I am so glad that “Sound of Freedom” suddenly has people all over the country talking about the horrors of child trafficking. Most people tend to think of slavery as a thing of the past, but that is not true at all. In fact, human rights organizations tell us that more people are enslaved right now than ever before in all of human history. Approximately 50 million precious people are currently living in a state of slavery, and a significant percentage of those are enslaved for sexual purposes. There is no place in any civilized society for such a thing, but the experts are telling us that every year it gets even worse, and millions of children are involved. Approximately 20 percent of all sex trafficking victims are children, and approximately 80 percent of all child victims are girls.
We are talking about evil that is being committed on an industrial scale, but most normal people don’t even realize what these kids are going through on a daily basis.
Thankfully, a brand new film entitled “Sound of Freedom” is bringing a great deal of awareness to this issue, and it was actually the top movie in the U.S. when it was released…
On July 4, Angel Studios film, SOUND OF FREEDOM became the top Box Office movie in America on its release date July 4.
SOUND OF FREEDOM grossed a total of $14.3 million in ticket sales in its debut, a whopping $3 million more than INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY.
Co-owner of Angel Studios, Jordan Harmon, told The Daily Signal, “As exciting that it is to hit the number 1 spot for this summer opening, it doesn’t even come close to the excitement that the number means for awareness of this issue.”
Beating out the new Indiana Jones movie was no small feat.
If you are not familiar with “Sound of Freedom”, here is a brief synopsis…
“Sound of Freedom” chronicles the real-life experiences of former U.S. government agent Tim Ballard, who left his job at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the early 2000s to launch Operation Underground Railroad, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rescuing children from sex trafficking and the modern-day slave trade.
Amazingly, there are some in the mainstream media that are actually speaking out against this movie.
Even though audiences absolutely love this film, certain liberal pundits are furiously attacking the anti-trafficking message of this film. Why is that? Do they think that child trafficking is a good thing?
The sad truth is that it is happening all over America right now, and once in a while an incident pops up in the news…
A 14-year-old girl who ran away from her grandmother’s Spring Valley area home on June 9 was found last week inside the barracks at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department (SDSO) confirmed. The teen’s disappearance was reported to the Sheriff’s Department four days later by her grandmother.
“The grandmother reported to deputies that the teen had previously run away before, but always returned home quickly,” Melissa Aquino, SDSO’s media relations officer noted.
The girl, who has learning disabilities, was found in the barracks June 28 by military police, according to her aunt Casaundra Perez. Perez claims her niece was sold to a Marine for sex.
This is an issue that should definitely unite all of us.
But somehow there are many on the left that wish to oppose those of us that want to permanently eradicate child trafficking from our society.
This is yet another example of how divided we have become.
Millions of Americans want to take this country back to the values that it was founded upon, while there are millions of others that want to drag us in the exact opposite direction. And to a certain extent, they are winning.
For example, it is being reported that 38 percent of the students at one Ivy League university now identify as LGBTQ+…
The latest data show that between 2010 and 2023, identification as LGBTQ+ has almost tripled among the student body at Brown (from 14% in 2010 saying they were not heterosexual to 38% now). “The Herald’s Spring 2023 poll found that 38% of students do not identify as straight — over five times the national rate,” The Brown Daily Herald reported. “Over the past decade, LGBTQ+ identification has increased across the nation, with especially sharp growth at Brown.”
Other sexual orientations have seen massive increases. “Since Fall 2010, Brown’s LGBTQ+ population has expanded considerably. The gay or lesbian population has increased by 26% and the percentage of students identifying as bisexual has increased by 232%,” the student newspaper reported. “Students identifying as other sexual orientations within the LGBTQ+ community have increased by 793%.”
Those numbers absolutely floored me when I first saw them.
And once they take power, they will go to extreme lengths to impose their views on the rest of us. If you doubt this, just check out a new bill that has now been passed by the Michigan House of Representatives…
Michigan’s House of Representatives has passed a hate speech bill, known as HB 4474, which criminalizes causing someone to feel threatened by words, including the misusing of their pronouns, with the possibility of a hefty fine or even jail time.
The bill introduces hate crime penalties for causing someone to ‘feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened,’ with ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity or expression’ included as protected classes.
Offenders could face up to five years in prison for such a felony offense or a $10,000 fine.
Would you like to go to prison for five years for using the wrong pronoun?
This sort of nonsense would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
If things are getting this crazy now, what would they look like if America was given another 10 or 20 years?
Unfortunately, if we stay on this path our country isn’t going to have a future. So don’t be afraid to stand up for what is right, because you are literally fighting for the soul of this nation.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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.
