(End of the American Dream)—In 2024, virtually all major U.S. cities have certain things in common. First of all, if you visit the downtown area of one of our major cities you are likely to see garbage, human excrement and graffiti all over the place. As you will see below, some of our core urban areas literally look like they belong in a third world country. Most of our politicians don’t seem too concerned about doing anything to clean up all the filth, and so it shouldn’t be a surprise that rat populations are absolutely exploding all over the country. In some of our largest cities, the total rat population is numbered in the millions.
Meanwhile, rampant theft, out of control violence, endless migration, predatory gangs and the worst drug crisis in the entire history of our nation have combined to create a “perfect storm” of social decay that is unlike anything that any of us have ever seen before. Millions of law-abiding citizens and countless businesses have been fleeing America’s largest cities, and property values in our core urban areas have been absolutely crashing. We really are in the early stages of a full-blown societal “collapse”, and things just keep getting worse with each passing day.
In this article, I want to focus on the three largest metropolitan areas in the United States: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
John Williams recently took his camera with him as he walked through downtown Los Angeles, and he described what he witnessed as “hell”…
Decades of failed policies have transformed one of the greatest cities in the entire country into one of the worst.
At this point, theft has become so rampant that even the ultra-progressive politicians in California have come to the conclusion that something must be done.
So several bills that would “crack down on shoplifting” have been introduced in the state legislature…
Shoplifters beware.
The California Assembly has introduced a comprehensive package of seven bills aimed at addressing the rising concerns over retail theft across the state.
One of the key initiatives is Assembly Bill 2943, jointly authored by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D) and Speaker Robert Rivas (D). The bill targets serial retail thieves by introducing a new crime with penalties of up to three years behind bars for possession of stolen property with intent to resell. It also allows for the aggregation of similar thefts from different victims to charge grand theft, under specific criteria.
Hopefully something will get done, because right now a criminal in the state of California can “literally walk into a retail store every single day of the year and steaI $949 worth of merchandise” and never spend a single minute in jail.
"You can literally walk into a retail store every single day of the year and steaI $949 worth of merchandise"
"And you will NEVER do a minute in jail"
"Under California law, assauIt on a peace officer with anything other than a fully automatic weapon is not a vioIent crime"… pic.twitter.com/jX0l4OK6pA
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) April 19, 2024
Los Angeles has become a paradise for shoplifters, but many would argue that things are even worse in the Big Apple.
As I discussed a few days ago, New York City has “a $4.4 billion shoplifting economy”. And approximately 90,000 packages are stolen in New York City every single day.
This is just one of the reasons why we have seen a mass exodus.
Countless New Yorkers have already left for greener pastures, and lots more are thinking of leaving…
About 7 million New Yorkers plan to leave the state, a new survey revealed this month.
In a new Marist poll, 37 percent of New Yorkers—roughly 7 million people—said they plan to move away. The number was slightly more concentrated among Republicans, as 46 percent said they plan to leave the state compared to just 29 percent of Democrats.
Unsurprisingly, many of those that are fleeing are heading to Florida…
For many, Florida remains one of the top places to move, but Southern states in general have been recording the biggest influx in transplants.
According to Realtor.com, Philadelphia, Miami, Atlanta, Tampa and Orlando remain some of the top locations for New Yorkers to start again.
I wouldn’t want to live in the Big Apple either.
The rat problem alone would be enough for me to move.
It just continues to escalate, and politicians are now proposing to use “rat contraceptives” to deal with “the millions of rats lurking in subway stations and empty lots”…
In New York City, the idea to distribute rat contraceptives got fresh attention in city government Thursday following the death of an escaped zoo owl, known as Flaco, who was found dead with rat poison in his system.
City Council Member Shaun Abreu proposed a city ordinance Thursday that would establish a pilot program for controlling the millions of rats lurking in subway stations and empty lots by using birth control instead of lethal chemicals. Abreu, chair of the Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management, said the contraceptives also are more ethical and humane than other methods.
Unfortunately, New York City doesn’t have the worst rat problem in America. That title actually belongs to the city of Chicago…
Chicago has once again been declared the rattiest city in the U.S. according to Orkin’s annual ranking.
Los Angeles surpassed New York on this year’s list now holding the #2 spot and bringing the Big Apple down to #3, Orkin shared.
Other notable shifts included Houston, which moved 10 spots up to #20, and Charlotte, North Carolina that rose 16 spots to #21.
Somehow, the rat problem in Chicago has gone to an entirely new level in 2024.
In fact, one local resident says that it is now the worst that she has ever seen in her entire lifetime…
A resurgence of rats has gotten out of control in Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood, multiple residents explained Friday as they called for city leaders to take further action.
Diana Gazda, a resident of the Far Northwest Side community for seven decades, said she has never seen an infestation like it.
“We never had a rat problem like this,” she stated. “I’ve been here 71 years in my house.”
In addition to being world famous for rats, the Windy City is also world famous for violence.
In Chicago, you can be gunned down at any time of the day or night. Nobody is safe, and that is especially true for police officers…
A Chicago police officer was shot to death early Sunday in Gage Park on the Southwest Side in what sources are saying was an apparent carjacking.
Officers responded to a ShotSpotter alert about 2:55 a.m. and found Officer Luis Huesca with multiple gunshot wounds in the 3100 block of West 56th Street, a police spokesperson said in a statement.
Huesca, 30, was driving home from work, according to city officials. Huesca, who was still wearing his uniform, was taken to University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
So which of these cities will completely collapse first? I think that is a very good question.
They are all headed downhill very rapidly, and they are all being run by radical leftists. Of course the exact same things could be said about dozens of other U.S. cities.
For years, I have been warning my readers about the “cultural transformation” that has been taking place in America.
How we raise our kids really matters. We have been failing them for decades, and now the consequences can be very clearly seen in the streets of our major cities.
A horrific societal collapse is upon us, and yet this nation continues to refuse to change direction.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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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.