When I write about threats to Western civilization, I struggle to find the sweet spot between describing the myriad problems we face and my firm belief that we are capable of winning this fight. I do not think all is lost. I do, however, think that it is important for as many people as possible to recognize what our enemies are doing.
When we are being attacked from all sides — culturally, politically, economically, socially, parentally, morally, religiously, psychologically — it is sometimes difficult to recognize that these attacks are all connected. Those who wish to destroy Western civilization use every available weapon to hurt us. When we concentrate on nothing but “bad news,” though, we talk ourselves into premature defeat. We psych ourselves out. We give our enemies greater power over us than they have.
We cannot bury our heads in the sand and ignore what is happening. We also cannot allow what is happening to intimidate us into silence or cow us into submission. Ideally, we will become more vocal in articulating exactly what our enemies are doing, find comfort in the growing chorus of voices urging resistance, and become only more confident in our defense of Western civilization.
Sounding the alarm is not a call for surrender. Nor should hearing the alarm cause us to tremble. This is the time for courage and determination. When our Western ancestors faced similar dangers in the past, they did not hide or run away. They prepared themselves for hardship. They prayed. They retrieved hidden swords from thatched roofs, straw beds, and bales of hay.
In broad strokes, we know what’s happening. Open borders policies in North America and Europe are sabotaging social cohesion. Christianity is under attack. Reason, rationality, and scientific inquiry have been abandoned. Our shared history is continuously rewritten in ways that turn our ancestors into villains. Enlightenment ideals fostering individual sovereignty, personal freedom, and maximum liberty have been eroded by the pernicious encroachments of collectivism, Marxism, socialism, and communism.
Virtue is mocked, while sin is celebrated. Unchecked desire, envy, and instant gratification have supplanted temperance, humility, and self-restraint. The indulgence of personal fantasy has superseded the pursuit of eternal truth. Schools, governments, and cultural institutions preach a false and destructive religion requiring Westerners to repent for their “climate change sins” and embrace the doctrines of “multiculturalism” and “diversity” as tenets of leftism’s “faith.”
Those are the various arrows being shot at us daily. The damage caused from such sustained onslaught is immense. Last week, conservative publications around the world carried the sad news of a twenty-five-year-old Barcelona woman named Noelia Castillo Ramos who chose to end her own life with the help of Spanish authorities. Ramos spent her childhood in Spain’s broken foster system, being moved from one facility to the next. Spain also uses these facilities to house unaccompanied foreign minors.
A group of these foreign minors brutally gang raped Ramos when she was a teenager. Suffering physically and psychologically, Ramos attempted suicide by leaping from a fifth-floor window four years ago. She survived but was left paraplegic. Spanish authorities deemed her “severe mental suffering” sufficient grounds to grant her plea for State-assisted death.
Dutch political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek spoke for many Westerners who have mourned Ramos’s death when she wrote: “The system didn’t fail her, it actively betrayed her. This girl’s tragic story is a perfect illustration of how the establishment feels about European women. They first endanger you and then when you need help and cost them too much money, they push you to your grave.”
The life of Noelia Castillo Ramos is a terrible indictment of the malignant forces working to collapse Western civilization. State-run childcare facilities cannot replace the immeasurable value of a loving mother and father. Uncontrolled immigration invites predators to prey on our nations’ children. Western governments’ evil efforts to protect foreign rapists and murderers from public scrutiny have aided and abetted the exploitation and abuse of our most vulnerable citizens for decades. Because of the State’s complicity and the corporate news media’s silence, the butcher’s bill of victims has only grown.
Ignored and kept hidden, victims are deprived of life-saving attention, counseling, rehabilitation, Christian nurturing, physical recovery, and the salubrious promise of spiritual salvation. In place of familial protection, social support, cultural camaraderie, and Christian fellowship, the forgotten members of our societies receive the cold indifference of government bureaucracy. When those most suffering cry out in pain, the same institutions that failed to secure the border or provide for citizens’ safety offer State-sponsored death.
Discarding the moral and intellectual enlightenment obtained over centuries of work and contemplation, today’s governments have abandoned the hallmarks of Western civilization and reanimated the rotting corpses of paganism, hedonism, idolatry, and child sacrifice. While Western citizens desperately seek civilizational renewal, Western governments do nothing but fan the flames of the growing inferno.
In the United States, Democrat Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal is demanding that law enforcement agents who arrest illegal aliens be prosecuted and that illegal aliens who have been detained receive monetary “reparations.” For decades, Democrats (and Establishment Republicans) have aided and abetted foreign nationals in illegally entering the United States. Many of these illegal aliens steal American citizens’ social security numbers and commit various forms of identity theft and fraud in order to collect welfare benefits or secure employment. Democrats wish to reward the criminals and punish their victims.
Criminals who have no legal right to be in the United States — including those who fled criminal prosecutions in their native homelands — go on to commit new crimes while here. Violent foreign nationals who should not be here have raped and murdered far too many Americans. Negligent foreign nationals who should not be here have killed far too many Americans while driving cars and commercial trucks across the country.
Far too many schools have been forced to figure out how to teach illegal alien children who cannot speak English or easily assimilate. Far too many towns and cities have been forced into insolvency while providing ever-expanding social services for illegal aliens whom American taxpayers cannot afford. Far too many hospitals are overrun with illegal alien patients who delay treatment for and drive up the healthcare costs of Americans. And now the Democrat Party wants to pay the tens of millions of foreigners who illegally reside here “reparations” for feeling “unsafe.”
You know who doesn’t feel safe? American citizens. At some point, they will be forced to seek reparations from the same government officials who do everything to feed, shelter, and protect foreigners while leaving Americans poorer and less secure.
In responding to the pro-foreigner / anti-American policies of Representative Jayapal and her Democrat colleagues, one online commenter concluded, “Sometimes seems like only a civil war will save this country.” That’s a sentiment widely held throughout the West these days.
Last week, a European Parliament conference concluded that the whole continent is headed for civil war. One professor argued that “the foundations of Western self-belief, prosperity, and competency” are now broken and that Europe is “on a track for a peasant revolt.”
In response to Western governments’ betrayal of Western civilization, there will be an “uprising in which the ruled seek to punish their rulers for violating their obligations under the social contract, and for changing the rules of the game against their wishes.” Most of the politicians and academics who participated in the conference do not believe that Europe will survive this century. Although they expressed various opinions about how the coming chaos will unfold, they reached a common conclusion: “It will be bloody.”
Those of us who wish to defend the West should not scurry and hide. We should recognize the moment and prepare ourselves accordingly. Our enemies are everywhere. That’s okay. We are everywhere, too.
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.
