(Daily Signal)—I normally avoid reading any United Nations papers lest they trigger my gag reflex. If Florida is where “woke” goes to die, the U.N. is where woke goes to fester and congeal, seeping into bureaucracies and weighing down the rest of the world with the ideological refuse of the West.
Imagine my surprise, then, at hearing a clarion call for sanity blast through the noise of abortion, gender ideology, and climate alarmism that deafens any dissent at the U.N.
I almost had to do a double-take when I heard that Reem Alsalem, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, accurately identified gender ideology as a threat to women’s safety—and not just any threat but the “biggest barrier” to ending violence against women and girls in the United Kingdom.
Alsalem shared the advance unedited version of her report Thursday, announcing that she will present the edited version to the Human Rights Council in June.
Sharing the advanced unedited version of the report of my visit to the #UK conducted in 2024: https://t.co/3Dq5L1npul
I will present the report to #HRC59 in June this year.
— Reem Alsalem UNSR Violence Against Women and Girls (@UNSRVAW) May 29, 2025
“The lack of legislative clarity on ‘sex’ hampers data collection on violence against women and girls,” the report states.
“The conflation of sex and gender data in particular—prioritizing self-identified gender—erases biological sex records, distorting the male-driven nature of [violence against women and girls] and hindering root-cause analysis,” Alsalem’s report adds.
The U.N. employee highlighted one rather revealing statistic as evidence of this problem. English and Welsh law clearly define “rape” as an action only a male can perform, yet U.K. records claim 49 “females” have been convicted of rape in the decade leading up to June 2023. Alsalem is not afraid to call a spade a spade, faulting the statistics for logging “violent males” as “female offenders.”
Furthermore, the report laments “the erosion of single-sex spaces like prisons and shelters for survivors of violence.” By allowing men who identify as women to enter women’s prisons and shelters, authorities in Britain have allowed “increasing risks in safety” and unwittingly encouraged “self-exclusion,” where women avoid shelters out of concern that men might victimize them there.
Conservatives have raised concerns about these issues for over a decade, and we have often faced ridicule for speaking the straightforward truth: While many men who identify as transgender may pose no harm to women, voyeurs and predators can use the fig leaf of gender identity to smuggle their way into women’s spaces.
It’s refreshing to see even U.N. bureaucrats acknowledging this basic truth.
Yet the report also stands up for women’s freedom to speak out on these issues, noting that defenders of biological sex have been “ostracized, attacked, and punished by state and non-state actors for their beliefs and opinions, including political parties, universities, private employers, the media.”
I immediately think of British tax expert Maya Forstater, who lost her job for posting, “Men cannot change into women” on X, then known as Twitter.
Thankfully, Britain is moving in the right direction. The U.N. report notes a recent U.K. Supreme Court decision defining “sex” in terms of biology, not “gender identity.” It also notes the Cass Report, which exposed the Frankensteinian practices of prescribing cross-sex hormones and transgender surgeries, often euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.”
The report also praises a February 2023 U.K. government policy stating that biologically intact men who identify as women or those convicted of sexual or violent offenses would no longer be housed in women’s prisons.
Alsalem urges the U.K. government to “ensure that public and private institutions” uphold the U.K. Supreme Court ruling on biological sex, particularly on “female-only spaces.” She also urges that “women and girls must be able to speak on all issues, including sex and gender identity, without fear, intimidation, and reprisals.”
Unfortunately, these excellent recommendations are still exceptions to the general rule—even in this particular report.
The report includes a great deal of “woke” activist framing, such as the language of “intersectionality,” the Marxist framework that interprets Western society as inherently racist, sexist, and in other ways unjust.
The report also recommends that the U.K. repeal its 2023 Illegal Migration Act and to “ensure access to services irrespective of migratory status.” In other words, the U.K. must give up its sovereignty as a country and agree to allow illegal aliens to access social services.
The long-term battle for sanity at the U.N. is far from over, but the opposition to gender ideology here may represent the securing of an important beachhead in the war against woke.
If even the U.N. is warning that men in women’s prisons represent a threat to women, how long can Democrats afford to close their ears?
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.