(Daily Signal)—My colleague Tony Kinnett captured a rather revealing declaration at the anti-Israel protests in Chicago ahead of the Democratic National Convention this past week. A protester shouted, “Reproductive justice means Palestinian liberation.”
This leftist gobbledygook is nonsensical on its face (abortion isn’t exactly legal under Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and legal protections on abortion in the U.S. will have no impact on civilians in Gaza), but it reveals a nihilism at the root of much leftist protesting. The protests aren’t really about the omni-cause of climate alarmism, LGBTQ+ demands, abortion, Palestine, or whatever the college kids are into these days. Instead, they represent a challenge to authority, an attempt to “stick it to the man,” regardless of the consequences.
These protests echo a culture that has lost faith in itself and is committing suicide.
Former CIA analyst Martin Gurri examines this phenomenon in his superb book “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” Gurri explains that while modern protesters often coalesce around a specific issue, they have little interest in policy solutions or actual governance. These protests often devolve into a sort of nihilism, where protesters—who usually have actually benefitted from the capitalistic system they loudly condemn—attempt to saw off the tree branch on which they sit.
What better example than the DNC protesters, many of whom wore pins reading, “Make it great like 68”?
Button on several of the marchers. A bit on the nose, tbh. pic.twitter.com/umc32qgPf8
— Tony Kinnett (@TheTonus) August 19, 2024
As my colleague Jarrett Stepman noted, the 1968 Democratic National Convention saw hordes of anti-Vietnam War and far-left protesters descend on the Windy City, making an already negative mood even more sour.
Parallels to 2024 are indeed rather eery. Incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson had dropped out of the race amid criticism in his party (sound familiar?) and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, eventually won the Democratic nomination. Anti-war protests rocked the convention, a former Democrat launched a third-party bid, and high-profile assassinations (of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy) shocked the nation.
In 2024, President Joe Biden fills the shoes of Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Kamala Harris those of Hubert Humphrey, and anti-Israel protesters take the place of Vietnam War peaceniks. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the man assassinated in 1968, mounted a third-party bid (before dropping out and endorsing Trump Friday), and the near-assassination of Donald Trump echoes in the minds of many voters.
If there’s one thing Democrats don’t want, it’s a repeat of 1968, when Nixon won the presidency due in part to the split in the Democratic Party.
Yet the 2024 protesters consciously echoed the troubles of 1968, and they actually succeeded in breaking through the Secret Service barrier—however briefly—on the first day of the convention.
The protesters also openly condemned Harris, portraying her as an enemy of “Palestine” and with blood on her hands.
Effigy of Kamala Harris with blood on her hands less than a mile from the DNC, here in Chicago @DailySignal @MarchOnDNC2024 pic.twitter.com/I9EPpauLHY
— Tim Kennedy (@TimKennedyJr1) August 19, 2024
Yet if 2024 were a binary choice between the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, and Harris, Harris would be far more likely to support the Palestinian cause. Harris has openly called for a ceasefire in Gaza, a policy critics say will enable Hamas to regroup and stage another terrorist attack like the attacks Hamas carried out in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Biden-Harris administration has loosened sanctions on Iran, which has likely enabled Tehran to send more money to Hamas. The Trump administration, meanwhile, had tightened those sanctions, weakening Hamas’s sponsor in the Middle East.
Harris may be an imperfect candidate for anti-Israel voters, but she represents their interests more than Trump. So why are these protesters targeting Harris and the DNC?
It seems they just want to watch the world burn. Either that, or they have a financial incentive to be there.
Martin Gurri notes that many of the 2011 protests—from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to the Indignado protests in Spain and even housing protests in Israel—involved middle-class leaders who benefitted from the system but nonetheless had unrealistically high expectations of government. He attributes the modern protest movement, in part, to the exaggerated promises of politicians, who believe technocratic government will enable them to bring about a utopia, and the dashed hopes of the people who take those promises seriously.
Gurri’s work reveals a latent nihilism in the West. Francis Fukuyama’s much-criticized book “The End of History and the Last Man,” noted that the fall of Communism left free-market capitalism and representative government triumphant and predicted capitalism would reign supreme. Yet Gurri notes that there is always an alternative to the ruling ideology—the rejection of the entire system. Late-empire Rome didn’t lose out to the competing ideology of feudalism; it collapsed from within, and feudalism rose from the ashes.
The death wish of nihilism represents a most insidious foe, and only a wake-up call to reality can defeat it. Contrary to the Left’s demonization, the West has what Psalm 16:6 calls a “goodly heritage” and we all richly benefit from the system these protesters rail against.
Many leftist protesters may believe the system is evil, but that does not change the fact that they themselves benefit within it. These people have conveniences our remote ancestors could only dream about. From running water to electricity to washing machines, microwaves, and the tiny computers that fit in the palm of their hands, they enjoy an embarrassment of wealth and knowledge. Yet many of them claim that the entire system is unjust, rooted in white supremacy, colonialism, anti-LGBT animus, or whatever the hip complaint is today.
The Left’s causes are often bundled into one chaotic mess, with protesters claiming that helping Susie get an abortion in Michigan will somehow improve the life of a toddler in Gaza, or that Tom’s decision to drive an electric vehicle in Georgia will somehow prevent a tsunami from drowning the Maldives beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean. It doesn’t matter that none of it makes sense—the point is to condemn the system.
Of course, a vast network of far-left donors props up pressure groups on all these issues, sending a message to the elites in power that they should yield to the activists’ wishes, or else. This also provides a handy excuse for the government to favor radical causes—the people are “demanding it.”
Ultimately, however, these protesters’ revolt isn’t about implementing a specific policy, it’s about railing against “the system” and sending a message. Martin Gurri astutely notes the real root of that message—cultural suicide.
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.
