(Conservative Playbook)—Robert Kennedy Jr. has consistently claimed that Sirhan Sirhan, imprisoned for nearly six decades for the 1968 assassination of his father, Sen. Robert Kennedy, is not the true killer, pointing instead to a second gunman. This stance has caused a rift with most of his siblings and their late mother, Ethel, and is likely to resurface as Sirhan, now 81, may face parole again in 2026.
“I believe Cesar killed my father,” Kennedy Jr. wrote in a 2021 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, referring to security guard Thane Eugene Cesar, who died in 2019 without ever being charged. “Sirhan,” he added, “is not my father’s killer.”
Documents declassified by the Trump administration recently revealed that Kennedy Jr., now the US health and human services secretary, wrote to then-US Attorney General Eric Holder in 2012, urging a new investigation into his father’s death and the two-gunman theory. In 2021, when Kennedy Jr., 71, supported Sirhan’s parole at his 16th hearing, six of his siblings, backed by their mother, condemned the recommendation.
“Our family and our country suffered an unspeakable loss due to the inhumanity of one man,” Ethel wrote in a Sept. 7, 2021, post on her daughter Kerry Kennedy’s X account, adding: “He should not have the opportunity to terrorize again.”
Ethel died on Oct. 10, 2024, at 96. Her children Joe, Courtney, Kerry, Chris, Max, and Rory oppose Sirhan’s parole, while Douglas aligns with Kennedy Jr. in supporting it. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, in a 2018 Washington Post interview, noted that Kennedy Jr. “makes a compelling case” for Sirhan not acting alone but has not spoken on it since.
Kennedy Jr.’s 2012 letter to Holder included a three-page “Summary of Evidence for the New Investigation” by Paul Schrade, a former RFK confidant and labor leader wounded in the 1968 shooting at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel. Schrade, shot in the head by Sirhan, spent decades advocating for the two-gunman theory.
“Paul and his team of nationally prominent attorneys including former US Attorney Rob Bonner strongly believe this new evidence is conclusive and requires a new investigation,” Kennedy Jr. wrote to Holder. “I agree and support his request for a new investigation.”
Schrade, who died in 2022 at 97, cited “new forensic tests on a journalist’s audiotape recorded during this crime and found in the FBI’s files” in his own July 29, 2012, letter to Holder. An acoustics expert claimed the tape revealed 13 shots fired, while Sirhan’s .22-caliber Iver Johnson revolver held only eight bullets and was not reloaded, Schrade noted. He also highlighted the autopsy report showing RFK was shot from behind, despite eyewitnesses placing Sirhan in front of him.
“I have been a strong advocate for the release of Mr. Sirhan B. Sirhan since I learned of evidence that was not presented to the court during his trial,” Kennedy Jr. wrote in an August 27, 2021, letter to the California Board of Parole Hearings. “After years of careful investigation, I arrived at the conviction that the story of my father’s murder was not as cut and dried as portrayed at trial.
“While Sirhan clearly fired shots at my father, overwhelming evidence suggests that these were not the shots that took his life.”
Kennedy Jr. pointed to Cesar, a security guard that night, as a suspect, noting: “Cesar was in the exact position to fire the shots as described in the autopsy. Three witnesses saw him draw his gun — which he later admitted — and one said she saw him fire it.” He added that the Los Angeles police never examined Cesar’s gun and that Cesar, who worked at Lockheed with high-security clearance, “acknowledged a loathing for the Kennedys and their race-mixing sympathizers.”
Sirhan has repeatedly stated he cannot recall the events of the assassination. Recently released files, disclosed by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, included threatening notes found in Sirhan’s Pasadena, California, bedroom, such as: “My determination to remove RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakeable obsession.”
The 2021 parole hearing exposed family tensions, with sources telling The Post that one side “double-crossed” the other. Despite an agreement to abstain from statements, Sirhan’s lawyer, Angela Berry, received a letter from the parole board via the LAPD the night before the hearing, stating: “On behalf of the Kennedy family, we oppose the release of Sirhan.”
“[Kennedy Jr.] had been staying out of it specifically on the assumption that his family was going to stay out of it,” Berry told The Post in 2021. “I got ahold of him right away letting him know what happened.”
Kennedy Jr. quickly wrote a letter supporting Sirhan’s release, which nearly missed the hearing. “The parole hearing started at 8:30 a.m. and Robert’s letter streamed in at 10:30 a.m.,” Berry said. “It read in part, ‘I have to assure you that the letter you got is not on behalf of the whole Kennedy family.’ That was the very last thing the hearing officer read into the record.”
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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.
