During the first week of October, the American Library Association (ALA) “celebrates” an exercise in self-delusion called “Banned Books Week.”
“For more than 40 years,” the ALA insists, “the annual event has brought together the entire book community – librarians, teachers, booksellers, publishers, writers, journalists, and readers of all types – in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.”
In my experience, libraries are notoriously hostile to “unorthodox or unpopular” ideas when those ideas come from the right. Fueling that hostility are insecure, left-leaning women, the “Karens” of our sidewalk encounters and sleepless nights.
I had my suspicions confirmed last week when the board of the Darwin Barker Public Library in Fredonia, New York, chose to “disinvite” me from a speaking engagement arranged by a brave part-time librarian.
The subject was my new book, “Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities.”
As I recounted in last week’s column, library director Graham Tedesco-Blair blithely emailed me, “Recent developments have led us to re-evaluate the suitability of your views and opinions for our diverse audience as well as the potential impact they might have on the inclusive and welcoming atmosphere we strive to foster within our library community.”
Last week I speculated, “By ‘recent developments’ – I’m guessing here – he means an ideological Karen or two called in to complain that the library was hosting someone with whom they were likely to disagree.”
In the week since, my speculation has been confirmed. The president of the library board emailed my wife, “So, very soon after our website posting which announced Jack’s appearance at the Barker we began to receive numerous correspondence ranging from general disbelief to adverse protestations from with in the local community.”
He then added, as though this detail were necessary, “Oddly, all of this response came from women.” I should clarify here. All Karens may be women, but not all women are Karens.
Upon hearing of my disinvite, one women, whose actual name is “Karen,” invited me to speak at the Chautauqua County TEA – Totally Engaged Americans – Party at their upcoming meeting. “And,” she added wryly, “you will not be disinvited.”
Once the word got out other local women emailed their sentiments – ranging from general disbelief to adverse protestations – letting Mr. Tedesco-Blair know what they thought of the library’s decision.
Unlike the Karens, these women knew exactly what they were protesting, namely a publicly funded betrayal of the library’s core mission by its director and board of trustees.
“I am absolutely appalled at your decision to cancel Jack’s book presentation,” wrote Virginia. “Your job as library director is to provide open, unbiased access to information and viewpoints from many different sources regardless of who might or might not be offended.”
“You have made me ashamed of being a resident of Chautauqua County,” said Beth in an email. “I have just become aware that you ‘disinvited’ a nationally known author due to your concerns about ‘diversity.’
“You only care about diversity when it lines up with your little cause,” Beth continued. “Such a small, small man you must be. You can’t even stand up to a few Karens who couldn’t bear the thought of letting someone with whom they disagree speak to people who wanted to hear him.”
Some women were more delicate in their approach. “Just wanted to let you know I emailed the director,” Kathy emailed me, “and very politely told him he sucks for canceling your speaking appearance.”
On Aug. 15, the brouhaha made the local newspapers. Although awkwardly titled – “Author Critical Of Library After Talk Canceled” – the article was more than fair.
Reporter John D’Agostino added this helpful clarification: “According to one slang dictionary, Karen is a pejorative term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviors.”
The slang dictionary is harder on Karens than I would be. Those Karens I know tend to be more anxious than angry. Lacking confidence in their own beliefs, they are as wary of dissent as Dracula is of dawn. Unfortunately, they are destroying America, one local library at a time.
Fortunately, though, not all librarians are as feckless as Mr. Tedesco-Blair, an honorary Karen and the newly named “New York State Librarian.”
The librarian who extended the original invitation defies the norm. “Your cancellation by the library is a hot topic,” she said in an email to me. When I expressed my regret at her predicament, she consoled me, “I am not sorry I was involved.”
There is hope for this country yet.
Jack Cashill’s new book, “Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities,” is available in all formats.
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
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.