Last week, this poncy English toff named Chuck gave a speech to Congress. In his home country, they call him “Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.” However, as he had crossed America’s moat to visit the descendants of the rebels who turned the British Empire upside down, he looked like a “Chuck” to me.
President Trump hosted Chuck at the White House with splendid pomp and circumstance. He also greeted America’s former landlord with a contingent of Revolutionary War-attired soldiers and a huge statue of Benjamin Franklin. The White House communications team even blasted out a Paul Revere-esque warning to Americans: “The British are coming!” Taken together, the president’s message was polite but clear: Lovely of you to visit, and even lovelier to see you go.
I’ve never understood Americans’ fascination with the dis-United Kingdom’s “Royal Family.” The royal family…barf. The only “Royals” families that matter to me are the ones who support the Kansas City baseball club. That club, by the way, is named for the “American Royal,” a cattle show that began in the Kansas City Stockyards in 1899 and a tradition that took its name — with some humor and a tip of the ol’ cowboy hat — from the Royal Agricultural Society of England’s annual “Royal Show.” It was Missourians’ way of telling the rest of the world that, in America, horse shows, rodeos, and barbecue competitions are more important than any king.
Still, when I inspect the “pop culture” drivel spewing from the sewers of Reddit, Facebook, or podcast gabfests, I realize that a large number of Americans are enamored with the inbred idiots of Europe’s hemophiliac aristocracy. Wealth and fame are well-known aphrodisiacs, and just as some people are attracted to Hollywood actors too dumb to know just how dumb they are, many of those same people are attracted to pudgy, balding, stuttering, gouty imbeciles who know next to nothing, aside from how to wear an unwieldy crown.
I have noticed over the years that the Americans most caught up in the soap opera of wayward “spare” Harry and his “D List” actress wife Meghan (Are they “royals” still? Who cares.) are the same ones likely to go to a “No Kings” street performance in the middle of a workday afternoon. Leftists scream about the “patriarchy” with feral rage but are the first in line to grovel at the feet of reigning European patriarchs. When Downton Abbey was “Making the Monarchy Great Again,” every other article coming from the rubbish bin of America’s glamour magazines dramatically declared,
This is the kind of caring, compassionate, feminist, virtue-signaling aristocracy that we deserve! The same groupies who loved Downton also “occupied Wall Street” and endorsed the murder of anyone loosely connected to the “1%.” As is their bent, leftists talk a great deal from their own derrières. They speak in flatulence and call it French.
Chuck is hardly a ringing endorsement for monarchy. He is plain and uninteresting. His wife, Camilla, is plain and uninteresting. Together, they look like a couple of forgotten antiques that the American Pickers crew might find in an old barn. If I lived in a land that made these two my “rulers,” I would at least understand the impulse to commit national-suicide-by-Islamic-conquest. You look at the extended “Royal Family” — an odd assortment of perverts, profligates, and prostitutes — and a reasonable person might rightly conclude, “Yeah, Britain’s done. The party’s over. Turn out the lights, and call it a night.”
The kingdom’s ruling monarch used to daydream about being a tampon, for goodness’ sake! We make fun of “Tampon” Tim Walz in the United States because the governor of the Somali colony of Minnesota insists on putting women’s menstrual products in boys’ locker rooms. Chuck wanted to become a menstrual product so that he could become “closer” to the object of his affections, and the Brits made Creepy Uncle Chuck king!
Sending Chuck over to woo President Trump during America’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday bash wasn’t a great idea. Yeah, we Americans have a connection to our British pals across the pond. On the other hand, none of us relates to the reigning king. Seeing him in action leaves the impression that the reason we speak of America’s “special relationship” with the U.K. is that Britain is, well, special and needs a little extra help getting on in the world. After all, our former lords did scuttle their navy, declare war on “climate change,” and invite most of the third-world to invade their shores. Do these sound like the actions of a sane and competent empire or the delusional concerns of another mad English king?
For what it’s worth, Congress seemed to adore Mad King Chuck’s speech to the corrupt members of its dishonest and degenerate legislative body. Democrat senators and representatives — you know, the self-described “anti-authoritarians” inciting insurrection against the federal government and assassination attempts against President Trump — jumped to their feet to applaud a foreign king. Democrats actually love authoritarians, so long as those authoritarians believe what Democrats believe. And King Cuck Chuck speaks “Democrat” as well as the Democrats’ own Senate minority leader, up-Chuck Schumer.
Royal Chuck told America’s preeminent criminal class of insider-traders-posing-as-esteemed-lawmakers how important it is for the United States and the United Kingdom to remain partners in defending “democracy” around the world (so long as the U.S. military does all the hard work and American taxpayers foot the bill).
His Majesty “Chas Trips” reminded Congress of America’s obligation to defend Ukraine from Vladimir Putin because the United States is in NATO; and Article 5 requires the collective defense of all members; and Ukraine, of course, is not a member of NATO; but reasons and such; therefore, Americans must support non-NATO Ukraine because the British king who dreamed of being a tampon says so.
Chuck also pontificated on the importance of respecting the “rules-based international order” (which globalist financial elites from the City of London wrote so that globalist financial elites from the City of London could make lots of money). The British king took a number of swipes at President Trump by demanding “checks and balances” on the Executive Branch. If what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, we Americans would like to demand that the British stop making inbred dotards king.
Finally, Chuck III declared, “Nature is my god.” As someone who has chosen to “defend the Christian faith” by submitting to Islam, it’s hardly surprising that the British king worships Mother Earth, not Jesus Christ. Camilla’s poodle has replaced the Three Magi with Greta Thunberg, Al Gore, and John Kerry.
If we little people don’t embrace serfdom, totalitarianism, and a global government run by ruling elites, then bad weather will kill us all. Of course, our would-be feudal lords have bunker-palaces in New Zealand where they can safely watch us die. Chuck’s Green New Deal commandment to Americans is thus: Submit to carbon taxes and global redistribution of wealth, or suffer damnation in hell (which almost certainly means being stuck listening to Thunberg, Gore, and Kerry whine for eternity).
I listened to Britain’s tampon king for one reason: to remind myself how awesome it is to be an American during this year, our country’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. Chuck did not disappoint. I’m extremely grateful our ancestors chucked the monarchy into the deep sea. Getting rid of useless kings was step one in making America great. Ignoring foreign kings who visit our shores is essential for keeping her great.
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.