(Discern Report)—A headline crossed my desk today that chapped my khakis. The article was written by Duke over at Red State and read, “Kari Lake Is Running for Senate in Arizona While Still Protesting Her Loss as Governor—and I’m Confused.”
I symbolically cracked my knuckles, put the article on one screen and prepared to rebuke the article on the other screen. But upon reading it, I realized it was written from a proper perspective. It wasn’t bashing Kari Lake out of spite. It didn’t claim the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election was fair and square. It didn’t call on Lake to get out of politics and let a non-MAGA RINO run.
As it turned out, the article was spot on other than one major point. And even though that point is major it’s not blatantly obvious, so I uncracked my knuckles and prepared to move on, leaving my ire on the table to direct at someone else who actually deserved it. But as the day continued the article nagged at me. I’m not big on writing about slight disagreements since there are plenty of UniParty Swampsters to go after passionately.
In lieu of a rebuke, I’ll add a bit of context that should clear things up. According to Duke, Lake should not be running for U.S. Senate because she should be putting all of her efforts and fundraising prowess to work in a focused effort to expose the massive, widespread voter fraud that stole the 2022 (and 2020) elections in Arizona. It’s an understandable and even noble premise for his article, but the flaw is this: She’s already done that and lost multiple times.
Nobody has fought voter fraud following a stolen election harder than Kari Lake’s team. Not Donald Trump. Not Doug Mastriano. Not Dr Mehmet Oz. Not Blake Masters. I like all of them other than Dr. Oz, but combined they didn’t fight their stolen elections as hard as Lake’s team.
Considering the efforts that have thus far yielded zero fruit, it make sense for her team to assume that the truth isn’t going to prevail. They’ve presented mountains of evidence that demonstrate unambiguously how ballot fraud at a massive scale took place in Maricopa County, but the UniParty Swamp system has them completely blocked off. They can’t get a judge that isn’t corrupt. They can’t get media coverage even from conservative news outlets who are scared of being labeled “election deniers.”
They can’t catch a break.
But here’s the thing. They ARE continuing to fight against all odds because it’s the right thing to do. Lake’s direct participation at this stage is not needed. She raised enough funds to make the case and it still wasn’t enough. Could she raise more funds? Sure, but that’s not the problem. They need more evidence that’s beyond the bombshells they already dropped.
Instead of fighting a single-front war, she decided to run for U.S. Senate while allowing her team to continue the uphill battle of exposing the fraudulent 2022 election. At this stage, they don’t need much from her. They can continue to fight on that front while she tries to get to Capitol Hill.
Duke’s assessment was accurate. I have no qualms about his perspectives. I simply agree with Lake’s decision that her efforts are better spent attacking the UniParty Swamp directly rather than continuing to participate in the ongoing 2022 election litigation. She and her teams (legal and campaign) can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Sound off about this article on my 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.
