Bank executives from major U.S. financial institutions have stepped forward to describe a pattern of government coercion under the Obama and Biden administrations, where regulators allegedly twisted arms to cut off banking services to conservatives, religious groups, and industries deemed politically unfavorable. These revelations come amid President Donald Trump’s recent executive order aimed at ending such practices, highlighting what many see as a weaponization of the financial system against dissenting voices.
The issue traces back to Operation Choke Point, a Department of Justice initiative launched during the Obama era. A congressional report detailed how this program pressured banks to sever ties with legal businesses, including firearms dealers and payday lenders—sectors often aligned with conservative values.
Trump dismantled the program in 2017, but accusations surfaced that the Biden administration revived it as “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” this time targeting cryptocurrency firms and others. Bank leaders, speaking anonymously to avoid backlash, explained how vague federal laws allowed regulators to exploit “reputational risk” as a pretext for these actions.
Bob Hoge at Red State said, “Democrats are constantly shrieking on about Trump’s ‘authoritarian streak’ and how he’s ‘a threat to democracy.’ Time and time again, however, it is revealed that they themselves are the real despots.”
“When there’s ambiguity in the law, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and for a long time the beholder was the Obama and Biden administration,” one executive said.
Another senior banking official emphasized the intensity of the directives: “Those pressures were very, very real. When your regulator gives you a suggestion, it’s not a suggestion, it’s an order. The political stuff is very real, those pressures are real.”
Negative media coverage of conservatives, often amplified during high-profile events like the 2020 election and subsequent legal battles against Trump, was weaponized as justification for account closures.
“It’s all kind of set up, it’s like somebody set the table, and it all ends up focusing on Republicans and conservatives,” the executive added.
High-profile victims underscore the human cost of these tactics. President Trump himself accused institutions like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America of rejecting over $1 billion in his deposits. His wife, Melania Trump, detailed in her memoir how she and her son Barron faced abrupt account terminations.
“I was shocked and dismayed to learn that my long‑time bank decided to terminate my account and deny my son the opportunity to open a new one.… This decision appeared to be rooted in political discrimination, raising serious concerns about civil rights violations,” Melania wrote.
Eric Trump experienced similar treatment, alleging that Capital One shuttered more than 300 accounts tied to the Trump Organization in 2021, prompting a lawsuit against the bank. Former Senator Sam Brownback reported that JPMorgan Chase debanked his nonprofit, the National Committee for Religious Freedom, in 2022, citing vague reasons that smacked of ideological bias. Religious and conservative organizations have been hit hard, with Bank of America recently scrapping a policy critics blamed for enabling the debanking of charities and faith-based groups.
States like Florida and Tennessee have pushed back with laws protecting against such discrimination since 2024, reflecting growing conservative frustration with big banks. While some reports downplay the scale, noting only 35 formal complaints of political bias in recent data, the anonymous testimonies from insiders paint a picture of systemic pressure that went far beyond isolated incidents. Banks like JPMorgan have updated policies to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on political or religious views, but only after years of controversy.
Trump’s August 2025 executive order, “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” directs regulators to halt policies that enable debanking based on political or religious beliefs and to investigate past abuses. This move arrives as a relief to many on the right, who view it as a correction to years of federal overreach that stifled free speech and economic freedom under Democratic leadership. As one bank executive put it, the system was rigged to target conservatives—but with these disclosures and new safeguards, the tide may finally be turning.
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.
