(DCNF)—A recent report by The Associated Press is drawing attention online for appearing to criticize a Nordic country for having too few non-white athletes on its rosters for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
The Associated Press (AP) published a piece Monday with the headline, “Europe’s rising diversity is not reflected at the Winter Olympics. Culture plays a big role.” While naming other European countries, the story and its accompanying video, posted Friday to X, focused primarily on Sweden. It prominently featured one Somali immigrant to the country who has a “passion” for snowboarding, yet does not appear to compete in the sport professionally.
“Immigration from Africa and the Middle East is changing the demographics of Europe’s top winter sports countries, but that hasn’t really translated to their largely white rosters heading to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics,” a female narrator says in AP’s video. “For instance, Team Sweden is almost entirely made up of ethnically Swedish athletes, which is hardly a reflection of the country’s diversity as Sweden has welcomed historic numbers of asylum seekers in recent decades.”
The outlet’s story began with recounting the perspective of Maryan Hashi, a Somali-born woman who took up snowboarding after immigrating to Sweden.
“Maryan Hashi remembers the thoughts running through her mind when she began hitting the ski slopes in northern Sweden. As a Black [sic] woman from Somalia, she felt like an ‘alien,’” AP’s story continues. “A few years later, snowboarding is the 30-year-old student’s big passion and it is helping her integrate into her adopted country’s society better than she could ever have imagined. What she’d love now is to see other migrants experiencing the same joy.”
“My parents made me nervous because they felt scared. They felt maybe I was also out of place, maybe something dangerous, maybe something I don’t belong to, but I proved them wrong,” Hashi says in the video, appearing to reference the time she started to snowboard in Sweden.
“Immigration from Africa and the Middle East has transformed the demographics of Europe in recent decades. And while the growing diversity is reflected in many sports such as soccer … it hasn’t made a dent in winter sports,” AP’s story continues.
It also noted that, during the upcoming Winter Olympics taking place in Northern Italy from Feb. 6 – 22, “Sweden is sending a team made up almost exclusively of ethnically Swedish athletes.” It called New York Rangers star Mika Zibanejad, a member of the 2026 Swedish Olympic men’s ice hockey team, a “rare exception.” Zibanejad was born in Sweden to an ethnically Iranian father and an ethnically Finnish mother.
“The Olympic rosters of France, Germany, Switzerland and other European winter sports nations look a lot like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation seen in their soccer or basketball teams,” AP added.
“Immigrants typically live in major urban areas away from skiing hubs in the mountains and are in less privileged economic positions,” the narrator of AP’s video continues. “Participating in winter sports can be very expensive. While some countries like Sweden offer programs to young children that give them access to free ski equipment and the slopes, experts also believe that more needs to be done by winter sports to improve accessibility, specifically for immigrants and underserved communities.”
A Trump administration State Department official called out the outlet in an X reply to the video.
“The AP is concerned that there are too few Somalis snowboarding for the Swedish Olympic team,” Sarah Rogers, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, wrote Saturday on the platform. “Every time you think the media has evolved to be more sophisticated and serious since the 2012-2020 era, you get an item like this.”
“Wait til you guys find out about the racial demographics in the NBA or on NFL defenses,” conservative activist Robby Starbuck, known for his opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in corporate America, wrote in an X reply to AP.
NBA and NFL players — specifically on the defensive side of the ball — are predominantly African American, despite the fact that only about 14% of the U.S. population is black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
About 73% of Sweden’s population claims an ethnically Swedish background, Statistics Sweden, an agency of the European country’s Ministry of Finance, reports, citing 2022 data. Less than one percent of Sweden’s population is of Somali descent.
As of Sunday afternoon, both Rogers’s and Starbuck’s replies to AP on X have received significantly more “likes” than the video.
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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.
