The families who lost loved ones on September 11 still carry the weight of that morning. Twenty-five years later, they are being told to shut up.
A Change.org petition started by widows and widowers of the 2,977 murdered by al-Qaeda has surged past 62,000 signatures. Its demand is simple and sacred. Keep New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani away from the 25th-anniversary memorial at Ground Zero. The organizers do not want a man who pals around with people who excuse or minimize the slaughter standing on the hallowed ground where their spouses, parents, and children died.
Now a small nonprofit that claims to speak for 9/11 families has stepped in to scold them. September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows issued a statement accusing the petition of “anti-American accusations and Islamophobic sentiment.” The group all but insisted the real problem is that Mamdani is the city’s first Muslim mayor.
Giovanni Galante, who lost his 29-year-old wife Grace when the North Tower fell, is not having it. “This has nothing to do with Islam or Mamdani being Muslim,” he told the New York Post. “It has to do with who he associates with and who he represents. We’re against people who are against America — who want us to suffer or be murdered.”
Those associations are not subtle. Mamdani campaigned with Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who once served as a character witness for the Blind Sheikh.
He has maintained ties to left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who openly declared that America “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. He has shown repeated reluctance to clearly condemn the chant “globalize the intifada.” His own father wrote that suicide bombers should be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than marked as barbarism.
These are not invented grievances. They are public record. And thousands of 9/11 family members have signed the petition because of them.
Enter George Soros. Records show the Open Society Foundations have poured $525,000 into September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows since 2016. The group is an affiliate of the Tides Center, a longtime clearinghouse for radical left causes. The same Soros network previously steered roughly $37 million to the Working Families Party and other outfits that helped Mamdani defeat Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary.
Councilwoman Joann Ariola, whose Queens district buried many of its own after the attacks, put it plainly. “The voices of 9/11 families should not be drowned out by billionaire-backed activists and those engulfed by their propaganda campaign. The mayor needs to stay home and sit this one out.”
Charles G. Wolf, who lost his wife Katherine that day, was even more direct. “Anything that is backed by George Soros is illegitimate. This is not the people speaking. This is George Soros and his billions of dollars trying to cause public strife in America. Don’t let George Soros make a monkey out of us.”
The pattern is familiar. When ordinary Americans who paid the highest price speak with moral clarity, the professional left reaches for the checkbook and the smear. Accuse the grieving of bigotry. Fund a compliant counter-group. Demand that the sacred yield to the political.
Scripture does not treat the memory of the murdered as optional. “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord”
The families asking Mamdani to stay away are not inventing darkness. They are refusing to pretend it is light.
Ground Zero is not a campaign backdrop. It is a graveyard. The men and women who still feel the empty chairs at their tables have every right to insist that those who traffic in excuses for terror remain outside the fence. No amount of Soros money or carefully worded statements about “Islamophobia” changes that simple truth.
The petition keeps growing. The families keep speaking. And the billionaire’s preferred narrative keeps running into the one thing it cannot buy: the unfiltered grief of people who refuse to forget.
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.
