Over the last few decades, a particular pattern of disruptive protest has emerged in the U.S.: some news event or flashpoint brings a flood of demonstrators to a highly visible location, where they engage in a mix of legitimate speech and illegal activities. Such protests broke out—overnight, in some cases—after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Many of those involved merely waved flags and repeated chants; others, though, broke windows and physically attacked people they described as “Zionists.” In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement produced hundreds of such demonstrations, revealing a characteristic dynamic in which large numbers of nonviolent protesters surround a nucleus of trained, organized activists determined to engage in lawbreaking and violence.
These events might be described as hybrid protests—on the model of hybrid warfare, in which irregular combatants combine low-level sabotage and mayhem with bursts of full kinetic combat. The goal of hybrid warfare is to avoid provoking a decisive military response by disguising the full extent of an operation. 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. CNN’s famous description of a 2020 Kenosha, Wisconsin, riot as “Fiery but Mostly Peaceful” was both comical and all too typical.
When police belatedly make arrests during such protests, they are often seen as overreacting. Indeed, in the mostly blue cities where many BLM protests turned violent, progressive prosecutors often released suspects without charges. This dynamic did not evolve by accident. As Park MacDougald documented in Tablet last year, a loose network of professional organizers, Antifa activists, and self-professed revolutionaries has spent years teaching members how to organize, embed within, and ultimately escalate seemingly spontaneous demonstrations.
During anti-Israel protests at Columbia University, for example, arrests revealed that many of the most aggressive participants were seasoned radicals—some of them decades older than the students. These veteran activists train newcomers in what they call “direct action,” which includes techniques to battle police, barricade buildings, and disrupt arrests. “This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors,” wrote MacDougald.
The movement’s roots go back as far as the “Battle of Seattle,” when thousands of activists turned out to protest the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization and hundreds of “black bloc” anarchists broke windows and started fires. The shadowy network gained strength and tactical sophistication through the 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampments and the Ferguson, Missouri, antipolice demonstrations in 2014.
In 2016, as many as 10,000 demonstrators gathered at North Dakota’s Standing Rock Indian Reservation seeking to block construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) nearby. It would become one of the longest and most visible hybrid protests to date, with sympathetic media coverage and words of encouragement from President Obama. While local tribal leaders tried in vain to keep the protests peaceful, a smaller group—including many non-Native activists—repeatedly fought with police, blockaded access roads, and torched heavy equipment.
When protests such as Standing Rock turn violent, it’s often hard for the victims—or law enforcement—to identify and sanction the people who fund and foment this illegal behavior. Since many participants in hybrid protests are genuinely peaceful, even the lawbreakers among them can claim to have been participating in protected speech. Moreover, the funding channels and lines of authority in these loosely linked networks are notoriously murky. In a sense, the NGOs that fund violent protests are engaging in a hybrid strategy of their own: maintaining a veneer of legitimacy while using shadowy channels to boost extremism.
But after the months-long battles at Standing Rock, Kelcy Warren had had enough. Warren, the chairman and CEO of Energy Transfer, the pipeline giant that built and owns DAPL, is not a man to back down from a fight. Though the pipeline was eventually finished, Warren resented the expensive delays—and global opprobrium—brought on by the protesters. Warren and his legal team believe that Greenpeace was the principal behind-the-scenes fund-raiser for the radical faction that instigated violence at Standing Rock. Energy Transfer also holds Greenpeace responsible for a sophisticated PR campaign—based on falsehoods, the company says—to have the firm banished from international financial markets.
“What they did to us is wrong,” Warren told a TV interviewer in 2017, “and they’re going to pay for it.” That year, Energy Transfer filed a civil lawsuit against Greenpeace and various other parties under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That RICO suit accused Greenpeace of running “a relentless campaign of lies and outright mob thuggery.” Using the RICO statute in its legal battle with Greenpeace proved to be a risky strategy. “RICO is a notoriously nebulous area of criminal and civil law,” Adam J. White, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, observes. The original federal RICO statute, enacted in 1970, was intended as a weapon against the Mafia. “The innovation was to define the RICO crime as, not participation in a criminal act, but membership in a criminal organization,” former federal prosecutor and National Review legal analyst Andrew C. McCarthy explained in an e-mail exchange. RICO allowed prosecutors to take down entire Mafia syndicates based on their history of running an ongoing criminal “enterprise.”
But Congress went further by also creating a civil RICO statute (and many states enacted their own versions of the law). Civil RICO statutes allow plaintiffs such as Energy Transfer to sue not just an individual lawbreaker on the front lines, but the behind-the-scenes enterprise that funds and directs that criminal activity. “As an old organized-crime prosecutor, I’ve long been in the camp that holds civil RICO was a big mistake,” McCarthy said. In his view, the expanding use of RICO in civil cases has led to lots of needlessly complex, murky law. “I can’t say the Greenpeace litigation [was] an inappropriate use of RICO—I’ve seen worse ones—but it is not, to my mind, a use of RICO that is in the public interest.”
The Standing Rock protesters aren’t the only activists to be targeted under RICO laws. In 2023, Georgia officials used that state’s criminal RICO statute to indict 61 people connected to a two-year protest against the construction of an Atlanta police-training center that activists dubbed “Cop City.” Like Standing Rock, the “Stop Cop City” movement was supported by mainstream nonprofits and involved illegal tent encampments, firearms, arson, and other alleged crimes. The trial is pending.
Energy Transfer’s use of the civil RICO statute proved unsuccessful: a federal court dismissed the RICO count in 2019. Undeterred, the pipeline company immediately filed a new complaint under North Dakota state law. Although that suit did not include an allegation that Greenpeace violated the state’s RICO statute, the nonprofit describes it as otherwise “virtually identical” to the federal suit. Energy Transfer alleges Greenpeace and others entered into a civil conspiracy to engage in trespass, defamation, and other crimes. “Defendant’s unlawful acts include violent attacks on Energy Transfer employees and property, soliciting money for and providing funding to support these illegal attacks, inciting protests to disrupt construction, and a vast, malicious publicity campaign against Energy Transfer,” the suit states. It adds that the defendants exploited the anti-DAPL cause “to raise tens of millions of dollars from the public under the guise of concern over indigenous people’s rights.” The company seeks $300 million in damages. Greenpeace has responded that it “was not an organizer of the Standing Rock protests and did not direct any of the activities that took place there.”
The North Dakota suit is slated to come to trial in February 2025. Some observers believe the company has a good chance of winning over a jury in that oil-friendly state. Losing the case would, of course, be devastating for the environmental group. “Fossil-fuel billionaire Kelcy Warren is about to land a knockout punch on Greenpeace,” writes the Wall Street Journal. A victory against Greenpeace might open an avenue for other plaintiffs to challenge the obscure networks funding and instigating political violence.
Civil libertarians worry that using civil conspiracy or RICO laws to go after demonstrators and online critics will have a chilling effect on the public’s right to free speech and assembly. Of course, attacking construction sites and fighting police are not legally protected speech. Nor is defamation. University of Tennessee law professor (and founder of the Instapundit blog) Glenn Reynolds believes that more muscular legal tactics are long overdue, especially given how some left-leaning nonprofits seem to be knowingly funding illegal activity. “NGOs need some kind of accountability and discipline,” he told me. “Right now, they have basically none.”
Greenpeace and its defenders stress that local Native American groups—principally, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe—started and led the pipeline protests. Initially, that was the case. But it appears that the Sioux elders gradually lost control as more radical outsiders arrived. When the demonstrations began in the summer of 2016, Sioux chairman David Archambault II said that the tribe wanted to protest “in a respectful and peaceful manner.” Nonetheless, in early August, a group of demonstrators broke through a fence and scuffled with security guards hired by the pipeline company. Some were injured by guard dogs employed by the security team. Over the coming weeks, more protesters poured into various encampments—including one on land owned by Energy Transfer—and set up barricades on roads approaching the construction zone.
By October, clashes had grown more extreme as activists took over construction sites and chained themselves to heavy equipment. Others set fires and threw rocks and bottles, while police tried to clear the protesters by using pepper spray and concussion grenades. One woman fired three shots as police tried to take her into custody. (Her defenders said that the gun went off accidentally during the scuffle. As part of a plea deal, she received five years in prison.) By the end of that month, police had arrested more than 400 protesters.
Outside magazine reporter Mark Sundeen, who spent weeks at the site, reported that, by December 2016, the tenor of the occupation had changed as well. “In August, natives comprised about 80 percent of the camp, but now it seemed like it was closer to 20,” he wrote in an admirably candid report. As white activists flocked to the site, it became hard to tell who was in charge. Tensions flared between tribal leaders and the newcomers, many of whom seemed in it for the thrills. “[N]atives accused whites of ignoring tribal protocols, disrespecting elders, treating the experience like Burning Man or some other way station on their own ‘spiritual journey,’ ” Sundeen wrote.
The anarchist website CrimethInc (“an international network of aspiring revolutionaries”) published a firsthand account from a self-identified white anarchist who described physical scuffles between tribal leaders trying to keep protests peaceful and young radicals ready for battle. In one confrontation with police at a makeshift highway barrier, the proponents of direct action won out, and a pitched battle against the cops was on. “For the following eight hours, America is over,” the anarchist writes. “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.”
From the start, the most radical DAPL protesters gathered in what they called the Red Warrior Camp. In a rare press release, the camp’s leaders described the group as a collective of “highly disciplined, principled individuals who encompass a unique skill set to provide non-violent direct-action trainings, decolonization tools and organize[d] actions.” (Not surprisingly, direct-action advocates define the term “nonviolent” as loosely as possible.) Red Warrior members also said that they had “gathered allies from proven social justice movements.” The most extreme actions during the DAPL protests appear to have been led by Red Warrior members, often to the dismay of tribal elders. On November 1, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council voted unanimously to ask the Red Warrior Camp to leave the protest. The RWC activists refused.
Energy Transfer’s lawsuit charges that Greenpeace directed and funded the Red Warrior group from behind the scenes. The suit also names the Red Warrior Camp as a defendant, along with protest leaders Cody Hall and Krystal Two Bulls, both of whom served as spokespeople for the group. “Red Warrior Society is a front organization for Greenpeace USA intended to provide cover for Greenpeace USA’s support of and engagement in illegal, violent ‘direct action’ against Energy Transfer and DAPL,” the lawsuit continues. Those claims will need to be proved in court, of course. But for several years, the Greenpeace USA website hosted an appeal written by Two Bulls, soliciting volunteers and funds on behalf of the Red Warriors.
Sheltering and feeding thousands of protesters for several months must have required considerable resources. It is unclear how big a role Greenpeace or other groups might have played in raising and distributing those funds. But according to Outside, some of the white activists arrived with significant cash in hand. Sundeen recounted a tense scene in which “a stylish young white woman in a scarf and wool hat and designer eyeglasses” gave a group of Pawnee leaders more than $2,000 to buy supplies. When they returned from the errand, she accused the men of pocketing much of the money. The unfounded allegation led to shouts and anger all around.
The Standing Rock occupation finally wound down in December 2016, after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suspended the permit that Energy Transfer needed to tunnel under the Missouri River. Most protesters left the now-bedraggled encampment. Once in office, Donald Trump revived the project, and the pipeline went into operation in June 2017. But Energy Transfer’s legal battle against Greenpeace was just beginning. The February 2025 trial in a North Dakota courtroom could shed needed light on the methods that Greenpeace and other NGOs allegedly use to encourage mayhem at mass protests. It will also test the limits of using the court system to target NGOs that support violent, frontline activists.
Dozens of the people arrested in the 2016 protests were convicted of crimes, including arson, civil disorder, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. That record of convictions certainly reinforces the plaintiff’s claim that some Standing Rock activists routinely broke the law. But Energy Transfer’s lawyers will also have to connect those criminal acts closely to Greenpeace, which could be a bigger challenge. The federal judge who dismissed Energy Transfer’s earlier RICO suit ruled that the plaintiff failed to show that Greenpeace had directed the protesters “to perform specific illegal acts or had any control over the protesters.”
The thorniest parts of Energy Transfer’s case will likely involve various forms of speech rather than physical attacks. The company’s suit alleges that Greenpeace and its allies “engaged in large-scale, intentional dissemination of misinformation and outright falsehoods regarding Energy Transfer, DAPL’s environmental impact . . . [and conducting] a defamatory campaign to interfere with and, indeed, destroy Energy Transfer’s relationships with its investors, financiers, and other constituents.” (The company recently dropped some of the original suit’s defamation claims.) Greenpeace has responded that the company is using its power to suppress legitimate criticisms. “From the outset, this has been an attempt by ET to bury nonprofits and activists in legal fees, make them go bankrupt, and ultimately silence dissent,” the group said in a media statement.
The First Amendment doesn’t protect all forms of speech: fraud, defamation, and other crimes involving communication aren’t covered. “I don’t really see any First Amendment problem with a private plaintiff (not the government) suing another private party for peddling misinformation in a way that caused damage,” McCarthy said. But the plaintiff, he explained, would have to show a clear, close connection between the speech and the harm caused.
Finally, Energy Transfer will need to demonstrate why its suit at the state level is sufficiently stronger than the one that a federal judge dismissed in 2019. Speaking on background, a judge in another western state explained to me that judges often look askance at plaintiffs who file lawsuits in state courts after a similar suit has been rejected at the federal level. “Is there an advantage the plaintiff has in North Dakota such that refiling there might be perceived as unfair, given that a similar case was dismissed in Federal court?” he asked. Considering that concern, the presiding judge will likely be inclined to hold the plaintiff to a particularly high standard of evidence. Also, given that the defendants will certainly argue they were engaged in constitutionally protected behavior, the judge adds, “the case will likely be reviewed all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which might give the defendants some protection against being ‘home-teamed’ in North Dakota.”
Whatever the result, Energy Transfer’s suit against Greenpeace and certain pipeline protesters seems destined to be a groundbreaking case. Given this country’s robust free-speech laws and traditions, businesses, municipalities, and others victimized by violent activists have historically been reluctant to sue the groups funding left-wing protest movements. But the widespread BLM riots of 2020, the long running “Stop Cop City” occupation, and the continuing violence at anti-Israel protests have all brought more scrutiny to the shadowy networks of “direct-action” activists and the NGOs that fund and encourage them. Law professor Reynolds believes that leftist organizations have gotten away with promoting illegal behavior for too long. Businesses and other groups victimized by violent protests shouldn’t hesitate to challenge them in court. “If the last few years have shown us anything it’s that the Left will do what it wants even if the Right restrains itself,” Reynolds said.
“Our lawsuit against Greenpeace is not about free speech as they are trying to claim,” Energy Transfer said in a September statement. “It is about them not following the law. We support the rights of all Americans to express their opinions and lawfully protest. However, when it is not done in accordance with our laws, we have a legal system to deal with that.”
If Energy Transfer’s suit succeeds—and is upheld by higher courts—it could represent a sea change in how radical groups operate in the United States. For years, far-left organizations (and some putatively mainstream ones) have hidden their support for illegal activity under a veneer of legitimate protest. This legal battle could help expose how such hybrid protests are organized and financed.
Top Photo: In 2016, protesters tried to block construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) near North Dakota’s Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Most were peaceful, but some, allegedly backed by Greenpeace and other NGOs, resorted to arson and attacks on pipeline workers and equipment. (© Larry Towell/Magnum Photos)
