(Daily Caller)—No serious person has ever argued that American elections should run more smoothly than they do. By design, they are usually raucous affairs full of spit and vinegar because there is so much at stake in how they turn out.
None of that has kept people, particularly among the cultural and political elites of the nation, from expressing a desire for impartial umpires to call balls and strikes during a campaign, distinguishing between what’s acceptable and what’s not.
It’s a mistake to believe the media can handle the responsibility now, even if it might have done so once fairly and effectively. A new study by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications explains why.
Simply put, the composition of the media is too biased to expect reporters to be fair. According to the Newhouse survey, based on online interviews conducted with 1,600 U.S. journalists in early 2022, 36% identified themselves as Democrats, while just 3.4% said they were Republicans. If you think that’s confirmation of an imbalance in how the world is viewed in newsrooms from New York to Los Angeles, you wouldn’t be wrong.
Half of those surveyed in 2022 claimed to be independent as was the case in 2013, the last time the data was collected. That doesn’t make much difference. Usually, that’s just a codeword that, when deciphered, means liberal but not partisan. How can any Republican candidate or conservative policy prescription expect to get a fair shake given numbers like that?
This plays out in all sorts of ways, including in the battle being waged by some liberals to keep former President Donald Trump off the ballot in 2024.
The proponents of the cause, including a number of influential Democratic lawyers and law professors, four of the seven judges on the Colorado State Supreme Court, and the former American Civil Liberties Union official who is now the secretary of State in Maine believe sui generis, that Trump engaged in acts that are, according to the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, insurrectionist which therefore prohibit him from holding high elective office ever again.
That’s a lot to swallow and based on the images impressed on people’s minds of events in and around the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it seems simple enough to prove. But it’s not, which many of the stories covering the effort to bump Trump off the ballot have failed to address.
Words in a news article don’t matter much. They are what they are, open to interpretation. In a court of law, however, they can mean everything. This brings up a prerequisite central to the argument: Trump has not been convicted of the crime of insurrection, which has a specific definition, nor, it can be argued, has he been charged with it in a venue that matters.
Partisans like Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a former non-profit executive who is not an attorney, have decided to substitute their own judgment for the requirements of the law. Admittedly, in the case of Trump and January 6, it is a gray area with many untested arguments. For her to act as she did on Thursday deprives Trump of his right to due process and the citizens of Maine of the right, potentially, to vote for the candidate of their choosing.
It’s that kind of elite behavior — some might even call it tyrannical — that has pushed so many people into Trump’s corner. They’re tired of other people making decisions for them and of the interference in their lives and businesses and the raising of their kids.
There are strong arguments in favor of the view Trump’s actions and words following the November 2020 election did not rise to the level of insurrection but good luck trying to hear them. Most of the 96.6% of the American media who aren’t Republicans — and even some who are — have devoted themselves to making sure they’re not discussed in any serious way in any prominent venue.
People who want to know what they are so they can decide for themselves are going to have to wait until the GOP begins to respond in kind and tries to have Democrats running for governor and United States senator declared ineligible for a place on the ballot to hear the arguments in favor of the public being able to choose.
About the Author
A former UPI senior political writer and U.S. News and World Report columnist, Peter Roff is a senior fellow at several public policy organizations including the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network. Contact him at RoffColumns AT gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and TruthSocial @TheRoffDraft.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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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.
