(DCNF)—Socialist New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani promises to respect police officers, but leaders of the “abolitionist” group that helped him seize power say they are “pigs” and “lazy cowards.”
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member will control one of the nation’s largest police forces upon taking office Jan. 1. Mamdani previously advocated for dismantling the NYPD as a state assemblyman, a stance aligned with the DSA’s platform.
Mamdani told the press while campaigning that his public safety agenda is more moderate than the DSA’s, despite winning the mayoral election with help from thousands of DSA staffers and volunteers.
Mamdani will inherit a myriad of public safety problems as mayor, including Rikers Island’s uncertain future, the New York Police Department (NYPD) bleeding officers by the hundreds and a COVID-19 pandemic-era crime spike that has not waned.
Misdemeanors, “major” felonies and non-major felonies in New York City have been more frequent in every year since 2020, according to NYPD data. The city’s seven major felonies combined — murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny of motor vehicle — hit a 17-year high of 126,786 in 2023 and decreased by just 2.2% in 2024.
If the DSA has its way, Mamdani will abolish the justice system as we know it.
“For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state — from prisons and police themselves, to their manifestations in all forms throughout society,” the DSA’s website says.
The DSA demands America “end the criminalization of working-class survival,” “invest in community self-governance and care, not cops” and provide “freedom for all incarcerated people.”
Members of the DSA’s National Political Committee have for years used social media to excoriate cops, calling them “pigs” and “lazy cowards” and accusing them of “literally killing us.”
“In 1886, the pigs killed 4 workers in Haymarket Square and 4 more later and this day should always remind us that every basic right we have was won with blood,” Committee Co-Chair Megan Romer declared in May 2024, railing against the police killing of pro-labor rights protesters during the Haymarket Square riot in Chicago, Illinois. “This doesn’t stop the fascists from spilling more; they won’t stop until we win (and we will).”
Mamdani did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment. The DSA’s New York City chapter did not respond to a request for comment.
The DSA’s willingness to compromise with Mamdani remains to be seen. The group passed a resolution sometime before the election committing to “serve as an effective outside ally to a potential Zohran Mamdani administration,” though some wanted to nail down stricter expectations for him, Politico reported.
“If we succeed in electing Zohran Mamdani, our priority will not be policing the mayor’s lapses and demanding accountability — orientations the left has adopted in moments of decline and marginality,” said a drafted clause of the resolution that was later removed, according to Politico.
The mayor-elect told reporters in August that he does not support measures such as eliminating misdemeanor offenses and that his “platform is not the same as national DSA,” The New York Times reported. He aims to create a new $1.1 billion “Department of Community Safety” that his campaign says will offset police officers’ burdens by letting some emergencies be handled by counselors, medical professionals and “violence interrupters.”
Mamdani got the idea for the department from his new chief of staff, a close DSA ally, City & State reported.
Even Mamdani’s stated plans should concern those who favor more traditional law enforcement systems, according to Charles Lehman, who studies public safety for the conservative Manhattan Institute.
“At this point, my biggest concern is his commitment to not try to increase the sworn force size,” Lehman told the DCNF. “Given that the NYPD is losing 300 cops per month, that will inevitably lead to further attrition, which will make the city less safe,” he added, citing an August report from amNewYork.
“I’m also pretty concerned about how he will handle the pending closure of Rikers, due by law in August of 2027,” Lehman said. “The borough-based jails won’t be ready by then — what’s his plan? Will he just let the city have no jails?”
The city’s prison system is slated for a nearly 80% reduction in holding capacity with Rikers gone, bringing the DSA’s dream closer to reality, Lehman has noted in his research.
Mamdani stressed on the campaign trail that he no longer supports defunding the NYPD. He also apologized to NYPD officers during an October Fox News interview for disparaging police earlier in his career, adding he is committed to “representing the men and women of the NYPD.”
“I apologize because of the fact that I’m looking to work with these officers, and I know that these officers, these men and women who serve in the NYPD, they put their lives on the line every single day,” Mamdani said.
Mamdani is still a long way from convincing some that his far-left vision will help police.
“Even if he has given up on his past radical plans — and I’m skeptical — there’s lots of things he’s promised to do that will undoubtedly impact the city for the worse,” Lehman told the DCNF.
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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.
