(DCNF)—Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson said Thursday on Fox News’ “Hannity” that he believes socialist Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani will test how “far he can go” if elected, based on a 2021 statement the nominee made.
Since winning the nomination, Mamdani has faced callouts from Republicans and some Democrats for past remarks expressing anti-police sentiments and for refusing to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Discussing the deepening division between left and right, Fox’s Sean Hannity asked Hanson if reconciliation is possible despite the wide ideological differences.
“Well, they’re incompatible with the history of the United States, the 249 years, and you have to refute them at the polls. Everybody has to get out in November and do something historic and win for the end party, the Republicans. A huge midterm victory, and that will refute it,” Hanson said. “That’s how McGovernism was refuted. That’s how Carterism was, but this is much more extreme.”
One of Mamdani’s recent controversies stems from his use of the phrase “seizing the means of production,” which is tied to socialist and communist ideology. Philosopher Friedrich Engels, co-founder of Marxism, wrote in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” that when society seizes the means of production, “production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.”
During a Young Democratic Socialists of America winter conference in 2021, Mamdani appeared on the livestream as a guest speaker. Attending for an over 40-minute session, Mamdani said that while some issues like Medicare and eliminating student debt have “popular” support in the U.S., others, like “the end goal of seizing the means of production” don’t have the same support “at this very moment.”
“David made a really good point, Sean, that Mamdani didn’t say this as a young person, he said it just four years ago. And he used this term ‘seize the means of production.’ That’s a direct English translation of a German catchphrase by Friedrich Engels,” Hanson said. “If you look at what he said was you got to be very slow and get people acculturated, but just because you’re moving them toward that direction doesn’t mean your ultimate goal is not to seize the means of production.”
“So David made a good point that he’s on the spectrum, and he wants to get to that point. And he’s going to see how far he can go each month when he’s in office. But that’s his ultimate aim, and he used the catchphrase for the last century of Marxism. He didn’t have to use that term, but he wanted to,” Hanson added.
If elected in November, Mamdani said he plans to implement policies like raising the minimum wage to $30, launching government-run grocery stores and taxing “richer and whiter” neighborhoods. While Republicans have raised concerns over the proposals, reports have circulated that some business owners in the city are considering whether to flee if Mamdani takes office.
With pushback on some of his statements, Mamdani sidestepped a reporter in July who asked if he regretted making several anti-police statements in 2020 and repeatedly called for the NYPD to be defunded following the death of George Floyd. Mamdani said the statements were made “amidst a frustration” due to Floyd’s death and that “they need not choose between the two.”
During an interview ahead of New York City’s election day, Mamdani came under fire after appearing on “The Bulwark” and refusing to denounce the phrases “globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea” when host Tim Miller asked if they made him uncomfortable. Mamdani later told CBS’ Kristen Welker that while it isn’t the “language” he uses, his beliefs are grounded in “universal human rights.”
Since the backlash, Mamdani has flip-flopped on his more progressive arguments, saying on Sept. 7 that he will now “discourage” the use of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which comes after meeting with Jewish leaders and others in the New York City community, according to Fox News.
Additionally, during his recent interview on ABC’s “The View,” Mamdani said that delivering “justice” can’t be done without “safety,” adding he has been in talks with individual officers to learn “more about the difficulties of” the job.
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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.
