Sometimes it feels as if we are drowning in a torrent of bad news. I would suggest, however, that the worse people feel, the more they are waking up to the serious contests of our time. If you are unhappy with the political, economic, and social powers manipulating the world today, the critical first step in fighting those forces is changing the way people think about them. By that measure, people today are changing their minds about the culture and institutions around them faster than ever. Consider some of these fundamental shifts in thinking:
(1) Good vs. evil
Not long ago, it was common for conservatives to see the Marxist left as foolishly mistaken — a collection of young and inexperienced troublemakers who would eventually “snap out” of their common delusions once forced to confront reality.
Now people understand that the left’s real mission is to reject reality. Castrating boys so that they can pretend to be girls is not “healthy.” Perpetuating racism as social policy is not “justice.” Imposing a “woke” State religion over personal conscience is not “moral.” Aiding and abetting child sex–trafficking and drug-smuggling at our borders is not “compassionate.” Stealing property is not “equitable.” Just as with Leninism and Maoism before, today’s leftism is evil.
(2) Parties vs. uniparty
There has been a seismic shift in the way Republican voters see political parties. After Obama forced government-controlled health care on America, the Tea Party movement began a desperate fight against socialism’s advances. From the energy of that movement, Republicans eventually took back the House and Senate. Despite those triumphs, Paul Ryan rubber-stamped Obama’s budgets, while refusing to build Trump’s border wall. McConnell’s Senate Republicans, who had run on repealing Obamacare, cemented socialized medicine with McCain’s decisive betrayal.
Grassroots voters finally rejected Establishment Republicans and catapulted outsider Donald Trump into office. In response, Republicans quietly assisted Democrats in their attempt to remove Trump through the Russia hoax. In the space of a decade, most Republican officeholders were outed as RINOs, before voters properly concluded that they were actually part of a single D.C. Uniparty all along.
(3) Science vs. political manipulation
The only good thing to come out of the government’s COVID lockdowns, forced medical experimentation, and masking theater was its inadvertent creation of a Eureka! moment for tens of millions of Americans who realized that “science” has become irredeemably politicized. When health authorities opted for experimental injections over known medical treatments, they sacrificed lives to push an agenda. When hospitals separated families and forced vulnerable patients onto ventilators, they acted inhumanely. When politicians and corporations censored public dissent, destroyed livelihoods, hobbled childhood development, and terrified the public with known lies, they not only proved that objective science is dead, but also committed crimes against humanity.
(4) Self-determination vs. global government
Just as “RINO” and “Uniparty” have entered our lexicon as profanities, so too has “globalism.” Without respect for the Constitution’s express prohibitions or the American public’s wishes, Deep State bureaucrats and politicians continue to surrender national sovereignty to the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, and their globalist brethren. Americans have lost their self-determination and are now ruled by an alliance of spy agencies, central banks, multinational corporations, and transnational interest groups posing as charities. In order to thwart a hegemonic global aristocracy, citizens must defend their national interests.
(5) Elections vs. selections
Every presidential election this century has been tainted by allegations of fraud. Instead of remedying this public perception, election officials and courts have made things worse. Voting has turned into a months-long affair that begins before candidates have even debated and often extends many weeks past Election “Day.” Electronic voting machines remain vulnerable to hacks. Mail-in balloting devoid of fundamental security, identity checks, or signature verification has transformed contests into ballot-stuffing fraud-fests orchestrated by paid political operatives. Secretaries of state refrain from enforcing election law; attorneys general refrain from prosecuting crimes; courts rewrite statutory law to tilt elections. Battleground states routinely suffer from inexplicable counting problems that delay the timely reporting of results. Vote-counting lacks transparency and reproducibility. When lawyers attempt to challenge results, their professional licenses are often threatened. Americans overwhelmingly believe that election cheating is pervasive.
(6) Free speech vs. propaganda
Western governments are so terrified of losing control over their citizens that they attack freedom of speech as a threat to their continued monopolies over information. Words and ideas are now labeled as “hateful” whenever they contradict official State dogma. Debate and argument are censored as “misinformation” so as to stifle dissent. Corporations and bureaucrats have anointed themselves as high priests for assessing “truth” or “disinformation.” Their anti-Enlightenment efforts to smother freethinking have exposed the political Establishment as mere propagandists and bullies.
(7) Money vs. control
More and more people realize that free markets cannot exist alongside central banks that engage in rank manipulation of the economy. Fiat currencies unbacked by precious metals are dying. While private investment bankers and multinational corporations have benefited generously, central bank policies have destroyed ordinary Americans’ economic security. Before the privately run Federal Reserve came into existence, Americans’ intergenerational social mobility was the highest in the world. A century after its creation, income inequality has never been higher. Now, in order to avert a looming economic Armageddon caused by a century of profligate spending, private banks and coercive governments seek to force everyone into a surveillance system based on central bank digital currencies. Until we free our money from government control, totalitarian governments will use money to enslave the people.
(8) Impartial justice vs. targeted persecution
There is no faster way to destroy trust in a nation’s institutions than to use the criminal justice system as a machine for targeting political enemies. Yet that is exactly what the FBI, the Department of (in)Justice, and their unethical allies donning black robes, have done. In any country suffering from corruption, a telltale sign is when agency heads choose to rebuke ordinary citizens for no longer having faith in the system. A healthy system, in contrast, never fears public challenge. The people, upon whose consent government legitimacy rests, have a duty to call out corruption. Consider it an admission of guilt, then, when FBI director Wray or Attorney General Garland condemns Americans for correctly noticing their two-tiered application of “justice.”
(9) Republic vs. empire
As Mark Twain succinctly noted, “America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.” It did not work for the Romans, and it has not worked for American citizens since the end of WWII. The U.S. Constitution severely limits the powers of the federal government while maximizing the powers of the states and the people. Congress alone has the power to declare war. The vast administrative bureaucracy has been divined from thin air. The states have no obligation to obey the federal government when it acts unconstitutionally. D.C. has transformed its limited powers into a global juggernaut beyond accountability. In the process, Americans’ inherent rights and liberties have been abandoned.
(10) Civil war vs. revolution for independence
As Americans have come to terms with these revelations, they have also realized something else: the federal government spends an awful lot of time and resources dividing Americans against one another. Should ordinary citizens ever seek to reclaim their liberties, that future conflict will resemble not America’s regional Civil War, but rather the Revolutionary War’s struggle against government tyranny.
We are living through a combustible era in which common Establishment illusions shatter daily. Paradigm shifts in the way people see their world advance in short years, rather than over decades or centuries. Is this revolution of the mind uncomfortable? Absolutely. It is also the quintessential feature of every great awakening.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.