(The Organic Prepper)—The government defines malinformation as “based on fact but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
In other words, inconvenient truths.
Now, while this nation used to celebrate the revelation of inconvenient truths, one of the 21st century’s biggest spreaders of inconvenient truths, Julian Assange, may be headed to prison for the rest of his life.
Extradition hearings for the WikiLeaks founder wrapped up on February 21, though a decision by British judges is not expected till mid-March. If extradition is granted, this Australian publisher and journalist will be taken to the United States, where he will stand trial on espionage charges.
How does an Australian journalist, who has scarcely spent any time on American soil, get charged under American espionage laws? How does someone, whose only criminal conviction so far has been bail-jumping, spend nearly five years in “Britain’s Guantanamo” on top of seven years in near-isolation in an embassy?
What did Julian Assange do?
Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks was designed to facilitate whistleblowing by providing an anonymous platform for whistleblowers to post material. In 2010, WikiLeaks published almost half a million documents from US intelligence analyst Bradley/Chelsea Manning. Despite the fact that most of this information was already in the public domain, then-President Obama condemned Assange as a national security threat, and Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, though the sentence was later commuted
Citizens older than 40 may remember Obama campaigning on creating the most transparent administration ever, in his desire to distance himself from the Bush administration and its War on Terror. However, Obama went on to charge more people under the Espionage Act than any other president in history.
None of this stopped Assange. Later, in 2010, WikiLeaks published about 250,000 American diplomatic cables. At the end of the year, while Assange was living in Britain, two Swedish women made sexual assault allegations against him.
Assange did not want to go to Sweden to face trial; he believed the Swedes would turn him over to the American government. So, in 2012, he sought refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy. The Ecuadorans granted him asylum after the Swedish government would not guarantee keeping him out of American custody.
Seven years later, in 2019, the Ecuadorians turned him over to the British police after complaining about his increasingly bizarre behavior and violating their conditions of hosting him.
Since Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy rather than go to court, the British government charged him with bail-jumping and granted him the maximum sentence for this, fifty weeks. When the fifty weeks were up, the US charged him with espionage. As lawyer-turned-journalist Glenn Greenwald noted at the end of 2020, espionage charges are so complex that this guaranteed Assange would spend years in prison as British courts deliberated.
Indeed, Assange has been in Belmarsh for more than four years now, where he suffered a minor stroke in 2021, at the age of 50. Again, this is all without being convicted of any crimes more serious than bail-jumping.
How are authorities defending this?
In his data dumps, Assange revealed the names of collaborators within Iraq and Afghanistan. American lawmakers say that revealing these names, as well as the actions of American soldiers in those wars, puts American lives at risk. They believe, therefore, that Assange does not deserve any of the protections journalists would normally enjoy.
There would be a logic to this, if it could be proven true that Assange cost American lives. However, it cannot. No soldiers have ever been proven to have died as a result of Julian Assange’s actions. And as far as the welfare of our foreign collaborators, where was our concern for them when we fled from Afghanistan, handing over more than $80 billion worth of weaponry to the Taliban?
Furthermore, what about the more recent dump of classified information regarding American intervention in Ukraine?
The double standard is nauseating.
Assange’s persecution has far less to do with concern for American soldiers, or their overseas friends, than it does with the fact that Julian Assange embarrassed the Washington establishment in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular.
Documents posted on WikiLeaks showed that the 2016 Democratic primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton. Naturally, Hillary’s team did not find this flattering, and so her campaign blamed WikiLeaks in part for her 2016 loss.
Hillary does not have a reputation for letting offenses slide. In 2016, she said, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” regarding Assange After being confronted about this, like a good politician, she said she doesn’t remember saying that, but if she did, it was just a joke.
Though Trump seemed generally sympathetic toward Assange, his appointees hated him, particularly CIA director Mike Pompeo. In 2017, CIA officials were so mad about Vault 7 leaks they discussed assassinating Assange.
The Vault 7 leaks revealed vulnerabilities within different operating systems. While federal agencies were upset about the information itself being leaked, what was even worse was that no one at the agencies noticed the data was missing until WikiLeaks posted it.
In response, Mike Pompeo designated WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” Intelligence officials tried to find leaks between WikiLeaks and the Russian government, though they were never able to do so. Even a former national security official under Trump admitted that the actions taken toward Assange were out of embarrassment, not in response to any kind of tangible threat.
The real problem with Julian Assange is that he destroys narratives.
I don’t know the man personally; I don’t know if he does what he does out of a sincere, disinterested love of truth or if he simply hates the US and wants to humiliate us on the world stage. Maybe he’s just a provocateur who wants to take down the biggest guy in the room.
Either way, our political class can’t tolerate it. They believe that the narrative is more important than the truth and that without a uniting narrative, the American public will collapse.
Who remembers 1984, when Winston gets a copy of The Book? He reads about the Inner Party, about how those most fanatical about the war effort are precisely those who are most aware of how cynically war is used to keep the standard of living low.
This is a real phenomenon, and it’s how Julian Assange described the war in Afghanistan back in 2011, “. . . because the goal is not to completely subjugate Afghanistan. The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the United States, out of the tax bases of European countries, through Afghanistan, back into the hands of the transnational security elite. . . The goal is to have an endless war, not a successful war.”
Assange made this prediction ten years before our humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, and several years after the Americans could have won the war, had they not gotten distracted in Iraq. All introspection regarding Iraq and Afghanistan proves his points.
Assange continually called bullsh*t on a political elite that thinks Americans are too stupid to keep track of our own overseas interventions.
The US was never supposed to be an unaccountable political establishment.
This country was created with a system of checks and balances, precisely to keep the branches of the government restrained by each other, and the entire apparatus accountable to the people.
A free press facilitates this. Yes, it’s ugly sometimes. I had friends in Iraq. I was furious when the Abu Ghraib photos leaked. But, after years of ruminating on situations like these, I believe it is better for the American public to know what war consists of. I think the press should make it clear that our adversaries in various entanglements are not particularly humane, either. War is ugly. People do horrible things to each other. And that is why it is so important to have a diplomatic class that sees war as an option of last resort.
What happened to Assange should scare everyone who loves freedom.
Assange isn’t killing people. He just reveals information in times and places that the political class dislikes. The Washington establishment wants to push the same narrative that’s been pushed since WWII, that of the Americans being the permanent good guy, no matter what. Assange hasn’t been lying. He’s spreading malinformation, the information that is technically true but inconvenient to the prevailing narrative.
The Legacy Media loved Assange fifteen years ago when the liberal establishment was in favor of anything making George W. look bad. Today, as Assange’s revelations continue to drive the public’s general distrust of the political elite, they want him to disappear. If extradition is granted, they may get their wish.
Julian Assange is guilty of malinformation. That’s it. His decades-long harassment should concern anyone who truly believes in the First Amendment, a free press, and the United States as the Founding Fathers envisioned it.
What do you think?
Do you think that Assange has been unfairly persecuted? Do you think his leaks were important information or stuff that should’ve remained secret? Do you think he’ll be extradited to the United States? What then?
Let’s discuss it in the comments section.
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.
