Climate Defiance has emerged as one of the nation’s most extreme protest groups
A fund backed by Hollywood stars including Jeremy Strong and Chelsea Handler provided nearly all of the funding for Climate Defiance, the far-left group that carries out illegal demonstrations like storming the field at the Congressional Baseball Game to “defeat” what it calls “fossil fuel fascism,” tax filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.
The Hollywood-based Climate Emergency Fund (CEF) gave $250,000 to Climate Defiance’s political action arm and another $243,292 to its charitable arm in 2024, according to the filings. That means the CEF provided more than half of the two groups’ combined grant revenue and the entire revenue for the charitable arm, the Climate Defiance Foundation.
The records provide the most complete view of Climate Defiance’s finances since it was founded in 2023 for the purpose of pressuring officials to fight climate change, which it says is “an existential crisis that threatens every fiber of every being in every corner of the world.” It also comes shortly after the IRS formally granted the group tax-exempt status in July 2025.
The nearly three-year-old organization has emerged as one of the most extreme protest groups in the nation, regularly disrupting public events and speeches in an effort to force lawmakers to rapidly abandon fossil fuel power in favor of green energy. It accuses oil executives and other officials who support fossil fuels of “mass murder.” One of their activists once went viral for calling former West Virginia senator Joe Manchin a “sick fuck” and “hideous fiend” to his face over his support for a large natural gas pipeline.
Perhaps its most high-profile protest came during the annual Congressional Baseball Game in July 2024 when Washington, D.C., police arrested eight of its members after they stormed the field demanding an end to fossil fuels. “Make no mistake: It’s the Members of Congress who should be locked up,” the group wrote afterwards.
The group regularly protested former Biden administration officials, including then-energy secretary Jennifer Granholm and then-transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, yet still earned a private meeting with White House clean energy czar John Podesta in late 2023, where it urged him to block proposed gas export facilities. A few weeks later, in late January 2024, former president Joe Biden ceded to those demands. The White House touted Climate Defiance’s support for the action.
In addition to its climate activism, since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, Climate Defiance has deviated from its usual climate activism and vigorously protested against Israeli military actions. “There is no climate movement without moral clarity. And there is no future on a dying planet where we normalize the mass killing of children,” the group said after disrupting an event featuring liberal commentator Van Jones, who it accused of supporting “genocide.”
The CEF, for its part, was founded in 2019 and has since received millions of dollars from Hollywood elites including actors Strong, Handler, and Thomas Middleditch; Walt Disney heiress and filmmaker Abigail Disney; director Adam McKay; producers Shannon O’Leary Joy and Geralyn Dreyfous; Getty Oil heiress Aileen Getty; and Rory Kennedy, the daughter of former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. Strong, McKay, Joy, and Kennedy all serve on the CEF’s board of directors.
In 2024, the CEF received $1.4 million from McKay’s foundation, $250,000 from the left-wing Rockefeller Family Fund, $15,000 from Getty’s foundation, $10,000 from singer and actress Barbra Streisand’s foundation, and $4,000 from actress Jane Fonda’s foundation.
“We are in a climate emergency,” CEF executive director Margaret Klein Salamon told the Free Beacon in a statement. “Fossil fuel corporations have lied to the public and corrupted our democracy so they can continue enriching themselves as the planet becomes dangerously hot.”
“The brave activists at Climate Defiance are committed to nonviolently telling the truth, raising the alarm, and holding fossil fuel executives and fossil-fueled politicians accountable,” she continued. “They are exercising their constitutionally protected right to protest in order to protect all of us and our common home. We are proud to support them.”
Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, made the opposite case.
“The climate left would not exist without deep-pocketed radical billionaires who finance their activism,” he told the Free Beacon. “The Trump administration would do the American people an enormous favor by ending the nonprofit loophole which allows bored radicals from punishing our society with their green communist stupidity.”
Climate Defiance did not respond to a request for comment.
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