(DCNF)—We’re now entering the fourth straight year of Joe Biden trying to sell the lie to the public that he’s leading our country successfully, and I am certain that this year’s State of the Union address will be no different.
Throughout his entire time in office, Biden has tried to take indisputable facts about his failures and spin them into a fictitious success story. But what he doesn’t seem to realize is that the American people are not stupid, and they see right through his snake oil salesman pitch every time.
Let’s start with a topic at the forefront of the national debate: illegal immigration and our southern border. In total, there have been over 9 million known illegal border crossings since Biden took office, and in January 2024 alone, there were over 176,000 illegal border crossings – the worst January recorded in U.S. history. Now, in an attempt to save face and point the blame elsewhere, Biden is saying he needs Congress to pass an immigration bill that would give him the authority to secure our southern border. Here’s the thing: He already has that authority and could shut down the border right now if he wanted to, but he doesn’t.
Not only is he lying about his ability to secure our border and stop the massive waves of illegal immigrants, drugs, and human trafficking flowing through it, but he’s the one that caused it in the first place. During his first 100 days in office, Biden took over 90 executive actions to weaken America’s border security, including ending the Migrant Protection Protocols, or “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forced immigrants requesting asylum to wait in Mexico while their claims were being processed.
Make no mistake about it: Biden’s illogical and asinine policies are what led to the worst border crisis in U.S. history, and his refusal to use his existing authority to secure our border only continues to exacerbate the problem. Biden’s backwards thinking regarding illegal immigration is destroying communities across America and has made every state a border state. This madness must end now.
Biden and his administration have also done some Oscar-nominee-worthy spinning regarding our economy, doing splits six ways to Sunday to try to put a positive light on the financial pain Americans are feeling. In recent months, Biden and his administration have attempted to tout misleading metrics on our economy and inflation, but, once again, they don’t realize that the American people are not stupid. Citizens across the United States are still feeling immense stress due to Biden’s ludicrous economic policies and they aren’t fooled by this administration’s conjecture.
Under this administration, overall prices are up over 17%, and roughly $2 trillion in real wealth held by the middle class has been eliminated since March 2022. In 2023, almost 75% of working-class Americans reported cutting back on entertainment and eating out specifically due to inflation. On top of that, 51% of working-class Americans are working more hours. In response to the inflation that this administration is wholly responsible for, the Fed has hiked interest rates 11 times within the last two years alone leading to the highest interest rates we have seen in over 20 years.
This administration has repeatedly tried to sell us the lie that “Bidenomics” is a raging success. Well, according to the facts, this is what Bidenomics is: higher prices, higher inflation, and families having to work more hours just to make ends meet. It’s bad enough that Biden is entirely to blame for Americans’ worsening economic troubles over the past 3 years, but the cherry on top is his insistence on lying to the public about the reality that they’re facing.
Further, Biden has repeatedly shown us that he will bow down to climate extremists at the drop of a dime, regardless of the negative effects on energy costs or America’s energy industry. On day one of this administration, Biden launched his war on domestic energy production by killing the Keystone XL pipeline. Since then, Biden is responsible for depleting our Strategic Petroleum Reserve by over 40%, bringing it to its lowest levels since the early 1980s. And recently, Biden stopped the approval of liquified natural gas (LNG) exports, even further decimating the United States’ energy industry.
According to the American Petroleum Institute, increasing LNG exports could add as much as $73 billion to the U.S. economy and over 450,000 jobs. Ending this pause and other restrictions on LNG would allow the U.S. to export more, encourage domestic energy production, and reduce our energy supply vulnerabilities. Since Biden took office, his administration has taken numerous actions deliberately designed to stifle domestic energy production, yet, he continues to point the finger elsewhere when energy and crude oil prices skyrocket.
Biden could not have a more abysmal record when it comes to incentivizing domestic energy producers and has severely increased our energy market volatility. This doesn’t just bring more pain at the gas pump, but plummeting energy independence is a major threat to our national security as well. I’ve said all along that the United States needs to be energy dominant again, but Biden has done everything in his power to appease the woke mob and ensure it doesn’t happen.
Joe Biden has made it abundantly clear that he couldn’t care less about what real America is going through or how bad Americans’ wallets are hurting. This administration has made life worse for U.S. citizens at every turn, and during his State of the Union speech, I have no doubt that he will ignore all of the facts and do the same song and dance he’s been doing for over three years now. But the American people see through it. No matter which way you slice it, Biden’s policies are hurting our families, our wallets, and the future of the nation we love.
Sen. Eric Schmitt represents the state of Missouri in the U.S. Senate.
Sound off about Senator Schmitt’s story on The Liberty Daily Substack.
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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.
