(The Epoch Times)—Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed to redraw California’s congressional seats to elect more Democrats if Texas decides to move ahead with redistricting that would favor Republicans, he announced July 25.
Newsom held a press conference after private discussions with Democratic Texas lawmakers about what the governor called an “assault on democracy.”
The California governor, who has hinted at a presidential run in 2028, said he and other Democratic governors across the nation were concerned and have started discussing ways to counteract the actions by Texas and the Trump administration.
“If we don’t put a stake in the heart of this administration, there won’t be an election in 2028,” Newsom said. “We’ve got to fight fire with fire.”
The Texas Legislature opened a special session July 21 to consider redrawing its congressional maps.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says his state needs to redraw its districts because of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice surrounding four Democratic-controlled districts.
A July 7 letter from Assistant U.S. Attorneys General Harmeet Dhillon and Michael Gates of the Civil Rights Division outlines concerns that the state’s Ninth, 18th, 29th, and 33rd congressional districts create unconstitutional “coalition districts,” which run afoul of the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Coalition districts combine different minority groups to create a potential majority.
President Donald Trump says redistricting Texas could widen the slim Republican House majority by several more seats.
“I think we get five,” Trump told reporters at the White House on July 15.
Newsom responded to Trump’s claim later that day, stating, “Two can play this game” in a post on X.
Newsom didn’t offer a formal plan to capture more blue House seats, but said he and the Legislature were considering three or four pathways. One of the paths could include asking voters to weigh in on redistricting, Newsom said.
“We are committed to this process,” Newsom said. “This is not a bluff. This is real.”
Texas lawmakers flew out to meet Newsom in Sacramento before the press conference to brief the governor on the situation, according to Texas state Rep. Rafael Anchía, a past chair of the Mexican American legislative caucus. Texas Democrats are already planning several lawsuits to fight the redistricting, according to Anchía.
“We, as Democrats, are going to use every tool in our toolbox to fight this unlawful redistricting,” Anchía told reporters. “Every tool is on the table and we plan on fighting on multiple fronts.”
California’s redistricting occurs every 10 years after the census is complete and is done through an independent commission.
Bonta Is All In
California Attorney General Rob Bonta told CNN’s Jake Tapper on July 24 that he would join Newsom’s effort to redistrict the state if Texas’s plans are approved.
“I would support a lawful approach to blunting and neutralizing the raw and inappropriate exercise of gerrymandering power in Texas,” Bonta said. “We should neutralize any gains they try to seek if we can do it lawfully, and I believe we can.”
Bonta’s team has already met with Newsom’s team, he said.
Bonta said California would seek a “tit for tat” approach. If Texas adds five Republican seats, California will seek to add five Democratic seats.
Bonta has filed 34 lawsuits against the Trump administration in six months over a wide range of policies and actions.
Opposition Calls Newsom’s Plan Illegal
Newsom’s redistricting revenge plan has already raised some eyebrows in the state.
Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) said Newsom planned to abolish California’s voter-approved commission in an attempt to relegate Republicans to just three seats out of 52 in the state. The move would give Democrats even more power and erase all checks and balances in the state, Kiley claimed.
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Kiley posted on X.
California already has a supermajority of Democrats in the state Legislature, and Democrats fill every elected state seat across the board.
In Congress, the state is represented by two Democratic senators. In the House of Representatives, 43 Democrats and nine Republicans represent the state.
Republicans make up about 40 percent of the state’s voters, but hold only 17 percent of the congressional seats.
Steve Hilton, a commentator and Fox News contributor who is running for governor in 2028, deemed Newsom’s gerrymandering proposal an outrage.
“To be clear, there is NO way for Newsom and Bonta to carry out their outrageous threat ‘lawfully,’” Hilton said in statement. “Newsom and Bonta’s illegal and unconstitutional partisan scheme is a threat to our democracy, and I will do everything in my power to resist it.”
Hilton vowed to take immediate legal action if Newsom and Bonta followed through with their threat.
Hilton said the plan put forward by Newsom and Bonta would violate the California Constitution. In a 1983 Legislature v. Deukmejian decision, the California Supreme Court ruled that redistricting can happen only once per decade after the census and can’t be amended by a voter initiative.
The state would have to pass a constitutional amendment, repeal the once-a-decade redistricting rule, and transfer power back to the Legislature to carry out their plans.
Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) also noted California had created an independent commission specifically to keep politics out of the process.
“The voters took redistricting power away from the California Legislature in 2010 for a reason,” he posted on X. “They created the Citizens Redistricting Commission to keep partisan politics out of the process, because politicians shouldn’t be allowed to rig the maps to protect their own power.”
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.
