Far-left organizations are soiling legitimate protests with outside agitators looking for a real fight

Greenpeace backed radical protesters who tried to block a North Dakota pipeline.Now the pipeline company has won huge damages in a lawsuit against the iconic NGO.

Other nonprofits should take notice.Last week, a jury in Mandan, ND, returned a stunning verdict against Greenpeace for its role in the violent protests and misleading public-relations campaign that disrupted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.The jury hearing the civil lawsuit found Greenpeace USA and two other Greenpeace entities liable for civil conspiracy, defamation, trespass and other misdeeds.If the verdict stands, the storied environmental nonprofit will have to pay $667 million in damages to plaintiff Energy Transfer, the pipeline company that built and owns the DAPL.The decision wasn’t entirely unexpected.In fact, Greenpeace had tried (and failed) to get the trial location changed, asserting that a jury in that oil-producing region would be biased in favor of the plaintiff.Nonetheless, the sheer size of the damages awarded will send shock waves through the loose networks of nonprofit groups that support disruptive protests around the nation.There are similarities between the anti-pipeline protests near North Dakota’s Standing Rock Indian Reservation and other mass actions, including Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the anti-Israel demonstrations that erupted around the United States after the Oct.

7 attacks.These are “hybrid protests,” in which masses of peaceful demonstrators are joined by smaller groups of trained agitators who tip the events toward violence.As Park MacDougald has reported at Tablet Magazine, these loose networks of troublemakers are often financially supported “by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups.”Energy Transfer’s suit against Greenpeace represents the first major success in exposing and penalizing the putatively legitimate nonprofits that funnel money and material support to the lawbreakers...