(American Thinker)—There is so much latent energy beading up right beneath the surface of Western civilization. Everybody can feel it. Every day people read the news with the expectation that some as yet unknown event will trigger something bigger, which will ignite something horrifically combustible, which will put into motion a rapidly shifting set of complex variables that finally turn the world upside-down. Every public announcement is a potential spark. Every new emergency is a wobbly domino that could crash into another and cascade until everything falls apart. We’ve all been sitting uncomfortably on pins and needles for so long that we practically eject out of our chairs every time a television, computer, or phone screen blares, “Breaking Alert.”
Speaking of phones, the other day, a few hundred thousand mobile subscribers lost connection to their cellular networks, and amateur sleuths jumped into action — scrutinizing which carriers and cities were most affected in hopes of isolating some nefarious intent behind the inconvenience. Was it a Chinese cyber-attack? A series of small electromagnetic pulses set off by some terrorist cell inside the United States? A CIA/NSA test run for the Intelligence Community before it instigates information blackouts in the run-up to the 2024 election? Or could it have simply been the result of a particularly strong solar flare? Nobody knew for sure, but everybody had a theory. For what it’s worth, AT&T blamed the outage on an improperly executed software update, but that clarification didn’t answer every question or quell suspicions that something more serious had occurred. When everyone is anxiously awaiting the end of the world, there is little room left over for mundane explanations.
Nobody believes anybody right now. That makes sense. Distrust of institutions and authority figures has skyrocketed. News reporters have essentially become the public relations arm of the Intelligence Community. They repeat risible lies without even the pretense of journalistic incredulity. For instance, how could Hunter Biden’s laptop — filled with videos documenting his own debaucherous and criminal activities — have been “Russian disinformation”? Only corporate news mouthpieces paid to deliver the I.C.’s talking points know. Because they refuse to ask obvious questions, the public has learned to distrust their point of view.
In the old days, political operatives got paid to construct convenient “narratives,” while reporters got paid to distill hidden truths. As the distinction between “operative” and “reporter” disappeared, ordinary people learned that fictitious “narratives” completely replaced any representation of objective reality. Because a free press has always been instrumental in containing institutional corruption, the implosion of professional journalism should be understood as a late-stage symptom of our present system’s impending death. Reporters who spend more time explaining why boys should dominate girls’ sports than investigating how mail-in ballot fraud subverts democratic elections cannot be taken seriously as factual custodians or arbiters of truth.
While citizens have adjusted to journalism’s irrelevancy, they have held out hope that science — a philosophy dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge — would be more resilient. However, science, too, has abandoned rigorous discipline for the ease of regurgitating unscrutinized “narratives.”
Perhaps the most consequential upside of COVID was its exposure of most medical doctors as unscientific bureaucrats willing to parrot absolute nonsense if it meant they got paid. Why would a physician prescribe an experimental “vaccine” in lieu of available over-the-counter remedies that have been around for fifty or more years? Because pharmaceutical companies can’t make money from generic medicines with expired patents, and medical doctors can’t procure financial benefits from pharmaceutical companies if they don’t first push their newest drugs. Why would any physician coerce patients (even healthy ones) to undergo experimental treatments without their informed consent (including explicit warnings of known side effects and the impossibility of knowing potential long-term harms) in blatant disregard of the Nuremberg Code’s well established principles for preventing crimes against humanity? Because white coats who uninquisitively follow government orders have sold their ethical obligations to the highest bidder.
As with journalism, the scientific pursuit of knowledge has become a hustle. The World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum have made it abundantly clear that global pandemics and man-made “climate change” are existential threats that coincidentally require more intrusive public surveillance and greater government control over the economy. It should be no surprise that the prospect of future apocalypse tends to short-circuit the human mind and convince otherwise rational people to hand over their freedoms to doom-and-gloom charlatans and fear-peddling carnival barkers. It should be a surprise, however, when handsomely paid “scientists” manipulate research and punish academic dissent in order to fraudulently support bureaucrats’ self-serving conclusions. When “scientific consensus” arrives in advance of scientific corroboration, researchers aren’t seeking objective knowledge but rather selling snake oil for professional aggrandizement and monetary gain.
With the deaths of journalism and science laid bare before the public, a salubrious shift in social consciousness has occurred. People are once again asking critical questions in search of basic truths. For too long, professional disciplines have insisted on doing society’s thinking. Whenever significant public policy debates have arisen, common people have been condescendingly told, “Leave that to the experts.” With busy lives filled with other obligations, most people have been okay with this arrangement. Caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) and other fundamental notions of personal responsibility have been traded for the modern conveniences of letting the Food and Drug Administration, the White House press corps, and (SMDH) the Central Intelligence Agency decide what is true. If processing information and making wise decisions is part of what it means to be alive, then the effect of transferring these responsibilities to third-party institutions is a bit like lobotomizing a population. You end up with a highly dependent society beholden to the mercies of designated “experts.”
For a while, a lobotomized population might find relative happiness within this arrangement — so long as the “experts” continue to share the population’s general worldview and can be trusted to pursue policy goals that consistently advance the population’s priorities. However, if the “experts” are guided by beliefs divergent from those of society, or worse, if they reveal themselves as a privileged class filled with rapacious liars and frauds, then common people have no other choice but to reclaim their natural authority by exercising their own brains.
That latent energy beading up right now beneath the surface of Western civilization is what happens when a slumbering society begins powering up its long-dormant capacity for self-government. As old brain cells are put back into proper use, the body politic is trying to remember how to do things it once took for granted. In trying to separate lies from truths, it has begun to remember why virtuous character establishes mutual trust. And as it recalibrates its moral compass, society is a little unsteady on its feet. Cellular networks go down, and nobody knows what to believe.
Lack of trust in government, news media, and science has produced something far more extraordinary: a spiritual awakening. Why? Because the illusion that government-run institutions have our best interests at heart has shattered into a million pieces, and it is impossible to glue those pieces back together into some kind of reconstructed “truth.” If government and its vassals in science and journalism can no longer stand in as secular priests, then people desperate for authentic truth are forced to ask tough questions of themselves.
In my experience, the tougher those questions become, the more likely that people find their way to God. And once they find their way to God, they tend to realize that they were meant to govern themselves. As freedom is God’s gift to every soul, spiritual revolutions always precede political ones. That inalienable truth ought to give every true believer some needed peace of mind.
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.