Just when we need better understanding of the forces arrayed against us, historian Bill Federer offers a sobering look at the long arc of psychological operations—tools of influence that have evolved from ancient battlefields to the digital age. What was once the domain of military strategists has become a pervasive force in culture, media, and politics, often leaving citizens unaware they are even in the fight.
Federer traces the roots of these tactics to timeless principles of warfare. As Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz observed, the purpose of war is to compel your opponent to submit to your will. Sun Tzu, centuries earlier, elevated this idea: supreme excellence lies in defeating the enemy without fighting at all—by demoralizing, confusing, and manipulating perceptions. Modern “fifth-generation warfare” perfects this art, securing submission without the target realizing a battle is underway.
The Bible itself illustrates the power of psychological operations. When the children of Israel approached the Promised Land, ten spies returned with a demoralizing report of giants and certain defeat. The people, gripped by fear, nearly stoned Moses and longed to return to Egypt. Only Joshua and Caleb stood firm. In contrast, Gideon’s story shows the reverse: vastly outnumbered, his small band created the illusion of overwhelming force by shattering pitchers, waving torches, and sounding trumpets. The Midianites turned on each other in panic. Minds were conquered before swords were drawn.
These ancient precedents find echoes in more recent history. During World War II, Allied forces dropped pamphlets on German troops claiming their commanders had surrendered. Tokyo Rose broadcast seductive demoralizing messages to American soldiers in the Pacific. The goal was always the same: erode resolve from within.
Federer connects these military roots to modern marketing and propaganda. Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, weaponized insights into group psychology. Humans crave acceptance and fear rejection. Bernays demonstrated that people do not need facts about a product—they need the perception that “everyone” is using it.
He orchestrated campaigns that popularized women smoking cigarettes as “torches of freedom,” secured dubious medical endorsements for tobacco, and even helped establish bacon and eggs as the American breakfast. His book *Propaganda* was later rebranded as public relations, but the mechanism remained: engineer consent by shaping what people believe the group is doing.
Noam Chomsky later described this as the “manufacturing of consent.” In a republic founded on the consent of the governed, controlling information flows and social perception allows an invisible elite to rule from the shadows. Marketing techniques that once sold sewing machines and Crisco now sell ideologies, policies, and cultural shifts.
The implications for today are profound. When media, institutions, and tech platforms amplify certain voices while silencing others, they create the illusion of consensus. Fear of social rejection keeps many from questioning the dominant narrative. This is not mere disagreement—it is a sophisticated form of control that bypasses reason and targets the human need for belonging.
Federer’s work reminds us that history is not a series of disconnected events but a continuous story of spiritual and ideological conflict. Christians have long understood the battle is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers.
As Ephesians 6:12 reminds us, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
Yet the same Scriptures that record Gideon’s victory and the spies’ failure also record God’s faithfulness when His people stand firm. In a time of engineered division and manufactured consent, the call is not to despair but to discernment, courage, and unwavering commitment to truth. The fight for the mind precedes every other battle.
Those who understand this history are better equipped to resist the psyops of our age and point a confused culture back to the ultimate Source of wisdom and liberty.
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.
