Amy Westervelt
Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative print and audio journalist. In 2015, she received a Rachel Carson award for women greening journalism for her role in creating a women-only climate…
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The most serious pollution problem the world faces may just be the corporate contamination of our information systems. In Drilled founder Amy Westervelt’s new book, Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy, she reveals how a handful of ideologues, propagandists, and corporate consultants reshaped knowledge production systems using think tanks, courtrooms, universities, and social media. DeSmog investigations editor Matthew Green interviews Amy about the book, followed by a conversation between Drilled senior editor Alleen Brown and Nick Tilsen, founder and CEO of the nonprofit NDN Collective. Nick describes how he and his organization have repeatedly found themselves in the crosshairs of President Trump’s crackdown on the environmental movement.
Reading list from today’s show:
1. Amy Westervelt’s new book, Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy
2. Matthew Green’s interview with Amy Westervelt for Desmog, “Q&A: Amy Westervelt on the Corporate Poisoning of the Information Aquifer — and How to Undo the Harm.“
3. Alleen Brown’s investigation for Drilled into criminal charges, which appeared to be politically motivated, filed against Nick Tilsen. “An Indigenous Activist was Accused of Trying to Run Over a Cop. Body Cam Footage Shows What Really Happened.“
4. Body cam and surveillance footage of Nick Tilsen’s arrest.
Like what you heard? You can support Drilled and The Spill by making a tax-deductible donation or by becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter.
Pushkin.
00:21
Speaker 2
Hello!
00:22
Speaker 1
Guess what? I wrote a book. I'm sure you're tired of hearing about it now.
00:25
Speaker 3
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 work those layers in their efforts to circumvent democracy. It's called brought to you by how corporations worked the truth, calm the public and broke democracy.
01:01
Speaker 1
And it's out now.
01:02
Speaker 3
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 up. And then after that, we're going to hear an interview from Allie Brown, Drilled Investigative Reporter and Senior Editor with Nick Tilson, who's a citizen of the Ogallala Lakota Nation and and CEO and founder of Indian 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, Aline 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.
01:56
Speaker 1
It's so effective.
01:58
Speaker 3
Indian Collective has been in the crosshairs of all kinds of right-wing organizations that have Donald Trump's ear as well.
02:04
Speaker 4
And Nick's story gives us.
02:05
Speaker 3
Some valuable insights into how rising authoritarianism has hurt civil society and the environmental movement.
02:12
Speaker 1
So stay tuned for that. But first up, it's me and Matthew. Here's that conversation.
02:31
Speaker 5
Amy, I mean, first of all, I want to say a huge congratulations. I devoured the book and I found it not only gripping, but incredibly illuminating. It was as if you were drawing back the curtain to reveal the machinery that normally we're blissfully unaware of, 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. So why did you think it was so important to put together this portrait?
03:12
Speaker 3
Well, I feel like especially now, people talk about disinformation and misinformation and polarization and all these things, right? Almost as like products of technology or products of social 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 really not that much discussion of the concerted efforts that really like warped the information ecosystem that we're all living in and.
03:45
Speaker 4
The impact that that has.
03:47
Speaker 3
Like actually, we just ran a mini series in Drilled that was reported and hosted by Aline Brown, who's a reporter, who's also a senior editor at Drilled.
03:57
Speaker 1
And it was so interesting.
03:58
Speaker 3
Because 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.
04:26
Speaker 2
Right.
04:26
Speaker 3
And the whole like the gist of it is that they take, you know, some things that were maybe minor tensions in.
04:34
Speaker 1
The community already. And they they just like inflame them.
04:37
Speaker 3
You know, that's how. good propaganda works? Is it like it, it's sort of like finds a crack and it exploits it. So, you know, they do this thing and it's fairly successful. And, you know, I'm not saying it's the only thing that 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. You know, over $ 300 million settlement 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 movement, right? So like you take that story alone and there's all these little pieces of it where the pipeline company is really just trying to complete a pipeline project. They don't necessarily want to create conditions for protest rights to be eroded in the U.S. They don't necessarily want to deepen divides within this, you know, South Dakota community that they were 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.
06:17
Speaker 6
You know what I mean?
06:18
Speaker 3
This is a thing that's happening like absent specific humans trying to do specific things.
06:28
Speaker 5
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. and various businessmen, other interests, to the whole discourse around free markets and what we would expect from government. And that to me was one of the most powerful messages that came through the book. So I wonder if you could speak a bit more about that century more long project that you document so exquisitely.
07:01
Speaker 2
Yeah.
07:01
Speaker 4
I mean, I think that this is another thing that I just don't think.
07:05
Speaker 3
Is super visible to people that, you know, these guys aren't always, and in fact, maybe even less than half the time, are they specifically, you know, promoting oil and gas or defending a particular project or anything like that? Like actually a lot of the effort and money goes into shaping people's general ideas of like, 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 pieces of propaganda that on the face of it don't have anything to do with oil at all. 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 ideas grow, which it goes like so much deeper than I think people think. My favorite example of this with the API in particular is that they had a project running During the early 2000s, with the help of the Atlas Network, this global network of free market think tanks, to funnel money through the API to this Catholic priest whose project was to encourage other Catholic priests. to embrace capitalism and to increasingly see environmentalism as like the devil's work, you know. And so it was like, it's to that level where like, I mean, they're trying to sort of like, you know, shape the minds of individual priests. 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 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 that But then it like the rubber hits the road and they're like, oh, we don't really actually love it when people who don't share our interests or like have a vote.
09:51
Speaker 5
Yes. And that vision of the landscape, I think, that you illuminate is so powerful because even when I started working at. DSMOG on the public relations sector, there was a part of me was like, well, that sounds relatively innocuous. But you pull on this thread and actually public relations is just the front end of this enormous space. project to essentially undermine and even arguably end democracy. And I think that was the really powerful finding that came through so strongly.
10:25
Speaker 3
I don't even necessarily know if these industries like set out to undermine truth, but that's kind of the point too, you know, like this is what I thought was really interesting about William Nordhaus.
10:41
Speaker 1
Which I wrote.
10:41
Speaker 3
About in the book too, that I don't think that he's compromised or 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 unwitting participants in this whole machine.
10:58
Speaker 5
Yeah. And William Nordhaus being the economist who basically reassured us that climate change would have a marginal impact on our future prosperity.
11:08
Speaker 2
Yeah.
11:09
Speaker 1
Yeah.
11:09
Speaker 5
Thank you. Thank you, William.
11:10
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah.
11:11
Speaker 3
But, you know, it's like the the oil companies saw economics as like a handy thing to use to to push back 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 hiring an economist to do a particular study, although they also did do that.
11:40
Speaker 4
They can just find the people.
11:42
Speaker 3
And that's how it works more often than not with a lot of the university research stuff too.
11:47
Speaker 1
I don't know.
11:48
Speaker 3
I talked to a guy who ran the center at Stanford that Exxon funded for a long time. Really nice guy. He's a geologist by trade. He was a petroleum engineer for a long time. And then kind of 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 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.
12:28
Speaker 4
That like it.
12:29
Speaker 3
Can be political and, 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? There are any number of ways that like you can very innocently be doing science and it can be politicized because of this whole machine that exists.
13:00
Speaker 5
And yeah, I'm glad you brought in that reference to the academic because you obviously have a whole chapter on how the fossil fuel industry and other polluters, what is funded and even necessarily that they put their fingers on the scale of the results, right? It's more that they're just directing the focus. So if you're going to put everything into carbon capture as a climate solution, then the research dollars will follow. But what is the opportunity cost of researching something that actually could work, right?
13:30
Speaker 2
Right. Exactly. Exactly.
13:32
Speaker 3
I mean, we're working on a project right now with ProPublica that has been going on for like a couple of 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 cost question and like the overall impact of the funding to 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?
14:08
Speaker 5
I mean, and I love the imagery of information pollution. I think it's so helpful because it kind of allows us to visualize how it's kind of seeped into almost the aquifers from which we're drawing, right? It's everywhere, right? And you mentioned a couple of individuals that you've written about in the book already. One of the things I really enjoy is the portraits you paint of the men. And they are almost exclusively men who are the authors or the engineers of this machinery. I wonder if there was any one of them in particular who you.
14:52
Speaker 5
Enjoyed writing about the most. Maybe enjoy is not the right word because I sense the kind of dark fascination that you hold for these guys. I wonder if there's any that you feel you were glad to bring more attention to.
15:05
Speaker 3
I think my favorite one is probably Michael Schellenberger because.
15:12
Speaker 4
I thought.
15:12
Speaker 5
You might say that.
15:14
Speaker 4
I just feel like he's such an underexplored.
15:17
Speaker 3
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 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. 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 Chavez's PR guy in the U.S., And.
16:01
Speaker 5
He exposed the child labor in sweatshops by Nike factories, right? Yes, exactly. That was a big part of his early career. Yeah.
16:09
Speaker 4
And I remember I was in the... He.
16:12
Speaker 3
Is like a longtime Bay Area person. 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. It was like how a lot of environmental organizations felt about him.
16:28
Speaker 2
And then.
16:31
Speaker 4
Yeah, he just sort of like went progressively further to the right. And now he.
16:35
Speaker 3
Is just like full alt-right guy and very extreme, but also very good at propaganda.
16:47
Speaker 2
Yeah.
16:48
Speaker 1
I see him.
16:48
Speaker 3
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. 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 very strong opinions about gender-affirming care and this and that and the other, you know? There's really, like, there is no topic that he won't touch from UFOs to.
17:23
Speaker 3
And he's also, oh, actually, to touch 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 because he's not, like, the most masculine of men i would say you know what i mean i'm like it just feels inauthentic 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 so.
18:22
Speaker 5
There is a character I want to ask you about.
18:24
Speaker 4
Yeah, I'm curious who jumped out to you.
18:27
Speaker 5
Well, not just because I'm British, but maybe partly because of that. I'm thinking now of the Fisher Brothers.
18:34
Speaker 3
Oh, yeah.
18:34
Speaker 4
So interesting.
18:35
Speaker 5
And the Atlas Network. I mean, we could do a whole podcast on this, but maybe you could give us a little... summary of what you found because Amish Network is another huge theme in the book. It's obviously a huge theme for us at DeSmog. But the actual characters at the start of the story, I think, are fascinating. And I certainly was not aware of any of this.
18:57
Speaker 4
The backstory of him is so interesting.
19:00
Speaker 3
Also that he was like, crippled by depression for his entire life.
19:06
Speaker 5
This is Anthony Fisher we're talking about, the older brother. Yeah.
19:09
Speaker 3
So Anthony Fisher started one of the first modern think tanks. It was called the Institute for Economic Analysis. And 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, you know, like starts this think tank and It's pretty slow going for a while. Initially, he reads Hayek's work and he's like, yes, this is my thing. I'm going to really fight for free market economics in Britain. He decides he's going to 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 want to 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, she'd start one of these think tanks. There were a couple that had started in the U S 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 seventies, they get credited with really, you know, getting Margaret Thatcher elected. But his whole history is like, you know, he, he grew up very wealthy and, 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.
21:11
Speaker 5
He was shot by a sniper, right?
21:14
Speaker 2
Yeah.
21:14
Speaker 1
Yeah.
21:15
Speaker 5
He died in combat.
21:16
Speaker 3
Yeah, in World War I. So they lose their dad pretty early. 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 brother, you know, like plummeting to his death. So it's this hugely traumatic experience.
21:38
Speaker 5
Because they're fighter pilots, right? In the Battle of Britain, flying hurricanes.
21:43
Speaker 4
Exactly.
21:43
Speaker 1
Yeah.
21:44
Speaker 3
Because they bought a plane together when they were in school and learned how to fly. And so then they decide, okay, we're going to sign on with the Air Force. And yeah, he watches his brother fall to his death.
22:01
Speaker 1
It's very traumatic.
22:04
Speaker 3
And it's part of like what galvanizes him when he returns home to want to 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, just, it kicks off for him, um, this lifelong battle with really severe depression. There are, um, Writings about him where, you know, he would like go to bed for a year, a year with like a depressive episode.
22:42
Speaker 5
What I find fascinating and is kind of clarifying, even as we're speaking about it for me, is this ideological orientation that like when it by the time it arrives in the 1980s or even today is presented as free markets deregulation. trickle-down economics, like a whole kind of intellectual apparatus to justify a small state and allowing corporations to do whatever they like, essentially. But for someone like Fischer, 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. But we also hear echoes of that today, right? When you hear Jordan Peterson portraying climate policies as a kind of march down the road to Stalinism. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I find that echo very, very powerful. And I wonder whether we all need to be looking more deeply at the really deep roots of these of these fissures that divide us because there's something going on with Fisher that is way more than just an intellectual inclination towards free market economics, isn't it?
24:08
Speaker 3
Because he's not actually a very intellectual guy, which I find really funny.
24:13
Speaker 4
Like he's notably not a good student.
24:15
Speaker 3
He reads Hayek in Reader's Digest, like he reads the Reader's Digest version, you know?
24:21
Speaker 5
Yeah, great.
24:22
Speaker 4
By all accounts, was like.
24:24
Speaker 3
A massive fan of Reader's Digest and like subscribed everybody to it.
24:31
Speaker 5
I just I'm just wanting to dwell on the British culture that we're presencing here because I feel like it leavens the US slant that we might otherwise feel.
24:41
Speaker 3
Yeah, he actually at a certain point becomes like the guy who brings, you know, industrial ag to the UK as well.
24:51
Speaker 5
Yeah, it's like battery chickens as well.
24:53
Speaker 4
Yeah, that's him.
24:55
Speaker 5
Factory farming.
24:55
Speaker 4
He does that.
24:56
Speaker 3
Yeah, factory farming. He introduces that and he makes a fortune off of it.
25:01
Speaker 5
I know we've only got a few minutes and I want to hear your grand unified theory of information ecosystem restoration, because you do set out in the last chapter some really concrete proposals for how we can address all this. So I'd love to hear you speak about that.
25:20
Speaker 2
Yeah.
25:22
Speaker 3
We've actually had a lot of the guardrails in place in the past that have been removed. And there's this huge idea that if you talk at all about creating an information ecosystem where people can just find useful information, which we.
25:41
Speaker 1
Don't have right now, without being like, a.
25:45
Speaker 3
Professor or an investigative journalist or whatever, that like, okay, maybe there needs to be like some, maybe there needs to be some fact checking or maybe there needs to be content moderation or things like that.
25:59
Speaker 1
People are like, oh, that's censorship.
26:01
Speaker 4
That is not what censorship is.
26:03
Speaker 5
Well, it seems to me, and I think maybe you use a similar analogy, but it's almost like food labeling or like we accept that there should be some regulation over what goes into food and what is sold as food and what is advertised as food. But that's not particularly controversial unless you're maybe an extreme libertarian. But as I think you say in the book, this Overton window has moved so far from where we were, say– in seventies, even eighties, when there were more restrictions on or requirements for balance in broadcast and obviously more restrictions on corporate funding for political causes.
26:42
Speaker 2
Yeah.
26:43
Speaker 1
Yeah.
26:44
Speaker 3
I think like transparency around funding of all kinds, huge help, um, you know, fact-checking media literacy in general, like people just understanding, um, where information is coming from and who's shaping it, you know, in the same way, like when I was growing up, 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.
27:13
Speaker 2
I remember those.
27:18
Speaker 3
Yeah, it was only once a week, but he was very insistent that like we get familiar. And then we would talk about like, you know, how certain stories had been presented and you know, what interests.
27:33
Speaker 1
Were being represented in them.
27:35
Speaker 3
And it was actually like very useful. And I just don't think kids are getting that at all. Instead, it's like, I don't know, like you have a kid too, right?
27:44
Speaker 5
Eight year old daughter.
27:45
Speaker 2
Yes.
27:45
Speaker 5
I was just trying to visualize buying a copy of the times and seeing whether I could read it to her. But I think I'd have to first explain what this artifact is before we begin to read it.
27:57
Speaker 2
Yeah.
27:58
Speaker 3
Yeah. But like, I know in my kids' schools over the past few years, like the biggest conversation is like, to what level are we going to allow them to use.
28:09
Speaker 1
AI in school?
28:10
Speaker 2
Not like....
28:13
Speaker 3
What kinds of conversations are we having with them about like the information ecosystem that AI is entering into, you know? So yeah, I think there are like educational changes that need to be made. I think there, I think we should reinstate the guardrails that used to be in place around balance in broadcast news.
28:36
Speaker 4
And I also.
28:37
Speaker 3
Think that like, you know, I don't know. Okay. I, I feel like fear in my heart even saying this, but like.
28:47
Speaker 1
I actually think this is so bad.
28:49
Speaker 3
I'm going to get the Internet trolls coming for me so hard. I think that actually like some people who are caught lying over and over and over again.
29:00
Speaker 1
To the public.
29:02
Speaker 4
Probably should be censored. Like you get the right to speak to the public.
29:06
Speaker 3
You get, you have like 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.
29:19
Speaker 1
I don't know.
29:20
Speaker 3
I like, I get that, that like, it depends on who's in charge and like who gets to decide what's 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.
29:46
Speaker 4
The idea that that.
29:48
Speaker 3
Should always be or that that is a victimless crime and that it should never be punished is I don't think that that's like a very functional idea right now. 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 information, the right to be informed.
30:31
Speaker 5
Well, the right to an unpolluted information supply, just like we could expect an unpolluted water supply. It's just as fundamental.
30:38
Speaker 2
Exactly. Exactly.
30:40
Speaker 3
I hate the way that people will take that and say, like, oh, you just want to hear from people who think just like you.
30:47
Speaker 1
I don't, actually.
30:48
Speaker 3
Like, I'm very interested in hearing from people that disagree with me and.
30:55
Speaker 3
Changed 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. And I don't think that we should treat those two forms of speech the same way.
31:16
Speaker 1
This is why.
31:17
Speaker 3
Like one of the main arguments I make kind of 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 very toxic product created in the U.S. and now disseminated globally. The idea that corporations should have equal speech rights to individuals is completely out of touch with reality. They have, you know, a hundred times the budget to craft their message, get it out, amplify it, all of those kinds of things. And they should be held to a higher standard of truth as well because of that. You know, 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 easiest thing you can do is like disengage from social media, right?
32:16
Speaker 1
Just do it.
32:19
Speaker 5
And we can regulate the tech platforms as well, which is another proposal you made.
32:22
Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely.
32:23
Speaker 4
That's another big one. That's another one that they're really crying censorship over.
32:28
Speaker 3
But the reality is these guys are not fighting for your free speech rights. They're fighting for their right to not be taxed the same as any other industry has the entire history of capitalism. 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.
32:59
Speaker 1
But yeah, it's, it's ridiculous.
33:01
Speaker 3
The idea that like Elon Musk is a populist is completely fucking nuts.
33:10
Speaker 1
I'm sorry, but no, the world's upside down.
33:13
Speaker 2
Yeah.
33:16
Speaker 1
Stay tuned to hear Aline Brown's conversation with Nick Tilson. That's coming up after a quick break.
33:22
Speaker 7
So Hi folks, I'm Eileen Brown, Drilled Investigative Reporter and Senior Editor. 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 Tilson, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Indian 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 Renee 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 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. 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.
35:24
Speaker 6
Water, and environment?
35:26
Speaker 2
Border towns, I mean, the reference around border towns is towns that border the Indian reservations. And we've 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, Shine River, all in this area. And this is a regional town, right? So it's not just the Indians, but everybody comes here for their food, their construction supplies, their materials. And the history of border towns has usually been one of extraction as it relates to Indian people. You know, we forced us onto the reservations and on the reservations are some of the extreme pockets of poverty in there 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 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 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 firm reservations, pulling them over, harassing people. Historically, you know, places like Rapid wouldn't serve Indian people and the hotels wouldn't serve people in the restaurants. And so there's a long history of of entrenched racism.
37:18
Speaker 7
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?
37:28
Speaker 2
Well, we've got a lot of systemic racism to overcome. So I always think that there's a difference between prejudice and white supremacy. Prejudice is like, oh, somebody doesn't like you because you're Indian. follows you around at the store because they think you're going to steal something because you have a braid and dark skin. Racism is systemic. 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 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 organizer, in these conditions, we're dealing with over 150, 200 years of entrenched systems that have been built in to persecute our people and not get equal protections under the law. And 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 when people are racist, that's one thing I learned about racists is that When racist systems are the people who uphold them and the mirror is held up to them, there's shame. They don't like that. So they come down on you even harder. And it manifests itself in the policing. It manifests itself in over-prosecution and prosecutorial misconduct. It manifests itself in ways for them to try to make community organizers look like they're criminals. When actually they're changemakers and social justice warriors and 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 get to the point where they can call you a domestic terrorist. Because if they can use the T-word... I call it the T word, then they can get away with everything. They can get away with violating your civil liberties. They can get away with wiretapping your homes. They can 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 oil pipelines and mining projects as quote unquote critical infrastructure, because critical infrastructure means it's a 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. And so there's been all of these efforts to really change the landscape in the field. And you see that out here. And I've seen that manifest in many ways in my work.
41:08
Speaker 7
And so, you know, getting to this trial that you recently had to go through, what happened that day?
41:14
Speaker 6
Why did you pull into that spot?
41:16
Speaker 2
Yeah.
41:16
Speaker 6
Can you just share that with us?
41:18
Speaker 2
I think the important thing is to understand the whole arc. You know, it really started in 2020. You know, the protest at Mount Rushmore. We shut down the road and Trump had to, he couldn't drive to Mount Rushmore. He had to take a helicopter from the Air Force base. They didn't like that. And they came down on charges with me. I was facing 17 years for assault, burglary, and grand theft of the stealing of a police shield. And so those charges were dropped in 2022. 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 actually actively patrolling to make sure that police aren't committing police brutality against Native people, especially unsheltered. This wasn't even a design patrol. I had dropped off my son after his birthday and I was going home. And I just happened to look over and notice a cop that was coming up on an unsheltered relative. Sometimes you just show up and observe. They just kind of leave him alone. Or if you record, if you pull your phone out, then they leave him 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 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 kind of 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. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, not the cop, but a different guy, 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.
43:29
Speaker 5
Move back up, please. No, this is a public parking spot.
43:32
Speaker 3
I understand that.
43:33
Speaker 2
You almost ran this office for over.
43:34
Speaker 5
I almost ran over nobody.
43:37
Speaker 2
And then that cop notices it's me and then says, Nick Tilson gets on his radio and says, Nick Tilson just tried to run me over.
43:47
Speaker 6
P-15, Nick Tilson just tried to hit me with his car.
43:50
Speaker 5
We got him.
43:51
Speaker 2
All right, we got that guy. Within 47 seconds, cops pulled in, my vehicle was surrounded. Step out of the vehicle.
44:01
Speaker 5
Step out of the vehicle. I'm not stepping out of the vehicle. You just almost hit this.
44:07
Speaker 2
Officer with your car.
44:07
Speaker 3
No, I did not.
44:08
Speaker 2
I pulled into a public parking spot, right?
44:11
Speaker 5
That I was standing in, correct?
44:13
Speaker 2
You were standing right over there, in that corner of it.
44:15
Speaker 5
Okay, step out of the vehicle, Mr. Chelsea.
44:17
Speaker 2
I'm not stepping out of the vehicle. Not for a fucking minute. Some people showed up. and started recording. And then the supervisor came and I was like, is somebody going to interview me and ask me what happened? I'm sitting in this truck and nobody has told me I'm being detained. Nobody's told me that I'm 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 going to let you go. This was in June of of 2022. 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. But at that point between 2020 and 2023, the Rapid City Police Department had killed six people. All of them were Native people. There was not even ever a charge brought against any police officer. And so we wanted to have this protest. And holy crap, it got politicized really fast. The governor came out, said they were going to call in the National Guard. The mayor was hosting a press conference. And they were sending people around downtown telling local business owners to board up their doors, that there's these radicals coming to town, even though we're 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 Tilson case? And they made the decision to charge me in that case. So. I received a warrant for my arrest on 4 p.m. 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 or have me show up to the protest with an active warrant so that they could arrest me there. And right after they filed the charges, 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 a very powerful protest. It really turned into kind of like a ceremony. People prayed, sang, cried, spoke. They got to say their piece. And so these charges were 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 anywhere, I had to get written permission. Right.
47:42
Speaker 6
The jurisdiction is the county or what?
47:44
Speaker 2
Yeah. Pending the county. Wow. I also have a place on the res on Pine Ridge. You drive to the airport and you're outside the county. You drive to anywhere. You're outside of here. Everybody watches law and order and shit and says you're innocent until proven guilty. Well, some of your rights are taken from you at the time of indictment.
48:06
Speaker 7
Ultimately, this trial goes down and there's a hung jury and it was a mistrial. What did you think about that?
48:16
Speaker 2
It was just racism at play. I took the stand and I was on the stand for two hours, whatever it was, you know. And it was interesting because their legal strategy the entire time was to limit it down to this very narrow incident to happen just there because they felt like that narrow incident was enough to try to get a conviction. But in the cross-examination, it became very clear that this was political. They wanted to attack the mission of NDN. They wanted to try to say what we do in 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 Rene Good. Same month as the murder. A week, 10 days after the murder of Alex Peretti. Who were doing what? Just simply trying to keep their people and their community safe. That's it.
49:27
Speaker 7
Yeah, I mean, the murder of Rene Good in particular obviously involved a vehicle. The claim was that she was trying to run over this ICE agent and And she was labeled a domestic terrorist even after she was killed.
49:41
Speaker 6
Did that remind you of your case?
49:44
Speaker 2
Oh, yeah. In fact, the prosecution brought it up. In jury selection, the prosecution said, hey, how are we going to deal with the issue of ICE? You know, because 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 completely weak case. We're like, we shredded the case to pieces in a courtroom packed by elders. And so I really chalked up 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 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 jails in the state of south dakota So yeah, was I worried? Hell yeah, I was worried. But I also knew and realized over time that battling these charges and bringing the community along with and being transparent, in the end was transparent to our partners, to our community, to our funders, to our supporters. And we educated them on what this was about.
51:59
Speaker 7
And you know, how does this fit into a wider context of... the criminal legal system being used to suppress the voices of land defenders. Obviously, right now, you guys are trying to fight against extraction in a sacred place here in the Black Hills. How does this fit into that wider context?
52:27
Speaker 2
I mean, you look at all the work that NDN's doing. We're in our eighth year of existence, and I was under indictment for six of those eight years. it shows 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. 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, in cahoots with violent police forces, is actually weaken 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 going to go off to prison. My son, my son told me, he said, you know, I 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 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 going to go after, you know, they're going to go after Greenpeace because there's an entity for them to sue. They're going to come after me. They're going to go after Georgia Fort in Minneapolis. They're going to go after these visible people who have the ability to expose what they are doing. And so their approaches are strategic. And They're trying to not only diffuse the light that's being held on the injustice that they're perpetuating, they're trying to make us out to look like we're criminals. Greenpeace is not a criminal organization. Indian 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.
55:28
Speaker 7
So I want to ask, you know, National Security Presidential Memo 7. basically commands law enforcement agencies of all stripes to investigate a range of sort of like leftist organizations construed as supporting terrorism. 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 Indian Collective explicitly as an organization essentially to keep an eye on. That same organization is recasting just the term Turtle Island as being 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 Indian Collective?
56:30
Speaker 2
I think the biggest impact on NDN has been a chilling effect. There's been efforts to try to discredit us, and there was a congressional report done. We had an IRS audit that we, quite frankly, passed in flying colors because we keep a tight ship here. We follow nonprofit 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 a huge amount of people pulling out of funding. I think that 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, is NDN Collective too risky? Are they attracting too much attention? Will their activity bring attention to us? And the result of that creates a delay in funding. In addition to that, a delay in funding and sort of longer underwriting. And we've had some funders pull out. We had a large funder pull out at one point. Their decision was they did not believe that Investing into Indigenous self-determination was an evidence-based practice.
57:55
Speaker 6
Can you say who that was?
57:56
Speaker 2
Blue Meridian Partners. And I will say who that is. Because I disagree 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. 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. And that's what self-determination work is. So yeah, I think that Blue Medium Partners was completely off par in that. And it sucked because they were a big partner. I mean, they had funded us for a long time and we were working towards a bigger partnership.
58:46
Speaker 6
And did that happen after Trump started making these threats?
58:51
Speaker 2
Absolutely. Happened in 2025. So the timing of it was crazy.
58:58
Speaker 7
Just a quick note, we did reach out to Blue Meridian partners about this and a spokesperson sent a statement. It said, Blue Meridian's two-and-a-half-year investment wrapped up as planned in January 2026. The unrestricted grant to Endian 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.
59:46
Speaker 6
Back to the interview.
59:48
Speaker 2
So you have all this, what's happening in philanthropy. And then you literally have what it's, what's happening with all of the attacks on DEI. I mean, we just got another letter last week from a USDA grant that we got that they send out to all of the USDA grant, grantees in the whole nation for that particular grant program, basically canceling the grant. Wow. And, and now of course, all the grantees are going to appeal it. 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 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 100 staff. before Trump was inaugurated. And today we're at 52. Wow.
1:00:51
Speaker 6
That's a huge downsizing.
1:00:53
Speaker 2
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 them went on to other places to go do good work throughout the movement and in indigenous communities. But it's been a struggle. But I would say that we're also navigating well. Indian Collective is standing real strong. If you think about 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 Monroe withdrawal in the Black Hills. We won the 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 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 put our stake in the ground and fight. Right. And we got to be strategic and we got to do it maybe differently than we did before. And we got to 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 because of corporations backed by governments allowing it to be. And The reality is because capitalism is driving that. Capitalism is driving those decisions. So when a water protector or a land defender stands up in the face of these things, they're standing up against 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 corporations and the governments that support them, they're the terrorists. They're the ones that are eroding people's human rights and sovereignty. 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 a class war. We see it as a spiritual war. We see it as a war for Mother Earth, but it is very much a class war. They don't care about 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 children and for their rights, but 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 going to 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. 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.
1:05:23
Speaker 7
Well, Nick, again, thank you so much for your time and for the extra time that you gave. I really appreciate it.
1:05:28
Speaker 2
No problem. Thanks.
1:05:34
Speaker 3
The Spill is a regularly recurring segment of the Drilled podcast. It comes out every Friday when we're not in the middle of a narrative season. If you have ideas for folks you'd like to see us interview on here, let us know. We're at Drilled Media on all social media platforms, or you can email me at amy at drilled.media. Links to all the stories we mentioned and to pre-order my book are in the show notes. The Spill is produced by Peter Duff and edited by Aline Brown. Our theme song is Bird in the Hand by Fourknown. Artwork by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton. of the First Amendment Project. You can find transcripts of The Spill online at drilled.media. Like the rest of Drilled, The Spill is distributed by Pushkin Industries. The team there is Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Ratner, Owen Miller, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Brian Shreberneck, and Jake Flanagan.
1:06:38
Speaker 2
Thank you.
The Host
