Editor’s Commentary: To be clear, I have very mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I love the idea of a currency that is backed by gold for obvious reasons. On the other hand, I am opposed to centralized government-controlled digital currencies in general. The fact that this is a state instead of a federal or global currency offers a modicum of relief, but government-controlled is still government-controlled and entails similar drawbacks to privacy and security.
In general, I do not like this. But if digital currencies are inevitable as some believe, then the smaller the centralization, the better. Gold-backed physical currency that is untraceable and easily redeemable would be ideal, but ship likely sailed decades ago. The good news here is that more people are looking to physical precious metals, which I wholeheartedly endorse. I, of course, recommend my America First, faith-driven sponsors for that. Here’s the article by JD Heyes from Natural News:
The Lone Star State is preparing to take yet another step to ensure Texans have a stable future as the U.S. economy continues to crater under the current Biden regime and the spend-a-holics on both sides of the aisle in Congress.
Proposed bills in the Texas House and Senate aim to establish a state-issued, gold-backed digital currency, providing an alternative option for individuals to conduct business with sound money.
The move would not only challenge the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money but also create a potential rival to the central bank digital currency (CBDC). If the legislation passes, Texas would join a handful of US states that have taken steps to establish sound money alternatives to the US dollar, the currency info site SchiffGold.com reported.
Senate Bill 2334 (SB2334) was introduced by Sen. Bryan Hughes (R) on March 10, with a companion House Bill 4903 (HB4903) introduced by Rep. Mark Dorazio (R) on the same day. The proposed bills mandate that the state comptroller establishes a digital currency, backed by gold and redeemable in cash or gold, and creates a mechanism to use this currency in daily transactions, the site’s report notes further.
“In establishing the digital currency the comptroller shall establish a means to ensure that a person who holds the digital currency may readily transfer or assign the digital currency to any other person by electronic means,” states the legislation.
The state would hold gold backing the currency in trust on behalf of the digital currency holders, the site reported.
“The trustee shall maintain enough gold to provide for the redemption in gold of all units of the digital currency that have been issued and are not yet redeemed for money or gold,” the legislation notes further.
Individuals in Texas would have the option to purchase digital currency from the state, which would then use the funds to purchase gold to be held in a secure vault like the Texas Bullion Depository. This gold-backed digital currency would be fully redeemable for cash or gold and could be used in everyday transactions.
A state-issued, gold-backed digital currency would provide an alternative for individuals and businesses to avoid a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Digital currencies are virtual banknotes or coins held in a digital wallet on a computer or smartphone.
Unlike peer-to-peer electronic cash such as Bitcoin, the value of a CBDC is backed and controlled by the government, similar to traditional fiat currency. The push for a CBDC stems from the “war on cash” which seeks to eliminate cash and allow the government to track and potentially control consumer spending.
A gold-backed digital currency would offer an alternative and potentially undermine the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money, which appears to be the point Texas lawmakers are trying to make since the state has been stockpiling gold for years.
“Nigeria is already trying to get people to accept its CBDC (with a great deal of resistance), and China, India, and the US have all launched pilot programs to test CBDCs,” the SchiffGold report noted, adding a warning:
Imagine if there was no cash. It would be impossible to hide even the smallest transaction from the government’s eyes. Something as simple as your morning trip to Starbucks wouldn’t be a secret from government officials. As Bloomberg put it in an article published when China launched a digital yuan pilot program in 2020, digital currency “offers China’s authorities a degree of control never possible with physical money.”
The government could even “turn off” an individual’s ability to make purchases. Economist Thorsten Polleit outlined the potential for Big Brother-like government control with the advent of a digital euro in an article published by the Mises Wire. As he put it, “the path to becoming a surveillance state regime will accelerate considerably” if and when a digital currency is issued.
“The creation of a state-issued gold-backed digital currency would create currency competition with Federal Reserve notes and undermine the Fed’s monopoly on money. It would also provide an alternative if the Federal Reserve implements a central bank digital currency,” SchiffGold noted.
Sources include:
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.
