Editor’s Commentary: We are launching a new podcast, The Morning Sentinel, with my wife as the voice for the message. This replaces our joint podcast project from 2020, which was known as Conservative News Briefs. The Morning Sentinel will be very different from its predecessor as we will be focused on a single topic of the day, delivering a message we believe to be both relevant and sustaining. They will be short monologues about the state of affairs in America. We face existential threats on multiple fronts. Keeping it all in perspective requires calm urgency as we fight to keep America from falling into the abyss. Here’s her first episode:
There’s a difference between depending on someone and being dependent. As humans, we should be able to depend on the people around us to help us when we need, just as they should be able to depend on us when we are needed. There’s nothing wrong with depending on family and friends. Even our neighbors can be benefits to us just as we should be benefits to them. That’s part of the American way and it’s part of being human.
There are times when we should be able to depend on our communities as well. In times of major strife, being able to turn to the local community, our church, or local organizations can be true blessings when we need them the most.
With family, friends, neighbors, churches, and our communities, we can engage in the fellowship associated with being both dependable to others and depending on them when we need. Dependence on government, however, is completely different. It is a one-way street. They do not depend on us for anything, and while we may believe they depend on us for tax dollars that they steal regularly or our productivity that they rely upon to keep society going, they don’t really need us. We are a number to them, and as such, to them, our existence makes no difference.
This is why being dependent on government in any way is an affront to our freedom. It is why we should, as a free people, strive to rid ourselves of any dependency we have on government. By being dependent, we are beholden. By being beholden, we are at their mercy. And if you think that any government is benevolent and working only on behalf of the people, then you haven’t been paying very much attention. What they say and what they do are two very different things.
By no means am I suggesting that we don’t need government. Law and order require governing bodies to make certain those who do wrong are held accountable. But even in this basic expectation we should have for our government, so many of them have been failing miserably at it. From defunding police to letting violent criminals off regularly, it’s clear that many governments at every level are not fulfilling their oath to defend the constitution and thereby defend the people from forces of evil.
It’s a reasonable expectation that our government should keep us safe from foreign invaders. Yet even the most tone-deaf politicians are having a hard time ignoring the sad song being played at our southern border. If an illegal alien enters the country and tests positive for Covid-19, they will not be sent back for instance. If an American citizen tries to reenter the country after testing positive for Covid, they will be turned away. This is just one of dozens of examples of the hypocrisy that we’re facing with a government that has abandoned its role of preventing foreign invasions.
As billions of dollars are being sent to Ukraine to be distributed among their oligarchs and helping to prolong the war with Russia, thereby prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people, American citizens are getting shafted with massive food shortages, including the insane baby formula shortage. We’re often told by virtue-signaling politicians that we must defend the most vulnerable among us. Well, there are no Americans more vulnerable than infants, and our government has failed miserably to prevent or end the baby formula crisis. Shelves in the baby aisle should be the last ones to go bare in a civilized and caring society, yet they are the first in the long line of food shortage dominoes to fall. That is an unexpected insult to add to our growing list of injuries.
As a free people, we can no longer have a reasonable expectation of safety, security, or prosperity safeguarded by our government. That hasn’t been the case for a long time in the United States of America, but it’s quickly becoming our present-day reality. And perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps we have grown too complacent, too expectant, and too beholden to government. Right now, today, it is time for Americans to wake up from the slumber that our past comforts have afforded us and take matters into our own hands. This should have happened long ago for most of us. Some have been doing it for years. If we are to continue to be a free people, we must take full responsibility for our own safety, security, and prosperity. At no time during our generation has that been more obvious.
And to do that, we must break free from any and all dependence on government.
That does not mean taking action against government, let me make that clear. It’s a sad state of affairs when I’m forced to declare that important caveat. I am not calling for insurrection. I am not calling for crime, violence, or terrorism in any way. Breaking free of government does not require us to topple it. All it means is that every attachment we have to government apparatuses should be dissolved as quickly as possible. Some think of that as living off the grid. That may be the best way to go for some. But even those who are not able to run off to their secluded homestead in Montana should be striving to relinquish government control over our lives.
It starts with food. If food shortages are coming, and they certainly seem to be, then we must do whatever is in our power to preserve, store, stockpile, and possibly even produce our own foods. Prices are going up and that’s not going to change for the foreseeable future. It behooves all of us, even if we’re not in the “doomsday prepper” camp, to secure as much long-term food as possible. When the grocery store shelves go empty, the vast majority of Americans will be demanding that our government do something about it. You do not want to be among those waiting in breadlines. You do not want to feel the need to join marauding bands of desperate people trying to steal whatever food they can find. And you do not want to hold your hand out and hope your government selects you to be the beneficiary of their largesse.
Today, many are dependent on government to keep us safe from crime. That is already fool-hardy for most. As they say, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. Being able to defend your person, your family, and your property is a natural right that has been fundamental throughout human history. With many politicians pushing to eliminate our ability to defend ourselves, it is time to take the opportunity while it is still available to us. In the very near future, we may not have that option.
Our healthcare is arguably the toughest need for us to fulfill independently. Many of us need government in some form or fashion, whether through insurance or government-beholden medical systems. But just as food will be used to control the masses, healthcare will be used to control those who have their own food security in hand. This is why it is a best practice to find doctors who are willing to work outside of government programs. It’s also a best practice to work through private medical funding organizations like medical cost-sharing programs. If we’ve learned anything over the past two years, it’s that even doctors and hospitals will allow themselves to be played like the government’s fiddles on behalf of Big Pharma. To break free from that requires a willingness to find those in the medical field who are just as skeptical of government as you are.
We could talk for a very long time about the various ways to build and sustain our freedoms by breaking away from government dependency, but it really comes down to you and your situation. Examine what attachments you have in your world to government and determine a strategy to remove those attachments as quickly as possible. Today, government offers a series of conveniences that act as anchors to keep us compliantly docked in their ports. That is not freedom. Perhaps there was a time when freedom and working closely within the government system was possible, but today they’re mutually exclusive. You’re either reliant on government in many ways or you’re not. You’re either dependent or you’re free. There are degrees of dependence and freedom, and as patriots we must strive to reduce our dependency as we progress towards freedom.
One does not have to be isolated from society to be free. There’s a difference between detaching from government and detaching from society. Perhaps someday that won’t be the case, especially if society reacts to near-future catastrophe by running to government for solutions, which they most certainly will do. In that case, we may find ourselves isolated.
Our nation is on a collision course with disaster. It may not be too late to reverse course, but it’s foolhardy to assume that will happen. We all have difficult choices to make, and those choices must not be pushed off much longer. Will you choose to be free and isolated or enslaved with the masses? If enough people are isolated in their freedom, are we not the seeds upon which a future rebirth of freedom can be realized? Whatever the future holds, I choose freedom, and I hope I am not alone.
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.
