Inside Standing Rock’s propaganda war

This story is a partnership with Drilled, an independent global newsroom focused on multimedia climate accountability reporting. Reporting for this story was funded in part by the Center for Media and Democracy. Strike up a conversation at one of the dimly lit dive bars near Mandan, North Dakota’s Main Street, or a rural tavern decorated with taxidermy animals or even a popular breakfast spot. Mention the massive protests to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline that happened here 10 years ago, and a specific sentiment may bubble up. “Disgusting eco-terrorists is what I call all them,” a bar patron told Drilled and High Country News last April. “Next time it happens, I say everybody should be on rooftops and wear masks and be protected and take ’em out.” Another resident I spoke to said they should have mowed down the pipeline opponents with a Gatling gun, and a third said they should have done what they did at Wounded Knee, the notorious 1890 massacre of Lakota people. These feelings are likely in part a result of the tinderbox dynamics of what went down back then. The highways connecting the twin cities Bismarck and Mandan to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation are bordered by grassy, rolling hills dotted with ranches and tiny towns. Rural Morton County is the kind of place where an unfamiliar car driving past your home might be considered notable. In 2016, thousands of pipeline opponents from all over poured into this quiet corner of the world. People in the region mostly see themselves as North Dakota nice — courteous and willing to lend a helping hand but reserved outside their inner circles. However, this is also an area where the racist notion that Native people are “lazy” can come up casually at the local tavern — and it was members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe that initiated the protests. But there was another force at play. The pipeline’s parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, which is now known simply as Energy Transfer, hired a private security company, TigerSwan, to protect its project. Never-before-published documents show that TigerSwan sought to use social media to identify and exploit divisions between the Standing Rock movement and the mostly white surrounding communities. The violent fantasies some locals expressed don’t represent the majority opinion. But they do reflect an erosion of relations between tribal members from Standing Rock and residents of the surrounding communities. Some people from the cities no longer go to Standing Rock’s casino, and some from Standing Rock limit their trips to Bismarck to a Walmart run when necessary. More importantly for Energy Transfer, anti-protest and pro-oil sentiments run stronger than ever now. And over a half a million barrels of oil flow through the Dakota Access Pipeline and under the Missouri River every day. The pipeline has leaked at least a dozen times along its span. In Morton County, the divisions sown during Standing Rock continue to have repercussions. Just after Trump took office for a second term in the winter of 2025, Energy Transfer took three Greenpeace organizations to trial, claiming the environmental nonprofits were behind the protests. The company’s courtroom success hinged on the views of jurors drawn from the same area targeted by TigerSwan’s propaganda. “People in Bismarck in general were lied to,” Kandi White, a resident and member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, told me in an interview outside the courtroom. White, who was intimately involved in the pipeline fight, said, “There’s a misinformation campaign about what was really happening down there.” Despite flimsy evidence, the jury ruled overwhelmingly in favor of the pipeline company. The $345 million decision left Greenpeace in the U.S. fighting for survival. It also became the pipeline company’s biggest public relations coup yet — achieved via White’s neighbors. Today, people on all sides of the pipeline conflict see artificial intelligence as the next infrastructure battleground. Many water protectors — as pipeline opponents prefer to be called — are already fighting the construction of data centers that use massive amounts of water and energy to power AI. And rural communities across the West — and the country — are once again at the center of one of the nation’s pivotal issues. It’s unclear yet who will win this narrative war. If the TigerSwan files are any clue, propaganda efforts will likely be aimed at fault lines that existed long before AI was a word anybody said out loud. IT WAS A PUBLIC RELATIONS NIGHTMARE that led Energy Transfer to hire TigerSwan in early September 2016. The previous April, members of Standing Rock and other tribal nations established a small encampment on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, near where the pipeline was set to cross the river. When construction began in August, Indigenous people from all over the Plains joined them, holding small protests to block construction, while tribes also fought the project in court. Then, on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe submitted a court filing describing the locations of several gravesites they’d identified along the route. The next morning, bulldozers and pipeline security guards with dogs showed up in that same area, and the machines started overturning the earth. When pipeline opponents jumped the fence to try to protect the sacred sites, cameras were rolling, capturing the security dogs as they lunged at people, their mouths bloody. In court, Energy Transfer said it had avoided the sites the tribe identified, but the tribe disagreed. Either way, the damage was done. The footage went viral, and thousands of people from around the world — including Indigenous leaders, anarchists, environmental activists, plus a whole lot of regular folks and a few lost souls and grifters — arrived in North Dakota, vastly expanding the protests. “People in Bismarck in general were lied to. There’s a misinformation campaign about what was really happening down there.” The pipeline company hired TigerSwan to manage the fallout. TigerSwan was founded in 2008 by James Reese, an ex-commander of the elite Army special missions unit Delta Force. Its contractors were largely veterans, and the company held massive contracts with the U.S. State Department in Afghanistan as well as corporations like the insurance company MetLife. TigerSwan’s motto, “Solutions to Uncertainty,” extended beyond physical security. Reese established the company during the post-9/11 era, when counterinsurgency was the reigning military doctrine. According to the strategy, winning hearts and minds and convincing local people to take on the military’s priorities was as important as having an armed force. Reese ensured that TigerSwan’s mission statement said that they were not just there to protect the Dakota Access Pipeline’s infrastructure but also the brand. It’s unclear precisely how Reese chose Robert Rice to oversee the company’s information operation. Rice’s background didn’t exactly fit the TigerSwan mold. His LinkedIn profile doesn’t indicate that he ever worked in public relations, and he wouldn’t answer questions for this article. However, Rice had been dabbling in altering reality since the early 1990s. He worked for an early virtual reality company called Alternate Worlds Technology and founded a series of video game companies before shifting into the business of so-called augmented reality. At times, Rice’s schemes flopped, including an app that was supposed to allow users to scan geographical locations to uncover business reviews and other information. Almost as soon as TigerSwan started on the Dakota Access Pipeline contract, Rice was on the job. His early strategy focused on generating divisions within the movement and pointing out what TigerSwan considered to be inaccuracies in the pipeline opponents’ stories. For example, Rice researched other threats to the tribe’s water source, such as an oil train that runs over the Missouri River, to prove that the pipeline wasn’t the real problem. He was also eager to highlight the views of a tribal member who thought Standing Rock leadership was to blame for the pipeline controversy. And he sought photos of injured security dogs, apparently to prove that protesters were violent. “Our best bet is to get the truth out first, and weaken the automatic support the Tribe is getting,” he said in an email sent Sept. 19, 2016. “The second is to reveal the deceptions, which will generate fractures between the Tribes and the third party activists that are interfering.” In an email two days later, he said, “We want to be careful of public opinion and sentiment towards Native Americans, so we want to focus on the issues specifically, or wiggle around to take the side of the Tribes and how they are being taken advantage of.” Rice was attempting to thread an impossible needle: undermining a cause supported by dozens if not hundreds of tribal nations, without appearing to be critical of Indigenous people. He was just one node in a web of propagandists at work. The DCI Group — notorious masters of the dark arts of public relations — was hired by Energy Transfer for about $100,000 per month to run a so-called trade group called Grow America’s Infrastructure Now. Another firm called MarketLeverage was also working for Energy Transfer. And as outrage grew over law enforcement’s protest suppression tactics, the National Sheriffs’ Association hired a public relations firm called Off The Record Strategies, run by a guy who had done PR on the Iraq War for the George W. Bush administration, and an opposition research company called Delve, run by a guy who had formerly worked for the Republican National Committee. The Sheriffs’ Association turned to distributing pipeline protest updates with headlines like “Is the Money Coming from the Rockefellers?” DCI, MarketLeverage, the National Sheriffs’ Association and Delve all declined to respond to Drilled and HCN’s comment requests. Rather than reply to questions, Off the Record Strategies CEO Mark Pfeifle pointed to an op-ed he’d recently penned in a local paper about how the Dakota Access Pipeline’s route through North Dakota is a bulwark against Iran. On its face, the pro-pipeline propaganda didn’t seem terribly impressive compared to the onslaught of viral social media content coming from the other side. Water protectors on the ground, politicians, celebrities, journalists, tribal leaders and environmental nonprofits were churning out content. They even had a nickname — “keyboard warriors.” The story of Indigenous people from all over the world coming together to defend the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s sovereignty, sacred sites and drinking water source from an oil pipeline company had captured the proverbial hearts and minds of people around the world. At a moment of fear and uncertainty about the climate crisis, what was unfolding on the remote prairies of North Dakota felt like an answer to an existential question. Making matters worse for the pipeline company, Facebook Live had become widely available that year. If it’s outrage that helps drive social media algorithms, then the ability to watch in real time as police sprayed water protectors with water hoses in sub-freezing weather did the trick. Inevitably, misinformation mixed in with the deluge, including images of wounds from unrelated incidents. But authentic footage of police violence against pipeline opponents played a role in ballooning the anti-pipeline camps to an estimated 8,000 people. Of course, TigerSwan’s propagandists had at least one major advantage. At the same time the Standing Rock movement emerged, Donald Trump was campaigning for president. Trump held investments in both Energy Transfer and Phillips 66, another part-owner of the Dakota Access Pipeline. He traveled the country, promising to undo environmental restrictions for fossil fuel companies. The candidate’s combative messaging was rewarded heartily on Facebook and Twitter. Even as Trump dismissed mainstream media as “fake news,” actual disinformation, a disproportionate amount of it favorable to him, flooded social media like never before. On Nov. 9, Trump declared victory. He’d won in North Dakota by a larger margin than all but three other states. Right then, the pipeline propagandists found their footing. That same day, TigerSwan launched its first Facebook page, Netizens for Progress and Justice. Its opening video said that what people were seeing on social media about Standing Rock was wrong. Mixed in with the peaceful demonstrators were paid protesters, who were violent, the video claimed. Protesters were the ones attacking the police, rather than the other way around. Construction was not happening on sacred land, and the pipeline would not harm the water supply. The post garnered 1.8 million views, and 1,400 comments. The claims were misleading at best. Some protesters did throw objects, many yelled at cops, and at least a couple sabotaged equipment, but the police’s crowd-control weapons caused numerous injuries, and their guns carried a threat of deadly force. As to whether the pipeline would harm the water supply, pipelines often leak, and they carry oil that contributes to a climate crisis that is also a water-scarcity crisis, including for North Dakota. The theme of paid protesters would come up again and again in the months ahead. It’s a fact that millions of dollars were pouring into crowdfunding pages launched by hundreds of pipeline opponents. Many donations were used for camp infrastructure or legal defense, but some of the money was spent frivolously by individuals. It’s also accurate that nonprofits or tribal governments paid a small set of people for their time in the camps. But the caricature of a vast field of professional protesters who were in it for the money has never been true. It’s unclear if Rice knew how impeccable his timing was. Right then, locals from Bismarck and Mandan were getting fed up with the protests — and getting organized themselves. What would give TigerSwan’s propaganda life was that it landed on a local population that was uniquely vulnerable to its strategies. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS Lowell professor James Forest, an expert on counterterrorism and propaganda, has a name for guys like Robert Rice: digital influence mercenaries. They’re online actors who foster polarization for a profit. He explained how it works. “If you are targeting a group or even an individual,” he said, “and you’ve gathered information about the things that they’re uncertain about — that can become a weapon of sorts.” An effective digital influence mercenary triggers an echo chamber that deepens people’s fear-based convictions. “ You can even provoke them to do things that you want them to do,” he added. When I asked Forest what he would expect a digital influence mercenary to do in the scenario TigerSwan confronted at Standing Rock, he answered easily. “First and foremost, you want to gather information about the kind of population that you’re trying to influence. Are there potential divisions within that population? “ What you’re looking for are seams that you can fracture,” he added. Mandan, North Dakota, is “where the West begins,” according to its motto. Founded in the 1870s at the western endpoint of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the Bismarck-Mandan area was briefly a sort of border zone between the settled United States and the vast swaths of land belonging to Indigenous nations. The cities were established at a moment when U.S. history hinged on what was unfolding in the Dakota Territory. In 1890, police killed the famous Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, south of Bismarck. The Wounded Knee massacre happened two weeks later. The events marked the end of open warfare between the U.S. military and Indigenous nations fighting to hold onto their land. White people had already been streaming in from the East, some attracted by the Homestead Act, which promised 160-acre plots of Indigenous land to settlers and others rushing toward gold in the Black Hills, an area sacred to numerous Indigenous nations. Since the 1890s, North Dakota has rarely found itself at the white-hot center of U.S. conflicts. “There’s a local watering hole I love to go to,” explained Kay LaCoe, who administered a Facebook page in 2016 where area residents complained about the protests. “Every time that door opens and somebody else walks in, everybody turns and looks at the door to see who it is and, you know, is it a local or is it not?” LaCoe was born and raised in Bismarck. Her favorite pastime is cowboy mounted shooting, a sport that involves shooting balloons with a gun while riding a horse. Until very recently, she was a spokesperson for the lignite coal industry, but she swears that has nothing to do with how she felt about the pipeline. At its best, in her view, the area’s insular attitude means those who are known in the community have each others’ backs. “If you are targeting a group or even an individual, and you’ve gathered information about the things that they’re uncertain about — that can become a weapon of sorts.” However, it also can mean racism, said Kandi White, the water protector who observed the trial. “We have a lot of farmers and ranchers and people around here that are, like, ‘We’re hard workers. We grew up on the land. We’re very nice people. And if you rock the boat, then you’re a bad person.’” Stereotypes of Indigenous people as alcoholics persist. “There’s a lack of understanding of boarding schools and how we had a whole lost generation of elders who were hurting very, very, very bad,” White said, referring to the assimilationist policies that attempted to eliminate Indigenous languages and cultures. Plenty of people in Bismarck and Mandan were sympathetic to the protests when they started out small, but even LaCoe noticed one thing early on. “At the very beginning of the peaceful demonstrations, it really amped up that anti-Native sentiment,” she said. Fear and anger spread first in the agricultural areas closest to the protest camps. “Not many people live here, and we had strangers driving around. How’s that sound?” said Doug Hille, a rancher who lives on a dead-end road that both workers and water protectors used to get to a pipeline construction site. The extra traffic made it difficult for Hille to transport hay on narrow gravel roads with semitrucks. At one point, pipeline opponents took pictures of his home until he threatened them with a rifle. “I and several other people just got in the habit that we carried weapons for personal protection,” he said. Pro-police sentiments are widespread in Bismarck and Mandan. There, the Facebook Live videos sparked anger on behalf of the police. Many felt that media outlets unfairly favored the water protectors’ narrative of peaceful protectors against violent cops. It didn’t help that some pipeline opponents doxed cops, posting their personal information online. Some public officials got threatening phone calls — even visits to their homes. At one point, demonstrators set a bridge on fire. An idea started to circulate that this was not the “right” way to protest. Even among Indigenous leaders within the camps, disagreements over tactics left some with a sense that the movement had been exploited by outsiders or grifters. In November, a local guy started a private Facebook group called DefeND BisMan, where people could vent about protest-related disruptions without being criticized by anti-pipeline users. As the group grew in popularity, LaCoe took over as administrator, deleting ugly comments as they’d come up. Then, on Thanksgiving, Bismarck and Mandan residents started their day with an emergency alert, stating that protesters had blocked the intersection connecting the two cities. Images circulated on social media of a demonstrator carrying a pig’s head mounted on a stick. LaCoe spent six hours on the phone with outraged community members, who took the pig’s head as a threat to law enforcement. The next day, Black Friday, water protectors marched into Bismarck’s Kirkwood Mall and formed a prayer circle before being arrested. One local right-wing blogger claimed it was a “war on the Bismarck/Mandan community.” It was a supercharged moment, LaCoe said: “When Trump gets elected, community voices are feeling heard and empowered, and then a group of people that doesn’t live here, doesn’t contribute to the community, puts pigs’ heads on sticks on Thanksgiving.” Requests to join the DefeND BisMan Facebook group spiked. The group soon included about 4,000 members, and other Facebook groups like it began popping up. According to Forest, the professor of security studies, a group like DefeND BisMan is ideal for a digital influence mercenary. “By the nature of being allowed into that digital influence silo, in the in-group, you’ve already excluded other competing narratives,” he said. The group rapidly became a target for Rice. Locals responded. “Thank you Netizens for getting ‘the rest of the story’ out there!!!! North Dakotan’s are so fed up with being invaded by the *violent* protesters,” read one post that Thanksgiving week. TigerSwan brought on Nick Johnson, who ran a “clickbait empire” that sought to generate traffic to clients’ products by posting negative stories aimed at specific regions. Over the next several months, they put out a dizzying array of claims: Children were missing from the camps; there were rapes, and intoxicated people carrying STDs had been thrown out. Large amounts of meth and pain pills were being sold; gays and lesbians were verbally assaulted; people were carrying guns. Netizens routinely threw out the term “eco-terrorist.” They got support from the National Sheriffs’ Association. One of Netizens’ first videos featured mug shots of pipeline opponents arrested by law enforcement that had been sent to Rice directly by the association’s public relations contractors. In the comment section, Netizens’ administrators repeatedly denied that they were oil industry propagandists. The action also began to move offline. TigerSwan infiltrators were entering the camps undercover, pretending to be water protectors, and Rice regularly turned to other TigerSwan team members for intelligence to fuel his Facebook content. LaCoe was in touch with another TigerSwan contractor, who offered tips on how to organize, and she communicated regularly with the police. Local people joined rallies for police, monitored protesters’ social media, and offered assistance to business owners who were feeling nervous. LaCoe had become the public face of DefeND BisMan, and she faced blowback for it. She got death threats and was doxed and followed multi ple times. The experience went both ways. For tribal members from Standing Rock, visiting Bismarck and Mandan changed. “Things got really ugly when people were telling lies about the camp, the protectors, saying that they were dangerous,” said Valerie Eagle Shield, an enrolled member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation who was active in the camps. She and her husband, who were then in their mid-50s and mid-60s, respectively, were frequently watched when they visited local businesses and followed as they drove between Bismarck and their home on the reservation. “They would come up really fast on you and then just follow you,” she recalled. “Even if you slowed way down, they’d stay behind you.” Just as things began to spiral, a major blizzard swept through the region starting on Dec. 5. Hundreds of protesters abruptly headed home. Netizens’ posts fed on the chaos. By the end of January, its content had shifted to asserting that the camp represented an impending environmental disaster, since people’s belongings, abandoned and buried when the blizzard hit, could be caught up in spring flooding. When police evicted the last campers in late February, before the snow thawed, the mess left behind became one of Netizens’ biggest stories yet, leaving an impression almost as lasting as the pig’s head. The water protectors dispersed. Many headed home. Some moved to a handful of tiny encampments established throughout the region to promote healing or prepare for future fights. Many movement members were reeling from PTSD and the infighting nurtured by months spent under heavy police and private security pressure. Most of LaCoe’s contact with Rice happened after the North Dakota camps closed. At the end of February, someone sent her a Facebook message under the name Al Netizen. The Netizens team was headed to North Dakota to make a mini documentary that would provide a counter to water protectors’ narratives. He asked if LaCoe could connect them with some locals, and she did. The result was a 52-minute documentary called #NoDAPL: The Rise and Fall of Standing Rock. Released in late March, it featured police officers, locals and a Standing Rock tribal member who didn’t like the protests. LaCoe was in it, too. “Wow. Propaganda,” she said, looking back. “ It’s got that ‘message from President Snow’ vibe to it,” referring to the unsubtle propaganda efforts depicted in the dystopian film The Hunger Games. But back then, LaCoe didn’t really care. “Some of us felt legitimized — that we were right to care about our community, that we were right to be against these outside detractors,” she said. “By a weird twist of fate, it was outside influences legitimizing our efforts.” The people of Bismarck and Mandan were becoming more than just the targets of the propaganda; they were also its mouthpieces. BY APRIL OF 2017, pipeline construction was nearly complete, and the pipeline opponents camping in North Dakota were long gone. However, a small group of water protectors had moved two states down the pipeline’s path to rural Iowa and formed a tiny resistance camp that they called Little Creek. Another group, organized by the nonprofit Bold Iowa, prepared to embark on a march from the camp across central Iowa, intended to bridge divides over how to address the climate crisis. Two days before they set off, a post on Netizens for Progress and Justice announced a new Facebook page, DefendIowa. “A small town in Iowa County has been declared the new home for a cell of leftist protesters,” it said, referring to Little Creek camp. “Don’t let them grow roots. Just ask the folks in North Dakota,” said an accompanying video with the hashtag #IowaBeware. In the comments, administrators pointed to the documentary in which LaCoe appeared. As the marchers walked, drivers buzzed them and gave them the finger. After they settled into their campsite, cars slowly circled them, setting off firecrackers. Someone parked a Jeep flying Confederate and American flags at the edge of their spot. People with Bold Iowa had been organizing to stop the pipeline as long as anyone in North Dakota. They told documentary filmmaker Ralph King they’d never seen anything like the backlash they were experiencing. In another surprise, the next morning the Jeep’s owner, Darrin Ehret, approached the group to apologize. The filmmaker captured the exchange. “We were told you guys were going to come over and burn flags, that kind of stuff,” Ehret said. “I prayed about that last night and just really felt that I was wrong.” In an interview in King’s film Crossing the Divide, Ehret pointed to a Facebook video. “We’re a typical Iowa town that everybody likes to keep to themselves. You just kind of connect on Facebook and see what’s going on,” he explained. Based on what he’d seen in the video, he was anticipating a bunch of degenerates. That was the reaction Rice was hoping for. In a WhatsApp chat released via a records request, he celebrated his success in disrupting the march and described how he hoped to “unravel” the relationship between Ehret and the group. Earlier that month, one of Rice’s bosses at TigerSwan had put the propagandist on a chat with Joel McCollough, who had been hanging out undercover with Iowa pipeline opponents for months. More than any other document, Rice and McCollough’s chat records reveal the digital influence mercenaries’ intentions: They sought to divide people, and they did. The infiltrator told the propagandist who was bickering, or who was the subject of local rumors. Rice’s team then used the information to develop Facebook videos where Rice personally posed as an amateurish newscaster, sometimes using the name “Allen.” He also pushed to move the Facebook drama into real life. LaCoe received another direct message from Al Netizen, asking her to reach out to the fiancée of one of the Little Creek campers and tell her about LaCoe’s bad experience with Dakota Access Pipeline opponents. In the WhatsApp chat, Rice said he believed they could shut down the Little Creek camp entirely. He worked to foster a local countermovement. In turn, McCollough suggested Rice help him with interventions that bordered on the illegal — like hacking into a pipeline opponent’s email account. At other points, McCollough suggested the duo spread a rumor that another pipeline opponent was having an extramarital affair and proposed that they empty her bank account. “I’m not THAT good,” Rice replied. Rice, TigerSwan and Energy Transfer did not respond to requests for comment. McCollough declined to answer questions. There’s one plot from McCollough that was apparently carried to fruition. In the chat, he proposed they bribe pipeline opponents directly for information. McCollough figured that even if people said no to the bribes, the question alone would seed distrust. He was right. That summer, Chris Truitt, who’d been camp chef for several months, heard from a guy who offered him $100 for the “real story” of Little Creek Camp. “I needed money at the time,” he said. “ They were playing a game, so I was trying to play a game back.” So he went for it, but said he provided nothing very detailed or damning. Around that time, Rice and his team were involved in new pages aimed at locals in other states where Energy Transfer had pipeline construction projects, including Pennsylvania and Louisiana. Then there were the more outlandish efforts, like a page called “Cats for Truth,”which featured unidentifiable narrators wearing giant cat or unicorn masks, and a site called Black Badger Report, styled like an investigative news site. In August, Black Badger Report published what the authors claimed to be a leaked story from inside the Little Creek camp. It described the experiences of a woman who had faced unwanted advances from two members of the camp who had been drinking. The site said the authors had paid a source inside the camp for the information. To this day, Truitt swears that information didn’t come from him. Sikowis Nobiss, who is Plains Cree and Saulteaux and who helped start Little Creek camp, said that TigerSwan’s propaganda efforts caused harm. “They took regular situations where people were struggling, and where people were trying to do good things and do something they’ve never done before, and they tried to make them look sinister.” The impacts lingered even after the mercenaries moved on. “It’s long-term mental health issues on people, making some of us more paranoid, causing division,” she said. “Even if it’s just between two people — that’s two people that could have been friends for life, but they ruin that.” EVENTUALLY, RICE AND JOHNSON lost traction. Rice returned to North Dakota, and took several local residents out for drinks, urging them to take their organizing further. “It is not outside the realm of possibility to, like, start a nonprofit. We came up with an acronym a couple weeks ago — it was Moms Against Violent Activists,” Rice said in a leaked recording of the meeting, published by Type Investigations and The Intercept. “You could probably get anonymous donations from interested parties. Cough — oil — cough.” They drank his free drinks, then blew him off. They were over it. Around the same time, Johnson used an actor to play a local in a series of video posts. In one of the videos, the actor introduced himself as Josh Baker, a Pennsylvania resident upset about anti-pipeline camps. In a second video, posted on Louisiana First, the same actor, wearing the same clothing, introduced himself as Brent Williamson, a Louisiana citizen concerned about protesters. It was sloppy, and Facebook users called it out. Invoices that were released years later in a court case said that TigerSwan paid Johnson $122,279 between November 2016 and September 2017 for “promotion and content creation, social media monitoring,” through a company called Cedar Fork Partners. Johnson asked the company to reimburse him $30 for the cat masks and $25 for a payment to an “Iowa leaker.” A “task order” from TigerSwan described Rice as the project manager. Both of the propagandists returned to their long-term projects. Johnson cultivated a career as a YouTube travel influencer. He’d learned long ago that negativity sells on social media, and his most popular videos have titles like These Homeless Camps in California are Beyond Belief, and Immigrants are Taking Over Pennsylvania Now. Everyone Here is Freaking Out. Immediately before and after the 2024 election, the content shifted notably toward MAGA. Johnson didn’t reply to questions about whether he accepted money from the campaign. Rice refocused on XR, combining augmented reality and virtual reality. He spent years developing a “metaverse” called Omniscape, where our digital avatars can buy and sell things. He compared it to the virtual universe in the novel Ready Player One, set in a world wrecked by an energy crisis and climate change. In a 2024 interview with the media outlet CoinGeek, Rice acknowledged the dystopian possibilities of his digital realities. “My contribution to avoiding that is going to be letting people drop 3D poop emojis on their oppressors,” he said. “You could probably get anonymous donations from interested parties. Cough — oil — cough.” The thing about Robert Rice, though, is that his experience is in working for the oppressors. A version of Rice’s poop emoji vision has already come to fruition — except the other way around. In October 2025, on Truth Social, Donald Trump posted an AI video of himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet. The jet swooped over a crowd of protesters in a city that looked like New York, dropping graphic volumes of liquid poop on the smiling crowd. The Omniscape project apparently fell apart. One day, out of the blue, Rice announced to his workers that the project was out of money, according to Travis Ashcraft, who continued to work for Rice for free for a little while after that. “I’m not saying he’s a silver-tongued devil, but he can talk people into stuff,” Ashcraft said. “ I’ve been played, you know?” Still, he didn’t think Rice would do anything to intentionally harm anyone. Drilled and High Country News asked LaCoe what she felt about TigerSwan targeting her group. “That we got played — my words?” LaCoe said she wasn’t convinced TigerSwan deserved credit for all of the community’s anger, but she acknowledged how powerful that kind of messaging could be. “What scares me, though, is, how do you use that power? Who are you going to manipulate next and to what end?” Radicalization and extremism occur when people come to believe that the survival of their ingroup depends on hostility toward, or even elimination of, an outgroup, explained Forest. He saw that concept mirrored in the bar patrons’ statements about shooting pipeline protesters. “It’s a fantasy, but it’s still something that is a marker of the escalation,” he said. Johnson and Cedar Fork Partners didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story. LaCoe condemned the racism and violence people directed at protestors and said she wished that community leaders had stepped in to mend relationships after the protests. “I really hope that we can go forward as a community long into the future and heal those scars, reconnect. I truly believe that without negative outside forces, we can do that.” Except Energy Transfer has never really stopped aiming propaganda at the Bismarck and Morton County area. As Doug Hille, the rancher, put it, “All you have to do is go to Main Street, Mandan — take a look at all the money they donated for the park and to rebuild their library and a band shell.” He once watched Energy Transfer’s co-founder, Kelcy Warren, write a check on the spot for a new school for a community near his. As the Greenpeace trial approached last year, residents of Morton County, including potential jurors, received unfamiliar newspapers on their doorsteps, containing articles reminding them of protest-related disruptions 10 years earlier. Pro-pipeline commercials played on television and YouTube. Documents traced a trail of money that seemed to link the newspapers to Warren; in a statement to another media outlet, Energy Transfer denied any connection to the company that produced the papers. Meanwhile, Energy Transfer was shifting its investment strategy toward pipelines that supply fuel to data centers. Many of the people who led the fight to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline have shifted their attention in a similar direction. “That’s actually the next battle that we’re fighting now is the billions of gallons of water that it takes to use AI,” said White. “AI helps the propaganda machine. And so it’s, like, never-ending. We don’t have the ability or the convenience, the luxury, to sit back and take the time to reflect, because then we’re on to the next thing.” “I really hope that we can go forward as a community long into the future and heal those scars, reconnect. I truly believe that without negative outside forces, we can do that.” Last April, on the 10-year anniversary of the first No DAPL camp, a group of self- described future water protectors spent Easter weekend at Standing Rock’s Prairie Knights Casino, training for the fights ahead and preparing for an informational data center hearing that the tribe had scheduled for later that week. The future of data centers and of AI itself will hinge, once again, largely on who can tell their story most effectively. At the training, kids and grandmas drew four pictures: a place that meant something to them, a family tradition, an image showing how they’ve experienced the climate crisis and another of the future they hoped for. It was earnest armor for a new narrative war. “We’re still living in environmental injustice,” said Doug Crow Ghost, director of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s Department of Water Resources. Even if a data center were banned on the reservation, he noted, it could still be built on treaty land right outside its borders, just like the Dakota Access Pipeline was. Crow Ghost said that the 10-year anniversary of Standing Rock is not a moment of celebration. As for repair, it will remain difficult as long as the pipeline has permission to pump oil under the river. “We are in a movement, and we’re not even halfway anywhere,” he said. “The narrative is still being spun.” Summer Ester Orr is a Honduran American artist and illustrator based in rural Colorado. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. This article appeared in the August 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Inside Standing Rock’s Propaganda War.”