(Daily Signal)—Leftists are becoming increasingly totalitarian in their antipathy for freedom of speech. It’s an obstacle to their desire for power, so it must be crushed.
An exaggeration, you say?
Just listen to what high-profile leftists have been openly saying about denying you your right to information on both sides of the political equation.
Former presidential candidate and Obama Secretary of State John Kerry has gotten the most attention recently, mainly because of how bluntly he railed against our most fundamental freedom. But former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has been just as repressive—and more detailed. And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has been her usual self as she demands censorship without much specificity.
Kerry made his comments at a World Economic Forum panel on green energy on Sept. 25. A conservative comedian trying to satirize the views of the haughty ruling class could not have come up with better material.
As Kerry put it, “The dislike of and anger over social media is just growing and growing and growing, and it’s part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue,” Kerry lamented, apparently referring to abhorrence of freedom by members of his ilk.
“It’s really hard to govern today!” The problem, he said, was that the internet and social media have liberated people to choose from different sources of information, adding competition. Little over two decades ago, the country was held hostage to the views of the journalists working at three networks and a handful of national newspapers.
Kerry pines for those days. “The referees we used to have to determine what’s a fact, and what isn’t a fact, have been eviscerated to a certain degree, and people self-select, where they go for their news, or for their information, and you get into a vicious cycle,” said the man who came within 19 Electoral College votes of becoming president in 2004. “So, it’s really, really hard, much harder, to build consensus today than at any time in the 40 to 50 years I’ve been involved in this.”
He continued, “There is a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and it’s putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to hammer it out of existence.”
Kerry’s solution?
What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change. … Democracies are very challenged right now, and have not proven that they can move fast enough, or big enough, to deal with the challenges that we are facing, and to me, this is part of what this race, this election is all about—will we break the fever in the United States?
Reich also discussed his desire to hammer persnickety sources of information out of existence with a global audience. Writing in the leading newspaper of the British Left, The Guardian, he engaged in a bit of disinformation himself by mischaracterizing the actions of the man he’d like hammered out, X owner Elon Musk.
Musk and former President Donald Trump “have both floated the idea of governing together if Trump wins a second term,” wrote Reich, whereas, in fact, as Reich admitted himself, all Musk has done is recommend that Trump have in a second term a “government efficiency commission” in which Musk “would be happy to help out.” But apparently unaware that he was committing the same crime he accused Musk to be guilty of, Reich went on with his recommendation for how officials around the world should “rein in Musk.”
The first one was for people to boycott Musk’s electric vehicle, Tesla, and his social media company, X. But Reich wants much more. “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” he wrote. As for the U.S. government, it “should terminate its contracts with him, starting with Musk’s SpaceX,” wrote Reich, who published his screed weeks before the U.S. government had to come to SpaceX, hat in hand, asking it to retrieve two astronauts stranded by NASA.
Ocasio-Cortez has been far less trenchant and specific. The young representative, who’s been repeatedly dinged by left-leaning PolitiFact for spreading falsehoods, also wants to “rein in” media she considers guilty of spreading misinformation.
“We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,” she posted on social media. “It’s one thing to have different opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false, so that is something that we’re looking into.”
Unfortunately, these unhinged comments by American politicians don’t come in a vacuum.
There is a sustained attack on freedom of information from Brazil to our ally the United Kingdom to next door in Canada. Of course, that makes it all the more important that we speak up for freedom.
Image via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0.
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.
