As Memorial Day approaches and Americans prepare to honor the fallen who secured the blessings of liberty, one Democratic congressional candidate in California has chosen a different path: open defiance of the nation’s most basic symbols of unity.
Sacramento City Councilmember Mai Vang has repeatedly refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance during public meetings and has been captured on video turning her back on the American flag. This is not a quiet personal conviction but a public statement from a woman seeking to represent the United States in Congress.
Vang’s actions stand in stark contrast to the district she hopes to serve. California’s newly redrawn 7th Congressional District includes more conservative areas that value tradition and national pride alongside traditional Democratic strongholds. Yet Vang, polling competitively against incumbent Rep. Doris Matsui, has made her protest a point of pride rather than a liability. In doing so, she exposes a troubling trend on the left: the elevation of grievance over gratitude and global activism over national loyalty.
As a recent NY Post editorial notes, she has no place in the United States Congress.
Her refusal isn’t occasional hesitation but deliberate theater. Videos from city council meetings in 2025 and 2026 show Vang consistently averting her gaze from the flag while others participate. She even boasted about the practice on social media, framing the moment of national unity as an opportunity to “center our communities” and reflect on alleged injustices committed “under this nation’s influence,” complete with hashtags supporting causes far removed from her constituents’ daily concerns.
This episode raises profound questions about what kind of leaders Americans want shaping their future. The Pledge of Allegiance, for all its simplicity, represents a covenant: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. To reject it so brazenly while pursuing elected office isn’t principled dissent; it is a declaration that the republic itself falls short of one’s ideological standards.
Vang’s approach mirrors a growing radicalism that views America not as a flawed but exceptional experiment in self-government, but as an inherently oppressive force requiring constant resistance.
Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio captured the disconnect sharply, noting that reciting the Pledge is “Patriotism 101.” Even those who disagree with aspects of policy or history can stand in recognition of the sacrifices that preserved the republic. Vang’s choice to turn away during ceremonies, including a Veterans Day event, disrespects not only the flag but the men and women who defended the freedoms that allowed her family to find refuge here.
The irony deepens when considering Vang’s background as the daughter of Hmong refugees who escaped persecution with American military support. Her family’s story embodies the promise of America as a beacon for the oppressed. Yet rather than embracing that inheritance, she weaponizes selective grievances.
Compare this to Rep. Matsui, whose own family endured Japanese American internment during World War II yet continued to serve the nation with distinction. Matsui may be a Democrat, but at least she doesn’t overtly hate America.
Beyond symbolism, Vang’s record reveals substantive priorities that align with her Pledge protests. She has opposed city budgets over police funding disputes and championed policies that prioritize ideology over public safety. She is vehemently anti-Israel and a vocal “Free Palestine” activist.
Critics like community organizer Amy Gardner describe her approach as “infuriating,” particularly in how it undermines law enforcement in neighborhoods that need it most. This pattern suggests her rejection of the flag is part of a larger worldview that sees American institutions themselves as the problem.
Republican leaders have taken note. California Republican Party Chairwoman Corrin Rankin highlighted the broader implications: too much contempt for law enforcement and too little respect for country. San Joaquin Republican Party Chair David Cushman observed that Vang’s attempt to position herself as the AOC of the Central Valley misreads her district’s values. Republican challenger Zachariah Wooden put it plainly: such rhetoric rejects basic American principles.
In an era when congressional districts send representatives to Washington to defend the Constitution they swear to uphold, voters must consider whether candidates who cannot bring themselves to honor its most visible emblem deserve their trust. The Pledge is not a loyalty test for conformity but a reminder of shared commitment to something greater than factional grievances.
Public service demands clarity of allegiance. When leaders prioritize global causes and personal protest over the nation they seek to represent, they reveal where their true master lies.
Californians heading to the polls face a choice with national echoes. Will they reward defiance of the very symbols that bind this diverse republic, or affirm that gratitude for America’s gifts must precede demands for its perfection? The answer will say much about the soul of the district and the future of representative government.
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.