(Daily Signal)—When the Southern Poverty Law Center put Focus on the Family on its “hate map,” listing the conservative Christian nonprofit alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, it made life a bit tougher, but the Christian group had already faced so many “cancel culture” attacks, it was ready for the blowback.
“We are Christians, we’re commanded to love people that don’t think the way we think, we’re commanded to endure evil patiently, which I feel that this is one of these exercises,” Focus on the Family President Jim Daly told The Daily Signal.
The SPLC, which gained its reputation for suing Klan groups into bankruptcy in the 1980s but now puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on the “hate map” with Klan chapters, branded Focus on the Family an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group” last month. As I noted in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC claims America is more hateful than it actually is, partly to raise money and partly to silence its political opponents.
The SPLC started putting conservative Christian groups on the “hate map” in 2010, leading to accusations that it is anti-Christian. The SPLC had a section on its website calling this a “major misconception” and stating that it does not put organizations on that “hate map” just because they oppose same-sex marriage. As evidence, the SPLC noted that it did not put Focus on the Family on the “hate map.” The language addressing the “major misconception” has since disappeared from its website.
For years, the SPLC claimed it was a “major misconception” that “the SPLC considers opposition to same-sex marriage or the belief that being LGBTQ+ is a sin as the sole basis for the hate group label.”
What’s the evidence against this “misconception,” according to the SPLC? You… pic.twitter.com/iBZdXl3MNQ
— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) June 11, 2025
Daly noted that the “hate map” inspired a 2012 terrorist attack at the Family Research Council, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that spun off from Focus on the Family. While a security professional foiled the attack, the terrorist later told the FBI he targeted the council using the “hate map.” The SPLC condemned the attack but has kept the council on the map ever since.
“I think what they’re trying to do is quite evil and quite horrible to the Christian community particularly, but also to the United States in general,” Daly told The Daily Signal.
He said he read the SPLC’s reasons for putting Focus on the “hate map.”
“Basically, they’re saying Focus on the Family is a Christian, biblically based group that thinks marriage should be between a man and a woman,” he noted.
“As far as the SPLC and their list, the day after they announced us being on the list, we had about 15 protesters on the property, not on the sidewalk, outside the door of Focus’ entrance,” Daly recalled. He said the protesters were “kind of harassing our staff as they come into work.”
“I think that directly is at the lap or the feet of the SPLC,” he said.
Focus on the Family already receives threats and hate mail, but after the SPLC attack, “those instances are up slightly.”
Many companies use the SPLC’s “hate map” to screen potential clients and to “cancel” business relationships. While Daly expressed concern about this, he noted that many companies had already “deplatformed” his nonprofit.
“Focus was already experiencing the deplatforming,” he noted. “We have had definite problems with insurance, technology, and banking.”
Focus on the Family bought insurance from a U.K.-based company for 48 years and never filed a claim. “All they’ve done is taken money from us,” Daly explained. “They wrote me a letter and said, because of your position, Mr. Daly, on the definition of marriage, we can no longer underwrite you.”
“I thought, ‘You know what, I can’t wait until your actuary guys have a chitchat with you,’” the president said, wryly. “We’re the ones paying the bills for the rest of the people that are blowing it.”
Yet the “cancel culture” is not limited to insurance.
“We’ve had seven contracts when technology companies have signed an agreement to do work with us, midway through they’ve said, ‘Now that we know you don’t support gay marriage, we can’t work for you,’” he recalled. “We haven’t sued them like [Christian baker] Jack Phillips was sued by the [Colorado Civil Rights] Commission” for refusing to bake a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex marriage.
Daly said Focus on the Family just found other companies to do business with instead.
The Christian nonprofit won’t yield to cancel culture, he added.
“We’re gonna stand firm in the river of culture,” Daly pledged. “We’re not going to be moved by intimidation. We’re not going to be moved by the herd or cancel culture mentality.”
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.