(The Daily Signal)—Western civilization faces a crisis of confidence, and Josh Hammer has a recipe to combat the three threats eroding its foundations.
His new book, “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West,” lays out the key civilizational challenge and finds wisdom from the Bible to combat it.
“If you want to stand for something, if you want to actually turn back the tide against wokeism, Islamism, and global neoliberalism, it’s imperative that we be confident in who we are because only when we are confident in our inheritance can we possibly protect that strength and ultimately launch a successful civilizational counter-offensive,” Hammer, senior editor-at-large at Newsweek, tells The Daily Signal.
Hammer calls his book “an audacious and ambitious call for Jews and Christians alike to link arms and stand shoulder-to-shoulder like never before.”
He warns that the opponents of Western civilization often attack Jews first, as a soft target, before moving on to attacking Christians, as well.
“I’ve been very active in national conservatism for years now,” Hammer notes. “If you care about the nation-state and you oppose the globalizing, homogenizing imperative, then I think that you should understand that the state of Israel is the nationalist canary in the globalist coal mine, the same way that the Jewish people for thousands and thousands of years have been the canary in the coal mine when it comes to a broader civilizational decay and broader civilizational rot.”
Hammer, who founded the organization Jews Against Soros, points to the major money forces behind the Left’s globalist agenda, such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (now run by Soros’ son Alex), the Tides Foundation, Arabella Advisors, and Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.
He warns that globalism represents a threat to the idea of the nation-state—which he roots in King David’s uniting of the Twelve Tribes of Israel—while Islamism (a political force distinct from Islam but rooted in a radical interpretation of that religion) and wokeism (a Marxist ideology separating people into oppressors and oppressed by race, religion, and other factors) threaten other foundations of Western civilization.
“The entire premise of woke neo-Marxism [is] this notion that society in classical Marxist fashion can basically be boiled down to this false dichotomy,” Hammer says. “In the Wokerati’s case, that dichotomy ends up being oppressed versus oppressors. Basically white people, Christians, Jews, Asians end up being ‘oppressors.’”
“That’s news, frankly, to anyone who has ever read Jewish history, that the Jewish people could ever be oppressors,” he quips.
“All of this, where you are getting into this arbitrary dividing of humanity into these classes based on something like skin color or religion there, you’re rejecting the Bible,” Hammer claims. He says “the single overarching ethical imperative for all of Western civilization is Genesis 1:27—one of the first verses in the entire Bible—where it says ‘God made man in his image, male and female, he created them.’”
Hammer pushes back on likely objections to his claims that the Bible forms the bedrock for America’s legal system and Western civilization more broadly.
He notes that the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia features a quote from the book of Leviticus; that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin wanted America’s national seal to be Moses parting the Red Sea; and that Abraham Lincoln spoke of Americans as an “almost-chosen” people in “this covenantal language that he clearly learned from the Hebrew Bible.”
Hammer argues that it is in America’s interest to partner with Israel, and he pushes back on the notion that championing the U.S.-Israel alliance represents a form of neoconservatism.
Of Trump, the author says, “He opened the embassy in Jerusalem. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He pulled out of UNRWA. He pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. I mean, it would take us hours, frankly, to kind of talk about all the minutiae that he did to bolster this relationship.”
“And frankly, what was the result of that bolstering of this relationship? The Abraham Accords,” Hammer notes. The Abraham Accords refers to a series of international agreements between Arab countries and Israel toward the end of Trump’s first term. Trump’s policies arguably brought peace to the Middle East before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Furthermore, he argues that as America redeploys assets to the Indo-Pacific to face its “number one threat” in the Chinese Communist Party, the U.S. has to figure out how to secure its interests in the Middle East.
“The obvious answer, and Donald Trump gets this in his bones, is to embolden and empower your allies to patrol the region in a way that redounds to both of your interests there,” Hammer says. “This is the very sober, clear-headed, MAGA America First realist case.”
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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.
