We Westerners have an important job to do. In the years and decades ahead, we must reassert our God-given rights.
Note that I do not assign this task to Western governments. Governments, in the best of times, are an annoyance; in anything but the best of times, governments are oppressive and dangerous. It is in governments’ nature to use their respective monopolies on violence to take more and more from the citizens who live within their jurisdictions. It is unnatural for governments to fight for our rights and liberties because our rights and liberties are fundamental checks on every government’s powers.
Governments will not fight for your free speech; they fight to be the only voices that can be heard. Governments will not fight for your religious freedom because governments cannot countenance a higher moral authority than their own. Governments will not fight for your property rights because their taxes and regulations rely on the immoral premise that your property is never really yours. Governments do not defend citizens’ natural, inalienable, God-given rights from attacks because governments are the offensive entities doing the attacking.
Only the people can defend their God-given rights. And only the people can decide when they’ve endured a sufficient number of attacks on their rights to stand up and tell their governments, “No more.” Until citizens do so, governments will pretend that the people have given them permission to infringe upon those natural rights and accrue more power for themselves.
Across the West, governments continue to probe just how far they can go before the people push back. They regulate what citizens are permitted to say on social media platforms. They censor points of view that contradict official government narratives.
They criminalize public expressions of Christian faith. They read our emails, bank records, medical charts, chat messages, credit card statements, phone logs, and online shopping histories without first obtaining warrants or establishing probable cause that any crimes have been committed. They spy on us with their cameras, computers, AI systems, and drones.
Governments violate our God-given rights every single day, while telling us that these violations are justified. They tell us that their attacks on our speech, faith, privacy, and domestic sovereignty are done for our own good. That’s a bit like spousal abuse, is it not? Just as a bad husband might beat his wife until she “learns to behave,” governments censor, demean, spy on, and threaten us into submission. Whether through taxation, regulation, police intimidation, constant monitoring, or criminal enforcement, every government creates the conditions for an abusive relationship. The only question is how abusive each government will become.
A major reason why our rights and liberties are under attack today is that so many of us in the West have been asleep. We told ourselves that we belonged to the nations that defeated fascism, Nazism, and, more generally, totalitarianism. We spent decades standing up to the Soviet Union and championing freedom over communist tyranny. We took pride in knowing that we lived in countries where you could speak your mind without going to jail. We understood that in despotic nations, such as communist China, Christians practice their faith in secret.
We saw images of tanks massacring Chinese demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. We heard stories of famine and mass execution coming from North Korea. We knew that communists and drug cartels slaughtered people in South and Central America. Knowing that extreme barbarity and oppression exist elsewhere in the world made us feel relatively comfortable and safe. In other words, we took our freedoms for granted.
We forgot that totalitarianism is not some exotic creation of the Italians, Germans, or Japanese. We allowed ourselves to believe that the forms of government oppression against which our family members fought in prior wars could never find a foothold here. But just because our nations fought oppression in the past does not mean our governments became naturally immune to the totalitarian disease.
In some ways, Western governments have found it easier to imprison us precisely because we celebrated our past successes while ignoring the signs of failure in our own countries. We told ourselves, “We have free speech.” Our governments said, “Sure you do, except for words and ideas that we designate as ‘dis-,’ ‘mal-,’ or ‘mis-information,’” and we deluded ourselves into thinking that that contradiction somehow made sense. We told ourselves, “We are free to practice our religious faiths without fear of government interference.”
Our governments said, “Sure you are, except if you choose to pray before a football game or outside of an abortion clinic, and, of course, you definitely can’t call homosexuality a sin or ‘transgenderism’ a mental disorder”; and we convinced ourselves that governments’ will took precedence over God’s will. We told ourselves, “Our homes, papers, private communications, and personal effects are secure against government searches and seizures.”
Our governments said, “Of course they are, but we’re still going to have to look through all of your personal messages and belongings to make sure that you’re not doing anything illegal or spreading ‘disinformation’ or engaging in nondescript forms of ‘hate’”; and we assured ourselves that our governments were only spying on us in order to “protect the children” from all manner of threats.
All the while, these governments that we defended as part of the “free world” have adopted elements of the closed, authoritarian, centrally-controlled systems that leaders of the “free world” claim to oppose. Western officials never miss an opportunity to rail against “fascism,” while working hand-in-glove with unelected central banks, NGOs, multinational corporations, and vast armies of bureaucrats to impose the will of a small cabal of elites upon entire nations of citizens. Western officials rarely say anything negative about communism because they are constructing socialist systems that share much in common with the Chinese Communist Party.
Western officials have spent ten years telling us that the election of President Donald Trump in the United States represents a resurgence in “authoritarianism,” yet those same officials demand that Westerners obey the authority of so-called “experts” and the edicts that come from international organizations, “climate change” treaties, and health bureaucracies.
Western governments engage in all these contradictions by playing a devilish magic trick against Western peoples: They never speak about rights or freedoms. They speak only of “democracy.”
“Democracy,” however, means nothing without a Bill of Rights or similar charter that effectively prevents governments from infringing the natural rights of the people. In the United Kingdom, the unelected king just made Andy Burnham prime minister, even though the former mayor of Greater Manchester was handed a seat in Parliament.
In Ukraine, dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy remains “president” two years after the expiration of his term. In France, the Netherlands, and Germany, prosecutors, courts, intelligence agencies, and news media conspire to prevent politicians who believe in national sovereignty from coming to power.
In Romania, a presidential election was canceled when the wrong candidate won (who was then prosecuted for made-up “crimes” as so many other pro-nation politicians have been throughout the West). Unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen controls the legislation and foreign policy of the continent.
In the United States, President Obama’s administration framed President Trump as a Russian spy; Democrats rigged the 2020 “election” with unlawful mail-in-ballots; and unethical prosecutors and judges fabricated charges against Trump that could have imprisoned him for life. Then, in the 2024 presidential contest, Democrats summarily replaced Joe Biden with Kamala Harris, even though she never won a single primary. This is what Western governments call “democracy.”
As Western governments more frequently resort to installing leaders at whim, it becomes more difficult to distinguish Western “democracy” from oligarchy or dictatorship. This is why we must reassert our God-given rights. Fake “democracies” cannot take what only God can give us.
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.
