(Just The News)—For Gavin Newsom, it’s personal.
The California governor, who has wrestled with his own dyslexia since childhood, Thursday stressed the need to do a better job with literacy throughout the state.
“I don’t read speeches [when delivering them] because I can’t, but that didn’t stop me from getting through high school and getting through elementary school” with the help of dedicated teachers, Newsom said as he announced his Golden State Literacy Plan during a live-streamed news conference at Clinton Elementary School in Compton, just south of downtown Los Angeles.
“There’s not a day go by when my dyslexia is not exposed, as anyone who has seen my writing knows,” Newsom said. He added it has become imperative to do more to help students with dyslexia and other reading difficulties.
To do that, the state has allocated $25 million to screen kindergartners and first- and second-grade students annually for reading difficulties, including dyslexia, beginning with the 2025-26 school year. The requirement for screenings is part of Senate Bill 114, which Newsom signed into law in 2023.
“We have a responsibility to do more and do better as it relates to the educational outcomes, particularly as it relates to literacy in this state,” Newsom said, standing in front of local and state officials and students.
“Literacy is the pathway to success,” Newsom said. “All of California’s kids deserve to discover the joys and benefits of reading and the power to formulate and express their ideas. I’m proud to unveil the Golden State Plan for Literacy today to give teachers, schools, and students the power to read – and succeed.”
The governor’s proposal includes new initiatives such as:
$2.1 billion to support full implementation of a transitional kindergarten for all California children who turn 4 years old by Sept. 1 of the school year. That includes prior years’ investments. There’s also an additional $1.2 billion to lower the student-to-adult ratio from 12 to 1 to 10 to 1 in every TK classroom.$1.7 billion for the Student Support and Discretionary Block Grant for professional development for teachers.$525.5 million for the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program, which supports before-school, after-school and summer school programs. When added to previous funding, that brings total ongoing funding to $4.5 billion.$500 million for TK-12 literacy and math coaching.$378.6 million for additional Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant money to address areas such as low English Language Arts test scores.$200 million for evidence-based professional learning in literacy instruction for elementary school teachers. This was added during Newsom’s May budget revisions. This is one-time Proposition 98 General Fund money.$40 million to support costs related to literacy screenings and other professional development related to literacy instruction.$25 million to launch Literacy and Mathematics Networks statewide.$10 million in one-time Proposition 98 General Fund money for a county office of education to partner with the University of California, San Francisco to support the expansion of a reading difficulties screening tool in additional languages. This was also added during the May budget revisions. Authorizing the California Department of Education to draw down funding awarded through the federal Comprehensive Literacy State Development grant. This is designed to improve student outcomes over five years, according to the governor’s plan, and was included in his May budget revisions.
Newsom noted California’s eighth-grade reading achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress improved more than any other state between 2011 and 2022. Additionally, California was one of three states that had the nation’s largest gains in fourth-grade reading.
But more work needs to be done, Newsom said.
Before Newsom spoke, Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of public instruction, came to the podium and noted the governor has proposed more money for literacy and math coaches to work with students.
“We’re grateful for those programs that are built on top of the programs he has supported,” Thurmond said. He added that California’s goals include bilingual literacy so that one day every student will be able to speak more than one language.
“Literacy has the power to unlock countless doors for our students and transform their lives,” Thurmond said.
Thurmond and Newsom praised Clinton Elementary School and Compton Unified School District officials for their students’ scholastic achievements. Those welcoming the state leaders included school and district administrators, as well as Compton Mayor Emma Sharif.
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.