(The Daily Signal)—For Kamala Harris, failure is not an option. It’s a governing principle. President Joe Biden has delegated at least four key responsibilities to his vice president.
On each one, she has belly-flopped hard enough to empty an Olympic swimming pool.
Border Czarina
“I’ve asked her, the V.P., today … to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders,” Biden said about Harris at a March 24, 2021, White House ceremony.
“When she speaks, she speaks for me,” Biden added. “She knows what she’s doing, and I hope we can move this along.”
Defying Biden’s urgency, Harris did not visit the U.S.-Mexico border until June 25, three months after being crowned border czarina. After shirking her duties, Harris made her second, box-checking border journey this past Sept. 27.
In the intervening 39 months, southern boundary conditions deteriorated dramatically:
- Since February 2021, the first 42 months of Harris’ rule saw illegal-alien incursions on the U.S.-Mexico frontier soar from 2,450,167 under Donald Trump’s comparable period to 8,326,109—up 339.8%.
- Add 1,664,203 detected-but-uncaught “known gotaways” from fiscal year 2021 through fiscal year 2023 (versus 384,439 from fiscal year 2017 through fiscal year 2019 under Trump (up 432.9%), and the number of illegal aliens who invaded America under Harris rises to at least 9,990,312. This excludes “unknown gotaways,” who went unseen and uncaptured.
- During Trump’s tenure, 11 illegal aliens on the terrorist watchlist were nabbed at the border. On Harris’ watch: 382 such illegal aliens got caught—up an explosive 3,472%.
- Czarina Harris lost 323,000 illegal-alien children. Where are those unaccompanied minors? Who knows? Monsters, quite literally, are exploiting thousands of them as slaves in sweatshops. Even worse, boys and girls are raped routinely as sex slaves.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that from fiscal year 2021 through fiscal year 2023, fentanyl (usually smuggled across Harris’ obliterated “border”) fatally poisoned 222,166 people in America, including those who thought they had consumed legitimate drugs.
- Maria Gonzalez, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin are just three among many who police say illegal aliens have killed. Even former President Bill Clinton conceded that Laken Riley, a slain Georgia nursing student, was a victim of Harris’ no-border policy.
On Oct. 13, Clinton told Peach State voters about Riley, “a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant,” allegedly by José Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal alien who broke into America in September 2022, on Harris’ watch. Ibarra reportedly is tied to the deadly Tren de Aragua gang. Clinton added, “If they’d all been properly vetted, that probably wouldn’t have happened.”
- The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated in March 2023 that coddling illegal aliens costs local, state, and federal taxpayers $150.7 billion annually.
Broadband Czarina
During an April 28, 2021, joint session of Congress, Biden unveiled a rural-broadband initiative. “I’m asking the vice president to lead this effort,” he said, “because I know it will get done.”
No such luck.
“It appears that your performance as ‘broadband czar’ has mirrored your performance as ‘border czar,’” nine U.S. senators wrote Harris, including Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Deb Fischer of Nebraska. Their Sept. 18 letter continued: “Under your leadership, not a single person has been connected to the internet using the $42.45 billion allocated for the [Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment] program.”
That’s right: Despite Biden’s Nov. 15, 2021, signature, not one American has been hooked up via the BEAD plan, even after 34 months and more than $42 billion in taxpayer money.
As the senators explained, “burdensome climate change mandates” have stymied progress. So have a nine-step review process and a requirement that participating employers give preference to “individuals with past criminal records.” Consequently, Politico reports, “No actual construction projects are expected to begin until at least 2025.”
Bridge-Building Czarina
Biden sent Harris to the February 2022 Munich Security Conference. Goal: Project sufficient U.S. and allied strength to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine. Vice presidential scholar Joel Goldstein told CNN: “I think this is certainly the most significant mission yet of her vice presidency.”
The bridge-building czarina said at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof on Feb. 19, 2022, that “sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states must be respected” and “national borders should not be changed by force.”
Five days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Bus Czarina
Harris and the Environmental Protection Agency have pushed the Clean School Bus program since September 2022. As Thomas Catenacci reported on July 19 at The Washington Free Beacon, this boondoggle deployed $965 million to ship 2,463 electric school buses to 389 school districts. Two years later, just 60 green buses serve only 27 districts. Fifty-five districts have fled the program.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee reported last month that diesel-fueled school buses typically cost $100,000. Electric school buses average $381,190. This nearly 400% higher cost, limited driving range, and poor cold-weather performance have flattened the tires on Harris’ fantasy vehicles.
Beyond dispute, Harris is the Czarina of Failure.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
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.
