We made it to our two-hundred-fiftieth birthday, America. What’s next? Let’s get back to work, so that our descendants can celebrate one thousand.
Making sure the American Experiment endures is work, after all. Protecting American ideals from our ideological enemies is never easy.
Well before our nation declared independence from Great Britain, the American system repudiated the whole “ruling class” hierarchy that — to this day! — still oozes from the infected abscesses of the United Kingdom and much of continental Europe. After we fought two world wars in the twentieth century to save Europe from itself, we spent the Cold War period in a bit of a kumbaya stupor during which Americans often equated the beliefs of Western nobles with those who founded and built the United States.
But Europe and America have never been the same. The people who built America left Europe behind for good reasons. They rejected Europe’s aristocratic allegiances, its feudal social structures, and its false pretension that blue-blooded “elites” are divinely and innately empowered to rule over everyone else.
The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are not merely documents establishing America’s political separation from Britain and the legal foundations for its new government. They are revolutionary statements of America’s intent to remove itself from the generational enslavement upon which monarchies, ruling classes, and feudal systems depend.
Taken together, the Declaration and Constitution assert fundamental truths that governments throughout human history have tried to obscure from their peoples. Those truths include the recognition that all of us are equal before God; so-called noble aristocrats are not divinely given or entitled to receive more power or privilege than the common man. Furthermore, our rights come from God, not the government. Aristocrats, government officials, elected representatives, and bureaucrats cannot give us what only God provides for our well-being and happiness.
Additionally, because governments are artificial creations constructed by imperfect human beings, they are legitimate only when the people who live under those governments consent to their structure. Governments that exercise power in defiance of the will of the people are unjust governments utilizing illegitimate powers.
Finally, when governments deny the people their God-given rights, fail to keep the public safe, undermine their citizens’ happiness, usurp powers belonging to the people, abuse the public, or threaten the lives and liberties of citizens, the people have a right — nay, a duty! — to overthrow those governments and replace them with new governments more likely to protect the people’s lives, liberties, and God-given rights.
These assertions didn’t just repudiate the British Crown. They repudiated the legitimacy of governments throughout the world. Princes justified their powers over common people as expressions of God’s will. Claiming to be God’s direct emissaries on Earth, noble aristocrats considered themselves the arbiters of what rights and liberties common people might enjoy. The American Revolution rejected these premises as outright lies. Princes are endowed with the same rights as commoners. Rights and liberties come from God, not ruling class elites!
In other words, America’s War for Independence was also a war that threatened systems of power throughout the world. If legitimate government powers come directly from the people, then the whole feudal hierarchy is inverted.
Rather than a pyramid with a king or queen on top who allocates certain powers to a small royal court of lords who allocate a few powers to vassals who allocate a tiny portion of those powers to peasants who remain in indentured servitude, the Declaration of Independence asserts that power arises from the base of the pyramid with the people and that government authorities merely borrow the people’s power as temporary custodians obligated to secure and advance the public’s will.
Nothing at the top of the pyramid is legitimate unless the bottom of the pyramid consents. Two-hundred-fifty years ago, America turned the world upside down.
Do any of these American convictions describe Europe today? Does the unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen behave as someone who derives her power from the consent of those Europeans she insists upon governing? Do the digital censorship laws that prevent citizens of the United Kingdom and the European Union from freely communicating with each other protect their God-given rights and liberties? Do the growing swarms of European bureaucrats writing endless rules and regulations inside unaccountable government institutions appear to respect the people’s inherent powers? Do Europe’s open borders policies provide European citizens with security, safety, and happiness?
If the answer to these questions is “no,” then don’t common Europeans have the right and duty to overthrow their governments and form new institutions committed to their protection and the preservation of their freedoms? Otherwise, aren’t most of the bureaucracies and government institutions of Europe wholly illegitimate?
It is easy to see why governments around the world don’t spend much time teaching young students about the Declaration of Independence or the American Revolution. If they did, most citizens would immediately recognize their own forms of government as oppressive, harmful, unjust, and resentful of God’s authority.
This is why European political “leaders” refuse to talk about rights and freedoms and instead drone on about “democracy.” It is difficult to explain how rights and freedoms can be inalienable when governments insist on defining, redefining, or abridging them whenever those in power find it necessary or convenient to do so. “Democracy,” on the other hand, stands for nothing other than the dangerous proposition that fifty-one cannibals can vote to eat forty-nine of their neighbors.
“Democracy” can even be twisted to mean that a couple dozen European Commissioners are entitled to choose a European Commission president who is somehow entitled to write laws for all of Europe. Such an arrangement undermines all safeguards for Europeans’ inalienable rights and liberties. Describing fascism, socialism, or monarchy as “democratic” does not lend legitimacy to despotic forms of government.
To this day, Europe’s leaders don’t understand America. Or they understand, but they pretend that America embraces European “values.” Or they look down upon America as some kind of wild mongrel that makes a good guard dog but remains incapable of appreciating the dignified sensibilities of European “elites.”
The noble gentry who spread their cancerous ideologies from Brussels do their best to groom and domesticate America while expecting us to pee on the rug at any time. Europe’s entrenched aristocracy prefers for the unruly American dog to stay outside.
Part of the reason we are “unruly,” though, is that our political instincts are foreign and threatening to a European feudal structure that demands total power for the few and no power at all for the many. Europe’s bureaucrats prefer Karl Marx to Thomas Jefferson. Europe’s aristocratic “elites” prefer declarations of dependence to America’s Declaration of Independence.
The future is not a battle between the so-called “democratic” West and the authoritarian regimes of the world. The future is a battle between feudal forms of government and an American system that recognizes governments as legitimate only when they are used to protect each individual’s God-given rights. Both in Europe and the United States, the war against government tyranny and for human freedom will continue to rage. European and American “elites” will do everything they can to foster public dependence upon government. European and American citizens who wish to be free must declare their independence from Big Government.
There are those alive today who believe that Big Government cannot be beaten. That’s natural. Two-hundred-fifty years ago, few believed that America’s Declaration of Independence would lead to the British Empire’s defeat. The war for human freedom never truly ends. Every generation must fight to secure their God-given rights.
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.
