Nika Soon-Shiong, the publisher of Drop Site News who is also the daughter of Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, is circulating conspiracy theories seeking to tie a California-based Jewish couple behind a major pistachio processor to the recent U.S.-Israeli military strikes in Iran.

In a recent social media post that drew more than 1 million views, Soon-Shiong, citing unverified online claims that the United States and Israel had targeted pistachio warehouses in Iran this month, singled out Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the billionaire owners of the Wonderful Company, which grows and processes a large percentage of California’s pistachios as well as other products including almonds and mandarin oranges.

“The Resnick family’s Beverly Hills-based pistachio empire stands to gain,” she said of the alleged attack on Iranian pistachio warehouses. “You won’t believe the backstory,” she added, linking to the teaser for a recently released documentary she helped distribute called “The Pistachio Wars,” which seeks to implicate the Resnicks’ business interests, ties to hawkish think tanks and pro-Israel philanthropy in a shadowy effort to drive American hostility toward Iran and isolate its pistachio market.

There is little dispute that U.S. trade embargoes as well as steep tariffs on Iran — once a major pistachio producer — helped American competitors dominate the market after the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. But the documentary has faced skepticism for overstating cherry-picked evidence to support a narrowly tailored argument suggesting that U.S. pistachio growers hold blame for American hostility toward Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In addition to promoting the documentary on X, Soon-Shiong, a fierce critic of Israel, also pointed to the Resnicks’ contributions to what she called “Israeli military-linked groups from 2015–2022,” well before the current war began in February, while highlighting their donations to progressive causes, in keeping with their record of contributions primarily to Democrats.

She concluded by referring to their widely scrutinized use of California’s water supply, claiming they “stole” the scarce resource “in a series of secretive meetings two decades ago.”

In a separate post last year, she said the Resnicks’ pistachio business “underpins the California water crisis, the IDF and the propaganda war against Iran.”

Soon-Shiong, whose father is a biotech billionaire who took control of The Los Angeles Times in 2018, has also been outspoken in her criticism of other American companies with ties to the Jewish state. 

In the 2024 presidential election, she disclosed in a statement, refuted by the Times, that she personally intervened in order to block the paper’s endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris — a decision she said had been motivated by her opposition to the Biden administration’s support for Israel and “openly financing genocide” in its war with Hamas in Gaza.

Late last year, Soon-Shiong shared the stage as a speaker at the Doha Forum in Qatar with Neil Patel, the co-founder and CEO of the Tucker Carlson Network, during a panel discussion focusing on “Media Power and the Search for Truth.”

Soon-Shiong, 33, became the publisher of Drop Site News, a media startup that regularly features hostile coverage of Israel and sympathetic interviews with Hamas leadership, in September 2025, voicing admiration of its Gaza coverage.

“For media institutions that downplayed genocide, ignored apartheid and fail to cover America’s role in foreign wars,” she explained at the time, “the verdict of history will be merciless.”

Drop Site launched in July 2024 with an 8,000-word interview with two senior Hamas leaders in an article described as an “exclusive” conversation with officials from the terrorist group about “their motivations, political objectives and the human costs of their armed uprising against Israel.” Since then, the outlet has gained a reputation of credulously reporting on Hamas’ claims and repeating the group’s propaganda.
More recently, the site has faced scrutiny for publishing a Palestinian journalist in Ireland who called for violence against Israelis and an Irish pro-Israel commentator in particular, among other controversial claims.