Editor’s Note: The election has been stolen. There will be spin from legacy media for the next few days that this was “expected” and “normal” but in reality an obscure and unpopular candidate, Nithya Raman, was incapable of dominating the late (manufactured) ballots. Don’t be fooled. Here’s the latest from Zero Hedge:
Update (2200ET): In a stunning shift, 9 days after the actual election day, LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman has suddenly overtaken former reality TV star Spencer Pratt for second place in the Los Angeles mayoral primary race on Sunday, the latest election results show.
With 83.2% of the expected vote in, Democratic incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, who NBC News projected on election night will advance to the November runoff, maintained her lead with 250,871 votes, or 34.68%, according to the updated vote tally released by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk on Sunday afternoon. Raman has 27.12% of the ballots counted so far, surpassing Pratt, who has 26.69%. She is now ahead of him by 3,113 votes.
Although no news outlet has projected which candidate will face Bass in November, Bass’ campaign released a statement following Sunday’s drop, referring to Raman as the mayor’s “general election opponent.”
Spencer Pratt took to social media:
This post on X summed up the general farce well…
Don’t forget, “democracy” itself is at stake here…
What a f—ing joke!!!
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Spencer Pratt entered election night with momentum, a measurable polling advantage, and what looked like a path to one of the two runoff spots in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Days later, the outcome is still unknown, and Pratt’s path to the runoff is narrowing fast. Late-arriving mail-in ballots have methodically eroded his margin over Nithya Raman, and the trajectory has prompted pointed questions about how California counts its votes and who benefits when the process drags on for weeks.
California’s jungle primary structure allows two candidates from the same party to advance to the general election, and it is widely believed that Democrats intentionally designed this system to ensure Republicans would be shut out of general elections. If Raman overtakes Pratt, the November ballot will feature two Democrats, freezing out the candidate who ran as the race’s most prominent outsider voice on crime and homelessness in a city that has become a symbol of both.
As of the latest available count, Pratt’s lead over Raman sits at just over 7,000 votes, a margin of under one percent, with roughly 22 percent of ballots still waiting to be counted. Pre-election polls had Pratt leading Raman by three to four points, and the expectation was that he would advance to the November runoff.
The gap between those projections and the current count grows harder to square with each new ballot drop. In the most recent batch, Raman pulled approximately 40 percent of the vote, compared with Pratt’s 18 percent. Even Democratic incumbent Karen Bass, the race’s front-runner, captured only 33 percent of that same drop. The remaining candidates split what was left.
The slow-rolling count and the bizarre trend of Raman getting the lead over all candidates in the mail-in vote have drawn national attention.
And former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), is blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom. “The question to the rest of the world is what happened to California elections? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s Gavin Newsom,” McCarthy said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures. “When Gavin Newsom was elected governor of California, you knew who was elected in a day to two days. Now it takes more than weeks, almost a month.”
He continued, “Gavin changed a number of election laws in which you want to see is what did he do and why did he cause it?” He went further on the structural shifts that preceded the current chaos. “We had cut off voter registration 30 days before the election. That helps the registrars to know who’s going to vote and the candidates. Now we have same day voter, and you don’t have to show ID. Gavin changed the rules where he mails ballots to everyone. So he took away the choice to Californians to vote in person or to vote absentee. Everybody gets mailed a ballot. But he didn’t clean up the rolls. So that raises doubt in people’s minds.”
That doubt has found a louder audience online. Robby Starbuck posted a breakdown on X that laid out the ballot-drop pattern in stark visual terms.
Starbuck followed that with another post on Sunday morning that demonstrates just how unlikely it is that Raman would be performing so well in the mail-in ballots.
Elon Musk entered the conversation by pointing to what he sees as the underlying mechanism. “The reason ID is banned in California (and New York) elections is to enable large-scale fraud,” Musk wrote on X, replying to Starbuck’s post. “When you combine no ID and mail-in voting, fraud is de facto legalized.”
Voters watched Pratt finish a solid second in the polls and on election night, then saw that lead steadily shrink as waves of late-arriving ballots were added to the count. When a state with California’s resources still can’t produce timely, transparent results in one of the nation’s most closely watched elections, skepticism is inevitable.
If Pratt ultimately loses a runoff spot, it will become yet another flashpoint in the growing national debate over whether Americans can trust how elections are conducted and counted.
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.
