Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
We often associate leftist movements, anarchists of the 19th century, Jacobins of the 18th century, Marxists, Bolsheviks, Symbionese Liberation [Army], the Weather Underground with violence.
And the argument that they use is, we are for mandated equality and fairness and helping the underprivileged, and therefore to achieve those noble ends, which were morally and intellectually superior to those on the conservative side, we’re allowed to use any means necessary. And any means necessary is what’s happening right now.
Hasan Piker is always in the news.
He’s the multimillionaire podcaster, second-generation Turkish immigrant, who just recently led a cheering crowd in a song, whipped up the crowd, mocking the assassination of Charlie Kirk. He even said, Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk. He was whipping them up in a classical demagogic fashion, cheering and celebrating the horrific televised murder of an American activist.
Remember, he’s also told us that 9/11, we essentially deserved it. It was our fault, 9/11 was.
He’s not unusual right now on the Left. Angie Nixon is a radical socialist, and she won the Democratic primary Senate campaign, and she will be in the runoff for Florida’s junior senator. She said recently that ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, were slave catchers and that they were targeting black people, no different than people in the Confederacy, and that the U.S. government was trying to kill blacks.
She doesn’t understand that under the auspices of DEI, which continues affirmative action, that blacks have given preferential treatment based on past transgressions that the majority of the country felt needed to be addressed.
No one is trying to kill young black people, much less the government. If you look at the murder rates, the statistics make her completely unbelievable.
Almost 9 out of 10 murders by African Americans are committed by other African Americans. And when there are interracial violence, it’s six to 10 times more likely that an African American will harm, assault or kill a white person than vice versa. White people are underrepresented as assailants in hate crimes. black people are overrepresented.
I only bring it up just to refute the slur that she’s made against the immigration system and enforcement service. ICE deported people from over 180 countries of all colors, all religions.
Then we have another luminary in this new radical extremist movement, Abdul El-Sayed. He’s running now. He won the nomination in the Michigan senatorial race. He will be running against Mike Rogers for the Senate. He said—remember, he just—he said that before that he follows Sharia law. He was caught in a hot mic saying that we should not celebrate the death of the supreme leader, [Ali] Khamenei, in Iran.
Remember, he had just ordered 40,000 of his own people to be slaughtered, that were protesting. And he said, “My constituents wouldn’t like that.” In other words, his constituents, which he’s proud of, were on the side of the Iranian theocracy that for 50 years has been the chief sponsor of terror in the world.
When he tried to attack a fellow Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman, he said, ideally, you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message. That’s almost a blatant call to kill him and then to use that violence to intimidate other people.
When there was an attack on a Jewish synagogue by a brother of a Hezbollah member, and he was in the United States, and he was asked to comment, what did he say? Hurt people. Deep breath. Hurt people. Justifying that.
We’ve had four occasions now when the Secret Service shot at potential and actual Trump assassins. We’ve had Hollywood stars. We’ve had people like Robert De Niro, Kathy Griffin, Shakespeare in the Park in New York, celebrity cooks, and Snoop Dogg.
They’ve said they’ve all tried to compete in imagining to us an audience through public media and social media whether they should kill Donald Trump, whether they should burn Donald Trump, whether they should stab Donald Trump, whether they could shoot Donald Trump, whether they could decapitate him, whether they could throw him over a cliff, whether they could blow him up.
This comes on the heels that for the last essentially nine years there’s been no contrition, no apologies for a series of events that almost wrecked the sense of law and order in this country and severely damaged the integrity of the government and was a challenge to the Constitution.
For three years, the FBI, a rogue agency under James Comey and then later Andrew McCabe, cooked up the Steele dossier, which was a complete fabrication, and tried to take out a Republican candidate for the presidency. Operation Crossfire Hurricane was all based on a lie.
We were told in 2020 that a laptop with incriminating evidence, which the FBI had in its possession and had verified it was Hunter [Biden] laptop’s possession, it was his property with all the incriminating information on it, was cooked up by the Russians. Fifty former CIA and intelligence authorities swore on the eve of the election that the Russians and Donald Trump were colluding. It was a complete lie. No one has ever apologized.
We had four prosecutors, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fani Willis, Jack Smith. They all made up charges, and we know now that Alvin Bragg had to take a federal charge when he was a municipal prosecutor that the federal prosecutors thought was bogus.
Ms. James went after an old loan and said that he didn’t—he exaggerated his collateral when the bank that issued the loan said he didn’t.
Fani Willis, no need—she’s been so disgraced now. She’s been fined by the court. She made up most of the charges. She was essentially hiring her own paramour and then charging the state for their junkets.
Jack Smith, he tried to rush a federal indictment of Donald Trump on the Mar-a-Lago raid, and he was trying to get insurrection. That case was thrown out.
Not enough. They raided Mar-a-Lago, the private home of an ex-president. They said he had dozens of classified material. He had 11,000 documents, and all they could find under contention were 102 documents they claimed were classified. Then they scattered the documents on the ground and made it look as if Donald Trump was some type of criminal.
At the same time, Joe Biden had done the same thing for 30 years in four locations. No one said a word.
Over 20 states tried to take a Republican nominee off the ballot for the general election so the voters wouldn’t even have a chance.
I’m not even gonna get into the social media where the FBI was partnering with social media to squash stories they felt were prejudicial to Joe Biden.
What we’re witnessing is a revolutionary movement, as I said, and we have people who are celebrating the death of their opponents. They’re dreaming of how to kill their opponents. They’re praising people who murder. This is the starkest choice in November that we’ve had in a midterm election in my lifetime.
There is a vast gulf, a huge chasm between what the Democratic Socialists are advocating and what traditional conservatives are trying to maintain.
If they win, we will see the beginning of a destroyed border, and we will return to 12 million people within a four-year period crossing unaudited. We will see a war on fossil fuels, even as we were the greatest producer of gas and oil in history.
We will see biological men green-lighted to compete in female sports. Antisemitism will be the trademark and anti-hatred, not anti-Israelism, hatred of the only democracy in the Middle East.
We will see a full-fledged return of diversity, equity, inclusion, prejudice and bias.
What we’re talking about is a revolutionary group who often is telling us, “If you elect us, you will not recognize the United States as you’ve known it. We must destroy it and rebuild it along socialist and totalitarian designs.”
Remember that when you go in December, and vote for somebody who says, “We are not ashamed of what America is. We’re the greatest nation in the world, and we’re the greatest nation in the world because of our traditions, our Constitution, our protocols, and we have nothing to apologize for.”
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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.
