Friday marks twenty-five years since nineteen men turned airliners into weapons over New York and Washington. Al-Qaeda’s chief planner sits at Guantanamo. Osama bin Laden is fish food. ISIS was hunted across continents until its caliphate was a ruin. America has not taken another blow like that day.
That is the part the anniversary speeches will recite. Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer is asking the question those speeches will dodge. Did we actually win?
Bin Laden’s faction wanted the Judeo-Christian West punched in the face. The Muslim Brotherhood wanted the same prize without waking the giant. Same destination. Different timetable.
They opted for something called “civilizational jihad.” Rather than blowing things up, why don’t we just take things over?
That is Schweizer on The Drill Down. He has been documenting the method in The Invisible Coup. Immigration. Political organizing. Front groups. Ballot boxes. Europe first, then the United States. “The Muslim Brotherhood is alive and active in America today electing politicians.”
The Memo They Never Buried
This is not a podcast flourish. In 1991 a U.S.-based Brotherhood official wrote An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America. Federal prosecutors entered it into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial. The assignment was stated without poetry.
Members must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated, and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
They called it the “Civilization-Jihadist Process.” Migration was not a side effect. It was the tool. Schweizer traces the doctrine back to hijrah, the Prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina treated as a standing obligation until a land is “won over.”
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s most influential living ideologue for a generation, predicted Islam would return to Europe and America through da’wah rather than open war, with Westerners themselves spreading it.
Austria’s government just announced plans to ban “political Islam” and squeeze Brotherhood networks after its intelligence service described the project as a long campaign to seed Sharia and a caliphate inside Western institutions. French intelligence has already called it a decades-long “Western conquest strategy.” Washington still treats the same network as a community partner.
For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
They Did Not Need a Building. They Needed an Election.
Zohran Mamdani is the first Muslim mayor of New York City. Families of the murdered asked him to stay away from the memorials. He signed two ceremonial orders last Friday marking the twenty-fifth anniversary, then handed the pen to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem. Kassem previously represented Ahmed al-Darbi, the al-Qaeda operative who pleaded guilty in 2014 to the bombing of a French oil tanker off Yemen. The smirk on the video was not an accident of lighting.
Schweizer’s verdict is colder than the ceremony.
If you look at what Mamdani’s views are on terrorism, on groups like Hamas and what those entities say about him, you realize that they didn’t have to blow up a building to take over New York. They just had to have an election strategy.
Dearborn and Minneapolis already sent the prototype to Congress. Ilhan Omar reduced September 11 to “some people did something.” Rashida Tlaib has been tied, again and again, to Brotherhood-adjacent outfits and to Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Michigan now offers Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed as a Senate prospect.
The Democratic Party did not get captured by accident. It got captured because a faction of the left stopped seeing the dead of that morning as countrymen.
Co-host Eric Eggers cited Matthew Hennessy in the Wall Street Journal. The line is worth keeping.
The radical leftists taking over the Democratic Party don’t look at the victims of 9/11 as countrymen. They don’t think of that day and feel the enormity of the loss or the magnitude of the injustice. They think we had it coming. They think we’re the bad guys.
That is the alliance Schweizer has been mapping since January. Progressives want to dismantle the American order. Islamists want to replace it. They do not have to love each other. They only have to hate the same house.
The Contrast They Will Not Platform
Schweizer is careful where the media is sloppy. Not every Muslim office-seeker is running the Brotherhood play. He names Zuhdi Jasser, a former Navy commander, physician, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, and the Republican nominee in Arizona’s Fourth District. Jasser’s parents fled Syria. He has spent twenty-five years telling Congress that Brotherhood ideology is the taproot of modern Islamist extremism, that CAIR and its cousins are legacy shops, and that a “Sharia mentality” locates rights in the state rather than in God. He loves this country enough to fight the project by name.
Mamdani is not doing that. “Mamdani has embraced the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The difference is the whole argument. America is not at war with every person who prays toward Mecca. America is at war with a political theology that treats our Constitution as a temporary inconvenience and our compassion as an invasion route. Pretending those two things are the same is how the second faction wins without ever hijacking a plane.
Twenty-five years of airport lines, foreign wars, and intelligence work stopped the next spectacular attack. They did not stop the memorandum. They did not stop the migration strategy. They did not stop the red-green ticket from taking City Hall in the city that buried its dead under two towers of ash.
Bin Laden wanted Americans riled up. The Brotherhood wanted Americans distracted, generous, and ashamed of their own dead. Look around. One of those strategies is still operational.
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.
