UPDATE: Ric Grenell doubled-down after being called out by hundreds. Instead of deleting the original Tweet, he posted a heavily-edited video again trying to disparage Kathy Barnette. This time, it takes her out of context multiple times to make it seem in very short clips that she’s a BLM racist. It’s quite sloppy; there’s a part where she says “systemic racism” and then the video skips to “specifically amongst police officers.”
As one Twitter commenter noted, “100% splices.”
https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1524427280436498432
Original Story:
I like former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell. He was one of the most capable of Donald Trump’s appointments and has spearheaded many valuable initiatives in and out of government. But he just did something that absolutely blew my mind and potentially destroys his credibility going forward.
I’m hoping it was a mistake. I’m hoping it was just a hasty move and he didn’t realize what he was doing. But considering hundreds of replies to his Tweet point out what he did and he still hasn’t deleted it, I would say chances are strong he’s just playing dirty politics for the sake of his buddy and candidate, Dr. Oz Mehmet. He has replied to people, including me, who have pointed out that the quote Tweet he posted was out-of-context and the Tweet is still up over an hour later.
So that leaves two possibilities. Either he was hacked or he’s engaged in extremely dirty politics to disparage an America First candidate days before the primary. If it’s the former, which I hope it is, then I will update this post and offer an apology to Grenell. If it’s the latter, then I’ll edit the many positive articles I’ve written about him over the years — defending him at times against attacks similar to the one he seems to be engaged in now — to reflect this new understanding of his character.
Here’s the Tweet:
For those of us opposed to Black Lives Matter and who do not support defunding police, this Tweet by U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Barnette seems damning. But those who clicked through to investigate learned that she was using the hashtags to link to a video in which she is DENOUNCING Black Lives Matter and calling for MORE police. Here’s her post:
As I noted, there have been hundreds of Tweets, including mine, that Grenell has seen and responded to alerting him that the video Barnette linked to was not in support of BLM. For him to keep it up is the purest form of dirty politics I’ve ever seen. It’s intended to make it appear that she has the opposite opinion about BML and defunding police. Unless he was hacked, it was his hope that voters would see this, not investigate, and come out thinking that Barnette supports BLM and defunding the police.
What makes all this worse is that many of his responses have him pulling out the “discrimination” and “intolerance” cards. For example, I Tweeted this:
“I am so disappointed that @RichardGrenell posted an out of context Tweet to make @Kathy4Truth look bad. She Tweeted #BLM and #DefundThePolice hashtags to link to a video OPPPOSING them and highlighting that BLM does NOT care about Black lives. The @DrOz cult is despicable.”
His reply:
“Despicable? Grow up. Don’t be intolerant. People have different views from you.”
Intolerant? Pointing out that he was being disingenuous is not intolerance. It’s defending the unambiguous truth. As I told him in my reply, I am so disappointed that he would stoop so low.
To be fair, I believe this all ties back to Dr. Mehmet Oz, the RINO candidate that Grenell supports. It seems like the type of dirty politics that Dr. Oz would support, perhaps even prompt. It’s no secret that I support Kathy Barnette, but I do not engage in calling out opponents of people I support unless they are truly despicable. Dr. Oz qualifies.
Either Ric Grenell was hacked or he’s engaged in the dirtiest political attack I’ve seen in my life. As a surrogate for Dr. Oz, it’s up to the candidate to denounce this play or accept that his campaign supports it.
Image by Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
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