(Brownstone)—In today’s open access to information, any amateur can stuff any claim with enough sweetened pie charts and cherry statistics to make any ideology appear appetizing. Truth has always been hard to come by, but nowadays is obscured by the relatively even ability of anyone with WiFi to pontificate publicly. And then, a pandemic. When the stakes are high, lives are on the line, and suddenly the blase allowance of conflicting ideas becomes a liability. People will die without accuracy.
And so, as legitimate fear seeks the comfort of direction, a new way of talking about medical information appears. Attach a prefix, dis- or mis-, and good ideas shall trump the bad. In a utopian world where absolute truth is decipherable, we are surely obliged to separate fact from fiction. But in a corruptible world, it’s worth remembering that medical patients (though not psychiatric ones) are encouraged to seek a second opinion in matters of life and death.
Human beings, no matter how credentialed, are fallible participants in the mysteries of life, and doctors institutionalized with narrow sets of knowledge can therefore make errors of judgment. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re limited. All of us, and our certainties, are subject to revision.
Given that, the question becomes, who is certain enough of their knowledge that they may damn medical information in prefixes for us all?
Major online content platforms have an answer. They defer to institutions authorized by government bodies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. These elite bodies of experts provide sets of standards that demarcate medical truth from falsity, which a hodgepodge of third-party fact-checking organizations then rely upon to hunt down bad information across the web.
Now, in the old days, censorship meant blacklisting (which still happens), but in an internet age where liabilities for unfairness are more visible to the public square, online companies more often engage in a soft censorship—allow the dissenter to speak, but lessen the chances they’ll be heard. As Facebook puts it, “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution so that fewer people see it…and we show strong warning labels and notifications to people who still come across it, try to share it or already have.”
Perhaps you believe that demoting bad medical information during a pandemic is a necessary strategy for saving lives. Surely there’s a compassionate case to be made that the common good is more sacrosanct than an individual’s liberty to vibrate their vocal cords in whatever contortions they want, wherever they want, no matter the ruin. The trouble is, new powers of authority rarely contain themselves. Instead, incrementally, they parasitize new territories.
So I was unfortunately unsurprised to see the New York Times—paper of record—publish an opinion piece titled “Joe Rogan is a Drop in the Ocean of Misinformation.” The authors, who worked on the imperiously–named Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges, insist we are living in a manipulated marketplace where specious cures for anything and everything find their way far too easily into ailing bodies. Their solution: the soft censorship of not just pandemic unorthodoxy, but bad information across all medical fields.
We must, they propose, regulate flows of information to ensure that whatever medical advice we encounter online is best for us. Of course, they fail to mention who will lead that discernment, but we can hazard a guess they’d prefer a cosmopolitan run–of–the–mill MD over your village witch, a psychiatrist over their client.
Let us apply these authors’ suggestions to mental health, now that the field has graduated in the public eye into a bonafide hard science worthy of the designation “medical.” How might the downgrading of dissent in mental health impact accessibility to knowledge?
Imagine a Facebook group called “Coming Off Antipsychotics,” thousands of members strong. A commenter claims antipsychotics cause brain damage, maybe coaches another member restrained by a court order on how to quit taking them without getting caught. Now imagine that group in the censorious crosshairs of fact-checkers following standards set by major psychiatric institutions.
Indeed, to a profession that regularly uses coercion and force to keep clients medicated, any information that’s dissuasive against treatment is hazardous. This is why, for instance, a peer support worker in a conventional setting might be eagerly invited to share their recovery process when it follows protocol, but discouraged when it includes non–non-compliance: Saying “I got better when I accepted my illness, went to group, and found the right med” is much preferred by the authorities to “I got better when I ditched Haldol, took up kratom and weed, hooked into poker night at the local bar and joined a cult that worships Bastet the ancient cat Goddess.”
I fear a public health approach to so-called mental illness in the internet age will soon entail demoting online talk of violating treatment. To get rolling, all that’s needed is one incident wherein a member of that aforementioned Facebook group quits medications and acts dangerously in public view, for force–supporting organizations lie in wait ready to capitalize on the public’s fear.
And let’s be honest, when prefixes land on mental health information, they’re going to tag alternative modalities like Reiki, claims against the damage of shock, unconventional theories of causation, criticism of diagnoses as bogus constructs, folksy herbal cures, and so on. Never mind that my own saving grace has been the renegade psychiatric survivor movement, wherein I’ve met others who speak on their own terms, who’ve helped me clarify mine, who’ve never read me through a hospital note but asked that I narrate my reality instead.
“Health misinformation,” such as the kind that challenges psychiatric orthodoxy, “is a serious threat to public health,” proclaims the US Surgeon General. “It can cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people’s health, and undermine public health efforts. Limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole-of-society effort.”
“Limiting the spread.” Apparently, misinformation is now a virus capable of inoculating vulnerable hosts with discursive toxins that “undermine” public health. The task upon us is “moral,” and we do our “civic” duty when ensuring people accept that doctor knows best.
For what it’s worth, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, welcomes prefixes on bad information. As Joseph Bernstein notes in his illuminating article, “Bad News: Selling the Story of Disinformation,” these companies’ bottom line, always cash, is not threatened by framing the problem as one of information itself. Such myopia ensures the trust-busters, who could use anti-monopoly powers to weaken social media’s sway, instead stay at bay, while allowing propaganda-producing algorithms to remain obscure to regulation and consumer control.
More importantly, it strategically obfuscates the structural reasons why people gravitate towards bad information—their economic lives are ruined, their communities have fallen apart, their religions are disintegrating, healthcare is bankrupting their families, drugs are destroying their neighbors, and their traditions are losing meaning. In the midst of such politically-induced rot, people quite reasonably distrust institutions and their sneering spokespeople who lied to them about WMDs, the 2008 financial crisis, the return of good jobs, the addictive nature of opioids, and on and on it goes.
So let me end with an anecdote—the mark of unscientific knowledge—for I’ve tasted my own flavor of rot: that of my body, decaying in autoimmune disease. When my spine was so bitten that I could no longer bend over to pull up socks, I too did something crazy (as pain will have you do). I sat down at my computer, googled “Ankylosing Spondylitis natural pain relief,” and through a series of meandering clicks, headed ever further into an unguarded dungeon where risky potions lie. Eat poop? Get bitten by the Mexican bark scorpion?
Nah, I settled on an industrial solvent, a purely chemical byproduct from large-scale wood manufacturing. Even though the product’s intended use as a skin applicant was deemed dangerous by credentialed sources, I went further. I popped open the cap, recalled my halcyon days with Mr Jack Daniel’s, flipped my head back and gulped down a bitter shot. Like everything else, authorized or not, it didn’t take away the pain. But I felt a tingling sense of pride, maybe a little free. The Surgeon General would’ve been horrified.
About the Author
Steven Morgan has worked in mental health peer support since 2005. Beginning in 2013, he worked for seven years with Intentional Peer Support as an international trainer and Operations Manager.
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.
