The family of Army Sgt. Angel Sarah Rampersad had seen enough of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. So when the democratic socialist showed up at her funeral Friday with a prepared speech on his iPad, they made sure he stayed silent.
Rampersad, 28, grew up in Ozone Park. She enlisted, followed her uncle into the Army, and died July 17 when Iranian missiles slammed into Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. She was one of three American soldiers killed that day. Hundreds packed Calvary Assembly of God to honor her. Gospel songs filled the sanctuary. NYPD carried her flag-draped coffin to a hearse for the long ride to Long Island National Cemetery.
Gov. Kathy Hochul spoke. So did Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, state Sen. Joseph Addabbo Jr., and a local block association president. Mamdani sat in the fourth row near a Republican councilman. Names were called. His was not. Sources told the New York Post the mayor looked over at his staff, angry and frustrated, then put the tablet away.
“They kept calling names and then he was never called,” one attendee said.
The family is pro-Trump and conservative. They did not want the mayor’s politics turning a soldier’s farewell into a political sideshow. An insider put it plainly: they wanted to limit political distractions. Mamdani’s record made that easy.
He is an avowed democratic socialist who has harshly criticized Israel and labeled the U.S. campaign against Iran an “illegal war of aggression.” Back in February, when American and Israeli strikes began, he posted that the attacks marked “a catastrophic escalation,” complained about bombing cities, and insisted Americans only want “peace” and relief from the affordability crisis.
That is the man who expected to stand at the front of a church and eulogize a young woman killed by the regime he keeps defending in softer language. The family said no. Good for them.
City Hall ignored questions. Mamdani’s press team still released the speech he never got to deliver. It opened with the familiar line about the fallen giving their tomorrows for our today. Fine words. Empty coming from a mayor who treats the war that claimed those tomorrows as illegitimate.
Republican Councilman Frank Morano, no ally of the mayor, admitted he was surprised. “I didn’t understand why they would have lower-level officials speak and not the mayor.”
The answer sits in the family’s choice. Lower-level officials did not call the fight against Iran illegal. They did not spend years attacking the Jewish state while a Queens soldier fought under the American flag.
Rampersad’s story is straightforward. She graduated from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She served in Hawaii and Germany before deployment. Neighbors remembered a young woman who could talk to people above her rank and still be heard.
Daisy Davis-Credle of the Queens Sunday School Association put it simply: “It’s not what you do, it’s how you do what you do. And she knew how to do that.”
Hochul said she felt like Rampersad could have been one of her daughters. That is the right instinct. A mayor who treats the war that killed her as aggression does not get to claim the same moral ground.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. That is John 15:13. Sgt. Rampersad laid hers down. The family who raised her decided who would speak over her casket. They chose not to hand the microphone to a man whose politics reject the very fight that took her.
New York has a mayor who will ride a double-decker bus for a housing stunt and push city-run grocery stores with 30 percent discounts. He will release prepared remarks after the fact. What he will not do is force his way into a family’s grief when that family sees him clearly.
The snub was not rude. It was clarity. A conservative Queens family looked at the socialist mayor of their city and decided their daughter’s memory deserved better. They were right.
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.
