I do try to respect President Reagan’s 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of thy fellow Republican.” I know ideological litmus tests rub some people the wrong way. I get that turning internal disagreements into political losses is self-defeating. I agree that priority number one is to beat back the Marxist hoards pushing America to the cliff’s edge. And it sure is nice to pat ourselves on the back for having a “big tent” open to everyone. But…you knew it was coming…I sure wish we could move on from Mitch McConnell. Or rather, I wish we could find an effective way to compel Republican senators to move on from McConnell (and his lackeys) as their leader.
I don’t like him. I don’t like the way he conducts business in the Senate. I don’t like his imperious nature and his backroom double-dealings. I don’t think he represents the vast majority of Republican voters, and even worse, I don’t think he even cares. I find him off-putting and arrogant and a terrible spokesperson for the Republican Party. I do not think he has ever convinced a single non-Republican voter to come onboard. I’m not certain he believes in much aside from the accumulation and maintenance of raw power. And to the extent he actually does have sincere beliefs, those beliefs seem hopelessly aligned to an outdated Republican Party still grazing in the country-club safe spaces of bourbon-swilling “elites.”
His fingerprints are all over the Senate’s new gun control bill, of course, because nothing gets done on the Republican side unless Mitch first snaps his fingers or gives his blessing. His control over Republicans in the upper chamber looks more mafia don than minority leader. So once again Senate Republicans are marching down a path in which they will congratulate themselves for having taken a “historic step” in fighting “gun violence,” while doing nothing other than undermining the Bill of Rights and leaving their voters more vulnerable as future targets for Democrats’ lawless bureaucratic harassment. (Tell me that McConnell and his boys don’t secretly enjoy the idea of grabbing guns from the freedom-minded Tea Party and MAGA Americans they despise.) Well done, Senate Republicans! Thanks for habitually rewarding red state voters with the vomitous stench of betrayal.
If McConnell’s efforts to curtail the Second Amendment don’t prove him deeply unsuited to lead the New Republican Party during these uncertain times, consider a few additional reasons:
(1) Russia collusion hoaxer:
The Russia collusion hoax was Obama and Hillary’s baby (uh, gross), but Mitch gave it legitimacy by pretending that it deserved serious investigation. Using Richard Burr’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to hide the FBI’s illicit spying operations against candidate Trump while backing the two-year Mueller Inquisition allowed McConnell to wield some power over President Trump (who had uniquely come into high office beholden to none). By doing so, he helped divide the nation further than ever and betrayed all the Republican voters (a common theme here) who had succeeded in finally putting an America First candidate into the White House. Imagine how much better off the country would have been had McConnell firmly rejected the Democrats’ absurd allegations that Donald Trump was a Russian spy. Imagine how much more successful President Trump would have been in executing his MAGA policy agenda.
(2) Backstabber extraordinaire:
No matter how many times President Trump went out of his way to keep McConnell happy (making his wife Transportation Secretary, choosing mutually agreeable Supreme Court nominees, acceding to some of McConnell’s unsavory anti-MAGA picks for elected office), the Establishment Republican never thought twice before stabbing him in the back after January 6. It is rumored that McConnell was “exhilarated” with the media’s framing of that day as a “terrorist attack” and “insurrection” because he confidently believed it would “finally, totally discredit” Donald Trump and return control of the Republican Party back to the same Chamber of Commerce China appeasers who have sold out America’s labor force for decades. Had polling not ultimately cowed him, he certainly would have joined Mitt Romney in voting for Trump’s second farcical impeachment. McConnell could have defended the president’s right to freely express his opinion that the 2020 election was a sham, but that would have put him on the side of free speech and against his good friend, Joe Biden.
(3) Corporate stooge and anti-labor globalist:
I’m thrilled that the Republican Party is becoming the home of hardworking Americans. I think the future of the party is Main Street, not Wall Street. I think it’s a great time to fight back against “woke” corporations and the multinational institutions that push foreign interests at the expense of everyday Americans. A self-sufficient America is a secure and prosperous America. An America that prioritizes manufacturing, industry, and innovation over imports is an America with an expanding middle class. An America that produces real products and not simply financial instruments traded by investment banks is an America with a real future and real wealth. And Mitch is not suited for this transition. He’s what most Republicans have come to despise: a politician who does the bidding of corporate lobbyists, not his constituents. He’s a globalist in an America First party.
(4) War hawk with a China problem:
Biden’s Build Back Better boobery has unleashed inflation hell. His unguarded borders are flooding America with millions of illegal immigrants. Americans are suffering. What does McConnell believe is the biggest problem on the planet today? Ukraine. After two decades of sending Americans to sandboxes in Asia and the Middle East to accomplish questionable objectives, now he and his war hawks desperately want to engage Russia on the battlefield. I don’t think he or his acolytes realize how few Americans have their backs. After pushing military adventurism abroad with little gain, they are not trusted. Their new “woke” military is not trusted. And nobody trusts McConnell’s obsession with Russia when he turns a blind eye to China’s genocide, market manipulation, and aggression. As Peter Schweizer has well documented, McConnell’s family has made too much money from the Chinese Communist Party to know who his real friends are. Should war with China become inevitable, McConnell is a liability.
(5) Election manipulator:
He helped get Alabama Democrat Doug Jones elected by attacking conservative Republicans Mo Brooks and Roy Moore. He handed over senate seats in Arizona and Georgia by insisting that those states’ conservative bases back the unpalatable candidacies of Martha McSally and Kelly Loeffler over local favorites. He’s forced Lisa Murkowski on America. By interfering in state elections to tank the rise of more conservative candidates, McConnell has cost Republicans Senate seats time and again. His my way or the highway approach to Senate elections has given Chuck Schumer a majority. Even worse, the few true conservatives in the Senate have been left vastly outnumbered by moderate milquetoasts and Romney-like quislings.
(6) Party boss, not a leader:
Establishment Republicans bemoaned their inability to attract black and Hispanic voters for years. You know who finally succeeded in appealing to a much broader voting coalition? Right! Donald Trump. For all their underhanded moves to weaken his presidency and destroy his influence within the party, McConnell Republicans have benefited greatly from Trump’s direct appeal to voters disenchanted with the Democrats’ Marxist ways. You know who doesn’t remotely appeal to that coalition? Yep. Mitch McConnell. McConnell has always struck me as an anachronistic throwback to a nineteenth century party boss before the invention of radio or television. He lacks gravitas, eloquence, charm, or even the inkling of an inspiring demeanor. He rules through fear and punishment, and voters do not like or trust him.
For that last reason alone, he should be dismissed as an unhelpful relic of Republicans’ past.
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.
Only six? C’mon man.
His letters begging for money always hit the trash can in a flash. Now, Rand Paul I like!
Very telling that McConnell denounces Rick Scott’s very conservative Republican plan for America, saying that taking a stand on issues might alienate independent voters in November so just run on an anti-Democrat platform. AND YET he is now gung-ho to support a worthless gun grabbing measure that will do nothing but alienate Republican voters in November.
Joe Biden boasted during his presidential campaign that the Communist Democrat party had the most sophisticated and extensive voter fraud organization ever created, IMHO, they use this organization to also keep Rino’s like McConnel, Graham and others in office who work with them on key issues behind the scenes.
How is that McConnel and his Chinese wife can conduct business with the communist Chinese government, when a large part of his job is to vote on legislation, policies and laws concerning China and our national security?
The Turtle, his wife and their extended family members have become multi millionaires through their business dealings with the communist Chinese government.