(End of the American Dream)—Did you know that FEMA is not answering nearly half of the calls that it receives from those seeking disaster relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene? This amazing fact is being reported by Politico, and it shocked me to the core when I first read it.
If the federal government responds this poorly to a hurricane, what is going to happen when we are facing a major long-term emergency that affects the entire nation? As I have been consistently warning for years, you should not be counting on the government to come riding in on a white horse to rescue you when global events hit the fan. Unfortunately, global events may hit the fan a lot sooner than most people think.
Politico spoke to a man named Mike Toomey in North Carolina that desperately needs help after floodwaters destroyed his home. When Toomey called FEMA last week, nobody answered his call. Instead, he got a recording that informed him that he was 675th in line to be helped…
Mike Toomey called a federal helpline last week to get disaster aid after Hurricane Helene flooded his home in western North Carolina.
He got a recording instead.
“They said I was 675th in line,” Toomey, a painter in a spattered shirt, recalled as he waited outside a federal recovery center in Hendersonville.
Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina over a month ago. And people like Toomey still can’t get help from FEMA even though they are reaching out.
In fact, Politico says that “hundreds of thousands of people” have not been able to get the assistance from the government that they are hoping for…
Hundreds of thousands of people who are trying to recover from disasters nationwide have been unable to get through to federal call centers or have stayed on hold for excessive periods of time in the weeks since Helene barreled into southern Appalachia last month.
Overwhelmed by Helene and Hurricane Milton, the centers failed to answer nearly half of the incoming phone calls over the course of one week recently. For the calls that were answered, it took more than an hour for federal workers to pick up, on average.
This is the worst federal response to a major natural disaster that I have ever seen.
I honestly don’t know how to explain it.
At one time, most federal agencies exhibited at least a minimal level of competence, but those days appear to be long gone.
In addition to not getting hundreds of thousands of people the help that they desperately need, it is also being reported that hundreds of roads are still closed in North Carolina…
Hundreds of roads in North Carolina remain closed or damaged as Americans try to recover in the aftermath of flooding from Hurricane Helene, according to the New York Times.
Many of the roads have been washed away or severely damaged by the floodwaters that stranded people in remote areas of the state, the newspaper reported on Saturday.
Some of the roadways and portions of major highways have been reopened, the Times reported. “But as of early Saturday, there were just over 700 incident reports noting a portion of road still listed as closed, impassable or otherwise affected by the storm.”
What in the world is taking them so long?
You would think that opening up the roads would be one of the top priorities.
But at this point we are being told that it could take “months” to even get Interstate 40 back to full operation…
Bringing Interstate 40, as well as many other highways and roads, back to full capacity is likely to take months, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars, though officials cautioned it was too early to make formal estimates.
We used to be a country that worked harder than anyone else.
Now we are being run by a bunch of bureaucrats that like to stand around and talk instead of taking action.
After everything that we have witnessed in North Carolina, there should be no doubt about what will happen when a truly apocalyptic national emergency comes along. And that may occur a lot sooner than most people think, because war is here.
In the Middle East, the Iranians are preparing for a major attack against Israel…
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has instructed his forces to prepare a direct attack against Israel after deeming the Jewish nation’s retaliatory strike last week too big to ignore, according to a new report.
While Khamenei attempted to downplay to the public the extent of Israel’s attack on Tehran’s military facilities, privately, he greenlit plans for a counterattack in a meeting with his Supreme National Security Council, three Iranian officials told The New York Times.
The ayatollah allegedly made his decision on Monday after reviewing the damage report from his military officials, which detailed the strikes across Tehran’s missile production plants and defense systems.
Israel has publicly warned that it will hit back even harder than last time if Iran attacks, and the Biden administration has informed Iran that it will not be able to restrain Israel…
“We told the Iranians: We won’t be able to hold Israel back, and we won’t be able to make sure that the next attack will be calibrated and targeted as the previous one,” a U.S. official said.
It appears that this war in the Middle East could soon take an apocalyptic turn, and that would have major implications for the entire planet.
Meanwhile, those living in the EU have been instructed to “stockpile emergency supplies” in case a direct conflict with Russia breaks out…
People living in the European Union should stockpile emergency supplies in the event of war breaking out or another major emergency, a new report has advised.
The report on Europe’s civilian and military preparedness, published on Wednesday, was written by former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö in his capacity as Special Adviser to the President of the European Commission.
The report notes that the EU was not prepared for either the COVID-19 pandemic or Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and that it needs to move “from reaction to proactive preparedness.”
As I warned my core supporters on Friday, we are closer to a nuclear war with Russia than we have ever been before.
If missiles start falling on U.S. soil, there will be absolutely no help from the federal government.
You will be on your own.
Speaking of nuclear conflict, North Korea just tested a new ICBM that has enough range to easily reach the continental United States…
Pyongyang officials have since identified the massive rocket, which they dub “the world’s strongest strategic missile,” as a new Hwasong-19 ICBM. Given that nuclear warhead-capable ICBMs can reach several thousands of miles away, such a missile would have the capability of hitting the continental United States. And the timing has not been lost on anyone, as it was a mere days before the US presidential election.
“It can be stored and moved anywhere, allowing for excellent mobility, stealth and survivability,” said Kim of the rocket. State media has subsequently released carefully edited, high quality footage of the ‘perfected’ missile launch, which has been widely circulating on Friday:
2024 has been a year of war, but in 2025 we are going to see things go to an entirely new level.
If you are blindly trusting that our government officials have everything under control, you are not being wise because they don’t.
When war comes to U.S. soil, what are you going to do?
Are you going to be counting on the federal government to bring you food and supplies and everything else that you need?
When things go sideways, the federal government is not going to be there for you. At this point, they can’t even take care of the areas of the country there were devastated by Hurricane Helene.
There are many that are trying to sound the alarm about what is coming, but most of the population is simply not listening.
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.
