There have been two types of reactions to the Chris Pratt thriller, “The Terminal List.” Viewers who don’t want or don’t care about wokeness in their entertainment generally loved it. Those who either disregard shows that aren’t woke enough or who fear being canceled themselves if they like an unwoke show hated it. This is why on Rotten Tomatoes, honest viewers loved it and gave it a 95% rating while critics hated it, serving up a 39%.
The audience adoration was well-deserved because it’s an extremely entertaining series. Critics were compelled to give it bad reviews even if they liked it because from the start, the show was getting targeted by cancel culture. Paid critics hate getting hit by cancel culture so they manufactured flaws that didn’t really exist. That’s not to say the show was perfect, but it was quite enjoyable and completely devoid of wokeness.
It follows a Navy SEAL played by Pratt who goes for a bizarre ride from the opening scenes on a doomed mission all the way through to its climax eight episodes later. It’s a thriller with a creative plot and an appropriate mix of drama and action throughout. Well-directed and well-acted, this should have been a slam dunk. But there are no LGBTQIA+ characters. The closest they get to having strong characters played by persons of color are three or four side characters and a Chinese-American female journalist.
The show was not overtly “conservative.” It simply wasn’t woke. For that, cancel culture has come after it hard.
Based on its tremendous success, it should have already been renewed for a second season. It outperformed “Reacher” and “Jack Ryan,” both of which were renewed by Amazon immediately after release. Is fear of cancel culture holding Amazon back from pulling the trigger on “The Terminal List”?
Last month, the show’s creator warned it wasn’t going to be woke. According to IndieWire:
“There’s no ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke,’ but just because there’s not this ‘woke’ stuff that’s shoved into it, then it’s perceived — by critics, at least — as not promoting their agenda, so they’re going to hate it,” Carr said. “We don’t mention right, left, conservative, liberal, none of those things are even mentioned.”
Carr called out a Daily Beast review that likened the series to an “unhinged right-wing revenge fantasy.”
“The Daily Beast, in particular, their review was quite mean,” Carr commented. “But they see an American flag and they get upset. Or they see someone who is competent with weapons and has a certain mindset and holds those in power accountable for their actions and they just kind of lose it a little bit.”
Carr summed up, “We didn’t make it for critics. What’s important to me and to Chris Pratt was that we made something that would speak to those members of the military who went down range over the last 20 years so they could sit down and say, ‘These guys put in the work and made a show that speaks to me.’”
When a show of this caliber and success is held up, we have to look to the key players to see if they’re to blame. They’re not. Everyone from producers to directors to Pratt himself have talked excitedly about a new season. The show is based on a book series and it’s being reported that they already have the rest of the series plotted out and ready to go. What’s the holdup?
The show doesn’t hate America. It doesn’t pay Hollywood tribute to the LGBTQIA+ mafia. It follows a strong straight White male with guns. For these things, Americans generally loved it. The woke did not. If this show somehow doesn’t get picked up for another season, we’ll be able to blame cancel culture and their tiny but vocal group of wokesters.
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.
