Governments habitually lie. They lie so often that it is peculiar for governments to claim “authority” on anything other than falsehood. Before the Gutenberg press and general literacy, “authorities” announced self-serving lies in the public square. With the arrival of newsprint, “authorities” disseminated State propaganda as daily news. Radio and television revolutionized the mass manipulation of minds.
The adoption of the personal computer, the rise of the Internet, the commercialization of pocket computers posing as handheld phones, and the sticky web of an ever-growing social media complex have made it possible for government “authorities” to reach inside every human brain and squish it into compliance. AI-powered machines now manufacture and disseminate lies faster than human-powered governments ever could.
Most people are only now realizing that — even in so-called “free” countries — government-sanctioned propaganda, censorship, and misdirection are pervasive and routine. To the surprise of citizens taught to “trust the authorities,” the unvarnished truth is a bitter pill to swallow: Governments regularly employ psychologically manipulative, and even exploitative, forms of information warfare against their own citizens.
Politicians and generals tell lies to mobilize the American public for war. Economists and central bankers tell lies to justify money-printing that robs from the middle class and rewards wealthy elites. Government regulatory bodies tell lies about the safety of food and medicine before taking lucrative jobs inside the global food and pharmaceutical industries. The Chamber of Commerce calls the offshoring of blue-collar jobs and the importation of slave-produced crap “free trade.”
How can the word “authority” maintain any positive meaning when “authorities” are always wrong? At least since the First World War, scientific “authorities” have promised that human industry and mass commercialization would kill the planet in the “next few years.”
After Trump thumped Hillary like a drum, Intelligence Community “authorities” concocted an elaborate scheme to frame the MAGA outsider as a Russian agent who threatened national security unless removed from office. When Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the World Economic Forum sank the globe into mass COVID hysteria, health “authorities” promised that children would die unless they sat behind plexiglass-enclosed desks, their parents got experimental injections every few months, and every stranger wore at least three masks!
Since the Second World War, trust in “authority” has evaporated. Why? Perhaps because “authorities” routinely lie, keep secrets, and cover up crimes. Roughly three-quarters of Americans think the CIA killed President Kennedy. A top FBI official transformed a rather mundane Watergate scandal into a successful operation for taking down President Nixon after his landslide re-election victory. President Bush I pushed the “new world order.”
President Clinton “did not have sexual relations with that woman.” President Bush II gave us endless war with few long-term successes. President Obama told us we could “keep” our doctors before doubling the cost of healthcare instead. Secretary of State Clinton was never prosecuted for keeping classified documents on an unsecured private server in her home, but President Biden made sure to send an FBI SWAT team to bust down President Trump’s doors.
Politicians, prosecutors, judges, and news media mouthpieces told us that 2020’s mass riots, arson, robbery, and murder were justified civil rights “protests” against racism. Those same “authorities” told us that J6 protesters seeking free and fair elections were “insurrectionists” and “terrorists.” Now those “authorities” tell us that anti-ICE insurrectionists terrorizing citizens and attacking federal agents are “protesting” for civil rights once again. When “authorities” describe riots as “protests” and protests as “insurrections,” words mean nothing.
Meanwhile, the average member of Congress enters office as a salaried “public servant” and exits office a millionaire! Inside every institution of “authority,” corruption is king!
A writer named Lucas Leiroz argues that revelations within the Epstein documents prove that “nothing legitimate remains in the Western world.” Predicting the “moral collapse of the elites,” he thinks the “systematic, organized, and ritualized” nature of their perversions and crimes constitutes nothing less than a civilizational “rupture.”
Why? “When evidence emerges of extreme violence against children, of practices that go beyond any conventional criminal category, the discussion ceases to be legal and becomes civilizational.” The reason why people are fascinated with this scandal is that it undermines the legitimacy of so many powerful people in positions of “authority.” The very elites who have been exposed as monsters “continue to decide elections, wars, economic policies, and the fate of entire societies.”
Leiroz sees the Epstein scandal as the final straw for broad swaths of the public. “How can one continue to accept the authority of institutions that shielded this level of horror?” he asks. “How can respect be maintained for laws applied selectively by people who live above them?” Those are good questions. As “authorities” have been exposed as liars, the public has lost trust in them.
Now that “authorities” have been exposed as “pedophiles, satanists, and cannibals,” the public is disgusted with them. When members of society “still retain some sense of limits” and members of the “ruling class” behave as if they were “outside the common human species,” the structures of power forfeit moral legitimacy.
Leiroz says, “After Epstein, nothing can continue as before.” In the months ahead, we will see whether he is correct. This much is certainly true: For three-quarters of a century, trust in “authorities” has steadily declined. Over the last couple decades, those “authorities” have proven to be frauds, grifters, and liars. Now many of these same “authorities” have been exposed as sick and depraved perverts whose actions are, as Leiroz describes, “vile and essentially evil.” How are ordinary citizens supposed to ignore “absolute evil,” while so many devils maintain positions of “authority”?
The devil is the father of lies. We should not be surprised when the same “authorities” who regularly tell us lies end up behaving just as wickedly as the devil, too.
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.