(End of the American Dream)—When three thugs in Halloween masks terrorized a family in northern Virginia a few days ago, it was a sign that Halloween crime season is off to an early start this year. Once we get to the evening of October 31st, you will want to make sure that your home is both occupied and secure, because criminals love an easy target. It is the one time during the year when criminals can wear masks and freely approach your home without causing much suspicion. Unfortunately, many choose to use that as an opportunity to cause mayhem.
According to the National Retail Federation, Halloween has become a lot more popular in the U.S. over the last couple of decades…
The National Retail Federation has surveyed Americans about their Halloween plans each September since 2005. Back then, slightly more than half of Americans said they planned to celebrate. In 2025, nearly three-quarters said they would – a huge jump in 20 years.
And people are planning to shell out more money than ever. Total spending on Halloween is expected to reach a record US$13 billion this year, according to the federation – an almost fourfold increase over the past two decades.
It was once a relatively minor holiday, but it has now become one of the biggest holidays on our entire calendar.
Halloween is a festival that literally celebrates evil, and so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that violent crime spikes on October 31st every year…
“The evening violent crime count on October 31 is about 50 percent higher than on any other date during the year, and twice the daily average,” criminologist James Alan Fox wrote for the Boston Globe, noting criminal activity peaks during trick-or-treat hours, and trails off later in the night.
“The most popular hours for gathering Snickers and Junior Mints around the neighborhood are apparently also the prime time for violent crime.”
This time of the year, Americans consume millions upon millions of hours of Halloween programming that show people in masks doing all sorts of unthinkable things, and there are always going to be sick people that want to copy what they see on their screens.
In fact, a group of three “mask-wearing creeps” absolutely terrorized a family in Virginia just a few days ago…
Halloween mask-wearing creeps terrorized a widow in Virginia as chilling doorbell footage showed the trio trying to break into her home and threatening to kill the occupants.
The three suspects showed up at the Alexandria home — about eight miles from Washington, DC — around 10 p.m. Tuesday, according to the homeowner’s daughter, Shayla, WUSA9 reported.
“At first I thought it was just a Halloween joke, a little prank,” Shayla said. “So I said, ‘Happy Halloween.’”
It turns out that this wasn’t a joke at all.
The thugs just kept pounding on the door and demanding to be let inside…
Shayla said the trio kept knocking and pounding “harder and harder” on the door.
“It’s either you coming out or we coming in,” one person can be heard saying on the video. Another shouted, “Open the door!”
I can’t even imagine how frightened Shayla must have been.
The three criminals were unable to get in through the front door, so they went around back where they “broke through a wooden fence, slashed open deck screens, and banged on windows”…
The group broke through a wooden fence, slashed open deck screens, and banged on windows while peering inside.
“They were just hitting the window,” Shayla told WUSA. “My heart dropped when they said they were gonna take a chair and break down the door. That is just too much.”
Shayla told the outlet the masked suspects “threatened to kill us.” After about 10 minutes of pure terror, the trio finally left — leaving Shayla and her widowed mother shaken.
This is the kind of people that our culture is producing.
Wearing masks and frightening people is considered to be “fun”, and often that is combined with theft.
For example, a woman in Tennessee was recently caught stealing a package from someone’s porch while wearing a clown mask…
A woman in a clown mask was caught on camera stealing a package, giving people quite a scare in Baxter.
The unwanted visitor and thief had several folks double-checking their locks and home cameras this past week.
“To think somebody was so brazen enough to do it in the daylight in a clown mask is kind of crazy,” said Terry, a neighbor of the victim.
In Seattle, two young males were arrested for “harassing two women while wearing clown masks and brandishing guns”…
A 19-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy were arrested early Monday after allegedly harassing two women while wearing clown masks and brandishing guns in the Bitter Lake neighborhood, Seattle police said.
The incident unfolded around 12:20 a.m. when officers were flagged down by two women on Aurora Avenue North.
In Indiana, a teen that was spotted “wearing a clown-like mask” went on quite a crime spree before he was finally caught…
An Evansville teen who was seen wearing a clown-like mask on security camera has been arrested and charged, according to the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office.
VCSO says a 16-year-old from Evansville was arrested and charged with multiple crimes, including attempted burglary, theft, and attempted theft.
The arrest is connected to a series of car break-ins and attempted residential burglaries in the Wellington Acres neighborhood of northeastern Vanderburgh County.
This time of the year just seems to bring out the worst in many people.
One forensic psychologist believes that Halloween is a time “when we expect and almost accept petty crimes and mischievous acting out”…
Forensic psychologists say the holiday’s mischievous nature inspires criminals.
“Halloween is a celebration of the dark side — a time when we expect and almost accept petty crimes and mischievous acting out,” said forensic psychologist Barbara Kirwin, the defense shrink for serial killer Joel Rifkin. “Mostly it acts as a pressure valve that allows repressed people to release some of their pent-up anger and hostility.”
Sadly, we don’t just see a spike in petty crimes during Halloween.
Every year, homes get invaded.
Every year, women get raped.
Every year, innocent people get murdered.
So it is important to take precautions. The following list of safety tips for Halloween comes from CBS News…
- Don’t leave your home unoccupied. If you have to go out, leave lights and the TV on, and ask neighbors to keep a watch. Never put a spare key under the mat.
- If you’re home, make sure your walkway is well-lit to prevent trips and falls by children who can’t see through their masks. Make sure to see who’s at the door before you open it.
- Keep pets indoors and under control. Dogs can become easily spooked by strangers, especially in disguises, and end up biting friends or children.
- Put away outside movable objects such as grills, lawn mowers and bicycles that could be stolen, vandalized or thrown against your home.
- Park cars in a garage, if possible, or in well-lighted areas and remove all valuables. Activate the car alarm when leaving.
- If you’re going out, remain on high alert and avoid children in dark costumes whose minds will be on candy, not safety.
- Set up an informal “Neighborhood Watch.” Some locales have a “Witch Watch” — groups of volunteers who guard the community.
There is one point on that list that I disagree with very strongly.
If you have dogs, make sure that they are visible to anyone that approaches your home, because most criminals do not like to deal with dogs.
In general, I would recommend doing whatever you can to make your home as unwelcoming to intruders as possible.
We live at a time when our society is absolutely teeming with predators, and it is only going to get worse in the years ahead.
So please be very careful and take the security of your home seriously, because the safety of your family is not something that you want to gamble with.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.
