The people who want to seize the means of production keep seizing brownstones first.
The New York Post has now caught two more New York City Democratic Socialists of America leaders living the capitalist dream they spend their weekends denouncing. Labor coordinator Olivia Gonzalez Killingsworth flipped an inherited Upper West Side triplex for $2.4 million. Steering Committee chair Julie Swoope sits in a half-million-dollar Brooklyn co-op with skyline views and “great closet space.” They join co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, the Yale sculptor whose telecommunications-millionaire father gifted him a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy townhouse.
Three leaders. Three properties. Zero irony detectors.
The Marble Shower Revolution
Killingsworth, elected DSA labor coordinator in 2025, sold the two-bedroom, three-bathroom triplex on September 12, 2022. One block from Central Park. Ten-foot ceilings. Fireplace. Marble showers. Bay windows looking out on Callery pear blossoms. Public records put the sale at $2.4 million. Two days later she closed on a one-bedroom in Brooklyn for $521,000.
She inherited the triplex from her aunt Elizabeth, who died in 2018. That is not a crime. Inheritance is how families pass on what they built. The problem is the sermon that comes with it. Killingsworth told the Post she has “the privilege of stable housing, something that should be guaranteed to every New Yorker.”
Guaranteed. By whom? With whose money? The woman who just banked a multimillion-dollar family property wants the rest of the city treated as if housing were a human right extracted from somebody else’s balance sheet. She runs a bookkeeping business. She acts. She sings. She is not sleeping on a cot in a union hall.
Queens Councilwoman Vickie Paladino did not miss it.
Once again we’re finding out why DSA actually stands for Daddy’s Savings Account. Selling a multimillion-dollar Manhattan Triplex to go play pretend bohemian with your rich comrades in Brooklyn is a luxury working-class New Yorkers will never have.
The Committee Chair With Closet Space
Swoope bought her $510,000 one-bedroom co-op near Prospect Park in 2021. High ceilings. Skyline views. Closets the listing bragged about. She told the Post she became a private property owner and built a family “after living in a rent stabilized apartment.” Fair enough. Then she logged onto X to scold anyone who noticed the pattern around her co-chair.
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
Charges of hypocrisy against Gustavo or any DSA member who has comfortable financial background are dumb. It’s not hypocritical to want others to enjoy the economic security that you do.
That is the whole trick. They enjoy the security private property created. They want the state to manufacture the same result for everyone else by punishing the system that produced their own pads. Swoope’s late mother was an artist who spent three years on a live-aboard sailboat and belonged to a Florida boat and ski club. Again, not a scandal. The scandal is pretending this résumé is the proletariat.
Both women’s apartments sit more than $100,000 above the average U.S. home price of $387,400. Nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers rent. The people writing the housing program own.
Gotham’s Socialist Landed Gentry
Gordillo is the mascot. The Post reported earlier this month that his father bought the Bed-Stuy row house through an LLC. The place has taken a facelift since 2019. Decks. Landscaping. A fine hanging over unpermitted work. He used to talk like an IBEW electrician. The union story did not hold. He has said nobody should have a “constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment.” Easy doctrine when Dad already bought the building.
A source close to the chapter told the Post the revelations have rattled the shop. “They’re like babies opening their eyes for the first time, and everything’s blurry. Many of them have never worked a job before and now they’re realizing if they want to be a player in New York, people are going to ask them questions.”
Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.
That is the DSA housing gospel in one verse. Heap rent control, land-value seizures, and “guaranteed” apartments on the city. Keep the inherited triplex, the Prospect Park co-op, and the father’s townhouse. Call the gap solidarity.
New York does not have a shortage of lectures about landlords. It has a shortage of people who will say out loud that private property, families who save, and an aunt who leaves you a brownstone are not crimes. They are how a civilization houses its children. The socialists know it. They just prefer the lecture from the good side of the closing table.
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.
