(Just The News)—President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, though not yet confirmed, has pledged to root out “woke” ideology in the military. Other Republicans have lamented the same issue for years but done little about it, but if Peter Hegseth can be confirmed, the U.S. military may become ground zero in the Right’s war on woke.
Military veteran and Fox News Host Hegseth has repeatedly attacked the military leadership’s embrace of “woke” culture, which usually refers to the ideology around transgenderism, gender pronouns, and racial identity politics.
Despite allegations and attempts to end his bid, Hegseth has stood firm, though his fate in the Senate is unclear. A public statement from Trump last week put to rest any thoughts that Trump was considering withdrawing the pick.
“Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!!!” Trump said in a statement.
The American Accountability Foundation released a list of 20 officers who Hegseth should fire. Notably, during his viral interview with Joe Rogan, Trump told a story about how military leaders in Washington, D.C. told Trump that destroying ISIS quickly wasn’t possible, but when Trump visited the military leaders on the ground, he heard a different story. Those commanders, Trump said, told him it was doable but Washington, D.C. had tied their hands.
“The woke takeover of the military is a major threat to our national security,” AAF President Thomas Jones wrote in a letter to Hegseth earlier this week.
“As global tensions rise, with Iran on the march, Russia at war, and China in the midst of a massive military buildup, we cannot afford to have a military distracted and demoralized by leftist ideology,” he added in the letter, first obtained by The New York Post. “Those who were responsible for these policies being instituted in the first place must be dismissed.”
That anecdote highlights growing sentiment on the Right that the effectiveness and mission of the military has been hijacked by a handful of leaders in the Pentagon. Lawmakers have raised that concern for years, pointing to a slew of recent federal spending backing controversial Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies.
Last year, Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. State Department, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told The Center Square that woke policies were “hollowing out” our military. A Department of Defense comptroller report from the same year included $86.5 million for “dedicated diversity and inclusion activities” as well as language showing the importance of DEI to the military.
“The Department will lead with our values – building diversity, equity, and inclusion into everything we do,” the report said.
The actual figure spent on backing the same kind of policies is likely much larger and impossible to know, as the language and ideology has permeated much of the employee training, H.R. policies, and more. Other anecdotes highlight the prevalence of the newfound way of thinking for Armed Forces. For instance, as The Center Square previously reported, official training materials for West Point cadets included warnings about white privilege.
Rubio released a report detailing these same issues, which includes another example where a slide presentation for the Air Force Academy was titled, “Diversity & Inclusion: What it is, why we care, & what we can do.” This same taxpayer-funded training warns cadets to avoid saying words like “mom” and “dad” because the language is gendered.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., spoke about the NDAA and blamed woke policies for the armed forces’ difficulties meeting recruiting goals. Even after lowering recruitment targets, the U.S. military has fallen short of its recruitment goals in recent years.
“We’ve seen under the last three and a half years of the Biden-Harris administration, it’s been hard to recruit and keep good service members, in part because of the bad woke policies, the loss of focus by this administration on what the mission is,” Scalise said at a news conference Tuesday.
With Trump and Hegseth in the executive branch and leadership like Scalise behind it, cleaning house of the Pentagon might be possible, albeit difficult.
“We start addressing that by routing out more of the woke policies over at the DOD,” Scalise continued. “Of course, that ultimately is going to get fixed when President Trump takes office next month. He talked about those things during the campaign, what he would do to restrengthen and reinvigorate our military.”
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Hegseth would lead the largest and most complex federal agency with an annual budget of $840 billion and 3.4 million military and civilian employees.
Hegseth, 44, was an infantry officer in the Army National Guard from 2002 to 2021. He graduated from Princeton University in 2003. He was later commissioned as an infantry officer in the Army National Guard. He served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. He left with the rank of major, according to the Army National Guard. Hegseth earned two Bronze Stars, two Army Commendation Medals and the National Defense Service Medal with Bronze Service Star, among others.
But Hegseth faces scrutiny over a 2017 sexual encounter in which a woman told police the former Fox News anchor blocked the door of a hotel room in California and sexually assaulted her. Hegseth has denied the allegation and said that the encounter was consensual. The woman reported the allegations to local police. Hegseth was never charged with a crime. He reached an undisclosed settlement with the woman in 2023.
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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.
