(The Daily Signal)—The FBI announced Wednesday that it had cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a welcomed development. However, the FBI should also cut ties with an even worse organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center.
While the ADL has twisted the facts to promote a leftist narrative, attacking critics of transgender ideology and straining to find any excuse to deny the Nashville transgender shooter was driven by left-wing extremism, the SPLC has a long and ignominious history of demonizing conservatives and carrying water for Antifa.
Based on the FBI’s decision to cut ties with the ADL, it should also distance itself from the SPLC.
The ADL
“James Comey disgraced the FBI by writing ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedding agents with an extreme group functioning like a terrorist organization and the disgraceful operation they ran spying on Americans,” FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News Digital earlier this week. “That was not law enforcement, it was activism dressed up as counterterrorism, and it put Americans in danger.”
Comey declared his and the FBI’s “love” for the ADL at the organization’s leadership summit in Washington, D.C., in May 2017. He called a previous 2014 speech a “love letter to the ADL.”
“Three years later I can say, from the perspective of the FBI, we’re still in love with you,” he said.
“That era is finished,” Patel said this week. “This FBI formally rejects Comey’s policies and any partnership with the ADL.”
As The Daily Signal exclusively reported last year, the ADL flagged “online amplifiers of LGBTQ+ hate” as extremists to be examined by law enforcement.
The ADL pushed law enforcement to scrutinize opponents of transgender ideology such as The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo.
Why the SPLC Is Worse
The SPLC is arguably even worse than the ADL.
The SPLC gained a reputation for suing Ku Klux Klan chapters into bankruptcy in the 1980s, and it developed the Klanwatch project to monitor Klan groups. “Klanwatch” morphed into “Hatewatch” and the “Intelligence Project,” which publishes an annual map of “hate groups” and “antigovernment extremist groups” across the country.
Yet the map includes far more than just truly racist and hateful organizations like the Klan. Starting in the early 2000s, the SPLC added organizations that oppose illegal immigration to the map. In 2010, it added a host of “anti-LGBT hate groups” to the map, including the Family Research Council. It added organizations that oppose radical Islamist terrorism, such as the Center for Security Policy, as “anti-Muslim hate groups.”
In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council using the “hate map.” The SPLC condemned the attack, but kept the council on the map.
In recent years, the “hate map” has grown even more expansive. The SPLC put Moms for Liberty and other parental rights groups on the map in 2023, just two years after the National School Boards Association compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists in a since-retracted memo. This year, the SPLC added Turning Point USA to the “hate map.” A few months later, an assassin with a transgender boyfriend allegedly murdered Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
The SPLC does not call for violence against organizations on the map, but it has repeatedly stated that the map reveals the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”
The comparison between mainstream conservative organizations and the Ku Klux Klan is arguably defamatory, and the SPLC is currently defending itself in court after calling the Dustin Inman Society, which opposes illegal immigration, an “anti-immigrant hate group.”
Big Tech companies like Amazon have used the “hate map” to screen program recipients. Companies like Eventbrite, PayPal, and Hyatt Hotels have relied on the SPLC’s “hate” accusations. Donor networks worth billions have pledged to keep charitable funds out of the hands of SPLC-accused “hate groups.”
Then-SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged in a 2021 donor meeting that “many agencies in the new Biden administration” reached out to “solicit our expertise” to “help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat.” That wasn’t hyperbole. The Justice Department received a briefing from the SPLC shortly after it added Moms for Liberty to the “hate map” in June 2023. The FBI cited the SPLC in its notorious memo on “radical-traditional Catholics.”
Law enforcement agencies do not take briefings on mere matters of opinion. Companies do not blacklist charities based on matters of opinion.
Perhaps even more disqualifying, the SPLC has troubling ties to Antifa.
Kash Patel has previously criticized the SPLC, but he should give it the full ADL treatment.
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.
