(Daily Signal)—The Trump administration has launched a counterrevolution in American culture and government. As much as the credit for this sudden and dramatic reversal belongs to the president, it is further being fueled by larger changes in the conservative movement.
These changes were set in motion in part thanks to the annual National Conservatism Conference, initially created by Yoram Hazony, author of “The Virtues of Nationalism,” and hosted by the Edmund Burke Foundation. The conference first launched in 2019 and just wrapped up its fifth such gathering on Thursday.
As a disclosure, I’ll note that my wife Inez Stepman is one of the hosts of the “NatCon Squad” podcast, an excellent weekly show that provides some of the most insightful analysis about contemporary politics. (Yes, I’m biased, but it’s true.)
The National Conservatism message has largely “won” on the Right. That’s in part because it’s strongly aligned with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Vance has spoken several times at the conference, including in 2024, when he spoke about how America is a “homeland” and not just an idea.
But in a certain sense, the movement has run alongside Trump and Vance’s success. It has thrived because it filled the vacuum of where the pre-Trump conservative message failed.
Addressing What Matters Most
Too often there was talk of liberty and the Constitution, of how the government had infringed on the rights of citizens. There was a clear understanding that the Left had gone too far, but little clarity about what to do about it.
The first National Conservatism Conference set the tone of how the Right needed to act if Western civilization was to survive and not either disintegrate or become a twisted, villainous version of itself, powerful but wretched.
The conference was met with a certain degree of scorn when it began, as many elements of the traditional conservative movement denounced it for embracing ideological heresies.
But it succeeded in large part because it was addressing the issues that the American people cared deeply about—issues the Republican Party and conservative institutions ignored or didn’t seem to be taking seriously.
For instance, why should Americans extol the virtues of free trade when it seemed to mean the disintegration of jobs, the breakup of communities, and the destruction of the “good life” at the heart of the American dream? Pointing to national economic growth or the benefit of cheaper consumer goods wasn’t good enough when communities were dying and local schools were allowing biological males in girls locker rooms.
Unsettled arguments had been treated as settled; dissent or second-guessing was looked upon as a betrayal; and any suggestion that the institutional Right had missed some things in the lead up to Trump taking over the Republican Party was often lambasted as a “sellout” of principles.
‘The Kingdom of God Must be Defended Like Any Other’
Much has changed now. The existential threat the Left poses to our way of life is more widely understood and acknowledged. The Right is more focused on issues directly related to the concerns of millions of forgotten ordinary Americans who are forgotten no more.
There is a much stronger focus on culture and the family.
Cultural issues are in the driver’s seat, not the backseat—or in a ditch by the side of the road. There is a more widespread belief that political and institutional power is a necessary component of change and success. The National Conservative movement reminded the Right that a great moral and spiritual deficit will bankrupt the country just as much as a fiscal one.
What National Conservatism brought to the larger Right is the mentality that the good things at the heart of Western civilization could not be defended by creating small islands of liberty in a sea of hostile leftism.
It wasn’t sufficient to just explain the virtues of free speech, to demand religious liberty, and to extol the virtues of the Constitution and limited government. The institutions and changing culture of Western societies controlled by the Left had not only ghettoized traditional cultural and religious ideas, but they had also set them on a path of ultimate annihilation.
National Conservatism took hold because it embraced a maxim excellently conveyed in the 1964 movie, “Becket,” which is about the 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury who defended the church against a corrupt and hostile state.
When Becket, played by Richard Burton, decides to excommunicate a state official who killed a priest—thereby angering the ruling regime—three court bishops begged him not to take that action because it would “strike a blow that will split Church and State for a generation.”
Becket rebuked them sharply, saying, “If I do not strike it now, the Church as we know it now will not survive a generation.”
The bishops answered back, “God will see that it survives.” But Becket had none of it and concluded in a spirit that I think is emblematic of the mindset of National Conservatism: “No, the kingdom of God must be defended like any other kingdom.”
It’s not good enough to accept being a “remnant,” mere dissenters clinging to a handful of battered, infiltrated bastions just waiting out the clock and hoping that something will change.
It’s About the Institutions, Stupid
What was needed was an aggressive counter, an attitude that the institutions of Western civilization do not belong to the Left. We can build and use our own political and institutional power to ensure that we live in a good society of human flourishing.
That mindset has produced tangible results.
For instance, the second Trump administration has done something that Republicans had never seriously attempted to do regarding higher education. Instead of just grumbling about the loony Left that’s taken over college campuses and turned them into woke madrassas, as conservatives have done for more than half a century, the administration defunded or threatened to defund them.
No longer could schools actively violate the law with impunity and carry out policies that discriminated primarily against white and Asian students. By doing so, colleges risked losing in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars. States followed suit with their own demands that higher education change its ways—or else.
And for the first time in a long time, even elite universities such as Harvard must take the Right’s demands seriously, because conservatives are serious about using real political power against them.
Even long-standing demands such as defunding the ideologically compromised NPR and PBS, long talked about by conservatives but seemingly never taken seriously by Republicans in office, have suddenly come to pass.
It turns out, you can just do stuff.
There are other big changes, too. The Trump administration hasn’t just secured the border, it’s deporting thousands of people who have come here illegally, and taking amnesty off the table. The United States is a nation, as National Conservatives have argued, not just an economic zone. With limitless illegal and even legal immigration, it becomes impossible to maintain the cultural bonds that are necessary for a healthy and thriving people.
The emphasis has moved away from raw economic competition to family-building and uplifting the American citizens that the state has a duty and obligation to.
The challenge now is to keep the momentum going. Trump and the Right’s more confrontational attitude have thrown the Left and its disgraced, untrusted institutions into disarray. That doesn’t mean that a “Retvrn”—“reject modernity, embrace history“—is guaranteed and that the West has been fully restored. Far from it. It’s going to take a generation—or likely generations, plural—to rebuild what has been lost.
All that it means is that we are at the beginning of the beginning. We have a new lease on life, so to speak. And that’s thanks in large part to the changes that National Conservatism has brought to America and other Western nations.
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.
