The political assassination of Charlie Kirk continues to impact America. Charlie’s conservative nonprofit organization, Turning Point USA, has seen a surge in membership. There are reports across the country of increased church attendance, as lapsed congregants contemplate the sacrifice Charlie made to spread a Christian message. Conservative and Christian Americans are expressing themselves more boldly on social media platforms and college campuses.
An equally important, though darkly troubling, consequence of his murder has been the deluge of mockery and hatred from leftists celebrating Charlie’s death. Antifa-aligned groups show up on college campuses to attack Turning Point staff and prevent students from hearing Charlie’s arguments. Prominent Democrats continue to pretend that violent leftist rhetoric had nothing to do with his murder. Celebrity “journalists” defend Charlie’s assassination by not-so-subtly suggesting that Charlie’s willingness to debate a range of political and moral issues with Americans of all political backgrounds constituted some kind of impermissible “hate” or linguistic “violence.”
In a recent interview with Democrat Senator John Fetterman, leftist propagandist Katie Couric tried really hard to blame Charlie for his own murder. “Did you have any issues, now in hindsight, over some of the things that Charlie Kirk said?” Couric asked Fetterman. When the senator responded with compassion for Charlie’s family and pointed out that “engaging in debate would never justify what’s happened,” Couric nonetheless insisted, “I think some people might say Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric was extreme. … People think his words lead to violence.”
Breaking news, Katie: During the height of the civil rights movement, people worried that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words would lead to violence, too. His assassination did not dispel the truth of his message. The same is true of Charlie.
When famous “reporters” such as Couric so conspicuously work to justify a leftist-inspired political assassination, non-leftists pay attention. As one social media account posted, “Charlie was a moderate Christian conservative. If Katie thinks he ‘deserved’ this because of his beliefs, she thinks we ALL deserve the same thing.” A lot of non-leftist Americans have realized over the last two months that leftists want them dead.
For the last ten years, they’ve watched Antifa domestic terrorists burn down businesses, threaten drivers, and perpetrate all kinds of violence against random American citizens. Seeing this organized terrorism on computer screens, many non-leftists could effectively compartmentalize these incidents of violence and destruction as the actions of revolutionary Marxists and militant Democrats.
After Charlie’s assassination, however, non-leftists witnessed the publicized glee of ordinary Democrats across the country. Teachers, nurses, and even therapists felt no shame in expressing happiness over Charlie’s murder. Government bureaucrats laughed about Charlie’s death without any fear that they might lose their jobs. A music instructor in Pennsylvania recently posted a video in which she cruelly gives Charlie’s wife, Erika, “acting notes” so that the widow’s grief will appear more “convincing.” These psychopathic jeers have continued for two whole months.
Rather than being horrified at the public responses of so many leftist Americans to the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, Katie Couric apparently believes that Charlie deserved his fate. When such a famous corporate news face seems genuinely amenable to assassinating Americans for their political speech, even people who normally ignore politics notice how dangerously divided the country has become.
For non-political, non-leftist Americans, Charlie’s murder has been an exclamation point to the steady rise of organized political violence during the last decade. After a deranged leftist tried to assassinate an entire baseball team of Republicans from the House and Senate in 2017, non-political Americans hoped that the shocking event would help to cool the temperature in Washington. Just as soon as Democrat Party leaders did a little bipartisan kumbaya routine for the cameras, however, we got the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.
Even though those violent riots killed several dozen Americans and caused more property damage than any other insurrection in U.S. history, the Democrat Party euphemistically defended the mayhem and bloodshed as a “summer of love” for Americans’ civil rights. While cities burned, the corporate news media warned Americans that the violence would get much worse unless Joe Biden “won” the 2020 election. In this way, “journalists” and politicians openly threatened Americans as they headed to the polls.
After claiming the presidency, Democrats did not let up. Instead, they used the DOJ and FBI to hunt down and harass political opponents. Democrat-engineered lawfare that had been ramping up since Obama was in the White House went into overdrive as leftists persecuted non-leftists with abandon. Aside from years of politically motivated prosecutions, however, Democrats continued to call non-leftist Americans “fascists” and “Nazis.” By 2024, it was little surprise to anyone paying attention that leftist-inspired assassins would attempt to murder President Trump.
What was a surprise for many non-political Americans, however, was that such near-historic assassination attempts did not sufficiently convince Democrats that their violent rhetoric had become unarguably dangerous for the nation. Within moments of the attempted assassination of President Trump in Pennsylvania last summer, Democrat politicians and their allies in the press were already downplaying the event or pretending that the shooting had been faked (even as fire chief Corey Comperatore lay dead). Rather than taking a moment to consider how close the country had come to a potentially civil war-triggering murder of a major national figure, leftists publicly regretted that the assassin had failed. Random leftists took to social media platforms to complain about the shooter’s aim.
After all the years of Democrat riots, lawfare, and violence, the near-murder of President Trump reminded non-leftist voters what was at stake in the 2024 election. Even then, however, the average non-political American tried to mentally separate the attempted murder of a national politician from the way ordinary leftists viewed ordinary non-leftists in the United States. American politics, many told themselves, had gotten entirely out of hand, but surely cooler heads would eventually prevail.
Charlie Kirk’s murder ended that psychologically comforting delusion for good. When a young man with a young family is killed in the prime of his life, people sit up and take notice. When an American is assassinated for his political convictions, otherwise non-political Americans wake up from their apathetic slumber. When random leftists celebrate murder across social media platforms and mock a young widow’s suffering, even Americans who desperately wish to get along with everyone realize that the country is in peril.
Two months after the leftist-inspired political assassination of Charlie Kirk, it is clear that the country is not healing in any form. Leftists continue to call for political violence. Democrat politicians continue to call non-leftists “fascists” and “Nazis.” Democrat-aligned “journalists” continue to blame Charlie for his own murder. There is a growing awareness in this country that the whole house of cards precariously holding civil society together could come crashing down with one more violent riot or political assassination.
What happens then is anyone’s guess. But formerly non-political Americans know that the country’s domestic peace is in serious jeopardy. Too many Americans seek and cheer violence right now. Too many Americans are eager for civil war. If we cannot lower the temperature in this country, Charlie’s murder will presage an unbearable slaughter to come.
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.