In recent years, I have been turned to by multiple politicians, candidates, and political organizations seeking consultation on their messaging. My past life in advertising combined with my current penchant for politics has prompted several to seek my counsel. I don’t own a consultancy and I don’t proclaim to be an expert, but for some reason, my name keeps getting dropped to various conservative campaigns.
This often gets me thinking from a strategy perspective on how to win on issues against the radical left. It was this strategic side that had me initially looking towards crime as a way to get more people on the side of defending the 2nd Amendment. Thankfully, I learned yesterday that my strategic thinking was wrong. It would be disingenuous of me to use glaring crime statistics and logic to defend the 2nd Amendment because that’s not what I truly believe.
Does the 2nd Amendment play a major role in our ability to defend ourselves against criminals? Absolutely. But that’s not the truest intent of the 2nd Amendment, nor is it the most important role of our right to keep and bear arms. Tyranny is the real threat that the 2nd Amendment addresses, which is why I’ve reversed course on talking about crime.
From a strategic perspective, it is easier to use crime facts to catch the ear of a moderate or leftist who can be made to understand the importance of the 2nd Amendment. When you try to talk to them about tyranny, they glaze over. For some reason, far too many Americans have been indoctrinated into two false beliefs. First, they cannot imagine a need for American citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical American government because they think it could never happen. Second, they cannot picture a scenario where the United States is invaded by foreign powers that would prompt the need for citizens to defend our homeland.
But at the end of the day, that’s what the 2nd Amendment is really about. For us to think otherwise is wrong, and for us to use the crime-fighting argument as the primary way to win the debate against the left is futile. We learned that yesterday with the Michael Sussmann verdict. If we thought evidence and logic can win over the left, Sussmann’s not-guilty verdict proves otherwise. The jury made a biased and very political verdict, facts be damned.
The same thing has happened with the crime-fighting argument in defense of the 2nd Amendment. It is unambiguously demonstrable that keeping guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens is extremely beneficial in preventing crimes from happening or stopping them when they do. But the left has not been generally dissuaded from believing the surface-level logic that fewer guns mean less crime. They don’t get it, and they won’t get it. They’ve been brainwashed into believing the lie.
Knowing this, we must always focus on our opposition to tyranny as the supreme reason the 2nd Amendment is so important. It may not catch as many leftists’ attention, but we need to stick to our guns (pun intended) on the true purpose of our rights. They are God-given and ensured by the Constitution. Any efforts to strike them down are direct attacks against us, and therefore they are direct agents of tyranny.
We need a groundswell of patriots who are willing to make the right argument in defense of liberty and opposition to oppression. That means we need to protest. Reactions to January 6th have had a cooling effect on many protests, but we must reverse that. Will there be FBI agents in our midst at these protests? Yes. Will there be Antifa and other leftist agitators? Absolutely. But just because they’re trying to foil us doesn’t mean we should avoid them.
We need phone calls to our representatives on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures. We need to prepare lawsuits to oppose any and all new restrictions they attempt to place on our right to keep and bear arms. We have to win the upcoming midterms in a big way, though that may not be enough to stop gun control with people like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy in charge.
Most importantly, we must educate as many as we can about the real intent of the 2nd Amendment. Crime is an issue that favors the left, not because they’re right but because that surface-level logic of “fewer guns means fewer crimes” penetrates the intellect of intellectually lazy citizens. But even if we could use facts about crime to change hearts and minds, we shouldn’t. It’s not what the 2nd Amendment is really about. If we are going to take the high ground, then we should do so with our intentions properly grounded in reality.
Tyranny is the real danger, and we need to express that to as many people in as many ways as possible.
I discussed all of this in the latest episode of The Midnight Sentinel.
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.
