In the shadow of Los Angeles’s spiraling collapse—streets choked with human waste, open drug markets, and tent cities that mock the City of Angels—reality television star turned independent mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt is speaking a language long forgotten in City Hall: enforcement, results, and restoration. His blunt vision for reclaiming the city, laid out on the All-In podcast, has the entrenched interests scrambling.
Unions affiliated with hundreds of thousands of workers have responded not with policy debate, but with a brutal ad blitz that even stoops to the “R” bomb, branding the registered Republican as the last thing Los Angeles needs.
This is not mere campaign theater. It is the desperate flailing of a failing regime confronted by an outsider willing to name the rot. While Mayor Karen Bass and socialist Councilmember Nithya Raman cling to failed progressive dogmas, Pratt is promising swift, visible action: signs across the city within three weeks banning public nakedness, drug use, robbery, and animal abuse. Enforce the laws already on the books, he argues, and the streets will begin to breathe again.
Pratt’s diagnosis cuts through the euphemisms that have long sanitized failure. Los Angeles residents are “living in feces and drug use and dogs burning,” he observed.
His remedy is refreshingly direct: restore order first, then unleash private investment to rebuild. He has reportedly met with ten billionaires eager to back the effort, signaling that capital is ready when competence returns to City Hall. On housing, he blasts the remote-work bureaucracy and outdated systems, advocating artificial intelligence to speed approvals that currently resemble “a bad movie.”
Hollywood, too, receives a targeted prescription. Rather than pretending a mayor can dictate industry revival, Pratt cites producer Peter Chernin’s counsel: prioritize independent filmmakers and artists to generate jobs and energy the big studios cannot match. This bottom-up approach stands in stark contrast to the top-down failures that have driven production elsewhere.
The union response reveals more about their priorities than Pratt’s record. The LA County Federation of Labor, representing over 800,000 workers, released ads decrying his stance against using taxpayer dollars for new homes without accountability—“get help or get out.”
Labeling him a Republican is no accident, as political analyst Dan Schnur noted. In deep-blue Los Angeles, the “R” word remains a potent weapon, even for an independent candidate. Yet Pratt’s debate performance, where he held his own and earned overwhelming viewer approval, suggests voters are tiring of scripted narratives.
Recent polls underscore the opening: Bass leads but with significant undecideds, while Pratt sits at 11 percent and Raman trails. Bass’s decision to skip a follow-up debate, citing other commitments, only fuels perceptions of avoidance. The political machine, Pratt rightly observes, thrives on unchallenged lies. When incumbents face real scrutiny, they pivot to character attacks.
This contest transcends one election. It tests whether a city drowning in progressive experiments can still respond to common-sense governance rooted in law, order, and human dignity. For decades, leaders have treated symptoms with ever-larger budgets while ignoring root causes—disincentivized work, tolerated chaos, and bureaucratic paralysis. Pratt’s outsider status, celebrity background notwithstanding, may be precisely what forces a reckoning.
As Scripture reminds us in the book of Isaiah, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” The refusal to enforce basic standards of decency has invited darkness into Los Angeles’s public spaces. Pratt’s willingness to call for enforcement is a step toward restoring the light of ordered liberty.
The coming weeks will reveal whether Angelenos, weary of managed decline, are ready to support a fighter prepared to wield the tools already available. The unions’ ad blitz may intend to destroy momentum, but it risks amplifying the very frustrations that propelled Pratt into contention. In a city desperate for results over rhetoric, the battle lines are drawn between preservation of the status quo and the hard work of renewal.
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.
