One of the few interesting things about America’s highly choreographed political conventions is the gathering of people outside these events. Supporters and protesters show up to yell at the top of their lungs for days. What kinds of taunts do these opposing groups scream at each other? Remarkably, they accuse each other of similar transgressions. Probably the most common insults being lobbed from each side of the political spectrum are accusations that the other side is full of “fascists,” “Nazis,” and “racists.”
It’s enough to make an observer wonder whether an awkward kumbaya truce could spontaneously break out, in which antagonistic foes raise a curious eyebrow and timidly ask, “You mean, you’re against fascism and racism, too?” before taking off their masks, throwing down their cardboard signs, and apprehensively shaking hands. Of course, that never happens, so very angry Americans continue to denounce one another in nearly identical terms.
The whole thing would be funny if it were not so serious. And it’s serious because the resulting confusion leaves Americans who might otherwise agree about an awful lot instead reaching for one another’s throats. The more time they waste fighting, the easier it is for their real enemies to get away with all kinds of mischief without anyone noticing.
Who are their “real enemies”? Well, regardless of any American’s particular ideological beliefs, those who most affect their lives (outside their families and friends) are almost certainly people with wealth and power — and not the vast majority of their working-class neighbors just trying to earn a living. Because wealth and power remain in the hands of a small collection of political and financial “elites,” they benefit when citizens with neither wealth nor power choose to attack one another.
Another way to think of this is to ask a simple question: what is the greatest threat to any political system? Is it the threat of foreign invasion? Economic depression? Disease? Of course not. It is the possibility that those controlled by the system will overthrow those doing the controlling. Every government in the world — communist dictatorship, theocratic regime, or so-called constitutional republic — claims to be working for the people. But when the “elites” of those governments speak behind closed doors, their efforts are directed toward subduing the people. Governments invest in the illusion that their power is limitless and that the people have no other choice but to obey. Whenever common people recognize that they are the ones with inherent power, the government’s illusion of control is shattered, the system is upended, and a new era with novel organizing principles arrives.
Seen through this lens, it is easy to understand why governments have a vested interest in stirring up domestic conflict. A peaceful and well mannered society might engage in respectful debate and start asking serious questions, such as: why should private central banks be allowed to print money and devalue personal savings? Why should America be financially squeezed by a bunch of multinational corporations that use cheap labor overseas and bully small businesses into bankruptcy here at home? Why should foreign investment houses own so much land and property in America when fewer Americans than ever before can afford to own a home? When government authorities use outside companies to censor Americans’ speech and spy on their private activities, do such workarounds really trump the Bill of Rights? When corporations work hand in glove with government bureaucrats to track and police citizens, hasn’t our system of government transformed into something we would have once recognized as classically fascist?
These important questions and others might lead common citizens to think more clearly about their government’s priorities before arriving at another uncomfortable question: does the government really represent the people’s interests, or does it represent the interests of its corporate partners? Such discussions threaten to shatter any government’s well-guarded illusion of control.
The political system can’t have that, so the corporate news media blast out daily reminders that “racism” and “extremism” are the real threats to peace and prosperity. On television and on social media sites, the message is clear: trust the government but distrust your neighbors. If everybody is more worried about Donald Trump’s personality or Taylor Swift’s political endorsements, nobody has time to wonder how we’ve reached the point when the federal government’s fiscal burden consumes 93% of America’s total accumulated wealth since its founding or how global debt now exceeds $315 trillion. The wealthiest and most powerful people in the West take from everyone else and then set society on fire with engineered division and hate. They are civil arsonists committed to destroying the evidence of all the damage they’ve wrought.
You can tell that financial and political “elites” are becoming desperate in their attempts to maintain power because they resort to little more than childish name-calling these days. The great bugbear this decade is the “far right.” Nobody explains why the “far right” should be feared more than the “far left,” when the theft and mass murder perpetrated by communist regimes over the last century dwarf the atrocities committed by all other ideologies in human history.
Nobody explains how the “far right” socialists of Hitler’s Germany can be distinguished from Venezuela’s “far left” socialists today. Rather inexplicably, corporate news organs and academic institutions lump everyone who believes in limited government, national borders, self-determination, and personal liberty into the same category of WWII fascists who promoted totalitarianism, empire, dictatorship, and subjugation to the State. Most citizens who are mislabeled “far right” distrust government and despise the notion of corporate control over society. How that makes them “fascist” is a linguistic mystery.
What makes more sense is that Western governments fear the emergence of liberty movements not because they will one day be marching under the Arc de Triomphe, but rather because they represent a renewed public rejection of centralized power. The more centralized the governing authority (e.g., the U.S. federal government, the E.U., and the U.N.), the more worried it has become that common people will reclaim sovereignty over their personal lives. Consequently, the mouthpieces for the axis of corporate and government power in Western capitals — which is socialist in spirit and fascist in principle — slander citizens who are opposed to Big Government as somehow being the ideological descendants of Hitler’s Nazi Party. It’s horse pucky.
Those who are nonsensically labeled as “far right” do have all too frequent encounters with fascism. It’s just that those experiences come in the form of corporate-government beatings from the same people and institutions claiming to “protect democracy.” During the Reign of COVID Terror, social media companies threatened and censored citizens who questioned the government’s monopoly on scientific debate, the need for school closures and economic lockdowns, or the efficacy of the pharmaceutical industry’s experimental “vaccines.” Fascist tyrants such as Justin Trudeau used his partnership with banking institutions to seize citizens’ savings and mortgaged properties when they protested against his COVID authoritarianism. Cellular companies kept track of citizens’ movements and reported those violating house arrest to the police.
This kind of corporate-government fascism has become commonplace. European governments dedicate enormous resources to monitoring citizens’ online speech and punishing those who express unapproved opinions, and tech companies are quick to assist these bureaucratic bullies in their hunt for “offensive speech.” A UK man was recently arrested for engaging in “anti-Establishment rhetoric” in a social media post. Google openly admits to manipulating search results in ways that promote the talking points of their government partners while hiding dissenting voices. Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big Pharma don’t operate independently of Big Government. They are one and the same.
It turns out that everyone hates fascism except for Western governments and their corporate friends. That’s why they demonize citizens who cherish liberty.
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.
