(The Epoch Times)—New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani quickly advanced his democratic socialist agenda on Jan. 1, passing a series of executive orders and using his inauguration speech to promote collectivism.
“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” he said after a swearing-in ceremony in front of City Hall.
After speeches from fellow democratic socialists Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Mamdani advocated universal childcare, freezing rents, and making “buses fast and free.”
Hours into his new administration, Mamdani launched a series of changes, such as establishing a deputy mayor for economic justice, a new Office to Combat Antisemitism, and an advisory Commission on Universal After-School.
Other developments included a new Office of Community Hiring and Workforce Development, designed to help prepare New Yorkers for “career success and economic security,” and multiple task forces aimed at catalyzing housing development.
Mamdani, 34, beat out former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, in the mayoral election last year amid intense scrutiny of his socialist ideology. He’s replacing another Democrat, Eric Adams, who has criticized socialism and stood in the crowd as Mamdani suggested the city had left residents behind.
“I stand alongside countless more New Yorkers watching from cramped kitchens in Flushing and barbershops in East New York, from cell phones propped against the dashboards of parked taxi cabs at LaGuardia, from hospitals in Mott Haven and libraries in El Barrio that have too long known only neglect,” he said.
Boos could be heard from the audience after Mamdani mentioned Adams, who ended his 4-year tenure. Adams was indicted in 2024 for alleged bribery, which he has denied, and federal prosecutors later dropped the case under the Trump administration. Despite calls for his resignation, Adams stayed in office and sought reelection before dropping out of the race in late September.
One of Mamdani’s first executive orders rescinded executive orders Adams issued on or after Sept. 26, 2024, the date of his indictment. During his speech on Jan. 1, Mamdani positioned his administration as following in the footsteps of former Mayor Bill de Blasio and his goal of ending inequality.
“I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist,” he said. “I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical.”
Mamdani has called for city-owned grocery stores, taxing the city’s most wealthy, and “Trump-proofing NYC” by keeping U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers out of city facilities and increasing legal support for illegal immigrants.
Mamdani and Trump, a native New Yorker, have traded jabs over the past year, with Trump criticizing the then-candidate as a “communist.” More recently, the two met in the Oval Office, where they highlighted their shared interest in New York, home to Trump Tower and Trump’s family business.
“We have one thing in common. We want this city of ours that we love to do very well. And I wanted to congratulate the mayor,” Trump told reporters as Mamdani stood next to him.
When asked about the communist label, Trump said Mamdani had “views that are a little out there” but that he was confident Mamdani could do a “good job.”
When reporters pressed Mamdani about his previously labeling Trump a “despot” and a “fascist,” he said he appreciated how the meeting was focused on “the shared purpose that we had in serving New Yorkers” instead of disagreements.
Trump later interjected, saying, “I have been called much more than a despot.
“It’s not that insulting,” the president joked. “I think he will change his mind after we get to working together.”
Immigration could be a sticking point for cooperation between the two leaders as they’ve offered sharply different visions on the issue. Under Trump’s second term, the city and the Trump administration, which has been prioritizing immigration enforcement and deportation of illegal immigrants, have sued each other over various immigration-related issues.
One of Mamdani’s executive orders on Jan. 1 established the Office to Facilitate Pro Bono Legal Assistance, which was tasked with compiling and providing “information on the availability of providers that offer pro bono legal services to City residents and entities that serve them.”
He also directed the new office to “coordinate with the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and the New York City Department of Social Services on the distribution of funds for immigrant legal services.”
His deputy mayor for economic justice has also been tasked with “supporting, uplifting, and protecting immigrant communities.”
Emel Akan contributed to this report.
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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.
