Freedom exists in the absence of government control. We are free when we are able to worship, speak, write, make a living, and protect our families and property without fear that government agents will punish us for our actions. America’s Founding Fathers embraced an expansive view of personal liberty that recognizes the inherent right of each person to do as he sees fit, so long as that person refrains from infringing upon the liberties of another.
Right away, then, freedom comes with some restraint. If we each lived alone on our own island, no-one’s liberty but our own would matter. When we live within a society, our freedom comes with certain encumbrances — namely, an obligation not to poach the freedom of others. There is, in other words, a moral consideration that necessarily accompanies the exercise of freedom. Do my actions cause someone else harm? Does the expression of my will unfairly restrict the expression of another? Do my decisions unjustly deny someone else’s liberty?
Harm…fairness…justice — these are words essential to every person’s moral reasoning. They are subjects that are dissected and analyzed throughout the Bible. Because our common law has evolved from a Biblical worldview, our legal system is rooted in Judeo-Christian morality. Therefore, an American who tries earnestly to be a good Christian is also likely acting within the boundaries of American law.
Taken together, freedom, moral restraint, and legal punishment operate in concert within any society. To the extent that a member of society can reasonably govern himself, State-implemented punishment becomes unnecessary. When members of society abandon self-control and pursue personal liberty recklessly or in ways that threaten the liberty of others, State-implemented punishment steps in to provide legal constraints where moral restraint proved ineffective.
Thus, there is a natural relationship among personal freedom, moral conscience, and State force. The more that people pursue their freedom in moral and just ways, the more irrelevant the State becomes. A society whose people are individually capable of governing themselves has no need for the machinery of government. The policing of a population’s legal obligations and the application of State-enforced punishments become not only redundant but also unjust infringements upon personal liberty.
It is no coincidence that free societies exist where there is a high degree of mutual trust among people. If a shop owner trusts that customers will not steal, then businesses can thrive without a government police force monitoring private transactions. If customers trust that manufacturers will refrain from making harmful products, then commerce can thrive without the need for government regulatory agencies. If members of society recognize that the fruits of an individual’s labor belong to that person, then property rights are respected without the need for courts and lawsuits. If public debate, dissent, and personal expression are highly valued, then there is no need for government agents to police words and ideas as “hate speech,” “harmful speech,” or “disinformation.”
High-trust societies are natural incubators of freedom. Accordingly, fostering trust among members of society maximizes personal liberty. How do societies cultivate trust? In a word: culture.
Culture is that collection of customs, mores, attitudes, traditions, beliefs, habits, language, and ways of life that bind a people together. Culture is an unwritten code of conduct passed from one generation to the next. Culture is the essential glue that allows common members of society to move in the same direction without any obvious director. Societies with strong cultures do not need external police forces because members of society “police” themselves.
When that culture includes a profound respect for personal freedom, private property, religious liberty, free expression, and self-defense, the mutual trust that exists among citizens naturally secures the blessings of liberty. It is no accident that an American, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the Declaration of Independence two hundred and fifty years ago. It is no accident that representatives from America’s original thirteen colonies devised together a Constitution that both greatly limits the powers of government and explicitly protects the inalienable rights of Americans. It is no accident that Americans’ respect for private property transformed an unsettled continent into the wealthiest, most innovative, and most influential country in the world. A moral people committed to personal freedom can build, do, and accomplish anything. A moral people committed to self-government can remake the entire world.
It is not difficult to see why the New World’s values have always threatened the Old World’s grip on global power. In a world where intelligence, hard work, and dedication matter more than titles of nobility and unearned inheritance, the common man is capable of generating wealth without a feudal lord’s permission. In a world where free speech and freedom of assembly are cherished political virtues, the common man is capable of forming opinions without the help of so-called “elites.” In a world where self-defense and private ownership of firearms go hand in glove with self-expression and private property, the common man is master of his castle and servant to none.
Globalism’s “elites” have been pushing the idea of a “New World Order” for decades. But it is important to remember that when Americans declared their independence from the British Empire, they established a “New World” order that has continued to the present day. Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, the United States is the wealthiest, strongest, and most robust nation that has ever existed. It has 4% of the world’s population but influences every part of the globe. When Old Europe pushes for a “New World Order,” old aristocrats are desperate to return to the social conditions that existed prior to 1776. Globalists want the “Old World Order” rebranded as something new.
Ask yourself how you might go about destroying America’s “New World” order, so that the Old World’s feudal system can return. If you want to dismantle Americans’ economic and political freedoms, then you need to wreck Americans’ mutual trust. If you want to turn Americans against each other, then you need to ruin the foundations of their shared culture. In order to weaken the bonds of culture, you must first discourage self-restraint. By discouraging self-restraint, you encourage demands for government control. By empowering the State, you diminish the sphere of personal freedom.
When the people have been denied freedom for long enough, they forget what it means to be free. Eventually, when the government offers “free” welfare in exchange for obedience, the descendants of free people accept their new chains. They accept total government control. They accept slavery.
Flooding Western countries with foreign immigrants has never been about compassion. Globalists use mass migration to destroy any semblance of social trust. “Multiculturalism” has nothing to do with fostering civic peace. Globalists “divide and conquer” populations in order to more easily rule over the dismembered parts. Anti-Christian programs do not exist to protect “diverse” points of view. Globalists attack Christians because Christian virtue cultivates the moral restraint necessary for freedom to thrive.
For globalists, freedom is the enemy. Government control is their greatest friend. You cannot destroy the former and promote the latter until the natural bonds of society are first broken. Totalitarianism never arrives by decree. It comes by request. In the two hundred and fiftieth year of America’s “New World” order, remember this: Our freedom is always under attack. Be vigilant and defend it.
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.