Here at CCF, we’re no stranger to catching activist groups hiding radical front agendas. Whether People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was actually providing grants to eco-terrorists and arsonists (when not killing shelter pets) or the “Humane Society” of the United States runs no pet shelters of its own and gives only one percent of its budget to local pet shelters, activist groups often have misleading names and imagery. We recently took note of a new set of agenda-obscuring activist groups: “Sportsmen” organizations that are funded by anti-energy and anti-development green radicals.
We call these groups the “Green Decoys,” and we’re debuting GreenDecoys.com to help expose their true agendas. As our Senior Research Analyst writes in the Tampa Tribune:
Many of these organizations started out furthering an agenda that ensured hunters and anglers could continue their favorite pastime for generations to come. But more recently, many of these groups have been co-opted by wealthy grant-making bodies notorious for their support of anti-gun, radical environmentalist agendas, all the while purporting to represent the hunting and fishing community.
We researched five groups that we identified as Green Decoys. They are:
- The Izaak Walton League of America, a national office whose local chapters advocate sport shooting, has received funding from a Chicago anti-gun foundation;
- The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which receives funding from the environmentalist Turner Foundation and has close ties to organized labor;
- Trout Unlimited, which has become ever more radically environmentalist as millions of dollars of left-wing foundation money has poured in;
- Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, which is funded by the radical environmentalist Western Conservation Foundation and is led by a Democrat-supporting Montana activist; and
- Bull Moose Sportsmen’s Alliance, which runs a liberal-leaning “Action Fund” and is run by former big-shots at other environmentalist groups.
You can learn more about these organizations and the web of environmentalist funding that supports them at GreenDecoys.com.
