(End of the American Dream)—There is no place in the world like California. It possesses such incredible natural beauty, but at the same time it is being run by a bunch of absolute lunatics. If it was an independent nation, it would have the fifth largest economy in the entire world, but it also has the largest homeless population in the U.S. by a very wide margin. In California you can find the world’s tallest tree (the Hyperion Coast Redwood), the world’s largest tree by volume (the General Sherman Giant Sequoia), and the world’s oldest living tree (the Methuselah Bristlecone Pine, which is over 4,850 years old).
Of course it also has the highest top marginal individual income tax rate in the United States at 13.3% (reaching 14.4% when including the state’s payroll tax).
I lived in California for a number of years when I was a kid, and I would still love to go back and visit some of the less populated areas of the state that are simply breathtaking.
But I certainly wouldn’t want to live there, because the control freaks that run the state have ruined it.
Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters, Ro Khanna and Eric Swalwell are all from California.
Sadly, the men and women that have been chosen to represent the state of California are an accurate reflection of the population of the state.
Just about every day, there are more stories in the news about Californians that have gone absolutely nuts.
For example, here is a story about a 37-year-old California man that just flipped out and stabbed his own father to death…
Gerardo Arroyo Almanza, 37, of Simi Valley, had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and three counts of criminal threats against his family members on Aug. 3, the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office said.
On the morning of April 6, 2024, several family members drove to Almanza’s home near East Pinecrest Street and North Justin Avenue to check on his well-being. They parked their cars across the street from his home.
As they were standing near their cars, Almanza ran out of the house while brandishing a knife to confront his family members, threatening to kill them.
He chased his mother and father around a parked car. He eventually caught his father, pinned him to the ground and stabbed him multiple times, prosecutors said. He fled from the scene as neighbors ran over to help.
I wish that I could tell you that this was an isolated incident.
But I can’t.
The streets are filled with violence, but authorities seem to be far more concerned about cracking down on ordinary citizens that are just trying to live their lives.
One man in Southern California has been repeatedly hit with huge fines simply for growing a garden in his front yard…
A Southern California city is waging war against a green-thumbed taxpayer — slapping him with fines for planting a sumptuous, front-yard garden full of fruits and vegetables.
Michael Sherman of Chino was shocked when a $750 fine for “overgrown vegetation” showed up in his mailbox in April — followed by a $500 fine in August.
Now, the landscape contractor says he faces yet another $500 fine this month — if he does not quickly comply with the city’s seemingly-draconian order to remove the alleged eyesore.
How would you feel if that happened to you?
In California, just about everything is upside down.
Even though California public schools are pumping out millions of graduates that do not possess the basic skills required to function in society, the number of students with a 4.0 or better grade point average nearly doubled over the course of a decade…
California has discovered a miracle. High school transcripts glow. Straight-A applicants to the University of California have roughly doubled in a decade. And the kids still cannot do the math.
That is not a punchline. It is the state’s operating system.
According to UC data reviewed by the New York Post, students applying to the University of California with a 4.0 or better jumped from 52,989 in 2015 to 103,138 for the class of 2025. The spike sharpened during the COVID years, when classrooms went online and standards went wherever the administration needed them to go. The vast majority of those applicants are California residents.
It would be wonderful if California was producing lots and lots of young geniuses.
But the truth is that the grades have been rising while the standardized test scores have not…
The report cards say excellence. The placement exams say fifth grade.
State testing does not play along with the fairy tale. On the Smarter Balanced exam for 2024-2025, only 57 percent of California 11th graders met the English standard. Math sat at 30.5 percent. Those numbers ticked up from the 2021-2022 floor of 54.8 percent and 27 percent. They remain worse than before the lockdowns. A diploma and a 4.0 now describe a feeling, not a skill.
Of course the parents aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed either.
One California parent recently busted the glass of a locked school bus and tried to confront the driver…
Police in California arrested a mother accused of breaking through the glass of a school bus door, climbing inside and confronting the bus driver.
According to reports, the incident began when the driver stopped the school bus on a highway in Calaveras County on Aug. 24. KOVR reported that a student inside the bus said the driver stopped it because the bus was getting rowdy.
KCRA said a student then climbed out of the window, prompting the bus driver to tell other students to close the windows and stay seated.
Some of the students called or texted their parents from inside the bus. According to KCRA, one parent showed up and broke the bus’s glass door to get inside and confront the bus driver.
Perhaps Californians just need to play more video games.
I say this in jest, but Elon Musk has pointed out a brand new study that shockingly discovered that playing video games is linked with “better cognitive performance”…
Speaking of video games, a California woman was shocked to learn that she had signed up to be a surrogate for the child of a “reclusive Chinese video-game billionaire”…
A single American mother signed up to be a surrogate after seeing an Instagram ad promising $120,000. The agency told her the intended parent was a single father expanding his family.
The intended father, leaked documents later showed, was Xu Bo, the reclusive Chinese video-game billionaire whose company has already confirmed a staggering surrogacy operation on U.S. soil, CBS reported.
Every baby born here is an American citizen at birth. Those children keep U.S. citizenship for life. They can vote. They can hold federal jobs. At 21 they can sponsor family members. Agencies have marketed the arrangement as cheaper than an EB-5 investor visa.
This sort of thing has been happening way too often in California.
If a rich guy from another country can just get his children to be born on U.S. soil, they will automatically possess U.S. citizenship.
Apparently there is a big market for that.
Another California woman was just “shot dead” by an illegal immigrant that had been released from custody by the Biden administration…
A California woman has been shot dead by a 22-year-old DoorDash worker who had been stalking her for months after he illegally entered the US in 2023.
Shalini Thakur, 38, was gunned down outside a Panera Bread in Sacramento as horrified witnesses watched on during the afternoon of September 8.
The suspect, Rohit Rohit, an illegal migrant from India who was allegedly released by the Biden administration, fled in a vehicle before fatally shooting himself, police said.
This was such a senseless tragedy, and it could have been so easily avoided.
But thanks to Joe Biden, this illegal immigrant had the opportunity to stalk her for months before gunning her down in cold blood…
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office Lieutenant Amar Gandhi said the horror unfolded just before 3pm, when Rohit approached Thakur outside her workplace at a shopping mall on Howe Avenue and ‘began to accost her’.
‘As the victim attempted to run away, Rohit chased her down, pulled out a firearm, and shot her multiple times,’ he said. ‘The victim fell to the ground.’
Gandhi added that Rohit then walked over to Thakur’s body as she lay dying on the sidewalk, and ‘shot her in the head at close range.’
Meanwhile, the ground in California continues to shake with alarming regularity.
Just yesterday, I wrote about a swarm of more than 80 earthquakes that rattled Southern California over the weekend, and now Northern California has been hit by yet another sizable quake…
A 3.0-magnitude earthquake rattled the East Bay early Monday morning, marking the third tremor to strike the area in just a few days, according to the US Geological Survey.
The quake hit at 6:47 a.m., with its epicenter east of Mount Diablo, about nine miles south of Antioch and 7.4 miles west-southwest of Brentwood. The preliminary temblor was estimated to have originated about 10 miles below the surface.
We keep getting reminders that “the Big One” is eventually coming.
But most Californians don’t seem to care.
They are just going to keep doing what they have been doing until it is too late.
Isn’t that sad?
It has often been said that “as California goes, so goes the nation”.
Let us hope that is not true, because California has gone totally nuts.
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.
