(Just The News)—Women who fled socialist regimes are pushing back on the Democratic Socialists of America, a group gaining momentum within the national Democratic Party.
The powerful two-minute, 39-second message known as “Take Me Back!” debuted two weeks ago and uses artificial intelligence in its generation of taking the audience to a future intended to show the implications of policies championed by Democratic Socialists of America candidates. Produced by Independent Women’s Voice, it ends with a woman’s scream to get back to the present day and a message, “Beware of the gap between promises and reality.”
The list of prominent elected officials and public figures associated with or aligned with the party includes U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani; and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who says Mamdani’s views are what the Democratic Party as a whole should look like. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., isn’t a member of the party but caucuses with Democrats and self-describes as a democratic socialist; he’s a significant ideological leader.
“Socialism places faith in the state,” writes Yali Nunez in an op-ed published by Fox News. Nunez escaped socialism in Cuba.
“Capitalism places faith in the people,” Nunez continues. “Socialism assumes government planners can best direct society and allocate resources. Capitalism recognizes that millions of individuals making free choices create innovation, opportunity and prosperity in ways no bureaucracy can replicate.”
The spot plays off the award-winning 1985 sci-fi comedy film “Back to the Future” that starred Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. A character in the spot transports the woman, Maya, in a vehicle resembling a modified DeLorean, has the white hair similar to Lloyd, and does the explaining of the differences.
He tells why everyone gets a home, although they are assigned; there is zero waste, so no lattes and only black coffee; the government-run grocery stores come with coupons for payments of groceries, though the prices are so high groceries are unaffordable, the woman says; and there’s no police when the grocery store gets robbed, he tells her. Even the public transit is a disaster, with none moving because “workers deserve more,” so they don’t usually show up, he tells her.
And as for healthcare, it’s totally free, he tells her – with a desk clerk saying it’s 72 days for an appointment, two weeks if it’s an emergency.
On social media, Gabriella Hoffman writes, “As a daughter of socialism escapees, I’m aghast at my fellow Americans embracing socialism – including its new ‘hot’ iteration that pretends to be democratic. … The end result is destitution, misery, and death. Let’s not have a repeat of the system that nearly destroyed my family and millions of others, please!”
The Democratic Party, on a national scale, has tension in an ideological tussle for control. Democratic socialism is on the rise, replete with a desire not only for social reforms but also restructuring, including abolishing the U.S. Senate, having Congress pick the president and U.S. Supreme Court, defunding the Pentagon, and allowing all residents, regardless of citizenship, to vote.
What’s commonly called the establishment Democrats, meaning mainstream members supportive of traditional institutional norms and pragmatic changes rather than complete overhauls, are being tested in their “big tent” slogan. Not all candidates connected to the rising tide agree with all tenets, and that’s no different from either main party today or in yesteryear.
On its website “about us” section, the Democratic Socialists of America say, “Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with a democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.
“We want to win ‘radical’ reforms like single-payer Medicare for All, defunding the police/refunding communities, the Green New Deal, and more as a transition to a freer, more just life.”
Judy Pino, writing for IW Features, said she was age 5 when the Cuban regime placed a rifle in her hands.
“Before we fled, I recall adults speaking in hushed tones; family members carefully discussing plans they did not want others to hear,” she says. “Like thousands of Cuban families seeking freedom, we were considered traitors and branded ‘gusanos’ – worms – by supporters of the regime. I remember my mother and grandmother breaking glass bottles in the backyard so they could use the jagged edges to defend themselves if we were attacked on the way out. That is how terrifying those final days felt.”
The Democratic Socialists of America have 2026 primary wins either by national or local endorsement by incumbent Ocasio-Cortez in New York’s 14th Congressional District, Claire Valdez in New York’s 7th Congressional District and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York’s 13th Congressional District; Christopher Rabb in Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District; Melat Kiros in Colorado’s 1st Congressional District; and Mai Vang in California’s 7th Congressional District.
The national chapter did not endorse Ocasio-Cortez, Valdez, Kiros or Vang, according to Ballotpedia. Kiros and Chevalier defeated incumbent members of the U.S. House of Representatives; Valdez and Rabb won open congressional races.
Patrice Onwuka is vice president for economic policy and director of Independent Women’s Center for Economic Opportunity. She was born in the Caribbean and immigrated with family to Boston.
Writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, Onwuka says, “I never get tired of only-in-America stories. My belief in the promise of the United States is endlessly renewed by the rich experiences of diverse people who moved to this nation for safety, freedom and opportunity. That’s what makes the socialist movement now surging through the Democratic Party so distressing: It challenges the very ethos that drew my family here.”
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.
