(Daily Signal)—A tech employee voiced opposition to his company’s policy against doing business with a nonprofit on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map,” calling the policy “absolutely ridiculous.”
Now, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is investigating the Big Tech firm that acquired the employee’s company, claiming the firm “systematically deplatforms conservatives.”
“It is outrageous that the SPLC gets away with labeling people this way,” Jennifer Roback Morse, founder of the blacklisted nonprofit Ruth Institute, told The Daily Signal. “The only thing worse is that supposedly sophisticated companies like tech businesses outsource their moral judgments to a scurrilous group like the SPLC.”
The SPLC publishes a “hate map” that it claims highlights the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.” Critics say the map includes mainstream conservative and Christian groups alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, falsely smearing mainstream groups as hateful.
In a February 2021 email, the fundraising company Salsa Labs refused to work with the Ruth Institute, a pro-family nonprofit in Louisiana that serves victims of the Sexual Revolution. Morse maintains that the Sexual Revolution harmed men, women, and children by deemphasizing marriage and the family, which promote human flourishing for husbands, wives, and children.
Salsa Labs cited the SPLC’s accusation that the institute is an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”
The constituent relationship management platform and fundraising software company EveryAction acquired Salsa Labs in June 2021. Bonterra, a Big Tech company that claims to have raised $28 billion from 53 million donors supporting 437,000 nonprofits in 2024, acquired both EveryAction and Salsa Labs in 2022.
The Email Chain Mentioning SPLC
Morse reached out to Salsa Labs in 2021, seeking to hire the company for fundraising. The Ruth Institute had experienced blacklisting before, and Morse wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.
“There is one thing that I feel I should mention to you up front,” she wrote. “We are an interfaith international coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love. We deal with pretty much all the major issues raised by the Sexual Revolution, trying to help people who have been harmed by the Sexual Revolution understand what has happened to them and how they can recover. This is naturally controversial work.”
She noted that the SPLC branded her organization a “hate group” and noted, “We dispute this characterization of our work. We challenge this description every time it comes up in the news.”
“I do not want to go through all the trouble of signing up with you, switching our lists over to you, and then being abruptly canceled,” Morse added. “If there is a problem, I would like to deal with it up front.”
The Salsa Labs employee she was communicating with said he appreciated the candor and would have to run the decision “up the ladder.”
“I think it’s absolutely outrageous that the SPLC gets to pick and choose who is a hate group,” he added. “You clearly are not. I really hope we can move forward. We typically are not able to if you are on the SPLC website. I’m going to fight for you because I think this is a travesty.”
He followed up a few days later, writing that it “pains” him to say Salsa Labs could not work with the institute.
The employee added, “I am aligned with the beliefs of your organization and I think it’s absolutely RIDICULOUS that the SPLC gets to pick and choose who is a hate group” (emphasis original).
“Doesn’t make any sense, and they should be shut down,” he added. “My CEO agrees that you shouldn’t be on there, she took it up to our board, and they said that is one rule they will not make an exception on.”
Bonterra, the company that later acquired Salsa Labs, did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about the move and whether it uses the SPLC “hate map” to screen potential clients. The Daily Signal cannot reveal the employee’s name.
While parts of the email were first reported by The Daily Wire, The Daily Signal obtained the email chain in full.
When approached for comment, the Ruth Institute confirmed the contents of the email and put them in a larger context. Morse was unfamiliar with Bonterra, “however, we can confirm that the information reported corresponds precisely to an email exchange we had with a company called Salsa,” she said.
Morse said how grateful she was to her organization’s supporters: “You stood by us when the Southern Poverty Law Center put us on their ‘hate map’ in 2013,” she noted. “You stood by us when our credit card processor, Vanco, abruptly withdrew their services from us in 2017.”
Cruz Investigates Bonterra
Cruz, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, launched an investigation into Bonterra earlier this year. In a 2024 report, Cruz revealed that Bonterra’s terms of service prevent the company from working with clients that denied “rights to the LGBTQ community,” “a woman’s right to reproductive choice,” “racial justice,” or “climate change.”
In June 2021, the constituent relationship management platform and fundraising software company EveryAction acquired Salsa Labs. In March 2022, Bonterra announced that it would acquire Salsa Labs and EveryAction, combine them, and produce a “nonprofit fundraising and relationships management system” now known as Bonterra Fundraising and Engagement.
Cruz’s investigation found that EveryAction said it would not work with nonprofits that are “not progressive aligned,” meaning they “can’t be a Republican org,” “can’t go against LGBT+,” and “can’t be against pro-choice.”
According to Cruz, Bonterra refused to renew contracts with Wisconsin Right to Life, Idaho Family Policy Center, Deaconess Pregnancy & Adoptions, and Stand for Health Freedom.
“Big Tech companies like Bonterra weaponized their terms of service to systematically deplatform conservatives,” Cruz told Politico.
“My committee’s investigation exposed what we long expected: Big Tech companies like Bonterra have used vague, broadly worded terms of service agreements as a political weapon to deny conservatives access to essential business technology,” the senator told The Daily Wire.
Earlier this week, Cruz reintroduced the “TERMS Act,” which would mandate that online service providers “disclose their acceptable use policies, provide users with written notice before the termination of a user’s account, and publish an annual report detailing actions taken to enforce their acceptable use policies.” Eight Republican senators have joined Cruz in backing the legislation, The Daily Wire reported.
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.
