(DCNF)—Democratic New York state Rep. Micah Lasher defeated Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway and Kennedy heir Jack Schlossberg Tuesday in his bid to replace Democratic New York Rep. Jerry Nadler.
Schlossberg and Conway were not able to capitalize on their political connections and media notoriety in the New York 12th District primary. Lasher narrowly won in a tight matchup against Democratic New York state Rep. Alex Bores, who previously worked for Palantir and campaigned on a platform that included placing guardrails on artificial intelligence (AI), according to Decision Desk HQ and NBC News.
Lasher received endorsements from Nadler, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Democratic New York Gov. David Paterson, according to his campaign website. His platform includes “fighting back against Trumpism,” allowing children to undergo transgender surgeries and procedures and fighting climate change.
The candidates engaged in heated spats on the debate stage Thursday. Lasher accused Bores of being beholden to the Big Tech players who supported his campaign. Bores repeatedly denied those accusations, saying that he authored one of the nation’s strictest AI safety laws, the Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act.
“This race started with AI megadonors pledging $10 million to stop me because they were afraid after I passed the strongest AI safety law in the country,” Bores said in a statement, according to WRAL News, a North Carolina-based outlet. “Since then, everyone who supports AI regulation and safety — from teachers to tech workers, from AI safety advocates to progressive activists — has united to take the other side. This isn’t one company versus another, this is one ideology versus another: regulate the powerful and protect people, or don’t.”
Several unions, including the New York Nurses Association, the United Federation of Teachers and the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, endorsed Bores.
Schlossberg also argued that Bores’ proposed AI regulation “is a dream come true” for tech companies.
Lasher accused Schlossberg of being on the debate stage because of nepotism, which Schlossberg denied. “As someone who grew up enormously admiring the legacy of service in your family, Jack, I say this somewhat sheepishly and mournfully, but when we talk about the reasons that each of us are on this stage, I’m on this stage because of nearly two decades in public service,” Lasher said.
“I have made my way here myself,” Schlossberg replied. “Do not ever invoke my family name to try to denigrate who I am.”
Schlossberg entered the race in November 2025 and received endorsements from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his mother, Caroline Kennedy. His list of campaign priorities included enshrining abortion protections into law, allowing Planned Parenthood to accept Medicaid, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and providing transgender procedures to any person who supposedly needs the procedure, according to his campaign website, “Jack for New York.”
The Kennedy heir made several bizarre social media posts, including one X post where he suggested second lady Usha Vance was “way hotter” than his late grandmother, Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
Conway, an anti-Trump lawyer, centered his campaign on removing President Donald Trump from office and “defeating Trumpism.” He co-founded The Lincoln Project a political action committee (PAC) consisting of former Republicans that tried to prevent Trump and his supporters from wining elections.
The anti-Trump activist wore a shirt bearing the words “I am Antifa” at a “No Kings” rally in October 2025.
Conway also posted a video of himself singing a song to celebrate the acquittal of a former Justice Department employee in Washington, D.C., who threw a footlong Subway sandwich at a law enforcement agent in August 2025. He shed tears when discussing Trump on a podcast in April 2025.
“I threw the sandwich, but I did not throw the condiments; I threw the sandwich, but I didn’t throw the condiments,” Conway sang while playing a guitar with a “Republican Voters Against Trump” sticker affixed to the instrument. “All around Washington D.C., they’re trying to track me down. They say they want to bring me in guilty for the spilling of some mayonnaise, for wasting all the dijon, but I say, I threw the sandwich, but I swear it had bad provolone I threw the sandwich, and they say it is a capicola offense.”
Conway changed his residence from Bethesda, Maryland, to Manhattan and registered as a Democrat so he could run in the race. His supporters were largely 60 years and older, while the support for Lasher and Bores spanned across all age groups, according to Emerson College polling taken before primary voting was concluded.
Nadler was a constant thorn in Trump’s side during his final years in Congress. As the then-chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Nadler led both impeachment proceedings against Trump and launched sweeping probes into Trump’s campaign, businesses and administration. He demanded the full report be released by former FBI Director Robert Mueller on alleged 2016 Russian election interference.
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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.
