(DCNF)—A California Democrat is outraged that former Kern County Supervisor Zack Scrivner, charged with felony child abuse, will not serve jail time after being allowed to go through mental health diversion — a law her party created.
In Feb. 2025, Scrivner was charged with felony child abuse after being accused of sexually assaulting one of his four children in 2024. However, a Dec. 19 ruling by a judge allows Scrivner to avoid a trial via a mental health diversion program established in 2018, which, according to some legal officials, is a get-out-of-jail-free card.
In a statement released just before Scrivner’s mental health diversion approval, Democrat Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains expressed her upset over the former supervisor’s motion to avoid a trial by applying for the program.
“There is no mental health condition that forces someone to touch a child inappropriately,” Bains said. “Not to mention allegedly doing so while being in possession of illegal firearms. If these allegations are true and treatment is warranted, that care can be delivered behind bars. If the allegations are not true, why ask for diversion?”
Initial accusations against Scrivner surfaced in April 2024. At the time, Kern County deputies were called to the former supervisor’s home after he was allegedly stabbed by his child.
The incident triggered an investigation in which Sheriff Donny Youngblood told reporters that authorities seized 30 firearms, boxes of documents and electronic devices for review, KVPR reported.
Youngblood said at the time that it appeared one of Scrivner’s children was defending a sibling when the stabbing to his upper torso occurred. California Attorney General Rob Bonta and his office were also contacted to review the case.
As reports of the incident emerged, Scrivner’s attorney, H.A. Sala, pushed back on the sexual assault allegations as “absolutely not reliable,” adding that there was an altercation at Scrivner’s home in which a gun was taken away from him to prevent him from harming himself, according to KVPR.
By Feb. 14, 2025 Bonta’s office released a statement officially charging the former supervisor with three felony counts of alleged child abuse and two felony counts of alleged possession of assault weapons after an “extensive investigation.”
Details of Scrivner’s allegations were revealed during his Dec. 19 court appearance as Deputy Atty. Gen. Joe Penney stated the former supervisor “got into bed with the minor victim — while he had alcohol, Ambien, benzos (benzodiazepines) and cocaine metabolites in his system — and fondled her breast area and genital area for a period about 10 minutes while she was frozen in fear,” according to Bakersfield.com.
Bains highlighted in her statement that she submitted a letter to Bonta questioning the lack of sex abuse charges. Bains questioned if Scrivner’s intoxication factored into the DOJ’s decision to withhold sexual abuse charges.
The state’s DOJ did not respond to the assemblymember’s letter, according to Bains.
“They have left an Epstein loophole open in this case,” Bains added. “Even if the DOJ was unsure they could prove every charge in court, they should still have brought charges reflecting the evidence in their complaint that alleges Mr. Scrivner ‘got into bed with and subsequently touched [a child] inappropriately.’ Failing to do so may result in no jury, no jail time, and no justice.”
The mental health diversion program was first tucked into a sweeping 900-page budget bill in 2018. The program was expanded in 2022, requiring defendants to prove only that a mental disorder “played a significant role” in their crime, effectively allowing any DSM-5 diagnosis to qualify.
Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper and San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation in December 2025 about the program’s issues, highlighting how defendants charged with felony child abuse, carjackings, residential burglaries and attempted murders can walk free without ever entering a guilty plea.
Those who enter the program are not tracked by the state, leaving it unclear how often participants reoffend or whether they complete treatment at all.
Cooper told the DCNF that judges are obligated to approve offenders into the program because of how the law was written, with Stephan echoing the sheriff’s concerns.
“The judges tell us all the time … their hands are tied,” Stephan said. “The law tells them they must grant mental-health diversion if these things are met — and the things that have to be met are so minimal.”
Since the diversion program’s creation, Democratic lawmakers and justice-reform groups have publicly supported the statute and its amendments over the years. Former Democratic state Sen. Jim Beall, who authored the original bill, argued that “early, court-assisted interventions are far more likely to lead to longer, cheaper, more stable solutions for the community, and for the person suffering from mental illness.”
The mental health diversion program excludes serious crimes like murder, rape, or lewd or lascivious acts on a child under 14. However, Scrivner’s charge of Penal Code section 273a does not fall under the exclusion.
A spokesperson representing California’s DOJ told the Kern Sol News that it opposes the court’s decision to grant mental health diversion to the former supervisor.
“This is a serious case given the nature of the conduct. We formally opposed the court taking this course, we disagree with the ruling, and we are reviewing our options,” the spokesperson told the outlet.
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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.
