There is a particular kind of irony watching California’s progressive establishment tie itself in knots over Tom Steyer. The state that gave the world identity politics, intersectionality seminars, and the sacred gospel of “lived experience” is now watching a 68-year-old white, straight, male billionaire attempt to purchase the governorship with what amounts to a small nation’s GDP. And the left, largely, is playing along.
Steyer — founder of the Farallon Capital hedge fund, longtime Democratic megadonor, and failed 2020 presidential candidate — has pumped nearly $200 million of his personal fortune into television, cable, and radio advertising alone.
That figure, compiled by ad tracker AdImpact, does not merely break records. It obliterates them, surpassing by more than $16 million the previous all-time record set by Republican Meg Whitman in her 2010 losing bid for the same office. Whitman, at least, had the decency to lose quietly. Steyer seems determined to keep spending until either California voters relent or his accountants stage an intervention.
The polls heading into the June 2 primary tell a story that should embarrass anyone who believed progressive voters could not be bought. A UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies survey shows Xavier Becerra leading with 25%, Republican Steve Hilton at 21%, and Steyer at 19%. The Public Policy Institute of California places the margins nearly identical. Emerson College polling has Becerra at 19% with Hilton and Steyer deadlocked at 17%.
Three separate surveys, same basic conclusion: Steyer has flooded the airwaves for months, spent twenty times more than his nearest rival, and still cannot crack a lead. What he has done, against all odds, is remain competitive — which in California Democratic politics apparently counts as a mandate.
Meanwhile, the betting markets remain unconvinced. Polymarket currently has Becerra as the overwhelming favorite at roughly 70%, with Steyer sitting around 20%. The money, it seems, does not trust the money. Sophisticated forecasters looking past the primary noise see a Becerra-dominated November, and they are likely right. But the fact that Steyer is even in the conversation — that his checkbook has kept him viable where his ideas and personality have not — is a window into how California Democrats actually operate beneath the sanctimonious surface.
Consider what Steyer represents on paper. He is precisely the demographic profile that progressive activists have spent years telling us is the problem with American politics: a fabulously wealthy white man with no governing experience who believes his fortune constitutes qualification.
When Republicans ran candidates like this, the left called it plutocracy. When a hedge fund billionaire does it with a climate change bumper sticker, it is called a grassroots campaign focused on affordability.
“Californians deserve a life they can afford,” Steyer declared in his campaign launch video. The man who walked away from a billion-dollar fund to “give back to California” is now spending that wealth to give himself California.
His history makes the posturing harder to sustain. In 2020, Steyer burned through more than $200 million of his own fortune chasing the Democratic presidential nomination. He received zero pledged delegates, finished a distant third in South Carolina after making it his firewall, and dropped out before Super Tuesday. Now he is back, having apparently concluded that the problem last time was not enough zeroes on the check. If at first you do not succeed, spend another $200 million. Somewhere, Meg Whitman is taking notes.
The deeper question California’s voters should be asking themselves is not whether Steyer can win, but what it means that he is this close. A party that has spent decades lecturing the country about the corrupting influence of money in politics is on the verge of potentially nominating a man whose singular qualification is that he is willing to spend more of it than anyone in state history.
Katie Porter, herself no stranger to left-wing credentials, has been bluntest about it: her campaign has repeatedly called out Steyer for “trying to buy the governor’s office.” That criticism, notable for coming from within the Democratic primary, has done little to slow the spending or the polls.
As it is written in the book of Amos, “They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” California’s progressives may not recognize the scripture, but they are living it out in real time. Principles, it turns out, have a price — and Tom Steyer has done the math.
Steve Hilton, the former Fox News commentator and British political strategist who carries Donald Trump’s endorsement, is the last man standing between California and an all-Democrat November ballot. Under the state’s top-two primary system, the leading two finishers advance regardless of party. Hilton has remained competitive on a fraction of Steyer’s budget, which is either a testament to Trump’s political pull in a deep-blue state or an indictment of what $200 million in advertising actually buys when voters are not sold on the product. Possibly both.
What happens on June 2 will tell Californians something important about themselves. If Steyer advances, it will confirm what cynics have long suspected: that progressive values are largely decorative, applied when convenient and discarded when a billionaire with the right slogans comes along. If he falls short, it will at least suggest that there are limits to what money alone can purchase, even in a state that has made a cottage industry of performative politics.
Either way, Tom Steyer has already proven something valuable. The next time a California Democrat lectures the country about democracy being corrupted by the wealthy, remember: they had a chance to send this one home, and many of them are still deciding.
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.
