Feminists in the ’60s and ’70s had a slogan that sought to politicize the household: The personal is political. The rallying cry was meant to challenge traditional family values and the expectation that women should be caring wives and mothers who looked after the home. Breaking free from the “prison” of the nuclear family was described as “liberating” for American women.
So-called “student activists” and “black liberation” groups adopted the argument for their own purposes, and protest movements sought out ways to invade Americans’ private spaces. The idea was to make people feel uncomfortable so that they were forced to acknowledge whatever “issues” protesters were pushing. Feminists, anti-war activists, and civil rights protesters targeted citizens in restaurants, movie theaters, parks, churches, and shopping districts. They made it impossible for ordinary families to enjoy ordinary days without being force-fed heaping spoonfuls of acidic politics.
These kinds of aggressive tactics that politicize every part of life have come with tremendous costs. Generations of women increasingly resented their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Rising divorce rates fractured the stability of nuclear families. Divorced men abandoned their children. Children grew up without both male and female role models. Young adults entered the workforce before first acquiring basic social skills normally developed during childhood.
More broadly, society suffered because the space between the political sphere and the social sphere entirely disappeared. Society and the political State are not the same thing. Government, laws, taxes, and mandates come with either the application or threat of force. The political State is coercion. Society, on the other hand, is much broader. It includes a people’s religion, customs, traditions, history, and familiar interactions. Those influences certainly “push” people to behave in certain ways, but there is considerable room for disagreement and compromise. Society is cooperation.
It would be difficult for young Americans to appreciate this fact, but seventy years ago, much of the social sphere flourished beyond the reach of raw politics. Men belonged to veterans’ organizations, bowling leagues, and public service groups. Women volunteered to help local schools, held book clubs, and organized social gatherings. Children attended summer camps, worked low-wage jobs, and participated in school clubs. Families attended church and enjoyed local festivals. Neighborhood functions brought entire blocks of families together. “Belonging” to things mattered to people. Membership numbers for recreational clubs and civic organizations during the first half of the twentieth century were much higher than they are today.
Politics did not always dominate American society.
Nostalgic Hollywood writers have become increasingly fond of portraying life before personal computers and cell phones. When they depict suburban streets in the ’80s, several things always pop out. Children are riding bikes and exploring the world as far as their legs can take them. Parents have no problem punishing kids when they misbehave. And politics is just one small part of community life. In order to drive this last point home, yard signs for Democrats and Republicans are shown side by side to remind Americans of a time when neighbors didn’t attack each other because of their personal political beliefs.
Today, not only are computers and cell phones everywhere, but also politics is everywhere. Schools teach children to become “activists” before they’re even teens. Instead of riding bikes and exploring the world, kids regurgitate talking points about “transgenderism,” abortion, “right-wing” fascism, “white supremacy,” and the “patriarchy.” And toleration for other people’s political beliefs no longer exists. Yard signs are defaced or stolen. Political slogans and Antifa threats are graffitied onto churches, businesses, and even homes.
Several generations of Americans have been taught that “the personal is political,” and because of that, tens of millions of Americans now see every political opponent as a personal threat. When every person with an opposing point of view is labeled a “threat,” it is impossible not to see “oppression” everywhere. Young Americans have been so indoctrinated to believe that their opinions are “correct” and that contrary opinions are “dangerous” that they think it is both rational and reasonable to censor disagreement as “hate speech,” punish “thought criminals,” and hide behind the imaginary walls of a “safe space.”
If only they understood that society was filled with safe spaces before leftist activists politicized everything. Little league games and swim competitions were opportunities for kids to compete athletically — not physically dangerous clown shows for adults to preach about boys being “girls.” Town festivals did not begin with “land acknowledgments” or other mayoral decrees informing the locals that they’re “oppressive colonialists” and “bigots.” School clubs did not obsess about “diversity, inclusion, and equity.” Republican-voting families and Democrat-voting families still laughed together at backyard barbecues. When Americans were not worried about “triggering” each other with harmless words, they could enjoy one another’s company and build social bonds that mattered more than personal political beliefs. Safe spaces existed everywhere because politics did not.
As just one pertinent example of how politicized civic organizations have become, recently leaked training documents from the country’s largest public school teachers’ union show outright hostility toward Republican parents. Without even the pretense of impartiality, the National Education Association advises teachers, “Over the last ten years, Republicans in state legislatures have increasingly turned to anti-transgender rhetoric and legislation as a powerful complement to their arsenal of racist dog whistles used to whip up fear and consolidate power.”
Moreover, the NEA insists, “The right has exploited ignorance about transgender people and our lack of an affirmative, race-forward message to advance anti-trans attacks, further splinter and impugn the left, and sabotage progressives on a broad range of issues.”
The NEA encourages teachers to “name the villains who violate our values.” Why must teachers inject such partisan political messages into their classrooms? The NEA provides the answer: because “certain politicians are pushing laws that restrict our freedoms because of the color of our skin, what’s in our wallets, or because we are transgender” and because those politicians “exploit divisions and fears among us so they can get and hold onto power, denying us the basic rights, resources, and respect all people deserve.” Nothing screams, “The personal is political!” quite like public schools teaching children that Republicans are “villains” and “oppressors” who do not deserve to be parents.
The politicization of everything always begins with the politicization of language. Unconstitutional race-based admissions and hiring practices are defended as “virtues” of “diversity, inclusion, and equity.” Market-distorting corporate preferences for the moneymaking “climate change” racket and other leftist political causes are justified as “environmental, social, and governance” ethics issues.
Our political programmers insist that “trans-women are real women” and expect fathers to watch boys physically abuse their daughters. On this issue, the NEA instructs teachers to lie by “supporting transgender women athletes as part of the broader fight for equality in girls’ and women’s sports” and by “connecting attacks on trans women athletes to the long legacy of discrimination against all women athletes.” The teachers’ unions have no shame.
As Democrats ruin Thanksgiving celebrations this year by lecturing their extended families on why “Trump is Hitler” and “Republicans are evil,” try to remember that this social catastrophe did not arrive overnight. Leftists since Marx have been destroying society and cultural unity by politicizing everything in society and our culture. Democrats have destroyed our personal connections by politicizing our relationships. The end result is that the political sphere — and its enforcer, the State — have crushed the family, community, and society.
To remedy our plight and subdue leftism for good, family, community, and society will have to make a comeback. We do that one conversation at a time.
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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.
