A citizen-based movement that claims to support the legitimate aims of defending property rights and protecting Louisiana’s sovereignty is now showing signs of major internal fracture. When a movement turns its fire inward, attacking one of its most effective defenders, it weakens itself and strengthens the very forces it claims to oppose. A Fifth Column of interlopers who are destroying this movement from within has reared its ugly head, attacking only conservative legislators who are the only ones fighting in defense of personal property rights. That should tell you something about their motives.

Before more fully addressing this problem inside Louisiana’s citizen-led opposition to carbon sequestration, one fact must be stated plainly and early: State Rep. Brett Geymann (R-Moss Bluff), who serves as Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, is not the enemy of this movement. He is one of its most consequential allies.

Geymann is a conservative legislator with a long, documented record of standing against centralized power, government overreach, and corporate capture of the public square. He is a member of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus who has impacted budget reforms, authoring mechanisms for paying down unfunded debt at a time the prior Speaker of the House was broadly punishing enemies of his tax and spend agenda.

Geymann opposed Barack Obama’s Common Core (mis)education standards when doing so also invited political retaliation. He has crossed governors, leadership, and entrenched interests when principle required it. He does not run rigged committees, stage fake hearings, or sabotage his own legislation. Any claims to the contrary are false, politically motivated fiction.

For reasons that defy logic, a faction within the anti–carbon sequestration movement has made Geymann its primary target. Something strange—and destructive—is happening.

The attacks on Geymann follow the familiar and troubling pattern of Fifth Column sabotage. He has become a stand-in villain blamed for outcomes he neither controlled nor caused. The accusations are sweeping: that committees are rigged, that outcomes are predetermined, that his eminent-domain reform in 2025 was intentionally sabotaged. These claims collapse under even basic examination of the legislative record.

In reality, Geymann advanced eminent-domain reform under intense pressure. When an initial committee vote tied—an outcome that would have killed the bill outright—he secured a second hearing and moved the bill forward. Once on the House floor, final passage was impossible. The governor had made clear he would not sign carbon sequestration legislation, and a simple headcount confirmed defeat. Delaying a doomed vote was not deception; it was strategic restraint.

More importantly, Geymann did not stop fighting.

Late in the session, he amended a Senate bill in a way that fundamentally altered the legal landscape. He removed statutory language that labeled greenhouse gases a “public threat”—language long used to legally justify eminent domain for carbon pipelines and storage. In Louisiana’s statute-driven legal system, that change was decisive. Without a defined public threat, companies lost their strongest legal footing to seize land through eminent domain.

He also changed how transported carbon is classified, forcing companies to prove in court that they serve a legitimate common-carrier purpose. Industry fought these changes aggressively, and remains angry, because of Geymann’s concrete changes to the legislation that put these restraints into effect.

This pattern of Geymann’s defense of property rights is not new. In 2024, he passed legislation requiring a supermajority of 75% landowner consent before carbon wells could be developed, ending a regime where companies could seize subsurface property with virtually no resistance. That threshold was later strengthened to 85%. Before Geymann, landowners had no meaningful voice. After his efforts, they did.

This is not the record of a saboteur. It is the record of a legislator using leverage, law, and timing to defend citizens against powerful interests. These efforts will continue in the upcoming 2026 session.

Which brings us back to the deeper problem.

Grassroots movements do not fail only because of external pressure; they often fail because of internal misdirection and sabotage. When allies are treated as enemies and strategy is replaced by suspicion, the result is predictable.

If this internal sabotage of the anti-carbon sequestration movement continues, it will not be landowners nor liberty that prevail. The movement will suffer a stunning self-defeat, delivering victory to the very interests it claims to oppose.

Connie Hair was Chief of Staff to Congressman Louie Gohmert (Ret.) of Texas, serving 20 years as a congressional staffer on Capitol Hill. A native of Louisiana, she is the Louisiana State Director for the State Freedom Caucus Network.