The Army’s highest-ranking enlisted soldier fought back with Twitter users who criticized a unit’s pro-Pride post on Friday and Saturday, hinting that those users committed “discriminatory harassment.”- The 82nd Airborne’s tweet recommended Army families check out a “survival guide” for “questioning” teens and another describing how parents can learn to “support” their LGBGQ+ child, from the on-base library.
- “The comment section isn’t your [Area of Operations], and voicing disagreement is not harassment,” one Twitter user said.
The Army’s top enlisted leader shot back at criticisms of a post from the 82nd Airborne celebrating LGBTQ+ members in a two-day Twitter battle, tweets show.
Twitter users, many of whom described themselves as veterans in their account bios, mocked the 82nd Airborne’s Friday morning post kick-starting the unit’s observance of Pride Month as a “disgrace” and distracting from the Army’s mission, the comments show. Sgt. Maj. Michael Grinston, the Army’s top enlisted leader responsible for morale and discipline issues in the service, condemned the criticism as harassment and shot back at tweets through Saturday morning as senior military leaders have not shied away from weighing in on American cultural controversies.
“The comment section is a good time to refresh ourselves with discriminatory harassment: A form of harassment that is unwelcome conduct based on race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity), national origin, or sexual orientation,” Grinston wrote.
The 82nd Airborne’s tweet recommended Army families check out a book called a “Survival Guide for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Teens,” as well as another that describes how parents can learn to “support” their LGBGQ+ child, from the on-base library. The titles are “intended for ages 13 and up,” the photo stated.
Some users praised Grinston for standing up on behalf of lesbian, gay and transgender people who serve in the Army against “bigots,” while others disputed whether their words counted as harassment, tweets show.
“The comment section isn’t your [Area of Operations], and voicing disagreement is not harassment,” one Twitter user responded at 7:59 p.m. “Many veterans including this one are disgusted by the continued degeneracy of our armed forces, so prepare to copy notes you can refer to later during your retention-crisis strategy meetings.”
In response, Grinston tweeted a screenshot of an Army Times headline: “Army hits retention goal four months early, says top enlisted soldier,” referring to Grinston’s own June 10 announcement that the service succeeded in getting the desired number of soldiers and officers to stay on for 2023.
Grinston said the Army set a goal of retaining 55,000 soldiers, higher than the year prior, amid a planned decrease of about 12,000 to the number of total Army personnel, according to Army Times. The deficit is a function of recruiting woes; once soldiers enlist or become officers, they want to stay, Grinston explained.
“Why yes this is really something to focus on, people being mean online. Screw warfighting,” another user wrote.
“The 82nd gives their paratroopers more live fire opportunities than almost any other organization. Stay based in fact,” Grinston responded.
When one self-described U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy veteran questioned why Memorial Day is set aside to honor the fallen for just 24 hours while Pride receives the entire month of June, another user noted that DOD observes May as National Military Appreciation Month and April as the month of the military child.
“June is also Army Heritage Month – don’t see much talk about that,” Grinston said at 9:33 p.m.
The last skirmish appears to have wrapped up Saturday morning after a user claiming to be an Army Special Operations Forces veteran criticized Grinston for spending time to combat individual Twitter comments instead of “making sure … soldiers don’t need food stamps.”
Congress is deliberating a measure that would expand troops’ access to food stamps as the number of servicemembers affected by food insecurity appears to have grown in recent years, according to Military.com.
“Like this?” Grinston replied at 10:22 a.m., linking to another Military.com explainer on the new Basic Needs Allowance that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered in September. The BNA is designed to assist U.S.-based troops who are struggling financially; critics argue that the military should pay servicemembers enough so they don’t fall below acceptable income levels.
Senior military leaders have not balked at weighing in on domestic culture issues, whether speaking independently or on behalf of the Department of Defense (DOD). Recently, a top Space Force official condemned red-state laws banning sex changes and gender education, saying they pose a “danger” to LGBTQ+ servicemembers, during a DOD Pride event on June 7.
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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.