Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the transfer of eight former death row inmates to the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, known as ADX or “supermax.” These individuals had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment by President Biden in December 2024, a decision that drew sharp backlash for overlooking the gravity of their crimes and the pain of victims’ families. The move places them among some of the most dangerous offenders in federal custody, including terrorists like Ramzi Yousef and drug lords like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, in a facility designed for extreme isolation and security.
Bondi’s statement captured the frustration many felt about Biden’s actions: “President Biden’s decision to commute the death sentences of these monsters showed abhorrent disregard for our justice system and total disrespect for victims’ families already suffering through immense loss.”
Victims’ families, who often learned of the changes without warning, described feeling betrayed by a process that seemed to sideline their losses.
Heather Turner, whose mother Donna Major died in a bank robbery carried out by one of the commuted inmates, Brandon Michael Council, said, “At no point did the president consider the victims. He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands.”
The transferred inmates include those convicted of particularly vicious murders within federal jurisdiction. One example is Edward Leon Fields Jr., sentenced in 2005 for the 2003 fatal shootings of Charles and Shirley Chick, a married couple gunned down while camping on federal land in Oklahoma. Fields, a former prison guard, stole their credit cards and used them after the killings, adding theft to the senseless violence.
Another is Shannon Wayne Agofsky, who abducted Missouri banker Dan Short in 1989, tied him to a concrete block, and threw him alive into Grand Lake, where he drowned. Agofsky later received his death sentence for stomping another inmate to death in a Texas federal prison in 2003, demonstrating a pattern of lethal aggression even behind bars. Many of the eight, including Wesley Paul Coonce Jr. and Mark Isaac Snarr, killed fellow prisoners while already incarcerated, a factor that justified their placement in ADX’s highly restrictive environment.
Bondi elaborated on her commitment after consulting with affected families: “After meeting with many of the victims’ families at the Department of Justice and promising to take action on their behalf, eight of these prisoners have been transferred to the Colorado super-max prison ADX. This will ensure that they spend the remainder of their lives in conditions consistent with the egregious crimes they committed.”
These meetings revealed deep wounds from the original crimes and fresh outrage over the commutations. Tim Timmerman, whose daughter Rachel was murdered by Thomas Steven Sanders, questioned the fairness: “Where’s the justice in just giving him a prison bed to die comfortably in?”
Similarly, Marissa Gibson, widow of slain Ohio police officer Bryan Hurst killed by Rejon Taylor, called the commutation a “complete dismissal and undermining of the federal justice system.” Such sentiments reveal how Biden’s blanket approach—commuting 37 of 40 federal death sentences—left many feeling that justice had been diluted for expediency.
The transfers mark the beginning of a larger effort under the Trump administration to reevaluate housing for all 37 commuted inmates, with Justice Department sources indicating the rest will move to ADX by early next year. This push aligns with a focus on violent crime and stricter confinement for high-risk offenders, contrasting with Biden’s reforms that critics like Sen. Tom Cotton labeled as siding “with depraved criminals over their victims, public order, and common decency.”
Ed Dowd Jr., a former U.S. attorney involved in prosecuting Norris G. Holder for the 1997 murder of bank guard Richard Heflin during a robbery, added, “This case was a message to people who wanted to go out and shoot people for the hell of it, that you’re going to get the death penalty,” warning that Biden’s actions send the opposite signal: “you can do whatever you want and you won’t get the death penalty.”
While some, like Donnie Oliverio—a retired officer whose partner was killed—welcomed life sentences as sufficient, the prevailing view among many victims’ relatives emphasizes the need for measures like these transfers to restore some sense of security and retribution. ADX’s regimen of 23-hour solitary confinement ensures these inmates face ongoing restrictions, a step toward aligning their punishments more closely with the severity of their offenses. As more relocations proceed, this development signals a return to prioritizing victims in the federal justice system.
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.