Now that Christmas Day has passed, I have put down my beloved copy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and picked up his masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities. As I have argued before, that novel’s opening sentence perfectly captures the contradictions of our time:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
And you thought that I struggled to locate a terminal period for some of my longest sentences! In Dickens’s defense, it is one hell of a sentence! It is also a sophisticated description of the tumultuous events that accompany transformative eras such as our own — what many have come to regard as a “Fourth Turning,” when crisis and social upheaval dominate life for a generation.
Will we be able to “Make America Great Again”? Will this be the beginning of a new American “Golden Age,” as President Trump suggests? Or will we soon endure economic collapse and war the likes of which none of us has ever seen? As 2024 comes to an end, it is fair to say that uncertainty is only accelerating and that the prospects for peace and prosperity are running neck and neck with their opposites.
We are surrounded by creature comforts that our relatives living during the First World War would have struggled to imagine. Flat-screen televisions with enough high-definition detail to transport us onto athletic fields of live sporting events or into realistic scenes of whatever shows we happen to be watching. Handheld computers that allow us to track down information and interact with strangers from all over the world. Online markets that link buyers and sellers who never would have found each other even twenty years ago. For most of human history, the wealthiest kings and queens never lived as luxuriously as many of the poorest people in the West live today.
Yet there is a darkness burbling beneath all this technological magic. Even before our televisions were “smart,” the programs on their screens provided manipulative actors the means to “program” what we believe. I refer not to the glitzy celebrities, but rather to those agents in boardrooms and committee rooms who use those celebrities to push messages we don’t always consciously see. Situational comedies have made us laugh for eighty years, but their product placements have subtly influenced what we buy. Their storylines have subtly influenced our opinions regarding politics, morality, and war. We turn on televisions to be entertained, but corporations and governments use television to shape our thoughts and keep us under their control. Mass propaganda does not work without our willingness to disengage our brains and let the “boob tube” do our thinking for us. There’s nothing “smart” about that.
These handheld computers that we call phones are similarly Janus-faced. On the one hand, I have felt fortunate to live during a time of intellectual nirvana, when no branch of knowledge lies beyond my reach. Esoteric subjects that once required me to seek out small collections in far-flung libraries are now instantly available in the palm of my hand. If knowledge is nourishment, then the rapid evolution of the internet combined with inexpensive mobile computers has given us an incomparably delectable feast.
On the other hand, we now see how those who manipulate us for a living will use the tantalizing smorgasbord of information at our fingertips to poison our minds and keep us in the cages they built for us long ago. For a while there, it seemed as if we had broken free from those cages. Governments’ monopolies over both mass communication and the availability of information appeared to have been shattered, as if Prometheus had stolen fire from the globalist gods and given it to the eight-billion-strong human rump that the infinitesimally small number of planetary “elites” prefer to keep in the dark.
Now that fire is slowly dying. Libraries and newspapers are retreating behind paywalls. Sources of information that conflict with governments’ preferred “narratives” are disappearing from corners of the internet. Government censors work with secretive “non-governmental” organizations to bankrupt independent news sites and criminalize dissent. Once-contrarian websites (such as the Drudge Report) have started toeing the Establishment line — as if they were quietly taken over by ideological enemies or their owners were threatened into submission. “Misinformation” and “disinformation” — words that meant little to Westerners two decades ago — have been elevated to national security bogeymen on par with nuclear weapons, so that governments can justify censorship on an industrial scale. We live both in a “Golden Age” of free speech and access to information and an unstable cauldron of viewpoint discrimination, intellectual suppression, “woke” bowdlerization, and State-sanctioned propaganda.
In this stomach-churning stew of technology-enabled propaganda and censorship, our favorite devices are also our jailers. Our “smart” phones and televisions spy on our conversations, monitor our movements, record our social interactions, and scrutinize our purchases. Our daily “selfies,” retinal and fingerprint security verifications, and health-tracking apps collect our biometric information while logging changes in our physical and psychological well-being. Technology companies and their government partners have complete access to our phone calls, text messages, emails, and social media histories. Our digital contacts provide intelligence agencies with a tidy list of our “known associates.” And these same devices that permit corporate and government spies to watch everything we do simultaneously allow those agents to bombard us with a constant stream of propaganda in the form of fake news (actual “disinformation” in government parlance).
Yet the best and worst features of modern technology merely distract us from a far more serious problem. For more than a century, the Federal Reserve System has printed paper money and constructed an unsustainable world of unfathomable debt. We cannot avoid the financial tribulation headed our way; we can only delay its arrival, just as Ponzi-scheming bankers and profligate politicians have done for decades.
In order to postpone economic collapse, the fraud-inducing Fed and its fraud-enabling partners in government have (1) placed downward pressure on wages by encouraging women to join the workforce, (2) decoupled from the gold standard, (3) imposed the petrodollar upon global markets to stimulate artificial dollar demand, (4) offshored entire industries to slave-labor nations, (5) regulated markets, (6) spent recklessly, (7) started wars, (8) used COVID lockdowns to contain inflation, (9) imposed “climate change” taxes, and (10) completely opened U.S. borders to illegal aliens willing to work for slave wages.
These policies were never about feminism, “free trade,” health, security, or multiculturalism. They were implemented to slow the catastrophic (and mathematically inevitable) inflation naturally resulting from a century of money-printing. Nevertheless, the U.S. dollar has lost 99% of its value since 1971. We have “fundamentally transformed” from a society in which a single breadwinner could earn enough to support a large family to a society in which two parents must work multiple jobs even for a small family to stay afloat.
As 2024 ends, we should be filled with determination and hope. But we have much to do if we are to survive the consequences of a century of government malice, predation, and foolishness.
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.
