New York’s Amish do not want a fight. They want a one-room schoolhouse on their own land, a horse, a Bible, and the right to raise their children without Albany’s syringe in the door. The state answered with $2,000 fines, a Cuomo-era decree, and a health department that treats a peaceable church like a public nuisance. So the plain people are saying the quiet part out loud. If the Supreme Court will not protect them, they will leave.
That is not a metaphor. Attorneys for the families in Miller v. McDonald told the New York Post the community of roughly 25,000 — the fifth-largest Amish population in the country — will pack up for Pennsylvania if they lose.
Pennsylvania already holds about 95,000 of them. New York can keep the bureaucrats.
“Have we gotten to a place where we aren’t going to make room for the Amish anymore?” asked Hiram Sasser, one of the lawyers. “When you think of Americana — apple pie, fireworks — the Amish are on that list. They’re part of the American fabric. They’re a good litmus test of our religious liberty and our tolerance.”
The test is not going well.
Cuomo Took the Exemption. The Fines Did the Rest.
In 2019, after a measles outbreak in an Orthodox Jewish community, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed away New York’s religious exemption to school immunization rules. California had already done it. Maine and Connecticut later joined the club. West Virginia never offered one. Medical exemptions stayed. Faith did not.
The law does not stop at public school. It hits private and parochial classrooms too, including Amish schools that take no tax money, sit on private land, and teach only Amish children. New York still demands 24 to 27 shots for K-12 attendance. The Amish generally refuse injectables. Their religion treats trust in the shot as a rival to trust in God.
Ezra Wengerd of Canajoharie, 55, an Old Order father and an elected representative of the state’s Amish schools, put it in a handwritten letter.
“We, as a peace loving religious group, are sincerely sorry that we are causing the state a prob. We are indeed grateful to the state of NY for the many privileges freedoms and protections they have blessed us with, for many years. Our Almighty God wants us to fully put our faith and trust in Him. Which is in conflict to put our trust in vaccines. We are also commanded to not be conformed to this world.”
The state was not interested in the apology. It started slapping $2,000 penalties on noncompliant schools around 2022. Three named in the suit — Shady Lane in Clymer, Pleasant View in Heuvelton, and Dygert Road near Canajoharie — have already been hit for $118,000 combined. Lawyers say every Amish school in New York sits in the same trap. The Health Department would not tell the Post how many others have been fined. Aaron Siri, who also represents the families, noted the only realistic way to collect that kind of money is to take the land.
Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.
The Second Circuit Doubled Down After the High Court Said Look Again
The Amish have been in federal court since 2024. They lost at the district level. The New York-based Second Circuit — majority Democrat-appointed — sided with the state. Last year the Supreme Court vacated that ruling and sent it back for another look in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor, the 2025 decision that backed parents who objected on religious grounds to a school district’s LGBT curriculum, as The Christian Post reported when the remand landed.
The Second Circuit “reconsidered.” On June 30, 2026, it issued the same answer. Neutral law. Generally applicable. Rational basis. The vaccine rule, the panel said, does not tell children what to believe, so Mahmoud does not save the Amish. The court treated a needle in a child’s arm as less serious than a storybook in a classroom.
That is the legal magic trick. Keep a medical exemption. Kill the religious one. Call the statute neutral. Pretend Wisconsin v. Yoder — the 1972 case that stopped Wisconsin from forcing Amish teenagers into high school — has nothing to say when the same people ask to keep their own little schools free of a mandate that violates their creed.
Siri has said the families will petition the Supreme Court again next month. They do not want to be there. Amish culture generally forbids both lawsuits and injectables. “They’ve been left with no choice,” he told the Post.
The Children Albany Wants to “Protect”
Here is the part the Department of Health would rather not put on a press release. Sworn filings in the case describe 168 unvaccinated children across 26 families at the three targeted schools. None had a health problem that arose after birth.
Expert evidence compared that group with expected rates in a random sample of 168 American children and found the usual load of chronic illness missing — the allergies, ADHD, asthma, and autism that now pass for normal in vaccinated cohorts.
Daniel Horowitz at The Blaze asked the obvious question. Why treat a living, unvaccinated population as a problem to be fined out of existence instead of evidence worth studying? New York’s answer is a slogan. A spokeswoman told the Post the department’s job is to “protect public health,” “enforce the law fairly and equitably,” and follow requirements “based in science.”
Fairly. Equitably. Against people who build their own schools and ask nothing from the treasury except to be left alone.
Wayne State law professor Christopher Lund told the Post the Amish are sympathetic plaintiffs, but the state is “thinking more widely.” That is the whole philosophy in one phrase. The individual conscience is always the rounding error.
The herd is the point. The Second Circuit has spent years batting down religious objectors to COVID shots. Vaccine cases make the justices nervous. Medical authorities still get the benefit of the doubt they squandered during the last panic.
The Trump administration is at least saying the quiet counterpoint. An HHS spokesman told the Post that the president’s executive order reaffirmed parental choice and religious freedom on childhood vaccination, and that under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the department will keep working to protect parents who make health decisions “in accordance with their deeply held beliefs.”
A Litmus Test New York Is Failing
Other states have found workarounds when Amish life collided with modern rules — photo IDs, reflective tape on buggies, building codes. New York chose confiscatory fines on churches that look like Little House on the Prairie.
If the high court shrugs, the buggies roll west. Pennsylvania will take them. New York will keep its schedule of 27 shots, its empty desks, and the proud claim that no child’s faith is allowed to interfere with the state’s idea of safety. The Amish will still be the Amish. Albany will still be Albany. Only one of those two has ever been good at leaving people alone.
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.