It may not be popular to post this considering the wild political debate within the Republican Party at this time, but the vocal minority of 20 Congressman is in the right as they push to force Kevin McCarthy to stand down and allow someone else to take the helm in the House. Fox News host Sean Hannity is siding with McCarthy because that’s what he’s been instructed to do. He’s playing his role as RINO shepherd to lay guilt on anyone who doesn’t abide by the GOP Establishment’s wishes.
He turned his GOPe spokesperson talents against Congresswoman Lauren Boebert on his show tonight. He questioned why McCarthy should stand down when he has 203 (it’s actually 201 but who’s counting?) supporters on his side while his opposition only has 20. On the surface, it’s a fair question. But the reality is McCarthy has 201 Representatives who are WILLING to let him be Speaker of the House. He does NOT have 201 members who WANT him there.
The fallacy in Hannity’s argument is to assume that nobody could get 218 or more votes from among the 222 Republicans. This is unambiguously false. There are several members who would easily get 218 votes in the caucus and at least a few who would get all 222. McCarthy’s support is by default for many who are voting for him because he has positioned himself as the de facto Speaker. But if you ask his 201 “supporters” if they really want him there rather than simply having a willingness to accept him, you’d find the ranks of his “supporters” would drop dramatically.
I would guesstimate that fewer than a dozen Representatives PREFER McCarthy over all other viable candidates. The lukewarm supporters just haven’t been handed a consensus candidate; thus far none of the Representatives nominated by the band of 20 opposition voters have had universal appeal. This is by design.
The strategy is actually a good one by Matt Gaetz and those standing with him against McCarthy. They are wearing the caucus down with choices that are ideal to the Freedom Caucus like Andy Biggs, Jim Jordan, and Byron Donalds. That’s how negotiations start; you offer up your best-case-scenarios as the starting point and work your way down from there. If their end goal is to have a consensus Speaker, they will nominate someone less “right wing” soon, someone like Steve Scalise or even former Congressman Lee Zeldin. They would have someone very well spoken offer the nomination with a heartfelt plea on the floor after garnering support from some of the members currently supporting McCarthy. As McCarthy sheds votes and shows no signs of recovery, he will be obliged to stand down.
Hannity knows this. That’s why he’s trying so hard to subvert them now knowing in the long run they will prevail.
Conservatives have been compromising for decades at the behest of Swamp mouthpieces like Hannity. It has only worked to keep the Establishment firmly in control. I would argue with a near certainty that Hannity’s forked tongue is, at least in part, what got Donald Trump to back people like Dr. Mehmet Oz and now Kevin McCarthy in the first place.
Here’s the first part of the interview. Admittedly, I couldn’t make it all the way through listening to him constantly interrupt Boebert while simultaneously claiming she was talking over him. Anyone who can stand to watch the whole thing can do so here.
How long has @seanhannity been owned by the Uniparty Swamp? Has it been his whole career or did this just happen in the last few years?
Either some entity has leverage over him, someone's paying him to be this way, or he's always been a serpent who hates this nation.
— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) January 5, 2023
The strategy Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and their fellow conservatives are engaged in is working properly. Soon, they will nominate a consensus candidate and McCarthy will stand down. It’s not ideal, but we need someone better than McCarthy to hold the gavel.
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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.
