Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
Have you noticed this phenomenon of the Democrat-socialist party trying to create fake or false or pseudo middle-class candidates?
We saw it in the 2024 campaign when they put Tim Walz in that position. I mean, we were told that he changes his own oil, that he was in the National Guard.
Of course, they didn’t really do a background check because they thought, “Why would we have to? He’s a middle-class, duck-hunting man of the people in Minnesota.”
And then, of course, all of that fell apart when he was an elitist, he was a radical leftist, he lied about his military service, his time in Red China, etc., etc.
We’re watching a little bit of that with [James] Talarico. They were so desperate to take a Senate seat in Texas that the Left thought, you know, Beto [O’Rourke] came off a little too elitist from a wealthy family. We got now Talarico, and he’s a Christian evangelical man of the people.
So, they leaped at him, and they thought, this guy, not Jasmine Crockett. She’s too extreme, we understand that. But he can get through a socialist agenda because he’s a Texan, and he’s Christian, and he’s an evangelical.
No sooner did they get this pseudo middle-class hero than we started to learn that he was obsessed with trans issues, gay issues. He really didn’t tell us much about his past. He said he had a girlfriend. He said he didn’t. We didn’t really know what he was talking about.
Then his social media accounts were opened up, and he had disparaged white people, he had disparaged meat-eating in Texas, etc., etc.
Again, another effort to have a middle-class candidate, who is not middle-class or is not a conservative populist.
The locus classicus was Graham Platner. Two very wealthy, nepo-babies, trust-fund kids in the Democratic Party said, “We’re going to find a working-class hero, and he’s Platner. He’s an oysterman. He’s a veteran. He talks like a regular person. He’s not a nasal-tone person like ourselves. He doesn’t sound like he’s on NPR. He will win. He will win the middle class. We don’t even have to vet him.”
And what do we find out? That he had a Nazi tattoo. He’s a misogynist. He had a history of violence and, perhaps, rape against women. He was antisemitic. He was a disaster, and his whole candidacy collapsed.
Remember Kamala Harris? She told us in 2024 that she wasn’t gonna talk about her prior opposition to deportation or her support of open borders or banning fracking. No, no, no. We had to hear that she worked at McDonald‘s. Where she worked and when, she couldn’t tell us.
She said she had a Glock. Where she bought it, when she bought it, she couldn’t tell us.
What is all this about?
Well, it’s all about that the Democratic, now socialist, Party has a left-wing agenda that does not appeal to 51% of the people. They don’t want it. They don’t want open borders. They do not want biological males in female sports or dressing with teenage girls in locker rooms. They don’t want critical legal theory. They don’t want critical race theory. They don’t want the Green New Deal. They don’t want any of it.
And so, they have to disguise that agenda because they won’t change. And so, they either have to resurrect Joe Biden, the good old Joe Biden from Scranton, Delaware, and use him as a waxen effigy, as a veneer for their leftist agenda, or they have to create a middle-class persona when there is no middle-class persona because they have lost the white working class.
Another problem they have is they talk about billionaires and oligarchs, and they’re for the middle class, but they are the billionaire and oligarchic class.
And usually when you look at where the vast amounts of money are coming, they’re coming from billionaires. Often, they’re divorcees of billionaires, Melinda Gates, or widows like Lisa Jobs or Jeff Bezos’ first wife, who pour hundreds of millions of dollars for leftist causes.
Sometimes they’re in China, like Neville Singham. Sometimes they’re in jail, like Sam Bankman-Fried. Sometimes they should be in jail.
I mean, George Soros was kicked out of France for violating some financial laws. He tried to break the—he did break the Bank of England.
So, they are manipulative capitalist billionaires, and they don’t want to talk about that. They want to disguise it with middle-class candidacies.
And their new socialist veneer is not helping.
[Zohran] Mamdani is a settler-colonialist family in Uganda with an estate on Lake Victoria. He grew up in privilege. Platner grew up in privilege, went to a prep school. His mom is his only client for his $5,000-a-year oyster business.
All of these socialists who’ve come recently from different countries are Ph.D.s, law degrees, upper urban metrosexual elites.
So, here’s the point, though. It’s not class that will solve the left-wing problem.
The problem is that they’re not for the middle class. They’re not for affordable fossil-fuel energy. They’re not for secure borders. They’re not for legal-only immigration. They’re not for voter IDs. They’re not for stopping abortion in the last trimester. They’re not for supporting the military.
They’re not, and what I just said does not win them votes.
And when they want to win votes by acting as if they are one with the middle class, they can’t because they’re not authentic.
Donald Trump is a billionaire, and he was a very, very happy, unapologetic billionaire. But he was authentic in what he did. He always wore a blue suit, a red tie, mostly wingtips. It didn’t matter if he was with poor people, wealthy people, urban, rural people. He didn’t change his voice like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden.
He is what he is. He is and was, will be what he is.
So, people understand that he was authentic and constant, and he did like and was empathetic to unions in New York and to the middle class.
He wanted to stop China from wiping out the industrial center of the United States. He wanted to use tariffs to protect the middle class. He wanted tax cuts. He wanted deregulation. He wanted energy development for the middle class.
But if you’re not for the middle class and you don’t feel comfortable with the middle class and you use disparagement like clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, garbage, chumps—just quoting from Biden and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—then you have to create an imaginary aborigine white male working person, a Platner, a Talarico, a Gavin Newsom, a Kamala [Harris].
It doesn’t work. Doesn’t work.
Watch out for this November election. You’re gonna see a lot of hardcore elite socialists that are masquerading as men and women of the people, and it will be as obvious as Platner’s and Tim Walz’s failed efforts.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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.
