Sacramento did not go after the fraud. It went after the cameras.
On Wednesday, California Democrats finished ramming through AB 2624, the privacy bill Republicans have been calling the Stop Nick Shirley Act. The Senate passed it 30-10 on Tuesday. The Assembly concurred 59-19 the next day. By Wednesday afternoon the enrolled bill was sitting on Gavin Newsom’s desk.
The author is Oakland Democrat Mia Bonta, wife of Attorney General Rob Bonta. That pairing should tell you everything you need to know about whose interests this law is built to serve.
A Fine for Showing What Happened
Democrats say the measure is just an expansion of California’s old Safe at Home address-confidentiality program. Now it covers “immigration support services” providers, their employees, and their volunteers. Legal clinics. Nonprofits. Health and hospice outfits. Case managers. Anyone handing out aid, referrals, or paperwork to immigrants and illegal aliens.
The trap is in the enforcement. The bill treats a photograph or a video as an “image.” A covered person can send a written demand that you stop posting it. Ignore that paper and they can drag you into court for an injunction, attorney fees, and money damages of not less than $4,000, up to three times actual damages.
There is no journalist exemption. Carl DeMaio said that out loud in committee. Bonta did not add one.
California Democrats are trying to intimidate citizen watchdog journalists and protect waste and fraud happening in far-Left-wing NGOs. AB 2624 can only be described as the “Stop Nick Shirley Act” — a bill designed to silence citizen journalists exposing fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars.
That was DeMaio, the San Diego Republican who gave the bill its honest name. He also said the law would let taxpayer-funded outfits “demand the removal of video evidence — even if it captures misconduct in plain view.” When he rose to debate the final product, Democrats shut him down.
Nick Shirley put the street version even simpler. If an immigration service provider hands you a piece of paper saying you cannot publish your video, you can be fined $4,000 and stuck with their lawyers’ bills.
They Went After the Man Who Found the Empty Buildings
Shirley is the reason this bill exists. His videos of empty, taxpayer-fed daycare operations in Minnesota blew up last year. Then he came to California and filmed hospice and health shops that looked more like storefronts than care. He alleged hundreds of millions in waste. State and federal investigators later started making arrests in massive Medi-Cal hospice schemes. Sacramento’s answer was not a thank-you. It was a statute.
For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.
That is the whole theory of AB 2624. Call it safety. Call it anti-doxxing. The effect is the same. Film a clinic that takes public money, post the faces and the empty rooms, and the people inside the program can try to bury the tape and bill you for the privilege. First Amendment scholars even the Los Angeles Times bothered to call warned about a chilling effect. Democrats voted anyway, on party lines.
Bonta insists this is about workers facing harassment, not about reporters. Fine. Then write a law that punishes true threats and leaves public-interest recording alone. They refused. They copied the same secrecy model they already gave to abortion and “gender-affirming” clinics and draped it over the immigrant-services industry. The people who cut the checks and the people who cash them get a shield. The citizen with a phone gets a lawsuit.
Newsom is expected to sign it. Of course he is. California has spent years importing a client class, funding the NGOs that service it, and then treating any adult who asks where the money went as the problem. The Stop Nick Shirley Act is not a privacy tweak. It is a warning. Keep the lights off, or pay.
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.