Americans woke up on Good Friday 2023 – the first Easter weekend in three years that held out the possibility that it would be somewhat normal – to a grim reality on Twitter. It was consistently blocking all engagement from any post with a link to Substack. I first saw the rumor and then tested it. It was and is true.
This came as a devastating shock to many of our best independent writers and thinkers who have found a home on Substack. They gain followers on Twitter and post their material, which inspires subscriptions and makes it possible for them to have a life and means of support. Without that ability, many careers will be devastated.
The platform of course is newly owned by Elon Musk, a self-described free-speech absolutist. What the algorithms are doing as I wrote is radically inconsistent with this. And maybe indeed it is all a mistake that will be reversed. Or maybe not. We are now at his mercy.
“We’re investigating reports that Twitter embeds and authentication no longer work on Substack,” Substack said. “We are actively trying to resolve this and will share updates as additional information becomes available.”
One theory is that Elon came after Substack for rolling out a Twitter rival called Notes. That seems pretty far-fetched to me. And yet Mashable goes further to say that Twitter is actively going to war against Substack.
Elon has so far (as of this writing) not spoken about the issue. This alone is rather spooky. It is possible that he is just working out a personal grievance but this affects everything and everybody.
If this turns out to be deliberate and Elon sticks with it, the effect on chilling research, writing, and free speech will be even worse than when Elon took over Twitter. It will also seriously hurt Substack too. There are huge businesses that are thriving there. It is one of the few bright spots on the Internet today. A loss of reach here will mean the further cartelization of opinion and ideas.
Over just a few months, the magic combination of Twitter and Substack have created a small zone of freedom in a media/tech system that seems otherwise 90 percent captured by industrial and government interests. With this combination, we’ve seen the rise of a powerful dissident press that offered the world some real hope that we can turn back the fascist tide.
The timing itself is alarming because the very woke ADL just published a big attack on Substack with the usual litany of complaints about how the platform is enabling disinformation.
“The ADL Center on Extremism observed a recent increase in Substack’s popularity, as well as several conspiratorial or extremist influencers either creating their own Substacks or directing their followers to others. A number of these Substack accounts were dedicated to spreading extremist, antisemitic and conspiratorial narratives, and several problematic authors are popular enough to have earned a ‘bestseller’ ranking on the platform.”
The article proceeds along familiar tactics. It lists aggressively hateful sites promoting real hate and anti-Semitism. As the reader warms up to the thesis and sees the point, the article starts including merely partisan material from Libs of TikTok, then goes after poor Steve Kirsch who writes mostly entirely about vaccines, and then even includes eminent scientist Robert Malone, just so we are clear about what is going on here.
The attack here is entirely pointless. The reader can handle egregious sites on Substack by simply not reading or subscribing. By throwing in good scientists with absolute hate-mongers, the article only serves a censorious agenda. I saw this piece only a few days ago and my first thought was: please not let it be so. To be clear, many Brownstone Institute writers are included in the list of bad guys by this woke ADL so it poses a real existential threat.
To be clear, there is no problem at all with the ADL’s posting a brutal attack on opinions they don’t like. But if this turns out to re-trigger the level of censorship we’ve had over 3 years – when government worked directly with social media to cast a single narrative in stone with grave consequences for science and society – it becomes a problem.
This sort of government/tech collaboration is being litigated now. But you can tell just how unafraid the platforms and government of the judgement are by their current behavior. LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, and the rest, are just as captured and controlled as they always have been. They have not relented at all even in the face of litigation that seems like it will be successful, whatever that means in this context.
Elon’s emancipation of Twitter from this machinery of control has been a true blessing for society and freedom. Together with Substack, Epoch Times, and a handful of other sites and institutions such as Brownstone, many have been given hope that the good guys will eventually prevail in this battle for free speech.
If this algorithmic change is for real and not rolled back, many hopes will be dashed. And keep in mind, even if Elon changes his mind or it is a mere mistake, this experience should serve as a warning against all forms of information centralization. There is only one future for freedom in today’s world, and it is entirely decentralized.
About the Author
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute.
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.