(Substack)—From Washington DC to Portland and in nearly every major city in between, there are two near-certainties. First, Democrats control the lion’s share of mayors’ mansions, city council seats, and police chief offices. Second, Democrat voters have been indoctrinated into believing the problems Democrat politicians created can only be solved by Democrat politicians. They are not as ready for change as many Fox-News-watchers believe.
In conservative media echo chambers, we read stories or watch videos of citizens in cities like Chicago and Memphis complaining about crime and welcoming federal intervention. We see viral videos of Border Patrol officers getting thanked by sidewalk diners at local cafes in leftist cities. We hear anecdotal tails of reformed Democrats seeing the light. But these cases are not nearly as prevalent as we’re being led to believe.
The “Woke Mind Virus” is still widespread in these cities. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is still commonplace. Despite great strides being made to wake the people up from the decades of brainwashing, the bulk of people living in major Democrat-run cities are still captives of the cult.
We see this in New York City where a full-blown Marxist is about to become the most powerful mayor in the world. I personally see it regularly in Los Angeles where a huge chunk of the city thinks ICE is their enemy. Even those who appreciate the raids and deportations will often still side with the “F- ICE” radicals.
Several cities can make a claim as being the most indoctrinated, but one stands out.
Portland used to draw people in with its offbeat vibe, craft beers, and that whole “keep it weird” mantra. These days, a trip there feels more like stepping into a cautionary tale about unchecked progressive governance. Fox News Digital columnist David Marcus, after spending time in the city, described an encounter that captures the absurdity perfectly.
His Lyft driver spent the ride insisting “President Trump has laundered money for Russia for decades and that Antifa doesn’t exist,” only to file a discrimination complaint afterward because Marcus pushed back on the rant.
That kind of exchange isn’t just a one-off; it points to a broader mindset where dissent gets labeled as bigotry. Marcus observed how residents appear convinced that stumbling over dead bodies on sidewalks counts as everyday life in America.
“Occasionally walking past dead bodies on the sidewalk is a normal American experience,” he noted, painting a picture of a population desensitized to the chaos around them. Elaborating on this, it’s clear the denial runs deep—people chat casually about fentanyl overdoses and tent cities as if they’re minor inconveniences, not symptoms of failed policies like drug decriminalization that turned streets into open-air markets for addiction.
Counter-protesters Marcus met on the ground put it bluntly, saying they’re fed up with “Antifa, drug addicts and woke policies that have ravaged a once-great city.”
Their frustration makes sense when you look at the numbers. Homelessness exploded after Oregon’s Measure 110 decriminalized hard drugs in 2020, leading to a surge in public use and related crime. Even though the state recriminalized possession earlier this year, the damage lingers, with encampments still dotting downtown and overdose rates stubbornly high. Antifa’s presence hasn’t vanished either; groups continue to clash in ways that disrupt normal life, all while locals downplay the violence as isolated or exaggerated by outsiders.
This isn’t just Portland’s problem anymore. With similar policies popping up in places like San Francisco and Seattle, the rot spreads. Marcus warns of the certainty among residents that supporting President Trump isn’t just mistaken—it’s downright immoral.
“Anyone calling themselves a Trump supporter isn’t just wrong, but immoral,” he wrote, describing the judgmental atmosphere that stifles debate. In such an environment, basic fixes like bolstering police presence or enforcing laws get dismissed as regressive.
President Trump’s recent crime crackdown initiatives offer a potential turnaround. His administration has already pushed back against the soft-on-crime approaches that let this mess fester under previous leadership. Yet, as Marcus’s experience shows, changing minds in these echo chambers won’t happen overnight. If cities don’t wake up to the delusion, what started in Portland could become the new normal everywhere—luxury condos next to squalor, ideological purity over public safety.
We have to keep chipping away at the brainwashed masses on the left. Some are irreversibly lost; they’d rather live dangerously than acknowledge that their side created the problems and our side is offering a solution. But others will come around. We need to educate them. We need to beat the drum of law and order while also defending the necessary actions of the administration.
That doesn’t mean DHS or the rest of the Trump administration is doing everything right. I would argue that they’re mishandling certain aspects of the ongoing crackdown. But some of our fellow American citizens voting against their own best interests may just need a dose of reality to snap them out of their indoctrination.
It’s not our responsibility. It’s not even our duty. They did this to themselves. But even if we’re not living in those cities, we’re still affected. It makes a whole lot of sense to expose them to the truth whenever possible. It behooves us to try to change the occasional heart and mind.
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.
