“Be careful what you wish for.”
Radical Democrat Hillary Ronen strongly supported defunding police in 2020, as did pretty much every Democrat politician in the nation. It was the easiest way to stay hip, cool, and woke back then. Now that those who got their way are seeing first-hand what defunding police actually does to their districts, they’re changing tunes.
I discussed Ronen’s hypocrisy on the latest episode of The JD Rucker Show.
According to Fox News:
Hillary Ronen, a Democrat, represents District 9 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. During a Budget and Appropriations Committee meeting on Wednesday, she made an impassioned plea to add more officers to the Mission District, which she represents.
Ronen was attacking San Francisco’s police chief for spending a large amount of overtime on an anti-retail theft program instead of prioritizing police presence in her district.
“I’ve been begging this department to give the Mission what it deserves in terms of police presence all year long,” Ronen said. “And I have been told time and time and time and time again there are no officers that we can send to Mission.”
“It hurts. And I feel betrayed by the department. I feel betrayed by the mayor. I feel betrayed by the priorities of the city,” the Democratic politician added.
The speech contradicts her stance on policing in 2020. After the George Floyd protests, Ronen tweeted that she believed “strongly” that San Francisco’s police force needed to be reduced.
Here’s what she said less than three years ago…
I want to make it clear that I believe strongly in defunding the police and reducing the number of officers on our force. For decades we’ve had an imbalance in our city’s budget, with hundreds of millions of dollars going to SFPD to have them do work they are not qualified to do.
After fighting to create Mental Health SF which redirects funds to mental health care crisis teams instead of police, I believe without a shadow of a doubt that SFPD is not where we should be putting our money. But we have a big fight on our hands to make these cuts happen.
The Mayor has submitted her proposed budget to the Board already, and unfortunately, this level of cuts has not been included. In my role on the Budget & Appropriations Committee, I want you to know I will be fighting for three things.
1. Significant cuts to SFPD’s budget that will meaningfully start off a multi-year process to defund and reimagine policing in San Francisco. 2. A reduction in the number of officers and command staff.
3. Fully funding the departments that are actually doing the work of keeping our streets safe, iIncluding full funding for street crisis response through Mental Health SF.
But I can’t do this alone. I only have one vote. If you agree with me that we need to defund the police and instead fund services, I need your support now. I’m asking everyone to join me to get these cuts passed in the Budget Committee.
There is a hearing on the SFPD budget on August 20, and the Budget Committee will vote on August 26. We need three votes at this Committee and 6 votes at the full Board to implement these cuts.
If I’ve learned anything from my years in City Hall, it is that our best wins come through collaboration. We need unprecedented unity between those who wish to defund the police if we are to get passed this finish line together.
Some may want to feel badly for her now that her district is being overridden by crime, but that was what she wanted. Others may want to feel badly for the people in her district, but most of them voted for her.
Wokesters are learning the hard way, I suppose.
The wokesters in San Francisco are learning the hard way that #DefundThePolice is a bad idea.
Hillary Ronen just made an impassioned plea for more police presence in her district. She claims she feels "betrayed."
Perhaps she should look in a mirror sometime… https://t.co/ngyxjjdqua
— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) March 20, 2023
Image by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Alternative Video Sources:
Radical San Francisco District Supervisor Who Pushed #DefundThePolice Is Now Begging for More Police https://t.co/oOyCi78qRJ
— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) March 20, 2023
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.
