(Zero Hedge)—The progressive left never admits they are wrong and they always double down on failure. This is the mindset that continues to lead Democrats down a path of self destruction along with the cities they inhabit. One cannot separate the ongoing decline of US cities from far-left policies; one precipitates the other.
The implosion of Joe Biden’s faux presidency and the defeat of the Kamala Harris campaign left Democrats reeling and searching for answers, but it didn’t take long for them to dismiss the idea of self reflection and come to the predictably insane conclusion they are right and everyone else is the enemy.
The answer, they argue, is not to abandon their radical ideology and find their way back to common sense. Rather, they believe that they lost the elections because their candidates were “not extreme enough.”
But what could possibly be more extreme than Biden’s mass online censorship campaign? His calls for pandemic vaccine passports for Americans to keep their jobs? His implementation of DEI and CRT programs across the federal government and the US military? His consistent denials over the stagflation crisis? When he declared Easter Sunday as “Transgender Day of Visibility?” What about the topless LGBT parties on the White House Lawn?
How much worse can a political leader get? Well, we’re about to find out.
Democrats in cities like Chicago, New York and now Seattle have decided to replace their bumbling leftist mayors with more openly socialist mayors and the trend is likely to grow. This seems to be a calculated reformation of the Democrat base around increasingly more militant Marxist policies, using blue cities as a “proving ground.”
It makes sense when one considers how freely groups like Antifa and anti-ICE are able to operate, with clear coordination between radicals and the local government. These are places where activists feel most safe and comfortable because they are protected by resident politicians and police. Blue cities are becoming experimental playgrounds for color revolution and socialist policies that would never be allowed anywhere else.
They see these cities as toys to be played with. The problem is, their initiatives are falling apart before they get into office and conservatives haven’t had to lift a finger.
For example, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promises are drying up on the vine like grapes in the desert sun. His supporters are now realizing that his 4-year rent freeze policy faces serious obstacles, with the new mayor relying on full support from the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) appointed by Mayor Adams (which he is unlikely to get until a new board is appointed). The reality is, a rent freeze would result in an immediate selloff of rental properties and landlord flight from NYC, meaning, there will be an even worse housing shortage.
Mamdani also got word from Governor Kathy Hochul that she will not be backing his fare free bus service concept, nor will she support his universal childcare program. In other words, Mamdani doesn’t have the authority to fulfill his campaign promises.
Mamdani is confronted by the fact Gov. Hochul said she won’t fund the free buses proposal part of his socialist agenda.
He responds by saying he’ll find the money.
Mamdani’s supporters have been duped.
He can’t pay for his socialism.
(nbcnewyork on TT) pic.twitter.com/UCPfoo7s2t
— Paul A. Szypula ?? (@Bubblebathgirl) November 13, 2025
Furthermore, if the “Democratic socialist” gets approval from all parties involved he still has to deal with Trump’s inevitable cuts to to federal dollars. NYC gets around $10 billion in direct federal aid and over $100 billion in federal funding through a variety of avenues. Even with all that cash, the city is still in the hole and desperate for relief after the Democrats disastrous migrant housing programs which crippled their subsidies for the homeless.
The loss of a mere $10 billion could cause chaos for NYC’s budget concerns and all of Mamdani’s projects require an increasing budget, not a falling budget.
Recently elected mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, is causing a stir as well with her socialist rhetoric. Her notions come off as unpracticed or poorly thought-out and one wonders if Democrats will feel any buyers remorse. Seattle was already in steep decline due to wealth taxation, which has driven numerous companies out of the area along with thousands of jobs and revenues.
SOCIALISM: Seattle mayor-elect Katie Wilson promises a full socialist smorgasbord, calling for guaranteed housing, universal child care, free K-8 summer care, social housing, and shifting land and wealth from corporations to community control. pic.twitter.com/GvmqFn8Yn2
— @amuse (@amuse) November 14, 2025
Wilson’s utopian wish list is facing a hard reality check and she hasn’t clocked in on the job yet. For example, she believes she has the power to prevent grocery chains from leaving the city and creating “food deserts”. It’s a problem that has been accelerating in blue cities across he country largely due to lax law enforcement policies and low criminal prosecution. Property theft continues to explode and businesses in leftist towns cannot survive, so they do the smart thing and leave.
Seattle’s new mayor Katie Wilson: “We will not allow grocery chains to close stores at will” pic.twitter.com/YQUpJyWy0H
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 13, 2025
Critics have lambasted Wilson as a child-brained imbecile, citing basic private property rights and her lack of authority to issue an exit tax without considerable state and local support. Again, socialist candidate make promises they cannot keep. This might get them elected, but their time in office immediately becomes a clown show, proving conservatives were right all along.
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.