Fracking Advocates Allegedly Get Homeless People To Pose As Shale Supporters

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/19/3569272/pro-fracking-suspected-bused-in-homeless/

by Joaquim Moreira Salles Posted on September 19, 2014

Around 30 people wearing t-shirts with pro-fracking slogans showed up to a state hearing in Cullowhee, North Carolina, to support the shale gas industry last Friday. The problem is that many had no idea what fracking was.

Representatives from groups that oppose fracking told ThinkProgress that they believe the North Carolina Energy Forum (NCEF) compensated people to attend a state hearing in order to feign grassroots support for hydraulic fracking in the state. A group of people wearing “Yes Shale” t-shirts were bused 200 miles from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to Cullowhee in order to attend the hearing, activists from Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (BREDL) and the Jackson County Coalition Against Fracking (JCCAF) told ThinkProgress. Some of the people in the group were homeless, according to anti-fracking activists present at the hearing.

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Anti-fracking activists insist that there was more than one homeless person at the hearing, and that they were being compensated for their attendance. “One of them showed me a card for the Bethesda Center for the Homeless,” said Ashby, adding that when she asked this man why he was there, he rubbed his fingers together, implying he had been paid. Another man told Susan Crotts of BREDL that “he was given a sandwich to be there, and felt duped.”

Additionally, a video of shale supporters in Cullowhee posted on Facebook by BREDL shows three men clad in pro-fracking apparel, who did not seem to know what the hearing was about. “I feel like we didn’t know about none of this stuff,” Winston-Salem resident Christian Bradshaw says in the video. Ashby, the activist who is shown questioning the men, said in a phone interview that most of the people she spoke to “didn’t know what the word fracking meant.”

The t-shirted shale supporters were being escorted by Cash and another employee of the NCEC, and were reluctant to speak to the anti-fracking activists when these men were around, as seen in the video. Ashby told ThinkProgress that Bradshaw expressed fear of being denied the three-hour-long bus ride home if he elaborated on his previous comments.

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