Colorado's Ambulance Chasing Fracking Activists - Part III

Colorado's Ambulance Chasing Fracking Activists - Part III

Time for yet another update on our favorite anti-fracking activists who work every day to mislead the public about the facts related to shale development in Colorado.
We have described these folks in two prior reports here as “Colorado’s” ambulance chasing fracking activists.  Turns out that is more than a little misleading - and the professional activists working on the ground in that state are working feverishly to hide that fact from the public, as this report by Michael Sandoval at “The Complete Colorado” documents.

These anti-fracking activists have tried mightily to maintain an image of the intrepid members of the community working on a shoestring budget to protect Coloradans from the “evil” oil and gas drillers.  This of course is a fiction professional fracking protesters attempt to maintain all over the country, from Pennsylvania to Texas to Colorado to California, and all parts in between.  Their problem is that this cover story is seldom, if ever, true, and easily discoverable for reporters who, like Mr. Sandoval, take the time to engage in investigative journalism on the subject.

Mr. Sandoval focuses on a group that calls itself “Frack Free Colorado”, headed by a professional activist named Russel Mendell, whose background includes involvement in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, among other mindless agitation activities on a variety of issues.  Mr. Mendell has attempted to maintain the fiction that his group is some sort of organic, grassroots activity soley staffed and funded by local citizens, as Mr. Sandoval points out:

FFC spokesman and statewide director, Russell Mendell, was quoted in a Bloomberg article dated November 1, declaring that local efforts in support of the fracking bans were “100-percent-volunteer done” and refuted claims ofunreported contributions to Colorado activists by national groups.

In a statement posted to the group’s main page following the election (and also since removed), Mendell celebrated the “strong grassroots movement to protect our communities,” while pushing back against charges that “outside groups were pushing some sort of nefarious agenda.”

The obvious reason Mr. Mendell had that statement removed from his group’s website is that it simply isn’t true.  But then, hardly anything anti-fracking activists have to say ever is true, so that’s no surprise.
Mr. Mendell also had the “Frack Free Colorado” website scrubbed of a disclosure that it had received support from a national anti-fracking group that calls itself “Water Defense”.  One of the founders of that professional activist group was none other than the Incredible Hulk himself, b-list actor Mark Ruffalo, who possesses about as much actual knowledge on the subject of hydraulic fracturing as my 3 year-old granddaughter.

Mr. Sandoval isn’t the only journalist who has recently begun to make these connections.  In this great October 28 report, Washington Examiner reporters Ron Arnold and Luke Rosiak untangle a complex web of misdirection, deceit and potential violations of IRS disclosure regulations by a group that calls itself the “Center for Western Priorities”, and its national, well-heeled funders.  Mr. Arnold concludes his story thusly:

These netwar groups have resorted to exploitation, deceit and outright lies for their ideology, self-satisfied that they fight not for selfish ends, but for a worthy cause.

Unfortunately, what they cannot — or will not — see is that their cause is itself a selfish end.

Look, here’s the truth about the anti-Fracking movement:  it has over the last few years basically been taken over by the same far left-wing professional agitators and big left-wing foundations who staff and fund Move-on.org and Occupy Wall Street.  This is the truth – it is the reality that the industry and the country face today.
Any agitator, like Mr. Mendell, who comes into your community – regardless of what state you happen to live in – and claims to be a representative of a local, grassroots movement to ban Fracking, is very likely to have ties to these groups and be funded by these groups.  If there is ever to be an honest debate on shale development in the United States, we must all recognize this reality and stop pretending otherwise.
Thankfully, some really good journalists, like Mr. Sandoval, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Rosiak, are doing the hard work needed to bring the truth of this situation to the public.  We can only hope that more of their professional colleagues will begin to follow suit.