S16, Ep3 | The Story of a Decade-Long Investigation

[00:00:00] Amy VO: I’m Amy Westervelt, and this is Drilled. Over the past couple episodes, you’ve heard in detail how TigerSwan, the private security firm hired by Energy Transfer to deal with the Standing Rock protests, mounted a propaganda campaign aimed at fanning the flames of division in the community and turning people against the protestors as much as possible. Today we’re gonna do something a little bit different. We’re gonna hear from Alleen about her work reporting on the Standing Rock movement and the backlash to it over the past 10 years.

That conversation’s coming up right now

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[00:00:39] Amy: Alleen, you’re someone who covered Standing Rock 10 years ago, tell us what things were like when you very first arrived to cover the Standing Rock protests?

Like, how much of this stuff was going on when you first got there, and how visible was it? How long did it take you to see that this stuff was, like, [00:01:00] happening behind the scenes?

[00:01:02] Alleen Brown: Yeah, I mean, it was November 2016 when I went to the Standing Rock camps. And already the, the issue of surveillance was really on people’s minds. Know, I think that at the time, I was a staff reporter at The Intercept, and you know, that’s an outlet that does a lot of coverage of national security issues as

[00:01:27] Amy: Yeah

[00:01:28] Alleen Brown: Different forms of state surveillance.

So that’s a specific issue that I was interested in. There was a lot of concern at that time about there being surveillance on people’s phones weird issues with phone batteries draining and, you know, things that even now, having looked through massive troves of internal records

[00:01:49] Amy: Yeah

[00:01:50] Alleen Brown: of police and private security, I haven’t seen, you know, proof that people’s phones were being hacked or anything.

But that was something people were really thinking about.

[00:01:58] Amy: Yeah.

[00:01:59] Alleen Brown: you know, when I [00:02:00] got there, there were, like, little planes flying over all the time. There was a police barrier you know, blocking a highway. It very much had a militarized vibe. And there were a lot of people there.

So people, people were scared and, you know, this was kind of at the midpoint, I would say, ish, of that movement.

[00:02:22] Amy: Yeah. What was the first Rob Rice video that you ever saw?

[00:02:29] Alleen Brown: Wow. That is a long time ago. Yeah, so I first heard the name Robert Rice you know, to back up a little bit and, and tell this story. I was at The Intercept. I had visited Standing Rock. I had written a couple stories. And I, I had come home, you know? While I was at The Intercept the outlet received basically this massive trove of internal records from the private security company that [00:03:00] was hired to, I guess, like, protect the pipeline.

That company was called TigerSwan and these records were daily situation reports. So they described what the security company was seeing on the ground, or what they claimed to be seeing, what they were seeing on social media as well,

[00:03:19] Amy: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:19] Alleen Brown: and a little bit about what they were doing. These were reports that were going directly to their bosses which was the pipeline company Energy Transfer.

It was called Energy Transfer Partners at the time.

[00:03:29] Amy: Yeah

[00:03:30] Alleen Brown: and so, you know, they had an interest in making sure these protests, this movement appeared dangerous. They wanted to keep their contract. So we were kind of, like, very aware of that as we were

[00:03:41] Amy: Yeah

[00:03:41] Alleen Brown: go through these files. But there was this line in there that was a little bit surprising, and I can’t think of exactly what it said off the top of my head, but it basically said that TigerSwan was overseeing an information operation, and this [00:04:00] guy Robert Rice was involved. So me and my colleagues at The Intercept were like, “What is this?” You know, I was working with Alice Speri as well as the freelancer Will Parrish at the time. And we were like, “Oh, information operation. What is this?” We, we quickly tracked down this Facebook page called Netizens for Progress and Justice and a- also another page called Defend Iowa. These pages just had a lot of sort of… guess I would categorize it as anti-protest type information,

[00:04:33] Amy: Mmhmm

[00:04:34] Alleen Brown: A lot of videos and posts that painted this movement in a negative light. And so some of the videos that were most striking, I would say, are these ones that featured this guy who, I believe sometimes he called himself Alan Rice in these videos but, but we knew it to be, you know, through journalism, we knew it to be Robert Rice.

[00:04:55] Amy: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:57] Alleen Brown: but he was sort of posing as [00:05:00] like a news anchor. So he would be on the screen. Sometimes there would be, like, a little box in the corner with some image, and it was as if he was reporting what was happening within this movement

[00:05:14] Amy: Hmm

[00:05:14] Alleen Brown: To an audience of local people. The types of things that would come up would be like, you know, I, I remember there was one that was like, “Oh, you know, the new thing within this movement is PayPal.”

Because there was this question of like, “Oh, where is this money coming from? Who’s behind this?” So, you know, he was kind of like reporting on what was going on with their money.

[00:05:37] Amy: Mmhmm

[00:05:37] Alleen Brown: know, it sometimes suggested that yeah, that water protectors, didn’t have jobs, and so, you know,

[00:05:45] Amy: Right

[00:05:46] Alleen Brown: Yeah, were kind of sitting around or something.

And definitely over the course of this body of like Facebook stuff there was a lot of suggestion that these were paid protesters. There were criminals among them. And [00:06:00] also they were actually the ones polluting the land through their encampments.

[00:06:05] Amy: Yeah

[00:06:05] Alleen Brown: just a lot of different kinds of messaging.

[00:06:07] Amy: When did Joel McCullough kind of enter the chat for you? What what, like, at what point did you realize that, you know, there’d been talk of infiltrators, there’d been talk of police infiltrators, FBI infiltrators, all kinds of stuff. When was it clear that, that the pipeline company was actually paying for infiltrators in the camps too?

[00:06:29] Alleen Brown: Yeah, I think that there was indications in those early documents that that someone had been on the ground. I think we kind of could get a sense of that

[00:06:39] Amy: Mmhmm

[00:06:41] Alleen Brown: I, I can’t share all the details of my reporting,

[00:06:44] Amy: Yeah.

[00:06:45] Alleen Brown: I can say that the name Joel McCullough, you know, came up before long.

And well, I would say that’s a relative statement ’cause I’ve been covering this stuff for 10 years now.

[00:06:55] Amy: Yeah

[00:06:56] Alleen Brown: One thing I can say is that it’s a name that also, that [00:07:00] came up from people who were on the ground and part of the movement. They knew this guy as Joel Edwards and,

[00:07:08] Amy: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:10] Alleen Brown: there was someone who, again, was a part of this movement they were actually kind of an activist in Iowa, and they got a tip that Joel Edwards, this guy that had been hanging out with them you know, who they considered to be l- like part of the cause, he had this dog he would bring around that people liked.

[00:07:29] Amy: Oh man, that’s so clever.

[00:07:31] Alleen Brown: What’s it called? Yeah, yeah.

[00:07:33] Amy: Oh

[00:07:34] Alleen Brown: so this, this, this water protector, this activist got a tip that Joel Edwards wasn’t who he said he was, and that he was

[00:07:42] Amy: Mmhmm Hmm

[00:07:44] Alleen Brown: know, I gotta be real, when I started publishing, when we started publishing these TigerSwan documents, we made a lot of phone calls.

We called like everybody who was named in the files because we wanted to publish them and, but we wanted to make sure that that was a safe thing to do and that, and that we understood [00:08:00] w- how much of this was bullshit and how much of it was like describing things that actually happened.

[00:08:05] Amy: Yeah

[00:08:06] Alleen Brown: to a lot of people and, know, paranoia about infiltration was really strong.

I heard from so many people, “Oh, you should look into this guy because we think he’s an infiltrator.” Like, “This guy is the real infiltrator.”

[00:08:21] Amy: Mmhmm

[00:08:21] Alleen Brown: the vast ma- majority of those cases, I had zero indication that that the person actually was like working for TigerSwan or the

[00:08:30] Amy: Yeah.

[00:08:31] Alleen Brown: or any- or anyone

[00:08:32] Amy: And in fact, we see in these WhatsApp chats between Rob and Joel that, like, that Joel’s like, “Oh, well, we can accuse this person of being an infiltrator.”

[00:08:42] Alleen Brown: Yeah, yeah. In those documents they say that the, th- just the act of proposing that someone share information i- in exchange for money, even if they said no, it would create suspicion. And,

[00:08:56] Amy: Yeah

[00:08:56] Alleen Brown: sounded like that was something that was good for them.

[00:08:59] Amy: [00:09:00] Yeah

[00:09:00] Alleen Brown: I mean, this is an old thing.

Like, it, it even has a name. It’s called snitch-jacketing, and it’s where like, I guess like the classic kind of form of that would be the FBI kind of surreptitiously labeling someone as an informant or a snitch in order to create divides and dissension among a group.

[00:09:24] Amy: Mmhmm

[00:09:25] Alleen Brown: And it can be really, really dangerous.

So, you know, like in that kind of classic case, it would maybe be like the actual snitch, the actual infiltrator, undercover

[00:09:34] Amy: Right

[00:09:34] Alleen Brown: agent planting that idea, and it creates all this drama, and maybe takes out someone who was playing an important role in the movement. You know, I think, one thing that was absolutely true at Standing Rock is that these kinds of movements, it’s like a pressure cooker, you know?

People are just under such extreme pressure from police and private security. You know, a lot of people there really saw this as an [00:10:00] existential fight. You know,

[00:10:00] Amy: Yeah

[00:10:01] Alleen Brown: they, they viewed the, I mean, the, the safety of the water was at risk. People really believed that this pipeline would mean that the Missouri river would end up contaminated.

[00:10:13] Amy: Yeah

[00:10:13] Alleen Brown: people were also thinking about the climate crisis and the reality that if we continue to burn fossil fuels the way that we, we are, we’re, you know, barreling toward, I mean, we’re, we’re already in the middle of a pretty severe crisis, I think we can all agree.

[00:10:25] Amy: Yeah.

[00:10:26] Alleen Brown: bound to get worse.

[00:10:27] Amy: Yeah

[00:10:28] Alleen Brown: The stakes felt very high to a lot of people on the ground, and they were under extreme pressure. Even if you’re not under extreme pressure, if you’re camping in a field with hundreds of people that you don’t know

[00:10:39] Amy: Yes

[00:10:40] Alleen Brown: Or even your family you know, conflict is gonna come up.

[00:10:44] Amy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:10:45] Alleen Brown: then,

[00:10:45] Amy: people are like putting their lives on hold for an indefinite amount of time. Money’s tight. Like, I mean, it’s, that’s stressful. Yeah

[00:10:55] Alleen Brown: Yeah, they’re, they’re getting shot with tear gas and rubber bullets. There’s [00:11:00] planes flying over all the time. It’s, was very, very intense. And so if, you know, if you add into the mix people who are actively trying to poke at divisions,

[00:11:13] Amy: Yeah

[00:11:14] Alleen Brown: it’s bad, you know? And so think there’s this fear, the infiltrator is like the boogeyman of in, in a lot of movem- movement spaces because it really kind of attacks…

I think this and this propaganda we found through these through these documents, you know, it seems kind of like mundane. It’s like, okay, whatever, it’s some bullshit on Facebook. But it was really designed with an eye for identifying preexisting divisions, both within the movement and between the movement and the communities that lived nearby, which were mostly like white, rural communities.

[00:11:50] Amy: Yeah

[00:11:52] Alleen Brown: they were identifying these divisions and trying to create content that would make them worse or deepen [00:12:00] people’s like

[00:12:01] Amy: distrust and like, yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:06] Alleen Brown: Yeah

[00:12:09] Amy: The way that you’ve covered this movement is pretty unique to the way that movements and protests get covered in the US. Something might get covered when there’s the initial protest but you’ve been, you know, continuously reporting on this for a decade. What do you think that does to sharpen your understanding of that movement, but also, like, how movements work in general?

[00:12:35] Alleen Brown: Yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit because it’s not, I think that The way that mainstream media works is that you’re supposed to be covering the, like, crisis of the moment, like, the specific action that’s happening at this exact second.

[00:12:55] Amy: Yeah

[00:12:56] Alleen Brown: timeframe. So sometimes I get these, like, guilt [00:13:00] complexes and like, “Oh,” like, “what am I doing?”

Like, “How can I still be looking at this?” But know, I do think, I think what’s distinct about this, this movement and and the way that I’ve been able to approach it is that the documentation of what the, this private security company was doing and how they were working with police also,

[00:13:22] Amy: Yeah

[00:13:23] Alleen Brown: is, is really uniquely extensive.

So

[00:13:27] Amy: Yeah

[00:13:28] Alleen Brown: while I was at The Intercept, basically the, the private security company got sued by or, you know, there was legal action taken a- against the private security company because they never got a security license in the state.

[00:13:41] Amy: Oh

[00:13:41] Alleen Brown: board, the local security board went after them. TigerSwan kept claiming that they weren’t actually a security company, which is wild, and the secure- t- to prove, to prove that they were a security company the security board requested all of these all this discovery material. So that’s like in [00:14:00] court you wanna prove something, you can ask the other party to turn over internal documents and communications and things.

[00:14:07] Amy: Mmhmm

[00:14:07] Alleen Brown: TigerSwan did that, and you know, I was reporting on this at the time and I noticed, I got a tip about it,

[00:14:14] Amy: Yeah

[00:14:15] Alleen Brown: It turned out this stuff had become public record. So

[00:14:18] Amy: Amazing

[00:14:19] Alleen Brown: The Intercept fought for, actually Energy Transfer really didn’t want this stuff to be released. The Intercept fought all the way to the North Dakota Supreme Court and some, around 60,000 pages of internal records of the security company were ultimately released.

[00:14:35] Amy: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:35] Alleen Brown: so I think, you know, if we had that kinda look into all kinds of movements around the world,

[00:14:43] Amy: Yeah

[00:14:44] Alleen Brown: think maybe we would see similar patterns. You know, I think the, the

[00:14:48] Amy: Yeah

[00:14:49] Alleen Brown: of this coverage is to some degree, unique to that movement. This was the, I would say of the biggest indigenous [00:15:00] uprising in the US since the Wounded Knee occupation in the

[00:15:04] Amy: Yeah. Yeah

[00:15:06] Alleen Brown: it was a big international deal, like, h- well over 100 tribes were coming together, tribal nations were coming together in this place and, and fighting for a cause in a way that we just haven’t seen very much. So it

[00:15:21] Amy: Mmhmm

[00:15:22] Alleen Brown: to document this specific case But also the depth of information that we have about the strategies that were being used illustrate how this stuff works around the world.

[00:15:34] Amy: Ja

[00:15:34] Alleen Brown: y- you know, one, one thing, one aspect of that is that this company, which was born out of, in the post 9/11 era you know, they had… The founder was an ex-commander of the Army Special Missions unit

[00:15:50] Amy: Mmhmm Mmhmm

[00:15:52] Alleen Brown: they were coming out, a lot of the people working there were coming out of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they [00:16:00] really explicitly in some of these internal materials talk about how they think of their work as counterinsurgency strategy.

[00:16:08] Amy: Yeah.

[00:16:09] Alleen Brown: that framework has, gets used all around the world, you know, both in, armed, in the context of armed conflicts, but also on, in these I guess, like, protest spaces where people are fighting infrastructure,

[00:16:25] Amy: Yeah

[00:16:26] Alleen Brown: sometimes fossil fuels, sometimes you know, transition mineral infrastructure, mining and things like that. So counterinsurgency, it’s you know, armed, armed force is part of it, but just as important is winning over people’s hearts and minds.

[00:16:42] Amy: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:42] Alleen Brown: so that can be, like, building a school or a bridge in in the neighborhood where this so-called insurgency is happening.

[00:16:50] Amy: Yeah

[00:16:50] Alleen Brown: it can also mean a lot of propaganda.

So I think, I actually think, you know, I’ve done all this I did a piece about Joel McCullough I wanna say it was [00:17:00] 2018 or 2019 for The Intercept that got

[00:17:01] Amy: Mmhmm

[00:17:02] Alleen Brown: what he was doing in terms of infiltration. But, like, I think infiltration’s kind of the boogeyman, but actually this propaganda stuff

[00:17:09] Amy: Yeah

[00:17:10] Alleen Brown: really important too, and I think, which, you know…

I know Amy, you’ve done so much work on propaganda of, of different kinds, but it

[00:17:18] Amy: Yeah

[00:17:19] Alleen Brown: of, like, decides the direction things take to some degree.

[00:17:23] Amy: Yeah, totally. And the corporate surveillance thing in general like any industry where democracy might be a problem for them at some point has to like have these tools at their disposal to, to deal with protest or with… I mean, I imagine, I shudder to think what the AI companies are doing right now.

[00:17:45] Alleen Brown: Oh my God. I know, yeah. I so wonder. I mean, I think

[00:17:49] Amy: Yeah.

[00:17:49] Alleen Brown: Lot of stories there. I mean, that’s the thing. Like right now, that’s not something, you know, the fossil fuel industry has spent a very long time convincing [00:18:00] local communities and the public at large that what they’re doing is great and fine.

[00:18:05] Amy: Yeah

[00:18:06] Alleen Brown: data centers, that, that hearts and minds effort has not been won so far.

And you know, it’s, it’s interesting because a lot of the people who were, you know, water protectors from you know, tribal nations in the Dakotas have now shifted their attention

[00:18:22] Amy: I saw that.

[00:18:23] Alleen Brown: centers.

[00:18:24] Amy: Yeah. Yeah

[00:18:26] Alleen Brown: felt like almost every conversation I had with people about this propaganda stuff, data centers or AI would ultimately come, come up, whether it was like, “Oh,

[00:18:34] Amy: Mmhmm

[00:18:35] Alleen Brown: what’s gonna happen now that AI is the thing, like that’s gonna supercharge propaganda,” or people

[00:18:40] Amy: Right. It’s like on both sides of the equation. Yeah. Yeah

[00:18:46] Alleen Brown: And there’s, you know, I’ve speaking of Facebook, there, I follow some Facebook pages in Bismarck and Mandan which are, you know, these twin cities that, very small cities that are pretty close to the Standing [00:19:00] Rock Reservation. And even there, you know, local people who probably you know, were, hated these protests, they were part of probably, like, among the targets of this propaganda we’re talking about,

[00:19:11] Amy: Yeah

[00:19:12] Alleen Brown: are kind of up in arms because there’s a data center, according to Facebook, I’m not…

I don’t know that i- is being proposed in that area.

[00:19:22] Amy: Yeah

[00:19:22] Alleen Brown: it’s interesting. I feel like all these places are now kind of grappling with infrastructure that they

[00:19:30] Amy: that they don’t want.

[00:19:32] Alleen Brown: And so

[00:19:33] Amy: Like the, yeah,

[00:19:35] Alleen Brown: happen

[00:19:35] Amy: the carbon capture stuff too. Like it literally the same community in North Dakota and Iowa,

[00:19:43] Alleen Brown: Mm-hmm

[00:19:44] Amy: Okay. I also think it’s like an emblematic story because of the timing of it, and the fact that this is all kicking off, like before video content was really the thing that it is today. Now I feel like in 10 years it’s become one of [00:20:00] the main ways that people get their information, right?

But at the time, like that was relatively new, and you have this guy coming in who, you know, is like an early pioneer of, of that strategy. How much do you think that like that piece of it, the Facebook Live and the video content, all of that, like helped to make their, their efforts more successful?

[00:20:25] Alleen Brown: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think when I think about, like, the moment that this was all happening in, I mean, I would say probably Facebook propaganda was already… I mean, definitely there was already, like, Facebook propaganda stuff happening.

[00:20:39] Amy: Yeah

[00:20:40] Alleen Brown: These pages were launched in 2016 and 2017. 2016 is the exact same time as Trump’s first presidential campaign.

[00:20:49] Amy: Yeah

[00:20:50] Alleen Brown: so I think before 2016, a lot was happening, but that was the year everything really got supercharged.

[00:20:57] Amy: Yeah

[00:20:58] Alleen Brown: Like you said, Facebook Live [00:21:00] also became, like, widely available that year. And I think people just weren’t… You know, I was kinda doing some research about misinformation and things and,

[00:21:10] Amy: Yeah

[00:21:11] Alleen Brown: the kinds of stuff that you’ve probably been looking at for years.

But and it’s like, oh, this whole, like, line of study really opened up in 2016, 2017, and it- it’s not because nothing was happening before then. It’s

[00:21:23] Amy: Ja

[00:21:24] Alleen Brown: Ev- so many people were, like, surprised by this election and by the amount of misinformation and disinformation that was circulating at that time.

[00:21:33] Amy: Yeah

[00:21:34] Alleen Brown: yeah, and like you’re saying, the idea of the social media influencer wasn’t even really a thing at that point. I don’t even know if we even said the word influencer back then.

I mean, also Standing Rock it was a huge on-the-ground movement, but it really took off because of stuff that was circulating on social media, you know?

[00:21:51] Amy: Yeah

[00:21:51] Alleen Brown: incident where dogs you know, attacked

[00:21:54] Amy: is

like

so

clutch to, to getting people there. Yeah

Yeah

[00:21:59] Alleen Brown: [00:22:00] totally changed everything, and so many people were on the ground, like, live streaming and posting videos that y- there was even this term, like, keyboard warriors.

Like, I,

[00:22:10] Amy: Yeah

[00:22:11] Alleen Brown: of people were not even on the ground but were really active on, in, like, reposting things all the time.

[00:22:17] Amy: Yeah

[00:22:17] Alleen Brown: so you know, some of that, some of TigerSwan’s actions, you know, they, they saw very clearly, in part because they had this, like, counterinsurgency background, that this was something that they needed to counteract.

And yeah, I think, the fact of Trump too, beyond I f- I spoke to a fair amount of local people in, you know, in both Bismarck, Mandan, Morton County, which are North Dakota, and,

[00:22:47] Amy: Yeah

[00:22:48] Alleen Brown: in Iowa, because, y- there was some of this propaganda was aimed at the anti-pipeline movement in Iowa. And people, like, on their own say, well, you know, this was [00:23:00] 2016, 2017 so it was this moment of Make America Great Again. People were feeling sort of really empowered around the ideas that Donald Trump was spreading, which included drill, baby, d- drill, baby, drill.

[00:23:15] Amy: Right.

[00:23:16] Alleen Brown: know,

[00:23:17] Amy: Right

[00:23:18] Alleen Brown: had investments in Phillips 66, was a, which was a backer of the pipeline and has gotten a lot of support from the pipeline company’s founder, Kelcy Warren, over to- over time.

[00:23:30] Amy: Yeah

[00:23:31] Alleen Brown: so you know, that, like, American energy kind of vibe was very, like, strong in the air, and people, I think, were excited to feel, like, felt empowered to push back on these protests and get kind of, like, active online in a way that maybe they wouldn’t have been a year before.

[00:23:56] Amy: Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk a [00:24:00] little bit about how the, sort of the backlash to Standing Rock connects to, like, all the anti-protest stuff since then?

[00:24:09] Alleen Brown: Yeah, I don’t think people really had this idea in their head that, like, protests were a bad thing before 2016. Or, like, maybe there was a little bit of that, but

[00:24:22] Amy: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Like the–

[00:24:24] Alleen Brown: that it is now,

[00:24:26] Amy: I think a lot of people, I guess maybe not boomers, but a lot of people like Gen X, millennial, and younger saw protest in sort of this, idealized 1960s social justice kind of way, and not as, like, disruptive or whatever, all of these things that we now hear about protests being.

I do feel like it’s been very successful, this framing of, like, they’re radicals, they’re interrupting our lives, it’s disruptive. Why can’t they just do it [00:25:00] politely and quietly?

[00:25:01] Alleen Brown: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:02] Amy: These all seem like things that really ramped up from Standing Rock to now

[00:25:08] Alleen Brown: Yeah, and I think, you know, pro- I, y- I’ve heard that if you look back to the ’60s, there was a lot of, like, kind of anti-protest sentiments then t- too. So

[00:25:18] Amy: Yeah

[00:25:18] Alleen Brown: the one hand, it’s like in e- any moment, this Standing Rock kind of opened a period where we saw a lot of, like, mass protests. You

[00:25:26] Amy: Yeah

[00:25:26] Alleen Brown: had begun before that some of them, some of these protests being, like, actively disruptive. But also, I think, you know, the, one of the biggest things I took out of this reporting on the Facebook propaganda is c- you know, I kinda grappled a lot with, like, these people already had negative feelings, so, like, what, how, how much can we really credit to some stuff on Facebook? And, you know, I, I can’t quantify that even, you know, after doing a

[00:25:51] Amy: Right Yeah

[00:25:52] Alleen Brown: You know, talking to experts about it, it’s like you don’t… Successful propaganda is not going [00:26:00] to, like, create issues out of thin air. It’s gonna take something that people are already afraid of and uncertain about, and it’s gonna, like, kind of feed that, like, feed those fears and make them worse.

And so, you know, again, we’ve had this period where there’s been a lot of protests, and also we’ve had people, like, really kind of stoking the fire of, like, “These are bad and disruptive riots, and these are, like, the bad people. These are the paid protesters. These are the criminals trying to destroy America.”

[00:26:32] Amy: Yeah,

yeah

Yeah

[00:26:33] Alleen Brown: that messaging has been strong, especially since Standing Rock. I think one of the most concrete things that has happened, which Drilled has covered extensively for a long time, is you know, the spread of these anti-protest laws. That really kind of kicked off right after Standing Rock.

Yeah, I can’t remember where the

[00:26:52] Amy: Standing Rock,

[00:26:53] Alleen Brown: where

[00:26:53] Amy: the first one was in Oklahoma, and Standing Rock got cited.

[00:26:57] Alleen Brown: Yes.

[00:26:59] Amy: Yeah.

[00:26:59] Alleen Brown: [00:27:00] yeah, and you know, ALEC took it on. It, I’m, I have

[00:27:03] Amy: Yeah

[00:27:03] Alleen Brown: APAC stuck in my head right now, so Alec. Yeah.

[00:27:06] Amy: Yeah. ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council.

[00:27:10] Alleen Brown: Thank you. Yes. So they took it on. It, you know, the, these laws were framed as critical infrastructure laws. They’re, like, protecting the infrastructure but, you know, really kind of amping up penalties that could be placed on people who are protesting.

[00:27:26] Amy: Well, and they acted like as though trespassing laws and private property laws didn’t already exist. They did. This just, like, increased jail time and fines and, you know, criminalized protest

[00:27:40] Alleen Brown: yeah, and like the pipeline, even though I, you know, people are still fighting pipelines, but

[00:27:45] Amy: Yeah

[00:27:46] Alleen Brown: to the degree that they were at that time. But pipelines are still, still kind of like come up in this, in narratives around, you know, r- mostly right-wing narratives around protest or like, you know, I think it would be framed as riots in in, in[00:28:00]

[00:28:00] Amy: Right

[00:28:00] Alleen Brown: speech.

But yeah, I mean, now we see, we kind of see like a lot of the versions of what we see now on steroids were playing out on the ground at Standing Rock. So now, I mean, now we have Trump’s second term in office, and the, the crackdowns on the ground are more severe. We’ve also got things like National Security, Security Presidential Memo 7, which basically encourages public security agencies to target essentially leftist movements.

A whole, this whole… I mean, Antifa is kind of like the most

[00:28:41] Amy: Yeah

[00:28:41] Alleen Brown: targeted gr- group. You can’t even really call it a group, I guess movement.

[00:28:46] Amy: Yeah

[00:28:46] Alleen Brown: memo has ideas in it like anti-Americanism. What even is that? Like, you could call,

[00:28:53] Amy: Yeah

[00:28:54] Alleen Brown: an, an indigenous movement for land rights anti-American if you [00:29:00] wanted.

I, you

[00:29:00] Amy: Yeah

[00:29:01] Alleen Brown: it kind of is a green light to just surveil and disrupt an array of, of movements.

[00:29:07] Amy: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I have one last question for you, and it’s a very California woo-woo question. I’m not sorry.

[00:29:14] Alleen Brown: Uh-oh.

[00:29:15] Amy: I do feel like the rhetoric around protest has tended to like try to push this frame of, you know, protesters being radicals and anarchists and rioters and disruptive and scary and all of these things, there hasn’t been like a ton to counteract that.

Like, I feel like the most I see is like protesters cast as weirdos which like is better than criminals, I think, but not like… an, like 100% positive. So, so like I– you’ve spent a lot of time in protest camps and with people who are activists, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about like, I don’t know, like [00:30:00] the types of people who do this and like a little bit about the, the paid protester thing. What you think that that frame gets wrong about like who these people are.

And I understand that like they’re very much not a monolith. But yeah, kind of speaking in generalities, what are some of the things that you’ve learned?

[00:30:19] Alleen Brown: Yeah. I mean, I think the two kind of movement spaces that come to mind are, you know, Standing Rock, both very criminalized movement spaces, Standing

[00:30:27] Amy: Yeah

[00:30:29] Alleen Brown: you know, the anti-ICE movement in Minneapolis. I’m from the Twin Cities,

[00:30:33] Amy: Yeah

[00:30:34] Alleen Brown: all the, when all this stuff went down this past winter, but I was in touch with a lot of people that were kind of getting involved and engaged.

And I think in both spaces, I mean, like you’re saying, I’m gonna be annoying and, like, acknowledge that there is, like, a diversity of people, especially

[00:30:52] Amy: Yeah.

[00:30:52] Alleen Brown: that reach those levels.

[00:30:55] Amy: Yes

[00:30:56] Alleen Brown: you know, and there are people in the mix who are chaotic. Like, [00:31:00] let’s not pretend that movement spaces, like any space, doesn’t attract some people that are, like, there for drama and not,

[00:31:07] Amy: Main character energy abounds. Yes. Yes

[00:31:11] Alleen Brown: yes, and, like, people who have issues. So, those people are there in all… Yeah. But also, there are also people who you know, have long-term, deep commitments to organizing for a better world. You know, I think the types of people who really, like, commit to a movement long-term and in a way where they’re gonna go, like, camp out somewhere,

[00:31:35] Amy: Yeah

[00:31:35] Alleen Brown: are, like, idealists in a way,

[00:31:39] Amy: Yeah

[00:31:39] Alleen Brown: idealists or realists.

You know, they, like, can imagine a world that is more fair you

[00:31:47] Amy: No. Sorry. God, they’re so annoying sometimes. Sorry, you were saying

A world that’s more fair? Mm-hmm.

[00:31:58] Alleen Brown: Yeah, so a, a lot of these people are [00:32:00] people who are, like, actively thinking about what a more f- a more just world would look like and what

[00:32:07] Amy: Yeah

[00:32:08] Alleen Brown: would need to be taken to build that world. And, you know, a lot of times these are people with serious integrity. They’re like, “Okay, if that’s what we have to do, if that’s what this takes you know, if, if we need to stop construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, then we should, like, actually try to do that.”

You know, that’s, So these are people who are, like, really acting on things that they, they believe in. And I mean, those are the more committed people. That’s actually, like, a smaller group in a, in a movement space. There are also, in both this space, again, and I’m thinking of Minneapolis, a lot of people who see something terrible happening and are like, “I can’t…” Like, “That is, like, morally not okay, and I need to, like, get involved and, a- and help out.”

[00:32:54] Amy: Yeah

[00:32:55] Alleen Brown: Rock, all kinds of ordinary people showed up who

[00:32:58] Amy: Yeah

[00:32:58] Alleen Brown: who’d never been [00:33:00] involved in any kind of movement space and are like, “Whoa, what is going on here? I need… This is like…” Who felt moved by this

[00:33:08] Amy: Yeah

[00:33:08] Alleen Brown: you know, the, the police or private security violence that they saw or just, you know, the, this idea of indi- an indigenous nation standing up for its water.

[00:33:20] Amy: Yeah

[00:33:20] Alleen Brown: like, “That is something that is, like, really important, and I n- I wanna show up, and I wanna support them.” The, you know. too people saw their neighbors being dragged away. You know, I can think of

[00:33:31] Amy: Yeah

[00:33:32] Alleen Brown: in my personal life who I would never imagine getting involved in any kind of movement suddenly found themselves organi- organizing against ICE because they saw people that they knew or people that lived in their neighborhood being abused and, you know, in some cases, like, murdered.

[00:33:53] Amy: Yeah

[00:33:54] Alleen Brown: so they said, “I need to show up. I need to, like, protest. I need to, like, be a part of these [00:34:00] watches that are making sure that people aren’t getting hurt.”

[00:34:02] Amy: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:03] Alleen Brown: you know, these, these are regular people, like, just seriously, like, very regular people. I’m honestly shocked that some of these people, like, did some of the things that they did.

[00:34:15] Amy: Yeah

[00:34:16] Alleen Brown: so you know, and, like, we’re living in a world of extremes. We’re gonna keep seeing that, and if we’re painting anyone who gets involved in a movement that’s responding to the extreme circumstances that we’re living through, if, if anyone who gets involved is gonna be painted as a criminal, then that’s, like, a serious it’s a serious threat to democracy on a pretty basic level.

You know, on, on the other hand, if, if we’re, we’re talking about threats to democracy, like, there is, there is no this, this project actually made me… I’m going off on a tangent now. Here we go.

[00:34:52] Amy: Good. Do it

[00:34:53] Alleen Brown: Project actually made me think a lot about journalism. You

[00:34:57] Amy: Yeah

[00:34:58] Alleen Brown: a lot of work for Drilled, but I’m also a [00:35:00] freelancer, so I do a lot of organizing with the Freelance Solidarity Project,

[00:35:04] Amy: Yeah

[00:35:04] Alleen Brown: union for freelancers.

And we think a lot about kind of the collapse of the media industry and, you know, some of that is kind of, like, at the hands of people who actively want it to collapse. They don’t wanna y- they don’t want power to be challenged. They don’t

[00:35:21] Amy: Yeah

[00:35:22] Alleen Brown: their wealth to be challenged. And,

[00:35:24] Amy: Yeah

[00:35:25] Alleen Brown: journalism is, like, very much under attack.

And so, like, if, but if there’s not journalism,

[00:35:31] Amy: Yeah

[00:35:32] Alleen Brown: d- there is no democracy. There just isn’t. And, like, I don’t know, I’m not one where I’m like, “Oh, democracy’s the only thing that matters.” Like, but it, it’s pretty imp- it seems pretty important. It seems to be, like, the f- one of these foundational things that we’re, that America is allegedly all about. But, like, this, this propaganda campaign that I kind of, like, dug into just really made me think about the fact that, like, if people are just getting their information on Facebook from

[00:35:58] Amy: Yep

[00:35:59] Alleen Brown: that they, [00:36:00] they don’t even know are actively trying to, like, influence the way they think for a profit then there just isn’t democracy.

That’s not,

[00:36:09] Amy: Yeah.

[00:36:10] Alleen Brown: It’s just a propaganda war.

[00:36:11] Amy: Totally. Totally. I was thinking about this too, because Rob Rice, like so many people since him, positions himself as a journalist, right? It’s so interesting to me when these propagandists actually try to use the credibility of journalism to undermine the credibility of journalism. And like, and it’s

kind working, you know?

It’s blurred the lines so much, and I don’t think it’s, like, an accident that tech platforms built the thing that’s, that’s, like, eaten the revenue stream that kept journalism alive. You know what I mean? And like, that didn’t just happen. Those guys fricking hate journalism.

So it’s like, yeah, of course they built a parallel universe that they get to control,

[00:36:55] Alleen Brown: mm-hmm.

[00:36:56] Amy: You know?

[00:36:56] Alleen Brown: Here we are. Oh, God.

[00:36:58] Amy: Ugh. [00:37:00] Yeah

[00:37:01] Alleen Brown: cool, cool.

But yeah, no, I think I’m like, I’ve been worrying that my journalism is not hopeful at all, and so I… But I

[00:37:10] Amy: Oh,

[00:37:10] Alleen Brown: it’s

[00:37:11] Amy: yeah.

[00:37:11] Alleen Brown: we… I, I don’t think it’s my job to be hopeful, but I do think

[00:37:15] Amy: is one of those areas where people knowing it exists and how it works is actually the thing that changes it. You

know?

like-

[00:37:22] Alleen Brown: totally agree.

Yes.

[00:37:23] Amy: Yeah

[00:37:24] Alleen Brown: I think, like, we need to, like, wrap our heads around the fact that we’re being, like, targeted in these ways and,

[00:37:30] Amy: Yes

[00:37:31] Alleen Brown: and think about how to respond because we gotta respond. It’s pretty bad

[00:37:36] Amy: Yeah. The thing that I worry about is like whenever I talk about propaganda and disinformation and stuff is that I don’t want people to take that and go and like double down on only listening to their favorite YouTuber.

[00:37:49] Alleen Brown: Mm-hmm. Oh my God, yes. Uh-huh. Hmm.

[00:37:51] Amy: “See, that’s why I only trust this one guy.”

[00:37:54] Alleen Brown: Okay.

[00:37:54] Amy: yeah. Okay, I’ll ask you. In the vein of solutions, what do you recommend [00:38:00] people do to like check the credibility of the news influencer they’re listening to or the Facebook cat video they’re watching?

Yeah.

[00:38:13] Alleen Brown: I mean, I think a good start is to not get all of your information off of social media, and I think, like, even I find myself, like, getting sucked into

[00:38:23] Amy: Totally.

[00:38:24] Alleen Brown: I think like actively like researching the people that you’re turning to for information is not a bad

[00:38:31] Amy: Yeah

[00:38:31] Alleen Brown: idea. Like looking into… I mean, I hate to even say this ’cause I don’t actually endorse the like journalism, like prize-winning complex,

[00:38:43] Amy: Right right right

[00:38:44] Alleen Brown: vet- If your organization has won a journalism award from like a credible journalistic organization, probably there’s been some vetting there.

You

[00:38:53] Amy: Right

[00:38:54] Alleen Brown: they say they follow Society of Professional Journalists ethics [00:39:00] code, then that’s like a good sign.

[00:39:02] Amy: Yeah

[00:39:03] Alleen Brown: you know, I think like indications that, again, it’s hard to figure out credibility ’cause everybody’s trying to pretend they are someone that they’re not,

[00:39:12] Amy: Yeah

[00:39:13] Alleen Brown: Starting to wrap your head around what in- what institutions exist that are actually made up of journalists and how,

[00:39:22] Amy: Yeah

[00:39:22] Alleen Brown: they are, know responding to the place where you’re getting information, like that could be a start.

I do, like I think journalists mess up all the time, and I’m

[00:39:33] Amy: Yeah

[00:39:34] Alleen Brown: by a lot of journalism,

[00:39:36] Amy: Yes

[00:39:36] Alleen Brown: way better than like sucking up whatever interest groups or influencers are, are sending information on social media. Like, ’cause you just don’t know where that’s coming from or why they’re putting it out

[00:39:50] Amy: Yeah.