(Daily Signal)—The socialist wave has already crashed well beyond New York City. Now the Democratic Socialists of America is even taking swings at swing states.
The latest far-left darling is Francesca Hong, a leading candidate to win the Democrat primary in the Wisconsin governor’s race.
One might call her the Zohran Mamdani of the Midwest, but there are a few contenders now vying for that title.
Hong has unsurprisingly grabbed hold of the issues that have become hallmarks of the insurgency taking place within the Democratic Party.
She has stood proudly by her “democratic socialist” label, made wealthy people the bogeymen of her campaign (despite a seemingly upper-middle-class constituency), unrepentantly backed the obliteration of U.S. immigration law enforcement, and—most importantly to Democrat primary voters, it seems—she’s virulently anti-Israel.
Hong has frequently appeared on the podcast of left-wing anti-Israel influencer Hasan Piker, one of the folks on the ship of fools that recently visited Cuba to declare their sympathy with communist tyrants.
She’s said on his show that she agreed with his positions—like creating government-run grocery stores and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and further noted that she hoped that “what happens here is a potential foreshadowing of what’s to happen in the future.”
No surprise, Hong has a long record of endorsing the most bonkers ideas of the Great Awokening.
In 2020, she posted on X that she backed “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police” while voicing support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
She later said, according to CNN, that “police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”
Since 2021 she’s gone a little more squirrely in her stated desire for total police abolition.
It’s a somewhat less popular position these days after a historic national crime wave.
But she didn’t exactly recant either.
According to a statement she gave CNN in May, her past support for abolishing the police was about having a “wider conversation around police abolition” grounded in a belief that “the current system is not working.”
She continued: “While I envision a world where public safety is not synonymous with law enforcement, I recognize that this paradigm shift is a very long term vision and my focus is building systems of care for now and for our future.”
Let me translate the politico-speak. She’s still for abolishing the police, but since voters hate the idea, she’s going to hem a haw a bit more around the edges to sound more reasonable.
It’s not just police she’s called to eliminate.
Hong apparently envisions a world without prisons, too.
At a recent political rally, she told the audience that “my perfect world would be a world without prisons.” When she was later questioned about her views on prison abolition, a spokeswoman for her campaign told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “A world where needs are met and there’s no need for prisons sounds like a goal worth working towards.”
That condescending statement is so perfectly in tune with generations of other smug, and utterly wrong socialists and communists who’ve plagued our world for more than a century.
We are all just so small-minded and mean for not pursuing the perfect world that exists in their heads.
We once had a world with virtually no police and prisons. Justice was meted out harshly, and often by vigilantes. When you abolish the police and do away with prisons, justice is handled more often than not by lynch mobs.
So, this “progressive” idea of prison abolition is quite regressive.
Furthermore, she’s staked out the position that crime is a result of material deprivation and not other cultural or personal factors. They really do believe that if people’s “needs are met,” crime would go away. But there’s no evidence of that at all. In the worst years of the Great Depression, for instance, crime declined.
Unfortunately, the never-ending road to Hong’s fantasy world without police and prisons runs straight through hell. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back to the chagrin of leftists everywhere, and to the misery of all who fall under their rule.
Once upon a time, Hong’s views would have been common only on the fringe of college campuses. Now they are effectively “mainstream” among Democrats, which is one of the many reasons the party has few antibodies against this movement.
The new socialists are just willing to say publicly what their base wants.
The result is that they are fully transforming the Democratic Party in their image, reshaping the party infrastructure to serve their goals. So far, this process has mostly been taking place in deep, blue bastions. But their aspirations are national and international.
This rising band of socialists and communists isn’t happy with a few House seats, the mayorship of America’s biggest cities, or the governorship of a single purple state. They want it all. And they are testing the outer boundaries of where their ideology can succeed in the hopes that one day soon, they’ll have it all.
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.
