Tuesday’s primaries had a few surprises with another potential surprise popping up in Pennsylvania if the final count goes in a certain direction. But even in the early hours on Wednesday, we have already learned a lot about the state of the America First movement. There were some positives, but overall I’m not coming away from Tuesday with a feeling that America or the Republican Party are heading in the right direction.
The big question that’s still to be answered is whether Dr. Mehmet Oz or David McCormick win the U.S. Senate Republican primary in Pennsylvania. As counting ended Tuesday night, we’re already seeing potential shenanigans that are reminiscent of the 2020 stolen election. Is the fix in, or is the Pennsylvania election system simply horrible? Either way, it’s bad news for the America First movement because both candidates are globalist RINOs.
Here are some things we’ve learned already…
Dirty Politics and Propaganda Still Work
Kathy Barnette was a good candidate in Pennsylvania. She wasn’t great. She surged in the final three weeks of the race due to a few things going her way, including the opportunity to highlight her status as a woman conceived through rape when the SCOTUS leak brought abortion to the national forefront. But that late surge made her two biggest opponents panic, especially Dr. Oz. His cronies sprung to action last week and went into full-blown dirty politics mode.
Sean Hannity led the charge with misleading representations of both Barnette’s history as well as her performance in the 2020 election. The argument he made that stuck the most was that she lost to a “weak” Democrat in that congressional race. What he didn’t mention is that the “weak” Democrat was an incumbent in a very blue district. He also failed to mention that Barnette received 48% more votes than the GOP candidate who ran in the same district against the same opponent two years earlier.
There simply wasn’t enough time to debunk claims that she supports Black Lives Matter, defunding the police, and Critical Race Theory. She doesn’t, but between Hannity and others the false rumors stuck. Dirty politics and propaganda worked, and Barnette finished third.
Donald Trump Still Has Influence But Not Enough to Unseat Brad Little
President Trump took another rare endorsement loss on Tuesday when Idaho Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin failed to defeat incumbent Governor Brad Little. McGeachin had made national news a couple of times last year and received both kudos and the coveted endorsement from President Trump. It wasn’t enough to move the needle and Little, a RINO, defeated McGeachin handily.
Still, Trump had some good wins with his endorsements, including Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano surging following a late endorsement by the President. He was already expected to win but his final margin was several points higher than the last few polls indicated.
Scandals Still Sink Good Candidates
Congressman Madison Cawthorn lost. I’m not going to dwell on the details or how big of a blow this is to the America First movement in the House, other than to note that Cawthorn was considered a rising star just a few months ago. What happened? He embarrassed the GOP Establishment with claims that he was asked to attend an orgy by a fellow member of Capitol Hill, so they dug up every ounce of dirt they could find to get him booted.
He had scandals, but should they have been enough to sink his career? No. Unfortunately, a plurality of voters disagreed with that assessment.
Mail-In Ballots Ruin Everything
Lastly, let’s talk about the big race of the night. Dr. Oz and McCormick are neck-and-neck with the mail-in ballots remaining. In most countries, they would have had all the ballots easily counted by now, but this is America and The Swamp is still in charge. Just because Democrats use mail-in ballots regularly to manipulate results doesn’t mean Republicans are immune.
There was a time not too long ago when getting a mail-in ballot was a special scenario for those who were travelling or otherwise unable to go to the polls on election day. Today, most states have some form of easily available mail-in ballots, and that has made elections far more complicated than they should be in tight races.
As Harmeet K. Dhillon noted on Twitter:
India counts votes and announces election results much more efficiently than many US states. Calling Pennsylvania elections “third world” is kinda unfair to said third world.
India counts votes and announces election results much more efficiently than many US states. Calling Pennsylvania elections “third world” is kinda unfair to said third world.
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) May 18, 2022
America First Needs Better Candidates
As I said earlier, Kathy Barnette was a good America First candidate. She wasn’t great. Madison Cawthorn was great up until the point that he made himself a target. Janice McGeachin had the right credentials and a true America First spirit, but somehow her campaign didn’t materialize properly.
There were some America First victories on Tuesday, including Doug Mastriano, but most were not surprising in any way. All of the surprises swung away from the America First movement, which tells us we’re not getting the best possible candidates. The fight against RINOs is nearly as important as the fight against Democrats. If we continue to let the Republican Establishment call the shots, we’re never going to do more than make incremental changes to bloated governments in a time of great need for the American people.
We need better America First candidate. Period.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
