Today’s inflation numbers were shocking for many, far worse than even the gloomiest projections. We seem to be in for much worse and it could turn into an economic collapse. We cannot rely on feckless politicians to fix it and if you think you can wait until the midterms or even 2024, think again. We need to act now. On today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, I discussed seven things we should be doing to fight back.
Consider this a stage of growth in our self-sufficiency. Many Americans have become complacent and, frankly, spoiled. We don’t need to do nearly as much for ourselves as generations of the past. If something is broken, we can have it fixed or order a new one. But what if we can’t afford a new one? What if we can’t just run down and get it fixed?
We need to try to fix the economy, at least in ways that it affects our families. Elections aren’t enough. Republicans will say all we need to do is vote out the Democrats and it will all be suddenly better. But Kamala Harris or Joe Biden will still be in the White House. Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy will still be leading the GOP. At the rate we’re going, we may not even make it to the midterms, let alone the 2024 elections. We need to take this economic turmoil into our own hands and fix it as Americans.
That means taking care of ourselves and our families first. A strong economy as a nation is derived from strong financial standing among individuals. We cannot focus on the collective the way the left wants us to because, as always, doing so would fail miserably. There’s a reason that Neo-Marxism is a broken system, which happens to be why the powers-that-be among the globalist elites are pushing it so hard.
No, we need to help ourselves, our families, and our communities. IF we can get all of that stabilized we can extend out if we choose, but let’s not delude ourselves with thoughts that Donald Trump or Elon Musk or Ron DeSantis or Santa Claus can get things fixed. We’re not going to make it as a nation if we’re waiting around for heroes to save us.
Here are the seven things I recommend everyone starts doing today:
Buy Local
Economic strength can be localized through revenue and tax dollars. That’s a top priority today because if things continue to get worse, it will be felt the hardest in cities and communities that are weak economically. And this isn’t just about buying produce at the local farmers’ market. We should strive to buy everything we can from locally owned businesses that employ our neighbors.
You want everyone around you to be as financially secure as possible. It will reduce crime and increase the likelihood that your area will be less affected or at least better prepared to recover quickly if inflation turns into full-blown economic collapse.
Encourage others to do the same. Doing it yourself is good, but getting your family and friends to do it as well is even better. Again, we must not operate as a collective. We need to work as individuals and family units to bring strength to ourselves and those around us.
Trust Nobody and Do the Math Yourself
Electric cars are the obvious culprit here. For some reason, people are dismissing the higher price they’re paying for electric versions of vehicles because gas prices are so high. It’s understandable until you do the math. Even with higher gas prices, how long will it take before you’re actually saving money?
Then, there’s the time issue. For many people who don’t drive often or who only go short distance, the pain of charging electric vehicles for much longer than it takes to fill up a tank is probably not a major issue. Then again, if someone isn’t driving much, are they ever going to realize savings against buying gas?
The point is this: Do your own math. Don’t just listen to people who say this or that works in today’s economy. Research and test it out for yourself. It often just takes a calculator to realize “great” ideas are actually very bad.
Diversify
No, I’m not reaching into the woke world of diversity. In this situation, I’m referring to financial diversity. For most of us, we’re not too concerned about diversifying our portfolio as much as how we’re going to pay bills next month. But for those with substantial retirement or wealth to preserve, it behooves them to take their investments and divide them up among various asset classes because the turmoil in markets can bring any of them crashing down at any moment.
Precious metals are clearly a great option for many and we have two companies we recommend depending on the goals of the individual. Another newer sponsor we picked up is Mass Tort Financing. This investment class does not correlate with the stock market and is available to accredited investors looking to move $50,000 or more in a different direction.
Learn New Skills
With the risk that an economic collapse could lead to delayed or even unavailable services, it is a best practice for everyone to start picking up new skills. Some of it can be survival-oriented; everyone should know basic first aid, for example.
Sometimes it just comes down to fixing things yourself. As noted earlier, we have become very spoiled as a nation. In my generation, at least half of the young men leaving high school or college could change the oil in their vehicle. Today, that’s just not the case. We all need to have better skillsets, just in case we can’t run our dishwasher down to the repair shop or order a new one to be delivered.
Grow and Store Food
This is the no-brainer. With food highlighted as one of the biggest risks to inflation and shortages having been predicted or months, every American household should be enacting a plan to store, grow, or otherwise produce their own food. They want us in breadlines. Eventually they’ll want us in cricketlines. It doesn’t make sense to rely on what we can easily get at the grocery store today because tomorrow the shelves might truly be empty.
Growing your own food and possibly even raising your own livestock is the ideal way to establish food security. It obviously isn’t for everyone and many of us aren’t in the type of situation that would allow it. If we can change our situations, great! If we cannot, we must figure out other ways to make sure we can feed ourselves and our families through whatever challenges may be coming.
We recommend three long-term storage food providers based on price and quality. There are plenty of others out there, but the three we recommend cover the spectrum from inexpensive but good quality all the way up to top-tier. Pick the best one (or two, or three) for you and your family.
Make a plan
The first step in any prepper guide is to make and practice a plan. Or, to be more accurate, make multiple plans for different situations. Just having some extra supplies is not enough. We need to think situationally.
As I noted on the show, the most likely scenario that I see is a continuous creep of inflation and other economic turmoil that leads to a sudden catastrophic collapse. They are easing us in before pulling the carper out from under us. In a future article I will go into much more detail about how to make a plan, but in the meantime there is plenty available online for those who don’t want to wait.
Make new friends
Along with buying locally comes the need for some to establish relationships within the local community. I relayed a story during the show about someone who was buying from their local farmers’ market when they met someone who told him of a group that would come together if the crap hits the fan. Such relationships will be invaluable if everything continues to go south.
The bad guys will form their own groups, also known as roving marauders bent on taking what you have. It’s good to have support and number of like-minded people in the area who can help you, and also who you can help.
This isn’t all doom and gloom. We really can make it through this, Lord willing. We just have to recognize the challenges we face and address them accordingly.
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.
