After my condemnation of our “banana republic” in a previous essay, a clever commenter remarked pithily, “Last patriot turn out the lights.” I laughed. But the truth is that the light is not dimming; it is getting brighter. We, all of us together, are in the sunshine business. And the more sunshine we bring, the more difficult it becomes for the darkness not to light up!
Case in point: After Facebook’s Zuckerberg recently confessed to censoring the New York Post’s explosive Hunter Biden “laptop from Hell” story (evidencing a compromised and most likely criminally culpable Biden family) before the 2020 election in response to FBI pressure that the social media giant treat real news as “Russian disinformation” (thereby corroborating that the national security Deep State helped rig the presidential election), the FBI superciliously responded with the equivalent of a teenaged shoulder shrug and a haughty “so what?” According to the FBI, our domestic spy agency regularly encourages censorship and secretive control over the free flow of information. No big deal!
Except it is a very big deal. Recent polling shows that nearly 80% of Americans believe that President Trump would have won re-election had voters “known the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop.” In other words, the Deep State stole an election. This isn’t a huge revelation for most readers here, but it is a huge revelation for those who have stubbornly refused to admit how corrupt and rotten the 2020 election was. Little by little, truth overpowers deceit. Let there be light!
In the sunshine business, our mission is to speak truth to power over and over again, much like a resolute punisher bringing down the lash against those who wound us with their lies. None of us alone must harbor the strength to complete the task at hand, for as long as another rises to give timely support and respite to any one weary arm, the lashings of truth will continue. That is truth’s power and purpose: it cannot be bargained away or buried in the darkness for long. It lives whether its tormentors like it or not, and all we must do is recognize it, protect it, and sing its blessings from one shadow to the next, with courage and conviction, until the brightness it brings becomes glaring.
How do you collapse a corrupt system? By flooding it with oceans of luminous truth.
This is a war between those who embrace cynicism and those who embrace virtue. The cynics are so committed to using fabricated “narratives” to obtain and maintain power that they have discarded even the pretense of seeking universal truths. Whatever aids them in their conquest over others is sufficient justification for defense. Is man-made climate change real? Is Donald Trump a Russian spy? Is America plagued with systemic racism? Is COVID really the deadliest pathogen to afflict humanity? To the cynics, the answers do not matter. Pursuing conclusory “narratives,” devoid of supporting evidence though they be, is valuable in itself. Even the most ugly, monstrous lies are worth protecting if those falsehoods serve their purpose — to comfort the powerful and afflict the powerless.
For those who believe in pursuing truth and virtue, this “ends justify the means” behavior is maddening. It is not easy living in a world where so many around us peddle delusions, malice, and lies. It is not easy to maintain clarity and balance when demonstrable truths are labeled as “misinformation” and outright fantasies are marketed as gospel truth. When even the loudest of truth-speakers, such as Deep State target President Trump, is tormented relentlessly with criminal persecution and media calumny, it is easy for the more reticent among us to lose hope. Yet when those with virtue stand fast and firm, those with no virtue screech and squirm. Resolute defense of truth reveals the cynics’ weakness. The weaker they become, the louder they must be. When the madness around us is deafening, then you can be certain that the cynics are losing all control. So stay true. Don’t bend. Hold the line.
When must a good citizen become a dissident? Is it when the FBI and other Deep State truth-twisters manufacture crises and manipulate elections? Is it when free speech comes under attack under the guise of State-labeled “misinformation”? Perhaps it is when the president-in-name-only reads carefully scripted messages (written by those who control his office from the shadows) attacking half the country’s citizens as “fascists.” Or when government and media “elites” falsely frame political protest as “insurrection” in order to justify criminal persecution and imprisonment of opponents of the ruling regime. Or maybe when the endless declaration of fake “emergencies” is used to justify the steady imposition of extraordinary State power over each citizen’s livelihood. Maybe it’s when the Intelligence Community operates a massive domestic surveillance network targeting Americans who have committed no crimes. Maybe it’s when secretly collected information mined from supposedly independent social media conglomerates and too-big-to-fail private banks is used to track and trace unsuspecting citizens. Maybe it’s when the value of the U.S. dollar is intentionally chipped away by central bank authorities enabling tax-and-spend legislators to expand institutional power at current and future Americans’ expense. Perhaps it is when the same federal government that insists on fighting wars all over the world in defense of other nations’ borders staunchly refuses to protect America’s own borders from invasion. Maybe it is when politicians openly mock freedom and the Bill of Rights as “selfish” relics of a racist past, while implementing race-based policies trumpeted as “progress.” Perhaps it is when the American government declares itself at war with the American system. Yeah, that seems like the right time to become a dissident.
America is a great nation. America’s history is rivaled by none. America’s people remain a melting pot of fighters and patriots yearning to be free. America’s government, however, is rancid. D.C. has become a den of narcissists, liars, and thieves. A lawless Deep State has made itself the enemy of all virtuous people. The bureaucracy’s failing cult of expertise has given rise to the urgent need for a new common sense conservatism grounded in individual liberty. Washington’s wayward class of inveterate liars requires a resurgence of fearless Americans willing to tell the truth.
What makes a good citizen today? A tenacious determination to stand in and help spread truth’s light.
Image via Pxhere.
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.
For Christians, the Bible is clear. We are to be subject to the government, except when it interferes with obedience to God. The government tiptoed across that line with Obamacare, and trampled over it when so-called “gay marriage” was imposed on the country by activist judges. It has gone downhill ever since. Christians have been targeted, extorted, sued into poverty, put out of business, lost jobs, children indoctrinated, listed alongside hate groups, made out to be terrorists, anarchists, insurrectionists, anti-government, demonized to no end.
We’ve long been a dissidents.