(WND)—A prominent Democratic voice in Democrat-dominated Colorado who once served in the state’s legislature representing Denver, then as Denver city attorney, then chief of staff for Democrat former Gov. John Hickenlooper, has delivered to his own party a warning about the wave of “socialist” primary election winners.
His own city experienced just that recently, with the victory in the party’s primary for Congress by Melat Kiros, a dedicated Democratic socialist whose extremism has pushed the limits of tolerance even for the leftist party.
She booted from office 15-term Democrat Dianna DeGette, who already was on the far left of the party.
“It was one thing watching this happen in New York … But when it happens in a state like Colorado, which is really the gateway to the West, it tells me that this issue is going to spread and may be a cancer to the Democratic Party if they don’t figure out what our values are,” charged veteran political strategist Doug Friednash, in an interview with Fox.
“I never would have thought we would have seen a victory of that magnitude here in Denver,” he said of Kiros’ 13-point margin.
The report noted Friednash has tracked Colorado’s political shift from red to deep blue over the past three decades. It was over that time period that a coalition of multimillionaires, including the present governor, Jared Polis, worked to take over the state for Democrats.
They strategically pushed tens of thousands of dollars in state legislative races that would shift the majority to the Democrats, and succeeded, with the state now run by Democrats in the governor’s office, the state House, the state Senate, and even the state Supreme Court, where Democrats wildly tried to ban President Trump from the 2024 election ballot before being rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Kiros victory in the primary was described as a “shock” to Colorado’s Democrat establishment. And it has raised questions about the party’s future.
“If you had told me this woman would have won by 13 points, I would have bet my house against that,” Friednash said, “I never would have thought we would have seen a victory of that magnitude here in Denver.”
Kiros actually has been just one of many socialists who have won Democrat primaries in recent weeks and months.
Friednash credited Kiros with messaging that attracted younger voters who feel let down by the Democrat establishment
“A lot of younger people that have moved to Denver have come here wanting to buy a house. They can’t buy a home, it seems unaffordable and unattainable. And I think she’s tapped into a lot of voter anger and hostility over things not being better,” he said.
He described Denver has become a microcosm of the national debate taking place within the Democratic Party over its future direction, the report explained.
He said, “As I look out at what’s happening within the Democratic Party, you know, it’s kind of like a ship without a captain. A lot of the more mainstream Democrats, rather than trying to say, ‘Here are the issues we should be fighting about,’ are embracing the socialists, because I think they’re afraid of them… much like I think we’ve seen with the MAGA movement.”
He’s not alone in his concern, the report said, as prominent centrist Democratic groups such as Third Way are fretting. That organization told the New York Times it is launching a $15 million campaign to combat the Democratic Socialists of America movement.
Other observers have noted the turn to the radical by Democrats.
Jon Caldara, of the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank, told Fox, “Without a doubt, the Democratic Party in Colorado has changed.” He charges the state has abandoned it’s historic pro-business positions.
Caldara is a libertarian.
“When the state started turning left, this machine was so powerful, it really couldn’t stop itself,” Caldara said. “And now it’s really beginning to eat their own. It’s kind of a French Revolution thing that you see that the Democratic Party here in Colorado is now well out over their skis. And there is a growing fight between Democrats and socialists.
“The real telltale is that Democrats are afraid to speak the truth because they don’t want to get canceled,” he added. “It is vicious to go against the socialists.”
Colorado resident Gene Maine, who fled the Soviet Union as a teen in 1981, also issued the state a warning about election people like Kiros.
“She is winning the primary because we have an organized group convincing people that they can have free stuff. You can have free medical care. You can have free supermarkets. You can have free transportation. And it’s very appealing,” Maine explained. “I like free stuff, but what they forget to tell you is that nothing is really free. As they say, there’s no free lunch.”
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.