In March, the pipeline company Energy Transfer won a massive civil suit against the environmental nonprofit Greenpeace. The case dates back to 2016, when as many as 10,000 activists traveled to North Dakota and joined Native American groups trying to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Some of the protesters vandalized equipment, threatened workers, and blocked access roads. Energy Transfer, the pipeline’s owner, lodged a civil suit accusing Greenpeace of secretly directing and funding the most militant activists. The verdict obliges Greenpeace to pay damages of $667 million, a sum that could bankrupt the iconic NGO. But, more important the case shines a light on the long-hidden connections between seemingly mainstream nonprofits and radical protesters who are sowing violence across the country.
The North Dakota protests fit a pattern that has become increasingly common over the past two decades. In case after case, a small and often spontaneous protest movement attracts experienced activists who blend in with the nonviolent protesters and then nudge the demonstration toward lawlessness. We started seeing the pattern emerge in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampments and during the often-violent protests following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. By 2020, this new form of protest exploded in the “fiery but mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter uprisings across the country. And, following the October 7 attacks in 2023, the movement went collegiate as pro-Hamas “tentifadas” materialized almost overnight on university campuses.
These protests all had several things in common. For one, they all spiraled into lawbreaking—trespassing, vandalism, threatening passersby—or naked violence, including gunfire, arson, and attacks on police. They all became magnets for a cadre of experienced, antifa-style activists who traveled long distances to join the action, had the resources to linger (sometimes for months), and brought specialized skills and equipment. Between major confrontations, these anarchists communicate anonymously on websites and encrypted messaging apps sharing “action reports” and the latest insurrection tactics. Ever since Occupy, such movements have usually also included tent cities: police-free “liberated zones” where veteran militants can organize and indoctrinate neophyte protesters.
These peripatetic activists often call themselves “trainers” and claim to educate their fellow demonstrators in “nonviolent direct-action tactics.” In radical parlance, direct action means taking physical steps to disrupt—rather than merely protest—some function the activists don’t like. These could include taking over campus buildings, vandalizing construction equipment, or interfering with police. Claims that trainers are teaching “nonviolence” are laughable. During the Columbia University pro-Hamas uprising, for example, veteran protest trainer Lisa Fithian was filmed by the New York Times showing a mob how to storm and barricade the school’s Hamilton Hall. The rioters—including many non-students—proceeded to trash the building and take a maintenance worker hostage.
But seasoned street fighters usually try to keep their violence within bounds that allow them plausible deniability. When things get too hot, the militants simply dissolve back into the mob of (relatively) peaceful protesters. Any clashes with police can be blamed on the jack-booted authorities. (The press almost always plays along.) Indeed, the stunts that the activists prize most, such as chaining themselves together to block roads, are calculated to provoke a police response, which can then be condemned as violent suppression of their rights.
A textbook example of this new form of protest took place near Atlanta beginning in 2021. The city’s police and fire departments planned to build a training facility on the grounds of a former prison farm. Some Atlanta residents objected. It might have seemed a local matter, but word quickly spread on activist online networks. Soon a ragtag army flooded in to block construction of what they dubbed “Cop City.” The newcomers called themselves “forest defenders” and set up camp in a nearby wooded area. The Stop Cop City protests dragged on for over two years. Some activists simply built treehouses. Others used bolt cutters to enter the site, torch equipment, and shoot fireworks at police.
In 2023, police were trying to clear the encampment when a Venezuelan protester named Manuel Teran fired at them from inside a tent, wounding one officer. Teran—who called himself Tortuguita, or Little Turtle—was killed in the return fire. Naturally, Tortuguita soon became celebrated as a martyr to radical causes. Far-left nonprofits from Code Pink to Extinction Rebellion stepped up their support for the movement and joined a sophisticated campaign to punish banks and other companies tangentially involved in the project. Activists demonstrated, sometimes violently, in various cities. Anyone arrested in such protests could count on having their bail and defense lawyers paid by various legal funds.
Until recently, the NGOs and radical networks behind these movements were able to operate in the shadows. But Energy Transfer’s successful suit against Greenpeace may mark the start of a new era. The trial exposed some of the ways that a big-money NGO—and a cadre of radical activists—can steer an initially peaceful protest toward mayhem. Like similar mass actions, the anti-DAPL protests started locally, as members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe objected to the pipeline running close to their North Dakota reservation. Tribal leaders wanted a nonviolent demonstration. But soon outside activists—many of them white and well-funded—began arriving by the thousands. Violence followed as activists battled police, burned heavy equipment, and barricaded roads. One protester facing arrest pulled out a handgun and fired several shots. (No one was injured.)
The pipeline eventually got finished, but Energy Transfer CEO Kelcy Warren wasn’t satisfied. “What they did to us is wrong,” Warren said in a 2017 interview, “and they’re gonna pay for it.” The company’s suit charged Greenpeace USA (and other branches of the global NGO) with civil conspiracy and trespass for the role it alleged they played in funding and directing extremist factions in the protest. Energy Transfer also asserted the NGO defamed the company through dishonest accusations and disrupted its relations with financial backers. Greenpeace argued its actions were protected under the First Amendment. The Mandan, North Dakota, jury sided with the plaintiff on almost all points.
Energy Transfer no doubt faces years of appeals before it can collect any of the staggering $667 million judgment. But the company’s lawsuit has already exposed some of the shady linkages between liberal NGOs and violent anarchists. Evidence produced in court showed that Greenpeace raised $20,000 to send trainers (including a Greenpeace employee) to teach what it called “non-violent direct action skills” to the protesters. The charity also donated a solar-panel-equipped van, power tools, propane tanks, and other gear. Greenpeace USA then–executive director, Annie Leonard, was all-in on the effort. “We have provided massive support for this cause since day one in terms of people, material, support and funding,” she wrote in a 2016 email. Leonard also used her Greenpeace email account to personally raise another $90,000 to support the protests.
One Greenpeace trainer bragged in an email about doing “some awesome spy shit” as he scouted locations where activists could blockade construction equipment. Another was photographed using a “lockbox” to chain himself to a piece of heavy equipment. A lockbox is a heavy plastic or concrete tube into which two or more protesters can lock their arms, forming a human chain and forcing police to spend hours carefully cutting through it. It is a favorite tactic used by climate protesters who think blocking highways during rush hour will save the planet. Greenpeace sent at least 20 of the lockbox devices to Standing Rock.
At the trial, Greenpeace argued that local tribal leaders led the protests and that the nonprofit offered only indirect support. According to the AP, Energy Transfer’s lawyer said the nonprofit “exploited a small, disorganized, local issue to promote its agenda,” and described the group as “master manipulators.” It’s possible Greenpeace was just one of several outside groups backing the most militant factions at Standing Rock. But first-hand accounts from the months-long protests do suggest the Sioux elders urging nonviolence gradually lost control to outside agitators. On an anarchist website, one young radical recounts how advocates for peaceful protest were overruled by the militant faction blocking a road near the pipeline. With undisguised joy he describes the subsequent all-night battle with police: “Rocks and Molotov cocktails defend the barricade; a wall of plywood shields deflects rubber bullets and tear gas cannisters. The partisans of nonviolence are gone.”
In an article for City Journal, I described Standing Rock and similar confrontations as hybrid protests, borrowing the military concept of hybrid warfare in which combatants employ sabotage and irregular forces rather than conventional troops. “The goal of hybrid warfare is to avoid provoking a decisive military response by disguising the full extent of an operation,” I wrote. “Hybrid protests exhibit a similar strategy: when nonviolent demonstrators outnumber hardcore activists, the press and the public tend to downplay the violence at the fringes.” Just as with hybrid warfare, the people engaging in hybrid protests have extreme but well-concealed goals. The causes they claim to march for—whether climate, civil rights, or Palestine—are interchangeable. The real goal is always radical, revolutionary change. A hint of this “omnicause” mentality could be seen in the Columbia protests: When protesters took over Hamilton Hall, they hung a banner out the window that read, “Glory to the Martyrs; Tortuguita Vive.”
The well-known NGOs backing these activists also employ a kind of hybrid strategy. They present a benign face to the public while using obscure channels to funnel money and resources to radical militants. In a fascinating exposé in Tablet last year, Park MacDougald documented how seemingly spontaneous BLM and anti-Israel protests often contain a nucleus of “professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals” who play “a central role in organizing and escalating” the protests. These groups are, in turn, politically and financially supported by “a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups.”
Until recently, it has been hard to uncover the ties between putatively mainstream groups and anti-American extremists. Leading progressive organizations, including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the George Soros–funded Tides Foundation, often engage in what critics call “charitable money-laundering,” MacDougald explains. This involves moving funds through layers of bureaucracy and offering grants and sub-grants to ever sketchier organizations. An investigation by Politico revealed that radical pro-Hamas groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, receive support from “some of the biggest names in Democratic circles.”
The students protesting at Columbia and many other campuses shocked observers with their automaton-like behavior: chanting in unison, hiding their faces behind keffiyehs or umbrellas, and locking arms to prevent outsiders from passing. This was no accident. The students had been trained by veteran militants and quickly adopted the tactics refined in previous hybrid protests. The activists distributed radical literature, including a “Do-It-Yourself Occupation Guide,” and personally led some of the most violent actions. When police finally arrested demonstrators at Columbia and other universities, they found that nearly half the protesters had no connections to the schools. What we are just beginning to learn is that these professional radicals do have connections, albeit indirect and furtive, to some of liberal America’s richest people and institutions.
The plausible deniability that shields big-money donors and NGOs may be starting to crumble in the wake of the Greenpeace verdict. There is nothing like the process of legal discovery to drag secrets into the open. In Georgia, the state’s attorney general has charged more than 60 activists involved in the Stop Cop City occupation under racketeering statutes. That trial, which will address whether the protesters were part of a “criminal enterprise,” should reveal insights into who funded the long-running protest. More such criminal and civil actions are sure to follow.
While we’re at it, let’s examine how even our own government has been sluicing money to revolutionary radicals. As I reported in a 2023 Manhattan Institute white paper, the Biden administration’s sweeping environmental-justice policies included sending billions in federal grants to far-left groups claiming to work for environmental empowerment. One of the most notorious of these, the Berkeley, California–based Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), received a $50 million grant. The Trump administration is now trying to claw back $1.7 billion in Biden-era environmental-justice grants, including this one. These efforts should shed more light on how money supposedly intended for benign causes winds up funding extremism.
Did some of the Biden-administration money go to legitimate environmental projects? Sure. But money is fungible, and funding sent to a group for one project frees up other resources that can be used for radical politics. Like similar nonprofits, the Climate Justice Alliance seems more interested in the omnicause than in any specific environmental problem. “The path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine,” the group asserts. It says it fights for ecological justice “under a framework that challenges capitalism and both white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy.” Leaving no box un-ticked, the CJA website also includes a page urging support for the Stop Cop City movement. It features an illustration of three childlike, multicultural activists fighting to “save the forest.” One is brandishing a pair of bolt cutters.
Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images
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