When tribal leaders question or disapprove of a potential energy development project, they are lauded and portrayed as victims of greedy corporations and environmental plunderers. But when Tribal governments approve of a project which does not fit the Administration’s radical environmental agenda, their input is largely ignored.
As mainstream media stubbornly promote the fiction that the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protesters are all members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and live on the reservation of the same name, evidence mounts that the protests are a planned, coordinated, attack against private domestic energy development, organized and funded by left-wing environmental extremists.
Daily Wire recently compiled a list of facts about the #NoDAPL protests that mainstream media outlets are ignoring or underplaying, which expose the funding, the violence, and the ideology behind them. The list reads, in part:
The pipeline would help the economy and is not environmentally unsafe.
The pipeline would allow the country to be more independent on oil and does not affect the water supply. As Brian McNicoll writes in a Daily Caller column, “It took approval from environmental bureaucracies in four states. It took negotiating with local and federal officials, working painstakingly with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of the Interior to identify the safest, most environmentally friendly route available.”
Common sense would dictate then that the pipeline is perfectly safe. But common sense is lost among the environmentalist left.
The environmentalist left seems to think that the pipeline will somehow poison and ruin sacred Native American land. There has been a myth that the pipeline’s construction would result in the destruction of “burial sites, prayer sites and culturally significant artifacts” belonging to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, CNN reports, but there is no evidence that this would happen.
There have been camps of protestors established by “[George] Soros-funded anti-energy, anti-environment, anti-jobs activists journeying from the coasts to protest, disrupt progess and get arrested or at least charged if possible.
The protests have escalated into violence. The protestors, encamped on private land where the pipeline is supposed to be constructed, have blocked off bridges and roads and have even secured themselves onto concrete and vehicles. The protestors proceeded to do the following:
- Ignited fires, including causing $2 million in damage.
- Hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at police officers.
- A protestor fired a gun three times at officers (thankfully, no one was struck).
- A separate gun was fired, injuring someone in the hand.
Eventually, the police forces from six states had to intervene.
The police have arrested 141 protestors.
Most of the people arrested appear to be out-of-state protestors, likely bussed in by leftist activist groups.
The Department of Justice wouldn’t let federal officials get involved in stamping out the violent protests. The Daily Caller reported that Jonathan Thompson, executive director of the National Sheriff’s Association, claimed that Attorney General Loretta Lynch would not meet with the association and that the “DOJ refused to deploy federal resources” to aid Morton County — the area in which the protests too place — in getting the violent protests under control.
What is it about leftist protests that spawns law-breaking and violence? The reality is that breaking the law and violence is, and always has been, the default tactic of radicals.
Aaron Bandler
These facts have not gone unnoticed by the House Committee on Natural Resources. On September 23, the committee issued the following press release with these comments from Committee Chairman, Congressman Rob Bishop (R) UT, citing the manipulation by the Obama Administration of tribes affected by its anti-fossil fuel agenda:
Dakota Access Delays Jeopardize Future Infrastructure Investment and Development
WASHINGTON, D.C., November 15, 2016 –
Yesterday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) announced they will begin another round of discussions and analysis on the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) project with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Energy Transfer Partners and Dakota Access, LLC. Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT) issued the following statement:
“From the beginning of this controversy, the Obama administration exploited Native Americans to advance an obstructionist and radical environmental agenda.
“The facts haven’t changed. The route was approved the first time around after an exhaustive permitting process under the established regulatory framework, including the Mineral Leasing Act. The president’s increasingly autocratic interventions create massive uncertainty that jeopardizes future infrastructure investment and development. This is a mockery of our constitutional system and beyond the pale for any administration. Americans are counting down the days until we can return a semblance of certainty and professionalism to the federal government’s permitting process.”
Earlier in September, Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bishop, made the following comments about the Obama Administration’s cynical approach to Native Tribes whose interests have been impacted by its energy policies. According to Bishop, when tribal leaders question or disapprove of a potential energy development project, they are lauded and portrayed as victims of greedy corporations and environmental plunderers. But when Tribal governments approve of a project which does not fit the Administration’s radical environmental agenda, their input is largely ignored:
Bishop: Obama Administration is Exploiting Native Americans to Advance Their Extreme Environmental Agenda
WASHINGTON, D.C., September 23, 2016 -Today, the U.S. Departments of the Army, the Interior and Justice invited tribal leaders to participate in government-to-government consultations on infrastructure permitting. Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT) released the following statement:
“This administration has never cared about consulting local communities or Native tribes. Over the past eight years, tribes and Alaska Natives have documented the lack of consultation in the proposed hydraulic fracturing rule and the new offshore air rule respectively. Tribal consultation is always good enough when a project is denied, but never good enough when a project is approved. Meaningful consultation becomes meaningless when it’s selectively applied to advance a political agenda in the White House as they’ve once again pursued here.”
The post-election riots in large cities throughout the country are not unrelated to the ongoing protests in North Dakota. George Soros, the globalist billionaire, is funding activists behind both the anti-Trump riots and the #NoDAPL standoff. Accompanying this shared financial resource is a radical agenda; an ideology which despises American progress, prosperity, freedom, and independence from global powers–especially the overseas oil-producing nations upon which we’ve depended for decades.
America’s Native Tribes have long been victimized and exploited by the federal government. This pattern hasn’t deviated at all under Obama, whose vision has been for the United States of America to be absorbed by the one-world government envisioned by Soros and the radical environmentalists. With the outgoing president’s extreme anti-fossil fuel agenda endangered by the incoming pro-fossil fuel administration, there seems to be no limits to which the environmentalist Left will go to impose their vision on the West, including destroying economic opportunity for the Native Peoples whom they claim to protect.
