(Daily Signal)—It was not very long ago that liberal writers would rhapsodize about how America’s changing demographics would spell Republicans’ doom. A 2012 headline from The New York Times read, “Demographic Shift Brings New Worry for Republicans.” By 2014, the corporate media was already writing the GOP’s obituary: “Republicans have a major demographic problem. And it’s only going to get worse,” one Washington Post headline claimed.
Then conservatives committed the crime of noticing—noticing that mass migration followed by mass amnesty was Democrats’ play for political power. The Left labeled them peddlers of the “Great Replacement Theory.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo, joined “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss how President Donald Trump upended Democrat plans for permanent control in Washington.
For Schmitt, it all starts with one crucial realization: The American nation is “not just an idea.”
This is a real nation with real people,” the Missouri senator said, and the GOP should be “fighting for them.”
“When Joe Biden is letting 15 million people here illegally, people don’t understand. How could the president of our country allow this? And the answer is that he bought into and was captured by this worldview that there wasn’t anything particularly unique [about America], that America was just some economic zone with an airport attached to it,” Schmitt continued. “We can have our jobs shipped overseas, all those good-paying jobs, and we get cheap Chinese T-shirts in return and everything is going to be great.”
In fairness, Schmitt says some of these policies were justifiable prior to the end of the Cold War. In the aftermath of World War II, America’s trade and foreign policy focused on “rebuild[ing] our European allies and Japan, to bring them into the fold, and defeat Soviet communism. That defined our foreign policy in the sense that we had this security umbrella for our friends and allies. We had trade deals that weren’t really good for us, but that allowed them to get back on their feet.”
Once the Cold War ended, Schmitt told The Daily Signal, “this is when the mistakes were made because the people in charge, the elites, they never really adjusted. They never adjusted trade policy. They never really adjusted foreign policy.”
“You sort of had this globalist view,” Schmitt said, “the end of history. And that fueled this mass migration. It fueled a wandering, aimless, Wilsonian kind of foreign policy that was based on these abstract ideas of global democracy.”
It was far from a Democrat-only problem. “Republicans were a part of this problem, too,” Schmitt added. Republicans of the post-Cold War era pursued trade policies “that shipped our jobs overseas,” but promised ‘creative destruction’ would leave Americans better off. The destruction came, but the creativity did not.
“We’ve seen devastation in our communities, factories that are desolate now, and they’ve been replaced with, in many ways, despair and death,” Schmitt said.
Long before Trump was president, he was one of the first to recognize the need for change. Since taking American politics by storm, he has vigorously reasserted the sovereignty of the American nation. Republicans of yesteryear hesitated to embrace this view, afraid of pejoratives like racist or xenophobic. But the Republicans of today have caught up to the party’s frontman.
America is “much more” than idea, Schmitt told The Daily Signal. “It’s our home.”
“We’re a people and we believe in things and that we ought to be fighting for the dignity of the guy that doesn’t have a PhD, but who wants to work and he wants to be able to raise a family and he wants his kids to have a better life,” Schmitt said. “He shouldn’t have to compete with foreign labor for that.”
“Work is important for people. It gives them meaning,” Schmitt continued. “And I think if we’re honoring the dignity of every individual, which we should, that’s a big part of what we should be fighting for. And President Trump tapped into that in a way that no political figure in my lifetime has ever really tapped into because he met the American people really where they were.”
In doing so, Trump reversed what The Washington Post and The New York Times seemed to think was inevitable.
“The Left understands they were playing a game of getting a permanent majority and total control,” Schmitt said. “It’s important, I think, to remember how close we were to maybe losing all of this.”
“If they had the House and they had the Senate and [Joe] Biden or [Kamala] Harris or somebody else was in the White House,” Schmitt continued, “they would eliminate the filibuster in the Senate. They’d add states to the union. They would pack the United States Supreme Court. They would get mass amnesty. They’d add a bunch of new voters and they very well could have been in the majority for a very, very long time.”
“Trump is a unique political figure in that way,” Schmitt claimed. “He was able to break through, and that’s why they came at him so hard.” But the task for the next generation of Republican leaders like Schmitt will be not to squander the inheritance they will receive from Trump.
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.
