Los Angeles’ top federal prosecutor just laid it out plain. Noncitizens are already voting in California’s midterms, the state has confirmed it will count those ballots, and that will corrupt the election. Bill Essayli, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District, said it after an emergency Sunday hearing that ended without a ruling.
The Department of Justice is fighting to sequester roughly 20,000 ballots from people federal investigators have identified as noncitizens. California’s answer, in essence, is that citizenship is irrelevant once the envelopes are open.
Mail ballots started processing on Saturday ahead of the November 3 election. Los Angeles County alone has already run through more than 500,000 of them, according to DOJ attorney Matthew Donnelly. Once processed, those ballots cannot be unprocessed. The damage is done. Essayli told the New York Post that California walked into a federal courtroom and argued the votes should be counted anyway.
“Our concern is that noncitizens are actively voting in this election and California has confirmed they will count their votes. This will corrupt the integrity of the upcoming midterm election.”
He added that the state treated the citizenship question as beside the point. “It dilutes the votes of American voters,” Essayli said. “We are committed to fighting this because even one noncitizen vote is one too many. They seem completely disinterested in the fact they are tabulating votes from noncitizens.”
The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel—Trump appointees Mark Bennett and Patrick Bumatay alongside Biden appointee Gabriel Sanchez—grilled both sides and then adjourned. Bennett questioned whether the court even had the power to intervene under the Elections Clause.
Sanchez pressed the government on how it narrowed a July Department of Homeland Security list of roughly 190,000 potentially problematic registrants down to the current 20,000, and on whether name-and-address matching could reliably identify the right ballots. Bumatay noted the obvious practical problem: without an injunction, once the ballots are separated from their envelopes there is no way to know who cast them.
California’s lawyer Sam Siegel told the panel the state relies on self-attestation under federal and state law. If the executive branch wants stronger verification authority, he said, it should ask Congress. The panel said it would decide “as quickly as possible.” If it dismisses the appeal, the case returns Tuesday to U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in Santa Ana.
This fight did not appear out of nowhere. On October 15 the Justice Department sued California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan. It also sent letters to every county demanding help identifying noncitizen voters within 48 hours. Last week, in what officials called the largest voter-fraud bust in California history, federal agents charged 28 lawful permanent residents—green-card holders who are not citizens—with fraudulent registration and voting.
Twenty-one of them are accused of actually casting ballots, some in multiple elections. The Justice Department named the effort Operation Protect the Vote. Essayli has said the 20,000 figure is the floor, not the ceiling, and that investigators have evidence these individuals received mail ballots this cycle. Fox News reported the same confirmation.
Essayli’s comments landed a day after Gavin Newsom’s office called the DOJ effort a “clown show.” The prosecutor fired back on X: “Hey Fraud King. We’re not waiting for them to vote. You’re not allowed to have any noncitizens on your voter rolls. Period. Full stop.”
Carl DeMaio, coauthor of Proposition 39, the voter-ID and citizenship-verification measure on the same November ballot, told the Post the episode shows “dereliction of duty.” Voters have been lied to about how thoroughly citizenship is checked before ballots are counted, he said. Politicians will not do a proper review on their own.
“They’re putting people in legal jeopardy. And as a result, Prop 39 is needed more than ever because we have to force the politicians to do their job at the ballot box.” Gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton called it typical of California leadership that simply will not enforce the law.
Scripture is clear on this kind of thing. “Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous.”
When officials treat noncitizen ballots as equal to citizen ones, they are wrestling judgment. Every illegal vote cancels a lawful one. California’s position is that self-attestation plus the fact that the election is already underway is good enough.
Federal investigators, after matching DHS data against the rolls, say it is not. The courts will decide whether any of those ballots get set aside before they are tabulated. Until then, the state’s message is unmistakable. Citizenship is optional. The count goes on.
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.