"Activism Uncensored": The Line 3 Pipeline Protests

Joe Biden made promises on climate policy that pipeline activists in Minnesota expect him to keep.

In late May, Biden administration lawyers went into court to defend the Willow project, a huge oil and gas endeavor on the North Slope of Alaska. This followed an earlier decision not to intervene to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline that disappointed activists, who feel they’ve been getting mixed signals from an administration whose president made a lot of promises on environmental issues as a candidate.

In this segment of “Activism Uncensored,” Ford Fischer travels to northern Minnesota and films the arrest of dozens of activists protesting the Line 3 Pipeline, a $9 billion project run by a Canadian company called Enbridge that’s slated to bring hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil through tribal lands. Activists say the development violates treaties and will have serious environmental consequences, and the Biden administration has been conspicuously silent about it.

Biden got a lot of kudos from environmental activists early on for canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, but in recent months has settled into a Star Trek-ian pattern of obeying the Prime Directive when it comes to energy deals. Protests of Line 3 ended in mass arrests, shown here, and reportedly, the use of a “crowd-dispersing sonic device” as well as bolt cutters and saws to cut down activists who chained themselves to equipment.

Stay tuned in this space for more footage, from here and abroad.