In the movie ‘Batman: The Dark Knight’ the well regarded district attorney Harvey Dent makes a statement that has since woven itself into our popular culture to the point that we often hear it quoted as if it was said by some ancient philosopher. He noted:
“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
The most predictable interpretation of this is that there is a fine line between doing good and doing evil with the best of intentions. People can start out as heroes and quickly fall to darkness in the name of serving the “greater good.” I think there is more meaning behind the quote, however.
There is also the issue of historical revision and the fact that the heroes of yesterday might be considered the terrorists of tomorrow given who is in charge of writing the history books or reporting the news. Sometimes heroes become villains through their own mistakes, other times they are just rewritten that way.
For example, today we hear constant gnashing and wailing from the political left about the “evils” of the Founding Fathers and why they should be erased or canceled from our cultural zeitgeist. They have even attempted to revise the very foundations of American history through their “1619 Project” as they assert that no American accomplishment is valid because EVERYTHING was built around the institution of slavery. They make no mention that slavery has been an institution in every single culture on the planet since civilization began, but that doesn’t matter to them.
The goal of the 1619 Project was to diminish or dismiss everything distinctly American, right down to the revolution that founded our nation. What they care about is the deconstruction of heroes, in part because if you can destroy the character of a hero then you might be able to also destroy what they stood for in the process. And, if you can destroy the ideals of a society, it becomes a lot easier to then control that society.
When the political left seeks to undermine the legacy of the founders they aren’t just engaging in character attacks against men who can no longer defend themselves, they are also attempting to sabotage the vision those men created – The vision of a free republic outside of the dictates of collectivism and monarchy (rule by the elites).
Obviously the Founding Fathers are no longer alive, but there are millions of people that have carried on their legacy for generations that are in fact still living to see their heroes be made into monsters through revisionism.
But the destruction of heroes goes even deeper than historical rewrites.
Leftists are also targeting the very foundations of heroic archetypes and mythologies by attacking heroic representations in our society. They are seeking to change the nature of heroism by hijacking cultural pillars and erasing beloved stories and characters in order to “reboot” them in the image of the leftist cult. This is usually done under the cover of “diversity and equity” as a means to obscure the true agenda. Let’s break down the tactics and motives behind this trend…
Rewriting Heroes To “Reflect Our Modern Era”
Woke ideology does not reflect our modern era in any way; it is actually a masked version of the old social models of collectivism and communism, specifically the social Marxism displayed by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The only difference is today we have online struggle sessions and corporations are fully onboard with the movement. When leftists claim they are fighting the system, they have no idea what this really means.
Leftists use the reflection argument all the time to justify the gutting of hero mythologies and replacing them with vapid clones. A recent example would be the latest Amazon release of their Lord Of The Rings prequel series. I wrote about this extensively months ago in my article ‘Amazon’s Woke Lord Of The Rings Is The Death Rattle Of Social Justice Content.’ To summarize, the new Lord of The Rings is designed to spread a political message and undermine the values of the past rather than tell a meaningful organic story that pays homage to Tolkien. Amazon even released their woke Lord of The Rings on the anniversary of Tolkien’s death.
Sometimes the propaganda is subtle, and sometimes it’s a train wreck in your face.
Specifically, I examined the political left’s obsession with injecting their own Cultural Marxism into every new entertainment product as a means to saturate the media space with their ideology. When they say they want to rehash old stories and old heroes but write them to “reflect the world of today,” what they are really doing is erasing past ideals and principles and eliminating choice. They don’t want you to see the world from different points of view; you are only allowed to see it from THEIR point of view. This is the exact opposite of good story telling.
Diversity As A Crutch And A Cudgel
Diversity is meaningless. It serves no purpose in terms of heroic representations. People identify with actions and deeds and principles, not skin color. Leftists in Hollywood do not actually care about diversity of skin color, they only care about two things – Using minorities as a crutch to justify poor storytelling and lazy productions, and using minorities as a cudgel or weapon when they face criticism.
That is to say, when they make garbage media with no imagination or effort, they announce “we got diversity, though,” and this is supposed to make you want to watch their products anyway, otherwise you might be “racist.” By extension, when you dare to criticize the political pontificating and terrible writing in their media, they can then say “our stories are fantastic, you just don’t like us because we hire brown people.” See how that works? They use minorities as a shield, either for their ineptitude or their malicious intent, but they DO NOT care about such people if they can’t exploit them.
“Diversity and inclusion” is the new slave plantation that leftist elites in Hollywood use to farm virtue points and ESG loans. That’s all there is to it. If they actually respected the idea of presenting diverse heroes, they would create original minority heroes and write them well. Or, they would pick minority heroes from real history and avoid implanting current day woke politics into that era.
Narcissists Can’t Write Heroes
It has long been my contention that the leftist ideology is rooted in appeals to narcissism. Everything about it is based in entitlement rather than sacrifice. It is based in demands for special treatment rather than respect for accomplishment and merit. It is based in equity of outcome while eliminating equality of opportunity. A person that has embraced the victim mentality can never be a hero or imagine how a hero would act. They have no relationship to the concept, because narcissists are usually villains in the real world and villains tend to see themselves as victims while they spend their time victimizing others. How else can they justify the evils they do?
No Conservative Heroes Allowed
As our media world was overrun with woke ideologues over the years the depictions of heroes and villains have become utterly twisted. Heroes act selfishly with ego and hubris, and villains are usually depicted as either misunderstood people that are only reacting to the trespasses of society, or they are ridiculous exaggerations of conservatives and liberty activists. This trend has become an epidemic in films, television, video games, comic books, etc. Only in the past couple of years has there been mass push-back against the agenda, but there is a long way to go before things can change for the better.
Many of these woke productions fail miserably, but they aren’t necessarily interested in box office success or making money. Again, what they care about is saturation, as well as murdering the hero archetype openly where everyone can see. They want to destroy your heroes in front of you and replace them with woke pod people. This is what drives them.
The biggest problem is that most conservatives ignored the culture war while only focusing on fleeting political battles. They acted as if the culture war didn’t matter, and in the process we have almost lost our country completely. Future generations need heroic ideals and examples to live by, among real live people as well as in popular media. By ignoring the culture war, conservatives ignored the future.
There are some people out there that are working to change our country’s course by producing original media with a heroic message based in American foundations of freedom, individualism, self reliance and meritocracy. I’m working to join them by producing my own graphic novel project based on a survivalist hero. The best we have is Burt Gummer from Tremors – He’s great but we need more. Readers who are interested in original non-woke entertainment can learn more about that project HERE.
It’s important not to underestimate the power of media in culture. There is a reason why leftists are so obsessive with it; by changing all our heroes to villains they hope to change our values and our behaviors. They aren’t just rewriting movies, or characters, or comic books, they are trying to rewrite us.
The only way to stop this is to identify the threat, neutralize the propaganda, and then bring back legitimate hero culture by writing it once again with our own hands and our own deeds.
Article cross-posted from Alt-Market.
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.
