The chaos that we are witnessing in our streets is the direct consequence of the incredibly bad decisions that our leaders have been making for decades. Traditional morality has been banished from our public schools, gang members and drug dealers are constantly pouring across our wide open borders, and in many of our largest cities hardened criminals are let back out into the streets time and time again.
As a result, property crime is out of control, violent crime has risen to very frightening levels, we are in the midst of the worst drug crisis in the history of our country, and sexual predators are seemingly everywhere. I wish that I could call what we are experiencing a “crime wave”, but I can’t because a “crime wave” is just temporary. Sadly, what we are enduring appears to be due to a permanent shift in our culture, and I believe that conditions are only going to get worse during the years ahead.
Los Angeles County recently reinstated their zero bail policy, and local residents are fearing the worst.
If you can believe it, even rapper 50 Cent is horrified. In an ominous Instagram post, he boldly declared that Los Angeles “is finished”…
Rapper Curtis Jackson, also known as 50 Cent, addressed Los Angeles’ crime crisis last week in response to the recent reinstatement of the zero bail policy.
Jackson shared a FOX 11 Los Angeles segment about the zero bail policy on Instagram Reels Thursday. The policy, which was adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic in an attempt to reduce crowding in prisons, drops bail to as low as $0 for suspects accused of misdemeanors and non-violent felonies.
“LA is finished watch how bad it gets out there.SMH [shaking my head]” the “Candy Shop” rapper wrote on Instagram.
Sadly, 50 Cent is right on target.
Crime in the L.A. area is already wildly out of control, and now this zero bail policy is going to make it even worse.
In addition, we are being told that police in Los Angeles County will no longer “detain people for crimes such as theft, shoplifting, drug use, vandalism, battery, and a whole host of other non-serious, nonviolent crimes”…
Los Angeles County Deputy DA John McKinney can be heard in the shared report noting that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department will no longer “detain people for crimes such as theft, shoplifting, drug use, vandalism, battery, and a whole host of other non-serious, nonviolent crimes that affect the quality of life for people here in Los Angeles.”
Seriously? So let me get this straight. They are no longer going to detain criminals if they steal things, use illegal drugs, smash windows or beat people up?
I suppose that is one way to get the crime rate to go down. But will letting criminals run wild in the streets really improve things?
Of course not. Just ask the citizens of Chicago.
Years of “soft on crime” policies have only empowered the criminals.
At this point, things are so bad that gangs of thieves drive around the city in broad daylight looking for potential targets to rob. When they find a promising target, they jump out of their vehicles with their guns drawn…
Democrat run Chicago had another weekend of rampant crime. This weekend, armed crews terrorized the city perpetrating dozens of robberies.
A report from the City Police Department shows that robbery at a five-year high in the city, up 14%.
Police believe at least three different crews are involved in this weekend’s rampage, but no arrests have been made.
Similar to prior sprees, these robberies involved three to five armed and masked men who jumped out of vehicles to rob victims on the streets.
Putting violent criminals back into the streets again and again simply does not work.
When will the politicians that are running our major cities finally understand this?
One recent study found that zero bail policies cause crime rates to go up dramatically…
A recent study published by the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office found that zero bail policies have “horrific” effects on public safety.
“I mean, we have more people being shot at, stabbed, assaulted, robbed, beaten. These are real victims – and the numbers are staggering under zero bail,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig told Fox News Digital.
The study found that suspects released without bail reoffended 70% more often than those who posted bail, and were rearrested on 163% more charges. Suspects released without bail were also accused of three times as many violent crimes.
If you live in Los Angeles or in another major city that has a zero bail policy, I would recommend getting out of there while you still can.
Of course most of our biggest cities are unsafe at this point. According to one recent survey, a whopping 33 percent of all Seattle residents are considering moving out of the city, and “public safety” is one of the primary reasons…
About 33% of Seattle residents surveyed said they were seriously considering moving out of the city. Sixty-seven percent said they were not. The poll of 500 residents was conducted by phone from June 12-16, with a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
Among the residents who say they are considering leaving, 37% blamed rising housing costs, and 34% cited public safety as their primary reason for moving.
A lot of people think that all of this violence is just temporary and that conditions will “return to normal” eventually.
But that just isn’t going to happen.
The number of mass shootings just keeps going up every year, and during the first half of this year we were already on pace for another brand new record…
As the July 4th weekend approaches mass shootings in the U.S. have reached a record high for the mid-year point—there have been more than 330 mass shootings so far this year, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive.
Unfortunately, the second half of 2023 is off to a really bad start, because we had 16 more mass shootings during the Fourth of July weekend…
From the nation’s capital to Fort Worth, Texas, from Florin, California, in the west to the Bronx, New York, in the east, the Fourth of July long weekend in the US was overshadowed by 16 mass shootings in which 15 people were killed and nearly 100 injured.
This is our country now.
The fabric of our society really is unraveling all around us, and we are moving into times when there will be great civil unrest from coast to coast.
I know that this article has been quite heavy, and so let me try to leave you with something to smile about.
In Atlanta, a man recently tried to rob a nail salon, but everybody ignored him…
I have to admit, I found that footage to be quite funny. But there is nothing funny about the violence that is happening in our streets day after day. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions have brought us to where we are today, and our cities are only going to get even more violent from this point forward.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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.
