(Discern Report)—The news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination hit like a thunderclap, leaving conservatives across the country reeling from the loss of a tireless voice for young people and American principles. But amid the grief, one Florida Democrat decided to pour salt in the wound with a Facebook post that twisted holy scripture into a sneer at Kirk’s devout beliefs.
Steve Cody, a councilman from Palmetto Bay, fired off his message on his personal page just as reports of the shooting surfaced. He paired a Kirk quote championing Second Amendment protections with his own venomous addition: “Charlie Kirk is a fitting sacrifice to our Lords: Smith and Wesson. Hallowed be their names.”
Those last words rip straight from the Lord’s Prayer, a cornerstone of Christian devotion that millions recite in moments of reverence. Cody’s version swaps out pleas to the Almighty for a mocking tribute to gun makers, framing Kirk’s brutal death—a single shot to the neck during a civil debate at Utah Valley University—as some twisted ritual payoff for political stances on self-defense. It’s the kind of rhetoric that doesn’t just attack a man’s ideas; it spits on the faith that guided him through years of building Turning Point USA and rallying the next generation against campus radicalism.
Kirk wasn’t hiding his convictions on that fateful Wednesday. He was in the thick of a tour to bridge divides on college grounds, urging students to question him openly and restore real dialogue in a fractured nation. The 31-year-old, who often wove his Christian worldview into talks on everything from border security to free speech, crediting divine intervention for saving President Trump last year in a widely shared video. Now, with the FBI dangling a $100,000 reward for tips on his killer, Cody’s post stands as a raw reminder of how quickly some turn tragedy into tribal score-settling.
The backlash was swift. Cody scrubbed the post after it drew fire, but screenshots had already spread like wildfire through Florida outlets. By Thursday evening, he surfaced with a public letter on his page, headlined simply: “I screwed up.”
In it, he tried to walk it back: “Yesterday, I regrettably made a significant error in judgment by sharing a quotation on my personal Facebook page that referenced remarks made by the deceased Charlie Kirk. This action, born out of my deep anger and frustration with the now too common tragedy of gun violence, was misguided. I want to state unequivocally that this post did not and does not reflect my personal values, my deeply held beliefs, or my solemn responsibilities as an elected official. To the Kirk family, my sincere condolences during this difficult time, and my apologies for any statements I made that caused you further distress.”
That admission of fault lands flat when you consider the deliberate sacrilege baked into the original words. Cody didn’t stumble into parodying a prayer; he crafted it to score points in the endless gun debate, using Kirk’s fresh blood as the ink. His profile picture—an AI-generated shot of Trump berating a taco—only adds to the sense of a man more at home in memes than meaningful public service. Apologies from folks like this often read like damage control, especially when the delete button comes before the delete key on their conscience.
Florida Republicans wasted no time piling on. U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez, the district’s congressman and a former Miami-Dade mayor who once battled fires as a first responder, didn’t mince words: “Absolutely mortified by Palmetto Bay councilman Steve Cody’s mocking of Charlie Kirk’s death in real time. This is unbecoming of any elected official. Steve Cody must resign.”
Gimenez’s call carries weight in a state where trust in leaders is hard-won; he’s seen enough real crises to know that elected voices should heal divides, not hack them wider with blasphemy.
Echoing that demand was Rep. María Elvira Salazar, another Miami-area heavyweight: “How disgusting for Steve Cody, an elected official, to not only celebrate news of Charlie Kirk’s assasination, but also, sacrilegiously smear the name of an American Patriot who was passionate about his faith in the one true lord, Jesus Christ. Charlie wanted his legacy to be courage for his faith. People like Cody betray the trust of the very community they represent.”
Salazar nails the deeper cut here—Kirk’s life was a testament to bold witness, from his post-Trump rally reflections on providence to his unapologetic stands on biblical truths amid cultural storms. To cheapen that with altar talk isn’t just tasteless; it’s a betrayal of the pluralism that lets faiths like his thrive in public squares.
The outrage spilled onto X, where Ryan Fournier, national chairman of Students for Trump, lit a fuse with a viral plea: “PLEASE HELP ME expose Florida Democrat and Palmetto Bay Council Member Steve Cody. This pathetic slob went on Facebook to celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death, sneering that the assassination was a ‘fitting sacrifice.’ SHARE FAR AND WIDE.”
Fournier’s post racked up thousands of shares, turning Cody into a lightning rod for conservatives still processing Kirk’s absence. Others joined the chorus, like the Mostly Peaceful Latinas podcast account updating followers: “Update ? Miami democrat and council member Steve Cody refuses to resign and has apologized for his misguided post. We all know you’re only sorry you got caught. We demand you RESIGN or the governor has to step in and REMOVE you.”
Calls even reached Gov. Ron DeSantis directly, with users tagging him to boot Cody from office.
As the suspect hunt drags on, this episode exposes the rot in some corners of politics: a rush to gloat over graves, all while cloaking it in policy gripes. Kirk deserved better—from the shooter, from the system, and especially from those sworn to serve with decency. Whether Cody steps down or clings to his seat, his words will linger as a stain on Florida’s body politic, a crude echo in the prayers now rising for a fallen fighter.
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.