(DCNF)—SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly said Tuesday on her podcast that she refuses “to be the CNN of Trump 2.0” on the “Epstein files,” adding that journalists have an “obligation” to “not just trust” politicians over it.
Since July 6, the Trump administration has faced major backlash from Republicans over the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) quietly released memo about the FBI and its investigation into deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. On “The Megyn Kelly Show,” Kelly said some Republicans are no longer pushing the issue, following President Donald Trump’s efforts to move away from it.
“I will state for the record, I have lots of friends inside the administration. I have nothing but respect and admiration for this president,” Kelly said. “But I’m in a different business. I am in the journalism business. My position is you can trust, but you must verify. And I refuse, refuse to be the CNN of Trump 2.0, where they just trusted the administration on Biden’s mental acuity, and, willingly, by doing so ignored the biggest crisis and controversy and scandal in modern presidential history.”
“That’s not what’s happening under Trump. But I’m just saying journalists, people like me who do consider themselves as journalists, you have an obligation not to just trust,” Kelly added. “You kick the tires. That’s your job. You approach all stories and everything fed to you by an administration official, like them, love them, respect them, trust them or not with a hefty dose of skepticism. And you drill down and drill down and drill down until you think you’ve actually captured the story. That’s what we’re going to do.”
Republicans and major Trump supporters like TPUSA’s founder Charlie Kirk, Daily Caller News Foundation co-founder Tucker Carlson and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson have called on the administration to show “transparency” regarding the remaining documents.
Within the DOJ’s memo, first obtained by Axios, the FBI said, after an exhaustive review, Epstein had no “client list” and that there was no foul play in his death in 2019. The memo was released alongside more than 10 hours of “raw and enhanced” video footage from outside Epstein’s cell at the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center. Questions about a missing minute in the video footage, however, began to circulate.
As a reporter attempted to ask Bondi about the issue on July 8, Trump stepped in and asked why the media was “still talking” about Epstein. Trump instead tried to talk about the natural disaster in Texas that killed more than 100 people. Bondi later said the missing minute was due to the correctional center’s cameras resetting each night.
Kelly went on to say she’s not “obsessed” with Epstein but simply wants to “get to the bottom” of the lingering questions. The SiriusXM host pointed out that CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson released a book in May that raised concerns about former President Joe Biden’s mental fitness during his time in the White House.
Republicans had warned about Biden’s mental decline prior to the 2020 election, but Democrats dismissed them. Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre labeled videos of Biden stumbling and misspeaking as “cheap fakes.”
Media pundits like Tapper had previously defended Biden and shut down arguments about Biden’s mental state.
“But we are going to try to get to the bottom of what’s knowable now that they’re telling us there’s no there there? For me, that’s just a red cape in front of a bull. I understand some people [are] like ‘Don’t do it. You don’t want to hurt Trump.’ I don’t think this will hurt Trump,” Kelly said. “I think non-disclosure and non-transparency is hurting Trump. But I’m also not in the business of protecting Donald Trump. Again, that’s what The New York Times does for a Democrat.”
“That’s not me. That’s not any honest journalist. I am not going on some media tour in four years with Alex Thompson trying to have to explain how I’m shocked, shocked that there wasn’t full disclosure under Trump on Epstein,” Kelly said. “I guess I was just too naive. I believe this is humiliating. This scandal is nowhere near, nowhere near what the Biden mental acuity scandal was. But I’m just saying it’s a time for choosing for people who consider themselves honest journalists. And you don’t back off a story just because a politician asks you to.”
With pushback against Bondi continuing, Trump released a statement Saturday defending the attorney general and criticizing the ongoing questions surrounding the deceased pedophile. Speaking to reporters while leaving the White House Tuesday, Trump again praised how he said Bondi has handled the case, adding that “whatever she thinks is credible, she should release.”
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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.
