S16, Ep1 | North Dakota’s Facebook Mercenaries

AMY: It’s been a decade now since members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe launched a historic movement to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline – but somehow details of the pipeline company's efforts to undermine the movement are still coming to light.

I'm Amy Westervelt, and this is Drilled. Last year we brought you SLAPP'd, from reporter Alleen Brown, the story of the pipeline company Energy Transfer's massive lawsuit blaming Greenpeace for the Standing Rock movement. Energy Transfer won that suit, and the judgement was so large it puts the future of Greenpeace in the US at risk.

Standing Rock started out as one Indigenous nation’s attempt to protect their drinking water, sacred sites, and treaty rights. Then thousands of people showed up to camps at the edge of the reservation to support them. But for Energy Transfer’s brand, the STORY of Standing Rock was as dangerous as any protest.

So Energy Transfer’s lawsuit wasn't just about sticking it to Greenpeace. The company used a big-swing legal case to retell the story of an Indigenous-led water protector movement. And that effort didn’t start in the courtroom, but in an incredibly well-documented ground campaign. Alleen’s back to tell you the story of that campaign.

Alleen Brown: Hello

Doug Hille: This is Doug[1]

Alleen Brown: Hi, Doug. Uh, my name's Alleen Brown. Um, I had reached out to you a while back. Um, I'm a reporter working on a story related to the protests back in 2016 and 2017 against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Um, and some guys at Rusty's Tavern, uh, said that you would be a good person to talk to

Doug Hille: Good day, Francesca Well, I can't believe you were digging in the sewers at Rusty's

[music beat]æ

Alleen Brown:   This past spring, some guys at a bar in Morton County, North Dakota told me that if I wanted to understand the impact the Standing Rock movement had on nearby communities, I should call up the rancher Doug Hille. And Doug got right to the point.

Alleen Brown: Doug lives on a dead-end road, and part of the Dakota Access Pipeline route runs nearby. Unusual stuff started to happen.

Doug Hille: There was a, a group, uh, out-of-state car, somebody sitting in the backseat with a big camera lens sticking out. I asked them what they were doing on the road here, and they said, "It's a public road." And I said, "Well, we watch who drives in this neighborhood, and, uh, w- we wanna know the reason that you're here."

Alleen Brown: The strangers wouldn't answer many questions.

Doug Hille: So I went, uh, I come back into the yard and, uh Uh, picked up a rifle they were taking pictures of the yard, and the mailbox, and everything.

And, uh, I said, uh, "I think you should leave." And they said, "Are you gonna make us?" I said, "No, but my friend here," and I raised my rifle, "will probably help me." And they left.

Alleen Brown: Doug told me that they posted images of him online. He began hearing other stories from his neighbors. A group of protesters blocked a school bus from taking their normal route[2] A grandma and her grandkids hid in a safe room for four hours, because they were worried about protesters. The new traffic made it difficult for Doug and people he knew to drive semi trucks loaded with hay down narrow country roads.

Doug Hille: I and several other people, um, just got in the habit that, uh, we carried, uh, we carried, uh, weapons for personal protection with us.

Alleen Brown: Doug said, even a decade later, those wounds haven't healed.

Doug Hille: Some of us, myself included, have not been on Standing Rock, uh, since.

Alleen Brown: On my trips to North Dakota, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what this place was all about.

I wandered the streets of Bismarck and the town across the river, Mandan, and drove down the County highways that connect the cities with the reservation. The roads are bordered by grassy, rolling hills, and occasionally these dramatic buttes. It's really pretty. There are a few tiny towns on the way, and dirt roads leading to ranches like Doug's.

When Energy Transfer’s private security contractors first touched down in this area in 2016, they found a community that was already pretty angry and freaked out about the pipeline protests. And the company developed a social media campaign aimed at hardening those divisions.

This all went down at the start of an era of social media misinformation that would transform Americans’ relationships with each other. These days, versions of the Facebook propaganda campaign that hit North Dakota get used around the world.But what's different in this case, is that I got ahold of the receipts.

Through a public records request, I obtained over 100 pages of internal email and WhatsApp chat records where Energy Transfer’s propagandists talk about exactly what they were trying to do — and why.

I'm Alleen Brown for Drilled and this is The Propagandist,  the inside story of a narrative war between a pipeline company and an environmental movement..

Back in 2016, a private Facebook group called “Defend Bisman” became the place for neighbors to exchange their negative experiences with the Standing Rock protests.Bisman stands for Bismarck and Mandan. And Kay LaCoe was the administrator of the group. At that time, she was also a spokesperson for a coal industry group.

I met her at a locally owned coffee shop in Bismarck.

Alleen Brown: Stick this in your face a little bit.

Kay LaCoe: No, not a problem. Um, and my voice projects quite well, so

Alleen Brown: Great.

Kay LaCoe: Yeah.

Alleen Brown: I just wanted to ask you about two things about your own biography. Um, one is, uh, you know, just 'cause I think people who understand that you work for this coal like Ignite Coal company might be like, well, you know, clearly she was doing this out of her, like love for the fossil fuel industry.

The other thing is you do horse riding with guns.

Kay LaCoe: Yeah. So, to your first point, um, I love coal. I love my community. Coal and oil are completely different things,

I had no stance on the pipeline. There was a void that I could help fill with my skillset of helping create and shape constructive conversation on a Facebook group.

Again, I'm about my community and my people. Um, and so yes, my favorite pastime, what I do in my free time is I shoot guns off of horses at high speeds. And it's just the coolest thing in the world. (Laughs)

Alleen Brown:  Kay tells me the protests DID cause some genuine disruptions.

Kay LaCoe: There was vandalism, there was fences that were cut, there were animals that were, you know, run around pastures and stuff like that.

So there were things, there was just enough truth that you could really blow it up if you wanted to.

Alleen Brown: Facebook Live had launched publicly that same year, and pipeline opponents and movement journalists were streaming videos from the frontlines of protests, where cops were sometimes firing tear gas or rubber bullets at unarmed demonstrators. It hit different when people could watch police violence unfold in real time. And the posts were getting re-shared by people around the world.

[AUDIO FROM VIDEO POSTED ON TWITTER – tape left long]

But a lot of people in Bismarck and Mandan are pretty conservative. Many have family or friends who are police officers. When they watched that footage, what they noticed was pipeline opponents  defying police orders or yelling at cops or throwing things. At one point, people lit a bridge on fire.

Kay and other local folks felt like their voices were being drowned out online. And some got doxxed for taking a position against the Standing Rock movement.

Kay LaCoe: I experienced it. I was, um, I was doxxed big time too. I received the death threats. And there was several locations that I got followed.

But then, another Facebook page appeared, that seemed to be aligned with Kay’s group. It was called Netizens for Progress and Justice.

Kay LaCoe: I, I remember Edison's came on the scene and it was like, boom, boom. I mean, like, it was like this, bam, bam.

Alleen Brown: They had a dramatic logo with an "N" and all these videos with titles like "Four reasons why Standing Rock is the worst protest in the last century." It hit a nerve for a lot of locals who felt like they didn't have media representing their views, the way the movement had.

Alleen: Who, who did you think they were at the time?

Kay told me Netizens presented itself as a counterweight to all that pro-movement media.

Kay LaCoe: They have all of these, this is your counter. We're your friends. Trust us.

Alleen Brown: A couple months earlier, after a video went viral of security dogs attacking pipeline opponents[8], Energy Transfer had hired the private security company TigerSwan.

TigerSwan was founded by an ex-commander of the Army special missions unit Delta Force.  Its contractors were mostly veterans.

The more you understand this company's background, the more it makes sense that they would be doing propaganda. TigerSwan was started during this post-9/11 era, where something called counterinsurgency was the reigning military doctrine. One of the things that blew my mind about some of these internal documents I obtained is that TigerSwan explicitly called its efforts at Standing Rock a “counterinsurgency approach.” Counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes that convincing local people to take on the military’s priorities can be as important as armed force.

In this case, a big part of the battle for hearts and minds was being fought on Facebook.

The guy TigerSwan brought on to lead that effort didn’t serve in the military, though. His name is Robert Rice, and he’s more of a tech guy. His big thing is virtual reality and he even attempted to develop a virtual universe called Omniscape. Propaganda might also be about changing people’s perception of reality, but it’s not totally clear why he was the guy for the job.

When Robert Rice joined TigerSwan's anti-protest effort, he started searching for a new narrative that could replace the story of peaceful, Indigenous water protectors fighting for the environment. I know because I've read his emails. In one of them, he asked if security contractors on the ground could take pictures of the wastewater drainage system for the tribe's casino. The idea was to claim the TRIBE was the one polluting the river.

ROB RICE (actor): They all lead directly to the river, so if we can show a link or very close proximity, we can take the wind out of the "Water Protectors" line.

ALLEEN: That’s the voice of an actor we hired to play Robert Rice.

Robert also wanted photos of any dogs that got injured the day of the dog attacks.

ROB RICE (actor): I want to create a few fault lines between all the third party activists and the tribes. Highlighting animal abuse and attacking dogs will have some effect with a few groups.

ALLEEN: At the same time, he seemed aware that it's not actually a great look to go after an Indigenous movement.

ROB RICE (actor): We want to be careful of public opinion and sentiment towards Native Americans, so we want to focus on the issues specifically, or wiggle around to take the side of the Tribes.

ALLEEN: In other words, he wanted to attack a movement that was started by Indigenous people and supported by hundreds of tribal nations — while also avoiding the appearance of antagonizing Native people.

Robert Rice wasn't just off alone in a weird corner coming up with this stuff.   He was deep in conversation with other TigerSwan contractors. And those guys had a LOT going on. TigerSwan was flying aerial surveillance drones over the camps, listening in on water protectors’ radios, and even sending TigerSwan operatives into the anti-pipeline camps undercover. They weren’t just collecting information.

In a WhatsApp chat that included TigerSwan’s founder as well as Robert Rice, another TigerSwan contractor floated the idea of sabotaging the porta potties by somehow removing the antifreeze element so waste would freeze. He told Robert that they should make lots of noise all the time and maybe pay some kids to fly drones over the camp with speakers playing Scandinavian Death Metal.

This is the kind of stuff the U.S. government has done when they want to break down groups they see as dangerous. In fact, this TigerSwan contractor described his ideas as psychological warfare.

And Robert Rice chimed in, too.

ROB RICE: Personally, I think 24 hour floodlights are good. I would also get some directional jammers to disrupt wifi, but not cell. They may need that for emergency calls, and if they want the internet, let them chew up their data.

Alleen Brown: Despite his spicy suggestions, Robert gives off a kind of try-hard energy. Like when a well-known military veteran announced he was joining the Standing Rock movement. Robert Rice made a point to complain.

ROBERT RICE: I mean shit, I did four years of JROTC and I feel  like I got more out of it playing soldier than he did and now he wants to fight against law enforcement? Kind of pisses me off. I missed my chance to serve and this nutjob is going to shit on things.

Robert Rice: Sorry, this sort of thing really annoys the hell out of me.

Alleen Brown: All of this was happening right around the time Donald Trump was elected.

Trump:   We're going to rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions Including the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the United States rule. Okay? Remember that.

Trump held investments in both Energy Transfer and Philips 66, another company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. As he was going around yelling about “American energy dominance,” social media disinformation was flooding the internet like never before. And a lot of it was favorable to him.

I don't know if it was intentional or not, but TigerSwan’s propaganda team launched the Netizens Facebook page the same day that Trump declared victory.

They posted videos featuring plain text over images with the kind of sappy, inspirational music you might hear in a video by a yoga influencer. Like this:

[PUT IN SOME OF THE DUMB MUSIC FROM THE EARLY NETIZENS VIDEOS?]

Its first videos claimed the pipeline posed no risk to water or sacred sites and that the movement was full of paid protesters and criminals.

One early video flashed a bunch of mug shots of water protectors, which were actually sent to Robert by a PR guy for the National Sheriffs' Association.

The videos hit their mark. Here's from one comment, from a couple of weeks after the Netizens' launch: “Thank you Netizens for getting ‘the rest of the story’ out there!!!! North Dakotan’s are so fed up with being invaded by the violent protesters,”

And Robert Rice started to notice that a lot of traffic to the Netizens page was coming from the Bismarck and Mandan area.

ROBERT RICE: Jim we are pushing various things on Facebook (primary) and website (secondary). Definitely contributing to some infighting and factions, both internal and on the bigger scope (like anti protestors in Bisman).

Alleen Brown: Robert had a cool idea about how they could increase traffic further.

ROBERT RICE: If we had some Kardashian or celeb nudes, we would have half a million followers in two seconds.

11/23/16, 7:04 PM – R2: Just sayin' heheh

Alleen Brown:  He maybe got something even better that celeb nudes. I don't know if Robert knew it, but his timing was pretty good.  Not long after Netizens launched, locals’ frustrations with the protests came to a head.

The morning of Thanksgiving, area residents got an emergency alert on their phones, indicating that protesters had blocked the intersection connecting the two cities.

[EMERGENCY ALERT SOUND]

Alleen Brown: Honestly, videos from this protest seem sort of tame. People set up a long table in the middle of the road, with pumpkins and a banner painted to look bloody that said No Dakota Access Pipeline. But they were blocking traffic on a holiday. And there was one other thing that really got the Defend Bisman crowd mad.

[CLIP OF PROTEST/SINGING]

Kay LaCoe: That was the day that protestors gathered in Mandan and placed pigs on sticks and pigs, heads on sticks, and made it very well known that they were going to be aggressive towards our law enforcement officers.

Alleen Brown:   Images circulated on social media of a demonstrator carrying a pig’s head mounted on a stick. Residents like Kay took that as a threat to police.

Kay LaCoe: I think that Thanksgiving day, I spent more than six hours on the phone with people who were just outraged by all of this.

And I think our Facebook group numbers request to join jumped threefold.

Archival tape: Our First Amendment right is to peaceably assemble.

You're on private property. They do not want you here. You will leave immediately. Or else you will go to jail.

"Water is life! Water is life! Water is life!"

Move! Move! Now! Turn around and go. I'm not gonna ask you again.

Alleen Brown: The next day, Black Friday, water protectors marched into Bismarck’s Kirkwood Mall and formed a prayer circle before being arrested. One local right-wing blogger claimed it was a “war on the Bismarck/Mandan community.”

Kay LaCoe: The average citizen was like, you know what, okay, we'll tolerate this for a while. Now it's the holidays, it's getting cold. Get the hell out.

Alleen Brown: That same day, in a whatsapp chat, Robert celebrated that his page views seemed to be going up.

ROBERT RICE: we are doing heavy targeting in the North Dakota area, mostly to focus on increasing the fracturing and creating doubt

Robert Rice: at least on the website the majority of traffic is in North Dakota, with Bismark at the top of the list with about 20-25% of traffic

Alleen Brown: People were already upset. And Robert was using Netizens to intentionally worsen divisions. The posts and videos kept coming, saying that outside interest groups had hijacked the movement and there were eco terrorists involved.

Things started to move beyond just the internet.

Kay was actually in touch with a totally different TigerSwan team member, who offered tips about how Defend Bisman members could organize. And she also talked to the police on a regular basis. Locals started participating in pro-police rallies. They held fundraisers for police. They monitored water protectors' social media accounts. And they offered assistance to business owners that were feeling nervous.

Kay LaCoe: I do know that there were oftentimes, um, yeah, I would say more than a dozen times where somebody would go down and sit at a business.

I'm not going to throw businesses under the bus here, but go down and sit at a business and make sure that. And Agnes got to her car, and believe me, Agnes is a completely fictional character. It's just totally North Dakota.

Alleen Brown: It's important to know that these places we're talking about — Morton County, Bismarck, Mandan — they're basically border communities. They're on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, and they're areas that have a long history of racism. Even Kay acknowledged that.

Kay LaCoe: At the very beginning of the peaceful demonstrations, it really amped up that anti-Native sentiment.

Alleen Brown:  She said she made it clear on Facebook that racist comments were not ok.

But for some Indigenous people from Standing Rock, the experience of visiting Bismarck started to get worse,  as TigerSwan poured fuel on the fire online. I talked to Valerie Eagle Shield about it at a gathering put on by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's Elders Preservation Council, at the Prairie Knights Casino.   Valerie's in her 60s now. She spent a lot of time at the camps, and helped at a school established there for children.

Valerie Eagle Shield: I was mainly a support person. Everybody's mom. I supported my daughter with the school. My son sang and stood at the front lines, and my husband did a lot of the, uh, prayers.

ALLEEN: This was a fight for her community's water. Valerie spent her whole life on Standing Rock but is enrolled with the Mandan Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. Like everybody from the reservation, she comes in and out of Bismarck regularly for errands and other things.

Valerie Eagle Shield: There are racist people everywhere, but it wasn't that bad.

Valerie noticed a shift at the same time that misinformation began to saturate the area.

Valerie Eagle Shield: things got really ugly when people were telling lies about the camp, the, the protectors, um, saying that they were dangerous and they were doing things.

Alleen Brown: She mostly noticed it when she went shopping.

Valerie Eagle Shield:  Yeah  I mean, we could go into shop in a store and // be walking around and then you notice somebody, you know, kind of around the corner is on the corner of your eye and you're like, oh, they're watching us, you know?

Alleen Brown:  She felt it at the checkout counter, too.

Valerie Eagle Shield:  I mean, you'd say thank you and they would, you know, not respond and, um, throw your stuff across that, that check thing and then count your change out and drop it on the counter like they didn't want to touch you.

But the scariest part was when she was driving home.

Valerie Eagle Shield: Yeah, they would, um, come up really fast on you and then, um, just follow you. Even if you slowed way down, they'd stay behind you. Yeah. And you worried about what — because there's long stretches of nothing, so.

[MAYBE A SECOND OF QUIET ROAD DRIVING SOUND]

Alleen Brown: This swell of anger in the local communities happened just as the camps shrunk pretty dramatically. A big North Dakota blizzard came through and hundreds of people had to leave all of a sudden.[19] All Their stuff got buried in the snow and was frozen there.[20] And THIS became one of Netizens' biggest stories. The message was that the water protectors had left behind an environmental mess of their own, and that it was gonna contaminate the water when the spring came and the snow melted.

Videos and posts hammered on the idea that pipeline opponents were the real environmental threat.

[MAYBE SOME MUSIC FROM ONE OF THE VIDEOS]

Finally, at the end of February 2017, police evicted the camps.

[Audio of arrests]

Those fractures that Robert Rice and TigerSwan were looking for and trying to widen — they were ultimately aimed at people's relationships with their neighbors. And there was no way that was just going to fade away because the camps were gone.

MIDROLL

I wanted to know whether the Mandan and Bismark community was still divided over Standing Rock, 10 years later. So when I visited in the spring, I tried talking to people at the Kirkwood Mall[24] about the protests.

Mall people: I'm gonna pass. Yeah, I'll pass. Okay. 'Cause I won't be saying anything good about it

Oh, okay. I won't either.

Alleen Brown: Call it North Dakota Nice, but no one seemed like they wanted to talk. I decided to try one of the bars off of Mandan's Main Street.

Alleen Brown: Hi!

Hi.

Uh, my name's Alleen. I'm actually a reporter. Okay. Um, and I'm in town trying to talk to people about, uh the 10 year anniversary of the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and all the protests that happened.

Bar guy: Fuck that bullshit.

Alleen Brown: These guys seemed like they were still mad — and also like they were down to talk. They said they were on the side of the protests at first, but then that changed.

Alleen: So what happened?

Bar guys: The eco terrorist movement. The people from out of state moved in and ruined our communities. Wow.

100%.

Alleen Brown: These guys start to run down the list of things I've heard from almost everyone around here I talked to about the protests: the pig's head, the trash left behind after the blizzard, the “outside agitators”. They say I should talk to their friend.

Bar guy: Oh, I'm, oh, I'm worked up. Um, oh.

Alleen Brown: He starts talking about how protesters would smash stuff up and smile and agree that they were paid to do it.

Bar guy: Disgusting Did disgusting human beings. Disgusting eco terrorists is what I call all them. Just

Alleen Brown: Was there?

Bar guy: Next time it happens, I, I say. Everybody should be on rooftops and wear masks and be protected and take 'em out.

Alleen Brown: Wow. Um,

Bar guy: take 'em out.

Alleen Brown: Did you say you had a business that they were bo, that people were bothering?

Bar guy: I'm not gonna mention that, no.

Alleen Brown: Okay, that's fine.

Bar guy: Yeah, because I, I understand that you're on their side.

Alleen Brown: Why do you think that?

Bar guy: Because your eye movement,

Alleen Brown: I mean, I think my eye movement might be because you're upset, so I'm just sort of responding to it.

It’s time for me to go.

But here's the thing. I didn't JUST hear that at this one bar. At another bar a different guy told me that they should have taken the protesters down with a gatling gun. And at a breakfast restaurant, yet another guy told me that they should have “done like they did at Wounded Knee” — which I can only assume means Wounded Knee 1890, the famous massacre of Lakota men, women and children by U.S. troops.

I asked the first bar guys if they remembered the Netizens page, and they didn't. Which I was starting to find out was sort of common. Even people who I knew had engaged heavily with TigerSwan's Facebook content sometimes didn't remember it all these years later.

So I started to feel a liiittle bit uncertain. How much of this anger could I even credit to TigerSwan or Facebook?

I reached out to James Forest[4] to see if he could help me figure it out. For years he was director of  West Point's terrorism studies program. Now he's a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and he wrote a book called Digital Influence Mercenaries.

I told him all about the situation that TigerSwan and Robert Rice had walked into. I asked him what a digital influence mercenary would do in that scenario.

James Forest: Well, first and foremost, you wanna gather information about the kind of population that you're trying to influence. Um, are there potential divisions within that population? Are there by biases. basically what you're looking for are seams, seams that you can fracture.

Alleen Brown: Robert Rice had used that same term "fracture" repeatedly in his texts and emails.

Alleen: One thing that I've sort of been grappling with is that the people in this community already had really kind of negative feelings about the protests. // If people already kind of like hated these protests, then why would you need propaganda? You know, why would it be worth the money?

James Forest: To amplify that

Alleen Brown: It turns out, an effective Facebook mercenary does best in a scenario where community divisions already exist. By identifying people's fears and uncertainties, and poking at them, you can deepen their convictions.

James Forest: So it's basically, yes, uh, I thought they were evil. Now you've confirmed it for me.

Alleen Brown: A private Facebook group like Defend Bisman would create an even stronger echo chamber, for strengthening that.

And James told me that an effective Facebook campaign can change people's actions.

James Forest: You put them in an emotional state where, um, they're a lot less likely to be able to make decisions. They're a lot less able to, um, do things that you don't want them to do.

James Forest: Um, and you can even provoke them to do things that you want them to do.

Alleen Brown: The other thing that I encountered when I visited this time, this is something that I mostly heard from men who at times had a beer in their hand. But, in three cases,, different people in different places said to me. Um, some version of, you know, we should have shot them all.

So, you know. I don't know that I, that I can say, oh, this, these Facebook videos are what made people feel that way. But, that's, kind of what I found.

James Forest: There. a central, um, concept within the study of terrorism, uh, about extremism and radicalization. And the radicalization process involves, increasing hostility towards the outgroup from within the ingroup, uh, to the point where the ingroup members start believing that their own survival, it depends on // in some cases, even the elimination of the outgroup., so it, it's kind of startling to hear that that's kind of mirrored in this particular incident where violent extremism is, like you said, it's a fantasy, but it's still something that, um, is, is kind of a, a, a marker of the escalation.

PAUSE FOR THAT TO SET IN

Alleen Brown: TigerSwan's propaganda story didn't end when the protest camps shut down. In fact, Kay LaCoe, the Bismark local, communicated with Netizens after things died down in North Dakota. She got a message from a guy calling himself “Al Netizen” on February 27, 2017.

Kay LaCoe: So the message was, hi kay, we're we — Netizens for Justice and Progress are coming out to Bismarck next week to interview people, particularly locals about the no Dapple stuff for a mini documentary we are producing.

Alleen Brown: He was looking for help finding local people to interview on camera.

Kay LaCoe: We want to get the rest of the story out there and are tired of other folks, vice Young Turks, unicorn riot, et cetera, controlling the news and false narrative.

I did give, get him connected with six, seven people in the Bisman Bismarck-Mandan area.

Alleen Brown: Robert Rice and his team did make a documentary, featuring Kay and a number of other locals.

It begins with this dramatic flashing "N" logo that says "I am Netizen" underneath.

And then cuts to footage from behind a police line. Pipeline opponents are standing on top of a truck yelling, with the wooden frame of a teepee behind them. The police are dragging people from the protest side to the police side to arrest them. A couple armored vehicles are parked nearby.

Narrator: How did we get to this point? Let's take a closer look at how Standing Rock became one of the worst protests in American history.

[keep playing sappy music while I do voiceover?]

Alleen Brown: The title card says  The Rise and Fall of Standing Rock. Robert Rice appears as a talking head throughout the film. And eventually Kay comes on the screen. She's sitting in a bar with a few other local people.

Kay LaCoe: In two days, they came after my job. They sent me death threats. They hoped that my children would die before my eyes.

Alleen Brown: Kay watched the documentary when it came out. I called her to ask her more about it.  She told me it had been cathartic to get together and look back at how this all happened.

Kay LaCoe: It was kinda like a reunion of sorts.

Alleen Brown: But Kay noticed the same thing I did.

Kay LaCoe: I do remember when I watched it, it just reeked of propaganda. It wasn't what you expect. So I've been watching a ton of documentaries on Netflix, and it wasn't this, "Hey, we're going to unfold this story and be as transparent and middle of the road as we can."

If I remember correctly, there was like these elements of just straight up propaganda, like like trying to make it worse than it was.

Alleen Brown: Did you feel any way about like, "Oh, I'm in this." Like where, what was your gut feeling and like kind of your emotional reaction?

Kay LaCoe: It kind of was that neutral, eh, okay, whatever.

I mean, that, that's just the world that we live in now is that's what's being done is sensationalizing something to suit their own needs.

Alleen Brown: There was a question that was still nagging at me. I asked Kay if she kind of knew Energy Transfer was behind Netizens.

Kay LaCoe: Absolutely not. I always assumed that it was all working towards, you know, anti-protest. For us here, at least I, speaking for the ones that I closely communicated with, it wasn't about the pipeline.

We didn't care if it went through or not. What we cared about was the bullshit that it brought on our community,

Alleen Brown: Do you think that these guys were maybe the real outside agitators? What do you think of that idea?

Kay LaCoe: I sure certainly wouldn't dismiss it.

I think that there was at least some of us felt legitimized that we were right to care about our community, that we were right to be against these outside detractors. And, um, by s- you know, a weird twist of fate, it was the outside, it was outside influences legitimizing our efforts.

I sent questions to Energy Transfer, TigerSwan, and Robert Rice about all of this, but none of them decided to comment.

That documentary that Kay was in doesn't actually seem like it was made for people in North Dakota. Because right as they made it, Robert Rice was shifting his attention elsewhere. The water protectors had dispersed. And some of them moved to a handful of tiny encampments established throughout the region to promote healing or prepare for future fights.

Here's the actual Robert Rice, describing it in the documentary.

Robert Rice:  The camps have been closed. The activists and protesters have now left to find other pipelines to create new camps and to find new followers.

Alleen Brown: One of the camps was in Iowa and it was called Little Creek.

And that's where Robert Rice began the next phase of his propaganda operation. This time, locals wouldn't just be the targets of propaganda, they would be its mouthpieces.

That’s next on Drilled: The Propagandist..

Robert Rice: Is this truly the future of ecoterrorism and protesting in North America?

END

A note to listeners: We hired an actor to read for Robert Rice. These were originally emails and text messages and we adapted them for voice. If you would like to see the primary documents they are linked in the show notes.