Chicago’s murderous culture remains relentless, with more than 1,500 people shot so far this year, a figure that combines 276 deaths and 1,224 non-fatal cases reported by the Chicago Sun-Times as of October 4. That count pushed even higher over the following days, as additional shootings added to the total by October 6. Weekend reports alone detailed at least 30 victims, including five who died, across the city.
CBS News tracked nine separate incidents on Sunday, October 5, and two more early Monday, October 6, resulting in 13 people hit by gunfire and one fatality. These events follow a pattern seen throughout 2025, where weekly police data showed shootings surpassing 1,100 by late September.
City data portals and police reports confirm the scale of the problem, with homicides and non-fatal shootings logged in real time. Even as some sources note declines in overall crime compared to prior years—such as a 15% drop from 2023— the raw numbers of shooting victims tell of persistent danger on the streets. Summer 2025 marked the lowest homicide count in six decades, according to WBEZ analysis, yet over 1,200 people had been shot by early September, per independent tracking. Incidents range from mass drive-by attacks, like the July 2 event in River North that injured multiple victims, to everyday domestic and street confrontations.
President Trump has pushed for federal intervention, including National Guard deployment, to curb the bloodshed in Democrat-controlled cities like Chicago. Local leaders, however, have rebuffed these efforts.
Mayor Brandon Johnson addressed the idea directly: “If President Trump wants to help make Chicago safer, he can start by releasing the funds for anti-violence programs that have been critical to our work to drive down crime and violence.”
Johnson dismissed broader federal troop involvement as ineffective. He added, “He is provoking on sending federal troops, the National Guard, into cities to plunder them, though those entities do not have policing power. They can’t even do the very thing that he claims that he wants them to do.”
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker echoed this stance during a news conference, refusing to request troops despite Trump’s insistence.
“I’m aware that the President of the United States likes to go on television and beg me to call and ask him for troops,” Pritzker said. “I find this extraordinarily strange as Chicago does not want troops on our streets. I refuse to play a reality game show.”
This resistance comes amid broader Democratic opposition to Trump’s crackdown on urban crime, with groups like Live Free Illinois working to counter federal assistance.
Not all voices align with city hall. Activist Zoe Leigh, founder of Chicago Flips Red, called out officials for prioritizing politics over safety.
“My mother’s originally from Chicago, and the fact of seeing seniors getting killed, our children getting killed, mothers getting killed, young men getting killed, and we are not getting any help at all… it’s starting to become normalized and that is not normal,” she said.
Leigh targeted what she described as the city’s “progressive Democratic gang” for turning down federal resources, arguing that the ongoing deaths demand action beyond local efforts.
Indoctrination
Despite the unambiguous needs for federal assistance in communities that have been failed by local governments, the pushback persists. As JD Rucker noted on a recent Substack, “Leftists Still Need to Be Told What’s Best for Them.”
Residents in high-violence areas offer mixed views. In Parkway Gardens, known as one of the city’s toughest blocks, Anthony Carter, a lifelong resident and community worker, emphasized self-reliance: “It’s within us to stop the violence. President Trump couldn’t do nothing about that.” Carter noted the significance of local opposition: “When you got neighbors in the worst community in the world saying that they don’t want the federal guards to come, that’s got to be something.” Darell McCoy, another resident, rejected Trump’s involvement outright: “Ain’t nobody begging for that man to come nowhere. They’re begging for him to leave and get out of the presidency.”
Younger voices share similar doubts. Student Charles Pierce, 17, worried about escalating tensions: “We need help, but not that type of help. A lot of us already don’t trust police as it is. So if military people come in, that’d make it worse, because they’re in the military, and all they do is kill.” Miracle Davis, 16, predicted backlash: “It’s not going to turn the violence down; it’s going to bring it back up.” Earnestine Gardner, an 81-year-old longtime resident, foresaw complications: “It’d be a lot of problems.”
As shootings continue to mount, the divide over federal aid leaves Chicago’s safety in limbo, with community programs clashing against calls for stronger intervention.
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.
