(End of the American Dream)—When I was a kid, it was much more difficult for hoaxes to spread. In those days, a much higher proportion of the population was grounded in truth, and so there was not as much fertile territory for falsehoods to take root. Unfortunately, times have changed. Today, a very large percentage of the population no longer believes in “absolutely truth”, and social media has made it possible for “fake news” and misinformation to travel all over the globe in just moments. Yes, without a doubt there are a lot of very strange things going on in our world today. But we must also have enough discernment to be able to separate truth from fiction.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about.
The other day, the police in the little town of Damariscotta, Maine started getting flooded with calls.
Local residents were breathlessly reporting that “Bigfoot” was walking around right in the middle of their community…
Maine cops launched an investigation after a surge of 911 calls reported spotting Bigfoot roaming around town — only to discover it was actually just a fashion victim in a “very convincing” costume.
Damariscotta cops received an “unusually high number of calls” on Tuesday about a Sasquatch-like creature wandering around the tiny mid-coast tourist destination, including during morning drop-off on the first day of school, according to NBC News and the Damariscotta Police Department.
The mystery prompted several alarmed residents to snap photos of what appeared to be a large figure covered head-to-toe in fur and wearing a top hat.
It is amazing that so many people fell for this.
If Bigfoot is going to invade your town, he probably isn’t going to do it wearing an odd brown hat…
Over the years, I have seen many photographs of creatures that I cannot explain.
This is not one of them.
After conducting a “completely serious investigation”, the police did not put the guy in the costume under arrest because he had not committed any crimes…
“After a lengthy, exhaustive, and completely serious investigation, members of the Damariscotta Police Department have reached a conclusion: Bigfoot is not real,” cops said.
“We understand this may be disappointing to some. Frankly, there were members of our department who were secretly hoping we had finally stumbled upon something that would make national news.”
Officers did not place the wannabee Bigfoot buffoon under arrest, since there was no evidence of criminal activity, police said.
That story made me smile, but this next story is much more serious.
There are some online hoaxers that are using a sinister AI-created version of “the Cat in the Hat” to terrorize local communities…
The “Cat in the Hat” hoax used AI-generated images depicting a sinister version of the familiar Dr. Seuss character. Some posts falsely suggested that the character was lurking outside homes, schools or neighborhoods, often pairing the images with threatening captions.
Needless to say, “the Cat in the Hat” is not real and is not going to hurt anyone.
But in one area, dozens of kids recently stayed home from school because there was so much concern about this hoax…
On Monday, Aug. 31, TRISD reported 90 students who were absent from school, most related to the hoax. On Tuesday, the number was 50 and on Wednesday, 35. While acknowledging the fear that parents may have, Superintendent Les Dragon said the social media craze has affected learning.
“Kids need to be in school,” Dragon said.
These days, people will fall for just about anything.
Earlier today, I came across an article that discussed how some people are using a 1937 painting to prove that time travel is real…
A painting from 90 years ago has resurfaced online and is sparking wild theories that it proves time travel is real.
The 1937 work, entitled ‘Mr Pynchon and the Settling of Springfield,’ allegedly shows an Indigenous man in the 17th century holding a smartphone to take a selfie.
The man can clearly be seen in the foreground holding the bottom half of the black device with white or silver trim like a modern phone while he looks into the top half of the object.
The out-of-place item, which did not exist in either the 1600s or the 1930s, has sparked speculation for years that the painter left a clue in this well-known work that confirmed the existence of time travel.
Are you kidding me?
Below is the 1937 painting that has created such a furor…
The Indian near the bottom of the painting is certainly looking at some sort of a rectangular object.
But to claim that it is a smartphone takes a lot more imagination than I have.
Now let me get into a subject that is more controversial.
The Mirror just published a piece about a series of cattle mutilations that have been occurring in the western half of the country…
A rancher featured in the new Amazon Prime documentary Not One Drop of Blood took filmmakers to see what remained of a bull that had been killed and partially carved up by an unidentified attacker.
The property owner, who identified himself as Keith, said: “We saw that bull laying there dead, and it was pretty obvious he’d been mutilated.”
When Keith’s wife closely examined the bull that had been killed, she discovered “a perfectly-cut circle on the underside”…
Keith’s wife Candy noted that the cuts on the bull’s carcass were remarkably exact: “You just don’t see a perfectly-cut circle on the underside of an animal like that. You can see where they cut his testicles out … and then when we walked around the other side we could see that the anus had been perfectly cut out too.”
I don’t doubt that she is telling the truth.
Another rancher in Oregon says that a similar thing has been happening on his property…
Another Oregon cattle farmer, Clint Weaver, initially assumed a deceased bull discovered on his land had perished during a confrontation with another bull: “At first, we thought it was just the bulls fighting, so we kind of chalked that up to a death,” he said, “But then we found another one.
“Then we started looking at them a lot closer, and noticed that their testicles and their reproductive organs were gone. Then we drove up the creek and found the rest of them, and it was the same: the testicles, reproductive organs, sometimes the tongues were gone. And then we knew something was going on, so then we called the law enforcement in.’”.
Clearly something very unusual is going on.
But it isn’t “aliens from another galaxy” that are doing this.
Nobody has traveled tens of thousands of light years to mutilate cattle.
The entities that people commonly refer to as “aliens” did not originate from a galaxy far, far away.
But I realize that a lot of people out there don’t want to hear that.
Lastly, I wanted to mention a story that millions of people all over the country are talking about today.
Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon is claiming that the people that are building AI are convinced that it could kill all of humanity by the end of this decade.
The following is the post on X that started the frenzy…
Yes, AI is a potential threat in a lot of different ways.
But it isn’t going to kill all of us within the next five years.
There are a number of other things that could kill millions upon millions of people during the years ahead, but AI will not be one of them.
AI is just another tool.
When computers were invented, people issued all sorts of ominous warnings.
When the Internet came along, many warned that it would be the end of everything.
And how many times have we heard that the robots are going to kill all of us over the years?
It isn’t the technology that is going to do us in.
Of course the elitists behind the technology are another matter altogether.
Throughout human history, one of the greatest threats to humans has always been other humans.
And right now tyranny is on the rise all over the planet.
In the UK, 62,000 people have been arrested for “speech crimes” in just the past five years…
A report from a leading civil liberties campaign group has found that the British state has arrested at least 62,000 people over five years for speech crimes, for an average of 34 arrests per day.
Censorship laws such as the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003, and the Online Safety Act 2023 have been used by both Labour and so-called Conservative governments to arrest 62,199 people for “communication offences”, including offensive jokes online, between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2025, the Big Brother Watch pressure group has revealed.
They don’t want us to be able to speak freely.
In fact, they want us to have as little freedom as possible.
Here in the United States, our lives are governed by literally millions of federal, state and local laws and regulations.
Just about every form of human activity that you can imagine is covered by these laws and regulations.
But despite all of their efforts to tightly control society, it is falling apart anyway.
We live at a time when the pace of change is faster than ever, and that is why it is going to be so important for all of us to be grounded in the truth so that we will be able to separate fact from fiction during the extremely chaotic times that are ahead of us.
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.
