(Daily Signal)—Democrats and LGBTQ+ activist groups say they want to empower parents on their children’s programming, but they also vehemently oppose putting labels on TV and streaming shows that would alert parents to transgender content.
Concerned Women for America analyzed the streaming shows on Netflix geared toward young audiences, and found that more than 40% of most children’s programming includes some sort of LGBTQ+ theme.
The Federal Communications Commission sought comment from the general public, asking for suggestions on how the Television Oversight Monitoring Board can update TV ratings to alert parents to content such as the introduction of a male character “becoming” female or same-sex romance themes.
Democrats
“We strongly believe that parents should decide what their children watch on television,” a group of 68 Democrats wrote in a letter first signed by Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif. Yet the Democrats also wrote that they “strongly oppose efforts to censor the inclusion of transgender children or topics, including by rating programming differently just because it includes transgender people.”
“Studies show that LGBTQI+ representation in media both improve young LGBTQI+ people’s self-acceptance and shape the broader public’s acceptance of LGBTQI+ people,” the Democrats wrote.
If smuggling LGBTQ+ themes into children’s content represents an attempt to change public opinion, shouldn’t parents be alerted to it?
This contradiction appears throughout the public comments opposing the labels. Opponents insist that parents should decide what their children watch, yet they oppose providing parents vital tools to make parental choice more meaningful.
GLAAD
The LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD, which brags about identifying more than 145 LGBTQ-inclusive children and family titles since 2005, also opposed the labels.
Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD’s president and CEO, suggested that adding labels would involve “disempowering parents to make the best decisions for their children and families.”
How did Ellis conclude this? By suggesting that “government interference” will “limit the entertainment industry’s ability to operate freely.” Yet the proposal does not involve preventing kids’ TV shows from featuring LGBTQ+ content—it would merely require a label so parents would know what they’re getting their kids into.
LGBTQ+ Activist Groups
GLAAD also joined a coalition letter with 43 other LGBTQ+ activist organizations, including Color of Change, the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and the Trevor Project, in opposing the labels.
“Content warnings that specifically single out LGBTQI+ people, including transgender and non-binary people, or mentions of gender identity on screen are unnecessary, unhelpful, and discriminatory,” the groups wrote. Yet they also claimed that such warnings “do not serve to inform parents or guardians; they serve to further a strategic political agenda that has targeted a minority for exclusion from public view.”
The activist groups rightly note that “Congress … has repeatedly chosen to affirm that parents and guardians are ultimately the parties responsible for deciding what content their children can watch,” yet they also claim that a label allowing parents to know whether a TV show includes LGBTQ+ themes would constitute “the government … deciding what content is and is not suitable for these individuals’ children.”
LGBT Tech
Another LGBTQ+ activist letter, this one led by LGBT Tech, stated support for “parents’ ability to make informed decisions about the programming their children watch.”
Yet the letter warned that the Federal Communications Commission may not “encourage a ratings framework that disadvantages an entire class of people by treating their ordinary on-screen presence as a basis for heightened warning or different ratings.”
LGBT Tech tacitly admitted that a label would inform parents.
“The label would not merely inform parents,” the letter states. “It would inaccurately and operationally mark a class of people as risky or harmful to children across the distribution chain.”
On the Contrary
The FCC did not raise the issue in a vacuum.
Michael Farris, general counsel at the National Religious Broadcasters, for instance, noted that “no one is seeking to ban content regarding gender identity and related matters. Parents simply want to know what is being communicated to their children so that the parents can make intelligent decisions regarding exposure of their children to such material.”
“No rules are being promulgated,” Farris noted. “No mandates are on the table.”
Trey Donathan at America First Legal, wrote, “Parents cannot exercise their rights if industry-controlled ratings obscure the nature of programming marketed to their children.”
He added that when a program rated for kids includes lessons about transgender identity “or other LGBTQ+ inclusive themes, parents should receive clear notice.”
“AFL is not seeking to ban programming; it is asking … to ensure that parents receive clear notice and workable parental controls before children are exposed to controversial content,” he added.
Labels would not stop studios from producing LGBTQ-themed programs or prevent parents from allowing their children to watch them. They would simply provide parents with more information before making that decision.
If parents should decide what their children watch, why shouldn’t they receive clearer information about the kind of content in these TV shows?
If LGBTQ+ activists are so proud about influencing the culture through streaming media, why do they oppose tools to truly empower parents? I think we already know the answer.
Outdated regulations are allowing radical gender ideology into kids' shows. The FCC needs to act now.@Tyler2ONeil pic.twitter.com/qhv2GmMnRj
— Heritage Action (@Heritage_Action) May 22, 2026
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.
