A federal appeals court has cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against a veteran Iowa pollster and her media partners to proceed in state court, setting the stage for a deeper probe into what many see as deliberate election meddling.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit issued a pointed ruling Friday, overriding a lower federal judge’s refusal to return the case to Iowa jurisdiction. This move strips away what Trump’s lawyers called a shield of “unlawful gamesmanship” by the defendants, forcing them to face accountability where the wrongs took place.
At the heart of the suit is a last-minute Iowa Poll from November 2, 2024, conducted by J. Ann Selzer for The Des Moines Register and its corporate parent, Gannett. The survey claimed Kamala Harris held a narrow three-point edge over Trump in the Hawkeye State—47% to 44%—a stunning reversal from an earlier Selzer poll that same fall showing Trump up by four points. Released just days before voters headed to the polls, the numbers lit up cable news and social media, painting a false picture of momentum for the Democratic ticket in a reliably red stronghold. In reality, Trump crushed Harris by more than 13 points, his widest margin in Iowa yet and the biggest Republican presidential win there since Ronald Reagan’s era.
Trump’s December 2024 filing in Polk County District Court accuses Selzer, The Des Moines Register, and Gannett of “brazen election interference” through a “leaked and manipulated” poll designed to sway undecided voters and demoralize Trump supporters. The complaint lays out a pattern of suspicious shifts: sample sizes skewed toward urban areas, questionable weighting that favored younger and minority respondents, and a sudden leak to friendly outlets that amplified the Harris lead without scrutiny.
Critics have long whispered about Selzer’s methods, but this miss—her biggest ever—smacks of something more coordinated, especially given the timing and the media echo chamber that treated it as gospel despite her spotty track record in national races. Her polls have always tended to favor whoever she personally supports, but this was by far the most egregious example.
The legal tug-of-war began when defendants yanked the case to federal court, citing diversity jurisdiction. Trump’s team fired back in May, arguing Iowa state law governed the claims and that federal venue was just a delay tactic. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger, an Obama appointee, sided with the defendants, but the 8th Circuit wasn’t buying it.
In a rare writ of mandamus, the three-judge panel—two appointed by Trump—slammed the district court for ignoring clear precedent and ordered the case dismissed without prejudice, greenlighting a refiling in state court.
As one Trump spokesman put it, “Today’s just and appropriate ruling by the 8th Circuit ensures that President Trump’s powerhouse case focused on the fake election interfering polls conducted and denominated by J. Ann Selzer, The Des Moines Register and its corporate owner Gannett will be litigated in Iowa State Court where it belongs.”
Now refiled in Polk County, the suit barrels toward trial unless tossed on motions—motions that have already failed once in federal venue. If defendants appeal any adverse rulings, the path leads straight to the Iowa Supreme Court, where a conservative majority could deliver the reckoning long overdue.
Selzer’s defenders, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, dismiss the whole thing as “frivolous,” with counsel Bob Corn-Revere insisting, “The 8th Circuit ruling was focused entirely on a technical point of civil procedure and said nothing about the merits of the case. This case is every bit as frivolous today as it was yesterday.”
Gannett echoes that line, with spokesperson Lark-Marie Antón claiming confidence in a “fair” state adjudication while privately fuming over losing their preferred federal forum.
But fairness cuts both ways. Selzer, once hailed as the “gold standard” for her uncanny Iowa accuracy, bowed out of polling altogether after the election flop, citing a desire for “other ventures.” Convenient timing, some say, especially amid whispers of data fudging to fit a narrative pushed by big-city editors at Gannett.
This wasn’t just a bad call; it fits a broader script where polls serve as weapons to manufacture doubt and suppress turnout. Remember the 2022 midterms, when “red wave” predictions evaporated on Election Night? Or the endless 2020 tallies that kept battlegrounds in limbo? Selzer’s outlier wasn’t isolated— it was amplified by outlets hungry for any whiff of Trump vulnerability, right down to the wire.
Iowa voters saw through the smoke. Turnout surged in rural precincts, delivering Trump a mandate that buried the poll’s fiction. Now, with the case back home, expect discovery to unearth emails, methodologies, and maybe even donor ties that explain how a three-point Harris “lead” morphed into a 13-point rout overnight. If the Iowa courts—ultimately the Supreme Court—uphold the claims, it could crack open doors to similar suits against pollsters nationwide, reminding the press that free speech doesn’t license fraud.
Trump’s push here isn’t vengeance; it’s vigilance. In a system rigged with invisible strings, holding the puppeteers accountable ensures the next election starts on level ground. As the case climbs the state ladder, all eyes turn to Des Moines—not for caucuses this time, but for justice.
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.
it’s good to remember that all of those crazies that are out protesting “No Kings” are all around us working in positions that can effect so much of our lives. because of their rabid partisanship it makes us question people in the jobs as teachers, professors, postal workers, election officials…. and the list goes on and on.
the brainwashing doesn’t just effect the media and comment sections… our entire society is driven by hate of the conservative political movement. and they are ruthless.
So you’re all for Trump being anointed KING?
ROFL, an example of what McLovin just described, fresh from the ward.
So you’re one of them.
It has nothing to do with Trump being King. That is just the lie you idiots protesting have been fed. Just in case you have not been paying attention; Biden did much worse things than you think Trump has done. There was an election and the people have spoken and what Trump is doing is what he promised and we asked him to do. Actually, we asked him to do much more and faster. You might have noticed all of the courts interference in everything he does. That is not what a king has to deal with.
Compared to what these radicals had in store for this country, Trump is a thorn in a golden rose that every patriot wanted to see for years. Thank god he is that thorn , because they have brainwashed this youth and others into forgetting what built this country. Wars and endless wars they based on freedom while being lied to as they still do. Enough is enough, if Trump could be a King , he got my vote hands down.