EcoTerrorism Is Alive And Well In The American Left
by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:
The DAPL pipeline “protest” has been broken up.
True to form the “activists” claimed that there would be “fake news” claims of despoiling the environment by the protesters and that it “didn’t happen.”
Oh yes it did.
I have a friend who is part of the crew sent in to remediate the land on which the camp was and is there right now.
I spend some amount of time camping in the backcountry, and even more camping with my car present at some sort of campground or other location. The rules are simple: The only way someone should know you were there when you are done is that there may be footprints on the ground.
The amount of waste left behind by these “protesters” is outrageous. Much of it is biodegradable but not all of it and among that which is not are plastics, human waste that was not properly buried (and thus may carry disease) and even abandoned vehicles which, I remind you, inherently include petroleum-based fluids that poison watersheds if they are released, and if those vehicles are submerged the fluids will be released.
The protest camp site is in an area subject to normal, annual flooding when the snow melts. The pollution that will result to the waterway if this trash is not removed prior to that happening is not speculative — it is a certainty.
May I remind you that the “protest” was over the possibility that there might be a release of pollutants into the water at some indeterminate point in the future by a pipeline being built which is in addition to several others already in the same place? In other words the protest was over the incremental increase in the possibility of despoiling the waterway over the risk already present from existing pipelines in the same immediate area.
The protesters, however, intentionally and with certainty despoiled the land and, since they did not remove their trash, intended to intentionally despoil that very same waterway.
There’s nothing speculative about their actions or their intended result. The enormous amount of trash, which they did not police up and remove on a regular basis and did, intentionally, leave behind, never mind burning structures (containing who-knows-what, so now we have unknown, possibly-hazardous combustion products in the wreckage) on their way out, was intended to and would have with certainty, absent this intervention by the very government they are protesting, polluted that very same waterway.
These people are not protesters, they are domestic terrorists. They intended to damage the waterway in question on purpose and it is only through the fact that the government evicted them and is sending in crews with sufficient time to clean up their pollution before the normal, seasonal melt occurs that this act of terrorism was thwarted and the harm averted.
The people involved — all of those who contributed so much as a candy-bar wrapper to that trash — need to be identified, arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned — then press-ganged into cleanup with only a toothbrush for tools.
Any political group or advocacy arm that has or does contribute to the organizational efforts of these “protesters” need to be investigated as having potentially provided material aid and comfort to terrorists.
You have a First Amendment right in this country to protest. You do not have a right to intentionally pollute a waterway through the intentional discarding of trash, human waste and petroleum products in such a fashion that you know is ecologically unsound and will end up in said waterway.
Period.
