In 2020 at the onset of the covid pandemic scare and right before the lockdowns I’ll never forget going on a grocery run on a Friday only to find near empty roads and near empty stores. The few other people shopping had a glassy stare in their eyes, like they were dazed or shell-shocked. For me and those I know that prep, it was just another day; for those that hadn’t prepped it was a nightmare of uncertainty.
In Montana we didn’t pay much heed to the lockdowns after the first month. In three months everything was basically back to normal except for the mask mandates which most people ignored. With more data available on the virus it was clear that the chance of death was being greatly exaggerated. What scared us far more was the rampant talk of vaccine passports in 2021. The proposed state and federal restrictions on people that refused to take the jab were familiar – This was the beginning of full blown tyranny unless we stood firm.
In the meantime there was a public rush to buy up as many necessities as they could afford. And of course, the covid stimulus measures finally triggered a stagflationary crisis that had been building in the US for many years.
In the face of so many potential threats, preppers were still well protected. If vaccine passports became the norm and access to public places was blocked then we had food storage to get us through for a long time to come. If the buying panic and inflation led to a supply chain disaster then we were well placed, along with the guns and ammo and training needed to keep what we had. If a fight was coming then we had the means to defend ourselves.
I have long been convinced that it was the prepper factor that caused the government to rethink their strategy of perpetual medical lockdowns and give up on vaccine passports. We represent an unknown element, something they can’t predict, a possible monkeywrench in the gears of the machine.
With our own supplies we are not dependent on the system to keep us alive, and the harder they push the more we are compelled to organize into an even greater obstacle. Just as NATO sanctions have pushed Russia, China and the BRICS closer together, openly authoritarian policies in the west during covid pushed liberty movement people together. The establishment backed away because they had to.
This is why I have to laugh whenever I see some idiot online say: “What’s the point of prepping when nothing ever happens?”
Have these people been living under a rock since 2020? We just dodged one of the biggest Orwellian bullets in our nation’s history with the defeat of the pandemic mandates. Or, do they not realize that the pandemic was just the beginning?
If that’s the case then it pains me to remind everyone that nothing has fundamentally changed. Yes, we beat back the mandates but all the same elites are still in power, all the same globalist institutions that exploited covid to create a panic still exist, and the event has acted as a domino in a chain leading to other calamities. Here’s just a few reasons why you’re going to be needing your survival preps in the next few years…
The Stagflation Crisis That Wouldn’t Die
The stagflationary problem is persistent despite all the media claims that it’s under control. Readers familiar with my economic analysis know that I predicted stagflation several years ago as the inevitable outcome of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing and near-zero interest rates. I also predicted the Catch-22 problem of rate hikes vs inflation and debt. And when I said a couple years ago that the Fed wasn’t going to return to rate cuts for some time, I was right about that too.
Given this track record, trust me when I say that stagflation is here to stay. Any move to cut rates will automatically trigger an even worse resurgence of inflation and the fed will be forced to hike once again. And, high interest rates will continue to create a national debt crisis as debt payments skyrocket.
In other words, the economic situation is getting exponentially worse with each passing year. There is already breakage in the system, but that’s nothing compared to what we face in the next five years. Any preparedness items you buy today should be considered an investment in the future because all of those items will be far more expensive or harder to find.
Political Riots Are Assured
Recent campus protests have reminded people that they shouldn’t get too comfortable with the fizzle of BLM. The same leftists that rode the wave of racial division back in 2020 are going out and finding new causes to co-opt. They’re looking for any excuse to riot, even if it has nothing to do with them personally.
With the 2024 election incoming I have no doubt that civil unrest will be the norm once again no matter who ends up in the White House. With riots follow the threat of looting, property destruction, political violence and even martial law. Then there is the public reaction to those circumstances, including the possibility of civil war. Don’t assume the country will calm down after the election. In fact, assume the opposite.
The War In Ukraine Is About To Become A World War
Again, I have mentioned in multiple articles the danger of western involvement in the war in Ukraine including the danger of a wider world war should NATO directly enter the fray. As I write this, France is pressing for “military advisers” to go to Ukraine to train recruits, which is exactly what the US did in Vietnam right before we officially went to war.
Multiple NATO countries also want to give Ukraine the green light to use long range NATO missiles against targets deep in Russia. If you are an avid student of history you know as I do that this only goes one way.
That’s probably why countries in Europe are suddenly talking about draft procedures and forced conscription laws in order to shore up their ranks. How many people will actually submit to a draft? I don’t know, but I do know this is not the kind of talk that governments engage in when their goal is diplomacy. It’s the kind of talk they engage in when they’re getting ready to antagonize the enemy.
A larger war with Russia comes with a host of difficulties that would take me too many pages to cover here. To summarize, war with Russia means war with China, war with Iran and most of the Middle East, tragic supply chain disruptions, the end of the dollar’s world reserve status and a good chance of a limited or regional nuclear exchange.
I have serious doubts that global nuclear war is on the table because the establishment has nothing to gain and everything to lose from it. However, a war between East and West is more than enough to cause absolute havoc in every nation on the planet.
The War Over Gaza Is Quickly Leading To A War For The Middle East
I’m not going to cheerlead for either side in this conflict. My concern is America and Americans. That said, it’s clear that actions on both sides are forcing the war to expand well beyond Gaza. Recent Israeli strikes on Syria and scuffles with Egyptian troops are concerning. Lebanon is highly involved and Iran has already traded missiles with Israel. Israel has stated their offensive will continue through at least the end of 2024.
In terms of how this all affects the US or Europe, the immediate consequence will be a shut down of oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. That’s 30% or more of the world’s oil trade slowed down or eliminated. Energy prices will explode along with prices on everything else. The price of everything you buy is affected by the price of oil.
Agriculture, for example, relies heavily on fuel and oil based fertilizers. This means high oil prices will trigger high food prices.
Prepping Isn’t A Hobby, It’s A Duty
Frankly, preparedness should be a social mainstay – An integral part of American life. It’s not a hobby, it’s a duty. The more prepared people are the safer every American will be. Most prepared people don’t panic because there’s no need. And people who don’t panic are less likely to harm others out of fear and desperation.
Think of food storage like a big battery. A battery is energy storage for later when you need it. Think about how much time and work and energy goes into growing just one month of food for your family. Isn’t it far better to store all that work in long term foods so that you don’t have to worry about it later during the worst of conditions? Every bucket of stored food is a battery that saves you precious time and labor.
Growing food and living sustainably is great in peacetime or in the middle of a large, well organized community. Growing food at the onset of a national crisis in a place where too many people are unprepared is almost impossible. If a breakdown occurs then your best bet is to hunker down, work with family, friends and neighbors, and live on your preps until there is a large enough community in place to securely grow food again.
There are too many variables right now around the world that can cause catastrophe, and even events on the other side of the globe can cause problems for you at home. I see very little chance of the situation improving in the next five years and a very high chance of things spiraling out of control. Take your prepping seriously, even when oblivious naysayers claim “nothing’s going to happen.” Those will be the same people crying for help before long and you don’t want to share their fate.
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.