This is going to be hard for some people to hear. I’ll likely get accused of politicizing a tragedy shortly after the fact, but it needs to be said. Considering the Buffalo mass murderer claimed in his manifesto that he was basically indoctrinated by 4Chan when he nothing else to do shortly after the lockdowns began, it’s a fair question to ask if he would have become violent had he not been forced out of school by destructive pandemic policies.
Article and podcast originally posted at one of my Substacks, End Medical Tyranny.
By no means am I suggesting he didn’t already have major problems. Those are well documented. But the timing of his transition to becoming a deranged young man of violence coincides perfectly with the psychologically altering time when Americans were tolled to fear everything and stay home. For young people, this often translated into even more online time than they used to have, and that can be a very bad thing for some.
On the latest episode of End Medical Tyranny, I didn’t dwell on this. I did read parts of the article below by Jeffrey A. Tucker from Brownstone Institute, but the focus needs to be on how we prevent the next round of Pandemic Panic Theater. It’s coming. There’s very little doubt about that. And with most lockdowns and mandates put on hold, far too many Americans are acting like the fight is over. It’s not. It’s just getting started. We need to be ready. Here’s Jeffrey…
Last weekend, an 18-year-old kid slogged a powerful weapon into a Buffalo, New York, grocery store and started shooting people based on race. Thirteen people were slaughtered. His goal was to start a race war, along the lines of the fiction books that inspired his online gurus. He live-streamed the carnage and left a manifesto explaining his motives. His ideology – which has deep roots and has spawned genocides – is the kind of demonic gibberish that unstable kids find on the Internet when they are looking for some mission and meaning in life.
Why might this kid have allowed his brain to become poisoned in this way? He was a high school junior when the schools in his town were closed by government, from March 2020 through September at the earliest. That cut him off from peers and normal social life and the civilizing effect that they have. He lived online in isolated loneliness.
He admits this in his revolting “manifesto.”
“Before I begin I will say that I was not born racist nor grew up to be racist. I simply became racist after I learned the truth. I started browsing 4chan in May 2020 after extreme boredom, remember this was during the outbreak of covid…. I never even saw this information until I found these sites, since mostly I would get my news from the front page of Reddit. I didn’t care at the time, but as I learned more and more I realized how serious the situation was. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore, I told myself that eventually I was going to kill myself to escape this fate. My race was doomed and there was nothing I could do about it.”
These words reflect grave pathology. Recent surveys of people in forced covid isolation have found that some 30% develop strong symptoms of PTSD over the course of weeks. In this case, an already imbalanced kid found personal meaning through his own perceived “race” identity. He invented a sense of belongingness through an imagined artificial solidarity with others of his tribe. The next steps are obvious: the demonization of others who are blamed for his plight, the manufacturing of a mission, and the valorization of his own violent longings. The grotesque ideology he adopted was the replacement for what he lost or never had.
The disruption of closures and quarantines affected millions of others without the same results but the tendency is there: people are robbed of a moral center and a clarity about life’s meaning. In Freudian terms, the last two years provided every pathway for the id (the primitive instinct) to displace the ego, which consists of social norms, social realities, etiquette, and rules when deciding how to behave.
This displacement can leave nothing but instinct fueled by resentment and hate. Along with this comes the search for the “other” on which to blame all problems. Whether that is the racial identity, political deviants, the covid non-compliant, the unvaccinated, or make up any other category, we see the same dynamic at work: the attempt to stigmatize, exclude, dehumanize, and eventually eliminate.
This kid’s behavior is but a sign, a marker, an extreme example of the loss of moral center. It is also a warning. Millions more have been so affected, as we lost two years, not only of education, but also of socialization opportunities. Networks have been shattered. Expectations that life can be stable and good, and always will be, are gone for many among a whole generation. Even the Surgeon General has commented on the crisis for a generation, without of course identifying the most obvious causes.
What kinds of things unleash this Freudian id that is always just beneath the surface? What breaks the barrier created by sublimation? Isolation. Despair. Deprivation. This is linked to a shattering of social bonds (via “social distancing”) and also material loss. These cause hope to evaporate. A happy future starts to seem unattainable, and so there is a loss of desire to work toward that end. Instead, the psychology of reversion takes place: to behave in a primitive, anomic, and violent way.
Freud is a good guide to this tragic process, but to see the other end of the moral spectrum, we can turn to Adam Smith’s masterwork The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is heavy on the analysis of what it means to feel empathy, and not only to feel it, but to rely on it to the point that our own well-being is connected to the belief that others too are experiencing something like a good life.
What instills this higher sense in our minds? It is the practical experience of depending on others and finding value in their labor, productivity, contribution to community life, and coming to see our own well-being as bound up with the fate of others. This is what the market and socializing encourages: the gradual recognition that others, and indeed all people, are worthy of being treated with dignity and respect.
The universalization of this sense is never complete, but as civilization and prosperity grow, we make progress toward that end. This is what grants us ever better lives. Without it, we can very quickly descend into barbarism in the way The Lord of the Flies describes. This is particularly true in the volatile years of youth, when the search for meaning is active and the mind is malleable in both good and dangerous ways.
Take away community and you take away the thing that instills that Smithian sense of empathy that extends from a conscience trained by socialization. All of this is contingent on a functioning market and social order. Without that, a decline in mental health can lead to violent outbursts and even genocide.
The World Can Be Broken
Like you, I never wanted to live in a society that is devolving ever deeper into moral decay. Along with that is, inevitably, a fall in overall prosperity.
Years ago, I was having lunch with one of the great economists who had dedicated his life to studying economic freedom the world over. He developed the metrics to quantify this progress and ranked countries. I asked him the big question, whether there was ever a chance that in the West we could lose what we take for granted, and find ourselves falling back to ever more primitive ways, eventually losing both freedom and prosperity.
His answer came quickly: there is almost zero chance of that. Markets are too complex, law is mostly good, and humanity has learned the right path. The foundations of civilization are so strong that it would require a mighty effort to break them. People would never stand for it. I was relieved to hear this and went on with my naive ways.
Two years ago, in spring, this confidence in the future was shattered. A friend just now described it to me as a nightmare unfolding in real time, as ruling class elites play willy nilly with sacred rights and liberties, while smashing so much of what it has taken hundreds of years to create.
The results of compulsory closures and shutdowns are all around us. It’s not only about educational losses, falling optimism, declining health, inflation, weakened financials, empty shelves, and shortened lives. Above all else, it is about the decline of society’s moral sense.
We saw public officials engaged in the unthinkable – locking people in their homes, closing schools and churches, shutting down venues for fun and therapy, excluding people from public accommodations based on vaccine status – and that sent a message to everyone else.
We’ve been through more than two years of isolating, segregating, dividing, excluding, and dehumanizing. The message: there are no more rules based on equality and rights. Nothing that we thought matters really does matter. The replacement is not rationality but primitivism and the destructive mindset.
How Bad Can This Get?
Many are now asking the unthinkable: just how bad can this get?
Polls say that the number one concern of Americans today is inflation, a direct outgrowth of terrible pandemic policy. We have examples from history of how forces like inflation can prompt rapid devolution. Venezuela is a good example: a prosperous and civilized country falling into the abyss when the money fails, after which civil society collapses too. Germany and Russia too come to mind. One or two things going wrong can cause a crack in civilized life that exposes whole social orders to the unthinkable.
What’s awesome and terrifying to contemplate is just how many things have gone wrong all at once. The quality of money has taken a huge hit and will likely endure many more years. But we also have a health crisis, a psychological decline, massive learning loss, dependency on government largess, a loss of work ethic, an ideological putsch against basic tenets of traditional liberalism, a revolt against religion, a denial of basic biology and science, a wholesale loss of trust in elites, the valorization of war, even as the administrative state alongside intellectual elites remain firmly in control of the apparatus of power at all levels.
This is an extremely dangerous mix, so much so that it is hard to find historical examples. Our moral sense is getting dulled by the day. We are getting used to rising crime, falling purchasing power, the loss of opportunity, diminished hopes for the future, rising social chaos, and the normalization of hate. It can happen gradually and then all at once.
Over two years, our friend networks have been shattered, our communities broken, small businesses beaten, and many of our leaders have been co-opted into a machinery of corruption, while the censorship of open dialogue about the causes and consequences is intensifying. The tools we thought would save us and lead us into the light – our laws and technologies – have betrayed our rights, privacy, and liberties.
Perpetual decline and fall is not inevitable. It is fixable but every powerful force out there, especially mainstream media, seems to stand against that. It is all designed to demoralize us and cause us to give up. We cannot accept this fate. There is still time, providing that we understand what is happening and the grave consequences of letting it all take place without a fight.
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.
