(Reclaim The Net)—A whistleblower has come out with information pertaining to a group known as the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), made up of a number of government officials, including at least a dozen from the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
The whistleblower allowed Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi access to documents corroborating his claims, and the three presented it to the public in a detailed report.
The significance of CTIL is that some observers believe it turned out to be the “censorship ground zero” that grew to unprecedented size on both sides of the Atlantic, spawning an entire industry “dealing” with suppressing free speech on anything from Brexit to Covid, and the 2020 election.
According to the whistleblower, CTIL was essentially prompted into existence with Donald Trump’s 2016 election as president and involved representatives of both US and UK authorities, and private military contractors.
The same source claims that co-leader of CTIL is former UK defense researcher, contractor Sara-Jayne Terp, and that the group’s goal was to be preventing “a repeat of 2016” under the guise of fighting disinformation.
Meanwhile the overall ambition was to incorporate CTIL into the federal government, thus formalizing and cementing its role.
This is why some see this particular set of documented evidence of the early days of the now notorious online censorship era, principally in the US, but also in Europe, as even more important than the Twitter or Facebook files. If CTIL was the original disease, then those files can be seen as the symptoms.
One of the key and most scandalous points is at the same time not surprising at all to anyone who’s been keeping a close eye on how that censorship is being carried out: although the government – military and intelligence agencies were “the co-founders” of CTIL, they quickly realized private entities would have be brought it.
As one document reads, spies and soldiers can act against foreigners abroad unchecked – but when it comes to suppressing the rights of Americans, “the government doesn’t have the legal authority.”
Meaning, for example, to directly trample on the First Amendment – so the tech and legacy media industry got involved.
CTIL, billing itself as “an anti-disinformation” group, started out as an outfit gathering defense and intelligence veterans as well as data scientists on a voluntary basis, but the way it operated was quickly noted as something positive to include in the work of government agencies, notably the DHS.
The large amount of leaked documents and training videos, the report’s authors say, serves to fill in some of the blanks from the Twitter and Facebook files, and provide a big and clearer than ever before picture of what has been happening behind the scenes during the past 7 years of the “dark censorship ages” on both sides of the Atlantic.
Picking some (documented) points from the data trove provided by the whistleblower, Taibbi wrote a series of posts on X, detailing CTIL’s techniques, that wound up being held in such high regard by the authorities they felt they needed to incorporate them in official (if secretive) policies.
Taibbi says that one recurring theme that those involved in CTIL are either heard saying or had written down, is the admission that they are “using many of the same techniques as the bad guys.”
But citizens in democratic countries should apparently not at all be worried about this scandalous turn of events – because the CTIL people seemed assured that their bad actions were motivated by good reasons.
Some of these “same things” included infiltrating “disinformation spaces” to then flood them what is referred to in the documents as “obviously fake content.”
Further, in the effort to “dilute” core messages found there (considered by CTIL to be misinformation), the group was creating honeypots with “coordinated inauthetics,” infiltrating, or making false claims of infiltration of groups to discredit leaders.
Next, CTIL was “creating fake websites to issue counter narrative, and counter narrative through phsycial merchandise,” as well as use bots, and flag legitimate speech and memes.
But if any of what the group was trying to counter was in fact illegal, wouldn’t there be an easier way to deal with it than go to all this trouble?
At one point, CTIL big-wig Pablo Breuer lamented: “(It’s) expressly forbidden (for the US Defense Department) to operate against US citizens.”
Read the full report here.
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.
