(Daily Signal)—Widespread outrage is growing over a proposed bill currently moving through the California Legislature, which experts say could be easily abused by traffickers by giving almost any unrelated individual the right to assume custody-like control over a child without the parents’ knowledge or consent.
AB 495, which has been named the Family Preparedness Plan Act of 2025, was authored by Assemblywoman Celeste Rodriguez, D-San Fernando, and is being presented as a solution for illegal immigrant minors whose parents are detained to live with a “caregiver.” But legal experts and parental rights advocates say that the bill is worded so loosely that it would give unvetted, non-related individuals broad powers in directing the care of children, to the point that the legislation could be widely abused by human traffickers and kidnappers.
Erin Friday, an attorney and president of Our Duty-USA, remarked that the legislation is “a child trafficker’s and kidnapper’s dream bill.” She further detailed how AB 495 does not require the prospective “caregiver” to undergo a background check or welfare check and requires no court oversight or verification of identity.
“All you need is a piece of paper and some form of identification, with no obligation for the adult handing the child over to verify the identification, and presto, someone walks away with your child,” she noted. The “piece of paper” referenced by Friday is simply an affidavit that “allows for the transfer of parental rights without ever having to speak to the parent” by simply checking a box saying that the potential “caregiver” has “advised the parent(s)” of the authorization or is “unable to contact the parent(s).” The affidavit also explicitly states that “A parent’s signature or a seal or signature from a court is not required.”
Friday went on to point out that the bill is not narrowly tailored to only apply to children of illegal immigrants facing an emergency. As noted by the California Family Council, “The bill’s language applies to any child for any reason, regardless of immigration status, and grants temporary legal rights to individuals with no blood relation, including people who may not even be known to the child’s parents.” The language of AB 495 states that a “caregiver” can include a “nonrelative extended family member,” which is defined as someone who has an “established familial relationship with a relative of the child, or a familial or mentoring relationship with the child” who “may include, but are not limited to, teachers, medical professionals, clergy, neighbors, and family friends.” (Emphasis added.)
“We’re talking about a legal pathway for predators to operate in plain sight,” Friday insisted. “This bill is not about immigration. It’s about relinquishing parental rights to unvetted strangers under the guise of compassion.”
As detailed by The Heritage Foundation’s Laura Bryant Hanford, “a mere affidavit grants unrelated, unvetted adults authority over a child’s residency, custody, school enrollment, and medical care. The bill further guarantees that ‘a person who relies on this affidavit has no obligation to make any further inquiry or investigation.’” This “medical care” may include “mental health treatment,” which Hanford notes could include transgender hormone treatments, which California allowed for minors to receive without parental consent via SB 107, which the state passed in 2022.
Pastors like Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills in California are issuing urgent warnings to parents in the Golden State about the bill potentially passing. “I have to tell you, if this bill passes, I am going to ask you to leave the state of California,” he declared from the pulpit. “You got to get out. You got to run with your kids. You got to go.”
Gina Gleason, who serves as executive director of the Real Impact ministry at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, gave a stark picture of the possibility of AB 495’s passage.
“[Democrats] have a supermajority and Republicans are in the minority,” she explained during “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “So, usually the Democrats get pretty much everything that they want unless we, as the church, as conservatives, stand up and speak up, and that’s what we’re trying to do with this bill. If we make enough noise, if we get enough attention, they will back off. But it’s a big fight, [an] uphill fight, and we don’t always win, but we are determined because this bill is probably one of the worst bills that I have seen come across our state Legislature.”
Gleason went on to observe that the bill could be voted on by the end of August, which means that public opposition to it must be galvanized quickly in order for there to be a chance of it being defeated.
“[W]e need to get the attention of our state legislators,” she emphasized. “Our state senators need to know that we are standing in opposition to this dangerous bill. The only way to really get their attention is to actually show up. … Several years ago, we came up against a bill that was going to legalize infanticide. … [A]bout 3,000 people [showed up], give or take. We made enough noise [and] got enough attention that that portion of the bill was pulled. Infanticide is not legal in California because I believe we stopped it.”
Gleason urged the citizens of the Golden State to stand up against AB 495. “We will be there on Tuesday, Aug. 19 at 1 p.m. at the west steps of the Capitol [in Sacramento], and we’re calling people from all over California to join us.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
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.