(WND)—If it is possible to watch a society – an entire civilization – go insane, we are watching that phenomenon in real time. Across all forms of media, the headlines bring fresh evidence daily.
Western civilization – that aggregation of cultural, political, social and religious traditions that has formed the basis for European societies and those of their current and former colonies and territories – is committing suicide, using every weapon – philosophical, legal, political – at its disposal.
The fundamental principles of Western civilization are drawn from a variety of sources, including Judeo-Christianity, Greek philosophy, Roman government and British legal theory. Among these principles are a belief in the existence of truth and the ability to discern it; the pursuit of scientific inquiry to elevate man’s understanding of himself and the world; the existence of the nation-state and the rights and duties of citizens; the rule of law and the importance of private property; the value of honesty and integrity; the need for punishment of crime and protection of the innocent, especially children; the primacy of family and the role of parents in the upbringing of children; and – at least in the United States – the balance of liberty and individual responsibility as a necessary precursor to limited government.
Each of these pillars of Western civilization is being undermined, corrupted and hacked down.
Where we once had a society that held science in the highest esteem, we now hear men can become women and vice versa by sheer force of will (whether or not assisted by drugs or surgery). But this is impossible as a matter of chromosomal biology. We once believed women needed distinct, safe spaces for themselves and that they deserved equal opportunities in sports. Now biological males who “identify” as female are permitted to expose themselves to girls and women in bathrooms and locker rooms, and are taking women’s places and awards in sporting events. Anyone who dares raise objections rooted in biology or basic fairness is denounced as a “hater” or a “transphobe.”
We once aspired to the Aristotelian notion of the “city” as a civilizing influence on humanity, a place that “exists for the purpose of living well.” Now our cities are cesspools, literally, with puddles of urine and piles of feces on the sidewalks. Hundreds of thousands of homeless people – many suffering from addiction and mental illness – live in garbage-ridden clusters of ramshackle “tents,” if they have any shelter at all. Citizens who object to the filth, the crime or the public use of drugs are told homeless people have the “right” to live where and as they do, or even that it is more “compassionate” to leave them to their fate.
Criminals, too, are now released back onto the streets without even the need to post bail, where they are free to continue victimizing others, while citizens who defend themselves or others find themselves arrested and prosecuted.
Both private property and the rule of law are under attack. Shoplifting cost retailers more than $100 billion in 2022, and corporations are closing stores in crime-prone areas. The New York Post reported this week that a woman was arrested for changing the locks on a home she inherited from her parents, because “squatters” had moved in more than 30 days prior. And the myriad cases being brought against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are shocking examples of conflicts of interest, abuse of process and arguably unconstitutional double standards of selective prosecution by corrupt and partisan attorneys and judges.
Where there was once a societal consensus to protect children from sexually explicit content, schools now include books with pornographic content in their libraries and curricula; teachers discuss their sexual identities and preferences with students; children are encouraged to question or change their “gender identities” without the knowledge or consent of their parents; health care professionals funnel troubled young people into “gender transition” programs, including experimental drugs and irreversible surgeries.
Our federal government does not protect the integrity of our borders or the citizens residing within; it allows millions of people to pour into the country illegally and even sues border states trying to enforce immigration law. Despite the number of American citizens victimized by crimes committed by illegal aliens, the government does nothing.
Worse than all of these – indeed, at the root of all of these – is the abandonment of truth. Without truth, all arguments collapse like sandcastles. But for many of today’s most visible and vocal intellectuals, academic theorists and thought leaders, there is no such thing as objective truth; there is “my truth” and “your truth”; or “power” and “patriarchy” and “class warfare” and “systemic racism” and “heterosexism” and “ableism” and other “isms” that replicate like bacteria.
It took hundreds – if not thousands – of years to create the (largely) safe, civilized, highly technical Western society we presently inhabit. The advancements we enjoy – including peace and prosperity – aren’t “inherent” or inborn; they’re not “human nature” and cannot exist where even a significant minority of people do not know them or subscribe to the values that make them possible. Outsiders can certainly be required to assimilate and conform their behavior to societal standards. But a society browbeaten into self-loathing won’t do that.
Without the pillars to support it, the entire edifice of what we consider Western civilization will collapse, taking every one of its achievements and attributes with it. Those keen to “burn it all down” promise utopia when they are done. But survivors will find themselves instead grubbing through the ashes in brutal and barbaric conditions they thought had been left behind centuries ago for good.
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.
And overthrows the secure ones.
20 He deprives the trusted ones of speech,
And takes away the discernment of the elders.
21 He pours contempt on nobles,
And loosens the belt of the strong.
22 He reveals mysteries from the darkness,
And brings the deep darkness into light.
23 He makes the nations great, then destroys them;
He enlarges the nations, then leads them away.
24 He deprives the leaders of the earth’s people of intelligence
And makes them wander in a pathless wasteland.
25 They grope in darkness with no light,
And He makes them stagger like a drunken person. Job 12
This world feel to evil in the very beginning. The Devil’s days are short and he’s filled with a terrible resolve. And what does a scared animal do? They go insane.
This world fell to evil in the very beginning. The Devil’s days are short and he’s filled with a terrible resolve. And what does a scared animal do? They go insane.
You’re welcome, Hollis.
– Pete Novak
Liberalism is a hate crime. Democrats are evil. Split the country. Kick Democrat cities out of Free America.