Thousands gathered in downtown Los Angeles on Friday, starting what appeared to be a routine demonstration against federal immigration enforcement. The crowd assembled at City Hall before marching toward the Metropolitan Detention Center, chanting demands to dismantle ICE operations.
What began as organized chants quickly devolved into confrontations, with a group of agitators pushing a large construction dumpster to block the facility’s loading dock entrance. Bottles, rocks, and other debris soon flew toward officers and federal agents guarding the site.
LAPD responded swiftly, issuing a dispersal order around 5:45 p.m. local time for the area along Alameda Street between Union Station and First Street. When some refused to leave, the department declared a citywide tactical alert, citing ongoing violence between Temple and Aliso streets.
Video footage released by LAPD captured the scene, showing protesters hurling objects at law enforcement. Officers deployed pepper balls and tear gas to regain control, and less-lethal munitions were authorized after reports of direct assaults on personnel.
At least five arrests followed for failure to disperse, as announced by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass during a press conference that evening. One additional individual faced charges for allegedly using a slingshot to launch hard metal objects at officers.
LAPD stated on social media, “Protestors are actively fighting with Officers after multiple dispersal orders were issued. Metropolitan Division is now on scene. Less than lethal has been authorized due to the violence against officers.”
The department had expressed hopes for peaceful demonstrations but pointed to the actions of “violent agitators” as the catalyst for intervention.
These clashes formed part of a broader “ICE Out Everywhere” campaign rippling across the nation, fueled by recent fatalities in Minneapolis involving federal agents being used as excuses for anti-American puppet masters activating their insurgents.
On January 7, ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good after she struck him with her vehicle. Just weeks later, on January 24, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents fatally shot Alex Jeffrey Pretti as they attempted to disarm him after he interfered with an enforcement action in an active crime scene.
These incidents have amplified accusations that the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” are somehow making Americans less safe despite leading to over 3,000 apprehensions in Minnesota alone since December.
Adding to the tension, former CNN host Don Lemon was arrested on Friday in connection with a January 18 protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Lemon, along with eight others, faces federal charges of conspiracy to deprive rights and violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for disrupting a worship service to protest ICE.
Released without bond, Lemon is set to appear in court on February 9. Mayor Bass referenced his case in her remarks, calling it “an egregious misuse of our justice system” and tying it to broader erosion of democratic norms in the nation’s 250th year.
Rep. Maxine Waters joined the Los Angeles crowd, leading chants of “ICE out of L.A.” in front of riot-geared officers. She described the scene at the detention center as people “exercising their constitutional rights,” even as tear gas filled the air, insisting, “people are not moving.”
Bass echoed calls for peace but warned, “Violent protests are exactly what I believe this administration wants to see happen. Don’t be surprised if the military reenters our city.”
Such statements raise questions about whether local leaders are fanning flames rather than calming them, especially as peaceful assembly gives way to property damage and assaults on those tasked with upholding the law.
In a city already strained by immigration debates, these events expose deeper divides. Federal agents face scrutiny for their methods, yet the chaos in streets like Alameda underscores the risks when protests cross into aggression. As nationwide demonstrations continue, with more planned through the weekend, the pushback against enforcement reveals a coordinated effort to thwart policies aimed at protecting American communities from the burdens of porous borders. Law enforcement’s measured response in Los Angeles prevented worse outcomes, but the pattern of escalation suggests underlying forces may be at play, intent on sowing discord to derail necessary reforms.
When violence supplants dialogue, it undermines the very freedoms the Constitution and natural law uphold. As investigations unfold and charges proceed, the nation watches whether accountability will prevail or if division deepens further.
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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.
