(Daily Signal)—An inconvenient Democrat has had his career torpedoed by an avalanche of allegations, and the media want to give themselves a big pat on the back for their heroic “investigative journalism.”
They deserve no applause from the American people. In fact, the whole episode is a masterclass in media bias. More on that in a bit.
Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., announced Monday that he was not only bowing out of the California governor’s race to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom, but that he would be leaving Congress entirely.
Swalwell, in just a few days, was hit with an avalanche of accusations that he had inappropriate relationships and engaged in sexual misconduct with a series of women, including a staffer. Swalwell is married.
As I write this, another accuser has come forward saying that Swalwell drugged and raped her in 2018.
So far, Swalwell has denied the allegations and said he was resigning from Congress because he was distracted from his duties.
“I am aware of efforts to bring an immediate expulsion vote against me and other members,” Swalwell wrote on X. “Expelling anyone in Congress without due process, within days of an allegation being made, is wrong. But it’s also wrong for my constituents to have me distracted from my duties. Therefore, I plan to resign my seat in Congress.”
So far, nothing has been proven. We’ve seen previous “#MeToo” crusades turn out to be bunk, and that could be the case here. He could be a cad, but not a criminal. There are many possibilities.
Of course, Swalwell didn’t need facts or evidence to rush to condemn others who faced sexual assault accusations in the past. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for his plight.
What’s become clear, though, is that the allegations the media are dredging up now have been circulating in Democratic and media circles for a long time, if you can believe the commentary on X. Politico called it a “whisper network.” One journalist, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, wrote on X that she knew about these whispers for years, but the story wasn’t her “beat.”
Oh brother.
Then we get to the most ridiculous claim of all.
On CNN Monday night, Brian Stelter tooted the horn of his own network and showered praise on its due diligence in investigating Swalwell. He called it a “testament to the power of investigative reporting.”
What would we do without the legacy and corporate media working so hard to keep us informed?
It appears that rumors about Swalwell have been around for nearly a decade, even before he briefly ran for president in 2020. Is this a tribute to the glories of investigative journalism, or an example of malpractice?
These revelations line up in the most convenient way to ensure that Swalwell would leave the governor’s race at a time before his run could seriously jeopardize his party’s ability to win that race.
And that’s somehow the unseemliest part of this whole affair.
Despite Democrats holding a virtual lock on state-level politics for more than a decade, they find themselves in a situation where a Republican has a chance at taking the governor’s office. This is because they have a “jungle primary” system, whereby the top two vote-getters of any party advance to the general election.
In normal times, this would mean only Democrats would be on the ballot in a general election. But something funny is happening this year.
There are so many California Democrats desperate to get a crack at being governor, and apparently so few compelling candidates, that they’ve oversaturated the field. This has allowed two Republicans in the race to rise to the top of the polls, making a Republican/Republican runoff at least theoretically possible.
So what you are seeing now is a Machiavellian scramble, whereby the half-dozen Democrats in the race and their media allies find a way—any way—to delete candidates from the race.
It was just a few weeks ago that Swalwell and his fellow Democrats were accusing the Trump administration of weaponizing the FBI against him because he was allegedly sleeping with a Chinese spy. That couldn’t possibly be of concern, given his inclusion on the House Intelligence Committee, right?
Then events took a turn.
Just days before the Swalwell media deluge occurred, it seemed that the California election really could produce a Republican governor.
“If the primary were held today, according to the most recent polling, that would mean two Republican candidates, each pulling in just 14 percent of the primary vote, battling it out for the governor’s office in the fall,” Governing magazine reported on Thursday. “A lot could change before primary day, but the Democratic Party is increasingly nervous.”
A lot happened, almost immediately.
The allegations poured out. Swalwell’s supporters pulled out. He was ritualistically denounced by party leaders. In about a week, the California congressman went from being a front-runner in a governor’s election to resigning from his seat.
What this whole thing looks like, as my colleague Fred Lucas noted on X, is that the media were simply spoon-fed the Swalwell story to ensure that at least one of the other Democrats would make it into the general election and win the race.
That makes this media cycle against Swalwell nothing more than a shining example of how much the legacy media help Democrats, even when they are targeting a Democrat.
Perhaps the bias and collusion are only too obvious at this point. It’s still remarkable to witness the swift ruthlessness of the Democrat-media machine in action.
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.
