(Daily Signal)—The assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University Wednesday marks one more in a list of violent attacks against prominent conservatives.
Kirk, 31, had been hosting an event with students, and was in the middle of discussing shooters who identify as transgender.
He founded Turning Point USA to bring together conservative young people, and the organization grew to become the largest conservative youth grassroots group in the country.
The shooting came less than five months after the Southern Poverty Law Center—which became famous for suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy in the 1980s—put Turning Point USA on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In a statement today, the group said, “We condemn the shooting of Charlie Kirk and all violence in any form.”
This does not mark the first time conservatives have been targeted for violence after the SPLC criticized them.
Conservatives have faced many kinds of hostility, including 96 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and 356 attacks on Catholic churches since the leak of the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, Democrats, too, have faced attacks—most recently the horrific shooting of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman.
This article, however, focuses on physical attacks on Republican leaders or conservative groups.
A 2012 Terrorist Attack
In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins II opened fire at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the conservative Christian think tank the Family Research Council.
He carried a semiautomatic pistol and a bag of Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches. He later told the FBI he targeted the Family Research Council because he found it on the SPLC “hate map.” He said he intended to shoot everyone in the building and smear a Chick-fil-A sandwich in their faces. At the time, liberals had criticized Chick-fil-A for funding socially conservative groups like the Family Research Council.
In September 2013, a judge sentenced Corkins, 29, to 25 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to three felony charges, including a terrorism offense.
The SPLC condemned the attack, but did not take the Family Research Council off the “hate map.”
The Congressional Baseball Game Shooting
In June 2017, 66-year-old James T. Hodgkinson opened fire at a Republican practice for the Congressional Baseball Game. He shot and wounded four people: then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La.; U.S. Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika.
Scalise nearly lost his life, and he ascribed his survival to a series of 17 miracles documented in his book “Back in the Game: One Gunman, Countless Heroes, and the Fight for My Life.”
Hodgkinson specifically targeted Republicans in the shooting. He had volunteered for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016 and “liked” the SPLC on Facebook. The SPLC had repeatedly attacked Scalise. Sanders vehemently condemned the shooting. Then-SPLC CEO Richard Cohen condemned the attack as a “sickening and cowardly act of terror that must be condemned by everyone across the political spectrum.”
Rand Paul Attacked
Also in 2017, then-59-year-old Rene Boucher, a neighbor, physically attacked Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., from behind while the senator was mowing his lawn.
Paul suffered multiple fractured ribs and later contracted pneumonia, which required medical attention. Boucher admitted the assault but denied it was politically motivated, NBC News reported.
A judge had initially sentenced Boucher to 30 days in jail, 100 hours of community service, and a $10,000 fine, but prosecutors said the sentence was too lenient. A judge added eight months in prison to the sentence in July 2020, along with an additional six months home confinement.
Minnesota Republican Sucker-Punched Before Election
In October 2018, 53-year-old Richard Schmit punched Shane Mekeland, a Republican candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives.
During the attack, Schmit reportedly said, “You f—ing people don’t give a s— about the middle class.”
Schmit pleaded guilty to third-degree felony assault.
A Would-Be Kavanaugh Assassin
In June 2022, 26-year-old Nicholas Roske staked out near the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, with weapons in an assassination attempt.
The suspect told police “he was upset about the leak of a recent Supreme Court draft decision regarding the right to abortion as well as the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.”
Roske pleaded guilty in May to attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh. A judge has scheduled his sentencing for Oct. 3.
Butler
On July 13, 2024, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks shot then-former President Donald Trump in the ear in Butler, Pennsylvania. Crooks also shot dead 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, a former volunteer fire chief.
Many questions about Crooks remain unanswered.
Trump has credited God and a “miracle” for his survival.
A Second Assassination Attempt
In September 2024, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh aimed a rifle at Trump at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Secret Service arrested Routh, who is standing trial in Fort Pierce this week.
Routh pleaded not guilty to charges of attempting to assassinate a major presidential candidate and assaulting a federal officer, along with many firearm charges. He faces a sentence of life in prison if convicted.
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.