(Zero Hedge)—The year of 2020 was an unmitigated disaster for the US for numerous reasons. With so many chaotic events happening simultaneously, one can be forgiven if they have completely forgotten about the bizarre CHAZ/CHOP takeover of a section of Seattle by woke activists for around a month. The protest led to extensive violence and some deaths, but was widely supported by city officials. It was also a wellspring of hilarious memes as ignorant protesters tried in vain to establish a self sustaining progressive community complete with socialist garden spaces.
Seattle is one of the few leftist enclaves in the US still clinging to the old days of BLM and covid mandates, and they are back in the news again. This time because of an organized and violent mob attack on a peaceful Christian rally this week at Cal Anderson Park. The rally, held by a group called Mayday USA, spoke on pro-life issues and against transgender hormones and surgeries for children.
A group called “Radical Women Seattle” explained their protest of the event:
“Aimed to counter the well-funded anti-trans, anti-queer event that is led by far-right Christian activists. The Mayday USA rally in Seattle is provocatively being held in the heart of the Queer community. It is part of a 5-city national tour. Reactionary preacher and former Spokane Valley state representative Matt Shea, of the “On Fire Ministries,” is one of the prominent supporters…”
Freedom Socialist Party leader Doreen McGrath stated:
“We are encouraging everyone to come out and show their solidarity…Attacks of this kind need to be met with protest every time…”
In other words, a Christian group meeting in a public park is considered an “attack”.
By mid-day the mob engaged in a series of violent actions on the Christian rally, forcing police to intervene. At least 23 activists were arrested on charges of assault and obstruction.
Seattle — Antifa and Trantifa gathered to riot again at the site of the former CHAZ occupation, which led to people being killed in 2020. The May 24 riot was organized to violently shut down a Christian worship event. pic.twitter.com/7vzQAM6hJ6
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) May 25, 2025
After a decade of unhinged woke activism in the US most people are now well aware that the political left’s idea of “free speech” is highly one-sided. They believe that free speech laws give them the right to disrupt and even violently shut down other people’s free speech. They think that the 1st Amendment gives them the right to do whatever they want whenever they want. This is simply not reality.
Furthermore, the political left argues that the right to disrupt is supported by the content of their opponent’s speech. Meaning, if a person or group is presenting conservative or populist views (what they call “hate speech”), this justifies violence as a tool to shut that speech down.
This is a very convenient mindset because it allows them to rationalize any malicious tactic. All they have to do is label their enemies “fascists” and the rules of civil order go out the window. This is why leftists are unlikely to win a majority of elections at any point in the near future and it’s also why the American public is increasingly tempted to return the favor and visit violence on woke activists.
Far left Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell warned against violence but also defended the mob. He called for an investigation into the permit process that allowed the Christian group to meet at Cal Anderson Park, as if Mayday USA was to blame, and suggested that the attacks were caused by “anarchists infiltrating the protest”.
“Seattle is proud of our reputation as a welcoming, inclusive city for LGBTQ+ communities, and we stand with our trans neighbors when they face bigotry and injustice. Today’s far-right rally was held here for this very reason – to provoke a reaction by promoting beliefs that are inherently opposed to our city’s values, in the heart of Seattle’s most prominent LGBTQ+ neighborhood…”
“Anarchists infiltrated the counter-protestors group and inspired violence, prompting SPD to make arrests and ask organizers to shut down the event early, which they did…”
“While there are broad First Amendment requirements around permitting events under free speech protections, I am directing the Parks Department to review all of the circumstances of this application to understand whether there were legal location alternatives or other adjustments that could have been pursued. The Police Department will complete an after-action report of this event, including understanding preparation, crowd management tactics, and review of arrests and citations…”
This kind of progressive political bias might have been in vogue in 2020, but that was five years ago. Harrell should consider his positions carefully; a lot has changed and the notion that only certain activist groups have rights to public spaces is no longer being tolerated. The era of BLM and Antifa is over and even Seattle is going to have to catch up with the times.
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.
