(WND)—There could be no single example underscoring what is wrong with the international woke movement than by what occurred during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Paris, France, on July 26. What happened there was wokeism “run amuck.” It totally ignored two simple rules that should govern human behavior in free societies to nurture fairness and civility.
Let us examine what occurred at the opening ceremonies.
Many observers were shocked to see the famous painting by Leonardo Da Vinci of the Last Supper of Jesus with his 12 apostles grossly mocked, depicted in a scene involving sexualized drag queens. Some advertisers were so repulsed by it – such as Mississippi’s largest telecommunications company C-Spire – that their advertisements were immediately pulled.
While the Olympic Committee issued an apology the next day about the depiction and removed their video of the event from the internet, its statement was somewhat shocking in itself. It claimed the depiction was not intended to “be subversive or shock people or mock people.” As much time as the committee had to prepare for the opening ceremonies and with Catholicism being the world’s largest religion, it is absurd to believe committee members gave no thought as to whether any offense would be taken by the depiction.
One can only imagine the violent fallout that would have resulted had Olympic organizers decided instead to portray the world’s second largest religion – Islam – in such a light by having Prophet Muhammad depicted by a drag queen. Obviously more thought was given as to why that should not be done, remembering the 12 staff members of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo who were killed in 2015 by Muslims upset about Muhammad’s depiction on its cover.
What progressives seem to lose sight of, however, is any call for societal balance. It is obvious that in a free society like the U.S. with a population of 330 million, it is impossible to achieve unanimity concerning an issue. But two reasonable rules exist that should be logically acceptable to all.
The first has been stated a bit differently for thousands of years and in many different cultures.
Whether it was written by the ancient Greek rhetorician Isocrates, or the influential Chinese philosopher Confucius, or Epicteus from the ancient School of Stoicism, it is also found in a multitude of holy books including the Talmud, the Koran and the Mahabharata. Its words of virtue are known as the Golden Rule. Its simple message tells us to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
In 2016, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, II (D-Missouri) took on the task of providing an historical perspective of the Golden Rule and encouraging compliance with it as a new Congress was seated.
Cleaver recognized, “The most significant building block necessary to develop a federal government that actually inspires peace and tolerance across our bifurcated country is the practice of the Golden Rule.” It is also a societal building block that calls for common sense ethics – i.e., the ethics of reciprocity.
For example, applying such ethics of reciprocity would encourage one who finds transgenderism unacceptable but who is asked to refer to another person by a preferred pronoun, different from such other’s biological gender, would do so out of a common sense of respect for that individual. (It is not unlike others honoring the First Lady’s request to be addressed as “Dr. Jill Biden.”)
However, this is where progressives lose sight of balance in failing to apply a second behavioral rule known as the rule of the Common Good.
It is contrary to the Common Good to mandate transgenders be accommodated to the point of discomforting an opposing biological sex member majority, allowing the former to share segregated facilities based on biological sex just because one has mentally shedded one’s own biological sex. In some cases, such as housing transgender females in women’s prisons, a serious and unnecessary risk to the biologically female majority population has been created.
Thus, application of the Golden Rule would have a transgender’s request – to use a preferred pronoun – being honored while application of the rule of the Common Good would have the transgender honoring the request of a member of a different biological gender for gender privacy.
What is so divisive in our society today is the wokeist effort to disrupt everything that makes common sense by imposing a progressive mindset that ignores the interests of the Common Good, assisted in this endeavor by a government content to allow the ensuing disruption to occur.
Implementing the Golden Rule and the rule of the Common Good jointly would work wonders towards establishing tolerance and mutual acceptance in society – a society that today is chaotic because wokeness ignores both rules.
Foregoing any attempt at eloquence, former President Donald Trump perhaps bluntly said it best with his observation about a basic reality of wokeism. He noted, “Everything woke turns to sh*t!”
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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.
