We know that the copycat, generalized imitation, or media contagion effects are real, and yet the anti-liberty left and its media propaganda arm persist in promoting mass murder.
Have you noticed an all too familiar pattern in what is taking place in the nation’s socialist media? Just as they did after the Buffalo mass murder, the far-left’s propaganda arm is going hog wild in exploiting the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas. Each trying to outdo the other, but ten times worse than the previous crime.
Numerous studies on the subject have shown a high probability that with this level of wall-to-wall coverage, there will be another mass murder tragedy within 13 days. One of the more recent studies published in the Library of Medicine [PubMed.gov] entitled: Mass Shootings: The Role of the Media in Promoting Generalized Imitation concluded that while the media wasn’t directly responsible for these acts, they stated that:
In instances of mass shootings, the media appear largely responsible for providing the model to imitate. Although there are a variety of strategies that could function in tandem to alter the likelihood of a mass shooting, changing the way the media report mass shootings is one important step in preventing and reducing imitation of these acts. Furthermore, media-prompted imitation likely extends beyond mass shootings. A media effect has been shown with suicide,
It was just a day after the Buffalo attack that Reuters ran the following story with the headline: ‘Copycat’ mass shootings becoming deadlier, experts warn after New York attack:
Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama, has studied trends in mass shootings over time.
…
Lankford’s study found that the “deadliest” shootings comprised 25% of mass public shootings from 1966 to 2009, but from 2010 to 2019 had increased to 50% of mass public shootings, in which there was “direct evidence that perpetrator was influenced by another specific attacker or attackers.”
Lankford said the rise in these copycat mass killings have a specific trend: the gunmen find their inspiration from the personal life details of previous mass shooters. “It’s not repeating the incident that inspires them. It’s the intimate details of their lives that promotes the influence,” he said.
We also noted this back on May 17, 2022:
We should all be aware of the phenomenon of media contagion, whereby wall-to-wall coverage, cynically exploited by the anti-liberty left for political purposes to suppress civil rights, also encourages further attacks.
Numerous other media sources have discussed this issue over the years:
- Mass Shootings and News Media: A Connection? (Newsweek)
- Here’s What We Know About The Contagion Effect Of Mass Shootings(The Huffington Post)
- How the Media Inspires Mass Shooters (Mother Jones)
- Mass Shootings May Be Affected by ‘Media Contagion’: Researchers (ABC news)
- Should media avoid naming the gunmen in mass shootings? (Associated Press)
- Mass Shootings Can Be Contagious, Research Shows (NPR)
- Mass shootings: Experts say violence is contagious, and 24/7 news cycle doesn’t help (NBC news)
- PBS’ Frontline irresponsibly ignores the “media contagion effect” and gives notoriety to school shooters (Media matters)
- How the media covers mass shootings has evolved. But is it better? (Boulder Weekly)
Suffice it to say, if several of them have made note of this phenomenon, they all should know of it. After all, they claim to be in the information business and this is a very serious topic that directly impacts their decision-making process. In short, they should have no excuse for not knowing about the issue of media contagion because it directly involves their business.
We can’t help but notice that it seems like we’re also witnessing another aspect of this perverse far-left media phenomena. Aside from generalized comments on the subject matter that refer to the Buffalo tragedy, it has been completely eclipsed by the new one. Whether this is by accident or design is hard to discern. However, this tendency could act as an additional impetus for the next chumbucket. There has also been news of shutting down all campuses of the Donna independent school district in Texas after a credible threat was reported to the police. A search of one of the suspects homes turned up an AK-47 and a “hit list of targeted students”.
We also discovered an interesting study that indicates why the anti-liberty left moves so fast in these situations. A study shows that the emotions surrounding a mass murder tragedy last only 3-4 days, after which they drop off significantly. This means they only have a narrow window to make “bipartisan appeals that draw on the emotional responses to mass shootings”.
So, how many human-shaped ‘ticking time bombs’ are out there like the two that have already gone off? How many psychologically damaged children, worsened by the COVID lockdowns are being ‘inspired’ by the wall-to-wall media coverage to imitate others? Unfortunately, the studies show that we’re going to have to wait for about another week or so to find out. Curiously enough, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is going to force a vote on gun control legislation after the Memorial Day recess on June 3. Long after the 4 days’ emotional response period to the current tragedy. But what would happen if another took place in a few days?
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.
