(Daily Signal)—A nasty divorce case has put a man behind bars for 18 months in Chicago’s Cook County Jail despite what he says is a clean criminal record.
Thanks to a law first proposed by Illinois’ black lawmakers after the George Floyd protests of 2020, thousands of dangerous inmates are being released onto the streets of Chicago and other cities, while those subject to civil complaints are jailed like criminals.
Such is the case of Illinois native Steve Fanady, 59, who has been rotting in a Cook County jail cell in solitary confinement for 18 months over an unresolved, 14-year-old divorce settlement.
“I’m terrified of dying in prison over a 14-year-old divorce case,” Fanady told the New York Post.
A provision of the state’s 2023 Safety, Accountability, Fairness, and Equity-Today Act, or SAFE-T, effectively eliminates cash bail, allowing inmates who aren’t deemed flight risks to be released pretrial. The provision applies to those charged with violent crimes such as murder, rape, armed robbery, and aggravated assault.
Take the recent example of Cook County’s liberal use of electronic monitoring for violent criminals. Bertell Johnson, a convicted felon awaiting trial for murder, was charged with additional felonies after investigators seized firearms from his residence, including an assault rifle and a handgun with an auto switch, along with ammunition and narcotics, Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart said in a Jan. 29 press release.
“Mr. Johnson was caught with multiple firearms, ammunition, and a drum magazine while on EM [electronic monitoring] for murder,” Dart said in the press release. “This was an unacceptable risk to the safety of the community, and perfectly illustrates why I have for years argued that individuals charged with violent crimes should not be placed on electronic monitoring.”
The provision doesn’t apply to Fanady, however, since he is in the Cook County Jail on a civil complaint, not a criminal one.
Chicago’s news media barely has reported on Fanady’s case, perhaps because he doesn’t fit into the Windy City’s protected class: violent criminals.
The Daily Signal spoke with Fanady via Zoom to bring attention to his story and shed light on the harsh consequences of woke measures such as the SAFE-T Act. Fanady said that he is being held in jail on a judge’s order until he can pay $10 million or transfer 120,000 shares of stock to his ex-wife.
He had agreed to give his ex-wife everything she demanded, and a judge allowed him to keep stocks he had in Swiss bank accounts, Fanady said. But, he said, he spent the next 10 years pursuing his business partners because she suspected them of hiding some of his assets.
In June 2022, a Cook County judge ordered Fanady to pay $10 million or transfer 120,000 shares of stock to his ex-wife, or face years in jail for indirect civil contempt.
“I never had anywhere close to $10 million,” Fanady told The New York Post. “The money I did have was spent on a decade of expensive divorce litigation and child support.”
The judge then wanted him to prove he doesn’t have the stock any longer, but he can’t, Fanady said, because the record retention deadline on the Swiss accounts passed and documents aren’t available.
The judge has yet to make another ruling, he said, making it almost impossible for him to get out of prison.
What’s happening to him doesn’t happen in the America he once believed in, Fanady told The Daily Signal. Now he sees violent criminals released on electronic monitoring shortly after getting arrested.
The Daily Signal asked Fanady’s attorney, Laura Grochocki, about her client’s situation.
“The Illinois Supreme Court’s mandate of no-cash bail for criminal defendants and Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart’s release of thousands of defendants with violent criminal histories onto electronic monitoring, juxtaposed with his opposition to electronic monitoring for a noncriminal detainee like Steve Fanady, exposes a troubling incongruity in our legal system,” Grochocki said in a written statement to The Daily Signal.
“This discrepancy undermines trust in the system’s fairness and raises serious concerns about the protection of constitutional rights,” she said. “It’s imperative to address these disparities to ensure equal treatment and justice for all.”
In the Zoom interview with The Daily Signal, Fanady said he has been mistreated while in custody and is suing the sheriff for abuse.
Fanady said his cell is infested with rats and cockroaches. He said he hasn’t been able to shower or to get medical treatment for his physical and mental health. He sometimes isn’t allowed out of his cell at all, he said, even with other inmates during daylight.
Jail officials consider Fanady to be at high risk for suicide, especially after his parents—Greek immigrants who fled persecution in Turkey for a better life in America—both died while their only son was in jail.
So, Cook County releases violent criminals with electronic monitoring, but won’t release Fanady. The double standard in Chicago could not be more obvious, and it’s ruining lives.
The results of woke policies like the SAFE-T Act are that everyday Americans are targeted while criminals, even violent ones, get a slap on the wrist.
Steve Fanady deserves better. The people of Chicago deserve better.
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.
