The same five networks that spent a decade telling America it had a sacred right to watch every presidential footstep just refused to send a camera. President Trump goes to the United Nations today, and Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN will not put a pool crew on him.
It is not yet clear how far the “boycott” will extend.
The Daily Mail reports the White House television pool will leave Trump’s New York trip unaired on the major networks after the administration stripped CNN of Monday’s rotation. Fox News Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton, acting chair of that pool, put it in writing.
This is to advise that, effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President. This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place.
This is the status of legacy media today. They had four other networks that could have picked up a camera. They chose darkness. Then they issued a joint statement about the public’s “vital interest” in seeing the government. Vital, apparently, until solidarity with CNN required turning the lights off.
The Ban They Pretend Is Unprecedented
Trump announced Friday he was barring CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House “effective immediately” for what he called constant fake news. MS NOW is the leftover brand after MSNBC ran itself into the ground. Politico, in the same post, got called out for an $8 million Biden-era government subscription that looked less like journalism and more like a lifeline.
Over the weekend, Secret Service officers confiscated badges at the gate. CNN’s Betsy Klein, MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner, and Politico’s Cheyenne Haslett were turned away Saturday. Sunday’s official guidance listed no TV pool at all.
Just the News notes print, radio, and still photographers are still expected to cover the day. The boycott is a television strike, not a total news blackout. That distinction matters, because the networks are selling this as the death of the First Amendment when it is a fight over who gets a privileged seat inside a working building.
Trump answered the shrieking the only way he ever does, in public.
The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the fake news, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, now!
That is the argument the press refuses to meet. Nobody is padlocking printing presses. Nobody is criminalizing a headline. The White House is declining to host outlets it regards as hostile fabricators on the people’s property. Biden’s team iced conservative reporters for years and called it norms. The Associated Press already lost White House access in 2025 after it would not say Gulf of America. The sudden conversion to absolutist access theology started the minute CNN’s badge stopped working.
A Lawsuit Dressed Up as Scripture
CNN, MS NOW, and Politico notified the government Monday they are suing. Their statement claims the credentials vanished “without notice or process” because the White House “objected to our reporting,” and that the government must not decide what the press publishes. Fine words. They collapse under the facts. The government is not editing their copy. It is refusing them a workspace, a riser, and a camera position that other outlets still hold.
The First Amendment stops Congress from abridging the press. It does not convert the West Wing into a union hall for five corporations that rotate a shared feed and call the arrangement democracy.
For decades that pool existed because the networks wanted to split costs, not because the Constitution requires a CNN cameraman on Air Force One. When the White House said CNN would not do Monday’s job, the others could have done it. The Daily Wire is right that Fox pulling the plug is the unexpected turn. A network that built its audience covering Trump chose the guild over the story.
And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.
That is the real scandal. Not a president who finally treated persistent falsehood as a reason to revoke a courtesy. The scandal is a press corps that will deny the country pictures of its own president rather than admit it is a faction with a camera.
Someone Will Still Film It
The vacuum will not last. Real America’s Voice plans to stream from the UN. Hearst will cover White House events. Independent cameras exist. So do phones. The networks are betting Trump will blink because he likes television. Maybe he will. Maybe he will let the old cartel sit in the dark while newer outlets take the shot.
They can file their brief. They can stand on the sidewalk and narrate an empty driveway. What they cannot do is pretend this is 1791. A free press prints, broadcasts, and publishes without a permission slip. It does not get a guaranteed chair next to the Resolute Desk after years of treating the man behind it as an enemy of the republic. If the pictures vanish today, it is because the people who own the cameras chose the boycott.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.