(End of the American Dream)—Our culture is being transformed at a pace that is difficult to comprehend. The numbers that I am going to share with you in this article paint an undeniable picture about where our society is heading. That doesn’t mean that the trends that we are witnessing now are permanent. We have been through so many societal pivot points in recent decades, and it is probably inevitable that there will be more. But without a doubt there have been some very clear long-term cultural shifts that have radically changed how we relate to one another and to the world around us.
Earlier today, I came across a survey about how men and women view each other that absolutely shocked me…
As expected, we found that there are significant divides between young men and young women – but they are not just confined to political views. Gen Z women are more left wing than their male peers when it comes to politics and economics. This generation of women is also much more pessimistic about the country and their own lives than men, and substantially more negative towards men than the men are towards women. Seventy-two per cent of men under 30 say they have a positive view of the opposite gender, compared with just 50 per cent of women of the same age. Thirty-eight per cent of men say they feel “very positively” towards women, while only 18 per cent of women say the same about men. This trend is particularly pronounced among women under 25, of whom just 35 per cent feel positively towards men.
Read that last sentence again.
The survey discovered that only 35 percent of women under the age of 25 have a positive view of men.
How is that even possible?
This survey was conducted in the UK, but I am sure that it would have produced similar results if it had been conducted in the United States.
As I thought about this, it occurred to me that what we are witnessing is likely the result of decades of conditioning.
Men are almost always the villains in our movies and television shows.
When a family is depicted on screen, it is almost always the father that is the problem.
And even in our commercials, men and women are characterized very differently.
Once you become aware of this phenomenon, you will literally see it everywhere.
These days, much of the population considers men (especially young men) to be threats unless proven otherwise, while most women are considered to be trustworthy unless proven otherwise.
Of course it is undeniable that our society is absolutely teeming with criminal predators at this point, and if you trust the wrong person you and your family could get hurt very badly.
The thin veneer of civilization that we all rely on is disintegrating all around us, and that is a terrible thing.
Meanwhile, our values regarding sex and sexuality are rapidly changing.
According to the most recent Gallup poll on the matter, 9 percent of U.S. adults now identify as LGBTQ+…
Gallup finds 9.0% of U.S. adults identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or something other than straight or heterosexual in 2025. The percentage has more than doubled since Gallup first measured LGBTQ+ identification in 2012.
That is quite a high number, but the real story is what is occurring among our young adults.
According to that same poll, 23 percent of U.S. adults under the age of 30 now identify as LGBTQ+…
Young adults are far more likely than older adults to identify as LGBTQ+. Twenty-three percent of adults under 30 and 10.4% of adults aged 30 to 49 are LGBTQ+, compared with about 2% to 3% of older Americans.
I was curious, and so I had Google create a graph that shows how this number has changed since Gallup began asking this question in 2012.
The results were staggering…
The percentage of U.S. adults under the age of 30 that identify as LGBTQ+ has nearly quadrupled since 2012.
That is not just a trend.
That is a tsunami.
And there is a huge gender gap.
Only 11.4 percent of men under the age of 30 identify as LGBTQ+, but a whopping 31.4 percent of women under the age of 30 do…
Women are nearly twice as likely as men to identify as LGBTQ+ (10.5% vs. 5.6%, respectively), a gap driven primarily by women’s higher rates of bisexual identification. Gender gaps are especially pronounced in the youngest generation — 31.4% of women aged 18 to 29 versus 11.4% of men in the same age group identify as LGBTQ+, with most of these younger women saying they are bisexual.
Nearly a third of all women in the United States under the age of 30 now identify as LGBTQ+.
That may help to explain the survey results that I discussed at the beginning of this article.
And the vast majority of Americans that identify as LGBTQ+ consider themselves to be bisexual…
Bisexual adults make up the largest share of the LGBTQ+ population at 58.6%, equivalent to 5.3% of all U.S. adults. Beyond that, 17.4% of LGBTQ+ adults say they are gay, 16.0% identify as lesbian, and 12.1% say they are transgender, all ranging between 1% and 2% of U.S. adults overall.
This is a point that is often lost when people debate these issues.
Bisexual adults make up the biggest portion of the LGBTQ+ population by a very wide margin.
But now another segment is rapidly growing.
The number of Americans that consider themselves to be “heteroflexible” has been absolutely exploding.
If you are not familiar with “heteroflexibility”, the following explanation comes from Health.com…
Heteroflexibility is a sexual orientation that describes people who are primarily heterosexual but occasionally experience attraction to people of the same sex, according to Debra Laino, DHSc, a clinical sexologist and relationship therapist in Delaware.
People who are mostly attracted to a different gender but also feel some attraction to the same gender fit the definition of heteroflexible.
“Heteroflexible, like most labels, means different things to different people,” Casey Tanner, a clinical sex therapist in Chicago, told Health. “It comes up most of the time when a person identifies as mainly straight with a slight propensity towards queerness in certain circumstances.”
For most of my adult life, I had never even heard of this term.
But according to the New York Post, experts believe that 15 percent of the U.S. population is now “heteroflexible”…
It is estimated that a staggering 15% of the US population — that’s 50 to 55 million Americans — now identifies as heteroflexible.
Those numbers seem high to me.
I have a hard time imagining that there are 50 million “heteroflexibles” out there.
But of course the dating world is far different now than when I was young.
One dating app is actually reporting that the number of their users that identify as “heteroflexible” increased by 193 percent in just one year…
Feeld, a dating app for those seeking alternative relationship structures, recently released its annual Raw report, providing a look at the preferences that shape contemporary intimacy. According to the findings, heteroflexibility is the fastest-growing sexuality, with the number of practitioners skyrocketing by 193% over the past year.
Clearly this is a label that is gaining a tremendous amount of steam.
Nobody can deny that America is a completely different place than it was 50 years ago.
And it would be completely and utterly unrecognizable to our founders.
So much can change in just one generation.
The young adults of today are the future of our society, and that has enormous implications for all of us.
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.
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.
