People are understandably anxious about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. There are serious moral, economic, and social issues that arise in a world where synthetic “brains” perform jobs and make decisions in place of humans. As AI takes over social media platforms and other online repositories of human knowledge, it is unsettling to see algorithmic entities policing language and curating established “truths.” The more widespread that AI becomes, the more dominant it will become in “defining” our world.
There is a race underway to define what is “true.” Certain members of society have long imposed unwritten rules of “political correctness” to manipulate the “acceptable” limits of public debate. Certain governments are increasingly criminalizing thoughts and words as “disinformation” or “hate speech” to stifle free speech, silence dissent, and protect forms of institutional power.
As tech companies and government bureaucracies “teach” AI to enforce speech rules upon human populations, “politically correct” propaganda and censorship will spread exponentially.
We humans are not prepared for what is coming. In increasingly fractured Western societies, the public cannot agree about anything. We already read different websites and pay attention to different social media influencers. As AI becomes more adept at influencing our opinions, we become more vulnerable to those who wish to distort or obscure the truth.
The novelist Ann Bauer wrote a thread on X the other day in which she shared parts of an online conversation she had with a “nice” Minnesota woman. The woman had sent Bauer pictures of the makeshift Renee Good memorial in Minneapolis that included numerous images equating federal immigration enforcement to the Holocaust.
Incensed by the obscene comparison, Bauer responded by pointing out that Holocaust remembrance groups had strongly objected to the way Governor Tim Walz has been describing legitimate law enforcement actions as tantamount to the murder of six million Jews. To the Minnesota woman’s credit, she acknowledged that she had no idea that Holocaust groups had condemned Walz for the comparison.
Bauer replied by stating that, as much as she personally “deplored” the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, she blamed Governor Walz for creating a “dangerous, violent situation” meant “to run cover for the fraud investigations.” To which the woman inquired, “What fraud investigations?” After sending the woman articles concerning the multi-billion-dollar Somali fraud scandal in Minneapolis, the poor lady later exclaimed, “Oh my God. Do we ever get the money back?”
Though exasperated, Bauer wants readers to know that “this is not a stupid woman,” but “she’s busy.” “She relies on MN media for her news.” Describing the plight of Minnesotans, generally, Bauer rues, “They have no freakin’ idea what’s going on.”
I have seen this sharp information divide all over social media platforms. Outside of Minnesota, a lot of Americans wish that President Trump had officially declared leftist anti-ICE agitators in Minneapolis to be engaged in insurrection against the federal government. They wish the president had flooded Minnesota with troops in order to put an end to the political left’s armed rebellion against law enforcement agents.
This recurring phenomenon in which Democrat-aligned groups are permitted to riot in Democrat cities without suffering any criminal repercussions sustains the growing sense that two-tiered “justice” exists in America in which Democrat politicians, prosecutors, and judges aggressively harass political opponents while protecting political allies.
Inside Minnesota, however, there is a widespread belief that confrontations against federal ICE agents in the state are indistinguishable from the civil rights protests of the ‘60s. Businesses have signs on their front windows saying, “ICE Out!” Church pastors implore congregants to shield immigrants from federal authorities.
There is endless online chatter about how the whole “mood” in and around Minneapolis is weighed down by dread and depression about the federal government’s law enforcement actions in the state. Meanwhile, those locals seem completely oblivious to the reality that ICE agents are rounding up pedophiles and murderers living among them and rescuing trafficked children from dangerous homes. The disconnect is staggering.
The Minnesota information divide — in which locals and outsiders see the ongoing riots against ICE agents so differently — is mostly a result of self-identification. Democrat
Those voters listen to leftist voices on local NPR radio, watch leftist commentators on MSNOW, and share information on social media groups that are hostile to non-leftists. Self-selection prevents conflicting viewpoints from “contaminating” dominant leftist narratives. Online leftist “safe spaces” such as Bluesky actively censor anything that challenges leftist orthodoxy.
As divided as society already is today, imagine how much more divided it will become as AI takes over the role of “information curator” for large chunks of the population. As algorithms become even more adept at filtering information and sequestering people according to their perceived political alignment, the remnants of society’s shared “public square” will largely disappear.
We will complete our transformation into plural societies living beside each other but separated by incompatible worldviews. We will become incongruous tribes beholden to contradictory “facts.” The more we abandon real human debate and rely upon artificial definitions of “truth,” the more likely that neighbors will become strangers.
This “brave new world” of ours is not for the faint of heart. Democrats in the United States have already repeatedly tried to establish “governance boards” to police the Internet for so-called “disinformation” and “hate” speech. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act and the European Union’s Digital Services Act are structured to eliminate public dissent to official government policies. Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron dismissed unregulated free speech as pure “bullshit.”
While Western governments become increasingly antagonistic toward citizens’ natural right to free expression, those governments describe the future of online communication as one in which AI will monitor everything and “objectively” police “false” or “hateful” information. A vast technological infrastructure for dominating our minds is being built all around us, and an era of unmitigated government propaganda is about to take effect. The Minnesota information divide will soon look small compared to the divisions yet to come.
Thirty years ago, the rise of the Internet appeared liberating. People living under the yoke of dictatorships had access to information that could help set them free. People with limited access to books could find a lifetime’s education right at their fingertips. People who had been taught to hate each other could find common purpose online.
Despite providing all of these great gifts, our online connections now isolate and divide us. It is as if we rolled the Trojan horse inside our own homes until the day when AI could burst out and subdue us. Instead of liberating our minds, we risk becoming prisoners under the watchful eyes of self-replicating digital wardens that intend to hide from us what we are “not allowed” to know. In this new world where governments and synthetic entities work together to keep us under their control, thinking “outside the box” becomes more important than ever.
Politicians already “divide and rule” over us. AI systems will do the same. Freethinkers capable of becoming real leaders will have to push back against both malevolent humans and malicious machines.
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.
