(End of the American Dream)—We live in a high crime society. Nobody can dispute that fact, and it has been this way for a long time. But the crime wave that we have witnessed in recent years has been truly breathtaking. Tens of thousands of gangs are running wild in our major urban areas, and the growth of those gangs has been supercharged during the past four years thanks to the reckless border policies of the Biden administration. Now we have rampant lawlessness in our streets, and it certainly isn’t going to be easy to clean up this mess. The following are 15 facts about the growth of crime in the United States that will blow your mind…
#1 The number of shoplifting incidents per year in the United States is up 93 percent compared to pre-pandemic levels…
The average number of shoplifting incidents jumped 93% in 2023 compared with pre-pandemic times and monetary losses for retailers have risen 90%, according to the nation’s largest retail trade group.
With its “Impact of Retail Theft & Violence 2024” study, the National Retail Federation (NRF) is highlighting the severity of this issue. For instance, despite the continuous efforts by retailers to combat such crimes and a growing number of states that have updated their laws to prosecute organized retail crime as felonies, the number of retail theft incidents continues to climb.
#2 Bakersfield, California is the car theft capital of the country…
Bakersfield is a city with less than half a million people, making it the 9th most populous city in California. It also has the distinction of having the most car thefts of any U.S. city.
#3 Denver, Colorado is closing in on Bakersfield very quickly. In fact, the car theft rate in Denver increased by 37 percent in just one year…
Denver is the capital and most populous city in Colorado which incidently made the NICB’s hot spot list for the top state by number of auto thefts. Not only did Denver experience 964 thefts per 100,000 residents, but the theft rate increased by 37%. As with most places, Kia and Hyundai vehicles make up a large percentage of those cars stolen.
#4 When it comes to car theft, Pueblo, Colorado only ranks third, but a 47 percent increase in just one year has it climbing the chart fast…
Well south of Denver and with a much smaller population, the city of Pueblo takes the third spot on our list. The city experienced auto theft at a rate of 891 per 100,000 residents. Additionally, the theft rate increased by a whopping 47% in one year. Pueblo police cite driver apathy as a reason behind the record levels of theft.
#5 According to the FBI, more than 14 million crimes are reported in the United States each year…
The FBI released detailed data on over 14 million criminal offenses for 2023 reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program by participating law enforcement agencies. More than 16,000 state, county, city, university and college, and tribal agencies, covering a combined population of 94.3% inhabitants, submitted data to the UCR Program through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the Summary Reporting System.
#6 There are more than 1.9 million people sitting in our prisons…
Further complicating matters is the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have one criminal legal system; instead, we have thousands of federal, state, local, and tribal systems. Together, these systems hold over 1.9 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 142 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories — at a system-wide cost of at least $182 billion each year.
#7 The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world by a very wide margin. We have approximately 5 percent of the world’s population, but we have approximately 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population.
#8 According to the FBI, 33,000 criminal gangs are operating inside the United States today…
Some 33,000 violent street gangs, motorcycle gangs, and prison gangs are criminally active in the U.S. today. Many are sophisticated and well organized; all use violence to control neighborhoods and boost their illegal money-making activities, which include robbery, drug and gun trafficking, prostitution and human trafficking, and fraud. Many gang members continue to commit crimes even after being sent to jail.
#9 Collectively, it has been estimated that those gangs have about a million members.
#10 Gangs account for about 80 percent of the violent crimes that are committed in the U.S. each year.
#11 In 2023, there were 127,436 rapes reported in the United States.
#12 For the most recent year that we have data, it was being estimated that more than 550,000 U.S. children “were victims of abuse and neglect”…
An estimated 558,899 children (unique incidents) were victims of abuse and neglect in the U.S. in 2022, the most recent year for which there is national data.
#13 If you can believe it, there are 795,000 registered sex offenders in this country.
More than 795,000 people were listed on state sex offender registries as of August 2024. This is about 8,000 more people than in 2023.
#14 There are 75,710 registered sex offenders in the state of Texas.
#15 There are 60,615 registered sex offenders in the state of California.
What in the world is wrong with us?
What would cause people to behave this way?
At this point, our society is literally teeming with evil. In my brand new book entitled “Why”, I take a look at the root causes that motivate people to do what they do. It isn’t an accident that our society has gone completely and utterly nuts. It is simply a result of cause and effect.
As a society, we have been doing the wrong things for a very long time, and so now we have a giant mess on our hands.
Let us hope for better things in 2025, because right now lawlessness is thriving all around us.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
