(ZeroHedge)—For several years the WNBA and other female sports figures have tried to ride the third-wave of feminist propaganda in and attempt to garner pity from the public and demand a higher pay rate. In 2020, this was largely centered on the fallacy of the “gender pay gap”, a now thoroughly debunked claim that women get paid less than men due to sexism and discrimination.
In fact, the studies feminists use to support the gender pay gap theory do not actually show any evidence that such a discrepancy exists. Not accounting for all factors, yes, women make less than men on average, but this is because men work longer hours, take less vacation days, do not take leave for pregnancy or family and are more likely to ask for a raise. In other words, men get paid more because they work harder, not because there is a patriarchal conspiracy to make women work for less.
The general public has been educated on the lies of the gender pay gap narrative, but this has not stopped some activists from promoting it anyway. The WNBA has been incessant in its efforts to push the notion that they are paid less, purely because they are women. This time they are touting increased audience numbers as evidence.
In the recent WNBA All-Stars Game opening, players including Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese, wore “Pay Us What You Owe Us” T-shirts during warm-ups. The shirts were worn to highlight the WNBA contract dispute in CBA negotiations.
The players and the league failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement at an in-person meeting last week. The league’s players opted out of their last CBA in October and they are looking for a better revenue-sharing model, increased salaries, improved benefits and a softer salary cap after record attendance and TV ratings in 2024.
The problem is, “record” attendance and TV ratings don’t mean much for a league which has never turned a profit in its 29 year history. Let’s break down why WNBA players don’t deserve a pay increase…
The WNBA is subsidized by the NBA. Without the men’s league the WNBA would not exist and would have no operating cash.
To put this in perspective, the NBA brought in $11.3 billion in revenues in 2024 (ticket sales, advertising, product deals, etc.). The WNBA brought in $710 million in revenues in 2024. The NBA does not calculate league-wide profits, with each team franchise reporting their own individual profits (referred to as Operating Income).
The team with the highest operating income in 2024 was the Los Angeles Lakers with nearly $200 million. WNBA teams do not report their individual operating incomes, but the league as a whole lost $40 million in 2024 even with higher viewership.
One WNBA claim is true: They have increased their audience in the past year. The league’s viewership jumped from an average of 500,000 people in 2023 to 1.1 million in 2024. That’s quite a success story, but not as important to player payment contracts as one might think.
First and foremost, the majority of gains in WNBA viewership are owed to one player – Caitlin Clark. Clark has displayed actual skill on the court, something which has been severely lacking in WNBA games for many years. Furthermore, the ongoing controversy over other players attacking Clark on and off the court (female jealousy and girl-fights) has lured in watchers. There have been multiple flagrant attempts, for instance, to poke out Clark’s eyes during game play.
Fans of Clark see her and her team as underdogs battling an army of low class ghetto players trying to cripple her just for getting more media attention (or for being white). The drama has led to a larger audience and Clark is a ratings magnet. As proof, when Clark was sidelined from games in May due to an injury, WNBA ratings plunged by a staggering 55%. In other words, Clark is the only reason people are watching.
The same players that have been jealously criticizing Caitlin Clark and her team and injuring her on the court (and smiling while doing it) have apparently been pressuring her to be more vocal about the contract dispute.
During a post game presser, two-time WNBA champion Kelsey Plum singled out Team Clark players for not being as participatory as members of Team Collier in the planning of the on-court tee demonstration.
“It was a very powerful moment…We didn’t … know that that was gonna happen, so I think it was kind of a genuine surprise. The T-shirt — just [the] united front — was determined this morning. That, we had a meeting for.
“You know, not to tattletale, but zero members of Team Clark were very present for that.”
WNBA ticket sales in 2024 averaged 9800 fans per game, a 22-year high. However, the NBA brings in an average of 18,700 fans per game. WNBA tickets sell for $20-$50 per seat with high end tickets going for $150. NBA tickets sell for $97 per seat on average and $500 or more for high end tickets.
For an organization of players that lose money every year, feed off the men’s organizations, and owe almost all of their recent success to a single player who they seem to hate, these women are acting incredibly entitled. Until the WNBA actually brings in legitimate profits they have no right to demand anything. And, if there is an eventual pay raise, the majority of the money should go to Caitlin Clark.
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.
