(Just The News)—Recognition of only two sexes as defined in proposed North Carolina legislation, and three diversity policy bills have been vetoed by first-term Democrat Gov. Josh Stein.
The quartet of rejections on Thursday morning ahead of the holiday weekend came alongside eight bills signed into law. Among those was the Parents Protection Act.
Efforts to overturn all or some of the vetoes will come, said leaders of the Republican majority General Assembly.
“At a time when teachers, law enforcement, and state employees need pay raises and people need shorter lines at the DMV, the Legislature failed to pass a budget and, instead, wants to distract us by stoking culture wars that further divide us,” Stein said in a statement. “These mean-spirited bills would marginalize vulnerable people and also undermine the quality of public services and public education. Therefore, I am vetoing them. I stand ready to work with the Legislature when it gets serious about protecting people and addressing North Carolinians’ pressing concerns.”
House Speaker Destin Hall, R-Caldwell, said he was disappointed, and Stein chose to side “with radical activists over the overwhelming majority of North Carolinians who believe in parental rights, biological reality and protecting women and children.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has already sided with Tennessee in banning gender-affirming care for minors, and Thursday said it would take up two challenges from West Virginia and Idaho related to women’s sports.
Prevent Sexual Exploitation/Women and Minors, known also as House Bill 805, declares there are two sexes “without regard to an individual’s psychological, chosen or subjective experience of gender.” It defines gender identity as “a term that means an individual’s self-declared identity that may not align with biological sex and being a subjective internal sense, shall not be treated as legally or biologically equivalent to sex.”
The House agreed to Senate modifications of religious objections for school assignments; parental limits on school library books that can be borrowed; and library book databases in each school district.
The law aligns with executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, both in giving definitions and in the effort to protect women’s spaces.
Stein also vetoed Eliminating “DEI” in Public Education (Senate Bill 227), Eliminating “DEI” in Public Higher Ed. (Senate Bill 558), and Equality in State Agencies/Prohibition on DEI (House Bill 171).
“Gov. Josh Stein had the opportunity to support women and girls across North Carolina today, yet he chose to bow down to a radical ideology that harms women,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, R-Rockingham. “In House Bill 805, we took bold action to define two sexes in state law, just like President Trump did in his groundbreaking executive order.
“Gov. Stein also had the chance to rid our public schools, colleges and universities, and state agencies of divisive ‘DEI’ programs but refused to do so. He’s choosing to ignore the clear will of the people who are tired of politically correct nonsense.”
The higher education bill says it is an act “to demonstrate the General Assembly’s intent that students, professors, administrators, and other employees of public institutions of higher education recognize the equality and rights of all persons and to prohibit public institutions of higher education from promoting certain concepts that are contrary to that intent.”
The K-12 bill says it is an act “to demonstrate the General Assembly’s intent that students, teachers, administrators, and other school employees recognize the equality and rights of all persons and to prohibit public school units from promoting certain concepts that are contrary to that intent.”
The agencies bill language says it is an act “eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in state and local government and clarifying the penalty provisions of the state budget act and local government budget and fiscal control act.”
Leading the list of new laws was the Parents Protection Act. Also known as Senate Bill 442 with companion House Bill 560, it prohibits parents from prosecution for refusing to affirm the gender identity of a child that experiences gender dysphoria.
The law makes sure parents can’t be accused of abuse or neglect for raising their child according to birth sex or lose custody of their children if there is disagreement of their sex when born and a potential gender identity claim. Medical decisions are the parents’ fundamental rights, according to the bill. Also, potential adoptions or foster care would not be tied to prospective parents having to affirm gender identity.
The other seven bills signed into law included:
- Improve Health and Human Services (SB600).
- Neighbor State License Recognition Act (HB763).
- Continuing Care Retirement Communities Act (HB357/HB719).
- Various Education Changes (SB125).
- Extend Certain Rights to Catawba Nation (SB655).
- Info. Rights of Estate/Death of LLC Member (SB307).
- NCCCS LMS/NCLDS (SB133).
Stein has 18 bills awaiting action. Two have 10-day deadlines on Monday, including the famed Make Elevators Great Again bill touted by first-term Republican Labor Commissioner Luke Farley.
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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.
