In a secret society typically left untouched by the outside world, the Freemasons are struggling to come to terms with the transgender ideology in their all-male fraternity, according to members who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.- In 2018, the United Grand Lodge of England issued a decision allowing transgender individuals to join the secret society, but this year, the Grand Lodge of Texas announced its own opinion on the issue, barring transgender members.
- “[One Texas lodge] has several visibly transgender people, these are people who either already took the oath as a guy and then changed or took the oaths saying that they were nonbinary, gender fluid, or something … and this is considered a big provocation,” a longtime Scottish Rite Mason from Houston told the DCNF.
The Freemasons, an all-male secret society whose history goes back to the Middle Ages, have been struggling to deal with the transgender movement infiltrating their ranks over the past several years, according to members who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In 2018, the United Grand Lodge of England, founded in 1717 and considered by Masons to be the most senior of all lodges, announced that it would allow transgender individuals to retain their membership at the lodge or be eligible for membership if they were transitioning to a man, according to the BBC. In the U.S., the issue is far from settled, with conservative Masons in states like Texas clashing with the more liberal fraternities on the coasts, and according to several Masons who spoke with the DCNF on the condition of anonymity, the issue is splitting the society with real consequences for those not falling in lockstep.
“[N]ow that all of these English lodges have been forced to allow females in and the mother Grand Lodge of the world is now being required by its own country’s Supreme Court to force all of its own members to break their oath and let females in,” a prominent central Texas Mason told the DCNF, “America and every other Grand Lodge is now stuck in a gray area, and we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
In March, the Grand Lodge of Texas, which oversees all the Freemason chapters in the Lone Star State, issued an opinion on the transgender debate directly contradicting the U.K. decision from five years prior. The Texas Grand Lodge said that it was not possible for a transgender individual to be a Mason based on the way the membership rules were originally intended to be interpreted in 1722, five years after freemasonry became a nationally organized fraternity in England and specific rules were established.
“A biological woman (meaning an individual who was assigned female at birth) cannot be a Mason,” the opinion reads. “A transgender man (meaning an individual who was assigned female at birth whose gender identity or gender expression is now male) cannot be a Mason. A transgender woman (meaning an individual who was assigned male at birth whose gender identity or gender expression is now female) cannot be made a Mason nor remain a Mason.”
A longtime Scottish Rite Mason from Houston told the DCNF that despite the decision, however, other lodges in Texas continue to have multiple openly transgender members.
“The problem is lots and lots of lodges in Texas have been admitting transgender people, very visibly,” the Mason told the DCNF. “[One lodge] has several visibly transgender people, these are people who either already took the oath as a guy and then changed or took the oaths saying that they were nonbinary, gender fluid, or something … and this is considered a big provocation.”
Additionally, consequences for not following the directives of England’s Grand Lodge can be extreme, according to the Masons. Chapters deemed illegitimate are barred from Masonic charities, special dorms on college campuses, trips and events and can even be removed as a recognized lodge.
In light of this, one of the Masons told the DCNF that it would not surprise him if the opinion is rescinded in a year or two once leadership switches hands to prevent being excommunicated by the rest of the community. Texas Freemasonry is also experiencing a notable demographic shift as older, more conservative members are slowly growing less common while younger, more liberal men take their place, according to the Masons who spoke with the DCNF.
“The idea of gay Masons and transgender Masons is causing consternation and divisive issues and a lot of that comes from the diversity within the fraternity as far as religious and political beliefs,” the Houston-area Mason told the DCNF.
The tension behind the transgender issue is a long time in the making, according to the Masons who spoke with the DCNF. In May 2022, an older gay Mason in Austin, who is a well-known musician and referred to as the Pianist, was written up on charges for derogatory comments against the Grand Lodge of Texas, which is expressly forbidden, after it prevented him from playing music during a ceremony, according to documents obtained by the DCNF.
The Pianist accused the Grand Lodge of being homophobic, racist and misogynistic hypocrites, enforcing some rules and not others, according to the documents, and the outburst prompted several individuals to file charges, restricting him from nearly all of his rights as a member. To date, the Lodge has allegedly not ordered a trial, and according to the Masons who spoke with the DCNF, it is being delayed to avoid restarting a decades-long disagreement among some members about whether the secret society should accept gay and transgender members.
The accusers who filed charges declined the DCNF’s request for comment, and the Pianist’s identity was not disclosed.
Combining this with the lack of enforcement of the Grand Lodge’s decision, many conservative Masons are feeling disenfranchised and ignored, while some of the more left-leaning members argue that the decision is evidence of Texas Masons’ intolerance of those who fall outside of a Christian, conservative lifestyle or worldview.
“We have a group of Christian extremists who hijacked our fraternity and they want to try to turn it into something churchy … and we’re really pushing back hard on it,” a central Texas Freemason told the DCNF. “So that’s kind of where we’re at right now. And yes, the [Pianist] is part of a greater problem that we’re experiencing in Freemasonry. He just represented everything they hated and there was a perfect opportunity for certain elements within our fraternity to come after him and come after [his] lodge in general.”
“So I’m a conservative Christian,” another prominent central Texas Mason told the DCNF. “I’m a member of my church, my Boy Scouts and my civic organizations and so forth. So my personal opinion is the same thing that it says in the Bible, which is that homosexuality is a sin and that transgender is still defined by the Merck Manual, which is a physician’s manual, as being a mental illness. So I mean, that’s kind of what I see as reality, [and] that is very divisive.”
The one thing the Masons who spoke to the DCNF all agreed on was that the gay and transgender issues should be handled separately. They noted that Freemason law expressly forbids anyone other than men from being part of the fraternity but says nothing about the sexual orientation of any male members, pointing to several famous gay Masons such as Oscar Wilde.
“Transgenderism is trying to insert itself into the gay community and they are separate issues,” a central Texas Freemason told the DCNF. “And they are trying to hijack the gay movement by making them support transgenderism, saying that if you don’t support transgenderism, you’re not supporting the gays. That’s totally not true.”
The Grand Lodge of Texas did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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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.