(Daily Signal)—Whether through pressure exerted on social media platforms or through armed raids carried out against pro-life Americans, former President Joe Biden and his administration oversaw an alarming increase in the suppression and censorship of religious—chiefly Christian—expressions and actions in the public square.
At the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) International Christian Media Convention on Thursday, Christian journalists, broadcasters, and policy experts gathered to discuss where religious censorship stands today, now that President Donald Trump has returned to the White House.
“Censorship, as we know, is the trademark trait of authoritarian regimes throughout history, which is very telling that the Biden administration crossed that Rubicon in many ways and sent us down that slippery slope,” National Review columnist Caroline Downey told moderator Tyler O’Neil, a senior editor at The Daily Signal.
“For progressive administrations,” Downey added, “discrediting speech that threatens the ruling class is essential. And what is the most threatening kind of speech is mock or ridicule.”
Babylon Bee, Big Tech, and Fight Over Free Speech
Downey pointed to the example of the Babylon Bee, a conservative and Christian-themed satire news website, which has been repeatedly censored on social media for satirical posts critical of transgenderism, mainstream media outlets, and Democratic Party policies.
She noted that the censorship of the Babylon Bee was a key factor in prompting tech billionaire Elon Musk to purchase Twitter (now called X) and usher in a “renaissance of free discourse on a major social media platform.”
While Downey expressed her gratitude to Musk for restoring freedom of speech on X, she added that she found it “harrowing” that freedom of speech was protected only by “a benevolent billionaire,” asking, “How do you depend on those types of people to make sure that we have free conversation?”
Press Freedom Clashes With Religious Freedom
A more recent example Downey highlighted was that of former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who last month participated in an anti-immigration enforcement protest which disrupted services in City Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Downey suggested that Lemon behaved as though his First Amendment right to freedom of the press “trumped those worshippers’ freedom of religion.”
She continued, “I think what that shows is a flippancy toward people of faith, that they somehow … don’t apply under the protections of the First Amendment. But beyond that, I think it does show that there is a double standard when in politics, when it comes to religious people.”
Cancellation Replaces Deplatforming
The Daily Signal’s president and executive editor, Rob Bluey, agreed with Downey that the censorship of Christian media seems to be easing, thanks to individuals like Musk, Trump, and his administration, but cautioned that there is still “a lot of work to do because, on a daily basis, conservative media, Christian media are facing these challenges of censorship.”
Today, Bluey said, the threat is “cancellation.” He noted that a video series The Daily Signal had produced on gender ideology had been flagged by YouTube as “hate speech.”
Bluey explained, “The big tech firms that exist today, their leadership is most decidedly not Christian and do not particularly like people of faith and I think exercise these terms of service rules they’ve written into their platforms to censor the content that we experienced.”
How Marriage and Gender Became the Media Flashpoint
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins pointed to gender ideology and marriage as a key media battlefield between Christians and progressives.
Perkins recounted that he used to make frequent guest appearances on corporate media news programs but became persona non grata after then-President Barack Obama endorsed same-sex marriage in 2012.
“All of a sudden, the networks began to drop anyone who had a biblical view of marriage between a man and a woman, that was really the pivotal point, was on human sexuality and marriage. It later became gender, but the starting point was the redefinition of marriage,” Perkins observed.
He noted that even supposedly conservative media outlets like Fox News would not present a biblical perspective on marriage and sexuality. “It’s fundamental as a society, if we drop the idea of marriage and we capitulate to the Left’s redefinition of marriage, we have no future.”
Parents Push Back—and the Resistance Grows
Perkins recalled that the tide began turning against gender ideology thanks to parents, who made national headlines showing up to school board meetings and protesting progressive practices like critical race theory and transgender bathroom policies.
“That was the tipping point. It was moms and dads who said, ‘Enough of this, because you’re taking my children and you’re indoctrinating them, and you’re jeopardizing their future and leading them down a destructive path.’ So thank God for parents who had the backbone to stand up,” he emphasized.
Once parents began drawing attention to the issue, Perkins said, politicians began taking notice, in turn inspiring men and women of faith to step “into the political arena at every level: school board level, city council level, state legislature, and now in Congress. So yes, the resistance to censorship is becoming intense. Now it’s stepped back a little bit.”
However, Perkins also warned that American Christians ought not grow complacent.
He pointed out that organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which he said “has been the junkyard dog of the Left, forever labeling people hate groups so that it gives the media legitimacy to knock them off,” have substantial monetary reserves and are “probably not going to go away anytime soon.”
‘Now Is Not the Time to Be Silent’
The Left’s censorship regime, Perkins averred, is evidence that the Left fears the message shared by Christian media.
He urged fellow Christians “not to shrink back, not to be complacent, thinking that all problems are solved, but to charge forward and retake many of these institutions that have been the agents of censorship. … Now is not the time to shrink back. Now is not the time to be silent. Now is the time to take the hill.”
Alexis Wilkins, a senior fellow at the American Principles Project, agreed.
“This cannot be a generation of careful men. There is great concern that there are too many careful men,” she said, encouraging Christians to “address these problems—especially problems that arise in people censoring faith—with conviction, instead of cowardice, and credibility.”
While Wilkins acknowledged that Christians are called to treat others with charity and grace, she added that “we are not required to take a step back if someone challenges the values that we hold or the safety that we want to provide for our children, for the freedom to believe in Jesus in public spaces and private spaces, as we’ve seen during the Biden administration.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand.
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.