Garfield Mayor Everett E. Garnto, Jr. has turned his back on the Democratic Party after years of affiliation, announcing his switch to Republican and his endorsement of Jack Ciattarelli for New Jersey governor. The decision unfolded at a lively rally in Garfield, where Garnto laid out his frustrations with the direction of the state under Democratic control.
A retired police officer who spent 29 years on the Garfield force and 12 years as president of the local Police Benevolent Association, Garnto brings a grounded perspective from his time in public service. Elected to the city council as a Democrat in November 2024 and later chosen as mayor by his colleagues, he’s no stranger to local politics. But Garnto explained that his party switch stems from deeper issues.
“Over the last seven and a half years, the policies that Murphy has put out, it’s ruining the state,” he said, referring to Gov. Phil Murphy’s tenure.
This critique points to a broader pattern where state-level decisions have piled on economic burdens, from escalating property taxes to energy costs that hit working families hardest. Garnto, who once ran for the school board as an unaffiliated voter before joining Democrats at the urging of locals, noted how he’s voted across party lines in the past.
“In 2016 is when I first ran for the board of education and people in Garfield basically said, ‘Hey, listen, you should join the Democratic Party.’ I was unaffiliated at that time, and I just did, and since then, I’ve voted for Democrats, Republicans,” he recalled.
His history of flexibility underscores a pragmatic approach, one that’s led him to conclude that the Democratic agenda no longer aligns with the needs of everyday New Jerseyans.
Garnto didn’t mince words about the state’s woes. “The state is broken,” he declared at the rally, blaming “sky-high taxes, soaring electric bills, and less safe communities” on Murphy’s leadership. These problems have real consequences: families stretching budgets thinner as utility rates climb amid disputes with energy providers, while communities grapple with policies that Garnto sees as undermining law enforcement.
He revealed his own vote for Donald Trump in the last presidential election, adding that Trump “had it right about N.J. all along.” This admission ties into Garfield’s recent voting trends—the city, with over 30,000 residents and ranking as Bergen County’s fifth-largest municipality, backed Trump by nearly nine points in 2024, even after Murphy eked out a narrow win there in 2021. It’s a sign of shifting ground in what was once a Democratic stronghold, where voter registration and turnout reflect growing unease with progressive priorities.
Turning to his choice for governor, Garnto praised Ciattarelli as the solution. “New Jerseyans deserve better,” he told the crowd, describing Ciattarelli as “the right leader at the right time.”
He elaborated further: “I really believe Jack’s the man to turn Jersey around, to make New Jersey more affordable, lower the utility costs and make our community safer. Jersey’s an absolute mess, I’m honored to switch parties.”
These statements highlight Ciattarelli’s focus on core issues like affordability and public safety, which resonate in places like Garfield where residents feel the pinch of high costs and want leaders who back the blue without reservation.
Ciattarelli welcomed the endorsement, calling it a “courageous decision” and noting how it reflects widespread frustration. “People are upset all across the state with Phil Murphy’s failed policies in the last seven and a half years, all of which have been supported by my opponent,” he said earlier in the week on Fox News, zeroing in on residents “paying through the nose” for electricity.
At the rally, he expanded on the theme: “It’s not just Republicans who are crying out for change. It’s unaffiliated, independent voters and yes, even moderate Democrats who’ve come to the realization that this current administration has failed.”
Ciattarelli also took aim at the Immigrant Trust Directive, which limits local police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. “The president will never have to worry about sending the National Guard in New Jersey because we’ll be a law and order state under Gov. Ciattarelli,” he vowed. “My attorney general will support local law enforcement. We’re going to take the handcuffs off, let the men and women in blue do their job to keep our communities safe.”
This pledge addresses longstanding concerns among officers and residents who prioritize effective policing over restrictive mandates from Trenton.
Garnto’s move isn’t happening in a vacuum. He’s the second Democratic mayor to back Ciattarelli in recent days, following Dover Mayor James Dodd, and joins former Democratic assemblyman Jamel Holley, who switched parties earlier this summer. Ciattarelli has also secured support from the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 825 and a “Complete and Total Endorsement” from Trump, bolstering his campaign’s momentum.
With the election just weeks away, these crossovers suggest a hunger for practical solutions over ideological experiments, potentially reshaping New Jersey’s political landscape. As Ciattarelli put it at the event, “With your help, we’ll get it done. Sixty-two days, all gas, no brakes.”
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.
