(Substack)—It wasn’t too long ago when I was very concerned about federal law enforcement agencies and military troops being sent to Democrat-run hellholes like Memphis, Chicago, and Portland. My concern was that if the citizens didn’t rise up and demand such actions from their local leaders, that the effects of federal moves would be limited and fleeting. I also understand the slippery slope of such actions, especially in a tit-for-tat reversal in which a future Democrat president uses these moves as precedent to crack down on manufactured “right-wing domestic terrorists” or worse yet, “thought criminals.”
I’ve changed my mind. It doesn’t happen often but I have no problem acknowledging it when it does. In certain circumstances and for certain cities, the need to defend the people and property they’ve worked so hard to own supersedes my slippery slope concerns. It’s bad out there and getting worse. And it’s spreading.
Portland, Oregon, has become a symbol of what happens when leftist policies let criminals run wild. Even as city officials pat themselves on the back for a dip in homicides—down 51% in the first half of 2025, from 35 to 17 according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association’s midyear report—the streets tell a different story.
Property crimes remain sky-high, with rates hitting 59.8 per 1,000 residents, including motor vehicle thefts at 13.4 per 1,000, nearly four times the national average. Drug offenses have exploded by 278% in the same period, fueling addiction and disorder that spill over into everyday life. Just last month, the Gateway Fred Meyer store shut its doors for good, citing rampant theft and safety concerns. This isn’t progress; it’s a city still gripped by lawlessness, where residents can’t even shop without fearing for their wallets or their lives.
Local cops and state troopers are the real heroes here, but they’re handcuffed by Democrat-run governments that starve them of resources. Portland Police Bureau officers have been vocal about their frustrations—understaffed, underfunded, and lacking the training and equipment to tackle the surge in organized theft rings and drug-fueled violence.
It’s understandable that frustrated sheriffs, police chiefs, and state troopers see their hands tied—they know where crime is happening, they know what needs to be done, but they lack authorization or backing from legislative leadership to get it done.
Mayor Keith Wilson’s administration has poured money into “community-based violence prevention” programs like youth mentoring and environmental design projects, but that’s no substitute for boots on the ground enforcing the law. State lawmakers have tied law enforcement’s hands with sanctuary policies that block cooperation with federal immigration authorities, even as assaults on ICE officers in Portland have skyrocketed by nearly 700% this year. Officers report being doxxed by anarchist groups like Rose City Counter-Info, with their names, photos, and addresses plastered online, inviting harassment and worse. When local leaders prioritize “compassion” over consequences, it’s no wonder cops feel like they’re fighting with one arm tied behind their back.
Cities like Chicago and Memphis face the same rot—high violent crime rates, overwhelmed police departments, and politicians more interested in virtue signaling than public safety. In Chicago, federal agents have already clashed with protesters outside ICE facilities, firing pepper balls and tear gas to protect buildings under siege. Memphis is bracing for National Guard deployment amid similar chaos. These aren’t isolated incidents; they’re the result of years of soft-on-crime policies that let gangs and radicals dictate the rules.
Federal intervention in these cases isn’t about overreach—it’s about filling the void left by local failures. President Trump’s directive to send troops to safeguard ICE buildings in Portland, where attacks on officers have surged over 1,000% since January 2025, is a direct response to this breakdown. Without federal backup, these cities risk descending further into anarchy, where businesses flee, families suffer, and law-abiding citizens pay the price.
Of course, unleashing federal law enforcement comes with risks—we don’t want a slippery slope where Washington micromanages every street corner, eroding states’ rights and turning America into a police state. Overuse could breed resentment, stifle local innovation, and set precedents that future administrations abuse for political gain. But in isolated hotspots like Portland, where rampant protests turn violent nightly outside federal facilities and local authorities refuse to act, it’s not just justified—it’s essential to restore order and protect lives.
Portland and its sister cities in crisis need help, and they need it now. Federal forces can provide the surge in personnel and authority that local teams lack, cracking down on the worst offenders and giving communities a chance to rebuild. It’s time to prioritize safety over ideology, enforce the laws on the books, and make these streets livable again. If Democrat leaders won’t step up, the feds must.
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.
