Days after the 2020 election was stolen, the editorial board at the Washington Examiner posted their first call for conservatives to “move on” and accept the results of the election despite clear evidence that there were abnormalities. Those “abnormalities” turned into mountains of evidence over time, but the same editorial board did not change their tune.
It was then that I realized the “right-leaning” news outlet was no better than many at Fox News or any of the other corporate media shills who support RINOs and Never-Trumpers instead of conservatives or populists. This is important for America First patriots to know because it’s easy to not realize we’re reading McConnellesque propaganda.
The latest attack on an America First patriot is disguised as a news story that initially looks like it’s painting Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in a positive light. Titled, “MAGA’s next megastar: Dems reportedly concerned Kari Lake could shatter 2024 dreams,” it drew me in even as I knew they likely weren’t going to be endorsing the staunch conservative candidate. It started off fine, but by paragraph two, it was clear that their labels of her as an “election denier” and an “Ultra-MAGA” candidate were intended as pejoratives. They then proceeded to reinforce this notion by filling the article with quotes and perspectives from Democrats, including Lake’s opponent, Katie Hobbs.
Conspicuously, there are ZERO quotes from Kari Lake or anyone at her campaign, nor any of the patriots who support her. All of the quotes are from those opposed to her. They even took a swipe at Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who also happens to be an “election denier” and “Ultra MAGA.”
On the surface, this doesn’t appear to be a hit piece. But as experienced propagandists are well aware, the conscious and subconscious takeaways from a “news” report can be shifted in one direction or another based on how it’s crafted. This one is masterfully done to subtly disparage Lake while making her opponent and critics sound reasonable. All they have to do is highlight a quote or fact that sounds acceptable to the reader or listener, then subsequent quotes are digested as reliable.
In this case, the story’s first quote came from Obama disciple David Axelrod.
“If you get a candidate who has the performance skills of a major-market local TV anchor and the philosophy and thinking of Steve Bannon, that’s a potent and dangerous combination. … Look at Italy,” he said.
To America First patriots, the statement doesn’t have a negative impact. But to lukewarm conservatives or Republicans who are not ideologically aligned with Steve Bannon or the next Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, that single line can turn those voters and potential supporters off. That was the intention of leading with Axelrod’s quote.
Later, the article quotes Hobbs and, as noted, did not allow Lake to retort. Here’s the first of three long quotes from Hobbs with the intended takeaway emphasized.
“How do you debate someone who refuses to accept the truth, who doesn’t live in facts, and it doesn’t do any service to the voters in terms of deciding, looking at the contrast between us and how we’re going to govern if all she’s going to is shout over me, interrupt me, and spew lies?” she said on MSNBC this week.
This story has been the top headline over at the Washington Examiner from Saturday morning until at least evening. It may be the best example of how to post a hit piece without letting people, including the Lake team, know that it’s a hit piece. It’s manipulative and disingenuous, filled with all of the negative opinions they want voters to have about Lake while never getting a single perspective from a Lake supporter or Lake herself.
Even the headline is intended to draw in Lake supporters or potential supporters who hope to see why Lake would make a good leader. They included a click-bait insinuation about 2024 knowing many have seen her as a potential running mate for Donald Trump. Laughably, the article doesn’t even mention 2024. Once they got you to click through on an insinuated promise, they had no intention of actually talking about the point their readers wanted to see. That’s not just click-bait. It’s a way to get readers to go all the way through the article to the end.
To be clear, there are several writers over at the Washington Examiner that I like and respect. They’re not all RINO shills. But just as Fox News has Tucker Carlson, they also have Brett Baier. They also have a whole lot of people at the top of the food chain who hate Donald Trump. They likely also hate Kari Lake because she supports Donald Trump and represents the type of leadership Arizona and America needs.
America First patriots must practice as much discernment as possible when dealing with RINO shill publications. It’s easy to see the blatant hatred toward conservatives at CNN, NY Times, and other leftist outlets. But the so-called “right-leaning” corporate media outlets will give fodder to conservatives by posting a pro-life story or an anti-CRT rant, right next to those stories will be a puff piece about Mike Pence or Doug Ducey. Be warned.
FYI, this is why we’re launching Discern.tv very soon.
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.
The article was first in Axios, and considering that, it constitutes high praise for Kari and is not at all surprising of the slant!
Um, it’s Washington Examiner, an exposed neocon toilet paper…so who cares what it craps out and smears?
Your first mistake was reading the Examiner, a first-class bird cage liner if there ever was one.
Thank you, JD Rucker!
I always enjoy reading your work, but this particular piece is exceptional. Alerting readers to the fact that we all must be far more discerning these days than was ever necessary in earlier days is an essential message if there is really any chance at all of overcoming the media’s control over the minds of Americans.
Anything in, or sent out of Washington is excrement.
Please change “Peace” to “Piece” in the article headline. Great article.
I believe the Washington Examiner is simply the Weekly Standard rebranded. POS publication.
Hit “PEACE”???
“ Peace” instead of Piece? Suspect right away!
Isn’t this a prime example of “yellow journalism”? The ironic thing is when you call it out for what it is you run the risk of giving it more attention than it deserves.
One would think you would want good leadership regardless of party side. Too many evil people with their own agendas in this world. Kari is a strong, confident, smart lady. Don’t you want this as a quality in leadership?
Thank you for your excellent analysis and the unveiling of the snake that is “The Washington Examiner.” It is, of course, the goal of the propagandist to never be discovered. Though I did read the entire article I would have happily moved on to the next if your complete article had consisted of merely, “Days after the 2020 election was stolen …”
The extent of the left and the extent of evil is staggering. I’m amazed that I have survived given the fact it must be God only that has navigated me to the truth given how many people who have portrayed themselves as sheep and truly are sheep underneath but have been forced to take a leftist position because of high-handed black m a i l tactics.
Good to know. Another RINO rag. Consider what happened to George Will, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, et.al.: faded into obscurity.