How to Confront a Polluted Information System | The Spill

Amy Westervelt: [00:00:00] Hello. Guess what? I wrote a book. I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about it now. It includes a lot of the research that I’ve done for Drilled over the years, and tons and tons of new stuff as well. I spent quite a bit of time in archives, finding new documents, and talking to all kinds of people to lay out a unifying theory of the information ecosystem, all the different layers included in it, and all the different ways that corporations have tried to warp those layers in their efforts to circumvent democracy.

It’s called Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy, and it’s out now from Bloomsbury. You can get it wherever you buy books. We’ll stick a link in the show notes as well. Around the time that it came out in late September, Matthew Green from DeSmog interviewed me about it, and we’re bringing you that conversation now, today, coming [00:01:00] up.

And then after that, we’re gonna hear an interview from Alleen Brown, Drilled investigative reporter and senior editor, with Nick Tilsen, who’s a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and CEO and founder of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led nonprofit that provides grants and loans to Indigenous groups and organizes campaigns to protect Indigenous rights and the environment

If you haven’t read it already, Alleen wrote an incredible story a little bit earlier this year about Nick and his work, and how he’s been targeted by police as punishment for that work, because it’s so effective. NDN Collective has been in the crosshairs of all kinds of right-wing organizations that have Donald Trump’s ear as well, and Nick’s story gives us some valuable insights into how rising authoritarianism has hurt civil society and the environmental movement.

So stay tuned for that. But first up, it’s me and Matthew. Here’s that [00:02:00] conversation.

Matthew Green: Amy, I mean, first of all, I wanna say a huge congratulations. I devoured the book, and I found it not only gripping but incredibly illuminating. It, it was as if you were drawing back the curtain to reveal the machinery that normally we’re blissfully unaware, aware of,

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: but which at the same time is, I think as you put it in the book, is, is kind of creating the soil in which all of our thinking and discourse grows.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

Matthew Green: So why, why did you think it was, it was so important to, to put together this, this portrait?

Amy Westervelt: Well, I feel like especially now, people talk about disinformation and misinformation and polarization and all these things, right? Almost as, like, um, products of technology or products of social [00:03:00] media, or maybe it’s because nobody goes to church anymore. You know? There’s always like, “Oh, it’s this, it’s that.”

And there’s, there’s r- really not that much discussion of the concerted efforts that, that, um, that really, like, warped the, the information ecosystem that we’re all living in, and the impact that that has. Like, actually, we just ran a li- a miniseries in Drilled that was reported and hosted by Alleen Brown, who’s a reporter, who’s a- also senior editor at Drilled.

And, um, it was so interesting, ’cause it’s just, like, this very deep dive on the propaganda effort that Energy Transfer undertook to deal with the Standing Rock movement. And it particularly centers on these two guys. One is hired to be an infiltrator, so he’s, like, infiltrating the protest camps. And then the guy who’s kind of in charge of propaganda, and they’re working back and forth, and they’re each kind of feeding each other information and all of these things, right?

And [00:04:00] the whole, uh, like, the gist of it is that they take, you know, some things that were maybe minor tensions in the community already, and they, they just, like, inflame them, you know? That’s how good propaganda works, is it, like, it, it sort of, like, finds a crack and it exploits it. So, you know, they do this thing and it, it’s fairly successful.

And, you know, I’m not saying it’s the only thing that, um, made it possible for that pipeline to be built, but it was helpful, and it certainly then helped Energy Transfer with their lawsuit against Greenpeace, which, you know, may well end up resulting in the end entirely of Greenpeace US, which is a pretty big deal.

Um, you know, over $300 million settlement that, that Greenpeace now owes this pipeline company that really created a story that isn’t true, you know, that Greenpeace, like, manufactured the Standing Rock [00:05:00] movement, right? So, like, you take that story alone, and there’s all these little pieces of it where, you know, the, the pipeline company is really just trying to, like, complete a pipeline project, right?

Like, they don’t necessarily want to, um, you know, create the conditions for, for protest rights to be eroded in the US. They don’t necessarily want to deepen divides within the, this, you know, South Dakota community that they are operating in. That’s just, like, a byproduct. But this happens, like, thousands of times a year where these companies are doing, these kinds of things, and it has this enormous effect on society at large, on local communities, and on how we all process information.

This isn’t a thing that’s just happening because of the internet, you know what I mean? This isn’t a thing that’s, that’s happening, like, absent specific [00:06:00] humans trying to do specific things.

Matthew Green: These groups, they’re not, as I understand, not just representing the industry’s interests, but part of this much bigger project by think tanks, um, and, and various, uh, businessmen, other, other interests the whole discourse around free markets and what we would expect from government. And that, that to me was one of the, the most powerful messages that came through the book. So

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: if you could speak a bit more about that, that century-more long project that

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: you document so, so exquisitely.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. I mean, I think that This is another thing that I just don’t think is super visible to, to people that, you know, these guys aren’t always, and in fact, maybe even less than half the time are they specifically, um, you know, promoting oil and gas or defending a particular project or anything like that.

Like, actually a lot of the [00:07:00] effort and money goes into shaping people’s general ideas of, like, uh, the economy and how it works and how it should work, or the natural environment and, like, our relationship to it, and all of these kinds of things. Like, they’ll create these, um, pieces of propaganda that on the face of it don’t have anything to do with oil at all.

Um, they’re just, you know, a particular vision of nature or the economy or society. You know, they’ll get involved in university research because it helps to shape, again, like, the whole framework in which we’re talking about these ideas. So, like, you know, are they trying to skew the science and stuff? Yes, they’re doing that, but they’re also, like, very involved in, again, this sort of like, you know, tending the soil in which certain, uh, ideas grow, which it, it just, it goes, like, so much deeper than, than I think people think.

My, my [00:08:00] favorite example of this with the API in particular is that they had a project running during the early 2000s, um, with the help of the Atlas Network, this, um, global network of, you know, free market think tanks, to funnel money through the API to this Catholic priest whose project was to encourage other Catholic priests, um, to embrace capitalism and to increasingly see environmentalism as, like, the devil’s work, you know?

Um, and so it was like, it’s to that level where, like, I mean, they’re, they’re trying to sort of like, you know, shape the minds of individual priests. So it’s at, like, it’s at so many different levels, and it really is with the intention of, yes, helping one company do a particular thing, but also creating the context in which all companies can operate with less and less regulation, less and less [00:09:00] scrutiny, and really, like, as an end run around democracy.

I mean, this all grows out of a reaction to democracy at its, like, most basic level. You know, it’s sort of, okay, you have these wealthy industrialists, you have all these great Enlightenment ideals, but then it, like, the rubber hits the road, and they’re like, “Ooh, we don’t really actually love it when people who don’t share our interests are, like, have a vote.”

You know?

Matthew Green: That vision of the, of, of the, of the landscape, I think, that you illuminate is so powerful because e- even when I started working at DeSmog on the public relations sector,

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: there was a part of me that was like, “Well, that, that sounds relatively innocuous.” But you pull on this thread, and actually public relations is just the front end of this enormous project to essentially undermine and even, uh, arguably end democracy. And I think that, that was the really [00:10:00] powerful finding that came through so strongly.

Amy Westervelt: And I don’t even, I don’t even necessarily know if, if these industries, like, set out to, to undermine truth. But I, that’s kind of the point too, you know? Like, this is what I thought was really interesting about William Nordhaus, um, which I, I wrote about in the book too, that, like, I don’t think that he’s, like, compromised or, like, a bad person or doing the oil company’s bidding or anything like that.

There are so many people that you come across who are really just, like, unwitting participants in this whole machine, you know?

Matthew Green: Yeah.

Amy Westervelt: it’s just

Matthew Green: William Nordhaus being the economist who

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: basically reassured us that climate change would have a, a marginal impact on our future prosperity.

Amy Westervelt: A negligible impact.

Matthew Green: Yeah.

Amy Westervelt: Yes, exactly.

Matthew Green: Yeah. Yeah. Well,

Amy Westervelt: But, you know, it’s like the, the oil companies saw economics as, like, a handy thing to use to, to push back [00:11:00] against emissions reductions, and they found the economists that were making arguments that helped them push that idea and amplified them. You know? Like, they don’t have to actually, like, do something as nefarious as, you know, hiring an economist to do a particular study, although they also did do that.

You know? They can just, like, find the people, and that’s how it works more often than not with a lot of the university research stuff, too. Like, I, I don’t know. I talked to a guy who ran the, the center at Stanford that, um, that Exxon funded for a long time. Really nice guy, you know, he’s a geologist by trade.

He, like, was a petroleum engineer for a long time, and then kinda got into, like, earth sciences and carbon capture and all of that stuff. And he, um, you know, was like, “Well, I get really frustrated when my students complain about me, you know, working with, um, scientists at fossil fuel companies ’cause, you know, I’m just trying to [00:12:00] solve a differential equation, and so are they, and there’s nothing political about it.”

And I was like, “Yeah, but, like, you, you understand, right, that, like, it can be political whether you’re actively participating in that side of it or not?” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, what did Exxon do with the solution to that differential equation? And, like, how did they present that work to the public?

Was it used in any lobbying that they did?” Like, any, there are any number of ways that, like, you can very innocently be doing science, and it can be politicized, um, because of this whole machine that exists.

Matthew Green: And, and yeah, and I, I’m glad you, you brought in that reference to the, to the academic because you obviously have a

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: whole chapter on how the fossil fuel industry and other polluters, uh, shape what it’s, what, what is funded. And it’s not even necessarily that they tip their, put their fingers on the scale of the results, right?

Amy Westervelt: Right

Matthew Green: It’s more [00:13:00] that they’re just directing the focus. So if we’re gonna put everything into carbon capture as a climate solution, then the research dollars will follow. But what is the

Amy Westervelt: Right

Matthew Green: opportunity cost of researching something that actually could work, right?

Amy Westervelt: Right. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, we’re working on a project right now with ProPublica that has been going on for, like, a couple years now. We finally have the first two stories out. There’s more coming throughout the rest of the year. But really trying to dig into the opportunity co- cost question and, like, the overall impact of the funding, too, um, beyond just, you know, oh, hey, maybe Stanford shouldn’t be taking hundreds of millions of dollars from oil companies.

It’s like, well, what impact did that money have? Like, how did it shape policy, and how did it shape… everything the IPCC tells us every four years.

Matthew Green: I mean, and, and, and I love the, the, the imagery of information pollution, I think it’s so helpful because

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: it kind of allows us to visualize how it’s [00:14:00] kind of seeped into almost the aquifers from which we’re drawing,

Amy Westervelt: Yes.

Matthew Green: right? And, um, You mentioned a couple of individuals that you’ve written about in the book already, and one of the things I really enjoy is the, the portraits you paint of the men, and they are almost exclusively men who, who are authors or the, the, the, the engineers of this machinery.

Amy Westervelt: Yes

Matthew Green: I wonder if, if there was any one of them in particular who you enjoyed writing about the most. Maybe enjoy is not the

Amy Westervelt: Hmm

Matthew Green: right word, because I, I sense the kind of

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: dark fascination that you hold for these, for these guys. I wonder if there’s any

Amy Westervelt: Interesting.

Matthew Green: that you were glad to bring more attention to.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, there is… I think my favorite one is probably Michael Shellenberger because

Matthew Green: I thought you

might say that.

Amy Westervelt: I just feel like he’s such an [00:15:00] underexplored character in this universe.

Definitely like someone with, with delusions of grandeur, but like is starting to become as important as he always thought he was, um, and actually wields a weird amount of influence and power because he’s very close to Elon Musk.

He’s become very close to the Trump administration. You know, he goes on Joe Rogan all the time. Um, he’s very in with like the Jordan Peterson crowd, and I find him fascinating because he is totally horseshoe theory come to life. Like, he started out very, very left in the ’90s and early 2000s. You know, he was Hugo Chávez’s PR guy in the US.

Matthew Green: And, and he exposed the child labor, uh,

Amy Westervelt: it pr-

Matthew Green: in sweatshops by, in Nike factories, right? That was a big part of his early career.

Amy Westervelt: Yes, exactly. Like, that was…

Matthew Green: yeah

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. And I remember I was in the, he was, he is, like, a longtime Bay Area person, [00:16:00] and I was a reporter in the Bay Area at that time, and I remember people being like, “Oh my God, We finally have one of these genius propagandists for our side,” kind of thing, was, like, how a lot of environmental organizations felt about him.

And, um, and then yeah, he just sort of, like, went progressively further to the right, and now he is just, like, full alt-right guy. And very extreme, but also very good at propaganda.I see him today and I’m like, “Oh, he’s doing the same job for Elon Musk that he did for Hugo Chavez in the late ’90s and early 2000s.” You know? I’m like this guy never cared or talked about or had an opinion on trans rights until he got in with Elon Musk, and now all of a sudden he has these like, you know, very strong opinions about, um, gender affirming care and [00:17:00] this and that and the other, you know?

There’s really like, there is no topic that he won’t touch, from UFOs to, um… And he’s also… Oh, actually f- to touch on, on our shared favorite topic, he’s gone really weird about the whole, like, masculinity thing. You know? Like, “Thank God it’s, like, okay to be a man again,” and blah, blah, blah, which is just funny ’cause he’s not, like, the most masculine of men, I would say.

You know what I mean? It just feels inauthentic. Um, but he’s getting, recognition and money and, adoration, and people are listening to him, and he just keeps, like, going more and more into it.

But, like, the weird thing is that it’s working,

[ MIDROLL 1]

Matthew Green: There is a character I want to ask you about and

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Tell me. Yeah. I’m curious who jumped out to you. Yeah.

Matthew Green: I’m British, but maybe partly because of

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: thinking now of the Fisher brothers

Amy Westervelt: [00:18:00] Oh, yeah. So interesting.

Matthew Green: I mean, I, I, we could do a whole podcast on this,

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: but maybe you could give us a little of, of what you found, because

Amy Westervelt: Yeah!

Matthew Green: Atlas Network is another huge theme in the book.

It’s obviously a huge theme for us at DeSmog.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: But the actual characters at the start of the story I think are fascinating, and I, I

Amy Westervelt: Oh,

Matthew Green: certainly was unaware of any of this.

Amy Westervelt: The backstory of him is so interesting. Also that he was, like, crippled by depression for his entire life.

Matthew Green: This is Antony Fisher we’re talking about.

Amy Westervelt: This is Antony Fisher. Yeah, so,

Matthew Green: The brother. Older brother, yeah.

Amy Westervelt: So Antony Fisher, um, started one of the first modern think tanks. It was called the Institute for Economic Analysis, and, um, he was very in with kind of all of the early neoliberal economists, the Mont Pelerin Society and Friedrich Hayek and all of that stuff.

And he, um, you know, like, starts this think tank and, and it’s, like, pretty slow going [00:19:00] for a while. You know, he has… Initially, he sort of, he reads Hayek’s work and he’s like, “Yes, this is my thing. I’m gonna really, like, fight for, you know, free market economics in Britain.” And he decides he’s gonna run for office, and then he ends up meeting Hayek, and Hayek’s like, “No, don’t run for office.

The thing to do if you wanna really influence policy is to, um, get into, the intellectual elite.” And at the time, I don’t know why the idea of, like, trying to get onto university campuses was not as appealing, but, um, yeah. He was like, you know, “You should start one of these think tanks.” There were a couple that had started in the US already that he was kind of pointing to as, as an idea.

So Fisher starts this and, like, he’s going on for a while, and then he starts to have a little bit of traction and he’s getting some corporate funding in, and eventually in the ’70s they get credited with really, you know, getting Margaret Thatcher elected. But his whole [00:20:00] history is like, you know, he, he grew up very wealthy.

You know, his mother was from an aristocratic line. His dad was, like, very high up in the church, and he grew up, like, in, you know, the woods that the Winnie-the-Pooh woods are modeled after, you know? Going between, like, a country mansion and a city mansion and, like, you know, just kind of lived this very charmed childhood.

And then he and his brother… Well, first their, their dad died fairly early, um, and then during World War I. And then he and his brother decide

Matthew Green: He was shot by a sniper, right?

Amy Westervelt: He was shot by a sniper, yeah,

Matthew Green: He died in combat, yeah.

Amy Westervelt: In combat, yeah, in World War I. So they lose their dad pretty early. They mo- they basically grow up without a father, and they sort of become that male figure for each other in a way.

And they enlist together when World War II starts, and he sees his [00:21:00] brother, you know, like plummeting to his death. So it’s this hugely traumatic experience.

Matthew Green: Because they’re fighter pilots right? In the Battle of Britain.

Amy Westervelt: They’re fighter pilots, yeah, in the Battle of Britain.

Exactly. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, because they, um, bought a plane together when they were, um, in, in school and l- like learned how to fly and, you know, so then they decide, “Okay, we’re gonna, we’re gonna sign on with the Air Force.” And yeah, he watches his brother fall to his death. It’s very traumatic. Um, and it’s part of, like, what galvanizes him when he returns home to wanna fight back against what he sees as, you know, Britain kind of going in the same direction that they were fighting in Germany.

So he has this very personal connection to this stuff. Um, and then, yeah, it just, it kicks off, I th- for him, um, this lifelong battle with really severe depression. There [00:22:00] are, um, writings about him where, you know, he would, like, go to bed for a year. A year with, like, a depressive episode.

Matthew Green: Well, what I find fascinating and is, is kind of clarifying even as we’re speaking about it for me, is this ideological orientation that w- like when it, by the time it arrives in the 1980s or even today, is, is, is presented as free markets, deregulation,

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

Matthew Green: trickle-down economics, like a whole kind of intellectual apparatus to justify a small state and allowing corporations to do whatever they like, essentially.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: But for someone like Fisher, it’s rooted in the war. It’s rooted in a fight against the Nazis, and even the fear actually of the communists as well at that time, right? The totalitarians, whether of the left or the right.

Amy Westervelt: Right

Matthew Green: I, we, but we also hear echoes of that today, right? When you

Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

Matthew Green: hear Jordan [00:23:00] Peterson portraying climate policies

Amy Westervelt: totally

Matthew Green: as a s- as a s- as a kind of march down the road to Stalinism.

Amy Westervelt: Statism — yes, exactly.

Matthew Green: I don’t, I, I find that echo very, very powerful, and I, I wonder whether

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: we all need to be looking like more deeply at the really deep roots of these,

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: fissures that divide us, because

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: on with Fisher that way more than just an intellectual inclination towards,

Amy Westervelt: Well, because he,

Matthew Green: free market economics, isn’t there?

Amy Westervelt: Be- because he’s not actually a very intellectual guy, which I find really funny. Like, he’s, notably not a good student. He reads Hayek in Reader’s Digest. Like, he reads the Reader’s Digest version, you know?

Matthew Green: great.

Amy Westervelt: So, and by all accounts was, like, a massive fan of Reader’s Digest and, like, subscribed everybody to it.

Um, and

Matthew Green: I j- I

Amy Westervelt: so, [00:24:00] like…

Matthew Green: I’m just wanting to dwell on the British culture that we’re presencing here, ’cause I, I feel like it leavens, leavens the US slant that we might otherwise feel.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, totally. Well, and then, yeah, yeah. He actually, um, at a certain point becomes, like, the guy who brings, you know, industrial ag to the UK as well

Matthew Green: Yeah, it’s chicken, battery chickens as well.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, that’s him.

Matthew Green: Factory farming.

Amy Westervelt: He does that. Yeah, factory farming. He’s, he introduces that and he makes a fortune off of it.

Matthew Green: I know we’ve only got a few minutes, and I,

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: your grand unified theory of information ecosystem restoration, because you do set out in the last chapter some really concrete proposals for how we

Amy Westervelt: Well,

Matthew Green: can address all this.

So

Amy Westervelt: I mean,

Matthew Green: w-

Amy Westervelt: I think,

Matthew Green: I’d love to hear you speak about that.

Amy Westervelt: We’ve actually had a lot of the guardrails in place in the past that, um, have been removed, and there’s this huge idea that if you talk at all about, um, [00:25:00] creating an information ecosystem where people can just find, like, useful information, which we don’t have right now, you know?

Without being, like, a professor or an investigative journalist or whatever, um, that like, okay, maybe there need to be s- like, some s- maybe there needs to be some fact-checking, or maybe there needs to be content moderation or things like that. People are like, “Oh, that’s censorship.” That is not what censorship is.

Matthew Green: Well, it,

Amy Westervelt: you know

Matthew Green: seems to me, and I think maybe you use a similar analogy, but it, it’s almost like food labeling or like we, we, we

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: accept that there should be some regulation over what goes into food and what is

Amy Westervelt: Right.

Matthew Green: food and

Amy Westervelt: Yeah

Matthew Green: what, what is advertised as food. But that, that’s not particularly controversial unless you’re maybe an extreme libertarian.

As I think you say in the book, the, this Overton window has moved so far from where we were, say, in ’70s, even ’80s, when there were more restrictions on or, or [00:26:00] requirements for balance in broadcast and obviously more restrictions on corporate funding for political causes.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, in terms of, like, transparency too. That’s… It’s like, um, yeah, I think, like, transparency around funding of all kinds, huge help. Um, you know, fact-checking, media literacy in general, like, people just understanding where information is coming from and who’s shaping it.

You know, in the same way, like, when I was growing up, um, and I had a civics class, one of the things that our teacher made us do was read the newspaper once a week, an actual print newspaper, kids. Um, read… And

Matthew Green: I remember those.

Amy Westervelt: It was only… Yeah, it was only once a week, but, um, but he was very insistent that, like, we get familiar. And then we would talk about, like, you know, how certain [00:27:00] stories had been presented and, you know, what interests were being represented in them. . It was actually, like, very useful, and I just don’t think kids are getting that at all. Instead, it’s like co- I don’t know, like, you, you have a kid too, right? I don’t…

Matthew Green: Eight-year-old daughter, yes. I was just trying to visualize

Amy Westervelt: Okay.

Matthew Green: buying a copy of The Times and seeing whether I could read it to her, but I

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Yeah

Matthew Green: I think I’d have to first explain what this artifact is

Amy Westervelt: What is this thing?

Matthew Green: before we begin to read it. Yeah

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Yeah. Um, but like I know in, in my kids’ schools over the past few years, like the biggest conversation is like to what level are we gonna allow them to use AI in school? Not like, like, uh, what kinds of conversations are we having with them about like the information ecosystem that AI is entering into, you know?

Um, so yeah, I think there are like educational changes that need to be made. I think there are… I think [00:28:00] we should reinstate the, the guardrails that used to be in place around balance in broadcast news. And I also think that like, you know, I don’t know. Okay, I, I feel like fear in my heart even saying this, but like I actually think this is so bad.

I’m gonna get the, the internet trolls coming for me so hard. Um, I, I think that actually like some people who are caught lying over and over and over again to the public probably should be censored. Like you get the right to speak to the public. You get, you have like a, a platform and people are, you know, engaging in what you’re doing and you’re using it to misinform them or give them false information or whatever.

I don’t know. I like, I, I get that, that like it depends on who’s in charge and, like who gets to decide what’s [00:29:00] true and what’s not and, you know, all of those kinds of things.

But I think that like we should be able to have a conversation about what should the consequence be of knowingly misleading people and, infecting the public square with lies. Um, the idea that that should always be or that that is a victimless crime and that it should never be punished, I don’t think that that’s like a very functional idea right now, you know?

I think and I write this in the book too that like that frame on speech, the sort of like free speech absolutists that are like, you know, any type of speech, a lie, hate speech, you know, violent speech, whatever it is should all be allowed forgets like the other side of the coin of free speech which is like the right to discourse, you know, the right to [00:30:00] information. Like the right

Matthew Green: The right to an unpolluted information

Amy Westervelt: to be informed.

Matthew Green: supply, just

Amy Westervelt: Exactly.

Matthew Green: like we could expect an unpolluted water supply. It’s

Amy Westervelt: And I’m not, like I, I hate the way that people, people will take that and say like, “Oh, you just wanna hear from people who think just like you.” I don’t actually. Like I’m very interested in hearing from people that disagree with me and, uh, change my mind all the time, you know? Someone who is just sharing something that they truly believe is very different from someone who’s being paid by a person or a company to spread a certain kind of narrative. Um, and I don’t think that we should treat those two forms of speech the same way. This is why like one of the main arguments I make kinda throughout the book, but especially at the end, is that we have to, reinstate the difference between individual free speech and corporate speech.

This is like a, a very toxic product [00:31:00] created in the US and now disseminated globally. Um, the idea that corporations should have equal speech rights to individuals is completely out of touch with reality. They have, you know, 100 times the budget to craft their message, get it out, amplify it, all of those kinds of things.

Um, and they should be held to a higher standard of truth as well because of that, you know? Like there’s absolutely no reason that we can’t say like, “Oh, you know, companies shouldn’t knowingly spread misleading information.” I don’t understand why that’s even remotely controversial.

I mean, the, the easiest thing you can do is, like, disengage from social media, right?

Matthew Green: Yeah.

Amy Westervelt: Like, just do it.

Matthew Green: and we can regulate, regulate the tech platforms as well, which is another

Amy Westervelt: Absolutely. That’s another big one. That’s another one that they’re really crying censorship over. But, like, um, [00:32:00] the reality is these guys are not fighting for your free speech rights. They are fighting for their right to not be taxed the same as any other industry has the entire history of capitalism.

It’s, there’s absolutely nothing unique to what they are doing. Um, it’s just that they actually have been very successful at sort of wrapping their anti-regulatory campaigns in the language of, you know, social justice somehow. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s ridiculous. The idea that, like, Elon Musk is a populist is completely fucking nuts.

Like, you know?

I’m sorry, but no. The world’s upside down.

Stay tuned to hear Alleen Brown’s conversation with Nick Tilsen. That’s coming up after a quick break.

[MIDROLL 2]

Alleen Brown: Hi folks, I’m Alleen Brown, Drilled investigative reporter and senior editor. [00:33:00] So it didn’t get a ton of national media attention when a police officer in the border town of Rapid City, South Dakota claimed Nick Tilsen, the executive director of the nonprofit NDN Collective, attempted to hit him with his car.

Nick said the charges, including aggravated assault on a police officer, were politically motivated. Then last winter, right around the time that Nick faced a jury trial, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis. The government’s story was that she had tried to hit the agent with her car, but the video footage showed otherwise.

This reminded me a lot of Nick’s case, so I decided to look more into it. I actually got surveillance footage of his run-in with the cop,

and Drilled published a story about it which you can find in the show notes. Nick’s charges were eventually dismissed after a mistrial and a hung jury. I spoke to Nick in person about all this last spring when I visited [00:34:00] Rapid City.

We got into why this case is representative of a type of judicial harassment that environmental and indigenous activists confront around the world. Nick also told me about how Trump’s crackdown on nonprofits has had a material impact on his group’s work.

Here’s the interview.

So you know, we’re here in Rapid City.

Um, what is a border town? What makes , Rapid City, a border town and what does that mean for someone who is here trying to defend the land, water, and environment?

Nick Tilsen: Border towns, I mean the reference around border towns is, um, towns that border the Indian reservations, and we got nine reservations in South Dakota. And, this is the biggest town in Western South Dakota. And so we have, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Rosebud, Cheyenne River, uh, all in this area. And [00:35:00] this is a regional town, right? So it’s not just the Indians, but everybody comes here for their, their food, their construction supplies, their materials. Um, and the, the history of border towns has usually been one of extraction as it relates to Indian people.

You know, they forced us onto the reservations and on the reservations are some of the, extreme pockets of poverty in there, um, with, with terrible economic conditions. And then these border towns, have been created over time, all on stolen land of Indian people.

So Rapid City wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the stealing of the Black Hills, and it wasn’t for the mining industry, both in gold and, other forms of mining that have built the regional economy here. And then there historically has just been in entrenched embedded racism, in a lot of the border towns. Even though ironically the border towns actually depend on Indian people to be part of their economic [00:36:00] engine. Because we come here and spend money here, and we come here and spend resources here, we contribute to the tax base here, and we’re, we’re a part of it.

So, uh, historically there’s been a lot of racism. You know, monitoring license plates that are from reservations, pulling ’em all over, harassing people. Historically, you know, uh, places like Rapid wouldn’t serve Indian people in the hotels, wouldn’t serve people, in the restaurants.

And so there’s a long history of, of entrenched racism.

Alleen Brown: And yeah, the second part of that question, what does that mean for someone who’s here, who’s Native, who’s trying to defend the land, water, and environment?

Nick Tilsen: Well, we got a big, uh, a lot of, we have, we systemic racism to overcome, So, um, I always think that there’s a difference between prejudice and white supremacy.

Um, prejudice is like, oh, somebody doesn’t like you ’cause you’re Indian or follows you around at the store ’cause they think you’re gonna [00:37:00] steal something ’cause you have a braid and hair, you know, dark skin. Racism is like systemic you know, how that manifests itself is when you have Indians, 10% of the population of the whole state, but represent 51% of the people incarcerated in the whole state of South Dakota.

Structural racism is when Native American children in Western South Dakota have, um, the lowest economic and education mobility than any child in America or that the people on Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River have the lowest life expectancy than any human beings in the Western Hemisphere, with the exception of Haiti.

These are not opinions. These are facts, and those facts are a result of systemic racism. So when you think about being a water protector, a community [00:38:00] organizer in these conditions we’re dealing with. You know, a hundred over 150, 200 years of entrenched systems that have been built to persecute our people and not get equal protections under the law.

And the, the stats show that. So when you’re trying to upend these systems, you end up in a situation where it is extremely risky, because when you organize, and you’re calling out these systems, in many ways what you’re doing is holding up a mirror. And people don’t, when people are racist, that’s one thing I learned about racists is when racist systems or the people who uphold them and the mirror is held up to them, they’re ashamed.

They don’t like that. So they come down on you even harder. And that, and it manifests itself in, the, the policing. It manifests itself in over prosecution and prosecutorial misconduct. It manifests itself in ways for [00:39:00] them to try to make community organizers look like they’re criminals, uh, when actually they’re change makers, uh, and social justice, warriors and, or warriors for Mother Earth.

And they try to stack laws against you, you know, and they also, like, we live in these conditions now where they’re trying to, they’re trying to get to the point where they can call you a domestic terrorist.

Because if they can, if, uh, if they can use the T word, I call it the T word, then they can get away with everything. They, they can get away with violating your civil liberties. They can get away with, wire tapping your homes. They can, uh, get access to your information. They can monitor you.

They can do all those things. And that’s why there’s been efforts, throughout the years to try to, you know, coin, um, oil pipelines and mining projects as quote unquote critical infrastructure. Because critical infrastructure means it’s, [00:40:00] uh, critical for America and therefore any sort of protesting against critical infrastructure, then you must be a domestic terrorist in order to be doing that. Um, and so there’s been all of these efforts to really change the landscape in the, in the field. And you see that out here and I’ve seen that manifest in many ways in, in my work. Mm-hmm.

Alleen Brown: And so, you know, getting to this trial that you recently had to go through, um, you know, what happened that day?

Why did you pull into that spot? Yeah. Can you just share that with, with

Nick Tilsen: us? Yeah. I think the important thing is to understand the whole arc. Yeah. It really started in 2020, um, uh, you know, the protest at Mount Rushmore. We shut down the road and,

Trump had to, he couldn’t drive to Mount Rushmore to take a helicopter from the Air Force base. Um, they didn’t like that, and they came down on charges with me. I was facing 17 years for assault, burglary, [00:41:00] and grand theft of the stealing of a police shield.

So those charges were dropped in 2020. Almost immediately in 2022, this incident happened. It wasn’t a protest, it wasn’t even really a community patrol. I was driving home and, we have a culture here where we’re always looking out for each other. Sometimes we have organized patrols where we’re, you know, we’re actually actively patrolling to, uh, make sure that police aren’t committing police brutality against native people, especially unsheltered.

This wasn’t even a designed patrol. I had dropped off my son, uh, on his birthday after his birthday, and I was going home and I just happened to look over and notice, uh, a cop that was coming up on an unsheltered relative.

Alleen Brown: Mm-hmm.

Nick Tilsen: Sometimes when you just show up and observe, they just kind of leave em alone. Or if you record, if you pull your phone out, then they leave them alone. I started pulling around the block, and I started pulling into this parking stall, and at the very front of the parking stall, all the way to the left, kind of on the line, this cop was [00:42:00] standing there.

He looks back, wasn’t concerned that I was there at all. And so then I pulled the rest of the way into the stall. The truck kinda lunged forward a little bit whenever I pressed on the gas to pull forward. And then I immediately pressed on the brake and then kind of came the rest of my way in there.

Yelling People: wow, he’s looking at you. What the —

Nick (from footage): I’m parking here. That’s a public parking spot.

Bystander Man: Back up.

Police Officer: 879, can I get a P unit? I got Nick Tilsen here.

Nick Tilsen: All of a sudden, out of nowhere, not the cop, but a different guy, uh, a white guy who just came from the bar, came running over and was like,

“That guy just tried to run you over,” and says that to the cop, and I don’t even know if he was with the cop or whatever, but this guy’s hollering at me,

Bystander Man: You need to back up, please.

Nick (from footage): This is a public parking spot.

Bystander Man: I understand that. You almost ran this officer over.

Nick (from footage): I didn’t almost run over nobody.

Nick Tilsen: And then that cop notices it’s

me and then says, [00:43:00] Nick Tilsen gets on his radio and says, Nick Tilsen just tried to run me over.

Police Officer: P15, Nick Tilson just tried to hit me with his car.

Bystander Man: We’ve got him. All right. You’ve got backup.

Nick Tilsen: Within 47 seconds, cops pulled in, my vehicle was surrounded.

Other Cops: Step out of the vehicle. Step out of the vehicle.

Nick (from footage): I’m not stepping

out of the vehicle.

Other Cops: Did you, you just almost hit this officer with your car?

Nick (from footage): No, I did not. I pulled into a public parking spot, right here.

Police Officer: That I was standing in, correct?

Nick (from footage): You were standing right over there, in that corner of it.

Other Cops: Okay. Step out of the vehicle, Mr. Tilsen.

Nick (from footage): I’m not, I’m not stepping out of the vehicle, not for a fucking minute.

Nick Tilsen: Um, some people showed up, um, and started recording. Then the supervisor came, and I was like, “Is somebody gonna interview me and ask me what happened? I’m sitting in this truck and nobody has told me I’m being detained. Nobody has told me that I’m [00:44:00] arrested. Nobody has told me anything.” So I told him exactly my side of the story and what happened. The supervisor says, “Oh, okay, well we’re gonna let you go. This was in June of 2022. Mm-hmm. They let me go. I never heard anything. A year later, in June of 2023, we announced a protest that was going to be on the 4th of July.

It was a march towards justice right in front of the police station. At that point between 2000, uh, 20 and 2023, Rapid City Police Department had killed six people.

Alleen Brown: Wow.

Nick Tilsen: All of them were Native people. There was not even ever a charge brought against any police officer, and so we wanted to, uh, have this protest and holy crap, it got politicized really fast.

The governor, uh, came [00:45:00] out, said they were gonna call in the National Guard. The mayor was hosting a press conference and they were sending people around downtown, telling local, um, business owners to board up their doors, that there’s these radicals coming to town, even though we, we are from here.

And then what happened is, and this came out in the trial, the prosecutor sat down with the chief of police and they made a decision together, “Hey, what’s going on with this Nick Tilsen case?” And they made the decision to charge me in that case. So I received a warrant for my arrest on 4:00 PM on a Friday. Monday was a holiday. And then the next day was the fourth. And so it was clear that they wanted to either arrest me over the weekend, um, or have me show up to the protest with an active warrant so that they could arrest me there.[00:46:00]

And right after they filed the charges, uh, the prosecutor did a press conference, and released a press statement. I was away at ceremony. I finished my ceremony. I was notified that there was this warrant for my arrest. And then that following Monday, I came and turned myself in. It was just a book and release. Turned myself in. I don’t know if they expected me to do that. And it actually turned into be a very powerful protest. It really turned into kinda like a ceremony. People prayed, sang, cried, spoke. They got to say their piece. Um, and, and so this, these charges were, these, this very, very — this incident that was nothing essentially. And then it just stretched on for years. You know I couldn’t leave the United States

I couldn’t leave the jurisdiction. Every time I went any anywhere, [00:47:00] um, I had to get written permission.

Alleen Brown: The jurisdiction is the county or what?

Nick Tilsen: Yeah. Yep. Pennington County.

Alleen Brown: Wow.

Nick Tilsen: I also have a place on the rez, on Pine Ridge. You drive to the airport and you’re outside the county.

You know, you drive to anywhere, you’re, you know, you’re outside of here. Like, everybody watches like, uh, law and order and shit, and it says like, you’re innocent until proven guilty.

Well, some of your rights are taken from you at the time of indictment.

Alleen Brown: Hmm. You know, ultimately this trial goes down, and there’s a hung jury, and it was a mistrial. What did you think about that?

Nick Tilsen: It was just racism at play.

I took the stand, and I was on the stand for two hours, whatever it was, you know. Um, and it was interesting because their legal strategy the entire time was to limit it down to this very narrow incident that happened just there because they felt like there was, that was like, that narrow incident was enough to try to [00:48:00] get a conviction.

But in the cross examination, it became very clear that this was a political, they wanted to attack the mission of NDN. They wanted to try to say what we do in community, community patrols and community care was villainizing.

I stand by what we do. We need to do community care. In fact, when community patrols and people hold police accountable, it’s safer for everybody, including the cops. It’s safer for the whole community. And this trial took place the same month as

the murder of Renée Good. Same month as the murder — a week — 10 days after the murder of Alex Pretti, who were doing what? Just simply trying to keep their people and their community safe. Hmm. That’s it.

Alleen Brown: Yeah. I mean, the murder of Renée Good in particular, obviously involved a vehicle. The claim was that she was trying to run over this ice agent, um, and she was labeled a domestic [00:49:00] terrorist, even after she was killed.

Did that remind you of your case?

Nick Tilsen: Oh, yeah. In fact, the prosecution brought it up. In jury selection, the prosecution said, “Hey, how, how were you gonna deal with the issue of ICE? You know, ’cause there’s a lot of different people’s ranging of different opinions.”

So, yeah, I thought about it. I looked at those videos and, you know, the officer in my case was never touched. My vehicle, never, you know, never was close to hitting him.

He went on the stand and said that he feared for his life. Nobody in that courtroom believed that. They had a, a completely weak case. Like we shredded the case to pieces in a, in a courtroom packed by elders.

And so I, you know, I I, I really chalked up chalk up the, the mistrial as a win. What people don’t realize is when prosecutors and police bring politically motivated charges like this, it’s often a narrative war.

Sometimes it has nothing to do with the law. They actually want to use [00:50:00] taxpayers’ dollars to try to create a narrative war and make it look like they’re being, hard on these criminals and trying to discredit what we are and what we’re about and what we’re fighting for in the world.

And I mean, I’ll be honest, they failed miserably at that, because the amount of support that we had from this community locally, the amount of support we’ve had nationally, the amount of support that we have from community leaders here just outweighed. And we had the stronger legal argument and we, we battled it out, you know, but it was, it was challenging because when you face, when the charges are brought against you, even though they’re bullshit, it is stressful.

And especially in a state where you’re a Native American, and Native Americans make up 51% of the people incarcerated in all the Yeahils in the state of South Dakota.

Alleen Brown: Mm-hmm.

Nick Tilsen: So, yeah. Was I worried? [00:51:00] Hell yeah. I was worried, you know, but I also knew and realized over time that battling these charges and bringing the community along with, and being transparent, NDN was transparent to our partners, to our community, to our funders, to our supporters, and we educated them on what this was about.

Alleen Brown: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, and, you know, how does this fit into a wider context of, uh, the criminal legal system being used to suppress the voices of land defenders? Obviously right now you guys are trying to, fight against extraction on, in a sacred place, here in the Black Hills.

How, how did, how does this fit into that wider context? I

Nick Tilsen: mean, you look at all the work that NDN is doing. We’re in — we’re in our eighth year of existence, and I was under indictment for six of those eight years. It shows that it shows [00:52:00] that they’re intimidated when people organize, when people organize money, when people organize people, when people organize movement. It shows that they will use selective prosecution, that they will violate their own laws that they sworn an oath to, to come after people who are actually standing up for justice.

Um, and so in the context of everything that’s happening in this country, most of the efforts that the law enforcement and the prosecutors have done in cahoots with corporations and in cahoots with, um, violent police forces, is actually weakened the democracy. There’s an effort to weaken the democracy.

There’s no consequences for them to do this either. I spent the last, you know, three, four years or even six years spending resources, being — worrying I’m gonna go off to prison. My son, my son told me, he said, you know, I [00:53:00] was 10 years old when this happened, and I’m 15 now. That was a third of my life.

What they’re trying to do is tire tire people out. They’re trying to drain the resources of the movement so that the resources are spent battling them instead of moving those resources into community to solve these very problems that we’re trying to do or to protect Mother Earth.

So when you think of these situations, okay, they’re gonna go after, you know, they’re gonna, they’re gonna, they’re gonna go after Greenpeace because there’s an entity for them to sue.

They’re gonna come after me. They’re gonna go after Georgia Fort in Minneapolis. They’re gonna go after these visible people who have the ability to expose what they are doing. And, and so their approaches are strategic, and they’re trying to not only [00:54:00] diffuse the light that’s being held on the injustice that they’re perpetuating,

they’re trying to make us out to to look like we’re criminals. Greenpeace is not a criminal organization. NDN Collective is not a criminal organization. We’re environmental justice and social justice organizations that are fighting for the protection of Mother Earth for all people.

That’s what we stand for in the world, and I think that’s what we’re up against is that there is this, these narrative wars are turning into real wars and in this process of these narrative wars turning into real wars, they do not care at all about the actual impact on the weakening of democracy or people’s human rights.

Alleen Brown: Um, so I wanna ask, you know, National Security Presidential Memo 7, basically,

commands law enforcement agencies of all stripes [00:55:00] to investigate a range of sort of like leftist organizations construed as, supporting terrorism. Uh, among the types of ideologies this memo says, you know, supports domestic terrorism is anti-Americanism. At the same time you have organizations, right, wing organizations like the Capital Research Center naming NDN Collective explicitly as an organization, essentially to keep an eye on. That same organization is recasting just the term Turtle Island as being, um, connected to criminality. So I’m curious about how all of this pressure from the federal government, you know, these threats from the Trump administration to go after nonprofits, is impacting NDN Collective.

Nick Tilsen: Um, I think the biggest impact on NDN has been a chilling effect. You know, there’s been efforts to try to discredit us, you know, and there was a congressional [00:56:00] report done. You know, we had an IRS audit that we quite frankly passed in flying colors, because we keep a tight ship here.

We follow non-profit laws and rules. But whenever the federal government tries to issue these types of memos, what it does is it creates a chilling effect, right? So funders are often taking a little bit longer to underwrite grants to organizations.

The one good thing, I’ll say, we haven’t experienced like a huge amount of people pulling out of funding. I think that those, these funders are really wanting to continue to support us, but we have to go through their legal departments, and they have to look at risk aversion and they have to look at, you know, is NDN Collective, you know, uh, too risky?

Are they attracting too much attention? Will their activity bring attention to us? And the result of that creates, uh, a delay in funding in addition to that, a delay in funding and sort of [00:57:00] longer underwriting. Um, and we’ve had some funders pull out.

I mean, we, one of our large, we had a large funder pull out at one point.

Alleen Brown: Wow.

Nick Tilsen: Their decision was, they did not believe that investing into indigenous self-determination was an evidence-based practice. And

Alleen Brown: Can you say who that was?

Nick Tilsen: Blue Meridian Partners. And I will say who that is ’cause I disagree with wholeheartedly.

Investing into self-determination anywhere is one of the best investments you can make into communities. And it doesn’t matter if you’re conservative or liberal or progressive or conservative. Everybody wants people who are directly impacted by the things that we’re trying to change in the world, putting them in a driver’s seat of change.

That’s what self-determination is. It’s the only way change ever happens. Change does not happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up. Um, and that’s what self-determination work is.

So yeah, I think that Blue Meridian Partners, was [00:58:00] completely, off par in that. Um, and it sucked ’cause they were a big partner. I mean, they had funded us, uh, for a long time and we were working towards a bigger partnership.

Alleen Brown: Mm. And did that happen after Trump started making these threats?

Nick Tilsen: Yep. Absolutely. Happened in 2025. Um, so that, the timing of it was crazy.

  Alleen Brown: Just a quick note. We did reach out to Blue Meridian Partners about this, and a spokesperson sent a statement. It said, “NDN Collective is doing vital work, and we are proud to have supported Nick Tilsen and his team as part of our shared belief in advancing economic and social mobility for young people and families in the US. Blue Meridian’s two-and-a-half year investment wrapped up as planned in January 2026.

The unrestricted grant to NDN Collective was made through the studio at Blue Meridian, which provides visionary leaders with flexible resources to explore strategies that help them prepare for future growth. The studio provides a one-time investment so that organizations can test and enhance their work solving societal challenges as a proving ground of readiness for future scaling investments. Blue Meridian invests further in a subset of these organizations.” Back to the interview

Nick Tilsen: So you have all this what’s happening in philanthropy and then you literally have what’s what’s happening with all of the, the attacks on DEI, uh, I mean, we just got another letter last week from a USDA grant that we got that they send up to all of the USDA grant grantees in the whole nation, um, for that particular grant program, basically canceling the grant.

Alleen Brown: Wow.

Nick Tilsen: And, um, and now of course, all the grantees are gonna appeal it. Um, we were part of an appeal — the Minneapolis Foundation had received a big, EPA grant in which NDN Collective was a named partner in that grant. And, [00:59:00] um, this, the, the Minneapolis Foundation and the partners, you know, sued and won, that they couldn’t revoke this grant.

But that is the climate that we’re in. And NDN had had to downsize, you know, we were at a hundred staff before Trump was inaugurated and today we’re at 52.

Alleen Brown: Wow. That’s a huge downsizing.

Nick Tilsen: And it was what we had to do. It was what we had to do because the landscape has changed. The landscape has changed. And these employees were, you know, these are families and amazing people, and I’m so glad that so many of ’em went on to other places to go do good work throughout the movement and, and indigenous communities.

But it’s been a struggle, you know? And, um, but I would say that we’re also, like, we’re navigating well.

Alleen Brown: Mm-hmm.

Nick Tilsen: NDN Collective is standing real strong. You know, if you think about [01:00:00] this, in the midst of all of that happening, in the midst of all of the different struggles happening, we freed Leonard Peltier, we got a mineral withdrawal in the Black Hills.

We won the, we won the, um, Grand Gateway civil rights litigation. We got my charges dropped. You know, the land back movement is robust and growing. And so at the same time that, that, that I want to highlight the negative, attacks on us, we have been navigating and maneuvering them. There is no throwing the towel.

Like if we want to achieve environmental justice, climate justice, social justice, we have to stay, we gotta put our stake in the ground and fight. And we gotta be strategic and we gotta do it maybe differently than we did before. And we gotta understand that we’re in it together. From a global standpoint, I think land and water defenders and land and water, protectors are being murdered around the world, they’re being murdered and they’re being incarcerated [01:01:00] because of corporations backed by governments allowing it to be. And the reality is because capitalism is driving that. Capitalism is, is driving those decisions. So when a water protector or land defender stands up in, in the face of these things, they’re standing up against a multinational corporations backed by settler colonial governments that are willing to bend their laws for corporate interests over somebody who deserves human rights, who has inherent human rights — often people who have treaty rights, and they’re willing to erode those things because they also want to discourage other people from doing so because it affects their bottom line.

It shows everywhere that when you rise up and you protest against these, you can cost them millions and billions of dollars. They’re trying to say that the act of doing that is terrorism. Meanwhile, these [01:02:00] corporations and the governments that support ’em, they’re the terrorists. They’re the ones that are eroding people’s human rights and sovereignty, um, in the pursuit of what? Environmental destruction contributing to climate change, because a weakening democracy actually does benefit the one percenters. It benefits the corporations, it benefits the super rich. And so this is very much way, this is very much, it’s a class war. You know, we see it as a spiritual war.

We see it as a war from Mother Earth, but it is very much a class war. They don’t care about their, even the constituents who vote for them, and they somehow get constituents to vote against their own interest and to support narratives against their own interest. And so these are the times that we’re in.

This is what we find ourselves in. And it’s dangerous.

People will give their lives to stand up for their [01:03:00] children and for their rights. And people will do that in every country in the world because that’s what has taken Indigenous people and water protectors and land defenders — that’s what it has taken for our survival. Our survival is bound up in this struggle.

We understand, what we’re fighting for and we’re fighting for clean water, clean air, basic human rights, inherent rights, something that is good for all human beings and Mother Earth. And that’s why that’s not something that we’re gonna back down from.

And I think the corporations have to realize this, and they have to realize that they’re not going to win these battles. Um, but there will be sacrifices. People have lost their lives, and will continue to lose their lives. And that is not a reason for people to retreat. It’s a reason for people to stand up.

Alleen Brown: Well, Nick, again, thank you so much for your time and for the extra time that you gave. I really [01:04:00] appreciate it.

Nick Tilsen: Yeah, no problem. Thanks.

Thanks.

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