What began as drag queen story hour evolved into drag shows for children. Now, naked men peddle bikes in front of children at pride parades in Seattle while LGBT activists in New York City marched through the streets chanting: “We’re here. We’re queer. We’re coming for your children.”
As previously reported by The Epoch Times, the tide is turning on tolerance for transgender ideology. Biological science has been replaced by internal feelings and chosen identities. The clarity of one’s sex has been blurred by the ambiguity of “gender.”
There are now an infinite number of pronouns. Failure to use the correct pronoun can result in losing your job. Men are claiming titles, trophies, scholarships, and accolades in women’s sports. Men are named Woman of the Year and crowned in women’s pageants.
The backlash started when Anheuser-Busch chose a transgender influence to become a spokesperson for Bud Light. It became a revolt when Target took aim at children. Now, recent surveys confirm that Americans have had their fill of harmful transgender indoctrination and “woke” corporate pride campaigns.
According to a recent survey conducted by Summit.org, in partnership with McLaughlin and Associates, 61 percent of likely voters believe that “introducing young children to ideas like transgenderism, drag shows, and LGBTQ+ themes hurts their emotional and psychological development.” Still more, 63 percent believe that the activists pushing transgenderism, drag shows, and LGBT themes to children have an ulterior motive.
Conversely, the survey also found that 50.3 percent of TikTok users believe introducing children to transgenderism, drag shows, and LGBT themes is helpful for their emotional and psychological development. Only 33.8 of Facebook users feel the same. In addition, 44.9 percent of TikTok users say introducing children to transgenderism, drag shows, and LGBT themes is “motivated by a desire to help children.” Only 31.4 percent of Facebook users believe the effort has altruistic intentions.
What is striking about the opinions of TikTok users is that data compiled by Statista in April shows that the majority of TikTok’s users (38.4 percent) are young females (20.9 percent) and young males (17.5 percent) between the ages of 18 and 24, nearly the same age group of “AFAB people” cited by Virginia Tech researches as showing the sharpest increase in gender dysphoria. The majority of Facebook users (41.9 percent) are between the ages of 24 and 44. The smallest audience, 22.3 percent, is among those between the ages of 13 and 24.
‘Americans Are Waking Up’
According to Mark Meckler, president and co-founder of Convention of States Action, the reason why we are seeing such a spike in the number of youth identifying as transgender “is very clear.”
According to Meckler, it’s the radical and blatant evolution of the transgender movement that has pushed the American tolerance level beyond its breaking point.
“Americans have been brainwashed by our own tolerance,” Meckler told The Epoch Times. “What we’re told to do is to tolerate anything, even if it’s cruel. That’s a problem because tolerance is an important part of the American ethos. It’s the reason why we’re able to live together over the long term with such an ideologically diverse population. Unfortunately, that tolerance has now extended to the toleration of things that are clearly wrong and evil. I think Americans are waking up to that, and the thing that is waking them up is the children.”
As Meckler explained, “It’s one thing to say that a consenting adult should be able to chop off healthy body parts, which I think should be illegal, and no doctor should be allowed to do that. But it’s an entirely different matter to say it’s okay to do this to children.”
Meckler also noted that it’s important to remember that a child is classified from a legal perspective as mentally and emotionally incapable of consenting.
“Nobody would say that a child under the age of 18 can consent to having sexual relations, especially with an adult,” he said. “We have laws against that. But now they’re saying they have the ability to give consent to having their genitals removed or being chemically castrated or having healthy breast tissue removed. The idea of children being groomed into this ideology has broken out into the mainstream, and people are naturally finding that abhorrent. Going for the kids has caused a turning point.”
The Bud Light-Target Backlash
A June 2023 Nationwide Issues Survey (pdf), conducted by Trafalgar Group in partnership with Convention of States, shows that 40.8 percent of respondents said they have “boycotted a company for taking progressive or woke stances.”
Only 24.5 percent said the same for companies taking a “conservative or MAGA” public stance.
In addition, the survey revealed that far more Republicans had boycotted a company for taking progressive or woke stances than Democrats have for companies taking a conservative or MAGA stance—60.4 percent to 45.1 percent, respectively.
The survey also revealed that, in light of the Bud Light and Target backlash, the majority of Americans believe businesses should stop making statements during pride month. While Meckler is pleased that Americans are finally waking up to what is really happening in the trans movement, he says there is still a lot that Americans need to understand.
“I agree the backlash is happening, but we’re not there yet,” he said, adding that “there’s a misunderstanding” in the public as to where the corporate involvement in pride campaigns is coming from.
I’m thrilled about what’s happening to Bud Light,” Meckler confessed, noting that the boycott of the product has bled 20 percent off of their year-to-year sales.
“That’s incredible. It’s complete brand destruction. I would argue that it’s permanent, irreversible brand destruction,” Meckler said. “That was the number one beer in America, and it will never be the number one beer in America again. It’s now a joke.”
According to reports, Bud Light is no longer America’s top-selling brand of beer, a status it held for over 20 years. In May, the beer plugged by transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney was replaced by Modelo Especial, a Mexican lager brewed near Mexico City. As Meckler explained, “brand” is short for “how you feel about something.”
Budweiser was once known as “the king of beers,” Meckler said. “Bud is now the Dylan Mulvaney brand. It’s the transgender brand.”
Target has also suffered from its decision to join the transgender push by aiming at children. Along with suffering a $13 billion drop in Target Corp.’s stock, the company was downgraded by KeyBanc Capital Markets, according to MarketWatch. That followed the downgrade already imposed by JP Morgan.
“Most people in America are not in with that agenda, so they’ve killed their brand,” Meckler surmised, suggesting that other brands are going to start learning the same hard lessons as Anheuser-Busch and Target if they continue to interject woke politics into their branding.
Kohl’s was the next company to suffer the outrage of shoppers fed up with the transgender campaign when it decided to sell onesies for infants with messages like “Belong, believe, be proud” and “Ask me my pronouns” printed on them.
In all, Axios calculated a combined loss in stock value for Anheuser-Bush, Target, and Kohl’s of at least $28 billion. Other companies facing boycotts during pride month are The North Face and PetSmart.
‘A Healthy Thing’
Meckler also drew attention to the fact that ESG policies are also facing resistance. ESG is the initialism for “Environmental, Social, and Governance.”
As reported by Forbes, ESG criteria were first forced into corporate and financial evaluations in 2006. By 2020, S&P Global reported that ESG was “all the rage.” But the tide is turning there as well.
“A study was done recently about what is being said at shareholder meetings,” Meckler said, explaining that “the use of ESG terms is down dramatically.”
As explained by Riskonnect, a corporation’s ESG score indicates its willingness to comply with shareholder demands to establish policies that promote climate change initiatives as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the interest of “achieving the greater good.”
In its July 2022 study, “As You Sow” reported a “Historic Year” of ESG Shareholder Resolution filings. However, that report showed that support for shareholder ESG resolutions at U.S. companies actually dipped by 5.4 percent—falling from 32 percent to 26.6 percent from the previous year—as asset managers backed away from supporting tougher investor demands. Meckler also explained that the decision by corporate CEOs to capitulate to ESG isn’t organic. It’s forced.
“It’s coming because giant investment funds like Vanguard and Blackrock are opposing the ESG scores on these companies,” he said, explaining that a company’s ability to raise capital is based on these scores. So when they do this stuff, they’re checking investment banking boxes.”
Ultimately, Meckler believes the growing backlash against transgender ideology is “a healthy thing for the United States of America” and that corporations, in particular, are finding there is no upside to pushing woke ideology into their brand.
“It’s a downside for them, and we’re starting to see that driven down into corporate behavior, and I think that’s going to continue,” he said.
In a recent appearance on “CBS Mornings,” Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth bemoaned the backlash stemming from the company’s decision to use Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesperson for their most popular brand of beer.
“I think the conversation surrounding Bud Light has moved away from beer, and the conversation has become divisive,” Whitworth said. “And Bud Light really doesn’t belong there. Bud Light should be all about bringing people together.”
In one respect, Meckler agrees.
“The truth is, it should be about having a beer and bringing people together, not about divisive issues,” Meckler proposed. “What we want is good products. Not products that divide us.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
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.
As J.D. Rucker stated, “We must make sure they are more afraid of us than they are of the socialist left.” And we do mean FEAR. The socialist left will not change their direction unless they are forced to do so by the will of the people. AND, by “WILL’, we do mean whatever it takes to get the job done with the least amount of casualties on the right and a maximum amount of casualties on the left.
Our government has gone rogue, thus you must understand that we are now at war with the communist on the left trying to manipulate us into believing that Democracy is dead, when in actuality the majority are just now waking up to the fact that we need to see the proof that socialism actually works. THEY HAVE NONE AND HAVE NO RATIONAL EXPLANATIONS WHY IT DOESN’T. FIGHT AGAINST THEIR SOCIALIST VIEWS WITH EVERYTHING YOU HAVE AMERICA, OR YOU WILL BECOME NO MORE THAN ROBOT WORKER-BEES FOR THE STATE !!!
You have more problems than just the socialist left. MAGA is pushing this agenda too.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/trump-hosts-gala-for-homosexual-republicans-after-biden-signs-same-sex-marriage-law/
Sorry, but Americans have selective outrage. They defend Fox News for indoctrinating its viewers by normalizing the mentally ill lifestyle of Bruce Jenner. Upon hiring Bruce Jenner, Fox New’s CEO Suzanne Scott celebrated the hiring with the following in the press release:
“Caitlyn’s story is an inspiration to us all. She is a trailblazer in the LGBTQ+ community and her illustrious career spans a variety of fields that will be a tremendous asset for our audience.”
Nobody blinked.
MAGA voters have embraced Donald Trump–the same Trump who attacked North Carolina’s conservatives for passing a bathroom decency act to keep men in dresses out of women’s bathrooms. Trump is also on record saying he has no problem with Bruce Jenner using the women’s bathroom.
Most recently, Trump hosted a big gay-la at the Republican version of Sodom and Gomorrah, Mar-A-Lago, to celebrate the “The Respect for Marriage Act” that will ensure gay marriage will forever be a part of the American landscape.
The GOP is as guilty as the left for pushing this agenda and few are noticing. https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/trump-hosts-gala-for-homosexual-republicans-after-biden-signs-same-sex-marriage-law/