Eco-Roundup: Introducing my new podcast, The Propagandist

Every month, I assemble a round-up of stories I’m following and issues I’m covering, with palate cleansers at the end. Please consider a paid subscription so I can keep up my independent reporting.

In the last week of August, I launched a new podcast miniseries for Drilled plus a print piece for High Country News. I’ll do a post or two with some deeper reflections in the next week or two — and I DO hope you'll listen and read. But for now here’s my TLDR:

--> We published over 100 pages of public records describing the private security firm TigerSwan’s propaganda campaign against the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016 and 2017.

--> In internal emails and WhatsApp chats, TigerSwan’s propagandist Robert Rice repeatedly said that he was looking for fractures and divisions within the movement and between the movement and the nearby community. He plotted to use Facebook pages to make them worse.

--> TigerSwan aimed much of the Facebook propaganda at the mostly white community bordering the Standing Rock reservation, including the Bismarck and Mandan area. People were already pissed about the protests, and the Facebook content made it worse. The Trump election at the same time supercharged it all.

--> The most damning document I obtained is a WhatsApp chat between TigerSwan’s propagandist and its most prolific infiltrator. They describe exactly what they intend to do and why. The propagandist sets out to organize a local countermovement in Iowa. The infiltrator plots to bribe people for information and floats the idea of emptying an activist’s bank account or hacking another’s email account.

--> This is sort of a prequel to the podcast me and Drilled put out last year, called SLAPP’d. That pod was about pipeline parent company Energy Transfer’s massive lawsuit blaming Greenpeace for the Standing Rock movement. The company essentially won a jury trial, with a judgement big enough to sink Greenpeace. This new series delves into the propaganda that Energy Transfer's security company aimed at the same community from which the jury would eventually be drawn. 

-->Episode 1 is out now. Episode 2 will be out tomorrow. We even got voice actors to read the texts between the propagandist and the infiltrator. You can find the episodes wherever you stream podcasts. Just search Drilled.

Other things I’m reading:

"It turns out all that burning all of those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects"

The propagandist Robert Rice wasn't a military veteran like many of his TigerSwan colleagues. He was a tech dude and a virtual reality evangelist. In fact, he spent years attempting to build a virtual universe called Omniscape. In interviews, he indicated it was inspired by the book Ready Player One, set in a dystopia where climate change and oil shortages have destroyed the planet, and people escape reality by plugging into an immersive video game universe.

“ What you’re looking for are seams that you can fracture.”

I was searching for literature that would explain TigerSwan's propagandists, Robert Rice and Nick Johnson, when I stumbled upon James Forest's Digital Influence Mercenaries. The title alone told me this was the right read. And in my interview with James, he seemed to predict many of the propagandists' moves. You take a group's fears and uncertainties and you turn them into weapons. You can hear directly from James in Episode 1.

Palate Cleansers

I cover topics that are heavy and distressing to take in, so I'm ending these posts with things that make me feel grounded: food, nature, community.

Something Delicious: Raw clams

As good as oysters when you're in a seafood joint on the Jersey shore with the stormy ocean less than a mile away.

Garden update: My Morning Bumblebee

He buzzes around the purple flower at breakfast-time while I sip my tea and read the news.

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