Ah, 1776 — a time when the ruling aristocracy taxed Americans without their say, destroyed printing presses of those publishers demanding liberty, and jailed outspoken critics for treason. How things have changed — not! If there were one indispensable truth to be learned from America’s glorious Independence, it is this: governments do not give freedom; they take freedom away.
Any smooth-talking politician who pretends that government should be praised for the “gifts” it bestows upon the people is a smiling agent of the Crown fashioning new chains for citizens to wear. Laws, taxes, and regulations do not liberate human beings; they are the bricks and mortar trapping us inside ever-smaller cells.
Government is the destroyer of liberty. Bureaucracies do not light the flame of freedom; they snuff freedom’s light out. People alone (separate from the organizing strictures of the State) secure their liberty by pushing back against and restraining the otherwise ever-growing oppression of power-hungry governments. Citizens hold the keys to their own prison cells. They must only find the courage to open up their doors and walk outside. This was true in 1776; it is no less true today.
What is remarkable about the period leading up to the American Revolution is how quickly public sentiment shifted. By and large, colonists saw themselves as loyal servants of the English Crown until, suddenly, they were not. They celebrated King George III’s birthday each year. They formed militias to aid their king in wars against his European foes. As late as 1775, few Americans desired anything so radical as political Independence. The idea seemed far-fetched.
A year after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, half a year after the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and a month after Richard Henry Lee of Virginia urged the Second Continental Congress to declare the United Colonies, “free and independent States,” Americans were well on their way to separating from the British Empire for good. Colonial delegates agreed to a Resolution for Independence on July 2, approved Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence on July 4, began publishing the Declaration on July 6, and publicly read the Declaration in Philadelphia’s Independence Square on July 8. A year later, Philadelphia celebrated July 4 as an official Independence Day holiday with music, bonfires, parades, military processions, speeches, and fireworks. From loyal servants of the Crown to rebellious rabble-rousers who staged mock funerals for King George in the space of two years. Sometimes History comes at you fast.
Fifteen years earlier, American colonists had been fighting alongside British redcoats in the French and Indian War. Now they were conducting guerrilla warfare campaigns against English garrisons and seizing English vessels. America had no navy; young fishermen and sea merchants created one. America lacked well-trained, professional soldiers. Sharpshooting hunters with accurate long rifles had to suffice. America didn’t have enough young men to bear alone the burden of fighting. Old veterans, patriotic young women, and dedicated wives became instrumental to the Revolution’s success.
Samuel Whittemore, around eighty years old when the British marched on Lexington, is often credited as the oldest colonial combatant. His obituary recounts the remarkable man’s heroics on April 19, 1775. “If I can only be the instrument of killing one of my country’s foes I shall die in peace,” he reportedly declared. Killing a redcoat with his rifle, taking out two more with his horse pistols, and drawing a sword to defend himself from advancing soldiers, Whittemore was shot in the face and bayonetted several times. “We have killed the old rebel,” the British allegedly exclaimed. “About four hours after,” his obituary records, Whittemore “was found in a mangled situation…but providentialy none” of the blades had “penetrated so far as to destroy him; his hat and cloaths [sic] were shot through in many places, yet he survived to see the complete overthrow of his enemies, and his country enjoy all the blessings of peace and independence.” Now that’s an obituary! Amazingly, Captain Whittemore lived another eighteen years after being left for dead.
I like to think that men such as Samuel Whittemore scared the bejesus out of the British Regulars. The Crown’s professional soldiers marched in formation and followed rules of gentlemanly conduct, and out of nowhere, some eighty-year-old madman was jumping out from behind a wall and firing on them without warning. “You’re not playing by the rules,” I bet they cried. “What rules?” Whittemore probably replied.
His story reminds me of that of Daniel Morgan, who formed a company of Virginia riflemen and marched six hundred miles to Boston in under three weeks in the summer of ‘75. During the French and Indian War, Morgan had been lashed five hundred times (yet miraculously survived) for punching an English officer in the face. He never forgot the lesson. In Massachusetts, he ordered his legendary snipers to take out British officers who believed they were well out of range. The British army was outraged. Morgan didn’t care.
In his memoir, Private Yankee Doodle, Joseph Plumb Martin described the heroics of Mary Ludwig Hays at the Battle of Monmouth. When her husband went down in the fighting, Hays began loading cannon in his place. Martin described the scene: “A cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage than carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat. Looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else.” Pennsylvania later rewarded her with a veteran’s pension.
Another woman, Deborah Sampson, disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the Continental Army as Robert Shurtleff. As part of a light infantry unit, she was involved in many skirmishes and got shot twice — and even removed one of the musket balls herself to avoid discovery. She was later honorably discharged, married a farmer, and received a military pension from the state of Massachusetts. Incredibly, Congress later granted her a federal military pension after the intervention of a rather famous friend — Paul Revere.
Never underestimate ordinary people determined to advance a cause. In the eighteenth century, the British redcoats were the preeminent fighting force in the world and represented the most powerful empire on the planet. Still, they could not best colonial irregulars who were willing to risk all for victory. Guns and bombs win battles. Hearts and minds win wars.
I look back at the feats of Deborah Sampson, Mary Hays, Daniel Morgan, and Samuel Whittemore and see a common attribute: they were men and women worth listening to. In my mind, there is no higher honor. We should all strive to conduct our lives in such a way that others might stop and listen to what we have to say. Those worth listening to tend to be people of principle, courage, conviction, and honor. During the American Revolution, our country was blessed with an extraordinary share of exceptional people.
Do not doubt that America is still blessed with an outsized share of heroes. I’ve met many. I’ve seen amazing people make tremendous sacrifices. I know many of you are heroes because I’ve had the chance to read your comments and reflect upon your words. If we were ever facing hardship as our ancestors did nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, I would want you all in a foxhole with me.
This patriotic time of year always reminds me of someone who is gone but never forgotten — Lloyd Marcus III, who passed away nearly four years ago. A tireless defender of America who loved his country dearly, the “Unhyphenated American” was unquestionably a man worth listening to. In spirit, he will always be in our foxhole, too.
Happy Independence Day!
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.
