Since Donald Trump’s second term began, Britain has emerged as a haven for American celebrities and affluent Democrats seeking refuge from the political climate in the U.S.
Recent data from the British Home Office reveals that in the year ending March, nearly 7,000 U.S. citizens applied for British citizenship or indefinite leave to remain—the highest figure since records started in 2004. Notably, one-third of these applications were submitted after Trump’s inauguration in early 2025.
High-profile figures have led the exodus. Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, staunch Kamala Harris supporters, relocated to the Cotswolds, selling their Montecito properties after feeling “very disillusioned” by Trump’s victory, per TMZ. Ellen’s recent Instagram reel, captioned “English country life,” showcases her lavish estate, complete with chickens and a frolicking rabbit.
Comedian Rosie O’Donnell settled in Ireland, stating in a March TikTok video that she’ll only “consider coming back” when America is “safe for all citizens to have equal rights.” British actress Minnie Driver, prompted by Trump’s win, left Los Angeles to return to the UK. Others, including Barbra Streisand—who vowed she “can’t live in this country if [Trump] becomes president”—as well as Cher and America Ferrera, are reportedly contemplating similar moves. Lena Dunham, Ryan Gosling, and Eva Mendes also swapped the U.S. for London before Trump’s second term began.
Yet, these progressive newcomers may be in for a surprise. Britain, despite its Labour prime minister, is not the liberal utopia they might expect. The populist Reform party, led by Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage, is gaining traction, with polls suggesting 40% of Britons believe Farage could become the next prime minister. Farage, a polarizing anti-immigration figure with a Trump-like following, commands fierce loyalty.
Like Trump, Farage’s base remains unshaken by controversy. For instance, a Reform candidate from Yorkshire, exposed for saying, “Black people should get off their lazy arses and stop acting like savages,” still secured second place in a parliamentary race. Recently, a Reform advert attacking Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar for allegedly prioritizing “the Pakistani community” sparked outrage but no apology.
Beyond politics, Britain’s social fabric is fraying. A car-ramming incident in Liverpool this week injured dozens celebrating a soccer victory. Last summer, the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport by Axel Rudakubana, a child of Sudanese immigrants, ignited riots. Mobs attacked mosques, and public anger surged over perceived cover-ups of issues related to unassimilated immigrants and asylum-seekers.
The influx of wealthy American expatriates has sparked a nuanced debate about immigration in Britain. While rarely acknowledged, a distinction exists between “Good Migrants” and “Bad Migrants.” In 2024, 694 boats carrying an average of 53 illegal immigrants each landed on British shores, costing taxpayers £6 million daily in hotel expenses. All parties now agree that action is needed to address illegal immigration.
Conversely, high-profile arrivals like Ellen DeGeneres, with her $18 million Cotswolds farmhouse, are warmly welcomed. Echoing Trump’s “gold card” concept for elite immigrants, the UK home secretary recently announced “provisions to qualify more swiftly that take account of the contribution people have made,” paving the way for more celebrity settlers.
While American celebrities are a boon for Britain, their vision of a progressive paradise may falter as they encounter a nation grappling with its own populist and social challenges. Their time in Britain may prove shorter than planned.
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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.
