What do our Google searches tell us about ourselves? I think that many of you will be quite surprised by what I have to share in this article. “Google’s Year in Search” for 2025 has been released, and it is a doozy. The past 12 months have been so crazy, and the top search trends of 2025 certainly reflect that. Let’s start with the top search trend.
“Charlie Kirk” is number one on the list, and his assassination completely shocked the nation. But it certainly was not an isolated incident.
Political violence is on the rise in our society. In fact, if President Trump had not moved his head slightly at just the right moment at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, he would not be in the White House today. Charlie Kirk was a prominent figure before his death, but after he died suddenly everyone knew who he was.
Unfortunately, I believe that we will see even more political violence in 2026. There is just so much anger and frustration out there right now on all sides.
“KPop Demon Hunters” is number two on Google’s list, and that stunned me. According to Wikipedia, it is “a 2025 animated musical film from Sony Pictures Animation and Netflix about a K-pop girl group, HUNTR/X, who secretly fight demons while performing, facing off against a rival demon boy band called the Saja Boys”.
Needless to say, it is particularly popular among young people. This year our society continued to be fascinated by entertainment that explores very dark themes, and that is quite alarming. And we see this with the third item on the list as well.
According to Wikipedia, Labubu is “a popular line of collectible, mischievous-looking elf-like monster figures created by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung, known for their large ears, sharp teeth, and scruffy appearance, sold primarily through blind boxes by the company Pop Mart, which has led to a global craze and high resale demand.”
The sharp teeth and bizarre eyes certainly make them look like monsters. In the old days, kids would play with teddy bears and other stuffed animals. But now kids want to play with creatures that look like they have been pulled straight out of a nightmare.
I don’t think that is a good thing.
The iPhone 17 came in at number four on the list, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Most of us are so addicted to our phones, and I don’t think that is going to change any time soon.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” came in at number five in the list, the government shutdown came in at number eight in the list, and “tariffs” came in at number ten in the list. I think that is quite appropriate, because this is a year when the news was so focused on political drama.
Donald Trump’s first year in office was an extremely busy one, and people all over the country were endlessly talking about it.
There are tens of millions of Americans that absolutely love Trump, and there are tens of millions of Americans that absolutely hate Trump.
Of course Donald Trump will continue to play a central role in our society for as long as he remains in the White House. A new political star on the left made the list at number six.
New York elected a “democratic socialist” named Zohran Mamdani as their new mayor, and suddenly he has become a major national celebrity. That is pretty remarkable considering the fact that he wasn’t even a U.S. citizen a decade ago.
“DeepSeek” came in at number seven on the list, and I was glad to see that a term associated with AI was represented.
For better or worse, AI is in the process of transforming virtually every area of our society. Interestingly, the FIFA Club World Cup ranked number nine on the list. I still don’t think that Chelsea deserved to win the final, but PSG just didn’t show up that day for some reason. Personally, I was shocked that the Epstein files did not make the top ten, but it did rank number eight in “news searches”.
To me, the drama surrounding the Epstein files was perhaps the most important political story of the year. It has dramatically shifted political opinion, and I think that much of the damage that has been done is permanent.
When they were finally released, they were so heavily redacted that they didn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know. And now we are being told that they have discovered a million more documents that hopefully we will get to see eventually.
2025 has been so wild, and now 2026 is nearly upon us. 27 years ago, USA Today and Gallup asked Americans what they thought 2025 would be like…
In the year 1998, Bill Clinton was facing impeachment proceedings, “Titanic” was cleaning up at the Oscars and most households still had landline phones. Gallup and USA Today called up 1,055 Americans on those landlines and asked them for their best predictions about a year in the distant future: 2025.
It turns out that those that responded to the survey were quite accurate about certain things, but on other matters they were way off…
Some were surprisingly prescient. Most Americans predicted that, over the next 27 years, the country would have elected a Black president, gay marriages would be legal and commonplace and a “deadly new disease” would have emerged.
Most people in 1998 correctly doubted that space travel would be common for ordinary Americans or that alien life forms would have made contact.
Other predictions didn’t hold up as well. About two-thirds of Americans thought the country would have elected a female president by now. More than half expected a cure for cancer and 61% expected that “people will routinely live to be 100 years old.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if most people lived to be 100 years old? Sadly, life expectancy in the U.S. has fallen to the lowest level since 1996. The first half of this decade brought us the pandemic, several major wars, the AI revolution and an endless series of natural disasters. But if you thought that was wild, just wait until you see what happens during the second half of this decade.
The pace of change is about to go into overdrive. So buckle up and hold on tight, because things are about to start getting really, really crazy.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.
