(Daily Signal)—The Boy Scouts of America taught me valuable lessons about tying knots, lighting fires, and what it means to be a man, but I’m glad to see the Department of War reconsidering its historic partnership with the Scouts.
Founded in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America taught young men wilderness survival skills, fostered friendship, and trained boys to become citizens and leaders. In order to attain the rank of Eagle Scout, a young man must not just demonstrate mastery of many skills but also plan his own project, leading others.
For these and other reasons, the military awards an automatic rank increase to Eagle Scouts who enlist. A 2017 post for Scouting Magazine noted that 20% of West Point cadets, 12% of the Naval Academy Class of 2016, and 10% of Air Force Academy cadets had attained the highest rank in Scouting.
Yet the Boy Scouts of America no longer exists, and the organization that replaced it, Scouting America, leaves a great deal to be desired. It is high time the military reconsider, and establish clear benchmarks for a scouting program that fosters virtue, rather than virtue-signaling.
The Trans Scouts of America
As a young man, I learned the Scout Law: “A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”
Tragically, the Boy Scouts of America abandoned these commitments. In January 2017, the organization endorsed transgender ideology, which I’ve long argued is fundamentally at odds with both trustworthiness and reverence:
‘A scout is trustworthy’ means more than just telling the truth. It means living with integrity, not presenting a false sense of yourself to others. There is a fundamental falseness in presenting yourself as a boy when you are in fact biologically a girl. But I think there is a worse loss of integrity among those who encourage biological girls to identify as boys.
‘A scout is reverent’ means honoring God, or at least a principle greater than yourself. Christians—and most Jews and Muslims, to my knowledge—believe that God created humans male and female, and that their sexuality is a good gift from God. Rejecting that gift—or encouraging others to reject it—is arguably irreverent.
Endorsing transgender ideology is a fundamental rejection of the virtues the Boy Scouts of America once championed.
The Boy Scouts of America also faced 82,000 claims of child sexual abuse in a scandal that led the institution to declare bankruptcy in 2020. I thank God that I never experienced any such abuse, but I am horrified by the fact that an institution tarred by such a scandal would go on to embrace an ideology that arguably makes young people more vulnerable to predation.
The Boy Scouts drifted from a non-political home for Democrats and Republicans alike to a left-leaning institution. The transgender policy came after the Boy Scouts allowed open homosexuality among boys in 2013, and then among adult leaders in 2015. In 2020, it announced solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and introduced a “diversity and inclusion” merit badge, now mandatory for the rank of Eagle Scout.
When the BSA changed its position on homosexuality, former scout leaders banded together to form Trail Life USA, a Christian alternative. The BSA encouraged a faith in God or a higher power, but Trail Life USA is explicitly Christian. By 2023, Trail Life USA had grown to more than 50,000 members in all 50 states, with 1,200 troops across the country.
Perhaps fittingly, at the beginning of this year the organization changed its name from Boy Scouts of America to “Scouting America.”
The Department of War
Last week, NPR published a story claiming that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had written a memo cutting off Scouting America. Hegseth reportedly wrote that the Scouts no longer promotes “masculine values,” instead focusing on “gender confusion” and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
A War Department official told The Daily Signal that “the department will not comment on leaked documents that we cannot authenticate and that may be pre-decisional.”
I support the Department of War’s connection with scouting institutions. Scouting trains young boys—and girls—to develop important skills, and the military should reward scouting achievements with a higher initial rank.
That said, I think Scouting America has taken this important relationship for granted, and it is high time the Department of War develop clear guidelines for what kind of scouting program it will honor. Since Scouting America aims to indoctrinate kids on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and rejects the distinction between men and women, Hegseth would be well advised to reconsider this relationship.
I’d recommend two things. First, the Department of War should set forth clear standards for scouting partners: standards focused on key skills and virtues, not political correctness. Second, the Department of War should seriously consider partnering with Trail Life USA and American Heritage Girls, the conservative alternatives to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.
Perhaps, if the military establishes clear standards, it may not just send Scouting America a well-deserved wake-up call, but also encourage reforms to restore the Boy Scouts to their own high ideals.
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.
