(End of the American Dream)—I was very surprised by the results of a survey of preppers that was recently conducted by Fortitude Ranch. The CEO of Fortitude Ranch, Drew Miller, says that preppers are “folks who watch events and read up on threats” and so they have a really good feel for what is really going on out there. Today, millions of Americans are preparing for the collapse of society because we really are facing very serious existential threats which could cause the complex systems that we depend upon on a daily basis to fail at any time. So I was very interested to examine the results of this new survey, because it gives us some insight into what the prepping community is thinking right now.
Only preppers were permitted to participate in the survey, and those that responded were asked to identify the three greatest threats to our society.
More than 50 percent selected “loss of electric grid” as one of the greatest threats. I would not have guessed that this would be the number one response, but without a doubt this is a potential danger that our politicians have neglected. Our sun is becoming increasingly active, and it is just a matter of time before a solar storm does a tremendous amount of damage to the grid. And once the U.S. is involved in a nuclear war, we won’t have a functioning grid at all.
“Economic collapse”, “bioengineered viruses” and “domestic civil war due to divided country” were all selected by more than 40 percent of respondents. Obviously, I was glad to see “economic collapse” so high on the list, because I write about that so much.
And I think that “bioengineered viruses” is something that preppers are very focused on right now because we have just been through the COVID pandemic. We are certainly living during a time when great pestilences will become increasingly common, and so it is imperative for all of us to be prepared for devastating outbreaks of disease.
As for our country being divided, I really do think that 2024 is going to be the most chaotic election year that we have ever seen, and that is extremely unfortunate.
More than 30 percent of respondents identified “terrorist attacks” as one of the greatest threats that we are facing. But no other response even reached the 20 percent threshold.
A “nuclear war arising from Chinese invasion of Taiwan” barely squeaked over the 10 percent mark, and a “nuclear war arising from Ukraine-Russia conflict” was way under 10 percent. Sigh.
If this had been a survey of the general population, I could understand such low numbers. I don’t know what I have to do in order to get people to understand that nuclear war is a very serious threat.
Perhaps after the first nukes are used more Americans will start to wake up. Natural disasters also ranked very low in this survey. Maybe that is because the Yellowstone supervolcano was the only one that was specifically asked about.
Personally, I would have added an eruption of Mt. Rainier, a tsunami on the east coast, a tsunami on the west coast, a historic earthquake along the New Madrid fault zone and “the Big One” in California as potential responses on this survey.
We are far more vulnerable than most people realize, and I am entirely convinced that there will be unprecedented natural disasters in the United States during the years ahead as our very shaky planet becomes even more unstable.
Another major threat that I would have liked to see asked about in this survey is the rapidly growing global food crisis. Last year, 2.4 billion people did not have enough food to eat, and 750 million of them experienced chronic hunger.
And the numbers for this year will inevitably be even worse. In fact, the numbers have been getting steadily worse since 2015.
But because we live in a very wealthy nation that still has lots of food, most Americans are not concerned about the global famine that has already started at all.
I also noticed that “large asteroid strike” was just one notch from the bottom on this survey. Apparently this is something that most preppers are not concerned about at all. But they should be.
It won’t happen tomorrow, but eventually the entire world will become aware of a tremendous threat that is looming in the heavens.
Needless to say, there is a lot of disagreement about what our greatest threats are, but just about everyone understands that something has gone seriously wrong with our society.
And that explains why gun ownership in the U.S. has surged to heights that we have never seen before in the entire modern history of our nation.
According to a new NBC News national poll, a whopping 52 percent of U.S. voters “say they or someone in their household owns a gun”…
More than half of American voters — 52% — say they or someone in their household owns a gun, per the latest NBC News national poll.
That’s the highest share of voters who say that they or someone in their household owns a gun in the history of the NBC News poll, on a question dating back to 1999.
In 2019, 46% of Americans said that they or someone in their household owned a gun, per an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. And in February 2013, that share was 42%.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans are stockpiling emergency food and other supplies.
They can feel that great chaos is coming, even if they do not fully grasp all of the specifics of the very serious threats that we are now facing.
If you have not been getting prepared for the collapse of society, I would very strongly encourage you to do so.
What we have been through during the past few years is just the tip of the iceberg, and the clock is ticking…
Sound off about this article on Late Prepper Substack.
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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.