I went into HBO’s Lanterns with modest hopes. A grounded murder mystery in rural Nebraska, a veteran and a rookie working a case, Kyle Chandler in the lead — on paper, that’s exactly the kind of storytelling I gravitate toward. Two episodes in, I can tell you the mystery is not what this show is about. The ideology is, and it’s delivered with all the subtlety of a power ring to the face.
There’s a chance I will continue watching it, but not for enjoyment. I want to see if the wokeness subsides or if it remains front and center. What started as a home date night diversion is now a call for commentary, but only if they keep the anti-white narrative as the heart of the show.
What is documented: the premiere features a scene in which John Stewart’s father counsels his son about how to handle his white mentor’s behavior, telling him, “They’re allowed to have tantrums. We’re not.” That’s not my paraphrase — even reviewers sympathetic to the show describe the scene as direct commentary on racial double standards.
Also documented: episode two builds an entire diner conversation around the phrase “white men,” repeated multiple times in a single scene, in which the wealthy white rancher character is diagnosed by the show’s hero and by his own wife as a walking case study in privilege. Cosmic Book News broke that scene down line by line, and their account matches what I watched with my own eyes.
Now here’s the part that should settle the argument for anyone tempted to dismiss this as right-wing pattern-matching. The outlets that love this show describe the exact same themes — they just call them a virtue. Salon’s glowing review praises the series for taking a swing at America’s “meritocracy myth” and openly frames Hal Jordan as the embodiment of unearned white confidence. When Salon and the skeptics agree on what a show is doing and disagree only on whether it’s good, the “it’s all in your head” defense collapses.
I’m not imagining the Cultural Marxism in the show.
The reaction ecosystem reflects this. YouTube commentators are already calling it the most woke show since Watchmen, while professional critics have pushed it to a 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — one of the wider audience-versus-critic gaps you’ll see this year, and by now a familiar signature. When the gatekeepers celebrate and the audience groans, you can usually guess what’s happening in the script.
What frustrates me most is that the ideological freight isn’t even necessary, and some of the sharpest criticism on this point comes from reviewers who cannot be dismissed as culture warriors. One review put it well: John Stewart was never interesting because he’s a black man overcoming racism. He’s interesting because he’s disciplined, stubborn, and supremely self-assured — the Justice League cartoon understood that for years without a single lecture.
Reducing him to a racial “prove yourself” arc is, ironically, a smaller vision of the character than the one comic fans already had. Even Grant Morrison, who actually wrote Green Lantern comics and is nobody’s idea of a conservative, panned the premiere on creative grounds, quipping that Chandler’s Hal Jordan plays more like Doctor McCoy and questioning why a cosmic franchise got flattened into low-budget realism.
A discernment note before anyone cancels a subscription on my say-so: I have seen two of eight episodes. Several critics who screened seven report that the alien murder mystery increasingly takes over as the season progresses, so it’s possible the sermonizing front-loads and the story eventually breathes. If that happens, I’ll say so. But a show gets one chance to tell you what it values most, and Lanterns spent its opening hours making sure we knew. The writers had a legendary character, a great cast, and a premise built for the kind of grounded, propulsive storytelling audiences are starving for — and they chose the seminar room instead.
Scripture tells us to “test all things; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). That’s the whole discipline in a sentence: watch with open eyes, name what you’re actually being shown, and don’t let anyone — critic or commentator — tell you that you didn’t see it.
I tested the first two hours of Lanterns. What’s good in it is buried under what its creators apparently believed was more important than the story. Hold fast accordingly.
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.
