Occasionally I hear credentialed professionals with prestigious titles whine about the so-called “war on expertise.” It really bothers people who see themselves as “experts” that a growing share of society ignores them. A psychologist might intuit something revealing from the lack of self-confidence plaguing our “expert” class. If all the fancy degrees, voluminous curricula vitae, and lofty career positions have failed to instill a resilient modicum of self-esteem, then perhaps all those things are not the true measures of a person’s worth.
“Experts” do not like to be challenged. They say things such as, “I have a PhD in this,” or, “I get paid a lot of money to talk about that,” and expect everybody listening to stop thinking and immediately agree with everything the “expert” has to say.
I once witnessed a young “race studies” professor intrude into an online debate and tell everyone that she was correct and everybody else was wrong. Her evidence? She cited the costs of her education, her recent promotion, and her new annual salary. Traditionally, that’s considered a specific kind of logical fallacy known as an appeal to authority. When appeals to “expertise” replace reason and rationality, false conclusions are more easily justified.
We have been living in an era rife with appeals to authority masquerading as truth. In fact, I came across something hilariously unsurprising as I was writing this essay. Because Internet search engines no longer operate as research tools but rather as propaganda aggregators, I often have to peruse many pages of search results before I find topical and pertinent sources. Leftwing disinformation index Wikipedia routinely receives prime placement for any online query. I decided to check how the propagandists at Wikipedia describe appeals to authority these days, and the editors did not disappoint (someone as cynical as I):
“While all sources agree this is not a valid form of logical proof, and therefore, obtaining knowledge in this way is fallible, there is disagreement on the general extent to which it is fallible — historically, opinion on the appeal to authority has been divided: it is listed as a non-fallacious argument as often as a fallacious argument in various sources.” My sides, they hurt so much as I laugh uncontrollably! Then Wikipedia’s meaningless equivocation ends with this gem: “Some consider it a practical and sound way of obtaining knowledge that is generally likely to be correct when the authority is real.”
There you go, kids! So long as the “authority” is “real,” it’s quite “practical” and “sound” to hand your brain over to the resident “expert” or AI machine and let he/she/it do your thinking for you! It’s not a “logical fallacy” if the “authority” says it’s not! How very twenty-first-century of the 1984-like censors, history rewriters, and information warfare specialists who manage the world’s “free” encyclopedia. Wikipedia may be “free,” but it still levies a steep tax. The “price” of offshoring one’s thinking to “experts” is a life filled with few cogent thoughts. That’s too high of a cost for any human seeking wisdom.
Appeals to authority are often absurd. Since the mid-twentieth-century, most of the handsome or beautiful news anchors who tell the world what to believe have been empty-headed script-readers with subpar intellects (Hello, Dan Rather!). According to renowned climate scientist Al Gore, Miami and Manhattan should have spent the last decade submerged under ten feet of water. At the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, then-fifteen-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg told world leaders that they were “not mature enough to tell it like it is.”
Those world leaders — prone to lean directly into appeals to authority themselves — immediately told the planet’s youngest generations to listen to the Swedish teenager if they wanted to survive the carbon apocalypse. Similarly, noted virologist Bill Gates (I forget: Does he have Nobels in both chemistry and medicine?) assured us that we would all die unless we allowed his corporate friends to inject us regularly with experimental serums and did everything government officials say. All the very smartest people spent at least two years telling us that only totalitarianism and censorship could save us from COVID.
It may be absurd to mindlessly trust the “expertise” of Dan Rather, Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, and Bill Gates, but it’s no less dangerous to mindlessly trust the “expertise” of someone whom Wikipedia would no doubt describe as a “real authority.” Dr. Anthony Fauci has all the credentials that people who enjoy credentials salivate over. He has a medical degree. He has a trophy room full of awards. He’s a member of the best institutions. He was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly forty years, for goodness’ sake! Wasn’t he even the highest paid employee in the federal government? Money, accolades, social status — Fauci has it all. His prestige drips with prestige.
Yet he told us that COVID couldn’t possibly have come from a Chinese bio-lab (that he and his associates partially funded). He told us that experimental mRNA “vaccines” would prevent infection…er, reduce spread…er, make symptoms less severe. He told us that natural immunity was no good (because the pharmaceutical companies can’t profit from that). He told us to wear one mask (cloth or paper or whatever), then two masks, then three masks, then three masks and a plastic shield. He told us that small businesses should close their doors, but that “critical” businesses — such as Walmart — should remain open. He told us that kids should be kept out of school…but perhaps they’d be safe behind plexiglass walls…so long as the powerful heads of public school teachers’ unions thought that “science” was sound.
And plenty of people around the world (including America’s cult of “authority”-worshiping Karens and government-worshiping Democrats) admired Fauci’s lustrous prestige, ignored his illogical and contradictory pronouncements, and did whatever he said.
That’s the danger with appeals to authority. When you hand your brain to third-parties, don’t be surprised to discover that “experts” value your life less than you do.
Europeans are learning this lesson the hard way right now. For decades, the “elites” have shunned hydrocarbon energies and made their economies too dependent upon unreliable wind and solar alternatives. European “authorities” decommissioned nuclear power plants, even though doing so meant that European industries became more dependent upon Russian natural gas.
Then came the War in Ukraine and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines. Eventually, Ukraine’s martial-law-holdover-president/dictator, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, blocked oil deliveries from Russia through the Druzhba pipeline to Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Germany. And President Trump’s strikes on Iran made it much more difficult for Europe to obtain critical hydrocarbons from the Middle East.
European “authorities” have spent decades using the “global warming” hobgoblin to scare the public into accepting expensive and unreliable sources of energy whose use will do nothing to “save the planet.” Those “authorities” have managed, however, to cripple most European industries and make Europe’s cost of living prohibitively expensive.
Inevitably, whenever I even passingly mention Ukraine President/Dictator Zelenskyy, some unhappy readers call me names. Regular commenter “Megan Draper, M.S.” recently wondered, “how much money the Russian government” must be giving me. Another commenter going by the handle “asherpat” implied that I am “a Russian influencing agent.” Putting aside their casual libel, I will point out that both commenters employ another kind of logical fallacy: appeal to ridicule. Although besmirching my character is one way to counter my arguments, it is not one based on solid reasoning.
I suggest that all authorities be challenged regardless of their credentials. Just as degrees are incomplete measures of one’s education, titles of “authority” are poor substitutes for wisdom. It is our capacity for reasoned debate that helps us separate the wheat from the chaff.
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.
