(WND)—On Tuesday a 2-1 Democrat majority of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit invalidated a good West Virginia law protecting girls’ sports against invasion by male-bodied transgender students. The Richmond-based tribunal held that West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act violates the federal Title IX law, which was enacted to protect girls’ sports, and also that West Virginia’s protection of girls’ sports may further violate the Constitution.
The Biden-appointed judge who wrote this absurd decision repeatedly used the propaganda term “sex assigned at birth,” as if sex were arbitrary and merely “assigned” to a newborn. On the contrary, biological science teaches that sex is determined long prior to birth, and does not change.
The transgender issue is boiling over in the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court, after earlier dodging this same transgender case and at least two others, sat on an emergency application by Idaho for an unusually long time of nearly two months before rendering a decision Monday that ducked the substance of a conservative Idaho law.
Two dozen states, including Idaho, have enacted laws protecting children against transgender operations and treatment, while the Supreme Court sidesteps the issue. Most of these laws have been challenged in federal courts by groups pushing the trans agenda, and the day after last Christmas a Clinton-appointed judge ordered a sweeping injunction blocking enforcement of Idaho HB 71.
But rather than affirm the authority of states to protect vulnerable children against irrevocable medical interventions, the Supreme Court instead rendered merely a procedural decision that cautioned against overly broad injunctions. In splintered opinions that Chief Justice Roberts refused to join, the high court reined in the Idaho federal district court without addressing the substance of the law.
There are billions of dollars at stake in profits from medical interventions for transgender purposes, and anyone in higher education who criticizes this lucrative field would risk losing career opportunities. By a wide margin, the most pro-transgender jurisdiction in our country is Washington, D.C., which might explain why the GOP-controlled House and Supreme Court have been so weak on this issue.
Three years ago Arkansas was the first state to ban transgender procedures on children, yet federal courts have still not allowed its good law to take effect. In an en banc sitting of 10 judges on the 8th Circuit last Thursday to review this law, nearly all of the Republican-appointed judges were unwilling to ask substantive questions of the ACLU attorney for the transgender plaintiff.
With Republican-appointed judges silent as though on the sidelines, the questioning was dominated by the court’s most liberal member, Obama-appointed Judge Jane Kelly, who apparently thinks the Arkansas law somehow discriminates on the basis of sex. Such a ruling by the court would trigger the difficult-to-satisfy standard of heightened scrutiny, by which legislation is typically invalidated.
Leftists who deny sex differences try to invalidate laws they don’t like by concocting arguments that they are discriminatory. Meanwhile the transgender culture holds a grip on D.C., and on most federal courts which depend on liberal law schools for their clerks.
On Friday, the Democrat governor of Kansas vetoed a bill protecting minors against transgender treatments and surgeries, even though a similar bill has passed in half of our country, overriding a governor’s veto in four states. Laws enacted in Kentucky and Tennessee were upheld by an appellate court, while a similar law in Alabama was reinstated by a different appellate court because the district court applied an incorrect standard to block it.
Republicans have a veto-proof majority in the Kansas state Senate, but the vote will be close in its state House. The outcome may depend on which legislators happen to be in attendance on the day that an override vote is held there.
Trump held a spectacular rally on Saturday evening in northeast Pennsylvania, considered by Biden to be his backyard where he grew up. There is even a President Biden Expressway in nearby Scranton, although a petition to restore the highway’s original name has attracted 17,000 signatures.
Trump attracted a vast overflow crowd on the chilly evening, withstanding a blustery wind that created challenges for Trump’s airplane to land there. Trump scored many points talking about energy, explaining how Biden’s war on coal and oil have caused runaway inflation and hurt many in Pennsylvania.
Trump courageously spoke out against the trans agenda and vowed to cut off funding of schools that impose transgender indoctrination on students. Trump included the trans agenda along with critical race theory as propaganda the federal government should not be funding.
Trump is the first major candidate to pledge to defund schools that mislead our children with transgender and other leftist ideologies. It is increasingly necessary to use the power of the purse to stop the transgender train.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
