Former “centrist” news outlet The Messenger launched last year with high hopes and a ton of cash. But it wasn’t enough to the revenue necessary to stay afloat and has officially shut down.
Started by Jimmy Finkelstein following his sale of The Hill in 2021, it was supposed to be the answer to the left-vs-right paradigm in modern corporate media. With most outlets leaning — and oftentimes lurching — to the left and the remainder leaning right, Finkelstein wanted something that was truly fair and balanced. What he delivered still ended up leaning left and as a result it had trouble paying for the 300 mostly woke employees they hired.
As much as I would love to see a news outlet that is TRULY unbiased, I’m not sure if that’s even possible anymore. I respect what Finkelstein tried to do and it’s discouraging that it failed, but it was also predictable.
Some, like us, don’t even pretend to be unbiased. Heck, the name of one of our sites is “America First Report” so we proudly hang our conservative badge. But those who pretend to be unbiased like CNN and the NY Times invariably lurch to the left which is why they fail. You either tell the truth and pick a side or you lie and pretend to be unbiased.
According to Jason Cohen at Daily Caller:
The Messenger’s CEO and founder Jimmy Finkelstein launched the outlet in 2023 after selling The Hill in 2021 for $130 million, according to Axios. Within a brief timeframe, the company onboarded 300 employees, providing them with generous salaries.
“This is truly the last thing I wanted, and I am deeply sorry,” Finkelstein wrote in an email to employees, according to The New York Times.
The Messenger produced centrist news on various topics and had a substantial audience, but it could not afford its large newsroom, according to Axios. It spent millions on travel and entertainment without making sufficient advertising revenue, according to Semafor.
“Over the past few weeks, literally until earlier today, we exhausted every option available and have endeavored to raise sufficient capital to reach profitability,” Finkelstein wrote, according to the NYT. “Unfortunately, we have been unable to do so.”
Finkelstein recently met with conservative media and business executives, including Omeed Malik, Garrett Ventry, Ryan Coyne and George Farmer to discuss selling a majority stake in The Messenger at Mar-a-Lago, Axios reported.
Many legacy media publications are dealing with economic challenges affecting the news industry and resorting to drastic measures, Axios reported on Friday. Close to a dozen are laying off workers, dealing with employee strikes or trying to sell.
For instance, The Arena Group recently let go of nearly the entire union staff of Sports Illustrated, and the Los Angeles Times announced it would lay off over 100 journalists as the publication lost as much as $40 million a year, decreasing its newsroom employees by 20%. BuzzFeed has been in talks to unload two of its brands, Complex and Tasty, according to The Wall Street Journal.
What’s not being said is that revenue influences pushed The Messenger to make editorial decisions… just as it does with all corporate media outlets. Those who are beholden to big advertisers such as Big Pharma or huge ad networks like Google Adsense can never publish the whole truth. For example, data surrounding Covid-19 “vaccines” is always suppressed by outlets that rely on Big Tech for traffic, revenue, or both. It’s also suppressed by direct advertisers that account for a huge chunk of the revenue paid to corporate media outlets.
This is why we only work with patriotic advertisers and never with ad networks. We will say what we want and reveal the truth without fear.
The takeaway here isn’t that being unbiased goes against human nature, though that’s true too. The real takeaway is that corporate media can only be successful if they are honest with their audience, and that’s only happening in the trenches of independent journalism today.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
- Hand-curated links from conservative and Christian sites — NO legacy media garbage links. Patriots get their news every day at JDRucker.com
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.
