(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Chaos has erupted in the streets of major cities all over this country, and it appears that we have reached a boiling point which could cause events to completely spiral out of control. We knew that there was no way that the Trump administration was going to back down on immigration enforcement, and we knew that there was no way that the left was going to back down and allow ICE to conduct mass deportations without resistance. In fact, the left now has “response teams” that literally operate like military units in cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis and New York City. So it was inevitable that we would see more violent confrontations, and now another “protester” has died. The left is promising to fight back harder than ever, and President Trump is seriously considering invoking the Insurrection Act. As both sides continue to raise the stakes, it is just a matter of time before this crisis ends with martial law in major U.S. cities.
Every time a protester dies, it is just going to make things even worse.
Following the death of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, enormous protests immediately erupted in Minneapolis, New York, Washington and Los Angeles…
Protests erupted in multiple U.S. cities after a U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot Alex Pretti, a 37‑year‑old intensive care unit nurse, during a federal immigration operation in Minneapolis, escalating tensions over immigration enforcement and prompting Democratic lawmakers to demand that federal officers leave Minnesota.
Demonstrations broke out in Minneapolis, New York, Washington and Los Angeles, with hundreds braving subzero temperatures in Minnesota to confront federal agents in a city already shaken by another fatal shooting involving an ICE officer earlier this month.
Things got particularly crazy in Minneapolis.
James O’Keefe and his team were surrounded by hundreds of rioters, and he is claiming that they barely made it out of there alive…
It takes a lot of courage to venture into a situation like that in the first place, because the streets of Minneapolis are a war zone at this stage.
In a subsequent post, O’Keefe described how lawless things have become in the downtown area…
URGENT UPDATE: I’ve never experienced anything quite like today in my life. I’ve interacted with the Cartel and have witnessed some crazy things in the desert in ‘24. But what strikes me is how organized these agitators in Minneapolis are. They have spotters everywhere in the city and suburbs, on street corners, even 30 minutes away from downtown. They have people at hotels that work with them and signal to them which made it making it difficult for us to lose our tail once my cover was blown. Usually I lose a tail. Not this time. We switched locations THREE times. I recorded and posted this while leaving Wayzata, while they were STILL surveilling. We all agreed we must make the threats public ASAP, even if we had people still in the field with the hidden cams.
Earlier around noon, while @camhigby released his report on the Signal threads, I was inside what appeared to be a fully autonomous Zone. No police presence. The police were told to leave. I identified myself as Press and they said they will kill Press and will not let me leave. My skin was fully covered because it was so cold. But because they couldn’t verify who I was, they screamed and started throwing ice bottles at us. One hit, @SKRUCHTENMMA, a marine who was with me. They patted him down like THEY were the authorities, attempting to confiscate any weapons. They were set to destroy our vehicle before we even got to it. I will have a full video report shortly.
But the bigger picture here is more important. I am angry. But not at the agitators. I find myself already angry at the people who don’t understand what we’re dealing with and will do nothing about it. When I got to the suburbs I felt like I was in a simulation.
I believe the American people need to wake up. This moment is a warning about where we’re headed. Fear pushes people to care only about their money and their families—I get it. But when fear turns inward, when self-preservation and greed replace moral courage, evil goes unchallenged. And history shows that what we ignore today will come for all of us tomorrow.
In that post, O’Keefe mentioned a report that was released by Cam Higby.
Apparently Higby had infiltrated the Signal groups that the left is using to direct the activities of their “response teams”…
Let’s begin with citizen journalist Cam Higby’s bombshell reporting, who says he “infiltrated organizational signal groups all around Minneapolis with the sole intention of tracking down federal agents and impeding/assaulting/and obstructing them.”
“Each area of the city has a Signal group, or in some cases multiple groups. Let’s start with a screen recording of all members of the south side group,” Higby said.
Spotters on the ground flag license plates that are then run through a database of suspected federal vehicles, and if a match is found specific instructions are sent out through the Signal groups to units that are specifically tasked with impeding ICE…
Higby describes spending several days undercover deep within left-wing activist Signal groups that coordinate pressure campaigns against ICE agents. He notes that members use emojis to designate their specific roles and responsibilities.
According to Higby, the group’s core operations include organizing mobile patrols that continuously search for suspected federal vehicles. When a vehicle is flagged, its details are shared with designated “plate checkers,” who cross-reference the information against a database of known federal assets and update the records if a match is confirmed.
“Dispatch runs a maxed-out call all day, telling protesters where ICE has been spotted and how they can best be impeded,” he said.
These leftists are running a very sophisticated operation, and it appears that local police are cooperating with them on at least some level…
I have never seen anything like this before.
At one point some of the rioters decided to try to set up an “autonomous zone” in the part of the city where Alex Pretti was killed…
Left-wing rioters erected barricades in the streets of Minneapolis after Border Patrol agents fatally shot a man in possession of a gun Saturday.
Alex Pretti, 37, was killed during what a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statement described as a “targeted” enforcement operation at 9:05 a.m. local time, triggering riots. Jorge Ventura, reporting for the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF), posted video of one such barricade made with dumpsters and trash cans Saturday afternoon.
“Protesters have blocked and barricaded multiple streets near the shooting, many people from out of town are starting to arrive here in Minneapolis and despite the massive amounts of tear gas used by authorities, the crowd is only getting bigger,” Ventura says.
Ventura told the DCNF that Minneapolis police and the Minnesota State Patrol “are letting them take to the streets” and not making any effort to remove the barricades. The Minneapolis Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
It is difficult for me to put the chaos that we are witnessing into words.
Fox’s Garrett Tenney was on the scene as these rioters were setting up the “autonomous zone”, and he was quite shaken by what he saw…
We’ve got a couple thousand protesters here, just completely filling this entire area. And one of the chants you heard them saying, for the last few minutes, is “Keep this block.” They’ve set up barricades blocking off this entire area that were removed by police initially. They have now moved those garbage trucks, the tables, the chairs, and they’re saying that they are going to keep this almost making it an autonomous zone.
They were chanting before that, “Whose streets? Our streets.” And that is significant, because, as we’ve talked about, Governor Tim Walz said, we have the forces that we need to secure this area; we don’t need the federal agents here. We saw, though, what happened as soon as the federal agents left this area, local and state police were completely overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of protesters that were here and got driven out of this area altogether. So, clearly they did not have the forces they needed to secure this area, then. The question is going forward into tonight, when things tend to get a little dicier, will they have the forces to control and to secure the city as a whole, or is it going to be a repeat?
The local police are pretty much standing down and allowing the rioters to do whatever they want.
Apparently some of the rioters were even brandishing guns…
We keep being told that the protesters are “peaceful”, but they aren’t peaceful at all.
They physically confront ICE officers wherever they can find them, and these confrontations often turn violent.
In fact, we just witnessed one incident in which an ICE officer had his finger bitten off…
In a disturbing incident amid ongoing anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officer had his finger bitten off by a rioter, according to a post from Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security.
McLaughlin shared graphic photos on X, showing the injured officer sitting in a vehicle, his uniform caked in mud, as a gloved hand tends to his mangled finger.
One image shows the severed fingertip, bloodied and raw, and another shows it preserved in a small plastic container, presumably for medical evaluation.
McLaughlin confirmed that the officer will lose the finger.
We all knew that there would be more violence.
Of course there is no way that the Trump administration will back down and allow the left to claim victory.
That is not the way that President Trump operates.
And after everything that has transpired, there is no way that the left is going to back down either.
So a lot more violence is coming.
It probably won’t be too long before President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act.
But that certainly won’t be the end of it either.
Ultimately, I believe that we will see martial law in major U.S. cities, and that will be extremely unfortunate.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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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.
