The departing performers all reached for the same script. Martina McBride claimed she had been assured the gathering was nonpartisan. Bret Michaels said he understood the event as a celebration of the country through music, a way to honor hardworking Americans, before declaring that it had supposedly “evolved into something much more divisive.” Rapper Young MC insisted he knew nothing of any political involvement and hoped to perform in Washington someday at something less “politically charged.” Morris Day & The Time, for their part, claimed they were never confirmed at all.
None of these excuses survives a moment’s scrutiny. Nobody expects pop stars to be paragons of courage or patriotism, but even by the low bar of celebrity behavior, this was a striking exhibition of both cowardice and confusion. The performers did not flee a politicized event. They politicized it by fleeing.
Here is the part the entertainers missed entirely: the concert was always going to carry political weight, and their cowardice only added more. Had McBride, Michaels, and the rest simply taken the stage, they would have modeled something Americans desperately need to see, the idea that love of country can sit apart from partisan combat. By bailing, they deepened the very division they pretended to mourn. It was a self-inflicted embarrassment.
Partisanship Is Neither Shameful Nor Un-American
Start here, because it is the unspoken assumption underneath the whole spectacle. The acts were thrilled to sing on the Mall right up until the press and Democrat operatives rebranded the event as “Trump’s concert.” The genuine objection, of course, is that they would rather not be photographed anywhere near the man. But admitting that sounds petty, so instead they reach for the loftier-sounding word: nonpartisan.
People adore that word, and it makes them sound foolish every time. You cannot wade into politics and somehow emerge nonpartisan. Bipartisan is a real and worthy thing, people of opposing parties cooperating toward a common end. But nonpartisan, in any matter touching public life, is a fantasy.
This is not merely a lament about our fractured moment, though pretending to stand above the fray has certainly grown harder over the past decade. Partisanship is woven into the nation’s founding fabric. The Constitution emerged from ferocious political combat. Washington, D.C. became the capital through a backroom bargain struck between rival factions.
Even George Washington’s Farewell Address, the very text where he warned against “the enterprises of faction,” was itself a partisan instrument. Alexander Hamilton drafted those words with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’s fledgling Republican faction squarely in view. Washington was not condemning political parties in the abstract. He was telling his countrymen they ought all to be Federalists.
So a celebration tied to a particular party or politician is not thereby corrupted. And here is the irony for our skittish lineup: this event was not even that.
There Is Nothing “Partisan” About a Concert on the Mall
Donald Trump is both divisive and partisan, and the two are not the same. The first is a matter of perception. If Democrats could manage to see him as the opposition rather than a mortal enemy, the temperature would drop considerably. The second is plain fact. He holds elected office and leads the Republican Party, which makes him partisan by definition.
But Trump is more than a party leader. He is the President of the United States, and the presidency contains multitudes. The partisan role is real, yet it is only one piece. The larger duty, the one that actually matters, is leading the whole nation, and that is precisely what a birthday concert for the republic embodies.
Marking 250 years of American independence with music and spectacle is exactly right. John Adams himself imagined the occasion celebrated with “pomp and parade, shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations.”
Will Trump deliver some political jabs from the stage? Almost certainly. Would it be better if he stuck to patriotic uplift and skipped the swipes at his opponents? Sure. But that is not his temperament, and it is not the temperature of our politics anyway. Even so, a few presidential barbs cannot drown out what the gathering represents. The republic is bigger than the squabbling of any given week, and it will still be standing long after today’s grievances are forgotten.
This is, in a sense, the entire premise of live music. Conservatives long ago accepted that many of their favorite performers despise them, and they buy the tickets anyway. You sit through a meandering Springsteen sermon about tyranny because you want to hear “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” roar to life. Liberals, having enjoyed cultural dominance for so long, can scarcely imagine such grace. And so a roster of artists, none of them famous enough to be turning down a national stage, decided that staying home beat sharing an afternoon with the president. That is unpatriotic and foolish. It is also, frankly, lame.
Scripture has a name for this kind of pride dressed up as principle. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” The performers thought they were preserving their dignity. They were forfeiting it.
Learn to Enjoy the Good Things
Granting that partisanship is not inherently wicked does not mean every partisan impulse is healthy. One of its ugliest forms appears when people allow political tribalism to blind them to plainly good things, a habit on constant display wherever politics meets entertainment.
Before the musical acts began their retreat, the chatter was about the upcoming UFC bout planned for the White House lawn. Construction on the Octagon began this week, and liberals predictably flooded social media to call it an assault on democracy.
If these critics were arguing honestly, one might counter that a bare-knuckle brawl on the White House lawn is about the most fitting tribute to American democracy imaginable. But honesty is not the motive. If keeping the grounds free of spectacle were really the concern, the same voices would have erupted when the previous administration handed the lawn over to a parade of half-naked activists. The actual objection is to anything bearing even a faint association with Trump.
A cage fight on the South Lawn, a concert on the Mall, these are remarkable spectacles, and the president’s involvement makes them more so, not less. It would be cool under a Democrat. It would be cool under a different Republican.
Some things are simply too enjoyable to surrender to politics. It is why there are conservative Grateful Dead fans and progressives glued to “Yellowstone.” It is why McBride herself did not protest when Americans transformed her song “Independence Day,” written about a woman escaping an abusive home, into a patriotic anthem after September 11.
The song’s writer, Gretchen Peters, has groused about that second life, pointedly noting she donated her royalties from Sean Hannity’s program, which used the song as its theme, to Planned Parenthood. McBride took the opposite path. She performed it flanked by two towering American flags at Farm Aid in 2001, in the raw aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
She later admitted to “mixed feelings” about that night, not wanting to obscure the song’s original meaning. But she was candid about why she embraced the patriotic reading when she did. The country was reeling, she explained, straining for solidarity, and when she realized the chorus’s plea to “let freedom ring” echoed what the whole nation was feeling, she made her choice.
Some things really are bigger than politics. Americans grasp this instinctively. The president grasps it. There was a time when Martina McBride grasped it too. It is a shame she and her fellow performers managed to forget. Then again, the night is young. Perhaps Trump can ring up Morgan Wallen or Ella Langley instead.
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.
