(End of the American Dream)—Over the past couple of weeks, there have been numerous warnings that terrorist sleeper cells may conduct attacks on U.S. soil in response to the war with Iran. Over the past couple of weeks, there have also been a lot of church fires all over America. Why isn’t anyone making a connection between these two things? We know that Islamic terrorists love to attack houses of worship. Since 2020, there have been hundreds of churches in Europe that have been vandalized or burned down, and in many of those cases radical Islamists were involved. Is a similar trend beginning to occur in the United States?
On Saturday morning, a church in Reese, Michigan that was about 100 years old burned all the way to the ground…
A historic Southeast Michigan church burned to the ground Saturday morning.
Reese Fire Rescue, an all-volunteer crew, responded at 2:45 a.m. March 14 to find Reese Faith Community Church “fully engulfed” in flames, said Jeremy Ross, fire chief.
“It was through the roof, through the walls – it was really fully engulfed when we arrived,” Ross said. “There was no way to make entry.”
This was an absolutely massive fire that erupted very suddenly.
One fire truck parked too close to the fire, and as a result “some of the plastic items on the outside of the truck were warped and melted from the heat”…
He said a Reese fire truck was parked a little too close to the fire and some of the plastic items on the outside of the truck were warped and melted from the heat. He said everything affected still functions, including some emergency lights, but will need to be replaced.
In so many cases, these church fires are happening in the middle of the night when no witnesses are around.
So even if authorities are able to determine that it is arson, it will be very difficult to catch whoever did this.
Today, more than 240,000 Muslims live in the state of Michigan.
The city of Dearborn is 55 percent Muslim, and it is not too far from Reese.
That certainly doesn’t prove anything.
But we do know that Michigan has experienced a lot of church burnings in recent years.
Last August, someone purposely firebombed St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church in Flint…
On August 30, 2025, an arsonist firebombed St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church in Flint, Michigan, causing extensive damage. Flint Councilwoman Tonya Burns said an individual “purposely brought three gasoline cans, used a metal object and fire bombed the church.” The fire burned several classrooms, and the church also had smoke damage and several broken windows. The church has an outreach center that hosts community events and food drives.
Flint is even closer to Dearborn than Reese is.
But that could just be a coincidence.
Arsonists tend to like to work at night, because that greatly increases their chances of getting away with it.
Very early on Sunday morning, an enormous fire broke out at The River Church in Post Falls, Idaho…
A Post Falls church was damaged in a fire early Sunday morning.
Kootenai County Fire and Rescue responded to the blaze in the 1600 block of E. Horsehaven Ave. about 4 a.m.
Units arrived to find The River Church burning and requested a second alarm.
“Due to the size of the building and challenges with accessing the fire, crews were on scene through the late morning hours,” KCFR said in a press release.
This is another case where it is going to be difficult to prove that it was arson.
But I think that it was.
Thankfully, most of the building was saved, but one portion “was lost and is now unusable”…
A large portion of the church building was saved during the response, but a part of the structure was lost and is now unusable, according to Kootenai County Fire and Rescue interim fire chief Pete Holley.
Another church fire that occurred this past weekend was definitely arson.
Video footage clearly shows “a man intentionally igniting the entrance to the building” at a church in Newark, New Jersey…
An overnight fire outside a Newark church is under investigation after video obtained by RLS Media appears to show a man intentionally igniting the entrance to the building while people were inside.
According to a statement released by Newark Public Safety Director Emanuel Miranda, firefighters responded at approximately 12:06 a.m. Saturday, March 14, to a report of a fire at a church located at 136 Mt. Pleasant Avenue.
I hope that the police are able to find this guy.
He just walked right up to the entrance of the church and started pouring gasoline around…
However, video obtained by RLS Media shows a man carrying what appears to be a gasoline can approaching the entrance of the church, identified as Centro Familiar Casa de Dios.
In the footage, the individual appears to pour a liquid near the doorway before spending several seconds striking a match.
The video then shows the suspect tossing the lit match toward the entrance area, igniting flames near one of the church doors.
Another clear case of church arson just happened at an abandoned church in Peoria, Illinois…
The Peoria Fire Department responded to a fire at an abandoned church near North East Madison and Park Avenues on Friday.
Fire crews saw moderate smoke and fire on the second floor of the church when they arrived on the scene at 6:56 p.m, said Battalion Chief Matthew Smith.
Fire crews used a hand line to quickly put out the fire and also went to the roof to check for additional damage.
Authorities have determined that the cause of the fire was definitely arson.
But in most of these cases the perpetrators are never apprehended.
Earlier this month, there was a large fire at the First Baptist Church of Little Rock that local residents believe “may have been intentionally set”…
A vacant church building in Little Rock was heavily damaged by a fire some neighbors believe may have been intentionally set.
The blaze broke out at the First Baptist Church of Little Rock, also known as Ernie’s Museum of Black Arkansas, late Monday evening. The building, long closed and in a state of disrepair, hadn’t been used in several years. According to a man who was looking to buy the property, the structure had previously served multiple purposes before falling vacant.
The Little Rock Fire Marshal’s Office is investigating the cause of the fire, though some neighbors believe it may have been arson.
I cannot prove that any of the examples that I have shared in this article have anything to do with the war in Iran.
But I think that it is quite noteworthy that so many U.S. churches are suddenly burning now that the war in Iran has begun.
And without a doubt there have been some incidents of violence in recent weeks that do have a direct link to what is going on in the Middle East. For instance, it turns out that the man that recently attacked a synagogue in Michigan had brothers in Lebanon that “were members of a Hezbollah rocket unit”…
Ghazali, born in Lebanon, entered the U.S. legally in 2011 on a spousal visa and gained citizenship in 2016. He lived in Dearborn Heights, working at a local restaurant—seemingly integrated, but harboring connections that proved deadly.
Sources confirmed his brothers in Lebanon were members of a Hezbollah rocket unit, the Iranian-backed group notorious for targeting civilians. Those same brothers, along with Ghazali’s niece and nephew, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on March 5, potentially fueling his rage.
There are more than 200 million Shiite Muslims living in our world today.
Approximately 2.5 million of them are living on U.S. soil.
There will be more terror attacks.
It is inevitable.
So please be very careful out there, because things are starting to get really crazy.
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.
