Life right now feels like that moment when your roller coaster car begins slowing down near a terrifying peak, and your line of sight finally captures the precipitous plunge lying ahead. Americans know that what happens next won’t be enjoyable except in that perverse way when abject terror floods the body with adrenaline. Majorities or near-majorities expect imminent economic disaster, global war against nuclear-armed foes, and civil war here at home. If that’s “progress,” then it’s long past time to turn the country around. Yet that’s the thing with roller coaster rides: even if we hit the brakes now before cresting the summit, our downward acceleration is guaranteed — in one direction or another.
It’s not as if the ruling class’s “cult of expertise” provides any comfort. We have a president who long ago lost his marbles, a vice president who succeeded in the political profession by excelling in the oldest one, a secretary of defense committed to promoting men in dresses, a health bureaucracy pumping citizens full of experimental drugs, a Treasury Department endlessly printing money, a Commerce Department prioritizing inflation-inducing “green” windmills over real economic growth, a homeland security chief dedicated to keeping the nation insecure, and a national police force that treats half the country as “domestic enemies.” It’s almost as if whoever installed these yahoos into the highest positions of authority wanted obvious “fall guys” for when everything, well, falls down.
The Gateway Pundit recently ran an article reminding readers of an ominous analysis from a private intelligence outfit predicting a seventy-percent decline in America’s population by 2025. That Deagel Corporation forecast released less than a decade ago shocked a lot of people at the time, but in an age when Farmer Gates and Doom Fauci continue to promise incoming pandemics worse than COVID, the World Economic Forum’s human sacrifice cult insists on widespread energy poverty and famine, and U.S.-NATO plays Russian roulette for fun and profit, apocalyptic population drops no longer seem so unimaginable from the top of this globalist roller coaster. (Morbid side question: If Deagel’s devastating prophecy proves right, will climate cultists still insist that only global government and micromanaged markets can save the world from destruction? Arg, of course they will; even after killing off 95% of the planet, A.I. clones of Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and Barack Obama will still be blaming the remaining 5% for “hate” crimes, global warming, and “white supremacy.” Hustlers can’t ever give up the con.)
A lot of armchair analysts originally wondered about Deagel’s math, especially since the intelligence firm predicted steady or rising population numbers for Russia, China, and most of the Global South. Did the private spooks expect a one-sided nuclear, biological, or EMP-inflicted war in which America’s enemies were overwhelmingly victorious? Or did they perhaps simply take the U.N., WEF, and Obama-deluded U.S. at their word when the West decided that its primary nemesis is bad weather? If you eliminate hydrocarbon energies and non-zero carbon producers from the market, after all, then agricultural production drops dramatically, energy for home heating disappears, and the costs of manufacturing inputs rise exponentially. Runaway food and fuel inflation all but ensures cataclysmic poverty, starvation, and a return to burning wood for heating (when smoke-filled skies will prove the toxic repercussion of tilting at windmills for energy).
Maybe Deagel attentively studied the new-world-order master plans of the Marxist globalists running the West into the ground and realized that if they were successful with all their “progressive” promises, the obvious cost would be 70% of the population. Just as the Mesoamerican Aztecs fought drought with human bloodletting, Western socialists know that a lot of innocent people must die for “hope and change.” No tyrant ever said Utopia comes cheaply. Russia, China, India, and everywhere else where hydrocarbon energies are still valued as instrumental for prosperity and population growth can just sit back, watch the West commit suicide, and wave.
So here we are in this maddening doom loop, where a majority of Western populations know exactly what kinds of homicidal maneuverings their governments are up to and yet find themselves in straitjackets and chains should they dare to say anything. If you object to the coming “green” energy–induced mass starvation, the zealots brand you a “climate denier.” If you prefer diplomacy to nuclear Armageddon, you get labeled a “Russian appeaser” or arrested for spreading “disinformation.” If you prefer free expression to government censorship, you’re one tweet away from committing the made-up crime of “hate.” And if you still cling to the antiquated notion that the Bill of Rights is an integral part of U.S. law, the national security Deep State dedicated to monitoring and regulating your language, religion, self-protection, privacy, property, due process rights, and other constitutional guarantees has something to say: namely, that all civil, human, or otherwise natural rights — even when bestowed by God — are suspended during times of declared emergency or whenever else government agents decide to terminate them because they don’t like who you are, what you believe, or what you say. Bet you never saw that fine print at the bottom of the Constitution and stamped by the directors of the FBI, CIA, and NSA!
This insane Western death march has reminded a lot of insightful historical observers of the so-called Tytler Cycle, a description of the natural rise and fall of democratic societies and named after eighteenth-century Scottish lawyer and historian Alexander Fraser Tytler (a kindred spirit, if not true kin, to his heroic but fictional clansman of Outlander fame). John Eberhard has written about Tytler at his website, Commonsense Government, as have Andrew Coy, Chris Talgo, and Emma Kaden here at American Thinker. All these essays are excellent.
As an analytical realist, Tytler looked at history through a lens free from wishful thinking. Every form of government, he argued, is “ultimately ruled by a single will,” and, therefore, every form of government is “virtually and substantially a monarchy.” He may have had a sincere respect for republican virtues, but he knew that, however democratic a society appeared, a permanent Deep State still rigged the game. Furthermore, he was certain that all great nations eventually implode from internal depravity and corruption: “It is a law of nature to which no experience has ever furnished an exception, that the rising grandeur and opulence of a nation must be balanced by the decline of its heroic virtues.” No matter how strong or principled in the past, no government will last.
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
Although it is not clear that Tytler actually delineated the “cycle” of civilizational growth and collapse with which he is generally credited, it seems likely that he would have agreed with its usual formulation: “From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
Looking at that cycle, it is difficult not to see the shorthand version of events tracking America’s meteoric rise and unfortunate decline. From “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” to a vast national security surveillance State dedicated to a “woke,” Marxist religion, two-tiered administration of justice, political persecution, censorship, redistribution of property, and the racist proposition that Americans should be judged by the color of their skin, rather than by their characters or minds. By every measure available, liberty and courage have been traded for complacency and dependence.
But what about bondage? Must we follow the Tytler Cycle to its completion and become slaves to a system we abhor? Or do we have the free will to decide which direction this roller coaster will soon head?
My deepest thanks to J.C.R., D.T., S., M.M., R.S., E.B., and P.V.
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.