We are in far more trouble than most people realize. In recent months, our rapidly growing economic problems have gotten a lot of attention, and without a doubt our economy is heading into really hard times. The greatest debt bubble in the history of the world has started to implode, and the end of this “mega-cycle” is going to cause an immense amount of pain. But if every other element of our society was strong, we could survive that. It may surprise a lot of you to hear me say that, but it is true. If all that we were facing was an economic collapse, it would cause an enormous amount of turmoil in this country but we would make it through.
Unfortunately, we are not just facing an economic collapse.
I like to call what we are facing “the everything collapse”, because virtually every element of our society is steadily breaking down right in front of our eyes.
So once our economic and financial systems implode, it won’t just be a matter of patching them up and returning to “normal”, because “normal” doesn’t exist anymore.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. The president of Giant Food just admitted to the Washington Post that theft at his stores is completely out of control…
Giant Food president Ira Kress said that theft and violence have risen significantly over the past several years.
“To say [theft has] risen tenfold in the last five years would not be an understatement,” Kress noted, according to the Washington Post, which also reported that the man said that violence has “increased exponentially.”
Giant has more than 160 locations, with stores located in Maryland; Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and Delaware, according to its website.
When I was much younger, I would often shop at Giant Food.
In those days, I never witnessed a single shoplifting incident.
But now systematic looting is happening on an industrial scale all over the nation. In fact, I recently wrote an entire article about the fact that theft is now costing U.S. retailers about 100 billion dollars a year.
Meanwhile, other forms of crime are spiking as well. Sadly, violent crimes are increasingly being committed by kids that are extremely young…
As soon as he confronted the masked youth who seemed to be trying to rob him with a gun last week on Irving Street in Northwest Washington, Ryan Cummins knew the assailant was young.
“When I shoved him, he weighed nothing,” Cummins said in an interview…
Police said the youth they arrested on Saturday in Cummins’s case and two nearby robberies is even younger: 11. He is among the youngest arrested in the District this year in an armed robbery…
Did you catch that last part?
That kid was “among the youngest” arrested for armed robbery this year. So how old was the youngest?
On the west coast, conditions are even worse.
The following is how one San Francisco resident named Seema Gokhale recently described what living in the heart of the city is like these days…
Speaking with Fox News Digital, Seema Gokhale who lives near the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood expressed, “It really feels post-apocalyptic. Something needs to be done. We have to make this a livable place. I describe it as a hellhole right now. If I wasn’t a homeowner and hadn’t grown up in the area and there wasn’t a strong job market in the area, I would leave.”
“I walk by people regularly and it feels horrible,” she said as drug addicts have “needle tracks all over their arms and legs and toes. I see people with rotting limbs because they’re living on the streets.”
“It honestly feels like I’m in a place that’s been in a zombie apocalypse. It’s like a dystopia. It really feels like a dystopian reality right now where I see boarded-up storefronts. I see people defecating on the streets,” Gokhale detailed.
Sadly, this is the direction that the entire country is going.
Up in Portland, voters are completely and totally fed up with the rampant social decay that has been steadily growing all around them…
Months of stepping past sidewalk homeless camps and open-air drug markets have taken their toll on residents of Portland, Oregon.
Voters there have delivered a stunning rebuke to officials of the Democrat-run hipster city, with three quarters calling homelessness ‘an out-of-control disaster.’
The survey, commissioned by People for Portland, a conservative advocacy group, found that more than two thirds of voters wanted to clear the streets by forcing drug addicts into rehab.
But no matter what our politicians do, the social decay gets worse with each passing year.
And that is because our entire culture has been completely transformed. According to one recent survey, only 16 percent of Americans now attend church at least once per week…
The number of Americans who attend church once a week fell from 19 percent in 2019 to 16 percent last year, says the survey of some 6,600 adults across all 50 states.
This means that 84 percent of us do not attend church at least once per week at this point.
If we could go back and tell Americans from 100 years ago this, they would be absolutely floored. Of course the truth is that we are a completely different country than we were 100 years ago.
Many of us like to think that we are superior to every generation that has come before us, but the reality of the matter is that just about every aspect of our society is rapidly getting worse.
If we are having this much difficulty keeping order now, what are things going to look like once our economic and financial systems have fully imploded and tens of millions of Americans are deeply suffering?
You might want to think about that, because “the everything collapse” is only going to pick up steam in the weeks and months ahead…
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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.