A mother in Wisconsin just scored a major win in her battle to speak freely about what’s happening in public schools. Scarlett Johnson, a leader with Moms for Liberty in the state, faced a defamation lawsuit from Mary MacCudden, a former English teacher who also served as the “Social Justice Coordinator” for the Mequon-Thiensville School District. The suit stemmed from Johnson’s 2022 social media posts that took aim at the position and its focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Johnson shared a screenshot of MacCudden’s LinkedIn profile and questioned the role outright. “Why the hell am I paying for a ‘Social Justice Coordinator’ in my school district?” she posted. In another, she added, “This is just what @mtschools needs; more woke, White women w/ a god complex. Thank you, White savior.”
She went further in other comments, labeling DEI specialists as “woke lunatics” and “bullies” who push parents into “silence and compliance.”
MacCudden claimed these remarks damaged her reputation and filed suit soon after. The lower court let parts of the case move forward, but Johnson appealed with help from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
The appeals court ruled in her favor, finding that her words amounted to protected opinions rather than verifiable facts that could support a defamation claim. The judges explained that terms like “bully” count as subjective judgments or exaggeration, not something a court could prove true or false.
“The term ‘bully’ is a subjective assessment that cannot be proven as true or false… Johnson’s statements do not allege any specific act of bullying or a specific victim that could be proved or disproved at trial,” the opinion stated.
They applied the same logic to “lunatic,” calling it a personal view without factual backing. As for “woke,” “god complex,” and “white savior,” the court noted their vagueness: “The terms ‘god complex,’ ‘woke,’ and ‘white savior’ are vague and do not have a clear meaning or definition… We are not persuaded that the terms are definitive enough to allow a jury to determine whether these terms are true or false.”
One judge disagreed in a dissent, arguing the posts named MacCudden directly and might suggest hidden facts worth a jury’s review. But the majority shut that down, saying no reasonable reader would see the comments as implying specific misconduct like abusing power over students. Instead, they came across as Johnson’s reaction to the job title and description alone.
Johnson saw the lawsuit as more than a personal attack—it felt like part of a pattern to intimidate parents who challenge school agendas. She mentioned a similar threat right before a 2021 school board election, timed to knock her off balance.
“I felt I had to fight back in this case. It couldn’t be like the other. I had to stand up because this would never stop,” she said. “They’d keep going after parents like me.”
After the win, she emphasized the bigger picture. “Free speech belongs to every mom, dad, and citizen who demands answers and accountability from their government,” Johnson stated. “Parents across the country are speaking out against radical ideology in our schools, and our fight does not stop today.”
Her lawyer, Luke Berg from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, echoed that sentiment. “Scarlett, like all of us, has the right to question and criticize her government. The defamation lawsuit against her was meritless and should have been promptly dismissed. We are pleased that the Court agreed, and that Scarlett can put this distraction behind her.”
This ruling arrives as debates over DEI programs in education heat up nationwide. In Wisconsin alone, similar concerns have led to pushback against what some see as overreach in classrooms, with groups like Moms for Liberty leading efforts to refocus on core academics over social activism. Johnson’s case could signal to other parents that voicing opposition won’t automatically land them in court, especially when lawsuits seem designed to scare off dissent.
MacCudden’s side hasn’t commented publicly since the decision, but the outcome reinforces that sharp criticism of public roles doesn’t cross into defamation just because it stings. For families worried about where tax dollars go in schools, this serves as a reminder that speaking up remains a fundamental right.
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.