After a Supreme Court victory and being reinstated to his football coaching position, Joe Kennedy has submitted a letter of resignation to the Bremerton School District in Washington state.
“We have come to learn of serious allegations of retaliation against coach Kennedy by the Bremerton School District,” Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel at First Liberty Institute, said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.
“They’ve done everything they can to make him feel unwelcome,” Sasser said, adding that First Liberty Institute, the legal organization that represented Kennedy throughout his legal battle, is “going to investigate the situation to determine whether further legal action is necessary.”
The Bremerton School District confirmed Kennedy’s resignation on its website Wednesday, stating, “The District has received Mr. Kennedy’s resignation, and it is pending board approval at tomorrow’s regularly scheduled meeting.”
In his resignation letter, Kennedy called it “apparent” that his “reinstatement ordered by the Supreme Court will not be fully followed after a series of actions meant to diminish my role and single me out in what I can only believe is retaliation by the school district.”
The coach added: “Bremerton’s football coaches, players, and parents have been such a blessing. I feel it is in everyone’s best interest I step back from coaching.”
Kennedy lost his assistant football coaching job at Bremerton High School, about 30 miles west of Seattle, in 2015 after he refused to break a covenant he made with God to take a knee in prayer at the 50-yard line after football games, a practice of Kennedy’s since he began coaching at the school in 2008.
The coach, along with First Liberty Institute, filed a lawsuit against the school and the case rose to the Supreme Court. In 2022, in a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court affirmed Kennedy’s right to take a knee in silent prayer in view of the public after high school football games.
Kennedy’s victory meant he would be reinstated at the school, and in March, the Bremerton School Board voted on a nearly $2 million settlement with the assistant football coach. The district agreed to “settle the attorney fees claim for $1,775,000,” according to information shared on the Bremerton schools’ website. The attorneys’ fees are to be paid out over the course of three fiscal years.
From the time he began the legal fight, all Kennedy said he wanted was to coach the young men of Bremerton High School and give thanks to God afterward, a desire that was fulfilled under the lights Friday night with a winning game for the Bremerton Knights.
🚨After Bremerton High School won tonight, coach Kennedy walked to the center of the field and took a knee in silence prayer. Fans cheered as he did so. pic.twitter.com/tlokZxhywB
— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) September 2, 2023
Prior to his first game back, Kennedy indicated in an interview with The Associated Press that he was not sure what the future held for him and his wife.
“We’ll make some decisions of what’s next in our life, because obviously it’s not going to be football forever,” Kennedy told the AP. “We’d like to do—I don’t know—maybe some ministry or something.”
Throughout Friday night’s game, Kennedy could be seen standing by himself away from the other coaches and players. “I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do tonight,” Kennedy said after the game, when The Daily Signal asked him why he was often separated from the players and coaches.
Kennedy did not say if there was any tension between himself and anyone else at the school upon his return, but did tell the press he hoped to feel “more embraced this coming week now that this part’s over.”
Asked about his future plans, Kennedy said, “I’m going to do whatever God tells me to do,” noting that he has children and grandchildren who live in Bremerton.
Kennedy and his wife, Denise, currently reside in Florida and have been caring for Kennedy’s aging father-in-law.
“Coach Kennedy’s family health situation is very serious, and he and his family are in our thoughts and prayers,” Sasser told The Daily Signal.
Kennedy’s publicist, Jennifer Willingham, said the coach is “looking forward to continue caretaking for his father-in-law in Florida and using his platform to raise awareness around the issues of religious liberty and freedom of speech.”
“At present, coach does not have plans to pursue coaching anywhere else,” Willingham told The Daily Signal.
Though he will not be coaching this fall, Kennedy will likely be busy, as a book telling his story, “Average Joe: The Coach Joe Kennedy Story,” is due out on Oct. 24.
“Those prayers I prayed on the 50-yard line after the Bremerton High School football games were never for attention, and certainly never to proselytize impressionable minors,” Kennedy writes. “As a 20-year Marine Corps veteran who fought in the first Gulf War, I simply took issue with my constitutional rights being assaulted—the rights I had risked my life to support and defend against when I took my oath of enlistment.”
Kennedy also details little-known stories about his troubled youth and his service in the Marines.
A movie about Kennedy’s life, also called “Average Joe,” is in production by GND Media Group, producer of the popular film series “God’s Not Dead.” A release date has not been announced.
Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.
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.
