The pipeline giant Energy Transfer paid a mercenary security firm to use Facebook to fuel divisions between an Indigenous-led movement and its mostly white, rural neighbors. Personnel working for the private security contractor TigerSwan described their divisive propaganda plans in WhatsApp chats and emails that Drilled and High Country News published at the end of the summer, as part of our investigation and podcast series The Propagandist. A decade later, in North Dakota, we found a community still divided.
But after we finished our reporting, something unexpected happened. Data centers were proposed in the same communities targeted by propaganda, and people of all political persuasions started to fight back.
This fall marks the 10-year anniversary of the movement to stop the Dakota Access pipeline, led by members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It was the biggest Indigenous and environmental uprising in the U.S. in the past half century, and we’re still uncovering details about the strategies the pipeline’s parent company used to break down the movement. Standing Rock was the starting point for a wave of anti-protest laws that swept the country. It was Trump’s first crack at crushing a social movement. In this latest investigation, we learned that it also raised the curtain on an era where more and more of us are being hoodwinked by social media propaganda disguised as news.
In this case, anti-protest propaganda was aimed at rural white people in North Dakota and Iowa, who were already steeped in a culture with a long history of racism, and pro-oil, anti-outsider sentiments. They were already pissed about the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, known as DAPL, and this propaganda was designed to make their feelings worse. So on recent visits to the region, I asked locals how they felt about the Standing Rock movement as the 10-year anniversary approached.
Three separate people in Morton County, North Dakota told me some version of “we should have shot them all.”
A decade had failed to chill out those extreme feelings.
When we finished the podcast, I texted a link to a source in Iowa, who was also targeted by TigerSwan’s propaganda. Lance Schaefer had expressed strong anti-protest feelings to me when we spoke last spring. His reply to me in September blew me away. I’ll paste it here in full:
Good podcast. You did a nice job. Water is a BIG issue now with not only pipelines…but data centers. water is drying up all over the world and will be the new commodity and currency Im afraid. People who were against pipeline protestors now can have empathy as we now speak out against data centers and robbing the water of entire small towns. We(myself and others) are now having a change of heart and have begun protesting… and seeing how crucial clean water is. Tables have turned, attitudes have changed, and time and wisdom have been imparted to many people after all these years. We find who was once an adversary, are now joined by a common thread and a cause. It was there all along, but propaganda oozes into poor decisions and feeds you a false reality. My, how life changes! Data centers…there’s your next story! Good luck to you. Be blessed.
This was a guy who a few months earlier had described how he and his buddies made a point to make a tiny anti-pipeline camp in Iowa felt unwelcome. Now, it seemed, Schaefer was a water protector, too.
This was happening all over the country. Deeply conservative communities, where people had tended to buy into police- and fossil fuel industry-sponsored rhetoric that said environmental activism is carried out by outside agitators, paid protesters, and criminals, suddenly found themselves fighting for their water.
Over the course of only months, data centers scrambled traditional party lines across the country. The lack of transparency, noise issues, potential to raise electricity prices and the massive water usage associated with data centers means that communities don’t want them, no matter their political persuasion. Tech corporations don’t have decades of propaganda efforts under their belts, like the oil and gas industry does. No one thinks of data centers as a symbol of American culture or masculinity or prosperity the way they do oil. Data centers have not won hearts and minds.
In Morton County, which borders the Standing Rock Reservation, another data center was proposed in the same area where people had told me protesters deserved to be shot.
I returned last month, to attend a few Standing Rock anniversary events, and I linked up with two of the women leading the fight to stop the city of Mandan’s proposed data center. The land an Israeli company bought to build the data center is covered in prairie grasses. The fact that it’s a stone’s throw from the city’s gleaming new high school is a key point of contention for opponents.
I sat in the lobby of an Eagles Club in Mandan with Sheila Froehlich as she collected signatures for a petition to force a ballot measure that would allow residents to vote on banning large-scale data centers in town. The Eagles Club is not in a particularly central location, and it was 2 pm on a Wednesday. Yet within an hour 12 people had stopped by to sign.
I asked some of them if all this had changed their minds about the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
“ There was people that needed to fill their pockets, and that’s the only reason that protest happened,” one guy told me.
“Mostly paid protesters,” said another petition signer. “And I wish there was a way to find out who they are and who’s paying them.”
The idea that Standing Rock was driven by paid protesters is one that was pushed hard by the propagandists — and by Energy Transfer, in a major lawsuit they filed blaming Greenpeace for the protests . The company won a $345 million judgement last year, via a jury from this same area (the subject of Drilled Season 12, SLAPP’d). Greenpeace is now fighting for its life.
“Where’s all those paid people now?” Another petition signer said.
Susan Beehler, one of the petition organizers, quipped back, “Are you guys paid protesters?” They laughed and said no.
Already, groups like the pro-oil American Energy Institute have pressed the idea that the anti-data center opposition is driven by foreign funding. In Utah, a data center developer claimed that protesters are being “bussed in.” It’s the same old rhetoric, this time being recycled against an environmental movement that doesn’t track party lines.
So far this new shared fight, however, hasn’t healed the bad feelings left behind after the Dakota Access Pipeline’s construction on the edge of the Standing Rock reservation. Beyond carbon dioxide, particulate matter, and spilled oil — we don’t talk often about the toxic social dynamics that fossil fuel companies often leave behind when they build a polluting project.
About an hour away from where Mandan residents gathered signatures, over 100 water protectors camped out for four days on the private land of Phyllis Young, an American Indian Movement veteran, who was deeply involved at the anti-Dakota Access Pipeline camps. They were there to reconnect and celebrate the movement they’d created — but perhaps more than anything this was a healing gathering. Some said they felt they’d never fully left camp, and others had only recently recovered from addiction or mental health struggles fueled by the trauma of tear gas, police water hoses, and private security surveillance. Some are still fighting pipelines like Enbridge’s Line 5 in Wisconsin, and others are trying to stop border wall construction. Several are now organizing to stop data centers.
| Today on The Spill |
Reminder that we’ve started a weekly newscast in the Drilled feed, where we bring you weekly episodes in between narrative seasons. This week, what extractivism looks like when it’s part of the energy transition. Most proposals to keep fossil fuels in the ground rely on taking new minerals out of the ground — especially lithium, a major component in the batteries powering electric vehicles. In Thea Riofrancos’ book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, she explores the paradox of attempting to save the planet with mining that causes irreversible changes to the landscape. She visits the communities most impacted by lithium mining, explores the mineral’s politics and history, and proposes a pathway toward harm reduction. On this week’s The Spill — Drilled’s weekly news podcast — journalist Adam Lowenstein talks with Riofrancos about all things lithium. |
| This week’s climate must-reads |
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[News] Standing Rock Sioux Tribe files lawsuit to shut down Dakota Access Pipeline The Dakota Access Pipeline operated for nearly a decade before an easement was granted by the Army Corps of Engineers last spring. Just in time for Indigenous People’s Day, the Standing Rock tribe is suing again to shut it down. |
[Report] The Greenpeace Trial: Report of the Independent Trial Monitoring Committee As Drilled documented in our investigative podcast SLAPP’d last year, the Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace trial was one of the most important first amendment battles of 2025. A team of human rights advocates and lawyers recently published a report finding that Greenpeace’s rights were violated and the deadly $345 million judgement should be vacated. |
[Feature] I am still a child, it cannot be good to be married’: how drought forces Afghan families to sell girls as bridesWhether you are running or lifting, it’s important that you are comfortable. Check our our top clothing brands that ensure comfort and ease when training. |
[Feature] The Israeli Private Eye at the Heart of a Climate Hacking Scandal A profile of Amit Forlit, who is facing federal charges in the U.S. for allegedly overseeing a hack-for-hire operation aimed at surveilling people involved in climate change litigation. His lawyers say he was commissioned by the PR firm DCI Group, which was working for Exxon Mobil. Both deny involvement. |
[News] What’s Driving the French Student Protests” Across France, student protests over learning conditions have shut down hundreds of schools — and climate change has played no small part in the problem. As one student told the New Yorker, “It’s a bit like in Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing.’ The heat wave was the drop of sweat that made the vase of what they could tolerate overflow.” |
