(ZeroHedge)—The invasion of woke ideology and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies into every facet of American life seemed to happen out of the blue starting in 2015-2016, but in reality the agenda had been quietly and insidiously slithering into western institutions for decades prior.
Establishment controlled NGOs like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation had been pumping billions of dollars into US universities since at least the 1960s, launching social justice programs and placing propagandists into teaching positions with the intent of “manufacturing consent” as Noam Chomsky once dubbed it.
The effort was to control the thinking of a top percentage of American professionals, turn them into rabid adherents of Cultural Marxism and globalism and then send them out into the world to create a progressive trickle-down effect in every major corporate and political institution. In other words, the establishment believed that if they could dominate the professional class with their suits and lab coats and specialized degrees the rest of the public would blindly follow along due to “expert bias.”.
As it turns out, they were wrong.
It took almost ten years to root out this tiny contingent of cult manipulators, but today the woke movement is well and thoroughly exposed. Woke organizations and DEI departments are now in fast decline and even the activists are beginning to admit they’re losing the battle for the minds of the masses. Let’s not forget, only a few years ago the political left denied the DEI agenda even existed and called anyone talking about it a “conspiracy theorist.”
Big Tech companies like Meta and Google made cuts to DEI staffers and resource officers in 2023. Dozens of major corporations are completely dropping their DEI initiatives in 2024. The Hollywood Reporter recently published an article lamenting the fall of DEI in Hollywood, spotlighting a list of DEI producers in an effort to assert that leftist activists still have power in Tinsel Town despite their failing ideology. Gay activist group GLAAD has complained that “LGBT representation” has started to decline in popular entertainment, with only 27% of films and television promoting gay and trans characters (given these people make up less than 3% of the global population, this level of representation is still far too high).
The reason for this precipitous collapse of DEI programs is three-fold:
First, after central banks hiked interest rates and ended QE programs the floodgates of ESG money closed and dried up. Venture capital disappeared and woke companies then had to rely on pure profits to stay afloat.
Second, the mass boycotting of woke companies proved beyond a doubt that there is no market for products that cater to DEI. For many years we have been told that woke is the majority, and anti-woke is a fringe minority. The truth is the exact opposite.
Third, lawsuits over DEI hiring programs are forcing companies to admit there is an element of ant-white and anti-straight prejudice involved in their employment practices. They are beginning to fear the backlash in civil courts, not to mention, hiring poorly qualified employees simply to check diversity boxes is a recipe for financial disaster.
There’s a good reason why the corporate media loses their minds every time there’s a successful boycott of a product like Bud Light or a progressive series like Star Wars: The Acolyte – Each time this happens the event stands as proof that the political left is a paper tiger, a tiny minority with no power or influence beyond their ties to corporations and governments. They are an astroturf movement created by psychopathic billionaires and politicians.
Consumers and the free market have spoken – They don’t like DEI and will not buy DEI products. But leftists insist the public is being “misled” by the right wing. The only way they can keep the farce going is to continue to maintain DEI programs across the board despite public refusal to participate. If corporate programs start to shut down then the entire facade is shattered. DEI finally dies.
This is probably the motivation behind a recent push by the NAACP, the National Organization for Woman and other “civil rights” activist organizations to pressure companies to keep DEI departments in place. At least 19 of these groups penned and published an open letter to corporate leaders of Fortune 1000 companies demanding that they stop cutting woke programs.
The groups claim that “companies that abandon their DEI programs are shirking their fiduciary responsibility to employees, consumers and shareholders.”
Their statement reads:
“Diversity, equity and inclusion programs, policies, and practices make business-sense and they’re broadly popular among the public, consumers, and employees…But a small, well-funded, and extreme group of right-wing activists is attempting to pressure companies into abandoning their DEI programs…”
Leftists always gaslight by accusing their political opponents of engaging in the same kind of sabotage they engage in all the time. In fact, these businesses only have a duty to their shareholders, and their shareholders are tired of losing money. The “corporate citizen” narrative is not going to fly anymore in 2024.
If there was a market for DEI then it wouldn’t matter if conservatives were boycotting these companies. If woke activists were anything other than an insignificant portion of the population then they would be buying up woke products like crazy and proving conservatives wrong. But, they don’t because they can’t.
In their letter, the civil rights organizations, which also included UnidosUS, the Urban League, Advocates for Trans Equality, the National Women’s Law Center and the American Association of People with Disabilities, said divesting from DEI would alienate a wide range of consumers. Again, the opposite is true. DEI propaganda and hiring practices have greatly degraded company performance, product quality and they have politicized consumer markets in a way that has greatly angered Americans. Get woke, go broke.
It would be brand suicide to continue on this path, which is why so many companies are finally backing away. However, is it too late? Did corporations flirt with leftist ideology for too long and lose their customers forever? Only time will tell.
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.
