(Zero Hedge)—Over the course of the last decade, the great social debate has mostly revolved around the issue of “merit vs equity”, or equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. For anyone with common sense it’s clear that “equity” is a non-starter; a system which skews accomplishment and hands success to unqualified people based solely on their ethnicity, gender or sexual identity. The experiment has been disastrous for western civilization so far.
Women in general and black women in particular were initially sought out by companies to fill DEI quotas that should not have existed in the first place. These quotas were instituted because governments and NGO’s created the demand for them by offering numerous subsidies, tax breaks and special credit access. Corporations that met the DEI requirements would then have a financial edge on the competition, so everyone had to participate to avoid being surpassed by the other guy.
One interesting side effect has been the encouragement of cultural delusion among certain demographics. The idea that minorities are somehow being “held back” by “white supremacy” and that they are at the same time far more accomplished than their oppressors is self perpetuating. One of the most common arguments heard in defense of the woke era was that “black women are the most educated and successful group” in America today.
This claim, of course, relied heavily on DEI in college admissions and DEI in corporate hiring. Black women were by far the biggest beneficiaries of DEI practices. Furthermore, the explosion in women’s wages and minority wages was thanks to a unique but brief employment market built on easy venture capital. This created an explosion in tech jobs, marketing jobs, HR and diversity positions, not to mention an avalanche of web media jobs promoting progressive ideologies.
On top of all this, government hiring accelerated dramatically under the Biden Administration, and a lot of these jobs went to women and minorities in order promote equity quotas.
This all changed in 2025 with the virtual death of DEI, triggered by the Trump Administration crackdown through DOGE cuts and the advancement of civil suits against companies engaged in anti-white hiring practices. Almost immediately black women were most affected by the change.
Over 300,000 black women faced layoffs last year, with the trend continuing into 2026 and some estimates at around 500,000 total job losses. Currently, the unemployment rate for black women is 7.1%, far above the national average of 4.4%. Black female employees represented 12% of all federal employees in 2024 (double their share of the population in the national labor force), but they were also 33% of federal layoffs in 2025-2026.
The first response of progressives is to cry “racism” over these numbers, but they’re not asking the question that really needs to be asked: Did these women truly qualify for the jobs they were hired for? Or, were they hired to make a political virtue statement and to collect subsidies? If they were highly competent and well trained, then one would think companies and government agencies would keep them regardless of extra cash or tax breaks.
Their value as workers should be enough. Another potential cause of these layoffs beyond the end of DEI is the prospect that black liberal women are notoriously difficult to work with. Companies tolerated them because there were financial benefits to having them on staff, but now those benefits are drying up.
The exodus of black women from the workforce has become a conundrum for the political left and the cope is flowing. The media is running stories regularly on the “return of black women” through burgeoning communities and online support groups. The discussion is often centered on the way in which black women can “regain their seat at the table”. The problem is, the dynamic that gave them so much access in the woke years no longer exists and it’s probably never coming back.
Beyond the collapse of DEI programs there is the looming specter of AI. Artificial Intelligence was initially heralded as an Apocalypse for low wage workers in entry level positions. However, the real demographic under threat is women in corporate environments.
Of the 6.1 million workers whose jobs are the most likely to be disrupted by AI and least likely to adapt, 86% are women, a recent Brookings analysis has found. Labor markets most populated by women in air conditioned offices across the nation – secretaries, receptionists, payroll clerks, customer service representatives, middle management, marketing, online journalism, education, even HR and communications – are all under threat from AI.
As easily as black women were elevated to six-figure incomes and the upper-middle class lifestyle, they are now on the verge of losing it all. The sad thing is, DEI built an environment in which every minority in a high level position became suspect. While there are certainly minority employees who are highly skilled and deserve the jobs they have, the decade of DEI has put them in a state of constant suspicion. Today, no one knows who was hired based on merit, and who was hired because of their skin color.
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.
