By James J. Devine
Rebecca Bennett spent 15 years flying Navy helicopters over the Persian Gulf, protecting the tanker routes that carry the world’s lifeblood. She fought in America’s oil wars. She watched friends deploy, bleed and die in conflicts that cost trillions and were, in blunt truth, fought to keep the fossil fuel flowing.
And today, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District owns stock in the very companies that profited from those wars.
ExxonMobil. Chevron. ConocoPhillips. Phillips 66.
The same corporations that knew about climate change in the 1970s and spent decades lying about it.
The same corporations that spent nearly $20 million lobbying Congress in the first half of 2025 alone.
The same corporations that, according to a FACT Coalition report released in October 2025, pay less than 10% of their global taxes to the United States while funneling billions to petrostates like the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan and Libya.
This is not a contradiction.
This is the modern Democratic Party in miniature: a party that claims to treat climate change as an existential threat while elevating candidates who profit from the companies causing it. A party whose House campaign arm blesses candidates with fossil fuel portfolios. A party whose front-runners talk about “incentivizing renewable energy” in vague, committee-tested language while their personal financial disclosures tell a very different story.
A party that may nominate a lifelong Republican from Texas for a seat in Congress where the GOP incumbent has virtually surrendered.
The question for Democratic primary voters in New Jersey’s 7th is simple, brutal and unavoidable: What is the price of your vote? And how much hypocrisy are you willing to swallow?
The Investor in Chief
Let us be precise about what Bennett owns, because precision matters and the truth is damning enough without exaggeration.
According to her personal financial disclosure, Bennett holds stock in ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66. These are not obscure exploration firms or greenwashed subsidiaries. They are the four horsemen of the fossil fuel apocalypse.
ExxonMobil and Chevron together rank among the world’s five highest-emitting corporations. A 2025 study published in Nature calculated that each is responsible for nearly $2 trillion in climate damages — a conservative estimate, given the fires, floods, hurricanes and heat waves that have become the American summer. Phillips 66, a refining giant, has been linked to some of the nation’s worst petrochemical pollution, much of it concentrated in a state — New Jersey — that has suffered more industrial contamination than almost any other.
Bennett, a Texas native who now seeks to represent a Garden State district poisoned by decades of fossil fuel infrastructure, appears untroubled by the irony. Her campaign website is a masterpiece of evasion. It promises to “incentivize the use of renewable and green energy” without explaining how, when or at whose expense. It does not mention her stock portfolio. It does not mention the wars she flew. It does not mention that the companies she invests in spent millions lobbying for the very tax loopholes that, as the FACT Coalition documented, allow them to pay pennies on the dollar to the U.S. Treasury while drilling abroad.
This is not a policy disagreement. This is a moral abdication.
The Oil Wars She Fought
Bennett’s military service deserves respect, not cynicism. She flew the MH-60 Seahawk, a helicopter whose missions included combat search-and-rescue, armed maritime patrols and support for Navy SEAL teams. She served in the Persian Gulf. She served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those wars were, in significant and documented measure, about oil.
The Pentagon has long understood this, even if politicians refuse to say it aloud. The U.S. military guarantees global energy security. It protects the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s petroleum passes. It maintains a presence in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin and the South China Sea — not out of humanitarian concern, but because the American economy runs on fossil fuels and the American military is tasked with keeping the taps open.
The men and women who fly those missions do so with courage. They do not choose the geopolitical realities that send them into harm’s way. But Bennett, unlike most veterans, has chosen to invest in the corporations that lobbied for those wars, profited from them, and then turned around and spent billions blocking climate action.
There is a word for this. The word is hypocrisy, and it hangs over her candidacy like smoke from a refinery flare.
The Party of Climate Hypocrisy
The Democratic Party faces a defining test in 2026. Its base — the young voters, the environmentalists, the progressives who powered opposition to Trump — views climate change as an existential threat. Polling consistently shows that voters under 35 rank climate among their top three issues. They are not asking for incrementalism. They are asking for a party that treats the planet’s destruction as an emergency, not a messaging problem.
And what does the party offer them? Rebecca Bennett.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s official House campaign arm, has apparently blessed her candidacy. The DCCC’s logic is as cynical as it is familiar: recruit candidates who can win in swing districts, raise money from wealthy donors, and avoid saying anything that might frighten moderate voters. Policy specifics are optional. Climate action plans are not only unnecessary but often considered a liability because they might alienate the billionaire class.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren stood at the National Press Club in January and warned that a party choosing donors over working people “is a party that is doomed to fail — in 2026, 2028 and beyond.” She was speaking generally, but she might as well have been describing New Jersey’s 7th District.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has spent years warning about what he calls “climate hushers” — Democrats who simply stop talking about the crisis. A Democratic think tank, the Searchlight Institute, recently advised that the “first rule about solving climate change” is to avoid mentioning it entirely.
That is not a strategy. That is a surrender. And Bennett, with her fossil fuel portfolio and her vague website language, is its perfect embodiment.
The Taxes They Don’t Pay
The outrage here is not abstract. It is measured in billions of dollars shifted from American taxpayers to foreign petrostates.
The FACT Coalition’s April 2026 analysis of 2025 disclosures found that Chevron paid just 2% of its global taxes to the U.S. federal government. Two percent. The same company paid roughly $1.6 billion to Australia, $1.8 billion to Canada and $755 million to Kazakhstan. Its combined federal, state and local U.S. tax bill: $367 million in 2023.
Exxon Mobil paid less than 10% of its global taxes to Washington. It paid nearly five times as much to the United Arab Emirates — a country whose human rights record includes forced labor, arbitrary detention and a legal system that treats dissent as terrorism.
ConocoPhillips, which produces more than 70% of its oil and gas on American soil, paid more than twice as much tax to Libya as to the United States. Libya, a failed state riven by militia violence and human trafficking, received more of ConocoPhillips’ tax dollars than the country where the company actually drills.
These are not anomalies. They are the designed outcomes of a tax code riddled with industry-specific loopholes, including foreign tax credits that allow companies to offset U.S. liability with payments to foreign governments — even when those payments are not really taxes at all, but royalties and production-sharing fees dressed up in tax clothing.
The 2017 tax law made the problem worse. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” signed in July 2025 made it a catastrophe, adding nearly $20 billion in new fossil fuel tax breaks while rolling back clean energy incentives. The American Petroleum Institute called it a victory. It was.
And Rebecca Bennett owns stock in the companies that wrote the wish list.
The Wars, the Profits and the Lies
Let us be clear about what these companies have done, because the scale of their deception is difficult to overstate.
Internal documents, congressional investigations and decades of journalism have established that ExxonMobil and Chevron knew about the risks of climate change as early as the 1960s and 1970s. Their own scientists told them. They chose, as a matter of corporate strategy, to fund climate denial, spread disinformation, lobby against regulation and promote false solutions.
They spent millions on front groups with names like the Global Climate Coalition, whose entire purpose was to confuse the public. They paid to have scientists attacked. They paid to have policy delayed. They paid to keep the world burning fossil fuels long after they knew the consequences.
And they profited. Immensely.
During the years Bennett flew her missions over the Persian Gulf, these companies generated over $480 billion in net profit. That money bought stock buybacks, executive bonuses and political influence. It bought wars, indirectly but really, because the military presence that protected their supply lines cost American lives and American treasure.
Now Bennett wants to represent a district in New Jersey — a state whose environmental justice communities have been poisoned by fossil fuel infrastructure for generations. She wants to be the Democratic nominee while holding stock in the companies that did the poisoning.
This is not electability. This is enabling.
The Choice Before Voters
Bennett may win the Democratic primary. The Hunterdon County Democratic Committee has lined up behind her. So have the New Jersey Firefighters Mutual Benevolent Association and the College Democrats of New Jersey. She has raised over $1.3 million, making her the top fundraiser in a crowded field.
None of her competitors want to raise the issue of her stock portfolio. To do so would be to “go negative,” to risk the wrath of party insiders, to be labeled a spoiler or a purist or a radical. So they stay silent, and the silence is its own kind of endorsement.
But the voters are not required to be silent.
The question before them is not whether Bennett served honorably. She did. The question is not whether she can win. She might. The question is what her victory would mean — for the climate, for the party, for the planet.
A Democrat who owns fossil fuel stock is not a Democrat who will fight to end fossil fuel dependence. A candidate whose portfolio is intertwined with ExxonMobil and Chevron is not a candidate who will tax them, regulate them or hold them accountable. A party that elevates such candidates is a party that has abandoned any pretense of moral seriousness.
Sen. Warren warned that the party is doomed if it chooses donors over working people. Sen. Whitehouse warned about climate hushers. President Biden, in his farewell address, warned of an emerging oligarchy.
The warnings have been issued. The evidence has been presented. The disclosures have been filed.
Now the voters of New Jersey’s 7th District must decide: Are they angry enough to demand better? Or will they swallow the hypocrisy, hold their noses and vote for the candidate who fought the oil wars and then bought stock in the companies that paid for them?
The planet is burning. The seas are rising. The storms are worsening. And the Democratic front-runner in a key congressional district owns shares in the arsonists.
That is not a contradiction. That is a disgrace.
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