Consider these recent news headlines:
- “NYC Turns Back to Gas Buses After Finding Out the Hard Way That the Electric Versions Have Big Problems,”
- “As a Former Head of MI6 it’s Clear That Britain’s Climate Policy is Leaving Us Dangerously Exposed to Our Enemies,”
- “Spain: 74% of sex-crime suspects are foreigners in Basque Country.”
They come from three different Western nations and involve three dissimilar subjects — public transportation, national security, and violent crime — yet each news story exposes the real-world consequences of government failure:
- In order to pursue “Net Zero” carbon goals, New York dumped a ton of money into electric buses that are too expensive and entirely unreliable for the city’s needs.
- Britain’s former top spy is finally ready to admit publicly that his country’s delusional obsession with “climate change” has devastated the United Kingdom’s capacity for industrial and energy self-sufficiency, rendering the former superpower dependent on foreign adversaries for future survival.
- Even though foreigners make up only 10% of the Basque region’s population, they account for 74% of rape arrests, 73% of homicide arrests, 95% of drunk-driving arrests, 80% of theft arrests, and 78% of violent robberies.
What’s so striking about these news stories is their “well, duh!” factor. An ordinary, rational person would have no problem predicting the failures of a citywide electric bus fleet, the offshoring of a nation’s critical industries, or open border policies that invite foreign invasion. Yet mayors, governors, and prime ministers have pursued these catastrophic programs anyway, while heads of espionage agencies and millions of government bureaucrats either support their harmful decisions or shamefully stay silent.
The middle article links to the transcript of a speech that Sir Richard Dearlove delivered to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London last week. It was a good speech concerning an important subject, and Dearlove deserves some credit for articulating a point of view that goes against the powerful flow of “politically correct” Western orthodoxy.
But he gave this speech from the comfortable perch of quasi-retirement with little to lose aside from a few honorary board positions. Where was his voice when he was in a position to actually do something about the U.K.’s suicidal energy policies?
In his speech, Dearlove explained how his Cold War experiences taught him “that the country’s war-fighting potential resided in its industry, that our most vulnerable link was the fuel chain…and that our industrial base could be rebuilt and repaired.” Now, however, there is “very little industry left to protect, and we cannot rebuild non-existent industries which lie in foreign jurisdictions beyond our reach.”
Dearlove concluded that the U.K. must “rebuild the strategic industries we require to ensure that we can defend our island fortress and be a reliable ally to friendly democracies around the world.”
These are absolutely true statements. Blue-collar workers throughout the West have been making these arguments for fifty years. Had an ordinary Brit with few credentials been in charge of MI6, that person would have been screaming profanities and ringing alarm bells long before the U.K. closed its last coal mines and steel factories. Shouldn’t that embarrass Britain’s “ruling elites”? And if it doesn’t, shouldn’t “ruling elites” be considered a danger to the public’s prosperity and security?
Long-overdue, post-career wake-up calls bring to my mind President Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address during which he warned Americans against the growing dangers from an emerging “military-industrial complex.” Although his turn of phrase continues to be used sixty-five years later, it would have been nice if the former Supreme Allied Commander and five-star general had used his two terms as president of the United States to tackle that problem before it got completely out of hand.
Eisenhower certainly had the expertise to see its destructive potential more clearly than most, but he chose to outline the threat on his way out the door and leave it for others to solve. Some historians believe that parts of the MIC had a hand in President Kennedy’s assassination, and if that is true, then Eisenhower’s failure to promptly act had extraordinarily far-reaching consequences that included the death of his successor.
The generations of Americans who were born after Eisenhower’s tenure have given him much credit for recognizing that the symbiotic relationship between Big Government and Big Business was evolving into an unconstitutional and anti-American oligarchy that we know today as the “permanent bureaucracy,” the “ruling class,” or the “Deep State.”
Perhaps if the American general-turned-president had neutralized the Deep State in the first decade after WWII, we would not have endured some of the worst chapters in recent American history, including the Vietnam War, the debasement of the U.S. dollar, the FBI’s soft coup d’état against President Nixon, fifty years of “global warming” con games, sixty years of mass immigration from third-world nations, NAFTA’s industry-killing bloodbath, China’s entry into the WTO, the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks, the Global War on Terrorism, Obamacare’s government takeover of medicine, the Russia Collusion Hoax, the COVID information war against the Bill of Rights, numerous rigged elections decided by unlawful voters and mail-in-ballot fraud, multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, leftist-inspired violence against conservatives, and the Democrats’ manufactured AI fearmongering going on today.
Diagnosing problems without taking concrete steps to solve those problems produces a perverse phenomenon: The worse unsolved problems become, the more prescient the person warning about them appears.
Toward the end of Dearlove’s speech, Britain’s former top spy argued that the government of which he was an integral part had monumentally failed: “The first responsibility of government is the safety of the nation. However, successive governments have forgotten this, and Britain is now caught in an energy trap of its own making. As with rebuilding our armed forces, it will take a significant national effort to extract us and bring us back to a position of safety. The task is urgent.”
This is certainly true. The question is why so many successive governments in the U.K. and across the West have betrayed their own citizens and made their nations much less safe. Because normal citizens would never have offshored their own industrial and manufacturing jobs to adversarial nations such as communist China. Normal citizens would not have conspired with transnational human trafficking gangs to import tens of millions of unassimilable illegal aliens.
Normal citizens would not have imposed “green energy” regulations that make it harder for farmers to grow food and for businesses to pay their bills. Normal citizens would not mandate that unreliable electric vehicles replace internal combustion engines while power grids crash due to insufficient supplies of wind and solar energies. These kinds of policies are so obviously foolish and suicidal that only our credentialed “ruling class” could justify them.
Does that tell us that our bureaucrats are too stupid to keep our nations safe, as Dearlove rightly recognizes as the first responsibility of government? Or are these self-destructive national policies proof that Western bureaucracies are waging war against Western citizens?
Certainly Western governments are guilty of failing their peoples. The only question remaining is whether their failures stem from a combination of incompetence and hubris or treason and malice.
As Western citizens ponder that question, they are quickly taking matters into their own hands. Spaniards in Ceuta are destroying government shelters built for foreign invaders. A British village has voted to secede from the U.K. after the government announced plans to house an army of foreign immigrants next door. The price of government betrayal might soon be the fall of a Western capital.
Recognizing problems is not good enough. Governments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive.
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.
