Two words surfaced on CNN Friday regarding Elon Musk’s successful SpaceX IPO. A third word actually encapsulates it all. Together they explain almost everything about why the modern left cannot abide the existence of Musk.
The first word was honest. The second was a costume. The third was the one nobody at the table was willing to say out loud, even though it sat underneath the entire conversation.
The occasion was Musk crossing the line into history as the world’s first trillionaire, a threshold reached after SpaceX went public and lifted his paper wealth past $1.26 trillion. There is no vault. There is no mountain of confiscated coins. There are ownership stakes in companies that launch rockets, build cars, beam internet to remote villages, and aim at a colony on Mars. And the reaction from the CNN NewsNight panel was not curiosity about how a man built all of that. It was something closer to mourning.
Jennings Named the First Word
Scott Jennings refused to play along with the grief. He had spent the day watching the same spectacle the rest of us had, and he described it without flinching.
All day long, I’ve been listening to liberals, count and spend Elon’s money for him. This envy, jealousy, hatred of success. Why is it immoral? Why is it wrong for somebody in our system, our capitalist system, in the greatest nation on earth, to go out and build a company, build companies, build technologies, go into space, aim to go put a colony on Mars, give internet to half the world, all the things he’s doing?
Envy. That was the honest word, and Jennings was right to plant it in the center of the table. The rest of the panel had spent the segment performing a familiar ritual, the one where people who have built nothing of consequence appoint themselves stewards of what someone else built. Cari Champion delivered the purest version of it, announcing that people “shouldn’t be allowed to have a trillion dollars.”
Jennings answered the only way a free man can.
Rich people in this country pay the vast majority of taxes, and I hear people today saying, “Oh, it’s time that we tax the rich.” Folks, I got news for you. We already tax the rich. But is it for us to sit around and say, “There’s a limit on what you can build, there’s a limit on what you can earn,” and it’s now my job to tell you what to do with your money?
Then Came the Costume
Bakari Sellers was too sophisticated to say what Champion said. He reached instead for a gentler word, one that arrives wrapped in the language of virtue.
I’m not saying that I’m mad at him for being innovative enough for creating an IPO that creates wealth or many others. What I am saying, however, is that there has to be some nature of altruism.
Altruism. It sounds lovely. It sounds like generosity, like a heart turned outward toward the suffering of others. But listen to the construction of the sentence. There has to be. That is not a description of charity. That is a demand. Genuine altruism is a gift freely given by a man who owns what he gives away. What Sellers described is an obligation he believes Musk owes to someone, enforced presumably by someone else, measured by a standard set by people who happen to disagree with how Musk spends his own fortune.
When Generosity Becomes a Demand
This is the sleight of hand. Strip the warmth from the word and what remains is a claim on another man’s property dressed in the robes of moral concern. Musk already gives in ways his critics conveniently ignore. He beams Starlink connectivity to disaster zones and war-torn regions, he employs hundreds of thousands of people, and he has built the most consequential private space program on the planet.
None of that satisfies the panel, because the panel was never measuring generosity. It was measuring obedience.
Altruism extracted by pressure is not altruism. It is a tax wearing a halo. And the moment a society decides that a productive man’s wealth belongs morally to the collective, and that the collective gets to decide how much he is permitted to keep, it has accepted a premise far older and far darker than anything Sellers said aloud.
The Word Nobody Would Say
Strip away the envy and the costume, and the third word stands exposed. Marxism. Not the cartoon version with banners and bread lines, but the load-bearing assumption beneath all of it. Wealth is treated as theft. Success is treated as evidence of guilt. The man who builds is recast as a man who took. And the state, or the mob, or the panel, becomes the rightful redistributor of what he never had any business keeping. From each according to his ability, to each according to the grievances of people who envy his ability.
That is the engine humming under the polite vocabulary. Champion gave it away when she declared that people should not be allowed to accumulate too much. Sellers softened it into a moral suggestion. But the destination is identical. Both arrive at a place where a committee decides the ceiling on a human being’s ambition, and where the act of building something extraordinary is greeted not with gratitude but with a bill.
For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.
Scripture understood the danger of envy long before Karl Marx was born. Envy is corrosive precisely because it cannot create. It can only resent what others have made and scheme about how to seize it. Dress it as altruism, and it grows respectable. Codify it into policy, and it grows lethal.
The confusion it breeds is exactly the confusion that filled that CNN studio, a roomful of people unable to tell the difference between a man earning a fortune and a man committing a crime.
So watch the three words the next time the left circles a successful American. Envy is the honest one, the feeling that actually animates the outrage. Altruism is the disguise, the word that makes covetousness sound charitable. And Marxism is the destination, the system that turns private envy into public confiscation. Jennings was right to call the spectacle what it is.
Success is not a sin, building is not theft, and no panel of professional resenters gets to set the limit on what a free man is permitted to achieve.
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.
