Reports have emerged that Paramount’s new CEO, David Ellison, is on the cusp of acquiring The Free Press, the independent media outlet founded by Bari Weiss, in a deal valued at over $100 million. According to Puck News, this move would not only provide a substantial payout for Weiss but also position her in a senior editorial role at CBS News, potentially overseeing an overhaul of the network’s operations. This development comes amid Ellison’s recent takeover of Paramount through an $8 billion merger with Skydance, marking one of his first major initiatives.
Weiss, who left The New York Times in 2020 after enduring what she described as bullying from far-left colleagues, has built The Free Press into a platform that often pushes back against dominant narratives in mainstream media. Her outlet has gained attention for its coverage questioning diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, gender ideology, and certain media portrayals of Israel’s conflict with Hamas. This approach has earned her a following among those seeking alternative viewpoints, but it has also drawn sharp criticism from liberal circles, who view her as a divisive force.
The backlash was swift and intense. Media critic Oliver Darcy, in his Status newsletter, expressed deep concern over the implications. “David Ellison vowed not to politicize Paramount—yet his first big move at CBS News is a major bet on Bari Weiss, one of the most polarizing figures in media,” Darcy wrote.
He went on to describe Weiss as “the stridently pro-Israel, proudly anti-‘woke’ culture warrior, [who] has built her brand on polarizing political commentary—supposedly the type of material Ellison signaled to reporters that he wishes to run away from.”
Even harsher rhetoric came from The Nation’s senior editor Jack Mirkinson, who penned a scathing piece titled “Vile Grifters Are Taking Over Establishment Media.” Mirkinson didn’t hold back, stating, “Bari Weiss has been making the world worse for a long time.” He delved into her past, claiming, “Twenty years ago, as a student at Columbia, she led a racist smear campaign against Arab professors who had the audacity to criticize Israel.”
Continuing his critique, he accused her time at The New York Times of being filled with “right-wing bile while posing as a liberal who was just tired of all the extremism and censorship on the left—a tedious bait-and-switch that nevertheless sent her media profile soaring.”
Regarding The Free Press, Mirkinson alleged it has “pushed genocide denial, transphobia, and the freedom to make Nazi salutes.”
Such inflammatory language reveals the depth of ideological opposition Weiss faces; Mirkinson’s portrayal frames her not just as a journalist with differing opinions but as a propagator of hate, a charge that ignores the outlet’s focus on stories often sidelined by legacy media, like investigations into campus antisemitism or critiques of gender-affirming care policies.
Mirkinson further lamented the cultural climate enabling this deal: “If we lived in a less terrible time and place, Weiss would be dismissed as a crank and a bigot, and never heard from again. But we live in the waking nightmare that is the United States in 2025. So instead, Weiss is being rewarded with a prize that even she must think is kind of wild. That prize? CBS News.”
He argued that CBS News, despite its flaws, “isn’t just some hate factory pumping out shoddy propaganda 24/7. But now it’s being shipped over to one of the leading hateful propagandists of our time.” In his conclusion, Mirkinson called for resistance: “I hope that CBS News staffers resist this attempt to destroy their workplace with everything they have. I hope that Weiss’s tenure atop CBS is short and failed. But mostly, I hope that one day we live in a world where people like Weiss are treated with the contempt they deserve and are hurled.”
This vitriol illustrates a pattern where critics on the left equate dissent with bigotry, potentially stifling debate in an industry already accused of echo-chamber dynamics.
Other outlets echoed similar sentiments. HuffPost labeled Weiss the “polarizing editor of The Free Press” and suggested the acquisition “offers a preview of how Ellison, the son of a top Trump ally, intends to shape CBS News moving forward,” implying a conservative tilt despite Ellison’s assurances otherwise.
Salon referred to her as “the polarizing editor and founder of conservative outlet The Free Press” and a “controversial figure.” Inside CBS, the New York Post reported that staffers are “apoplectic” and “not happy AT ALL,” with some bracing for an open revolt over the prospect of Weiss leading an editorial shake-up.
This internal unrest points to deeper tensions within legacy networks, where employees accustomed to a particular worldview may resist voices that introduce balance or scrutiny.
Not all reactions were uniformly negative. From a different angle, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly questioned the wisdom of Weiss joining mainstream media, asking, “Why would you go into mainstream media?” and warning that it could “eat her alive,” drawing parallels to Katie Couric’s experiences.
As negotiations reportedly near completion, this episode exposes fault lines in American journalism. Weiss’s rise from a criticized NYT columnist to a potential CBS power player demonstrates the growing appetite for outlets that prioritize unfiltered reporting over ideological conformity. Whether the deal materializes, the furor surrounding it reveals much about the state of media trust and the challenges of bridging divided audiences.
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.