(End of the American Dream)—Have you noticed that virtually all of our major cities are poorly run? I believe that the condition of our largest metropolitan areas is a warning. If we don’t straighten up, the entire country will soon resemble our core urban areas. Thankfully, there are millions of Americans that strongly support a return to “law and order”, but unfortunately “law and order” is the opposite of what we are witnessing in our biggest urban areas right now. In this article, I would like to check in on what life is like in America’s crime-ridden major cities in 2025…
Let me start with Boston.
Three years ago, Mayor Michelle Wu started handing out crack pipes and other types of drug paraphernalia to addicts, and now Boston’s “ritziest and best-known neighborhood” is essentially an open-air drug market…
Residents of Boston’s ritziest and best-known neighborhood are fuming at the city’s Democratic mayor – blaming her policies for rampant open-air drug use in the upscale area.
Beacon Hill, known for its preserved early 19th century brownstones and cobblestone roads famously saved from the wrecking ball, is now facing a new crisis: an alarming uptick in drug-related incidents.
Infuriated locals have laid blame squarely with Mayor Michelle Wu, who launched an initiative to hand out free crack pipes, syringes, and other drug paraphernalia to addicts on the streets in 2022.
In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams continues to insist that he is tough on crime.
But the total number of reported crimes in New York City has increased by 28 percent since the end of 2021…
Felony assaults rose by 29 percent, car thefts by 36 percent and robberies by 20 percent from the end of 2021 to the end of last year, according to the most recent year-end NYPD statistics.
And newly released data covering all 34 crime categories — including quality-of-life infractions like trespassing and graffiti — show total infractions grew 28 percent, from 454,404 at the end of 2021, just before Adams took office, to 580,338 at the end of 2024.
That puts crime back at a level not seen in a decade, and New Yorkers are taking notice.
In Chicago, gang members outnumber the police by more than ten to one.
A very young gang member that was recently interviewed by Vice admitted that it is dangerous to simply stand around outside because you could literally be killed at any moment…
Members as young as 14 years old walk the streets with handguns, warning it’s dangerous just to be outside. “This is our everyday life. Everybody just running around in chaos,” one member said.
“This, right here, right now, is dangerous,” he added, referencing standing outside in the group. “Going to restaurants, that’s dangerous. Going to the laundromat, dangerous. Going to funerals, dangerous.”
To keep each other safe, members “move like the military,” he said, and going to jail is the least of their concerns.
“I’d rather be in the cell than dead,” another young member said.
Conditions are quite chaotic on the west coast as well.
A shocking string of violent home invasions has prompted community leaders in Encino to beg Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for help…
Encino community leaders on Thursday asked Mayor Karen Bass to increase security following a deadly home invasion and a string of other break-ins in the San Fernando Valley hillside neighborhood.
“American Idol” music supervisor Robin Kaye and her rock musician husband, Tom DeLuca, were killed in their Encino home by an intruder earlier this month. The Hayvenhurst Avenue home of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Teddi Mellencamp was also targeted last week by three intruders who jumped a fence and entered the property.
Two other burglaries occurred in recent weeks, including an incident on Ostrom Avenue, where a homeowner shot a 14-year-old intruder, according to residents.
Good luck getting any help from Mayor Bass. At this stage, the entire city is a nightmare.
Just look at what has happened to MacArthur Park. In the old days it was so beautiful, but now it has become an extremely violent drug-infested hellhole…
Once a jewel of this crowded, vibrant, bustling immigrant community, MacArthur Park has fallen into decay, overwhelmed by the crises that afflict Los Angeles and so many other cities: drugs, homelessness, crime, blight. The result has been an alarming downward spiral, driving out families and turning the park into a drug market, with all its attendant violence.
Writ large, the struggle for the park is even larger. If Los Angeles cannot reclaim this piece of ground, cannot bring safety and community back through the city’s mix of enforcement and compassion, then those remedies may have lost their power, and sterner measures may be required for communities to live in peace.
But if you think that Los Angeles is run poorly, you should compare it to San Francisco.
One recent study determined that San Francisco is actually the worst run city in the entire nation…
San Francisco is the worst-run city in the nation, according to a report by WalletHub.
Several other California cities also ranked in the bottom 10 of 148 cities, including Stockton (138), Los Angeles (139), Long Beach (140), Fresno (141), and Oakland (146).
The finance website created a “Quality of Services” score of 36 metrics split into six categories, which was then measured against 148 of the nation’s most populated city’s per-capita budget.
San Francisco came in last overall, ranking 89th in financial stability, 137th in education, 102nd in safety, and 135th in economy.
If we don’t reverse course, eventually the whole country will go down the same road that California has gone.
And that would not be a good thing at all.
Down in San Diego, the pastor of a local Episcopal church was recently caught trying to hook up with “14 and 15-year-old boys”…
San Diego pastor busted by @peoplevpreds for allegedly messaging who he thought were 14 and 15-year-old boys on Grindr.
Reverend Roger Haenke, with St. John’s Episcopal Church, was seen emerging from his home with his husband after being confronted.
The San Diego pastor and professor admitted to using the gay dating app before smacking away the camera.
There are predators everywhere.
Our society is literally teeming with them.
I feel so badly for children that are trying to grow up in the extremely sick and twisted environment that we have created for them.
And sometimes the biggest monsters live far away from our large metropolitan areas.
For example, authorities in a rural portion of Florida recently discovered a “house of horrors” where foster children were literally being caged up…
Stomach-churning details have come to light after a family of four was arrested for allegedly abusing and caging nine foster children, one of whom was just seven years old.
Brian Griffeth, 47, Jill Griffeth, 41, and their biological adult children, Dallin Griffeth, 21, and Liberty Griffeth, 19, were arrested in Fort White, Florida, a small town outside of Gainesville, on July 22 for the alleged crimes.
They all face felony charges of cruelty towards children for the alleged horrific abuse inflicted against the kids living in the so-called ‘house of horrors’.
The tremendous evil that we are witnessing all around us should send us running in the opposite direction.
We desperately need to change direction as individuals, and we desperately need to change direction as a society.
Because if we just keep on doing what we have been doing, we won’t have a country.
We need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and realize what a mess our nation has become.
Ignoring what is going on is not going to solve anything.
If we truly love our country and if we truly love one another, we will try to clean up this mess while we still can.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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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.
