(The Epoch Times)—After the U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro sent shockwaves worldwide, activist groups aligned with Marxist ideology and sympathetic to Chinese communist causes staged protests in America.
The same network of groups that fueled anti-Israel protests and the June 2025 Los Angeles riots against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has organized dozens of pro-Maduro and anti-ICE protests around the country.
One group, Answer Coalition, declared on social media an “emergency day of action” on Jan. 3.
The coalition’s national director, Brian Becker, after taking part in a New York protest, appeared in a segment on Chinese state media CGTN—a registered foreign agent with the Department of Justice—to condemn the U.S. move.
The United States, he said, “might be considered a rogue nation at this point.”
U.S. actions in Venezuela, he alleged, followed a pattern “where the U.S. demonizes … the leader of the targeted country, Gadhafi in Libya, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Milosevic in Yugoslavia … and then the U.S. goes to war; carries out unilateral acts of aggression.”
The groups’ focus expanded to call for protests against ICE following the fatal shooting of a protester, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation, another group in the network, on Jan. 9 shared a poster depicting President Donald Trump as holding cash in one hand and oil in the other, with an ICE agent kneeling next to him. The poster showed the two figures encircled by red fists—imagery often used by communist and anarchist groups.
The activities of the groups are now facing scrutiny in Congress, with lawmakers pointing to their connections to a pro-Beijing U.S. millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who lives in Shanghai and has appeared alongside Chinese officials in at least one forum that promotes the regime’s agenda.
“He is definitely someone that is anti-American in ideology, and regardless of where you might stand, even on topics like Israel versus Palestine, is funding certain groups that actually sow discord in this country with no efforts to actually resolve the issues, only to get us to fight one another,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said at a House Oversight Committee meeting on Jan. 7.
She proposed a motion to subpoena Singham and hold him in contempt of Congress if he fails to answer it. The motion passed after a voice vote.
Luna, asked about the motion, noted that then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had pressed in July 2024 for investigation into the groups over concerns about “efforts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its allies to sow discord in the United States.”
The lawmakers at the time named 18 groups in the network they said may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a U.S. law requiring public disclosure for individuals and organizations advocating for foreign interests, over their alleged ties to Beijing. The list included Answer Coalition and The People’s Forum.
Luna said she is following up on the matter.
“We have credible reason to believe that [Singham] is an unregistered agent of China in violation of FARA,” Luna told The Epoch Times.
There’s “absolutely a connection” between the network and “the anti-ICE riots that we saw in Los Angeles and across the country earlier this year, as well as the stuff happening in Minnesota,” she said.
It would be up to the Justice Department to decide the potential penalties if Singham doesn’t comply with the subpoena; regardless, the groups are done “playing their games,” she said.
Singham has sent money to the People’s Forum, one of the groups named by the lawmakers, according to a July 2024 Instagram post by the organization, which described Singham as “our friend,” and a “former Black Panther and life-long socialist.”
In October 2024, the Manhattan-based People’s Forum hosted a three-part course series on the Chinese Communist Party’s 75-year rule of China. The course descriptions said the regime’s founding in 1949 “ushered in a new era in China’s history” and praised Chinese socialism as a “unique model of socialist construction.”
A Jan. 6 X post from the organization proclaimed, “Our movement is fighting on all fronts,” including for “a free Palestine,” “to get ICE off our streets, and for socialism.”
The organization’s founder and executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, appeared at the World Trade Center on Jan. 8 with a bullhorn, leading a protest against ICE as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference inside.
Some Venezuelans have said the protests against U.S. operations in Caracas don’t represent them.
“I think these are paid protesters probably from the CCP,” exiled Venezuelan Jorge Galicia, who fled political persecution in Venezuela in 2017, told The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD.
He said those who take part in the protests should go to Venezuela and see things for themselves.
“I have a really good friend who was put in prison by the Maduro regime in the middle of the night; they broke into his house,” Galicia said.
China and Venezuela have long maintained close relations. Maduro met with a Chinese delegation just hours before the U.S. raid in Caracas that captured him and his wife. He posted a video of their exchange online, saying it reaffirms the “strong bonds” and friendship between the two countries, a “relationship that stands the test of time.”
Jiang Pinchao, a Chinese dissident and writer, told The Epoch Times that the U.S. military action jeopardized the interests of certain communist and communist-aligned groups, prompting them to “cause disruption” in an attempt to steer U.S. society in a direction that’s favorable to them.
“These interests are at odds with those of the U.S. So of course they will use all kinds of ways to interfere,” he said.
Lawmakers said that although America protects freedom of expression, the groups agitating for Maduro belong in a different category.
“Free speech for American citizens is different than foreign states filtering their money through NGOs and the like to sway elections and to sow chaos into our country—that cannot be allowed,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) told NTD.
James Moylan, a Republican congressional delegate from Guam, said he considers the pro-Maduro protests “terrible.”
“There should be some restraints,” he told NTD. “We’re just trying to promote freedom, and they’re trying to kill it,” he said. “I think they’re communists.”
He said he sometimes sees such protesters on Capitol Hill.
“They’re right up into your face. I just feel for them. I wish they could just learn and understand,” Moylan said.
Cloud, who was at the Oversight Committee meeting, said he’s “all about continuing the investigation” into the foreign money. He said the committee will ensure “we’re turning off the spigots” on “these foreign influences that are coming to our country solely for the purposes of undermining our country.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to Singham, The People’s Forum, Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Answer Coalition for comment.
Epoch Times reporter Nathan Worcester and NTD reporter Melina Wisecup contributed to this report.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
