Our society is unwell. We see this in a thousand different ways. Regular church attendance has declined significantly over three generations. Marriage rates are down; divorce rates are up. An increasing percentage of women choose not to have children; an increasing percentage of men choose not to settle down.
For its part, the entertainment industry glorifies selfishness, violence, vanity, promiscuity, abortion-on-demand, immediate gratification, and overindulgence, while mocking religion, hard work, compassion, fidelity, strong marriages, committed parents, and healthy families.
Post-WWII Americans participated in clubs, amateur sports, town halls, civic organizations, and religious gatherings; today, Americans collect online “friends,” scream obscenities on social media platforms, and exercise next to strangers in the gym. As every part of our personal lives has become politicized, it has become increasingly difficult for Americans with varying political beliefs to interact. Political grievance has grown into a monster whose shadow follows us everywhere.
This shadow now eclipses the invaluable relationships that we once collectively understood as “our society,” the special camaraderie among countrymen that has little to do with government or politics and everything to do with a people’s concern for, allegiance to, and cooperation with each other.
Although the ugly symptoms of society’s illness are visible everywhere, they are particularly revolting when it comes to public celebrations of and excuses for murder.
Over the last year, four high-profile murders have continued to dominate the news
- the political assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson
- the political assassination of Charlie Kirk
- the stabbing murder of high school student Austin Metcalf in Texas
- a Massachusetts mother’s strangling-murder of her three young children
Three of the four defendants accused of having committed these murders have either admitted to killing their victims or been convicted of murder.
The defendant standing trial for Charlie Kirk’s murder sent a number of communications after the assassination that strongly suggest his culpability. In other words, there has been very little confusion in any of these four cases as to who committed murder.
Nevertheless, all four defendants have received an outpouring of support from parts of the American public.
After the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, American leftists celebrated the murder as some kind of “principled” and “justified” fight against private health insurance. Thompson’s assassin had inscribed the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” on cartridge cases used in the killing, and he was apprehended with a short manifesto criticizing the American healthcare system.
These facts combined with the murderer’s boyish good looks were enough to turn him into a celebrity among those Americans who wish to expand Obamacare’s government takeover of medicine and end private health insurance for good. Even though the murderer shot Thompson in the back, many Democrats blamed “capitalism” and “corporate greed” for the slaying.
Hundreds of thousands of social media users mocked the murder victim, and crowdsourcing raised well over a million dollars in funds to support the murderer’s legal defense. Fashion designer Marc Jacobs called the murderer a “trendsetter” who “looks pretty good the way he dresses.”
A similarly ghoulish public reaction followed the assassination of conservative thought-leader Charlie Kirk last September. American leftists flooded social media platforms with celebratory messages. Many news pundits suggested that Kirk’s Christian faith and defense of conservative principles made him guilty of “hate speech,” a ludicrous charge that his alleged assassin had repeated in private messages. Democrat politicians mocked Kirk’s young family for defending the Second Amendment after a rifle had been used in his murder.
Jimmy Kimmel used his late-night show to disseminate the lie that MAGA Americans were somehow responsible for Kirk’s assassination, even though all evidence points to a violent leftist in a relationship with someone claiming to be “transgender.”
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah defamed Kirk as a “racist” and lectured, “Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness, and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.”
In defending her callous trivialization of a political assassination, she insisted, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is…not the same as violence.” A leftist assassinated Charlie Kirk for his political beliefs, and the mainstream corporate press have conspired with American leftists to blame Kirk for his own murder.
After a black high school student stabbed Austin Metcalf in the heart with a knife at a Texas track meet, every race huckster in America came to the murderer’s defense. James Talarico, the Texas Democrat running for the U.S. Senate, has argued that, because “there were no black members of the jury” that convicted Metcalf’s murderer, the “system is not working for black Texans.” The New Black Panther Party has spent months demanding that the murderer be released in the name of “black power.”
Many of the murderer’s apologists claim that he acted in self-defense. These absurd and racist claims have persisted despite the convicted murderer having admitted to police that he committed the murder. Hours before killing Metcalf, the murderer texted, “When I stab somebody I’m gonna lick their blood off the blade.”
The murderer’s girlfriend reported him for stalking just one hour before he stabbed Metcalf to death. In another text, the murderer admitted being “on the verge” of committing violence. Nevertheless, the murderer has legions of supporters who blame “white supremacy” for his conviction.
Finally, mobs of pink-clad, leftist women are defending a Massachusetts mother on trial for murder, even though she confessed to strangling her three children to death. The murderer and her army of supporters blame “postpartum psychosis” for the triple-murder. Women across the country have chosen to give the child murderer “the peaceful support she deserved.” There are thousands of online videos in which women express sympathy for the murderer because of how difficult it is to take care of young children.
If the thought of millions of leftist women across the country empathizing with a mother who strangled her own babies were not startling enough, it is worth noting that over 50 percent of white, leftist women under the age of thirty have been diagnosed with a mental health condition and nearly 30 percent of women have an antidepressant prescription.
On the flip side, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is serving decades in prison for subduing — in a manner consistent with his training — George Floyd, a non-compliant suspect under arrest who had a lengthy criminal record and both fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system.
Because Floyd subsequently struggled to breathe and died while in custody, leftists demanded that Chauvin be tried and convicted of murder. Seeking vengeance, not justice, Black Lives Matter and Antifa burned down neighborhoods across the country and left dozens of unsolved homicides in their wake. The threat of continued violence secured Chauvin’s conviction.
As Elon Musk recently wrote, “Derek Chauvin was unjustly convicted of murder, therefore he should be freed. The facts show that he was not the cause of death, nor did he at any time intend for death to occur.…That is the truth.” But Chauvin is white, and the man who died in his custody was black. In America, “black lives matter” is a sacred mantra; “all lives matter” is considered “hate speech.”
When murderers are celebrated and scapegoats go to prison to satisfy the mob, it is clear that American society suffers from a devastating illness. We have communists who cheer the murder of businessmen. We have delusional people struggling with identity issues who believe Christians should be killed. We have race hucksters who excuse violence, while condemning police officers’ best efforts to enforce the law. And we have a lot of women who embrace and excuse madness.
Leftism is a deadly disease. Those suffering should seek immediate help.
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.