As we’ve covered many times, including an article we linked to yesterday, the world leaders at the G20 meeting are following the lead of World Economic Forum Bond-Style bad guy Klaus Schwab and his desires to spread Digital ID, vaccine passports, and other control mechanisms around the globe. We’ve heard many of the leaders in attendance express their giddiness over the prospects while only a handful of stalwart and likely endangered leaders are pushing back.
But it’s not just the actual leaders. Royalty has entered the fray, and while they have very little direct governmental power, they still hold sway using proxies and resources that often make them more dangerous than elected officials. Nobody votes for a King or Queen who has decades or even centuries of accumulated family power. One such quickly emerging bad guy is Queen Máxima of the Netherlands. She made her presence known as I discussed in a short segment during the latest episode of The JD Rucker Show. Here’s the clip:
Here’s the article by Didi Rancovik from Reclaim The Net that explains the details:
Some might say that in this day and age, members of royal families across Europe should be treated like children in Victorian England: seen, but not heard.
They still appear to be pretty quiet in England – at least when it comes to digital money, cryptocurrencies, and related issues. But over in the Netherlands, Queen Máxima is very active of late trying her hand at vigorously promoting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).
Not even a week ago, at a meeting dedicated to the digital euro in Brussels, Máxima made a “passionate plea” in favor of these controversial digital versions of fiat money; now, the audience gathered in Bali for the G20 summit heard much the same.
And critics say, it is at its core a call to introduce “a social credit system based on the Chinese model.”
Financial expert Arno Wellens, is one of those critics. “Max wants to introduce programmable digital money, supposedly to help the poor. That is a nonsensical argument,” Wellens wrote.
“This central bank digital currency (CBDC) destroys our privacy. Soon you will be ruled by an app, with which the government can freeze your life at the touch of a button.”
Queen Máxima’s own country’s prime minister and finance minister were in the audience in Bali, attending the summit’s B20 business event at the G20 conference – and what would a global gathering be without the participation of World Economic Forum’s leader Klaus Schwab, who was also there.
Somewhat amusingly, although perhaps more worryingly – given its status as a “reputable” news source – Reuters reported about Máxima’s remarks in a tweet that claimed “crypto” has a new royal follower.
But CBDCs – which, like the name suggests, are controlled by governments and central banks and whose backers would like to see them linked to digital identities of people around the world in a rather dystopian network – are a very different “beast” that what is known as cryptocurrencies, whose claim to fame is precisely decentralization and “liberation” from central financial authorities.
The Queen cites India a good example of combining digital ID with payment functionality and access to services in one platform.
Máxima sees an important task for stakeholders, such as banks, companies, governments and financial institutions, to enable the digital infrastructure.
Queen Máxima may be vigorous in her CBDCs “propaganda,” as some will no doubt see it, but she does not have anything particularly original or inspirational to say while pitching them to the elites, and by extension to the masses they control.
She talks about “coming together, joining hands, access for everyone” – and her kumbaya speeches insinuate that the world’s real burning problems like runaway inflation, as well as favorite agendas like climate change and Covid, can all be solved with a new, “digital financial infrastructure.”
Máxima is particularly impressed by what’s currently happening in India, where reports say “digital ID cards (are combined) with a payment interface and stakeholder services in an easily accessible platform.”
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.
