Daily Signal Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. A lot of officials in the Trump Cabinet are under a lot of criticism, as we’d expect, from the Left. But one has, I think, both got more criticism and more unfair criticism than any other Cabinet member. And that’s Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war—the newly renamed Department of Defense.
Let’s just review a little bit of his record because it does not justify the level of invective that the Left, and even some people on the Right in Congress and the Republican Party, have unfairly attacked him.
We were told during the Biden administration that the recruitment for the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, and even in one case, I think one year, the Marines, was off some 40,000 to 50,000 recruits. And the Pentagon’s reaction under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was, as we heard this echoed by a lot of the four-star admirals and generals, well, people are out of shape. They’re in gangs. They take drugs. They are wanted by private enterprise.
We have to compete with all of the excuses other than the real cause. The real cause was, as Pete Hegseth said when he came in, that people felt that the military was not emphasizing combat, battlefield efficacy. It was turning into a social justice “program.”
The subtext of Pete Hegseth’s point was that there was a particular demographic, white males from rural and often southern locales. They had died at twice their numbers in the demographic in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they weren’t joining.
Some of them were not joining because of the 8,500, maybe 8,000-8,500, that had natural immunity from prior COVID-19 infections. And yet, they did not want this experimental mRNA vaccine, and they were drummed out en masse. The majority of those fit this demographic.
The others felt that under the DEI obsessions with race and sexual orientation and gender, that people would be recruited, retained, promoted on criteria other than battlefield efficacy. So, they just stayed away from what they felt was a hostile environment. Didn’t help when then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin told the nation before Congress that they were going to invest white supremacy following the death of George Floyd.
That’s over with. There is a record number of Army recruits. The military has met all of its recruiting. That is equivalent to the dramatic revolution on the southern border. Nobody thought we could close the border. We did. Nobody thought we could get recruitment back. Pete Hegseth did.
The other thing, very importantly: We have procurement that we were focused largely, not entirely, but on a few big conglomerates. These were companies that, over the years, had consolidated dozens of defense contractors, who had famous names in World War II. But now they were Lockheed, General Dynamics, Northrop, Raytheon, etc.
And we were buying few platforms—$14 billion carriers, $120 million F-22s, billion-dollar frigates, etc. But our enemies were building lots of things. They were taking our approach to World War II when the United States just flooded the zone with Thunderbolt P-47 fighters, P-51 fighters, Essex carriers, escort carriers, light carriers, Sherman tanks. Good enough. But just swarm the enemy. We weren’t doing that.
So, one of the things that Hegseth has tried to do is look toward a wider variety of startup, off-the-shelf companies that make cheaper products in greater quantity. A million drones they have announced. That’s new.
The third thing is, yes, it was good to worry about American safety overseas, and that’s why, ostensibly, after 9/11, we went into Afghanistan, Iraq, or we take out the nuclear—but if you look, since 1990, when we first had figures, there’s some 900,000 people who have overdosed or killed themselves from foreign imported opiates, and particularly fentanyl, often disguised as designer drugs intended to kill Americans through Chinese agency and cartel fabrication in I guess we would call them pill factories in Mexico and parts of Latin America.
So, these drug interdictions are saving American lives. And he’s saying to the nation, it doesn’t do any good to spend billions of dollars and defend the borders and intervene all over the world if in your backyard you’re losing more people from all the battles combined since World War II. More than Vietnam, more than Korea, more than Iraq, more than the first Gulf War, more than Afghanistan—900,000 dead, 75,000 to 80,000 a year. For now, we’re getting close to the 35th year of this. And he’s trying to stop that.
He ended, as I said, DEI, which was amazing because what had happened—the Left had always despised the Pentagon. They had always tried to rake the generals over the coals. We knew that stereotype of the radical Democratic Party.
But the last 10 years, especially under the Obama administration, they said: Wait, wait, wait, wait. They have the chain of command. They don’t have to argue in Congress. They don’t have to get a bill passed. All we have to do is bring these generals and admirals in here, especially under a Democratic Obama or Biden administration, and say, you’re gonna do this, and you’re gonna do this. Abortion. You’re gonna make that base have abortion to everybody. DEI, you’re gonna make that artillery unit have—so, they could get an instant fiat right through the chain of command.
And all of a sudden, Pete Hegseth came in and said: You’re abusing the military for your political agenda. We’re not gonna do it anymore.
A couple of other things: Pete Hegseth, compared to what?
I didn’t hear anybody say that Lloyd Austin might have had a conflict of interest coming out of Raytheon right into the secretary of defense. Was that a good paradigm that we’re doing? Generals go out of the Pentagon, they go to defense contractors, then they rely on their former subordinates for, maybe, advice about which weapon systems to buy, and then they often go back into government in retirement, and then they’ll go back again to these defense? What Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex.
And Lloyd Austin was AWOL for seven days. We never knew where he was. Did anybody suggest he should step down? No.
So, this is political. And the calls for Pete Hegseth to step down—it’s ridiculous.
And finally, about the drug interdiction. We’ve had about 30 of these. Are we all suffering from collective amnesia? President Barack Obama, on the Pakistani-Afghan border, Somalia, somewhat in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Syria, Iraq, was a master of Predator drone assassinations. He didn’t kill, I don’t know, 60 or 70 narco-terrorists on 30 boats or more. He killed over 500 people, including a 16-year-old U.S. citizen.
And when he was asked about this, according to Mark Halperin’s co-authored book, he said: You know, I never really knew that I was pretty good at killing. Pretty good at killing. It suited me. That’s what Obama said.
He also said at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he joked about using Predators and killing people. He said, if people wanted to date his daughter, they better be careful because of Predators. In other words, that his hallmark, his brand, had been Predator assassination. That’s kind of a very light way of approaching human assassination, if you ask me.
What am I getting at? If you look at what Pete Hegseth has actually done, it was long overdue, and he’s doing it very well. And the criticism against him has two themes: It’s entirely political, and it’s not symmetric. Everything they said about Pete Hegseth in a negative context could have been applied to both the Obama and Biden administration, and much more egregiously.
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.
