Editor’s Note: CJ Hopkins generally delivers the truth in the form of political satire that often leaves us in stitches. But over the last three years, the commentary has been very much real as he works to expose the “New Normal” in Post-Pandemic Panic Theater society. This piece about Donald Trump is no exception. Hopkins is under attack for doing what he does, so prayers are appreciated. And, as always, here’s your language warning before reading the piece below. Hopkins has no problem using big boy words…
So, the quadrennial simulation of democracy in the USA is getting underway, and personally, I couldn’t be happier. It’s been a challenging few years for unincorporated political satirists like myself. The roll-out of the new global-capitalist totalitarianism hasn’t been particularly funny. In fact, it has been extremely not funny. Squeezing a little humor out of it has been like trying to suck a golf ball through a garden hose.
Not that the New Normal Reich is history … on the contrary, it is just getting started. Yes, the shock-and-awe campaign is over. It’s been over for the better part of a year. We are deep into the mistakes-were-made/limited-hangout phase of the changeover. Nothing can stop or reverse it now. The implementation of the new official (i.e., Orwellian) reality is a fait accompli. What actually happened has been memory-holed, forever, supplanted by stories of censorious “bad apples,” “overreactions,” lab leaks, and so on. Those who are old enough will recall this phase from the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. It’s going pretty much by the numbers.
Which … fine. That “reality” stuff was ruining my shtick. No one wants to be told that they’re the victim of an elaborate PSYOP, which is what I’ve been doing for the past three years, with one demographic after another. First, I alienated most of my friends and colleagues, and even family members, by challenging “The Science” (which has now been debunked) and opposing the transformation of the planet into a pathologized-totalitarian police state. Then, when I warned people about Elon Musk and the whitewashing of Twitter, or X, or whatever we are calling his Chinese-style “everything app,” which, if Elon has his way, we’re all going to “live on” in the visibility-filtered, advert-saturated, dystopian, global-capitalist future … well, that pretty much did it for the rest of my audience.
Not you, of course … the other rest of my audience. See, part of the genius of the New Normal Reich is how it has completely polarized society. It has systematically divided the masses into two irreconcilable warring camps, both of which demand absolute conformity to their dogma from their respective members. That isn’t to imply that there’s parity between them. The one camp, “the New Normals,” is backed by state and corporate power. The other camp, “the anti-New Normals,” is not. It’s no secret where my sympathies lie.
The problem, for me, is, I don’t do well in camps. Any kind of camps. I’m not a camp person. I have an aversion to self-appointed leaders, or an oppositional-defiant disorder, or something. Or maybe I’ve just seen too many movements congeal into irrelevant countercultural ghettos where people blow off steam in a virtual vacuum and get preyed on by hucksters and ten-cent gurus … or 240-billion-dollar gurus.
So, screw it, I’m going back to comedy, or at least I’m going to give it a try, and the upcoming US election season should provide me with the perfect material!
For example, this piece in The New Republic about the horror a new Trump term would bring. It’s basically a “Return of the Revenge of the Curse of the Bride of the Son of Hitler”-type piece … you know, like one of those 1970s Hammer horror films with Christopher Lee.
That’s right, he’s back … Trumpenstein, the monster! It’s the Second Coming of Literal Hitler! Vladimir Putin’s personal cock holster! The pussy-grabbing Destroyer of Worlds! According to Brynn Tannehill and The New Republic, it is “goodbye NATO … goodbye democracy!” Hello to the new-and-improved Trumpian Reich!
To folks who know their 20th-Century history, the story-line will be eerily familiar. Like Hitler returning from Landsberg prison, where he wrote Mein Kampf after the “Beer Hall Putsch” …
“[Trump] is coming back with the entire conservative apparatus at his back, having spent four years in the wilderness methodically planning how to permanently alter the political and legal landscape of the country to favor an anti-democratic minority.”
Apparently, Trump’s evil master plan this time revolves around reinstituting “Schedule F” for federal employees, which would allow him to fire anyone with “policy-making authority” and replace them with hate-crazed Nazi fanatics. Brynn explains the utter horror this will lead to.
“… a Trump administration would replace vast swathes of the federal government bureaucracy with sycophants and ideological fellow travelers bent on implementing pro-corporate, pro-religious, and anti-minority agendas. This weaponizes the entire federal bureaucracy against women and LGBTQ people.”
Shortly thereafter, the genocide will begin.
“The right intends to use every power of the government to eradicate anything it considers woke, particularly transgender people.”
According to Brynn, once Trump has mass-murdered all the transgender people, and the gay people, and women, and presumably the Jews, and African-Americans, and whoever else he’s planning to mass-murder, he will fire and replace all the generals and admirals, arrest all his political and personal enemies, and declare himself American Führer for life!
The next Trump administration would be worse, because this time they’d be coming in with a plan. https://t.co/AqeyXE8ByN
— The New Republic (@newrepublic) July 31, 2023
And so on. I think you get the idea. The most powerful propaganda machine in the history of propaganda is revving up again. It’s going to be a year-long Two Minutes Hate, with Donald Trump playing the part of Goldstein. The message is, Trump, and his master, Putin, and THE FORCES OF UNSPEAKABLE HITLERIAN EVIL, and Covid, and global boiling, and whatever, are slouching toward Washington to DESTROY DEMOCRACY, and, this time, they’re not screwing around! The only way to prevent the Trumpocalypse will be to visibility-filter the hell out of everything (except, of course, for free-speech Twitter), lock down everyone when things get unruly, and just basically go full-blown totalitarian again. It won’t be very difficult to set in motion. All they will need to do is get Rachel Maddow to shriek “IMMINENT COVID GLOBAL-WARMING INSURRECTION!” and the New Normal masses will strap on their masks and start clicking heels and following orders.
Seriously, they’re already breaking out the Trump-is-Literally-Hitler routine, and the official election season hasn’t even started!
Selfishly speaking, I can’t wait for it to begin. The global-capitalist ruling classes are not going to let him win again, but they’re clearly preparing to whip the masses into a full-blown frenzy of ass-puckering PARANOIA and MINDLESS HATRED of anyone even marginally deviating from official ideology, and I plan to milk that show for as many laughs as possible. I may not be able to stop what’s coming, but, in the immortal words of a very drunk Jim Morrison, I just want to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.
Of course, I’ll probably be doing that in my new accommodations in German prison, where I’ll be serving time for comparing the roll-out of the New Normal to the rise of Nazi Germany. For those of you who think I’m joking, I am not. I am under criminal investigation in Berlin for comparing New Normal totalitarianism to Nazism, which, comparing anything to the Nazis is strictly prohibited in Germany … unless, of course, you’re comparing Trump to the Nazis, in which case, that’s fine …
… or, as the Germans like to say, in Ordnung!
Article cross-posted from CJ’s blog.
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.
