In the shadow of downtown Los Angeles, where tent cities stretch for blocks and human despair meets institutional neglect, Spencer Pratt’s volunteer team has uncovered a pattern that demands scrutiny. Members of the so-called Pratt Pack fanned out across Skid Row on Sunday, interviewing residents about voter registration drives and mail-in ballots in the city’s mayoral race. What they found raises serious concerns about how ballots are handled in one of America’s most troubled neighborhoods.
Volunteers, including former California State Senate candidate Susan Collins, spoke with dozens of locals. Time and again, the stories aligned: many recalled being registered to vote and receiving mail-in ballots, but few—if any—remembered actually casting them.
Collins put it plainly: residents described registrations and ballot deliveries, yet “nobody actually voted.” The disconnect points to a troubling gap in accountability, especially in an area long plagued by exploitation.
Skid Row stands as a stark symbol of California’s failed policies on homelessness, addiction, and governance. Decades of progressive leadership have funneled billions into the crisis, yet the tents multiply, crime festers, and basic human dignity erodes. Now, questions swirl around whether this vulnerable population has become a vector for questionable electoral practices.
Pratt, the reality TV figure turned mayoral candidate who surged on promises of public safety and homelessness reform, saw his campaign momentum stall amid a surge of mail-in votes favoring other contenders.
Public records reviewed in related investigations reveal thousands of voter registrations tied to shelters, supportive housing, treatment centers, and service agencies in the area. One shelter alone, the Midnight Mission, linked to over a thousand registrations. These numbers fuel legitimate skepticism about the integrity of the process in environments where oversight is minimal and incentives for fraud are high.
Residents shared consistent accounts with the Pratt Pack. One longtime Skid Row local, Thadeus Brown, described petition circulators offering cash or cigarettes for signatures. He pointed to a specific corner where a woman known as “Anika”—Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, federally charged in May with paying individuals, including the homeless, to register—operated.
Federal prosecutors noted her history as a paid circulator for ballot measures, and she has agreed to plead guilty. Brown alleged payments ranged from two to five dollars, with some adding a cigarette as incentive. “They did register, but they just wanted the names,” he observed.
“A lot of people never voted. They did register, but they just wanted the names.”
Similar themes emerged block after block. Volunteers heard repeated tales of registration drives and ballot arrivals, but vanishing participation. Collins, who has long raised alarms about ballot collection practices, noted the uniformity of responses: “I have not found anybody that has actually voted.” The central question lingers: what happened to those ballots?
Editor’s Note: While this article doesn’t explicitly say it, I’ll declare what I BELIEVE happened. Homeless people were recruited to register and to have their ballots mailed to “friendly” shelters. These ballots were “harvested” by “someone,” filled out, and inserted into circulation near or on election day when they had an idea of how many votes Nithya Raman needed to beat Pratt. There, I said it.
This episode fits a broader pattern of concern in Los Angeles elections. Critics have highlighted vulnerabilities in mail-in voting, especially among transient populations where verification is challenging. While some dismiss these inquiries as conspiracy, the firsthand accounts from Skid Row cannot be waved away so easily. They echo longstanding worries about third-party harvesting, lax verification, and the potential for manipulation in high-density homeless zones.
Pratt’s campaign brought overdue attention to Skid Row’s realities, including not just housing but the intertwined scourges of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and animal abuse that thrive in the chaos. His loss in the primary, accelerated by late mail-in tallies, has only intensified calls for transparency.
First-time visitor Ann Juliano described the scene as intense and eye-opening, witnessing violence firsthand while committing to dig deeper. “The numbers just don’t make sense,” she said, expressing hope that the election would empower residents to demand truth.
California’s approach to elections and homelessness has long prioritized volume over verification and compassion over results. Billions spent, streets unchanged—except for the worse. When ballots flow into areas where daily survival overshadows civic engagement, and few recipients recall participating, it invites doubt about the system’s soundness.
Los Angeles cannot afford to ignore these discrepancies. True discernment requires facing uncomfortable realities rather than silencing questions. The Pratt Pack’s findings on Skid Row underscore the urgent need for robust election safeguards and honest reckoning with urban decay. Without them, the city’s decline will only accelerate, ballots or not.
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.
