(ZeroHedge)—With police forces overwhelmed by the enormous scope of devastation in Los Angeles County, residents are starting to take matters into their own hands, defying mandatory evacuation orders to instead guard their homes and their neighbor’s property with firearms.
As we reported yesterday, losses from the wildfires in Los Angeles county are poised to reach $250 billion or more. Property isn’t only being destroyed — it’s also being stolen by brazen looters. The neighbor of one LA county resident gave a disturbing description of what was going on on their street: “There were like a hundred people that came up on scooters and were trying to get into any and all houses on this street.”
In response, LA County Sheriff Robert Luna has imposed a curfew, saying, “We’re not screwing around with this; we don’t want people taking advantage of our residents that have already been victimized.” Of course, strong words are little defense against looters determined to prey on vulnerable innocents. Much as the bad guys ignore strong words, so too are plenty of good guys and gals who are opting to defy evacuation orders so they can secure their own property.
“I have no patience for any of [the police],” wealth-management firm president Ross Gerber told the Wall Street Journal. “After you survive this, you don’t care what they say.” Toting a firearm, Gerber has been sneaking into and out of the mandatory evacuation zone to check on his house. He says he’s also joined neighbors in walking the streets and questioning those they don’t recognize.
“I get that [police will] say this is ‘the rule,’ but it’s our land and our neighborhood and as much as I respect the authorities, we’re much more competent than them,” said Gerber, who said a neighborhood WhatsApp channel has proven to be an organizational resource that’s “better than any government.”
Others are staying put in their homes, ready to use gunpower to thwart looters. “I do have firearms and I’ve been calling my friends to make sure I know how to legally exist with them,” Altadena resident EveAnna Manley told KTLA 5. She has a slogan displayed on her Starlink satellite internet receiver: “If You Are Lootin’ We Are Shootin’.”
30 armed homeowners in Altadena defy evacuation orders to protect their homes from looters and flare ups. pic.twitter.com/ruVpbZEyiu
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) January 16, 2025
Manley said that, in addition to looters, the defiant residents — who call themselves “the stayers” — are also keeping their eyes out for fire flareups. Manley says she’s helping neighbors by letting them use her shower, doing laundry for them, and even cooking bacon and eggs for them.
The Stayers know that if they leave the neighborhood, they won’t be able to return, as police checkpoints are turning away anybody who tries to enter. For now, police are allowing supplies to come to the checkpoints, where stayers can receive the goods and return to their homes. Manley is grateful for the police barrier: “It’s a ‘hard no’ blockade and I’m glad for that. I want the ‘hard no’ because I don’t want anyone else up here.”
Another Altadena resident, Aaron Lubeley, tells the Journal that he’s been keeping vigil near what’s left of this fire-ravaged property. Sleeping in his SUV, a 9mm handgun by his side, he’s watching his neighborhood for criminals and resurgent fires, saying it “gives me a sense of value and purpose.” While touring his property, he swings from a voice choked with emotion to one filled with humor — as he refers to his burned home’s new “open floor plan.”
As many ZeroHedge readers know, Los Angeles history offers a legendary example of armed citizens banding together to safeguard their property from looting hordes. During the 1992 riots, Korean store owners took rooftop positions and nobly guarded their shops with rifles. Images of the “Rooftop Koreans” continue to serve as an enduring reminder of the power of citizens to safeguard their property when government police cannot or will not do so — and a reminder of why armed self-defense is a fundamental human right.
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.
