New York City’s first lady is packing her bags again. Not for a school visit. Not for a food pantry. For a manor house in the Portuguese countryside with two heated pools, landscaped gardens, and a price tag that would choke a working family in Queens.
The New York Post reports that Rama Duwaji, the 29-year-old wife of socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, will serve as artist-in-residence for the third time this year with The Women Sanctuary. The gathering is billed as a “Journey through Islamic Calligraphy” retreat near Porto, split into two sessions running September 16-21 and September 25-30.
A shared room starts at $4,300. A private room with a private bathroom runs $5,260. That does not include the flight. That does not include the picnics, the poolside hangouts, or the “unhurried moments” the organizers sell as suhbah — spiritual companionship while hearts soften amid the beauty of creation.
Creation is beautiful. So is a first lady who actually shows up for the city she represents.
The Pattern Is the Point
This is not a one-off artist trip. It is a season.
Last month Duwaji skipped America’s 250th birthday to host The Women Sanctuary’s “Plants of the Quran” retreat on Mallorca. The ticket was about $3,400 a head. She was spotted at Newark boarding an eight-hour flight while the rest of the country marked two and a half centuries of independence. The Daily Wire noted the same insult. Her husband stayed home and used the milestone to lecture New Yorkers about capitalism and American wars.
Days later she was in Corsica for a sold-out “Mary in the Quran” retreat. Fox News reported that the program framed the Virgin Mary as a “Palestinian woman” giving birth under occupation. Participants prayed for “our sisters in Palestine.”
The cheapest seats still started north of $4,000. Mary is honored in Scripture as the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ. Recasting her as a political mascot for a luxury Mediterranean seminar is not reverence. It is branding.
Now Portugal. Third retreat. Same outfit. Same title. Same heated-pool piety.
“Former first ladies spent their time visiting schools and doing charitable work,” Queens City Councilwoman Joann Ariola told the Post. “Being Zohran Mamdani’s wife must be very stressful because this first lady is more interested in vacations than she is in matters that affect New Yorkers.”
“They’re acting like jet-setters when they’re supposed to be for New Yorkers but they’re anything but. She’s a good example of the hypocrisy of this administration,” said former Queens Councilman Bob Holden.
That is the cleanest summary of the Mamdani years you will get this week.
She Is Not a Private Citizen When She Wears the Title
Hizzoner keeps insisting his wife should be spared criticism because she holds no official post. That is a convenient shield. She lives in Gracie Mansion. She is introduced as first lady. She curates the image of the administration. And she keeps leaving the country for sold-out Islamic wellness weekends while New Yorkers sweat through heat rules, crime, and a city government that lectures them about equity.
Her record is not a secret. In a 2015 Tumblr post she wrote that American soldiers “are not brave nor are they fighting for anyone’s freedom,” but are “mercilessly slaughtering 3rd world civilians and fighting to maintain American hegemony.”
Resurfaced posts also celebrated Palestinian terrorists, including plane hijacker Leila Khaled. She later apologized in general terms. The words remain. So does the posture.
September is already booked beyond Portugal. Duwaji is slated to visit relatives in Lebanon and Syria — both on the State Department’s Level 4 “Do Not Travel” list for terrorism, kidnapping, and armed conflict. City Hall first claimed an NYPD detail would go with her “upon the strong recommendation of the NYPD.”
The department shot that down. Officers are not sent into Level 4 countries for personal travel. Mamdani blamed a “miscommunication.” The first session in Portugal ends September 21. The Middle East trip was reported to begin around September 20. The calendar is a travel brochure, not a public schedule.
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. That is Matthew 6:21, and it needs no commentary. A first lady who keeps finding her rest in $5,000 Islamic retreats is telling you what she treasures. New Yorkers already know what they get in return. Lectures. Heat-wave rules. A mayor who defends the absences and a City Hall that cannot even keep its story straight with the police department.
Calligraphy is a fine art. Heated pools are nice. None of that is the job. The job is the city. She keeps choosing the manor house.
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.