(Just The News)—Michigan House Republicans say newly obtained records show Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson maintained ties to the recently indicted Southern Poverty Law Center after taking office.
The records come amid ongoing scrutiny of Benson’s relationship with the organization following a federal indictment announced in April.
“The people of Michigan deserve answers when one of their most prominent public servants is deeply tied to an organization facing federal criminal charges,” said House Oversight Committee Chair Jay DeBoyer, R-Clay Township. “Secretary Benson has a long, documented history with the Southern Poverty Law Center – one that she continued even after becoming Michigan’s Secretary of State.”
Benson, a Democrat, is also running for governor this year. She has secured the backing of much of the Democratic establishment and has consistently led fellow Democrat Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson in public polling.
Federal prosecutors announced charges against the SPLC including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in April.
According to the federal indictment, the SPLC “secretly funneled” more than $3 million in donor funds between 2014 and 2023 to individuals associated with extremist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations and the National Socialist Movement.
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference announcing the charges. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
The SPLC has denied the allegations. SPLC CEO Bryan Fair previously called the accusations “false” and defended the organization’s work.
Benson served on the SPLC’s board of directors from 2014 through 2018, overlapping with the timeframe outlined in the indictment.
The Michigan state House Oversight Committee has been investigating Benson’s connections to the SPLC. It held a hearing regarding the issue Wednesday, releasing emails from the Michigan Department of State that Republicans say show she “maintained a working relationship” with the organization after being elected to office in 2018.
“Her continued embrace of the SPLC makes her current situation even more difficult,” said state Rep. Rachelle Smit, R-Martin. “Benson led an organization accused of funneling money to hate groups and domestic terrorists. The public should rightfully question whether she was directly involved or if her leadership was so flimsy that she was completely unaware of the potential heinous actions happening right under her nose.”
In May, Smit led a House Republican effort to pass a resolution calling on Benson to release records tied to her involvement with the SPLC.
According to Republicans, the emails show that Benson participated in an SPLC event in 2019 and include internal communications among her staff about the SPLC’s recent indictment that were taken “offline.”
“The emails we got from MDOS may seem like a step in the right direction, but the internal conversations we’re now privy to do nothing but cement the clear relationship between Benson and the SPLC,” DeBoyer said. “The emails we obtained just begs the question: what is Secretary Benson holding back if these are the conversations she felt comfortable being public?”
Benson’s office did not respond to The Center Square’s request for comment on the hearing or emails.
State Republicans have promised that they will keep the pressure on Benson, though they have held off on officially issuing a subpoena.
“The people of Michigan deserve to know the full extent of that relationship and whether it had any bearing on the work of the Department of State,” said Majority Vice Chair of the House Oversight Committee Matthew Bierlein, R-Vassar. “We intend to continue following the facts, reviewing every record, and making sure the people of Michigan receive the full transparency they deserve.”
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.