“I am flying high over Tupelo, Mississippi, with America’s hottest band, and we are all about to die.” That’s the opening line for a fictional Rolling Stone article in Cameron Crowe’s somewhat autobiographical rock journalism tribute, Almost Famous. It’s a great sentence, and it runs through my head every morning as I digest the latest mainstream news ramblings regarding the White House.
President Trump has been in office for a hundred days, and during each of those eventful days, a reporter representing the interests of the largest corporate newsrooms screams in print or on television some version of “I’m here at the White House, and we’re all about to die!” It never gets old.
Journalists’ endless hyperventilating about President Trump’s every move makes clear that he is unquestionably the lead singer of America’s hottest band. The same reporters who rage against the MAGA machine are White House groupies who can’t help but chase after the president to see what he’ll do next. (Before some WHPC noob says, “That’s our job,” I’ll point out that nobody was chasing down pretend “President” Biden when he managed to wander away from the West Wing’s assisted living facilities.)
President Trump is a rock star, and the funniest thing about this reality is that he’s still producing great hits at seventy-eight years young! There are a few octogenarian-ish rockers out there who continue to make music as well as anyone working today, but most of the great ones ran their engines a little too hot during their younger days and have long since run out of gas. Some abused their bodies so much that their skin suits now look like deflated tires. Then there’s Trump — a man who stays up late, gets up early, and takes a break only for a round of golf. He has no intention of getting off the stage because every day he’s releasing new live albums!
Today’s chart-topper might be about tariffs. Tomorrow’s might be about immigration. The day after that might be about disbanding the IRS. Next week, there might be a crowd-pleaser about justice coming for Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, or Hillary Clinton. Next month, he might sing a ballad about the end of NPR and PBS. You never know what smash hit he’ll drop next!
That’s why the whole world has to tune in to see what happens. Russia, Ukraine, China, North Korea, Venezuela, the enslaved colonies of the European Union — every corner of the planet listens intently and wonders whether the American president will single out one of its leaders for a little impromptu duet. Invariably, after Trump bangs out a few chords and hits a set of drums with his fists, some propagandist posing as a professional reporter looks sternly into the cameras and declares, “I’m here at the White House, and we’re all about to die!” After some “serious” back-and-forth commentary with the corporate newsroom as to how President Trump will destroy the world today (just as they claimed he would do the day before), the rabid discussion usually breaks away for a batch of pharmaceutical commercials (somebody has to pay the bills!).
As it turns out, corporate news primarily consists of (1) screaming about President Trump and (2) selling legal drugs. When you accept that screaming about President Trump is its own kind of self-medication for millions of psychologically unhealthy people, a rational person might conclude that twenty-first century news cartels are really nothing more than roving gangs of drug-dealers! They got half the world stoned on Trump hate, and withdrawal symptoms are so painful that the afflicted flock to fake news for a quick fix.
Unfortunately for America, the news media cartels have forgotten the first rule of running a successful drug business: Never get hooked on your own product. Do you think the Fortune 500’s pharmaceutical giants encourage their chief executives to pop opioid tablets in the break room? Of course not; they need their moneymakers thinking clearly while churning out new dopeheads and flatlining rural America.
Modern journalists show no such restraint: They are most definitely hooked on their drug of choice. It’s just that most of today’s strung out newsies can’t admit to themselves that they are addicted to Donald Trump. They tell us he’s about to end the world, but they keep running after him for one more intoxicating hit before everything goes kablooey. President Trump even tried to detox the AP with a much deserved stint in rehab, but the Associated Propagandists sued the White House for a little more access to their favorite Trump drug. Come on, guys! The first step to a successful recovery is admitting you have a problem!
On Saturday, the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner consisted mainly of Trump groupies getting up on a third-rate stage during open mic night to explain that they’re totally not obsessed with Donald Trump! All evidence to the contrary, groupies! You make up stories about him. (Russia collusion, anyone?) You spread silly gossip about him. (OMG, did you hear that the president wore a navy suit to the pope’s funeral? LOL!) You spend all day, every day writing long articles about his hair, how many Diet Cokes he’s had, how he pronounces Chi-na, and whether he means half the things he’s said. You rage-tweet about his penchant for commenting on sports, music, and cultural issues, but you also rage-tweet when he hasn’t yet commented on the pop culture issue of the day. You’re all just a bunch of pouty stalkers who vie for President Trump’s attention!
When normal people break up with someone and cease to care about that person’s opinion, they do not sulk on stage and whine to their ex, “What we are not is the opposition. What we are not is the enemy of the people. And what we are not is the enemy of the state.” Uh, sorry, girlfriend, I’ll be sure to let Donald know. Maybe I’ll pass him a note at recess that says the press corps is, like, so over him and whatevs. How very melodramatic of the Fourth Estate! Let’s be honest: If they didn’t obsess about President Trump 24/7, they’d never sell enough Big Pharma ads to pay for even half an estate. Sad trombone.
For those keeping score at home, real reporter Mollie Hemingway added some narration for Trump’s jilted exes bawling their eyes out during their annual group therapy session: “The propaganda press is, in fact, the enemy of the people. They maliciously lie and invent stories, such as the Russia collusion hoax and the Kavanaugh smear. They cover up important true stories, such as the Wuhan virus and the Biden family business. Enemies.” And, I might add, so obsessed with President Trump that they should be renamed the Fatal Attraction White House press corps.
Like any rock star destined for the Hall of Fame, Trump puts on a great show. In recognition of his administration’s many accomplishments during these first hundred days, the White House erected a hundred yard signs on the North Lawn with the mug shots of criminal illegal aliens who have been taken off America’s streets. If the press corps won’t produce shows describing the dangerous foreign nationals who have invaded the United States and caused Americans great harm, rock star Trump will bring the show to them.
One MSNBC reporter complained, “What’s particularly noteworthy about this location is it is right directly behind the positions where TV correspondents do their hits from the White House lawn.” Leave it to a bunch of Trump addicts to complain about having to do “hits” while the president trolls them from his driveway.
The first hundred days of the MAGA reunion tour have been legendary. President Trump, rock on!
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.
