(End of the American Dream)—Have you noticed that America has been getting pummeled by a series of major natural disasters in recent days? Dozens of immensely powerful tornadoes have carved trails of destruction across the middle of the country, Chicago was just hit by an “apocalyptic” wall of dust, and a plague of millions upon millions of crickets is causing chaos in Utah. Some have pointed out that what we are currently going through is eerily similar to what the U.S. experienced during the days of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Others are wondering if the weird behavior of the Sun has anything to do with the disasters that we are now seeing. But what everyone should be able to agree on is that what we are witnessing right now is certainly not normal.
Late last week, more than 70 tornadoes caused “catastrophic destruction” throughout the heartland of America…
At least 28 people have died and dozens more were injured after a devastating wave of severe weather swept across the central United States late Friday into Saturday, leaving a trail of catastrophic destruction.
More than 70 tornadoes, destructive hail, and powerful wind gusts caused damage across the middle of the country during the multiday severe weather outbreak that started Thursday, May 16.
The state of Kentucky was hit harder than anywhere else.
According to Accuweather, entire neighborhoods in the town of London were “reduced to piles of shredded wood and debris”…
Large tornadoes have been reported in Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana with hard-hit southeastern Kentucky reporting a majority of the fatalities. According to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, there were 18 confirmed deaths in the state connected to the severe weather. The fatalities include 17 people in Laurel County and one in Pulaski County.
Images emerging at first light on Saturday from the town of London, about 75 miles south of Lexington, show entire neighborhoods razed with homes reduced to piles of shredded wood and debris, downed power lines, cars tossed all over the place and furniture strewn everywhere.
When those tornadoes first occurred, they made headlines all over the nation, but most Americans have completely forgotten about them by now.
But some of those communities in Kentucky will never recover from this.
St. Louis was also hit by an absolutely massive tornado on Friday.
That particular tornado had “maximum winds of 152 mph”, and it is being estimated that it caused about a billion dollars in damage…
A single tornado that marched through the St. Louis area on a path of 22.6 miles with maximum winds of 152 mph caused five deaths, a few dozen injuries and approximately $1 billion in damage Friday.
Mayor Cara Spencer gave the estimate of the damage at a Sunday news conference and said the recovery would be a long one. In a second news conference later in the day, she emphasized that financial donations were “badly needed.”
At this stage in our history, “billion dollar disasters” happen so frequently that nobody really gets too fired up about them anymore.
Last year, we experienced a “billion dollar disaster” about once every two weeks.
We are being told that conditions will “return to normal” eventually, but there is definitely nothing normal about what we have been experiencing over the past couple of years.
Just look at what just happened in Chicago. It is being reported that the Windy City just issued “the first dust storm warning ever”…
A dust storm that brought visibility to near zero swept across the Chicago area Friday, prompting the first dust storm warning ever issued to the city, officials said.
The “wall of dust” that struck the South Side and other areas occurred on a day in which high winds of 50 mph were forecast, and as a storm system caused at least one deadly tornado in Missouri.
The dust came in from the south, moving north, around 6:40 p.m. with winds of up to 60 mph, the National Weather Service said.
We haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Dust Bowl days.
On Friday, an “apocalyptic” wall of dust that slammed into Chicago was so large that it could literally be seen from space…
An apocalyptic ‘wall of dust’ is barreling across Chicago — so vast, it’s visible from space.
Satellite imagery shows the storm swallowing highways and buildings, plunging the city of 2.6 million people into darkness.
It has triggered visibility warnings, halted traffic, and left Chicago residents choking on dust.
When I first started warning that Dust Bowl conditions would be returning, a lot of people out there didn’t take me seriously.
But now gigantic dust storms have been hammering cities in the Midwest.
As the western half of the country continues to dry out, the gigantic dust storms will only get worse.
Following the chaos that we witnessed on Friday, 29 tornadoes touched down in five states on Sunday…
At least 29 tornadoes were reported across five states on Sunday, causing widespread damage in Colorado and Kansas. According to preliminary data, at least 16 tornadoes touched down in Kansas, 4 in Colorado, 4 in Oklahoma and Nebraska combined, and 1 in Texas.
Severe damage was reported in the community of Grinnell in Gove County, Kansas. Visuals of the storm’s aftermath showed destruction and damage to several structures, including homes and outbuildings.
The tornado blew the roof off the Catholic Church in Grinnell. Meanwhile, downed power lines caused closures on I-70, eastbound from Colby to Grinnell and westbound from Hays to Grinnell.
In the old days, the immense damage caused by these tornadoes would dominate the news cycle for weeks.
But most people will probably forget about these tornadoes by tomorrow.
We have become numb to the endless destruction that is happening all around us.
What is it going to take for people to start waking up?
How about a plague of millions upon millions of “cannibalistic insects”?…
Utah is under siege from a rapidly spreading infestation of Mormon crickets—cannibalistic insects that have returned in massive swarms.
In areas like Fillmore and Tooele, residents describe the invasion as ‘apocalyptic’, with bugs covering roads, fences, walls, and even the sides of homes.
Crushed crickets have made roads dangerously slick, leading to car accidents. In some counties, snow plows are being used to clear away tons of insects.
If you live in Utah, you will need to brace yourself for a long summer, because authorities are “warning that the worst may be yet to come”…
Farmers are already reporting early crop losses, and backyard gardens are being stripped overnight. In small towns, the air reeks of rotting insects.
Officials are warning that the worst may be yet to come. Eggs that hatched in spring could lead to a second wave of crickets by summer.
Throughout 2024 and 2025, the United States has been hit by major disasters again and again and again.
Sadly, hardly anyone seems to want to acknowledge that what we are experiencing is highly unusual.
There seems to be an overwhelming consensus that the period of extreme instability that we are currently witnessing is just temporary.
But what if it isn’t temporary?
We are being hit by one apocalyptic disaster after another, and I believe that what we have been through so far is just the beginning.
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.
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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.
