(WND)—This year is the 100th anniversary of the Hollywood sign, which used to say “Hollywoodland.”
But today the city is on hard times. A recent headline at deadline.com is, “Hollywood Jobs Down Nearly 20% This Year, & Not Just Because Of The Strikes, Study Says.”
The article notes, “Despite the now-resolved writers and actors strikes shutting down Hollywood production for several months, the loss of tens of thousands of Tinseltown jobs this year actually is part of a larger economic contraction, a just-released study claims – and those gigs might not be coming back.”
I see constant stories on how Disney is producing one flop after another at the box office. In their effort to be as woke as possible, the leaders at Disney purposefully violate the maxim that “the customer is always right.” They also seem to have forgotten the adage “Let kids be kids.”
Whether you’re a person or a company or a nation, you can never escape from an important principle in life found in the Bible.
Paul wrote, “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” We can never escape the consequences of our actions, good or bad. That’s why we need the Savior whose birth we celebrate at this time of year.
There was a time, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, when the movie moguls were not at war against America, against Christianity, against biblical morality.
Dr. Ted Baehr is an author and the publisher of Movieguide, which provides a biblical perspective on the movies. I reached out to him for a statement responding to the question: “What, if anything, did the church have to do with the Golden Age of Hollywood?”
His email to me was so lengthy I posted his whole answer here.
Baehr said, “Part of the reason for the breakdown of morality in movies and television today, and in the culture at large, is that people of faith retreated from being salt and light in the culture.”
He continued, focusing on movies and media programming, “From 1933 to 1966, people of faith were one of the predominant forces in Hollywood. During that period, the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency and the Protestant Film Commission (which started several years after the Legion of Decency) read every script to ensure that movies represented the largest possible audience by adhering to high standards of decency. As a result, ‘Mr. Smith [went] to Washington,’ ‘It [was] a Wonderful Life’ and ‘The Bells of St. Mary’s’ rang out across the land!”
Consider that the movies of the year in 1966 and 1967 respectively had Christian themes: “The Sound of Music” and “A Man for All Seasons.” But then the church left Hollywood, and by 1970, the movie of the year was X-rated, “Midnight Cowboy.”
I’m a big fan of old movies, especially comedies from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. I have seen scores of these films. I enjoy the films of Laurel and Hardy (1927-1940), W.C. Fields (1932-1941), the Marx Brothers (1929-1940), Charlie Chaplin (1917-1940), Buster Keaton (1920-1929) and others.
What a contrast to many, if not most, of today’s comedians. So many of them are so dirty; they get nervous laughs by shocking their audience, not by providing something actually funny.
But when a comedian is forced to resort to his wit, he is much funnier by being clean. I’m so glad W.C. Fields and Groucho Marx were born when they were. If they belonged to a later generation, they could have easily gone the lazy route for cheap laughs. But I doubt people would be watching their movies decades after they performed (as I do).
In recent times, many busy Christians have been working to provide positive Christian films, people like the Kendrick Brothers, Erwin Brothers, Kevin and Sam Sorbo, Dean Cain and the team at Pure Flix. What a positive trend this is turning out to be.
The smash hit last summer, “Sound of Freedom,” starring Jim Caviezel, was a faith-based movie. Mel Gibson helped begin this trend two decades ago with “The Passion of the Christ” by doing an end-run around the biased anti-Christian media.
Some people might think Hollywood has no place for the church. But who created the city of Hollywood and why?
In his book, “Inventing the Dream,” author Kevin Starr writes: “Hollywood, as Horace and Daeida Wilcot envisioned their city-to-be, would be a model Southern Californian community: Christian, righteous, and very dry – no saloons, no liquor stores, with free land offered to Protestant churches locating within the city limits” (p. 284). The city incorporated in 1903, 11 years after the death of Mr. Wilcot.
For too long, many well-meaning Christians have ignored the popular culture, despite its impact for bad or good. As Dr. Baehr warns us: “Whoever controls the media controls the culture.”
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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.
