Once again, a major national election is tainted by the appearance of fraud. This one occurred in Brazil, where communist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (aka, “Lula”) claimed victory over Flávio Nantes Bolsonaro.
Over the course of his political career, Lula was implicated in several vote-buying scandals but managed to avoid prosecution. In 2017, he was finally convicted of numerous public corruption offenses — including bribery, money laundering, influence peddling, and obstruction of justice — and eventually sentenced to seventeen years in prison.
Lula’s communist and Marxist-globalist friends around the world — including Pope Francis, Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, and the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee — painted Lula as a “political prisoner” and worked for years to secure his release. In 2021, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court annulled Lula’s convictions (holding that the original court lacked jurisdiction and that Lula’s prosecution had been politically motivated) and ruled that all evidence used against him would be inadmissible in any future court proceedings.
Lula immediately declared his candidacy for president and won his third term in office in 2022 by defeating President Jair Messias Bolsonaro with 50.9% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 49.1%. Bolsonaro’s supporters accused Lula and the courts of engaging in corruption and fraud as part of a scheme to install the criminally convicted communist in the presidency. Bolsonaro’s party eventually contested the election on the grounds that the internal logs of electronic voting machines showed irregularities and that the criminally convicted Lula was not eligible to have run for office in the first place.
Public riots against Lula’s election grew through December of 2022, and on January 8, 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed and ransacked the National Congress, the presidential office, and the Supreme Federal Court. Lula and his judicial allies used the incident to accuse Bolsonaro of plotting a coup d’état — exactly as Democrats had used the January 6, 2021, protest against election fraud at the Capitol in D.C. to accuse President Trump of “sedition” and “treason.”
Unlike the special treatment that Lula received for his numerous public corruption crimes, Bolsonaro was eventually convicted of “crimes against democracy” and sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison for supposedly engineering an “insurrection” against Lula’s government.
While Jair Messias Bolsonaro remains a prisoner, his son, Flávio Nantes Bolsonaro, challenged Lula for the presidency this year. In the first round of the election, held on October 4, Flávio Bolsonaro received 56.1 million votes (47%) to Lula’s 53.9 million votes (45%). All other presidential candidates received 9.3 million combined votes, and the majority of those votes went to conservative political candidates.
Because Bolsonaro did not reach the magic 50% threshold in the first round, a runoff was held on October 25. Despite expectations that most of the 9.3 million votes for other first-round candidates would go to Bolsonaro in the runoff, Lula picked up 10.4 million new votes for a total of 64.3 million (51.8%), while Bolsonaro picked up only 3.7 million new votes for a total of 59.8 million (48.2%).
This was the first time in Brazilian history in which the presidential candidate with the most votes in the first round lost the second round. Lula went from two percentage points down to nearly four percentage points up.
As Elon Musk quickly noted on his social media platform, X, the “Math doesn’t add up.” After the results of the first round, the markets did not expect this outcome either. Three weeks of global investments based on the expectation that Bolsonaro would win became costly bets as communist Lula declared victory. Absolute chaos in Brazilian markets followed.
What happened? Well, what we know for sure is that a member of Brazil’s Supreme Court, Justice Christiano Zanin — who was Lula’s former defense attorney before Lula appointed him to the Court — unilaterally extended voting across the country for two hours after Lula complained that some of his voters had been unable to reach the polls due to public transportation delays.
A time extension such as this had never been granted in a Brazilian presidential election, and it is the Superior Electoral Tribunal — not the Supreme Court — that has exclusive jurisdiction over these matters. At the very least, then, a judge who could not be considered impartial from a court with no jurisdiction over the electoral process gifted Lula an unprecedented two extra hours to gather votes.
This is no small thing, particularly because the order came down just minutes before the election was supposed to have concluded. Polling places that had closed before receiving the order could not restart voting machines that had already been shut down. In other words, those polling stations whose election workers knew the order was coming were able to stay open while other polling centers were forced to remain closed.
The two-hour gift of extra vote-counting from Lula’s personal attorney-turned-supreme-court-justice doesn’t explain how Lula picked up 10.4 million additional votes from a pool of third-party voters expected to vote for Bolsonaro, but the judicial intervention from a Lula loyalist once again taints the entire election.
During his victory speech, Lula told Brazil’s voters, “I was chosen by God.” I’ve never met a communist who believed in the Almighty, so I assume Lula was blasphemously referring to George Soros. As Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie, wrote while Lula was celebrating, “The Soros family knows how to fix elections.” That is certainly true, which is why Hillary Clinton should still feel embarrassed (if she were capable of normal human feelings) for being the 2016 beneficiary of Soros’s financial and election-rigging network and still losing all the swing states to President Trump!
Bolsonaro is requesting an annulment of the election, citing the unilateral decision of Lula’s former defense attorney to extend voting for two hours. However, as the Associated Press not-so-subtly points out, his father is already serving a twenty-seven-year sentence for contesting Lula’s victory four years ago.
Furthermore, Lula’s first statement after declaring victory included a promise to go after social media platforms that permit dissent to his regime’s propaganda. “We’re going to have to regulate” the “interference coming from outside to inside through digital platforms…Crime in the digital world must be treated like crime in the real world.”
Lula and his thuggish compatriot on Brazil’s Supreme Court, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, already target and criminally punish citizens for expressing opinions online that are contrary to the State’s official “narrative,” so Lula’s promise of additional “regulation” likely means that Brazil’s digital “Iron Curtain” will soon censor more speech, punish more speakers, and confiscate more money from social media platforms.
My guess is that Lula’s communist enforcers will jump at the chance to imprison any member of the Bolsonaro family who dares to question Lula’s latest “victory.”
Here we are again: A geopolitically powerful nation conducts an election in such a way that half of the populace will never believe the result.
In the case of Brazil, Lula’s suspicious comeback after the first round of voting reinforces bitter suspicions that have never dissipated following Lula’s unexpected transition from prison to the presidency in 2022. The fact that his 2022 opponent, President Bolsonaro, is serving a multi-decade sentence for “crimes against democracy” while Lula — who was implicated in vote-buying scandals in the past — celebrates “democratic” victory only increases the likelihood of civil division in Brazil.
Two-tiered justice is bad enough. When Lula is rewarded for committing crimes against democracy while his opponents are persecuted, simmering public resentment has a tendency to boil over into outright violence.
We know that Lula and his enforcers will come down hard on anyone who questions the legitimacy of his “election,” but how many more questionable elections can take place around the world before national populations decide they’ve had enough?
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.
