Katie Pavlich put it on the table Friday night, and the quote that stuck was not some campus activist chanting about Big Brother. It came from criminal defense attorney Jacqueline Goodman, who looked at Flock Safety’s nationwide license-plate web and said what a lot of elected conservatives have been circling for months.
This is very, very anti-democratic…. there is no oversight.
That is the argument now. Not whether cops should catch car thieves. Of course they should. The argument is whether a private Atlanta company gets to assemble a searchable map of where ordinary Americans drive, keep it in the cloud, and let tens of thousands of officers query it without ever bothering a judge.
Pavlich’s NewsNation panel sat Goodman next to Pinal County, Arizona, Sheriff Ross Teeple, the lawman who already answered that question with a contract cancellation. Teeple once sold the cameras as a public-safety win. Amber Alerts. Silver Alerts. Human smugglers. Then he looked harder at what the hardware can actually do.
You start developing enough information on someone that it becomes a warrantless search, that’s where our concerns are.
He told supervisors he would not renew. The deal dies at the end of September. Roughly 200 Flock units sit across Pinal County. The sheriff’s decision hits the cameras his office controls in unincorporated areas. Cities like Maricopa and Casa Grande still have their own contracts. Flagstaff, Sedona, Chandler, and South Tucson have already walked. A sheriff who swore an oath to the Constitution decided the oath outranked the vendor.
That is not a slogan. That is a man in a cowboy hat doing what too many city managers will not.
Twenty Billion Scans a Month and Nobody Voted for It
Flock Safety now boasts more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. The company works with thousands of agencies. The pitch is stolen cars and missing kids. Fine. Then the network grew into something else.
Officers can search not only a plate but a color, a dent, a bumper sticker, a kayak in the bed. Data hops from one department to another through statewide and national lookup toggles that cities sometimes did not even know were on.
Audits in places like Dayton, San Francisco, and Ventura County found outside agencies, including federal ones, querying local cameras by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands. Flock insists it has no ICE contract and that localities control sharing. The logs keep embarrassing that talking point.
Sen. Josh Hawley opened a formal investigation on August 26. His letter to CEO Garrett Langley put the constitutional problem in plain English. Americans do not surrender their privacy when they drive to work, drop their kids at school, or go to church. Congress never authorized this industry-built web. The company’s internal policies are, in practice, the only safeguard for hundreds of millions of people.
Rep. Greg Steube said the quiet part. We are not the CCP. We are not 1984. Americans have rights. Rep. Keith Self of Texas filed the PRIVACY Act to force federal agents to get a warrant before they query these systems. Tim Burchett and Thomas Massie are in the same fight. Even Ron DeSantis called the technology out of control. When Hawley, Massie, and a Florida governor sound like the same choir, stop pretending this is a left-wing tantrum.
The Dirty Cop Problem Is Not a Hypothetical
Flock will tell you the cameras solve a million investigations a year and find thousands of missing people. Grant some of that. Then read the charging documents.
A Milwaukee officer used the system 124 times to locate a romantic partner and 55 times to locate that partner’s ex. A Richmond County, Virginia, deputy allegedly queried a woman 1,639 times. Savannah fired employees and made arrests. Georgia officers got walked out after audit tools caught them. The Institute for Justice has counted more than two dozen cases of cops resigning or getting arrested for stalking people through Flock.
The company answered the scandal the way Silicon Valley always answers a scandal. Shorter retention. Seven days instead of thirty. Mandatory audit flags. Case numbers on searches. All of it still leaves the same hole. Any officer with a login can type a plate, type a fake case number, and reconstruct a life. There is still no warrant. There is still no judge. There is still a private firm holding the keys.
Courts have split. Some judges treat a single plate photo on a public road as no search at all. Civil-liberties lawyers point to Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 ruling that a comprehensive, retrospective record of movement is different in kind from a cop noticing a car on the street.
The Supreme Court has not decided an ALPR case. Until it does, your rights depend on which circuit you live in and how many poles your city rented.
That is not law. That is a lottery.
Safety Is Not a Blank Check
Law and order is not the same thing as a national panopticon. A plate reader aimed at a known stolen car is police work. A cloud that can tell an angry boyfriend, a rogue detective, or a future administration everywhere you went last week is a different animal.
The Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment because they had already met the general warrant. They did not need a TED Talk to understand the danger of a government that records first and invents a reason later.
Scripture is older than the Bill of Rights and just as clear about who keeps the books. Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. Psalm 146:3.
A vendor policy is not a prince you can vote out. It is a terms-of-service document with a sales team.
President Trump said his stance is under review. Good. Review it against the text, not the brochure. If the tool needs a warrant for a week of cell-site pings, it needs a warrant for a week of every driveway in America. If a sheriff in Pinal County can see the line and step back, Congress can see it too.
Catch the thief. Find the child. Then go to a judge like every other serious search in this country. The camera on the lamppost does not get a special exemption because the company printed “Safety” on the box.
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.
