The last major January 6 cases just got wiped off the books, and an Obama-appointed judge is not happy about it. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta granted the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the seditious conspiracy charges against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and seven other members of the group.
The convictions are gone. The records are clean. The book is closed.
Mehta had no real choice. After the D.C. Circuit vacated the convictions at the DOJ’s request, prosecutors returned to his courtroom and moved to dismiss the superseding indictment with prejudice. Precedent required him to yield. Courts do not get to force the executive branch to keep prosecuting people the President has already freed. Still, Mehta could not resist a lengthy lament.
He called the dismissal an “epilogue” that “diminishes the gravity of that day,” denigrates the work of prosecutors and law enforcement, and excuses acts that supposedly made “a centuries-long pillar of our democracy — the peaceful transfer of presidential power — to buckle.”
He complained the move bestowed “unearned grace” by wiping the defendants’ records clean. He insisted the public interest was not served. Then he signed the order anyway. That is the sound of a narrative dying.
For five years the left treated the Capitol protest as an attempted coup. Rhodes and the others were convicted in two trials of seditious conspiracy and related obstruction charges.
Rhodes drew an 18-year sentence. The media celebrated. Politicians called them terrorists. Yet the same system that hunted these defendants had spent 2020 looking the other way while cities burned and federal buildings were under siege.
President Trump ended that double standard on Day One of his second term. He issued a sweeping clemency order that pardoned nearly all of the roughly 1,600 people charged in connection with January 6 and commuted the sentences of the remaining high-profile defendants, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders.
The proclamation itself declared the prior prosecutions “a grave national injustice” and began a process of national reconciliation. The defendants walked free. The convictions, however, remained until the new Justice Department finished the job.
Prosecutors under the Trump administration argued that continuing the cases was not in the interests of justice. They did not claim the evidence was weak or that the trials were unfair. They simply exercised prosecutorial discretion consistent with the President’s directive. Mehta noted that Trump had not issued full pardons to these eight men and women and had not explicitly ordered the dismissals. He still had to grant the motion. Similar dismissals had already cleared the Proud Boys cases weeks earlier under another judge.
Defense counsel for Rhodes put it plainly. The seditious conspiracy charge, he said, was used “as a thought crime.” That description fits. These were not people caught planting bombs or coordinating a military takeover. They were veterans and citizens who believed the 2020 election had been compromised and who showed up to protest the certification. Some entered the building. Some engaged police. The government stretched Civil War-era statutes and conspiracy theories to turn political disagreement into sedition. The same statutes are now being dusted off against ICE protesters, proving the weapon was always political.
Scripture has something to say about this kind of selective justice. Isaiah 5:20 warns, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”
For years the establishment insisted the real threat to democracy was a few hundred Trump supporters inside the Capitol, while ignoring months of coordinated leftist violence that left businesses destroyed and people dead. That inversion is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
Mehta is right about one thing. The book on these prosecutions is closed. What remains is the record of how a politicized Justice Department under the previous administration turned a protest into a generational crusade, how judges and prosecutors treated ordinary Americans as enemies of the state, and how a new administration finally restored some measure of balance.
The Oath Keepers walk free without the scarlet letter of a federal felony. That is not the ending Mehta wanted. It is the ending the American people demanded.
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.
