Eric Schmidt, the billionaire former Google CEO and reliable Democratic donor, delivered a commencement address at the University of Arizona that laid bare the self-serving priorities of much of Silicon Valley.
While graduates voiced their fears over AI-driven job losses, Schmidt doubled down: America needs more artificial intelligence and more immigration. The message was clear—technological disruption for thee, but cheap labor to cushion the blow for us.
This is not a coherent economic vision. It is a convenient one for technocrats who profit from both automation that slashes payrolls and an endless supply of foreign workers that suppresses wages. Schmidt told the booing crowd that “America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to,” urging them to “choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant.”
The applause lines ignored the reality facing American graduates entering a marketplace already strained by prior waves of high-skilled visa workers.
Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies cut through the rhetoric with precision: businesses naturally want AI for productivity gains and immigration to keep labor costs down, but policymakers must force a choice. Congress cannot indulge both without betraying the American worker. Yet Schmidt and his cohort demand exactly that bargain.
The pattern is familiar. For decades, post-1990 policies have treated immigration as an economic steroid—importing workers, renters, and consumers to inflate GDP figures and asset prices while masking underlying weaknesses. Now AI accelerates the trend.
What mechanization did to Southern agriculture over decades, intelligent systems threaten to do to knowledge work in years. American software engineers who sacrificed to build careers find their roles diminished, not by superior competition but by policy choices that prioritize global labor arbitrage.
Schmidt’s stance echoes other financial titans. BlackRock’s Larry Fink once noted that nations resisting immigration turn to robotics and AI to offset demographic decline. The implication is telling: rather than protect citizens through sound policy, elites prefer importing replacement labor or replacing them with machines. Either path serves capital concentration over national cohesion.
Ken Griffin has lamented AI’s rapid encroachment on high-skilled finance roles, yet many in his circle still advocate for more visas that flood the very fields now automating.
California Republican gubernatorial hopeful Steve Hilton offers a sharper contrast—grow through genuine innovation and productivity, not demographic replacement. President Trump has similarly outlined an approach where robotics and American ingenuity fill gaps without surrendering sovereignty over the labor market.
These perspectives recognize a fundamental truth: a nation’s economy should serve its people, not treat citizens as interchangeable inputs in a global spreadsheet.
The human cost is mounting. Stories abound of Americans who clawed their way into middle-class tech careers only to watch the ground shift beneath them. One former junior engineer described years of intense self-study leading to stability for himself and his daughter, now threatened by AI disruption layered atop visa competition. Such accounts are not anomalies; they represent a fraying social contract. When tens of millions sense they have nothing left to lose, cultural stability erodes.
History offers warnings about societies that sacrifice their own for abstract notions of progress. When elites prioritize global flows over domestic fidelity, resentment builds—not from prejudice, but from lived experience of diminished opportunity. Constitutional principles and the American founding prioritized the general welfare of the citizenry, not the portfolio returns of multinational executives.
Schmidt’s generation of tech leaders built extraordinary tools, yet their policy prescriptions often reveal a disconnect from the human lives those tools disrupt. America does not need to choose between technological advancement and protecting its people. It needs leaders willing to pursue both without pitting them against each other. True ambition serves the nation that made it possible, not merely extracts from it.
As the Apostle Paul warned the church at Ephesus, “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth” (Ephesians 4:28).
A just economy rewards honest work and enables provision, rather than engineering obsolescence for citizens while importing substitutes. Policymakers would do well to heed that ancient wisdom amid the silicon rush.
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.
