In the heart of Brentwood, a small act of entrepreneurial support for a political underdog has exposed the thin-skinned intolerance that defines much of modern Hollywood. Spencer Pratt, the former reality television personality now mounting a serious challenge for Los Angeles mayor, has stepped forward to defend a baker who lost her home and business in the devastating Palisades Fire—only to face bullying from a member of Jimmy Kimmel’s family for selling cookies emblazoned with “Vote Pratt.”
This episode is more than a petty celebrity spat. It reveals a deeper rot: an elite class that preaches tolerance while wielding economic pressure against anyone daring to support common-sense alternatives to the failing status quo in Los Angeles. When a fire victim tries to rebuild by selling novelty cookies, the response from the left isn’t encouragement—it’s threats of boycott.
The story unfolded when Daniela Romano, operating out of Vicente Foods, began offering sugar cookies decorated with pro-Pratt designs. Demand surged. Yet according to reports, Carly Kimmel—sister-in-law to the late-night host—allegedly contacted the grocer and threatened to stop shopping there unless the cookies were removed from sale.
Pratt himself responded with characteristic directness. “That woman was trying to stop somebody from trying to support their family,” he said, holding a box of the cookies.
He expressed hope that the Kimmel family might make amends by purchasing some, turning their alleged intimidation into tangible support for a fire victim. His broader critique cuts deeper: opponents of his message, he argues, effectively endorse the chaos of open drug use, public indecency, and violent crime plaguing Los Angeles streets.
The irony here is thick enough to spread on one of those sugar cookies. Jimmy Kimmel built much of his career mocking conservatives and positioning himself as a champion of the little guy and progressive values. Yet when a relative stands accused of pressuring a family business to suppress support for a candidate promising to address homelessness and safety, the silence from Hollywood’s tolerance brigade is deafening.
This isn’t the first time a Kimmel has engaged cultural flashpoints involving bakers—recall his past skits ridiculing Christian business owners who sought to operate according to their faith. The pattern suggests selective principles.
Los Angeles faces real crises. The Palisades Fire destroyed lives and livelihoods, exposing vulnerabilities in governance under long-standing leadership. Pratt, though an unconventional candidate, has tapped into widespread discontent with rising crime, unchecked homelessness, and ineffective responses to disaster recovery. His campaign resonates because it confronts uncomfortable realities rather than papering over them with celebrity virtue signals.
The backlash against these cookies speaks volumes about the insecurity of the political establishment. Instead of debating ideas—public safety versus open-air drug markets, rebuilding versus endless bureaucracy—the response is economic coercion against a small business owner still reeling from tragedy.
Vicente Foods has served the community for nearly eight decades. Its decision to carry the cookies reflects customer demand, not some grand conspiracy. Punishing them for that reveals more about the bullies than the baker.
Pratt’s defense highlights a fundamental truth: supporting those rebuilding after catastrophe should unite people across divides. Yet in practice, political tribalism often prevails, especially when the rebuilding challenges the narrative of entrenched power. The surge in cookie sales following the controversy suggests Angelenos are voting with their wallets—and perhaps their ballots—in favor of change.
This incident also raises pointed questions about consistency. Progressive figures frequently lecture about supporting small businesses and disaster victims. Do those principles evaporate when the business owner or customer backs the “wrong” candidate? The left’s selective outrage exposes a worldview that prioritizes ideological conformity over human compassion or economic liberty.
In the end, this cookie kerfuffle is a microcosm of larger cultural battles. Los Angeles stands at a crossroads: continue down the path of elite-driven policies that have yielded visible decay, or embrace voices demanding accountability and restoration. Pratt may be an unlikely messenger, but the reaction to his campaign reveals far more about his opponents’ fragility than any flaw in his message.
Spencer Pratt has turned the alleged bullying into an opportunity, framing it as proof that his common-sense approach threatens the comfortable status quo. In a city desperate for renewal, that message—and those cookies—may prove far more powerful than Hollywood’s fading attempts at control.
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.
