(The Economic Collapse Blog)—We live at a time when it is expected that chaos will follow virtually every big event. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, there was looting. In the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, there was looting. The war in the Middle East has sparked wild protests and riots all over the country this year. And even if something really good happens, many people just consider it to be an excuse for even more rioting, looting and violence. For example, the Los Angeles Dodgers just won the World Series. But instead of celebrating peacefully, young men in Los Angeles looted stores and threw fireworks at police…
World Series celebrations descended into chaos in the early hours of Thursday morning in Los Angeles, with shops being looted by gangs and fireworks thrown at cops in the street.
Many of the rioters probably don’t even care much about baseball.
But once the Dodgers won, large numbers of people recognized as opportunity to run wild.
According to the LAPD, there was “looting at several stores in the area of 8th and Broadway”…
Looting broke out on the streets of Los Angeles on Wednesday night after the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees to win the 2024 World Series.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said they had received reports of “looting at several stores in the area of 8th and Broadway” and people were urged to stay out of the area.
This has become way too common.
When a team wins a major championship, it is basically expected that citizens of that city will start rioting and looting.
A Nike store that had actually been boarded up in order to prevent looting was hit really hard. We are being told that a “mob of looters” was seen “carrying merchandise and throwing it into cars”…
The Los Angeles Police Department shared footage of a mob of looters running in and out of a boarded-up Nike store carrying merchandise and throwing it into cars parked outside the store about four miles from Dodger Stadium just after 11 p.m.
If this is what they will do when they are “celebrating”, what will they do when they are extremely angry? You might want to think about that.
In addition to looting stores, the rioters also set a city bus on fire…
As looters ransacked businesses, other areas of downtown Los Angeles were plunged into madness.
The LAPD said a “hostile crowd” — estimated at between 200 and 300 people — lit an MTA bus on fire about a mile from Dodger Stadium around 12:35 a.m. local time.
Footage posted to Citizen captured the moment a massive crowd — the majority of whom were wearing Dodgers jerseys and apparel — surrounded and sat atop the graffiti-laced bus.
Needless to say, what we just witnessed in Los Angeles is not even worth comparing to the chaos that could potentially follow this election.
Survey after survey has shown that Americans are extremely alarmed about what is coming, and that includes a new poll that was just released by the Associated Press…
American voters are approaching the presidential election with deep unease about what could follow, including the potential for political violence, attempts to overturn the election results and its broader implications for democracy, according to a new poll.
According to that poll, a large proportion of the country is very concerned about the possibility of post-election violence…
About 4 in 10 registered voters say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about violent attempts to overturn the results after the November election. A similar share is worried about legal efforts to do so. And about 1 in 3 voters say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about attempts by local or state election officials to stop the results from being finalized.
Relatively few voters — about one-third or less — are “not very” or “not at all” concerned about any of that happening.
At this point, it appears quite likely that Donald Trump will emerge victorious on November 5th.
To many on the left, that is literally the worst possible thing that could ever happen.
I know that this may sound a bit nuts to many of you, but this is how they actually see the world.
There has never been a politician that the left has hated more than Donald Trump, and if he wins this election after everything that has happened over the last eight years, for millions of Democrats it will feel like the world is ending.
And if President Trump attempts to crack down on post-election chaos after he is sworn in, it will just reinforce everything that the left believes about him. As Lee Smith has noted, we really are on the verge of a very troubling scenario…
Prominent post-election scenarios forecast such widespread rioting that the newly elected president would be compelled to invoke the Insurrection Act. With some senior military officials refusing to follow Trump’s orders, according to the scenarios, the U.S. Armed Forces would split, leaving America on the edge of the abyss.
By vilifying Trump as a despotic madman who must be stopped before he can commence his reign of terror, the regime’s propaganda apparatus not only slanders Trump but also pre-emptively threatens the reputation, as well as the livelihood and perhaps the liberty, of current military personnel. The point is to push the military against Trump: When the time comes to act, will you stand for democracy or side with a tyrant who sees the military only as an instrument to advance his personal interests?
Close to half the country is not going to want to be governed by whoever wins this election.
Unless you are completely and utterly delusional, you should be able to see that this is a major problem.
We are headed for unprecedented societal chaos no matter how this election turns out. I wish that it wasn’t true, but we are a deeply, deeply divided nation.
For a long time I have been urging everyone to find a way to love one another even though we don’t agree on everything. But people like me are being drowned out by those that are preaching hate, division and revenge.
Now we are about to reap what we have sown, and it will not be pleasant.
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.
