The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright recently discussed a new “international socialist conspiracy” that has taken the world by storm.
“Fringe forces of the far left,” he noted, “are plotting to take away our freedom to be stuck in traffic jams, to crawl along clogged ring roads and trawl the streets in search of a parking spot.”
The name of this “chilling global movement?” he asked, sarcastically and somewhat contemptuously: The “15-minute city.”
Wainwright believes that these cities are simply part of a “mundane planning theory.” He’s wrong.
A few days after Wainwright’s piece was published, three academics called 15-minute cities (FMCs) “the hottest conspiracy theory of 2023.” In a truly elitist manner, they poked fun at those who dared to question the motive behind FMCs.
One needn’t be a card-carrying QAnon member to have fears over these Trojan-like creations. Before going any further, it’s important to get our definitions in order. As the political scientist Kelly M. Greenhill has noted, not all conspiracy theories are wacky, and not all conspiracy theories are wrong. Take the Watergate conspiracy theory, for instance, or the fact that Edith Wilson made most of the executive decisions after her husband, President Woodrow Wilson, suffered a stroke.
Quite often conspiracy theories turn out to be accurate.
Also known as smart cities, FMCs are places where everything imaginable, from your place of work to your favorite pizzeria, is accessible either by foot or bike (not by car, though; they’ll be verboten) in 15 minutes or less. What’s so bad about this?
On first inspection, very little. We are, after all, creatures of comfort. We live in a world where the mantra “too long, didn’t read (TL;DR)” now reigns supreme. We crave convenience; we crave expediency. However, expediency isn’t always a good thing; sometimes it’s downright dangerous. This is especially true when people, either consciously or otherwise, trade their freedom for ease of access to certain services.
While FMCs may make it easier for citizens to get from A to B, these creations will also make it easier for those in power to spy on us, harvest our data, and enable Big Brother to become Bigger Brother.
As I write this, FMCs are being actively championed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the group behind the “Great Reset” and the idea of owning nothing, having absolutely no privacy, and being very happy. This fact alone should concern all readers.
Want to discuss the WEF?
To many, I’m sure FMCs sound incredibly cool. But don’t be fooled by the name. FMCs are actually “smart cities.” As I’ve noted elsewhere, the word “smart” is really just a synonym for surveillance. These ultra-modern, tech-saturated monstrosities use hundreds of thousands of sensors to vacuum up copious amounts of personal data. FMC policies are currently being rolled out in cities such as Barcelona, Spain; Bogotá, Colombia; Melbourne, Australia; Paris; and the dystopian wasteland known as Portland, Oregon. What do these cities have in common? Surveillance technology.
Between now and 2040, cities all across the United States (and beyond) are predicted to spend trillions of dollars on the installation of additional cameras and biometric sensors. Sure, surveillance is bad now. But, as Randy Bachman famously hollered, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
By 2050, more than two-thirds of the world’s population will live in closely surveilled urban centers, like glorified rats in cramped cages. Contrary to popular belief, we no longer live in a panoptic society. When Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher and social theorist, put forward the idea of this prison system, there was no internet. In truth, there weren’t even cars. We now live in a post-panoptic world—a digital panopticon, if you will—with huge social media platforms collecting personal user data before selling it to the highest bidder.
The companies running these platforms often work closely with government officials, identifying supposed sinners and punishing them in the swiftest of manners. As the writer Kylie Lynch has noted, these companies know absolutely everything about you; they have instant access to your browser history, your activity online, and now, rather worryingly, even your biometrics. Not surprisingly, these Big Tech companies will have a big impact on the FMCs of the future by providing the underlying digital infrastructure needed to monitor us and ensure mass compliance.
FMCs are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Don’t believe the countless stories telling you otherwise. It has become common for elitist, mainstream media outlets to poke fun at those who dare to question the “we have your best interests at heart” narratives. We’ve been burned too many times before.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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.
Dems use “shiny” things to massage the citizens, while their inept competition can never get political traction on any one of the items.