(WND)—The American legacy media now is facing the prospect of a new court threat: Be truthful or else.
It’s coming as a filing with the U.S. Supreme Court challenges the legitimacy of an old court standard, established in New York Times v. Sullivan, that essentially allows media organizations to “falsely vilify, smear, and attack public figures with impunity.”
America’s legacy media outlets and corporations have, in recent years, become highly politicized. Donald Trump’s age? Huge problem. Joe Biden’s age? No big deal. Donald Trump’s government papers? A felony. Joe Biden’s government papers, in his garage no less? No big deal.
The new fight is coming on behalf of famed constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and now is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The American Center for Law and Justice is working on the fight.
The origins of the case come from Dershowitz’ appearance before the U.S. Senate arguing against the impeachment of President Trump, an impeach-and-remove scheme that ultimately failed.
“We have filed a petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court on behalf of Professor Dershowitz in his critical defamation case against CNN,” the ACLJ said.
“This case presents the court with an opportunity to reconsider whether the actual malice standard established in New York Times v. Sullivan remains consistent with the First Amendment’s original meaning and whether it adequately protects individuals’ reputational interests while preserving robust public debate.”
The problem with the law, the legal team said, is that there needs to be accountability for truth, constitutional fidelity, and a fundamental right to seek justice when wronged.
Dershowitz, a distinguished Harvard Law School professor emeritus and practicing attorney, testified to the Senate in 2020 when leftists were attacking Trump in one of several impeachment campaigns.
He explained why the Constitution would not authorize a conviction.
The legal team said, “In response to a question from Senator Ted Cruz (TX), Professor Dershowitz delivered a carefully crafted constitutional analysis that made critical distinctions about what conduct could and could not constitute an impeachable offense.”
That was that “actions motivated by ‘personal pecuniary interest’ – such as a president demanding a hotel with his name on it or a million-dollar kickback – would be ‘purely corrupt’ and present ‘an easy case’ for impeachment. This wasn’t a throwaway line. It was the central point of his constitutional argument.”
CNN, however, broadcast “to millions of viewers that Dershowitz had said the opposite of what he actually argued.”
One corporate statement was, “The Dershowitz Doctrine would make presidents immune from every criminal act.” Another charged Dershowitz was “essentially saying it doesn’t matter what the quid pro quo is as long as you think you should be elected.”
But the district court in the case acknowledged Dershowitz “said nothing of the kind.”
The ACLJ said, “Here’s where this case becomes critical for every American who values truth and accountability. According to Judge Lagoa in her concurring opinion, when the case was before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, CNN had ‘defamed’ Professor Dershowitz ‘under any common understanding of that term.’ Yet New York Times v. Sullivan and its impossibly high (and judicially created) actual malice ‘standard’ barred any remedy.”
The Sullivan opinion from the high court makes it “extremely” hard for any public figure to win such cases.
“As the Supreme Court explained in Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, Inc., under the Sullivan standard, a public figure cannot recover for defamation unless they prove by ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that the defendant acted with ‘actual malice’ – meaning the defendant either knew the statement was false or acted with ‘reckless disregard’ for whether it was true or false.”
Should the media get away with such behavior?
The ACLJ said the result of that standard is that “even when media organizations publish demonstrably false statements that destroy someone’s reputation, public figures are left without remedy if they cannot prove the publisher subjectively knew or strongly suspected the falsity.”
That is not what the writers of the First Amendment intended, the ACLJ said.
“The First Amendment protects not just speech and press, but also the right to ‘petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’ For two centuries before Sullivan, Americans understood that their right to have access to the courts to seek justice for wrongs done to them – including reputational harm. Defamation law had always (before the Sullivan case) operated under common-law principles that protected vigorous debate while holding speakers accountable for deliberate falsehoods. Remember, the First Amendment guarantee of free speech protects us from the government. CNN is not the government.”
The legal team said, “The First Amendment was designed to prevent government censorship – not to create a license for media organizations to systematically distort the truth with impunity.”
The ACLJ pointed out Dershowitz was a law clerk with the high court and worked on Justice Goldberg’s concurring opinion when Sullivan was released.
“He now believes that the justices went too far in protecting the media against lawsuits by private citizens who are deemed to be public figures,” the ACLJ said.
The brief points out that the circuits now are split on the dispute, and asks the high court to reconsider the burden it places on plaintiffs.
Further, it urges the court “to reconsider whether Sullivan itself should be discarded as inconsistent with the First and Fourteenth Amendments’ original meaning.”
The ACLJ said the fight is “about whether the First Amendment protects robust debate or shields profitable falsehoods. And fundamentally, it’s about whether Americans still have the right to petition their government – including the courts – for redress when they’ve been wronged.”
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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.