Iran’s regime has scheduled the execution of 26-year-old Erfan Soltani for January 14, set to mark the first hanging directly linked to the ongoing anti-government protests. Soltani, arrested during demonstrations in Karaj last week, faces charges of “waging war against God” after a trial where he was denied legal representation. Human rights organizations report that his only apparent offense was joining calls for freedom amid widespread economic collapse and demands for regime change.
Protests erupted across Iran in late December 2025, fueled by soaring inflation, unemployment, and corruption under the ayatollahs’ rule. Security forces have responded with brutal force, leading to over 500 confirmed deaths, though some estimates from groups like Iran International and Amnesty International suggest the toll could approach 6,000.
A nationwide internet blackout has hampered communication, allowing atrocities to unfold in the shadows, as documented by Human Rights Watch. Demonstrators in Tehran and other cities have burned symbols of the regime, overturned vehicles, and chanted for an end to theocratic control.
President Donald Trump addressed the crisis directly on Truth Social, stating, “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!” He followed with a stern warning: “They better not start shooting, because we’ll start shooting, too.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt affirmed that diplomacy remains the priority, but added that Trump “has shown he’s unafraid to use military options if and when he deems necessary.”
In a move to isolate Tehran economically, Trump announced immediate 25% tariffs on goods from any nation conducting business with Iran. This policy, detailed in statements from the White House, targets countries like China, India, and Turkey, aiming to starve the regime of resources. Sources from Reuters and CNBC indicate the administration is also considering targeted strikes or cyber operations against Iranian military assets if the crackdown escalates.
Senator Rand Paul voiced caution against hasty involvement, arguing on Sunday that U.S. intervention could rally Iranians around their leaders and bypass constitutional requirements for congressional approval. “We wish freedom and liberation the best across the world, but I don’t think it’s the job of the American government to be involved with every freedom movement around the world,” Paul said.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi dismissed U.S. threats, declaring Tehran “fully prepared for war.” This rhetoric echoes past confrontations, raising questions about hidden alliances propping up the regime—perhaps ties to global networks that benefit from Middle Eastern instability, including those opposed to American energy independence.
The plight of protesters like Soltani recalls biblical accounts of the oppressed crying out for justice. Christians in Iran face similar perils, with reports from Open Doors noting increased persecution amid the unrest, including arrests for sharing faith.
If Soltani is executed, eyes will turn to Washington. Will Trump act decisively to support those risking everything for liberty, or will diplomatic channels prevail? The coming days could define not just Iran’s future, but America’s role in confronting regimes that thrive on fear and suppression.
Recent updates from Al Jazeera and Bloomberg confirm protests persist in pockets, with UN officials decrying “horrific violence” and mounting casualties. The National Union for Democracy in Iran urged the world to “be his voice” for Soltani, emphasizing the regime’s pattern of extrajudicial killings reminiscent of the 1980s massacres.
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.
…the ONLY thing that those that govern Iran understand is ‘force’ and ‘terror’…Iran, as all Muslims believe, is that if they die a ‘Martyrs Death’ that ‘Allah’ will give them 72 virgins in the after life…sooooooooooo if millions of them die from many ‘drones’..’.cruise missiles’…many ‘MOAB’s…then they will be ever lastingly grateful…why wait tell they ‘infest’ the world with their cultism of taking over the world with their 5th and final violent ‘Jihad’…end them now and be done with it…they will get all the ’72 virgins’ they could ever want…Win-Win situation for everybody !
The most important thing for us to understand about Islam is that Allah is another name for Satan. Once that we are clear on that we in the civilized world will know how to proceed.
…Allah…is the ‘moon god’…thus the ‘Crescent Moon’ on their flags…the nomadic tribes of the far east centuries ago worshiped the ‘moon’ since that was all that they could relate to as an observance of a higher power…Mohamed channeled that ‘trust’ in a physical object to bring unity between the nomadic tribes…he also plagiarized the Jewish Torah to establish a connection to ‘religion’ (the Quran)…actually Islam is nothing more-or-less than a just a cult….
True
Wouldn’t it be a bummer if these Muslims got their 72 virgins after death and then found out that they were all college educated feminists from the United States of America 🇺🇸.
…LOL !…wonder how the DNC would applaud their zest for the ‘equality of gender’ with all their ‘trans-girly-boys’ in line for a real spin on the Islamic-Pole-G0-Round…what a sight that would be…but fortunately no ‘American Conservative’ will be in LaLaAllah Land….
NOW is the time to act pre-emptively against all muslim immigrants and countries. While we have a strong leader in Trump, who can back up his standing with military strength.
For a long time, I have been against American intervention in so many nations around the world, and intervention in overthrowing supposedly dictatorships. However, this has only resulted in more upheaval and wars. Yet, Iran is the one exception that needs to be dealt with. Why? Iran is a different situation in that they have promoted terrorism around the world, primarily in the Mideast. The Iranian people have finally had enough with economic and currency collapse causing hyperinflation. Should America get involved directly in over throwing the current terrorist theocracy ? I can only answer by quoting two Bible prophetic verses. 1. Jeremiah 49:34-39, “Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Behold I will break the bow [strength] of Elam, the chief of their might.” 2. Ezekiel chapter 38 warns of the end time war, the Gog/Magog War when many nations surrounding Israel will amass a great army to utterly destroy the Jewish nation which includes Iran joining this army, but God says he will destroyed 5/6th of this army. The unresolved question is if the Iranian Islamic regime will survive this current protest and attempt to remove it? If it survives, then Iran will be still able to attack Israel as part of the Gog/Magog War. If it does not survive, then how will the Ezekiel War occur? I can only conclude that the odds are the Islamic regime will survive to be later brought down by God.
Today is the first scheduled public execution of Iranian street protesters and rioters. This tells us that the establishment government of Iran is still very much in power. It also tells us that the so-called protesters in Iranian streets may not be what we are told and that the government of Iran hasn’t gone anywhere. Keep in mind that deception is the most prominent feature of the last days before The Lord returns. If as we are being told, U.S. forces are gathering in the Middle East against Iran, it could be an entirely different government of Iran that attacks Israel in the Ezekiel 38-39 battle of Gog and Magog. Remember that the Shah was there before the Muslim Ayatollah.
All O.T. prophesies have already been fulfilled incl. the Gog Magog war. That was describing the effort to destroy the church (true Israel-1 Pt. 2:9) after the resurrection and before the destruction of Jerusalem 40 yrs later which wiped true Mosaic Judaism off the earth forever. Proof? Where are the “Urim & Thummim” (Ex 28:30)? They can never be replaced or counterfeited because God never described them–it’s almost as if he knew there’d be a hoard of miscreants down the road who’d call themselves Jews and try to resurrect Judaism. The effort to destroy the true Israel was carried on for the most part by the fake one–(Rev. 2:9 ers) who say they’re Jews and aren’t but lie. There are 2 Israels in both the Old and New Testament–the true, good one, and the evil fake one. The true one’s spiritual–Gal 3:26-29; 6:15, i.e. those who’ve been baptized into Christ, no land-Lk 17:20,21.
We need to capture those demonic Mullahs presently in charge and charge them with war crimes.
Trump is the one who will be charged with war crimes and just because Bush and Chaney was not handed over to the ICC does not mean trump won’t be.
Twisting the knife in you trump cultists after midterms is going to be a lot of fun.
I don’t think people are as determined to worship President Trump as they are desperate to get big government and globalist bankers off their backs. It’s just that President Trump is the only one who has shown an aptitude for doing that. I don’t claim to have all of the inside information about all of the global issues, but there is no excuse for having illegal Somalians stealing our hard earned tax dollars through welfare and daycare fraud. Tampon Timmy and a host of other crooked politicians need to be removed from office and if President Trump restores justice and stops all the fraud and theft that is happening to the taxpayer, then it will speak well of him.
…why not just shoot them…much more decisive and cheaper…