France is calling them student riots. The soundtrack does not match the label. In Carpentras on October 1, outside Lycée Victor Hugo, a crowd that was supposed to be angry about missing teachers brandished a Palestinian flag and chanted “On a brûlé Israël” and “C’est qui les Juifs ? On les piétine.”
Translation: We burned Israel. Who are the Jews? We trample them.
That is not a complaint about class size. That is the red-green alliance doing what it always does once it has a crowd and a match.
The official grievance is real enough to hide behind. Blockades began in late September around Paris and spread until hundreds of lycées were shut. By Friday, Fox News reported roughly 400 high schools closed and some 2,000 arrests, most of them teenagers. Sixty-five school staff have been injured, including 40 principals. A Marseille head teacher was doused in gasoline.
In Nantes a school hall was gutted. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said officers were hit with hydrochloric acid in seven incidents on September 29. The New York Post described fireworks thrown at police in Marseille, bins burning in Rennes, and tear gas in Strasbourg. Cockroaches and absent teachers can start a petition. They do not explain a mortar fired at a principal.
Carpentras ripped the mask. The town holds the oldest synagogue in Europe still in use, and the chants landed days before the anniversary of October 7. Mayor Hervé de Lépinau said the city would refer the case to the prosecutor. His office called the scene proof that the lycée movement was being manipulated by an antisemitic far left that wanted chaos.
The city statement also recorded the other slogans of the day, the ones aimed at the National Rally, which is to say the riot had a party program. La Provence quoted pupils at the same blockade chanting obscenities at Israel, and one girl who had actually come about the school sighing that the others were mixing everything.
She noticed. Paris would rather not.
The red half of the alliance is not a rumor. French intelligence told a crisis meeting on Thursday that politicians from La France Insoumise had initiated the movement. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said LFI fueled the first demonstrations and that ultra-left groups then took the thing hostage. Teachers told him the people in front of the gates were not their students.
A government assessment cited by the BBC pointed to Palestinian flags, Algerian flags, outsiders, and radical-left tactics, and called it a flame-kindling strategy ahead of the 2027 election. Jean-Luc Mélenchon spent September 28 calling the pupils harmless, accusing Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu of a crackdown with a racist aftertaste, and telling his people to place themselves between the teenagers and the police. In Saint-Denis, LFI mayor Bally Bagayoko stood at Lycée Paul Éluard and said violence can be a legitimate reaction.
If I slap you, you will react. The Paris police prefect referred him for provocation. He refused to take it back. Marine Le Pen called the unrest riots organized by professionals and overseen by LFI deputies.
The green half did not need a membership card. It needed the banlieue map France has refused to read since 2005. Seine-Saint-Denis, the department with the highest immigrant population in the country, was the cradle again. The same housing projects that burned after Nahel Merzouk in 2023 produced another week of fires, and this time the foreign grievance arrived already translated.
Gaza on a French school gate. Jews named for trampling in a town that remembers what a desecrated Jewish cemetery looks like. Brussels Signal noted the obvious extra dimension. A large share of the pupils come from a migrant background, and anti-Israel chants have been recorded. The hard left did not invent that hatred. It recruited it, filmed it, and posed beside it.
Amos asked the question these two factions keep answering in the street. Can two walk together, except they be agreed? The reds want the republic broken before May, when Mélenchon hopes to reach a runoff against Le Pen. The greens want the Jews named and the West indicted. A leaking roof was the excuse they could share. The flames were the agreement.
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.
