- UC Berkeley allegedly accepted $220 million from China without disclosure, raising national security concerns
- Chinese-made cranes at U.S. ports contain hidden cellular modems, enabling potential espionage
- Fentanyl precursors from China fuel America’s deadly opioid crisis
- CCP-linked human rights abuses, including organ harvesting and persecution of dissidents, mirror California’s erosion of freedoms
Universities as CCP propaganda hubs
(Natural News)—As California increasingly adopts policies reminiscent of Communist China—from oppressive COVID-19 mandates to rampant censorship—former Congresswoman Michelle Steel is sounding the alarm on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) deep infiltration of the state. In a recent interview with EpochTV’s “California Insider,” Steel detailed how Beijing’s influence has corrupted universities, compromised national security at major ports, and fueled the deadly fentanyl epidemic.
One of the most alarming revelations involves UC Berkeley, a once-prestigious institution now accused of covertly accepting $220 million from China without reporting it to the Department of Education, as required by law. The funds, intended for the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, allegedly granted Chinese officials exclusive access to advanced semiconductor research—technology critical to U.S. defense.
“Universities were the worst one,” Steel said. “Instead of teaching our kids how to think and how to be independent, some of the universities are brainwashing our kids.”
The CCP’s grip extends beyond academia. Universities, bloated with foreign cash, prioritize administrative expansion over student education, mirroring China’s top-down control of intellectual discourse. Meanwhile, students are fed CCP propaganda, conditioning them to accept authoritarianism—a trend already visible in California’s embrace of radical leftist ideologies.
Spy cranes and port security threats
California’s ports—Los Angeles and Long Beach—handle 80% of U.S. cargo, yet rely on Chinese-made cranes equipped with hidden cellular modems. These devices, not disclosed in contracts, could allow Beijing to track shipments, disrupt supply chains, and even spy on U.S. Navy movements.
“It’s a national security issue,” Steel warned. “We heard that they always ask for those cranes to be in remote areas because they put chips on them… they’re collecting all this data.”
China’s LOGINK software, used by allies like Japan and South Korea, further extends its surveillance reach. Despite bipartisan warnings, California’s leadership has done nothing to secure these vulnerabilities, leaving America exposed to economic sabotage and military espionage.
China’s fentanyl war on America
While China executes its own citizens for drug offenses, it floods the U.S. with fentanyl precursors, fueling an epidemic that killed nearly 8,000 Californians in 2023 alone. Steel revealed that cartels use remote-controlled surfboards to smuggle drugs across the border—a tactic enabled by China’s lax enforcement.
“When they use [fentanyl] inside of China, you have a death sentence. But [when it’s] taken outside of China, making money, they’re very loose,” Steel said.
The pandemic exposed the scale of China’s role: when pharmaceutical exports slowed, fentanyl deaths briefly declined—proof that Beijing could stop the crisis if it chose to. Instead, the CCP profits from America’s suffering while California’s leaders turn a blind eye.
Human rights abuses and California’s silent complicity
Steel also condemned the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghur Muslims—victims of organ harvesting and forced labor. Yet California, home to sanctuary cities and rampant crime, increasingly mirrors China’s disregard for human dignity.
“You are trying to hide something. [That] means you are not doing the right thing,” Steel said of the CCP’s crackdown on dissident artists like Shen Yun.
Even U.S. citizens face intimidation from Chinese secret police operating on American soil. Witnesses at congressional hearings hide their identities, fearing retaliation against family members in China—an unthinkable reality in a nation that once stood for freedom.
Steel’s warnings come at a personal risk. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy cautioned her about CCP surveillance, advising firewalls and screen protectors to thwart hackers. Yet she remains undeterred, driven by her family’s escape from North Korea.
“I always stand up for the democracy of the country,” she said.
As California slides further into authoritarianism—embracing censorship, crushing small businesses, and surrendering to foreign influence — one question remains: Will America wake up before it’s too late, or will the Golden State become the CCP’s newest satellite colony?
Sources include:
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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.
