By Renee Nal
A billionaire crypto founder and a former Sierra Club chief have openly admitted they can’t win Americans—or even fellow Democrats—over to their climate agenda, so they’ve declared political “warfare” instead: secretly posing as MAGA conservatives, pouring tens of millions into GOP primaries, and bragging that they just took out Rep. Chip Roy as the first casualty in their elitist plan to deceive conservative voters and purge every politician who stands in their way.
A billionaire crypto founder and the former head of the Sierra Club are bragging about running a coordinated campaign of deception and massive spending to manipulate Republican voters and punish conservatives who stand against the climate agenda.
In a shocking podcast recorded at the elite climate gathering, the Prelude Climate Summit, Chris Larsen and Michael Brune, founders of the “Clean Break Fund”, laid out their subversive strategy to impose the climate change agenda on conservatives through deceptive infiltration. The idea is to break away from failed tactics such as ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and embrace conservative-friendly messaging -such as religion- to manipulate Republicans to get on board.
The aggressive tactics on display – massive super PAC spending, deceptive attack ads, punishing opponents, and infiltrating the opposition – were not invented for climate. Chris Larsen openly admitted that they were imported directly from the crypto industry’s highly successful Fairshake super PAC, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn crypto from a regulatory target into a political kingmaker in a single cycle. According to Larsen, the same bare-knuckle playbook is now being actively used by the AI industry’s on super PAC, “Leading the Future” – a group not associated with Larsen – which has raised over $100 million to punish politicians who want stronger AI regulation, particularly at the state level. Now, Larsen and Brune are openly applying these proven political warfare methods to the climate fight.
Larsen and Brune did not hide their contempt for Republicans who resist massive government climate spending. Instead, they openly celebrate tactics that mirror military operations: identifying “enemies,” dropping millions to take out opponents, engaging in “political combat” and “political warfare” and openly posing as MAGA supporters to deceive conservative voters.
“I mean, obviously that [ESG] was a total failure,” Larsen explains. He continues:
“We tried to load up the environmental stuff with a bunch of social and governance work that was like every Republican’s kind of worst nightmare…that climate was a Trojan horse to bring in all these lefty ideas and we have to stop doing that. I even think we have to stop talking about equity and sustainability,” he continued.
The scheme involves getting rid of failed tactics like ESG, while manipulating the right through existing organizations. Larsen explains:
“We’re putting a lot of resources into groups like Clear Path, the Evangelical Environmental Network. American Conservation Coalition is another group that we support.”
These organizations present themselves as conservative voices on energy and the environment, but they are not rooted in traditional conservative institutions or principles. Instead, they have spent years attempting to gain entry into Republican and evangelical circles.
Notably, this is not a new phenomenon. In 2021, the Capital Research Center (CRC) warned about what they referred to as the “Eco-Right” in an 84-page report. The CRC described them as “…those lobbying, litigation, and activist nonprofits that identify themselves as free market or broadly right-of-center and yet are attempting to rebrand environmentalism and global warming ideology as conservative values.”
With major new funding from Chris Larsen’s Clean Break Fund (and other leftist organizations such as the deep-pocketed William and Flora Hewlett Foundation [see here, here and here], the Bill Gates-linked Breakthrough Energy, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation [see here and here], and others), these groups have received a significant new lease on life and expanded resources to push climate policies inside conservative spaces.
Even as they deploy attack ads and primary challenges, Larsen and Brune openly discuss the need for more subtle, subversive messaging to pull conservatives into their orbit. Larsen explained their preferred framing:
