(Daily Signal)—A new form of socialism has escaped from the lab of “Woke 1.0,” and it seems intent on taking over the Left.
The strain of socialism driving movements like the Democratic Socialists of America goes far beyond the traditional definition of government ownership of the means of production—it marries economic socialism to identity politics.
This isn’t your grandfather’s socialism, featuring factory workers waving red flags and professors droning on about dialectical materialism. The new socialists are young, college-educated, and racially diverse. They talk about intersectionality, pronouns, and microaggressions. They may not think the USSR was on the right side of history, but they’re sure America’s on the wrong side of it.
When socialism surpassed 40% favorability in the latest Gallup poll last month, it wasn’t because young Americans are overwhelmingly burying their heads in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Instead, they’re breathing a noxious cocktail of envy, social alienation, distrust of institutions, and an ideological framework teaching them to interpret inequality as evidence of oppression.
Socialism is still fundamentally about government control over the means of producing wealth, but Marx’s class struggle has expanded into the social realm. The Frankfurt School applied critical theory to culture, while later scholars developed theories centered on race, sex, and sexuality.
Marxist critical theory teaches people to view the world through the lens of oppressor and oppressed. Critical race theory teaches that America is institutionally racist, and it justifies radical change to root this alleged racism out of our systems. Queer theory teaches that an oppressive gender binary keeps us all down, so we have to throw out the old vision of human beings as male and female, to liberate society.
Other theorists developed intersectionality, the idea that overlapping identities can compound oppression. Membership in more oppressed groups therefore confers greater moral authority to demand change—and ultimately, power—or so the reasoning goes.
That logic proved remarkably malleable. Marxism supplied the class struggle, other critical theories applied it to race and sex, and intersectionality combined them into a new ideological strain. Modern democratic socialism gathers all these grievances under a single political banner.
The socialists have worked to build power through institutions Americans don’t necessarily think of as socialist. DSA members have sought influence in organized labor, while socialist organizers aim to form tenant unions to organize renters around a class-struggle model of tenants versus landlords. Electoral politics is only one front in their broader effort to build power.
The same intellectual framework spread to other American institutions after George Floyd’s death in police custody in 2020. Corporations embraced racial preferences, schools told white kids they were oppressors, and government ramped up diversity, equity, and inclusion.
These trends inspired a backlash, and President Donald Trump has used the federal bureaucracy to root out DEI, but the underlying ideas remain resonant on the Left and in many American institutions.
Critical theory acts as an accelerant for the flames of natural human envy, and our current environment represents a dry tinderbox.
Social media allows us to highlight the best parts of our lives publicly, while hiding the work that we did to achieve that success. This creates a hall of mirrors, where everyone around you seems wealthier, happier, and more prosperous than you, but you know you’re not as happy as they seem.
As a student of history, I can’t escape the contrast. For most of human existence, people lacked electricity, running water, safe transportation, and effective medicine. Famine was an ever-present threat. Today Americans complain, often with justification, about rising grocery bills and health care costs while enjoying material conditions our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.
We enjoy a gobsmacking level of absolute prosperity, while increasingly measuring our lives by relative deprivation. It matters less that I live better than a king did centuries ago if the man on my smartphone appears to live better than I do.
Socialism feeds on the gap between those two ways of seeing the world.
The ultimate danger of socialism isn’t the pronouns or the microaggressions. Those ideas matter, but socialism’s final answer to economic and cultural grievances remains what it has always been: political power.
America’s free economy, protected by the rule of law, has produced an astonishing degree of prosperity precisely because no central authority gets to decide everything Americans should produce, buy, sell, or become. Socialism asks us to distrust that messy freedom and entrust ever more decisions to top-down politics instead.
“Woke 1.0” didn’t replace the old class struggle. It multiplied it, creating new categories of “oppression” and broadening the socialist cause.
Call it gain-of-function Marxism, but whatever you do, don’t spread it.
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.
