(The Economic Collapse Blog)—If the protests in Los Angeles are supposed to be peaceful, why is brand new riot gear being trucked in and given to the protesters? And why isn’t this making front page news all over the country? First of all, protesters only need riot gear if riots are going to break out. Secondly, it is becoming clear that someone purchased large quantities of riot gear in advance.
So who funded those purchases, and who knew that riots would erupt in Los Angeles at this specific time? If corporate news outlets in this country were still employing real journalists, those are the types of questions that those journalists would be asking.
As Eric Daugherty has accurately pointed out, Fox News actually captured footage of “bionic shields” that normally cost 60 dollars each being handed out to rioters on the streets of Los Angeles…
PAID-FOR “bionic shields” are being trucked in for the Los Angeles rioters.
These cost around $60, each…and there are BOXES and BOXES of them being handed out.
“That’s not the kind of thing that you buy in bulk if you don’t plan on doing something with it…”
They are planning for a CLASH.
This an enormous scandal. Why aren’t more people talking about this?
According to Newsweek, the “bionic shields” were being handed out by two women as “a masked driver waited for them to unload the goods”…
TV cameras have captured boxes of “bionic shields” being distributed to protesters in Los Angeles on Monday.
Footage of the scene showed boxes of solid, full-face masks—almost akin to helmets—being handed out from the back of a pickup truck by two women while a masked driver waited for them to unload the goods.
The footage has sparked concerns among some that external agitators are facilitating riots by equipping crowds for potential clashes with the police or National Guard. However, others say the masks are safety gear, worn as a precaution after protesters were injured by rubber bullets that the authorities fired.
So where did all of these “bionic shields” suddenly come from? Did someone order them from Amazon? Of course not.
Obviously, someone already had large quantities of these “bionic shields” on hand. Needless to say, that has enormous implications.
Were these “bionic shields” purchased in advance for pre-planned protests that were scheduled to erupt this month?
We really need an answer to that question. And as Fox anchor Elex Michaelson has pointed out, we also need to know who is funding all of this…
Fox LA anchor Elex Michaelson wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “We just saw people arrive in Downtown L.A. with truck loads of Bionic Face Shields that demonstrators quickly grabbed. It certainly seems like gear you’d wear if you’re preparing for conflict with police. Who is funding this?”
There is also concern about a Craigslist advertisement for “extremely tough, brave men” that was recently posted. Was someone trying to recruit paid agitators? Snopes cannot determine if the ad is connected to the riots in any way, but even they were forced to admit that the ad “was real”…
On June 9, 2025, screenshots of an actual Craigslist advertisement seeking “extremely tough, brave men” for $6,500 to $12,500 per week began circulating on social media. Users on X posted the screenshots as “proof” that ongoing Los Angeles immigration protests were “orchestrated and well-funded chaos.”
The social media posts gained significant traction, with one example on X receiving 267,200 views and another garnering 374,300 views as of this writing.
The ad itself was real — in the sense that it was indeed posted on losangeles.craigslist.org at 1:20 p.m. PT on June 5, 2025 — one day before the immigration protests began in Los Angeles. An almost identical ad was posted on austin.craigslist.org just 37 minutes later at 1:57 p.m. PT.
If authorities want to get to the root cause of the problems that we are witnessing in Los Angeles, they need to find out where the funding for the protests is originating.
At this stage, there is a lot of speculation about three specific organizations…
When anti-U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agitators took to the streets in the Los Angeles area over the weekend attacking officers, setting cars on fire, and looting, they drew attention to the left-leaning activist groups that may have helped instigate the riots.
Three major organizations have come under increased scrutiny: the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, Los Angeles; the Party for Socialism and Liberation; and the Service Employees International Union. One of these groups, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, Los Angeles, has received millions in government funding.
In the case of CHIRLA, we know that they have been getting showered with taxpayer money in recent years…
Citing an investigative X thread from DataRepublican, Liz says that of a “number of NGOs [that] have been implicated, foremost is Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights [of Los Angeles], or CHIRLA.”
According to DataRepublican, “$34 million of [CHIRLA’s] reported $45 million in revenue are from government grants,” meaning taxpayer dollars are being used to pay the people who are setting fire to cop cars and hurling concrete slabs at federal agents.
During the Biden administration specifically, CHIRLA’s revenue “jumped from $12 million to $34 million in government grants.”
“The Joe Biden administration knew exactly who they wanted to give money to in order to set up situations like these riots in California,” says Liz.
Of course these organizations are funded by other sources as well, but it should deeply upset all of us that our tax dollars are being used for such purposes.
The corporate media keeps telling us that the protests are “mostly peaceful”, but meanwhile a horrifying crime spree has broken out in downtown Los Angeles…
Rioters in downtown Los Angeles looted a prominent Apple store amid protests against ICE raids in the city.
Images from the scene show rioters in hoodies and masks ransacking the store Monday night. Dozens of people can be seen throughout the property before at least one individual began breaking a window in order to escape from the side of the building.
President Trump is determined to do whatever it takes to restore order.
In fact, on Tuesday he warned that he could even invoke the Insurrection Act if that becomes necessary…
President Donald Trump flirted with invoking the Insurrection Act in Los Angeles as he tore into ‘bad people’ and ‘animals’ he said brought the city to the verge of burning down.
The president defended his decision to send 700 U.S. Marines as well as California National Guard to Los Angeles, and brushed off California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s claim that the deployment inflamed the situation.
And he would not rule out use of an authority to deploy military forces under his control to put down disturbances if he sees fit.
We were warned in advance that this sort of civil unrest would be coming.
Now it is here.
The Democrats have been preparing for this summer for a long time.
Now the chaos that they have been plotting is starting to be unleashed, and it is going to tear our country apart.
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.
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.
A vote for a Democrat(Communist) is a vote against America. What the hell is wrong with the voters in Ft. Worth, TX who just voted for a Democrat? They also voted for the riots in LA.
The President calls the CA Gov. Newscum; I call him Newsance. Whatever.