(Reclaim The Net)—During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing held on May 21, 2025, titled “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: AI-Generated Deepfakes in 2025,” lawmakers and invited speakers rallied behind two highly controversial measures: the newly enacted TAKE IT DOWN Act and the pending NO FAKES Act.
Both proposals, under the banner of combatting AI misuse, would significantly expand government and corporate power to unilaterally censor digital content, posing serious risks to free expression.
Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) praised both bills, warning of a “deeply troubling spike” in explicit AI-generated content.
“We’ve got to do something about that,” she said. “And both the No Fakes Act and the Take It Down Act, which President Trump just signed into law this week, go a long way to providing greater protections for our children from these deepfakes.” Citing the misuse of celebrity images and voices in scams, she declared, “Congress has to act,” adding that she and her colleagues aim “to work on the No Fakes Act and get it to President Trump’s desk this year.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) similarly praised the new law as “a first step,” referring to the TAKE IT DOWN Act she co-sponsored with Senator Cruz. “It’s had huge harmful effects, about 20 some suicides a year of young kids,” she said, referencing the impact of non-consensual explicit imagery. Klobuchar emphasized, “We also need rules of the road to ensure that AI technologies empower artists and creators and not undermine them.” She noted that Grammy-nominated artist Cory Wong had warned her that “unauthorized digital replicas threaten artists’ livelihoods and undermine their ability to create art.”
Christen Price, Senior Legal Counsel at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, claimed that “deepfake technology allows any man to turn any woman into his pornography.”
Quoting Andrea Dworkin, she stated, “One lives inside a nightmare of sexual abuse that is both actual and potential and you have the great joy of knowing that your nightmare is someone else’s freedom someone else’s fun.” Price supported the NO FAKES Act, along with other bills, claiming, “These bills help protect individuals from the harmful effects of image-based sexual abuse and increase pressure on tech companies to manage websites more responsibly.”
Mitch Glazier, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, described the TAKE IT DOWN Act as “an incredible model” but insisted that it “only goes so far.” He warned of a “very small window and an unusual window for Congress to get ahead of what is happening before it becomes irreparable.” Pushing for swift passage of the NO FAKES Act, Glazier said platforms must act before content “goes viral very, very quickly,” arguing that these laws will allow content removal “as soon as technically and practically feasible.”
Justin Brookman of Consumer Reports emphasized the misuse of voice and video AI tools in scams and misinformation. He shared that “realistic cloning tools are easily available to the public and very cheap and easy to use.”
After testing six voice-cloning platforms, he reported that “four of the six companies we looked at didn’t employ any technical mechanism or reasonable technical mechanisms to reasonably ensure they had the consent of the person whose voice was being cloned.” Brookman argued that “developers of these tools need to have heightened obligations to try to forestall harmful uses,” adding, “Platforms, too, need to be doing more to proactively get harmful material off their platforms.”
The most expansive testimony on enforcement mechanisms came from Susanna Carlos, Head of Music Policy at YouTube. She highlighted YouTube’s Content ID system, explaining that it helps copyright holders by “creat[ing] digital fingerprints for those works in question and scan[ning] the platform.” She praised the NO FAKES Act, calling it a “smart and thoughtful approach” and said, “We are especially grateful to Chairwoman Blackburn, Senator Coons, Ranking Member Klobuchar, and all the bill sponsors.”
Carlos confirmed YouTube is building a new system dubbed “Likeness ID” that will scan users’ “face and voice” and match them across the platform. According to her, this system “allows individuals to notify us when digital replica content of them is online” and “is smartly mirrored in the No Fakes Act.” In a discussion with Senator Blackburn, Carlos acknowledged that platforms should act on takedown notices “as soon as possible,” but declined to specify an exact timeframe.
Senator Chris Coons asked Carlos why YouTube supported the bill. She replied, “So YouTube sits in a very unique kind of universe… And that is one area where this idea of digital replicas can cause real-world harm.”
Despite the sweeping praise from participants, the NO FAKES Act could easily stifle legal expression. The bill permits lawsuits over any “unauthorized digital replica” and gives platforms powerful incentives to err on the side of takedown, without requiring a counter-notice process. While the bill claims to exempt parody, satire, and documentaries, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has cautioned that “these exemptions are unlikely to work in real life.”
By encouraging rapid, opaque content takedowns, much like the DMCA system the bill seeks to emulate, the NO FAKES Act risks turning platforms into gatekeepers of permissible expression. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, though billed as narrowly tailored to non-consensual imagery, contains vague language and mandates fast removal timelines that could sweep in legitimate speech.
As Washington continues to frame AI as a threat requiring aggressive intervention, the implications for free speech are becoming increasingly dire. What was once the domain of manual moderation and individual judgment is being handed over to automated systems backed by vague laws, political pressure, and corporate lobbying.
The legislative momentum behind the NO FAKES Act and the TAKE IT DOWN Act raises pressing First Amendment concerns. Though marketed as tools to combat digital impersonation and image-based abuse, these bills introduce expansive mechanisms that risk stifling a broad range of protected expression, including satire, parody, documentary work, and political commentary. The vague definitions surrounding “unauthorized digital replicas” create a chilling effect, as artists, journalists, and ordinary users may self-censor out of fear that their content could be swept up in rapid takedown systems.
The lack of a robust counter-notice process, coupled with the threat of hefty fines for platforms, encourages over-removal rather than careful moderation, making lawful expression the collateral damage of legislative overreach.
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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.