(The Economic Collapse Blog)—How can we possibly undo the severe long-term damage that has been done to an entire generation of young people over the course of several decades? One of the most powerful pieces of evidence that our society is a failure is the fact that we have produced a “lost generation” of young adults that doesn’t have any hope. We shipped most of them off to public schools where they were trained to believe that they came from monkeys, there is no purpose to their lives, and when they die nothing waits for them on the other side. This sick philosophy is endlessly pounded into the heads of our young people, and many of those that have adopted it have come to the conclusion that they might as well live as hedonistically as they can while they are here. Of course that doesn’t give them any meaning or purpose either, and so a lot of them end up sort of drifting through life seeking anything that can fill the painful emptiness that they feel inside.
It isn’t really a mystery why so many of our young people have gone completely insane. Our modern liberal society urges them to constantly chase after things that will never satisfy them. As a result, we have a national epidemic of loneliness, a national epidemic of depression, a national epidemic of drug abuse, and a national epidemic of suicide.
Our young people are offered one hamster wheel after another. Each time, they are told that if they will just run hard enough they will finally be happy.
Of course that never actually happens.
It all starts in the public schools. Parents send their children to these schools believing that they will receive a quality education, but the truth is that the quality of education in our public schools just keeps getting worse…
The reading and math scores of 12th graders have plunged to their lowest level in over 20 years.
The scores, part of a test from the National Assessment of Education Progress, showed the average reading score for 12th graders dropped to the lowest level since the NAEP first administered the reading assessment in 1992. The average score for 12th graders in math in 2024 was the lowest since 2005, when the math assessment framework changed significantly.
I went to public schools all the way through high school, and then I attended two public universities for a total of eight years.
The quality of the education that I received was a joke.
The entire system is a fraud! It is about time that we all finally admit that the emperor doesn’t have any clothes on.
But what our public schools are good at is indoctrinating young minds. For example, just consider what has been happening in the state of Maryland…
Schools are subverting students’ mental health by endlessly hectoring them to doubt or despise their own bodies. These school antics reached epidemic level even before the start of the Covid pandemic. In 2019, the state of Maryland issued regulations to promote “viewing each student’s” “gender identity and expression” as “valuable.” Government officials and political appointees arrogated to themselves the prerogative to redefine gender in the state of Maryland. Montgomery County, the largest school system in the state, announced that it would choose books for the curriculum “through an ‘LGBTQ+ Lens’ and ask whether books ‘reinforced or disrupted’ ‘stereotypes,’ ‘cisnormativity,’ and ‘power hierarchies,’” according to a brief filed at the Supreme Court by parents who successfully challenged the school system. That brief also noted that “teachers are told to frame disagreement with [pro-LGBTQ] ideas as ‘hurtful,’ and to counter with examples of ‘men who paint their nails’ or ‘wear dresses.’” The goal is to instill in children “a new perspective not easily contravened by their parents,” as the county school board admitted.
The indoctrination produced a 582% increase in the number of kids self-identifying as “non-binary” in Montgomery County schools. “Disrupting children’s thinking” has been so successful that almost half of the students identified themselves as non-binary.
Sadly, most parents have no idea what is really going on in these schools. They just assume that their kids are being prepared for life in the real world.
But instead they are having leftist “values” systematically shoved down their throats.
Needless to say, it gets even worse at the next level. Our colleges and universities are completely and utterly dominated by radical leftists.
This is why so many of our young people abandon the values that they were raised with once they enroll in these “institutions of higher learning”. This is a point that was made exceptionally well in a recent article by Victor Davis Hanson…
Hundreds of thousands of students emerge from campuses not just indoctrinated with contempt for the Western tradition and American exceptionalism, and not just often thousands of dollars in debt from inflated tuition, but also poorly educated by the standards that once defined education.
The working classes and high school graduates, supposedly the losers of our society, are not those who are dividing the country. They are not often advocating violence or trying to use any means necessary to overturn the established order. But so often the products of the modern university are doing just that.
Sadly, in all these recent horrors, the ideology behind them—the premise that either birthed or appeased them—was birthed in modern higher education.
He is right. Once upon a time, colleges and universities were primarily concerned with equipping students with the skills that they would need for their future careers.
Today, colleges and universities are primarily concerned with brainwashing impressionable young kids. So how is that working out for our society?
Well, we now have a raging epidemic of loneliness among our young people…
Half of U.S. youth say that loneliness has a daily disruptive impact on their mental health, according to Hopelab and Data For Progress survey results shared exclusively with Axios.
In addition, the percentage of the population that is suffering with or receiving treatment for depression has nearly doubled over the past decade…
Depression remains an ongoing problem in the U.S. as historically high rates persist, polling company Gallup reveals.
The reported percentage of U.S. adults suffering or receiving treatment for depression has been higher than 18 percent for the past two years. A decade ago, in 2015, the number was just over 10 percent.
“The increase is alarming, and it is important that we keep an open mind and explore all possible causes for the rapid, and apparently sustained, rise in depression rates over the past decade,” Dr. Gerard Sanacora, a professor of psychiatry, director of Yale Depression Research Program and co-director of Yale New Haven Hospital Interventional Psychiatry Service at Yale University, told Newsweek.
On top of everything else, “deaths of despair” caused by alcohol abuse, drug abuse and suicide are absolutely soaring…
Two non-profits, Trust for America’s Health and Well Being Trust, published a report this month which paints a harrowing picture of reality for millennials with an addiction in the United States. According to the report, which is an analysis of data from the CDC, millennials are the most likely age demographic to die from alcohol, drug abuse, and suicide. Millennials are most often defined as people who were born between the years 1981 and 1996, although some definitions expand the category to cover people who were born up through the year 2000.
Over the course of one decade, from 2007 to 2017, the rate of alcohol-related deaths among millennials rose by 69%, the rate of deaths caused by drugs rose by 108%, and the suicide rate rose by 35%. The report also indicates that the opioid epidemic has devastated millennials. From 1999 to 2017, the rate of fatal opioid overdoses among millennials rose by 500% and the rate of fatal overdoses involving synthetic opioids (especially fentanyl) skyrocketed by 6,000%.
Please go back and look at those numbers one more time.
What we are doing is clearly not working.
We have a system that does not give our young people any hope, and the consequences have been absolutely devastating.
Those of us that refuse to go along with the system are increasingly being marginalized and pushed to the fringes of our society, but we will not yield because we have found hope in Jesus Christ. If you would like to study the evidence that proves that the Christian faith is true, I would strongly encourage you to read my book entitled “Why”, because it contains a lot of information that has been kept from the general population.
Our schools aren’t going to tell you the truth.
Neither will the other major institutions in our society.
If you are tired of being lied to, it is time to wake up and start thinking for yourself.
We live at a time when deception is literally all around us, but the truth is still out there, and you can find it if you are willing to search for it.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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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.