Another D-Day anniversary has come and passed, yet the significance of the date lingers with me. In some ways, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, receives greater commemoration than so many similarly heroic feats. Americans had been fighting in the Pacific Theater for more than two years before arriving in France, and both the Battle of Midway and the Battle of Guadalcanal in the summer of ’42 saw some of the bloodiest combat and self-sacrifice of the entire war.
Still, D-Day suitably binds those of us alive today to the brave generations who came before us. As the largest seaborne invasion in history and the lynchpin to the hard work of overwhelming and ultimately defeating Nazi Germany, thoughts of our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers storming exploding beaches covered in barbed wire while taking heavy fire from all directions remain indelible reminders that the men who fought for our freedom were of nobler, sturdier stock than most alive today.
Those men were a different breed altogether. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting quite a few over the years, and one of the first things you notice about the warriors from that generation is that they have no interest in singing their own praises. They do not seek recognition — and certainly not adulation. Nor do they describe lightly what they witnessed. I think most would stop talking after merely acknowledging, “I was there.”
I’ve always interpreted that soft declaration as a polite reminder that those who read about history do not know what history feels like when the blood of fallen friends suddenly streaks across one’s face. It is also, I think, part of an enduring promise to those friends who were lost: that their final moments will be reverently guarded and kept from prying eyes. The living witnesses remain on duty until their final breath.
It is a very different mentality to the one we often see today. Politicians who served in the military are particularly flashy while running for office. Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal told Connecticut voters that he had fought in the Vietnam War, when he had, in fact, never left U.S. soil as a Marine reservist. Maine’s Democrat senatorial candidate, Graham Platner, has such little respect for fellow warriors that he mocked Purple Heart recipient Ted Daniels for heroically shielding his squad during combat in Afghanistan by drawing enemy fire toward himself.
Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton (whose father has been staging his run for the presidency since he was a freshman in college) likes to show pictures of himself holding a rifle in Iraq as some kind of quasi-patriotic proof that his desire to gut the Second Amendment and disarm American citizens should be taken seriously. These Democrats have nothing in common with the brave men who fought and died during WWII.
When important dates such as D-Day arrive on the calendar, I cannot help but think of the courage and sense of duty that inspired so many great men to lay down their lives in service to their country.
Politicians and government bureaucrats often call themselves “public servants.” I mean no disrespect to the good civil workers out there, but in my experience, those who are most eager to describe themselves as “servants” tend to behave more as masters. It’s not just the three Democrat politicians I’ve mentioned above, who have used their military service as a springboard for obtaining higher office (following the John Kerry guide to exploiting the courage of others for personal political gain).
Members of Congress, in general, cannot be confused for “public servants.” Public servants don’t become wealthy by using their insider knowledge from secret committee meetings to make stock trades. Public servants don’t force overpriced, subpar Obamacare on citizens while awarding themselves top-shelf medical insurance coverage. Public servants don’t authorize warrantless, unconstitutional electronic surveillance of all Americans while creating lucrative causes of action for themselves should the Intelligence Community decide to spy on lawmakers, as well as citizens.
Public servants don’t vote on their salaries, perquisites, and retirement benefits while ordinary Americans struggle to make ends meet.
Likewise, the vast army of government bureaucrats don’t behave as public servants either. For several decades now, our “public servants” have been better paid than their counterparts in the private sector. Because of self-dealing public union agreements and quid-pro-quo collusion between lawmakers and bureaucrats, an arcane system of rules and regulations makes it incredibly difficult to fire even the most indolent and useless of government “workers.” Our bureaucratic “public servants” have better pensions and health benefits than the average American.
Taken together, would it not be more accurate to call a taxpaying American citizen in the private sector a “servant” of our public officials? After all, if somewhere between a third to half of your income is deducted from your paychecks in the form of local, state, and federal taxes, does that not indicate that you work for the government for four to six months each calendar year? Is that not just a non-violent and socially accepted form of modern slavery?
However one sees this relationship from the average taxpayer’s point of view, our so-called “public servants” are beneficiaries of a generous transfer of wealth, prestige, power, and privilege from supposedly self-governing citizens to the self-described governing “experts” who laughably refer to this imbalanced arrangement as “our democracy.”
This insulting inversion of what it means to be a servant of the public is all the more vulgar when compared to the authentic sacrifice members of the military make for the American people. It seems to me that we would all be better off if some of the salary and benefits awarded to the average cubicle king in D.C. were siphoned off and rerouted to those warriors’ families still paying the personal price for their loved ones’ commitment to real public service.
To no one’s surprise, both veterans and active members of the armed forces do not tend to plume their own feathers or seek new government benefits. They struggle with the health effects from having been exposed to toxic agents during combat.
They struggle with the loss of friends. They struggle with suicidal thoughts. Some struggle to keep a job and find a home. And if they were members of Congress, government bureaucrats, or part of just about any recognized “victim class” in American society, their stories would be front-page news. We would organize support groups and fundraisers. We would go street-by-street and door-by-door checking on those who put their lives on the line when it mattered most. We would invite them into our homes and make sure that they left with full bellies and warm coats.
The public servants most deserving of our attention, however, receive none of the rewards that our self-described “public servants” enjoy. In fact, members of Congress often work extra-hard to make sure that our veterans’ names are added to red-flag lists depriving them of their most basic right to self-defense — one of the unalienable personal rights that our veterans fought to preserve.
How does that make sense? It doesn’t. Unless you force yourself to step into the boots of the kind of man who clawed his way through the sands of Normandy to establish beachheads amidst chaos. That kind of man rarely asks for anything. Because when you survive hell, it’s difficult to recognize that hell has a way of following you home. It’s difficult to recognize invisible wounds when physical injuries claimed friends on the battlefield. It’s difficult to take someone else’s help when you are the one who usually offers it.
D-Day is an anniversary we should commemorate by honoring America’s true public servants every single day.
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.