(End of the American Dream)—As we approach America’s 250th birthday, a lot of people are reflecting on how much our society has changed over the years. If we could go back to 1776, we would be absolutely shocked by how different day to day life was back then. Early Americans didn’t have everything handed to them, and so they had to work extremely hard. But even though conditions were often very rough, the population was also very civilized. That actually didn’t change for a long time. Even as recently as 100 years ago, people living in the western world were very highly civilized. The way they dressed, the way they spoke and the way that they carried themselves commanded respect. Of course if our ancestors could see us today, they would be deeply shocked by how far we have fallen.
One of the primary reasons why our culture has shifted so dramatically is because we have embraced completely different values.
In early America, more than 95 percent of the population was made up of Bible-believing Christians.
But today we have gone down a much different road.
New York City’s world famous pride parade was on Sunday. It was being projected that approximately 2 million people would come out and watch the parade in person…
Elected officials like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani led the way Sunday morning, followed by tens of thousands of activists, sparkling and celebrating. In all, organizers said about 75,000 marchers participated in this year’s event, which was expected to draw over 2 million spectators.
Hochul also announced the state is expanding funding to improve support for the LBGTQIA+ community, including $1.8 million for crisis counseling services.
That is an absolutely massive crowd.
Other major U.S. cities had extremely impressive turnouts for their pride parades as well.
For example, it was expected that approximately 1 million people would show up for San Francisco’s pride parade, and apparently some of them had “absolutely nothing” on…
Hundreds of thousands flocked to the streets of San Francisco on Sunday afternoon adorned in glitter, rhinestones, and rainbow flags — or absolutely nothing — to celebrate the 2026 Pride Parade. In a year defined by record levels of anti-LGBTQ legislation across the country, SF Pride responded with a new theme: “Resistance in Action.”
“We’re organizing, showing up, doing the tangible work of protecting one another,” the organization’s president, Joshua Smith, said in a San Francisco Bay Times newsletter.
San Francisco has celebrated Pride for 56 years since the first march on Polk Street in June 1970. Now, organizers estimate about one million people will have descended on the city for Pride celebrations over the weekend. Resonating with its theme of resistance, the Party for Socialism and Liberation Bay Area and trans rights activists marched at the front of Sunday’s parade. They chanted “Donald Trump let’s be clear, queer people are welcome here,” and “Trans views are welcome here.”
Once upon a time, public nudity would get you arrested.
Now it is something that we celebrate.
According to Fox News, at Seattle’s pride parade on Sunday “participants pranced naked through the streets while children looked on”.
It is estimated that about 20 percent of the U.S. population has now attended a pride celebration in person.
And if you are a member of the Girl Scouts, you can actually earn patches by participating in pride events…
Today, Girl Scouts USA publishes an official LGBTQ+ Pride Month fun patch program — available for Daisy scouts (kindergartners and first graders) on up. Fun patches are optional and are at the discretion of troop leaders to present.
Girls can earn a rainbow patch by completing activities including making rainbow flags “to celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride Month,” watching documentaries on LGBTQ history “such as the Stonewall Uprising,” memorizing poetry by LGBTQ poets, reading children’s books such as “I Am Jazz” and “Love Makes a Family,” visiting the National Women’s History Museum website to study LGBTQ historical figures, and participating in the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (Glisten)’s No Name-Calling Week. The patch guide calls it an effort “to disrupt anti-LGBTQ+ harassment and bias-based bullying.”
Another suggestion is for the girls to don their uniforms and “attend an LGBTQ+ Pride celebration in June with your family or troop.”
In some cities, participants in the pride parades can literally do just about anything that they want in public and they will never get arrested as long as it is considered to be part of the parade.
But if you speak out against what is going on, then you will get in trouble.
In Detroit, a 31-year-old woman got removed from a Tigers game for wearing a shirt that said “Jesus over Pride”…
A 31-year-old Commerce Township woman said Tuesday she was the victim of religious discrimination by Comerica Park employees and Detroit police officers who escorted her from the ballpark Friday after she was told her hoodie bearing the message “Jesus over Pride” was offensive to people who’d complained.
But Detroit Tigers officials said the woman wasn’t removed because of her clothing, but because she refused multiple directives to sit down during the game.
Paige Combs-Morgan said when relatives invited her to join them in their seats behind home plate for the Detroit Tigers game against the Chicago White Sox, she decided to wear the hoodie in response to the flap over three San Francisco Giants players who wrote Bible verses on their caps during the team’s June 12 Pride Night celebration at Oracle Park. The players said they objected to wearing team caps bearing the Pride logo, which they said violated their religious beliefs.
All over the country, Christians are being singled out for what they believe.
Of course what we are seeing now is nothing compared to the persecution that is coming.
In Minneapolis, the “longstanding ban on adult bathhouses and businesses where people can have sex in the city” has been officially repealed…
The Minneapolis City Council voted 9-2 on Thursday with one abstaining to repeal the longstanding ban on adult bathhouses and businesses where people can have sex in the city. The vote comes after work from advocates, city staff and council members who say the ban is rooted in homophobia.
The final step to repeal the ban is a signature from Mayor Jacob Frey, who previously told MPR News he supports the repeal.
Adult bathhouses are community spaces that were historically frequented by gay men in the 1970s and ‘80s where people could engage in sexual activity or relax after going out to bars. They were banned in Minneapolis in 1988 during the AIDS epidemic.
Can you imagine what our founders would think about this?
Our society is changing at a pace that is difficult to grasp.
Today, approximately 54 percent of the population of Dearborn, Michigan is Muslim, and on Sunday thousands upon thousands of them showed up for a march that commemorated the Day of Ashura…
Waving religious flags and holding signs calling for justice, Shia Muslims gathered and walked on Ford Road in Dearborn in a colorful display Sunday, June 28, that marked Ashura, a holiday recalling the death of a leader whose message resonates today with the faithful.
The procession started at Fordson High School, led by a group of young men who held by red flags that read “Ashura,” referring to the 10th day of the Islamic month of Muharram, when a revered leader who is the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, Imam Hussain, died in battle against an unjust ruler.
A very high percentage of the Muslims in Dearborn are Shiites.
In other words, they believe the exact same things that the regime in Iran does, and they are very highly organized…
I just asked Google what the fastest growing religion in the United States is, and I was told that it is Islam.
Just think about that.
At the same time, Americans are less proud of their country than ever before…
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, 33% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely proud” to be an American, the lowest reading in Gallup’s trend dating back to 2001. Another 20% say they are “very proud,” which means just over half of Americans express high levels of pride in their country.
The remaining shares say they are “moderately proud” (22%), “only a little proud” (15%) or “not at all proud” (9%).
When Gallup first asked this question in 2001, 55% of U.S. adults were extremely proud to be American. Pride surged after 9/11, with 65% to 70% of Americans expressing extreme pride through 2004. Extreme pride declined after that but held at majority levels through 2017. Since 2018, no more than 47% of U.S. adults have said they are extremely proud. The latest figure, from a June 1-15 poll, is down eight percentage points from last year and is tied for the largest year-over-year change in the trend, along with 2004-2005.
So this is where we are at as we approach America’s 250th birthday.
Our culture is being transformed at a blistering rate, and our world is getting crazier with each passing day.
In this sort of an environment, it takes great courage to stand up for what is right.
It is certainly not easy to shine a light in the darkness, but it is so desperately needed at this time in history.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.
