Two weeks out from the November 3 election, the Democratic Socialists of America are turning on one of their own. Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, the DSA-backed challenger to Mayor Karen Bass, now faces a push from hardline Marxist caucuses that could strip her endorsement or even expel her from the organization.
The New York Post reported that Reform & Revolution and Bread & Roses have joined forces to demand Raman answer for her positions on Israel and Palestine. They introduced a resolution to the National Political Committee calling for a members-only meeting by October 25, preferably with Raman present. If national leaders decide her views remain incompatible with DSA’s anti-Zionist creed, they could vote to expel her by a two-thirds majority.
This is the same organization whose Los Angeles chapter endorsed her in September. Of the 1,473 members who voted, 937 backed Raman, 484 opposed her, and 52 abstained. That left her with roughly 64 percent support and more than a third of participating members either against the endorsement or unwilling to support it. Hardly a united front.
She Is Not One of Them
Reform & Revolution put it bluntly in its October 19 statement. “Raman is not a socialist,” the caucus wrote, noting that she neither publicly identifies as one nor advocates for socialism. They accuse the LA chapter of violating national rules by endorsing her without properly questioning her on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Under Resolution 22, consistent public opposition to BDS and Palestinian liberation can trigger expulsion.
Raman has a record of friction with the group. In 2024, DSA-LA censured her for accepting an endorsement from Democrats for Israel-Los Angeles. She also publicly criticized the national DSA’s response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, calling it devoid of empathy for Israeli communities. The hardliners contrast her with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who openly campaigned on the organization’s anti-Zionist line. Raman, they say, has distanced herself.
The Fox News noted that Raman has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide” and described BDS as a “legitimate form of peaceful protest” while insisting those issues are not part of her municipal platform. She has also said she will continue treating DSA as a “partner” if elected. That is the co-governing model the radicals demand, even as she tries to sound more flexible on the trail.
A Purity Spiral With Real Consequences
The timing is revealing. Raman’s campaign has spent months trying to present her as an independent progressive who can attract a broader coalition than pure DSA doctrine. National hardliners are now insisting that such distance is a betrayal. The local chapter defended its process. National factions rejected that defense and are forcing the issue right before voters cast ballots.
This is what happens inside movements that treat ideological tests as non-negotiable. Support for Israel’s right to exist, skepticism of BDS, or even a refusal to center foreign policy grievances above local governance becomes grounds for expulsion. The same organization that helped elect Raman to the council in 2020 is now auditing her for insufficient radicalism on Palestine.
Los Angeles voters should watch this closely. Raman has already shifted on issues such as police staffing and the mansion tax once she held office. The DSA’s own members are arguing over whether she can be trusted to advance their program at all.
That program, as the Post has detailed, includes seizing private housing, cutting sworn officers, expanding noncitizen voting, and running city-owned businesses. Raman refused to give clear yes-or-no answers when asked about sixteen specific planks.
Scripture warns against those who sow division over doctrine. “Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them.”
The DSA’s internal war shows exactly that pattern. One faction demands absolute loyalty to an anti-Israel line. Another treats political pragmatism as a crime. Neither is focused on the practical needs of a city struggling with crime, homelessness, and basic competence.
Karen Bass is no conservative alternative. The choice before Los Angeles is between an incumbent Democrat and a socialist-adjacent councilwoman whose own radical allies are now trying to purge her for not being radical enough. That purge attempt, coming days before the election, is the clearest signal yet of what these groups expect from the politicians they back.
Voters who want functional government rather than purity tests should take note.
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.
