(Just The News)—Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers is blasting his opponent in Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, over his ties to controversial far-left influencer Hasan Piker.
El-Sayed, who previously appeared alongside Piker, has since distanced himself from the political commentator, who has faced accusations of antisemitism.
Rogers, a former U.S. representative, addressed the controversy in an interview with Fox News on Thursday night.
“He can’t distance himself from Hasan Piker at all,” Rogers said. “He is clearly his running mate in this. He came as his closer and still maintains his relationship.”
Rogers added that he believes El-Sayed and Piker share a disdain for America.
“They don’t like America,” he said. “I think that is disqualifying.”
Michigan Democrats will gather this weekend for their nominating convention, just one week after Republicans did the same.
With just 27 days until absentee ballots begin going out in the Great Lakes State and millions of dollars pouring into the race, El-Sayed’s connections to Piker could prove critical in what is considered one of the most-important U.S. Senate races in the nation.
Of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate, 35 are up for election in 2026, including two special elections. Democrats currently hold 12 of those seats, while Republicans hold 23. Democrats will need a net gain of four seats to take control of the Senate.
In 2024, Michigan’s U.S. Senate race was decided by less than half a percentage point, with U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin narrowly defeating Rogers.
Rogers has received the endorsement of President Donald Trump and recent polling shows El-Sayed beating Rogers by 45.8% to 45%. That is according to the average of the last five polls compiled by 270toWin and a shift from before the primary, when polling showed Rogers beating El-Sayed.
Democrats were divided during the primary between El-Sayed and establishment-backed U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens. El-Sayed narrowly won the Aug. 4 primary and has since turned his attention to the general election, though his campaign has been clouded by ongoing media coverage of his relationship with Piker.
Piker has faced criticism over numerous controversial comments, including remarks in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11.”
Despite those comments, Piker appeared alongside El-Sayed during the primary, including as recently as the eve of the election. In an interview earlier this month, after the primary, El-Sayed called the comment “dumb.”
Since then, prominent Democrats in Michigan and across the country have criticized El-Sayed’s relationship with Piker.
“This bromance is a buddy movie about defending Hamas + a parade of deeply antisemitic rhetoric,” said U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania, on Wednesday.
El-Sayed’s former opponent Stevens has also warned him against continuing his ties.
“It certainly makes sense to get rid of this Hasan Piker affiliation,” Stevens said in an interview earlier this month. “I’m calling for that. I’ve continued to call on that.”
El-Sayed, who is seeking to become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate, has dismissed concerns about his relationship with Piker, while stating he has “no plans” to campaign with him.
“The effort to make this race about a streamer in LA is actually kind of laughable,” El-Sayed said in an interview published this week.
He also released a statement after controversial comments from Piker made headlines again this week. El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to questions from The Center Square about his relationship with Piker, instead directing the publication to the statement.
“My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as my commitment to the safety of my own daughters. Antisemitism is a scourge, and we need to address it in all its forms. And I stand against any rhetoric that puts the community at risk,” El-Sayed said.
Yet, his statement continued by brushing off ongoing press attention on his relationship with Piker.
“But I want to be crystal clear, nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople,” El-Sayed said. “And while politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer, we’re going to be talking about gas, groceries, good schools, and healthcare. Because that’s what Michiganders keep asking about.”
The controversy has become part of a broader conversation about antisemitism and the state of the Democratic Party in Michigan, which some are labeling a “crisis.”
At a recent event, Rogers said “El-Sayed wants to represent Palestine. I want to represent Michigan.”
El-Sayed responded to that, stating: “He’s so proud of himself, look at him. He practiced that line all weekend at his AIPAC fundraisers.”
El-Sayed has cast himself as the candidate taking on “AIPAC and the establishment.” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying organization, spent millions backing Stevens’ campaign in the primary
The 41-year-old also recently received backlash from Republicans for referring to Egypt as “home” during a podcast.
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.
