Behold the “No Kings” protests last month. Millions of Americans in the streets opposing the Trump administration’s reckless governing principles. Thousands of communities expressing the solemn right to push back against a clear and present danger.
At least for the time being. For real.
As public attention is diverted by the daily diet of strategically outrageous presidential distractions, fossil fuel companies and their industrial allies have been quietly advancing a new form of corporate vigilantism. It’s less messy than clubbing dissidents and union organizers, but much more insidious. Louisiana, for example, is considering a bill that could charge protestors under state anti-terrorism statutes.
History buffs recall that in the early years of the 20th century, one of the primary imperatives of major industrial companies was to ruthlessly quell dissent. In California, big farmers supported by the state government hired goons with clubs to batter immigrant farm workers into submission. In Idaho, when silver and gold miners organized unions and manned picket lines for higher wages, mine owners convinced the state government to call out armed national guardsmen to end strikes with bullets. During the violent period of union organizing in Michigan in the 1930s, “security forces” hired by Ford and General Motors joined police in putting down strikes with gunfire.
Today, big industrial companies, especially those in the fossil energy sector, aren’t paying armed gangs to do their dirty work. Instead, they’re buying influence in state Legislatures and Congress. The consequence is new laws that criminalize free speech and the right to peacefully assemble, both guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Five states have approved legislation that could define an active protest as a “riot” subject to criminal law. Kentucky bans protests at the state Capitol. Missouri outlaws the right of public unions to man picket lines, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), a Washington-based research group that tracks legislation in the U.S. that criminalize public dissent.
Louisiana passed its first statute in 2017 to criminalize protest and demonstrations against pipelines and other “critical infrastructure.” In 2024, it enacted four other anti-protest statutes, including one that could subject people who participate in a street protest that impedes traffic to criminal charges under Louisiana’s racketeering law. “These are the laws that were originally developed and used to target the mafia,” said Elly Page, senior legal advisor with ICNL.
Not to be outdone, Congress is now considering eight proposals to criminalize protestors who wear masks, block traffic, and impede pipeline construction. Offenders who aren’t citizens could be deported. Nonprofit groups supporting protests could lose their tax-exempt status.
Attack on Environmental Activism
No arena of public dissent is under sharper attack than the right to protest harm to water, land, and climate. Eighteen states, including three in the Great Lakes region, have passed statutes that make protesting oil and gas pipelines and other “critical infrastructure” a crime.
Behind this wave of intimidation, almost all of it promoted and enacted by conservative lawmakers, is an irony of epic dimension. America, you’ll recall, was galvanized by public protest from its start. The Boston Tea Party is a momentous example of the power of civil disobedience and protest.
The same is true for modern American environmentalism. Public demonstrations are among the effective tools available in the environmental movement’s march to progress. It’s been that way since the first Earth Day in April 1970, which attracted 20 million Americans to participate in public.
To date, the various anti-protest laws haven’t led to many arrests, according to authorities tracking the trend. Nor is there evidence that they’ve influenced turnout for public protest. “That’s the point, though,” said David Armiak, research director and investigative journalist for the Center for Media and Democracy, a Wisconsin-based government and corporate watchdog group. “It creates a chilling effect. You have folks staying home and not participating in the democratic process out of fear of being prosecuted, or thrown in prison, or losing their jobs.”
Dakota Access Genesis
In case you’re wondering, the source of all this repressive legislation is a loud and ultimately unsuccessful campaign a decade ago to halt construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline from the Bakken oilfield in North Dakota to an oil transport terminal in Illinois. Most of the route was under the jurisdiction of state regulators, who issued construction permits. But among the 37 miles overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was a segment close to the boundary of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation that also crossed beneath a Missouri River reservoir.
The tribe, assisted by state and national groups, organized a campaign in April 2016 to block the crossing and prevent the pipeline from 1) leaking oil into ground and surface water, and 2) generating greenhouse gas emissions from the 1.1 million barrels of oil it was designed to transport daily.
By conventional measures, the campaign achieved almost all of its goals. The confrontation on the cold North Dakota plains attracted national and international public and media attention. Energy Transfer Partners’ stock price dropped six percent. When 2,000 veterans arrived in the fall of 2016 to show solidarity, the stock value dropped another 5 percent.
A divestment campaign convinced people to close 150,000 checking and savings accounts with 17 banks involved with the project, including Wells Fargo and Citigroup. Three banks—BNP Paribas, ING, and DNB—also sold their shares in the project’s original $2.5 billion loan. A 2018 analysis by First Peoples Worldwide found that Energy Transfer Partners lost $8.2 billion from the delays in construction due to social unrest and legal filings.
The tribal resistance also built enough support to prompt the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deny Energy Transfer Partners permission to cross the river in December 2016, pending completion of a full environmental impact statement.
in Benzonia, Michigan in October 2025. (Photo/Keith Schneider)
Anti-Protest Law Is Born
That hard-fought victory, though, was short lived. In January 2017, three days after he took office for the first time, President Trump issued a presidential memorandum that canceled the impact statement and prompted the Army Corps to approve the river crossing. Construction finished in April and the pipeline opened operations in June 2017.
In lockstep with the president’s memorandum, Scott Biggs, a Republican state representative from Oklahoma, introduced a bill in January 2017 in response to the North Dakota fight. The proposal called for punishing pipeline protestors with prison terms and big fines for any actions that “willfully damage, destroy, vandalize, deface or tamper with equipment in a critical infrastructure facility.”
The Oklahoma proposal became the first so-called “critical infrastructure” statute in May 2017. It was recast as model legislation disseminated to states by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative activist group funded in large part by fossil fuel companies. ALEC, which is infamous for developing the “stand your ground” laws that allow people to use deadly force if they feel threatened, broadened the infrastructure proposal to include stiffer penalties for “impeding or inhibiting” operations of a facility.
There’s a second dimension to the Dakota Access Pipeline protest that is equally pernicious. In the summer of 2017, Energy Transfer Partners brought a lawsuit in federal district court charging three of the participants – Greenpeace USA, Earth First, and BankTrack, an international finance research group – with racketeering. The company said the “conspirators manufactured and disseminated materially false and misleading information” and “incited, funded, and facilitated crimes and acts of terrorism to further these objectives.” Two years later the case was dismissed after the federal judge ruled evidence “fell short” of what was needed to prove the groups conspired to harm the company.
Energy Transport Partners immediately filed a second lawsuit in Morton County District Court in North Dakota in 2019 that accused Greenpeace of aiding and abetting trespass, arson, vandalism, and the harassment and assault of construction workers.
On March 19, 2025, a Morton County jury delivered a startling verdict, finding Greenpeace liable for more than $660 million in damages. In February, the North Dakota judge trimmed the damages to $345 million. Greenpeace is requesting a new trial outside Morton County, where the Dakota Access Pipeline protest occurred, claiming that public opinion is being heavily swayed in favor of the oil industry and President Trump’s Make America Great Again coalition.
Should it be required to pay a financial judgment of that magnitude, Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace International, its Amsterdam-based parent, could shut down after 55 years of its environmental safekeeping operations.
Take a close look at what’s happening. With the Greenpeace trial judgment and the anti-protest laws active in almost half the states, the fossil fuel sector is turning two of the most important venues of activism – the streets and the courts – against environmentalism. That is as worrisome and menacing as anything else occurring in this dark era of disruption and danger.
— Keith Schneider
