(ZeroHedge)—Rapidly making good on President Trump’s promise to back a 2026 Republican primary challenger to libertarian-minded Rep. Thomas Massie, the Trump team has already launched a super PAC dedicated entirely to removing Massie from office next year. It promises to make for the strongest challenge Massie’s faced yet.
The new “Kentucky MAGA” super PAC will be run by top Trump political operatives Tony Fabrizio and Chris LaCivita, with La Civita telling Axios the new entity will spend “whatever it takes” to replace Massie. Trump’s political circle has already had discussions with potential challengers. “Massie’s long-time opposition to…really anything to do with President Trump — is coming to an end,” LaCivita said.
First elected to Congress in 2012 and consistently advocating for fiscal discipline, the right of armed self-defense, and a non-interventionist foreign policy, Massie has built a large and loyal national following among the libertarian right and other conservatives, with many regarding him as the congressional successor to the iconic Ron Paul. Massie issued a caution to would-be challengers: “Any serious person considering running should spend money on an independent poll before letting swampy consultants take them for an embarrassing ride.”
Massie, who has two degrees from MIT, has repeatedly triggered Trump’s wrath. In 2020, he opposed the $2 trillion, Trump-backed Covid-19 “relief package.” When Congressional leaders tried to usher it through without members present, Massie memorably stepped to the podium and declared, “Mr. Speaker, I came here to make sure our republic doesn’t die by unanimous consent in an empty chamber, and I request a recorded vote.” Last year, Massie told Tucker Carlson about his quest, which entailed a rushed, 8-hour drive to Washington and sleeping three nights in his wife’s SUV:
In May of this year, Massie was one of only two Republicans to vote against the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Objecting to its continuation of Washington’s profligate spending, he said, “We’re not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic tonight. We’re putting coal in the boiler and setting a course for the iceberg.” More recently, Massie condemned Trump’s unconstitutional waging of war on Iran and introduced a war powers resolution to prohibit military action without congressional consent.
Massie’s resistance to war on Iran, and his frequent votes against aid to Israel and other elements of Israel’s agenda inside American shores, means pro-Israel forces will be gunning for Massie too. Despite the fact that Massie faced no viable GOP opponent nor any Democrat opponent at all in 2024, the intentionally-vaguely-named United Democracy Project — the independent campaign-spending arm of the mighty American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — said it was spending $300,000 on ads on Fox television affiliates all across Kentucky last year. The move was seen as an preemptive attack in case Massie opts to pursue the seat being vacated by Mitch McConnell in 2026.
Given Republicans’ narrow 220-to-213 edge in House seats, Massie’s refusal to play ball frequently causes anxiety for the Trump administration and House leadership. (Two formerly-Democratic seats currently empty due to the deaths of the incumbents are awaiting special elections.)
For now, other Republicans in the House are abstaining from joining Trump in attacking Massie. When asked if he’ll back Massie in his primary, Speaker Mike Johnson — whom Massie voted against in the speakership selection — told NBC News “[that’s] the hardest question I had this morning.” As the GOP leadership team laughed nearby, Johnson added:
“I’m a leader of my party here, and the speaker leads the incumbent protection program. I got to make sure everybody gets re-elected… I certainly understand the president’s frustration about the colleague you named, and he and I talk about that quite a bit.”
.@realDonaldTrump declared so much War on me today it should require an Act of Congress. #sassywithmassie pic.twitter.com/ZrMiIKcAxu
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) June 23, 2025
Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, who himself dodged a MAGA-led challenge in 2024, said, “Teaming up to go against President Trump? Yeah, no, that doesn’t sound like a winning mission for me. I’ll sit this one out, boys. You all let me know how it goes.” On the other side of the Capitol, however, the most libertarian-minded senator, Rand Paul, praised Massie and predicted he’ll survive the onslaught:
“He’s the most faithful to the Constitution of any of the members of the House. He’s fiscally conservative, and I think he cares a lot about Kentucky. And I think that’s what they’ll remember when they vote for him.”
Unlike traditional PACs, super PACs are allowed to raise and spend unlimited funds from individuals, corporations and other entities to advocate for or against candidates. They cannot, however, coordinate their strategy with candidates, though the intent of that restriction is easily circumvented. As the anti-Massie super PAC gears up, Trump’s most recent attacks on Massie and his vow to unseat him have had an unintended effect — as contributions to Massie’s campaign fund have poured in from around the country:
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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.
