Property of the People (previously) used Freedom of Information Act requests to force the Department of Homeland Security to reveal that it tracks members of the Valve Turners — a nonviolent environmental group that practices civil disobedience against oil pipelines — alongside of white nationalist mass-murderers and killers like Dylan Roof (the mass murderer behind the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston) and James Fields, who murdered Heather Heyer when he drove his car into an anti-Nazi counterprotest in Charlottesvilla.
The DHS classes "environmental themed ideologies" with "racial ideologies" as drivers of domestic terror attacks, despite the fact that white nationalist violence has resulted in repeated mass murders, while environmental direct action is generally nonviolent and does not harm people.
Sam Jessup, one of the activists named in the document, said the bulletin sheds light on the role law enforcement and intelligence agencies have played in suppressing dissent."Equating mass murder by white supremacists with what Michael and I did is totally obscene," Jessup said in an email. "This whole infrastructure of so-called security has done little more than secure the future of the fossil fuel industry by terrorizing people into silence."
Jessup, a 34-year-old who had served as a driver and videographer live-streaming the action in North Dakota. Michael Foster, a former family therapist who lives in Seattle, turned the valve.
Revealed: US listed climate activist group as 'extremists' alongside mass killers [Adam Federman/The Guardian]
(Thanks, Ryan!)
