If Western nations replaced their respective fiat currencies with digital versions (as many advocates for individual liberty fear they will soon do), would organized crime disappear?
If the answer is, “No,” why not? Don’t human traffickers and international drug cartels depend upon a supply of paper currency that they can move back and forth across borders and launder through unrelated businesses for future use? If there were no money except for the digital ones and zeroes created and monitored by national governments, surely major criminal organizations would have no way to operate and nowhere to hide.
How could prostitution and corner drug sales survive within a system that traces all digital transactions in real time? How could black market trades in illicit commerce or between sanctioned nations continue if Western central banks actively surveil each digital dollar that changes hands? Surely the imposition of government-mandated digital currencies would usher in a more peaceful planet that is relatively free of crime…right?
If you’re still not convinced, let me suggest what might be tripping you up: your instincts tell you that criminals will find a way to skirt any future digital surveillance. Somehow, human ingenuity will succeed in creating effective workarounds to government-imposed central bank digital currencies. The sale of illegal narcotics, weapons, and other banned materials will continue around the world because, at the end of the day, humans adapt and overcome whatever obstacles stand in their way. Crime will continue to exist because criminals will continue to exist, and criminals will continue to exist because in every generation some faction of the human race behaves immorally, disregards social mores, or flat out refuses to obey.
If this is your conclusion — and I think it is the correct one — then don’t ordinary, non-criminal citizens also have a choice about what the future holds? If you believe that criminals are wily enough to fashion workarounds to totalitarian government, then shouldn’t you expect defenders of liberty to be similarly inventive? If so, then perhaps our worries about the future do not revolve around the idea that ordinary citizens will have no way to evade and overcome government tyranny but rather that the path to doing so might make many of us “criminals,” too.
An immoral law is no law at all — which is to say, whenever governments use the force of law to coerce citizens to do immoral things, moral citizens will choose to become “criminals.” This is more difficult than it sounds.
It is natural for people to overestimate their willingness to stand up to the State in matters of conscience. From the comfort of our armchairs, we often judge too harshly those who yielded to tyrants in the past because we cannot step faithfully into our ancestors’ shoes. We cannot accurately feel what they experienced as the coercive machinery of the State operated in their day. Would we have hidden Jews in our cellars while the Nazis were rounding them up to be murdered in camps? Would we have taken a strong stance against Japanese internment during WWII? Would we have opposed racial segregation laws in Brazil and the United States, caste oppression in India, or ethnic cleansing in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East? Many people would proudly say, “Yes.” Most would be sorely mistaken. Standing up to evil when it is backed by the authority of government offices and enforced by real human beings with guns and badges is no easy thing. Moral people too often balance an abundance of conviction with a scarcity of courage.
The question of moral courage becomes even more difficult when we ask ourselves what we would do in situations that don’t rise to the level of evil we associate with persecution and genocide. In 1933 President Roosevelt ordered Americans to hand over their gold savings. Although justified as a policy for fighting the worsening depression, critics warned that the action was nothing short of government-sanctioned robbery and would only increase inflation and exacerbate economic suffering. The critics were right, and a substantial number of Americans denounced the president’s order as entirely immoral. Still, most complied.
What would we do if the government came for our greenbacks, gold, silver, or bitcoin today? If the Federal Reserve and the Department of Treasury joined other Western central banks in making all digital currencies illegal except their own, would you comply? What if the FBI claimed that uncontrolled, decentralized currencies are used only by criminals who are most likely narco-terrorists and child sex-slavers? Would federal officials’ concerted efforts to use your morality and sense of shame as psychological weapons ultimately succeed? If the U.S. government used those same moral arguments to trash the Second Amendment and confiscate Americans’ firearms, would you hand over your weapons? What if all your favorite athletes, movie stars, and musicians told you 24/7 that we must disarm ourselves in order to “save the children”? Would you allow others to shame you into compliance?
Many Americans might do their best Charlton Heston impression here and declare, “From my cold, dead hands.” But how many of those same Americans quickly submitted to the government because of a virus not too dissimilar from the common cold? How many wore masks in Walmart in order to avoid accusatory stares from strangers? How many sat in cordoned-off stadium seats at empty ballparks or paid full tuition for college classes taught entirely online? How many did what they were told when faceless bureaucrats demanded that they stand six feet apart or isolate inside their homes? How many ultimately took at least one injection of an experimental “vaccine” because employers threatened their jobs, hospitals threatened not to treat their unrelated health conditions, or police officers threatened them with arrests and fines? As Hannah Arendt so insightfully observed, crimes against humanity usually come not from the hands of monsters but from those of ordinary people. Because they are ordinary, we too often disregard our worries, avoid conflict, and comply.
Every act of compliance comes with two costs: we lose whatever liberty we freely hand over, and we invite further encroachment upon our liberty in the future. Loss of personal freedom is like a loose thread that gets only longer with time. Before you can repair the damage, you must make sure that your rights and liberties stop unraveling. There has to be a moment when people say, “Enough.”
In other words, there has to be a moment when citizens accept that the State sees them as common criminals. The price for speaking our minds will not stop with censorship. It will not stop with de-banking. It will not stop with professional blacklisting. It will not stop with the J6 political prisoners. It will not stop with all the Republican attorneys who have been disbarred and prosecuted for fighting election fraud. It will not stop with the DOJ’s efforts to imprison President Trump. It will not stop with all the servicemembers whose military careers came to an end because they refused to submit to the government’s experimental “vaccines.” Like a loose thread coming undone, the State will continue to yank at our freedoms until we are left naked. Only we can decide whether to remain so.
Because we have a choice, we don’t really fear that there is nothing that can be done about growing totalitarianism in the West. We are apprehensive about what will be required to thwart it. That’s a fine and prudent feeling to have, but it’s altogether different from the miserable dread of acquiescence. Knowing that a fight is coming and worrying about its costs do not reflect weakness. Nor does it matter whether an immoral government calls moral people, “criminals.” We’ll have to get over that.
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.
AS I read my Bible, there is coming a time when people who Identify as Christians will be given a choice between Government’s Way or Death.
Having lost jobs because I am Unvaccinated, I think the COVID experience was partially to test who and how many would comply.
Test run for upcoming events?
I’ll take death, but I’ll try to take out on of these bottom feeders when I go.
How many people even understand basis concepts of freedom so they can recognize when those freedoms are being attacked?
Freedom from compelled self incrimination is one, also stated in the US Constitution’s 5th Amendment. Yet the majority of people eagerly trample the 5th Amendment every year to file their declarations of fealty to the DC swamp and pay tribute to the monsters putting boots on the necks of those that resist.
It’s disheartening that so many people crave submission to corrupt government so eagerly.
It seems to have all changed about the same time women started voting. 🤔
You guys should check out Tactical Civics (TacticalCivics.com). They have a comprehensive plan to lawfully restore our Constitutional Republic. There is no point in begging our criminal servants for justice. We need to enforce our Constitutional powers……which were not explained to us in our public “indoctrination” schools. God bless 🙂
I am going to suggest that we are very close to “… a moment when citizens accept that the State sees them as common criminals.” Think of the morally bent representatives of the State who exist on virtually every square-foot of inhabited land in this once more freedom loving country. You already know my point even though you may not wish to acknowledge it. There are those cadres of individuals, a brotherhood, that views themselves as morally superior, devoid of criminal intent or conduct and are capable of ignoring the codified laws of the land when they believe those laws are a hinderance to performing their duty of apprehending the criminal elements of this land which, in their opinion, is virtually everyone who does not wear the badge. Where have the truly good cops gone? I don’t know, maybe there never were any. But I am certain of one thing. Once one human being is granted authority over another, they become less the impartial issuer of citations and fines and more the overseer and taskmaster. But do not judge me wrongly. I do not advocate for “defunding” nor reducing their numbers, and definitely not replacing them with the “social worker.” But individuals who carry with them the power of life and death over their fellow man cannot be allowed to perform their duties without the strictest supervision and punishment when they violate their oaths. I will close these comments by trying to at least give the appearance of being on-point. If the U.S. dollar is replaced with an inferior digitized system, I will predict that within a matter of months a vast and flourishing underground black-market will appear, and eventually its own replacement hard currency that will make the policing of it nearly an impossibility.