(DCNF)—High-profile controversies involving progressive district attorneys increasingly dominate headlines across the country, from releasing violent repeat offenders and targeting police to clashing with federal immigration enforcement, prompting questions about what’s driving the surge.
Violent crime was a leading concern for voters in the 2024 presidential election, and the role of progressive policies has since drawn national attention. At a police memorial event in 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance condemned the agenda of “far-left prosecutors” backed by “faraway billionaires,” saying the administration has no tolerance for lawlessness. Leftist DAs have frequently used their offices to push increasingly radical policies. Even NBC News has acknowledged a broadly shared agenda among these “left-leaning Democratic district attorneys.”
Among the most controversial jurisdictions is Travis County, Texas, where Democrat DA José Garza is facing calls to resign after it was revealed that his office may have held secret meetings with Austin officials in an attempt to indict a police officer over an incident more than five years old.
The Austin Democrat is also taking heat from Congress after an internal office memo revealed guidelines that his critics say “incentivize” repeat criminal offenses in the county. Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, in a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, argues Travis County has become more “dangerous, unjust, and anarchic” since the progressive prosecutor took office in 2021, citing thousands of dismissed or rejected felony charges and rising crime.
Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, widely considered one of the nation’s most radical prosecutors, has threatened to cuff Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who were deployed to airports amid the partial government shutdown.
Democrat Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano, who has a history of freeing repeat offenders, faced major backlash in March for the release of criminal illegal alien Abdul Jalloh — a move that led to the murder of a Virginia mother.
The list goes on, and they all have one thing in common: a shared donor network directing prosecutorial policy across the country.
Garza reported $548,225 in political contributions throughout the 2020 election cycle in which he won office, including over $400,000 from the Texas arm of the national Justice & Public Safety PAC, which has backed multiple progressive prosecutors across the country. Descano received $601,153 from the same committee in 2019. Although Krasner did not directly receive money from the PAC, its Philadelphia branch spent over $1.7 million campaigning for him in 2017, according to campaign finance reports. In those years, billionaire leftist donor George Soros donated a combined total of $7,807,863 to the Justice & Public Safety PAC.
In addition to funding, the prosecutors received “communications” support from the Wren Collective, a leftist consulting firm offering “fee-free” services for “elected officials, grassroots advocates, and other allies,” according to a 2025 report by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. Garza’s office entered a non-disclosure agreement with the organization in 2022; Krasner’s office listed Wren Collective founder Jessica Brand as its official media contact and paid the firm as a campaign advisor; Descano’s team worked with the Wren Collective to “sketch out a policy and communications strategy” for his second term in office.
“Wren is proud to help reform prosecutors implement evidence-based policies to reduce crime and improve community safety. No matter how hard elected officials work, every large company or organization in every line of work needs outside support to fulfill its critical mission,” a spokesperson for the Wren Collective told the DCNF. “So, whether it’s Wren, Lexipol, the National District Attorneys Association, Accenture, Heritage, or any of the hundreds of consultant firms and non-profit organizations, prosecutor offices need support to do their vital work of keeping our streets safe.”
Founded in 2020 as an independent entity, the Wren Collective later became a project of the Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE), a leftist donor conglomerate deeply entangled with organizations in the broader Soros network. In 2025, Wren moved to split off from SEE and become an independent 501(c)3 organization, obtaining tax-exempt status in December.
According to Influence Watch, SEE was originally founded in 1987 as the “American-Soviet Film Initiative” to “promote educational and cultural exchanges among citizens of the U.S. and citizens of the then-Soviet Union through films and television programs.”
The organization’s website states that it works to “empower, encourage and catalyze individuals to facilitate progressive change in areas of social justice and ecological restoration.” The website adds that the projects SEE fiscally sponsors “provide long-term cultural transformation to create a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world.”
Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) network gave SEE $7,632,740 between 2017 and 2023 through the Foundation to Promote Open Society (FPOS), one of the network’s grantmaking entities. According to the organization’s tax filings, SEE also gave $760,220 to the FPOS in 2024. The organization also fiscally sponsors groups promoting leftist viewpoints on prostitution, gun violence, and incarceration through OSF grants.
An OSF spokesman told the DCNF, “We are proud to support justice, human rights, and equity for communities across the country, and to advocate for a justice system that is fair and treats everyone equally.”
The spokesman also said the “grants we provided to organizations through SEE as a fiscal sponsor were earmarked for specific projects” and “cannot be redirected by the fiscal sponsor to support other projects.”
The Soros network is not SEE’s only source of funding. Tax filings show that the organization received $28,075,334 in taxpayer dollars between 2014 and 2024 through federal funding. The Biden administration supplied a majority of the grants, totaling $25,211,801 between 2021 and 2024.
The Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) obligated even more money to the organization. Government spending records show that the agency obligated a stunning $63,000,000 to SEE, intended to be redistributed in at least 197 “subaward agreements.”
The DCNF did not receive a response from SEE, Garza, Descano, or Krasner for a comment.
In 2019, NBC News reported on a “new wave of progressive DAs” taking the reins across the country. The story warned that prosecutors were “shaking up the criminal justice system,” pointing to Krasner and former Suffolk County DA Rachael Rollins as prime examples of the then- new trend.
Leftist prosecutors have since seen pushback in the form of lost elections and recalls in several jurisdictions. Former Alameda County DA Pamela Price was recalled in 2024 after allegedly facilitating rising crime in the county. Former Los Angeles County DA George Gascón, who seemed to stand by as property crime skyrocketed, also decisively lost his 2024 reelection bid.
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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.
