Last month, the Justice Department targeted a central hub of the Left’s cancel culture machine that weaponized the federal government under President Joe Biden. Just over a week later, Democrats received a “whistleblower” report claiming that the DOJ rushed the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center.
To my eyes, this looks like a deep state operation to undermine the government’s case and prop up the SPLC’s flagging reputation.
A federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy charges for sending money to “field sources,” members of the very white supremacist groups the center claims it exists to dismantle. The SPLC did not deny funding members of the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations, but insisted the funds were part of an informant program that it used to prevent violent attacks.
Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., told the media they sent letters to Kevin P. Davidson, acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, and Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, claiming some insider information that’s rather convenient for their narrative.
They cited “whistleblower information” in stating that Singh ordered Davidson’s office “to rush through the indictment of the SPLC, despite serious concerns about the strength of the case.”
‘Systematic Flaws’
Raskin and Scanlon mentioned “systematic flaws” in the indictment. They accused Singh of attacking “a preeminent civil rights organization, the SPLC, for the ‘crime’ of attempting to study, investigate, and expose white nationalist groups.”
The Democrats noted that the FBI also uses paid informants, and they echoed the SPLC’s claim that it fed information to the FBI that it received from informants. “Should the FBI itself be indicted as a co-conspirator?” they asked.
Raskin and Scanlon suggested the DOJ brought the case because “the SPLC has publicly opposed and exposed numerous organizations that support the president and do his bidding—like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters—and called them hate groups.”
The Democrats insinuated that President Donald Trump is on the side of the KKK. “No one is accusing the Trump administration of working for the white nationalist groups, but they do seem to have the same enemies,” they wrote.
Big Problems With the Democrats’ SPLC Defense
When reached for comment, Davidson told The Daily Signal that he has yet to receive any letter from the Democrats.
“As I have not received a letter, four days after the media received it, I will simply state that the evidence in the case supports every word in the indictment and I look forward to litigating the case in court,” the acting U.S. attorney told The Daily Signal.
That doesn’t exactly sound like a man who harbors “serious concerns about the strength of the case.”
In fact, Democrats should be the ones harboring serious concerns about the SPLC’s ability to defend itself.
The indictment doesn’t just claim that the SPLC paid “field sources” inside the KKK and other white nationalist groups—it also states that the SPLC was supervising the “racist postings” of an organizer of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally.
Raskin and Scanlon also failed to mention that, while the SPLC reportedly did hand over some information from “field sources” to law enforcement, it kept the program secret.
Perhaps the largest omission, however, involves the fact that the SPLC doesn’t just face charges for allegedly misleading donors—it also faces charges for lying to banks. If the indictment correctly quotes the key financial documents—and neither Raskin nor Scanlon suggests it does not—the Justice Department has the SPLC dead to rights on bank fraud.
A Deep State Effort?
Last year, an RMG Research poll found that 75% of Washington, D.C.-area federal employees who made at least $150,000 a year and who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 would disobey a lawful Trump order if they considered it bad policy. While many of these bureaucrats may have left the government since then, it stands to reason that someone with this mindset might be behind the Democrats’ letter.
After all, the SPLC had a rather large footprint in the Biden administration. SPLC leaders and staff cultivated relationships with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, the FBI cited the SPLC in targeting “radical-traditional Catholics,” President Biden appointed an SPLC attorney to a top federal judgeship, and SPLC staff briefed DOJ prosecutors.
It stands to reason that some left-leaning Justice Department holdovers from the Biden administration might be none too happy to see the SPLC facing an indictment.
‘The Right Side of History’
Raskin and Scanlon didn’t just go public to condemn the indictment—they did so to make a statement. They suggested the SPLC is on the “right side of history” against the Trump administration.
With all due respect, they only think so because they cherry-picked the data. Sure, the SPLC did noble work in the beginning, but it has long since transformed into a far-left smear factory. Its “hate map” doesn’t just include the KKK and the Proud Boys—it also includes mainstream conservative and Christian groups, including Moms for Liberty, the Family Research Council, PragerU, Defending Education, and even Turning Point USA.
Perhaps Davidson didn’t get the letter because the Democrats thought twice about sending it. They should take a closer look at the indictment and ask if they really want to be defending the SPLC.
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.
