Earlier this month a British academic named Michael Rainsborough wrote an insightful essay on the United Kingdom’s descent towards civil war. Once the head of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, Rainsborough was dismissed from his post for committing a series of “thought crimes.” His final offense came in the form of a co-authored essay entitled, “The British Road to Dirty War,” in which he and former colleague David Betz diagramed “the hollowing out of British democratic institutions” and the dangerous rule of a permanent governing class filled with authoritarian elites.
Now working in Australia, Rainsborough returns to the subject with additional wisdom that only time and distance can provide. His verdict is as incisive as it is sobering: Britain’s institutions are irreparably damaged. The country is headed for long-term Balkanization. A “dirty war” similar to those that gripped Latin America fifty years ago may usher in an era of assassinations, hostage-taking, disappearances, industrial sabotage, censorship, and general repression. Although he acknowledges that the question of how bad things will become in Britain is still very much an open one, he doesn’t envision any set of circumstances that can entirely avert the misery to come.
Rainsborough describes a series of intentional acts engineered by governing elites to diminish democratic accountability and maintain permanent control. Rather than recognizing the democratic will of the people following the Brexit referendum in 2016, the ruling class responded with a “deranged mixture of denial and contempt for the electorate.” Even before the Brexit vote, however, leftist-globalists were engaging in a great “demographic transformation” intended “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity.” Today the whole British government “operates from a post-nationalist outlook, one that treats the very idea of nationhood as negotiable, even alien, to the political class.”
Making matters worse, the British Establishment has gone all-in on globalism by “outsourcing” its “sovereignty to supranational bodies” that “dilute and often override domestic consent.” Consequently, institutional elites are driving Britain towards “self-destruction” by “clinging to an incontinent immigration system and an almost devotional attachment to international and human rights laws that disadvantage its own citizens.”
Rainsborough accuses British authorities of repurposing old tools for imperial governance into “divide and rule” instruments for manipulating domestic society. “The aim” is “to rule by division: to fracture society into communities, reward loyal in-groups and discriminate against the majority through a two-tier system of justice, policing and social policy.” He calls the agents of this purposeful division the “new imperialists.”
The “new imperialists” have self-important titles — “diversity coordinators, anti-racism activists, curriculum decolonisers, climate campaigners” — but their mission is identical to the agents that once helped Britain’s East India Company conquer much of the globe: to “manage society by division.” After categorizing everyone by race, caste, and creed, today’s “woke” imperialists “elevate” favored minorities and “relegate” the majority to “second-class status.” Just as their predecessors felt morally superior to the natives when conquering India, today’s leftist-globalists are “buoyed by moral certainty and a conviction of their right to rule.”
The natural result of this manufactured division is today’s national flag protests across the United Kingdom. While government authorities enthusiastically support the waving of Ukrainian, Islamic, and “gay pride” flags, they are extremely angry with British citizens who proudly fly England’s Cross of St. George. “The majority population, already disregarded on questions such as immigration, is told that its own symbols of belonging must be hidden, while the emblems of others are to be privileged and extolled.” In effect, Britain’s elite ruling class has denied the British “people’s right to recognise themselves.”
What is particularly remarkable about Rainsborough’s analysis is its applicability to other nations throughout the West. An American, Canadian, Australian, German, or Dutch citizen reading his point-by-point rationale for why the United Kingdom is heading for civil war would logically conclude that civil war is also coming closer to home. Is there any public policy that the British Establishment has implemented to “divide and rule” over citizens that the Establishments of other Western nations haven’t also implemented? Support for mass illegal immigration, the demonization of patriotism as “fascism,” the criminalization of so-called “hate speech,” widespread censorship, and the systematic persecution of individuals and groups expressing dissent to the government’s official “narratives” — these hallmarks of encroaching totalitarianism flourish across the West.
Parts of France are in flames right now. After Emmanuel Macron’s government collapsed last week, riots erupted nationwide. Fed up with the direction of their country under Macron’s rule, French citizens across the political spectrum have temporarily coalesced into a “Block Everything” movement that has shut down major highways and turned the night sky into a medieval mixture of glowing embers and smoke. It has been reported that the ineffective French president is so desperate to quell the growing revolt that he is considering shutting down social media platforms.
Macron might resist the despotic urge to suspend public communication after witnessing events unfold in Nepal. The South Asian republic is also in flames right now after more than a week of total chaos. After large public protests over government corruption could not be controlled, the Nepalese Establishment made the fateful decision to block all social media platforms. Angry citizens promptly responded by burning down parliament, dragging politicians out of their homes, and beating officials to death. The government attempted to reverse course and permit social media access, but protesters continue to target anyone who might be considered an “elite.”
French President Macron is acutely aware that the carnage in Nepal could soon find its way to France if he chooses to shut down social media sites. Leftist-globalists already crossed a similar line in Canada when the government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau seized the bank accounts of “Freedom Convoy” protesters fighting back against COVID edicts and “vaccine” mandates. Trudeau’s actions demonstrated how willing Western governments are to punish dissent by seizing private property. Should Macron follow Canada and Nepal’s reckless examples by confiscating bank accounts and stifling public communication, French citizens will no doubt respond with even more intensity.
Perhaps that is why one of the U.K.’s top law enforcement officers, Sir Andy Cooke, is desperately trying to end the criminalization of “offensive” social media speech. Arguing that British authorities need to “allow people to speak openly without the fear their opinion will put them on the wrong side of the law,” Cooke wants cops to stop acting as free speech “monitors.” After years of throwing British citizens in jail for expressing opinions, this kind of public policy U-turn suggests that government authorities now regret energizing a free speech movement sweeping across the U.K.
In reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the United States, Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote, “We must all be free to debate openly and freely without fear — there can be no justification for political violence.” After years of imprisoning people for their speech and regularly censoring social media accounts, Starmer’s hypocrisy set off a chain reaction of national anger in the U.K. On Saturday, over a million citizens took to the streets of London in support of free speech. One Brit declared, “They just made a million Charlie Kirks.”
Could France, Britain, or the United States suffer Nepal’s fate? Maybe. The “new imperialists” are dangerously arrogant. As Rainsborough writes, “They imagine themselves clever enough — and the public credulous enough — that such policies can be pursued without provoking resistance. But arrogance is no substitute for foresight. Once matters tip into open conflict, escalation takes on its own momentum. Anger is already stirring — and anger, once roused, is the fuse of history.”
If you look around the West, it is impossible to deny that the “fuse of history” is already lit.
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.
