The Biden administration has been criticized for its treatment of Catholic Americans in recent months, especially after news broke that the FBI was using undercover agents to infiltrate churches, and religious experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation it will likely get worse. - The DOJ offered a plea deal earlier this week with no jail time to a transgender vandal that spray painted “kid groomers” and “woman haters” on a Catholic church and assaulted several members as well as police officers before being arrested, while opting to raid the house of a Catholic pro-life activist named Mark Houck in 2022 for an alleged assault of an abortion clinic worker.
- “Anti-Catholicism has been said to be the ‘last acceptable prejudice,’” Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the Conscience Project and a fellow at the Institute of Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Biden administration has put Catholic individuals and organizations under an unprecedented level of scrutiny by using the FBI and Department of Justice to infiltrate churches and prosecute members, according to experts that spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
President Joe Biden, the second Catholic president after John F. Kennedy, has talked about his faith on multiple occasions during his career, saying in 2012 that “my religion defines who I am,” but the president’s political positions on abortion and LGBTQ issues have put him and his administration at odds with the church on several occasions. The administration has been criticized for its attacks on the church, including issuing an FBI memo earlier this year calling traditional Catholics a domestic threat.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the Conscience Project and a fellow at the Institute of Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, told the DCNF that the president’s administration has “embraced the thuggery of anti-Catholic bigotry with zeal.”
“Anti-Catholicism has been said to be the ‘last acceptable prejudice,’” Picciotti-Bayer said. “The prosecution of Catholic pro-lifers, FBI witch hunts of attendees of the traditional Latin Mass, the refusal to protect Catholic Supreme Court Justices from grotesque intimidation in front of their homes, pressuring Catholic hospitals to kowtow to the absurd demands of gender ideology, and pulling priestly care from the nation’s top military hospital are just the tip of the iceberg.”
After news broke in February that the FBI had released an internal memo calling members of more traditional churches “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” and accusing them of being an extreme threat to Americans, Biden remained silent on the issue.
This week it was revealed that the FBI had used at least one undercover informant to spy on Catholic churches to obtain information to create the memo. The undercover operation was revealed during Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan’s investigation into the memo and found that the FBI had been trying to get congregations to help them create “new avenues for tripwire and source development.”
Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy and the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the DNCF that during his time as a career attorney for the DOJ’s civil rights department under the Obama and Trump administrations, he came across a similar memo to the one leaked this year.
“There was an investigation of a traditional Catholic organization where we were asked to enforce their rights [and] … in the memo, the attorney … cited the religious beliefs as being somehow radical and therefore a reason not to enforce the law,” Severino said. “I saw it with my own eyes and I spoke up and said, ‘You can’t target a religious group and exclude them from religious protection under the law because you dislike their religious beliefs.’”
Church attacks, specifically against Catholics, have also been on the rise in the last two years, according to a report from the Family Research Council (FRC). Churches across the country are set to experience a record-high level of attacks this year after 69 incidents were reported in the first quarter of 2023.
The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center also announced before the Easter holiday that it was issuing a “cease and desist” order for Catholic priests that operated in the hospital. The order ended a nearly two-decade contract between the hospital and the Holy Name College Friary in favor of a secular defense contracting firm, leaving the “largest Defense Health Agency medical center” effectively without pastoral care.
The DOJ offered a plea deal earlier this week with no jail time to a transgender vandal that spray painted “kid groomers” and “woman haters” on a Catholic church, assaulting several members and police officers before being arrested. The plea deal came in stark contrast to the FBI’s treatment of Catholic father and pro-life activist Mark Houck.
Houck was accused in 2021 of assaulting an abortion clinic worker, and as a result, over 15 FBI agents raided his house on an early October morning and arrested him in front of his wife and children. The DOJ charged Houck with violating the FACE Act, which protects health care and abortion clinics by barring “force with the intent to injure, intimidate, and interfere with anyone because that person is a provider of reproductive health care.”
Houck was later acquitted of the charges after a jury deadlocked in their verdict, but Meg Kilgannon, FRC’s senior fellow for Education Studies, told the DCNF that she worries about the precedent these types of attacks on Catholics may set for the future.
“The Catholic Church is a target for many reasons, and this has always been the case and sadly will never change, ” Kilgannon said. “Even faithful Catholics who try to live out these teachings find them challenging in the best of times, but always worth it, a continual opportunity to strive to serve Christ. So for a President of the United States to constantly message about the ‘soul of America,’ ‘unity,’ and his ‘devout faith’ while at the same time working so brazenly against the Catholic people, Catholic teachings, and the Church herself – let’s just say it’s a grave scandal and a matter for prayer and penance.”
The White House, DOJ and the FBI did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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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.