(End of the American Dream)—Our planet is starting to shake like crazy, and a lot of people out there are really beginning to freak out. On Wednesday alone, California was hit by a magnitude 5.6 earthquake, Japan was hit by a magnitude 7.2 earthquake, and Venezuela was hit by a magnitude 7.2 earthquake and a magnitude 7.5 earthquake. The second quake was the most powerful quake that Venezuela has experienced in more than a century. Dozens of aftershocks have already been recorded, and there is no way to count the number of structures that have collapsed. So much damage has been done that the situation on the ground is being compared to a “horror movie”, and it is being reported that tens of thousands of people are potentially missing…
Over 188 people have been reported dead and as many as 41,000 are missing following the two earthquakes that struck Venezuela on Wednesday, according to government and USGS counts.
A magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck the south American country around 160 km (100 miles) west of Caracas, and less than a minute one with a magnitude of 7.5 followed, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), which estimated total deaths to be in the thousands.
Hundreds of people in Venezuela were trapped under rubble and many more still unaccounted for on Thursday after two powerful earthquakes wreaked havoc in and around the capital Caracas, setting off powerful aftershocks and leaving thousands homeless.
The official death toll will inevitably go much higher as more dead bodies are pulled out of the rubble.
And Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez is telling us that the initial figures that have been released do not even include the coastal state of Venezuela that was hit the hardest…
In an early update on June 25, acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez warned that the death toll is expected to climb as rescuers continue searching through the rubble. She noted that initial figures do not include casualties from La Guaira, a coastal state in northern Venezuela that was hit the hardest by the powerful tremors.
“Dozens of buildings have collapsed, and we are currently carrying out very intense rescue efforts to save as many lives as God allows us to save,” she said in an appearance on state television just before 1 a.m. local time.
So many precious people are trapped under the rubble right now.
Venezuela normally does not experience such powerful earthquakes, and most of the buildings are not built to withstand this kind of shaking.
One man that actually lives in La Guaira told AFP that he was extremely fortunate to escape the building that he lived in just before it collapsed…
La Guaira resident Antonio Bermudez told the AFP news agency that the shaking began “all of a sudden.” He was in his living room, he said, but escaped his building before it collapsed.
“I started to move, I looked for shelter under a column. I was between my room and the shower. It shook harder and harder,” Bermudez sid. “I held onto the wall and the building started to come down.”
It is going to take Venezuela a very long time to recover from this.
Shortly after the twin quakes, the USGS projected that the final death toll will likely exceed 10,000 victims…
The U.S. Geological Survey, using predictive modeling to estimate the death toll, said it would most likely run into the thousands, with a substantial probability of exceeding 10,000.
Sadly, this is our new normal.
“Billion dollar disasters” are happening in rapid fire fashion, and so historic events that happened just a few weeks ago are quickly forgotten.
For instance, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines earlier this month was so powerful that it permanently changed the geography of the coastline…
Arsenio Butil Jr. fell to his knees and began to pray when last week’s deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake began shaking his home on the coast of the southern Philippines.
When he opened his eyes, he saw a once-familiar shoreline changing in real time, with swaths of previously submerged coral suddenly pushing above the waterline.
The June 8 quake, driven by a shifting of the nearby Cotabato Trench, toppled buildings, triggered landslides and killed at least 76 people on the southern island of Mindanao.
The tectonic forces at work also thrust chunks of the island’s coastline upward in a phenomenon known as “coastal uplift,” leaving stretches of shore unrecognizable to families who have spent their whole lives there.
How many of you were still thinking about this disaster before I just mentioned it?
Vast stretches of Mindanao’s coastline are now radically different, but we treat it like it isn’t that big of a deal.
We have become numb to all the craziness that is happening all around us, and the truth is that far worse is ahead.
Revelation chapter 6 describes a great earthquake that will be unlike anything that humanity has ever witnessed before…
12 And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;
13 And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.
14 And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
15 And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;
16 And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:
17 For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?
This is what our future is going to look like.
We are going to experience apocalyptic seismic events that will alter entire continents.
So yes, what we are witnessing right now is certainly quite dramatic.
But these earthquakes are not even worth comparing to what is eventually coming.
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.
