Eco-Roundup: A Trump Target List of Environmental Organizations

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One of the United States’ best-known Indigenous environmental organizations, a leading youth climate justice group, and a network that includes at least 11 environmental justice organizations — these are just a few of the environmental non-profits that a key Trump ally has suggested as candidates for being stripped of tax-exempt status.

Trump has repeatedly leaned on the right-wing Capital Research Center for potential targets in its crackdown on the left. In turn, the organization has pointed to a number of environmental groups that they argue may be running afoul of IRS rules. Their possible tax violation, according to the Capital Research Center? Supporting civil disobedience.

Attorneys for activists say that the argument doesn't hold water. "Incorporating some direct action into a broader advocacy strategy is not the issue," said Maggie Ellinger-Locke, a lawyer with Alliance for Justice, which provides legal support to non-profits. Direct action refers to protests that directly disrupt harmful activities, such as boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, or blockades. At times they involve law-breaking.

Environmental groups are far from the only ones being branded as potential tax code violators by the right wing. In fact, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means committee sent a letter before Trump was even in office, demanding the IRS go after pro-Palestine groups. The fact that environmentalists are now also in the crosshairs highlights the reality that authoritarianism is an environmental issue. It’s not just that Trump favors environmentally destructive energy strategies but also that he’s threatening to limit the ways people can protect land and water. As I argued a year and a half ago, the crackdown on pro-Palestine speech was always going to hit the environmental movement, too.

For now, the threats of tax-related attacks on environmentalists seem to be just words — but words matter. “There have been people who are preemptively complying – who are purposefully backing away because they just don't even want to be seen,” said Lauren Regan, founder of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which represents people involved in civil disobedience. “Even if a small amount of that funding gets afraid and shrinks into the background it can potentially have an impact.”

“We are gonna need solidarity with each other,” she said.

The Capital Research Center has also claimed several environmental organizations are supporting terrorism. Even if such claims fail to hold water, the suggestion raises the specter of law enforcement resources being redirected toward disrupting environmental groups — a possibility that has plenty of precedent and that could find fertile ground under Trump.

Whether or not Trump will follow all of the Capital Research Center’s suggestions is unclear. But what’s obvious is that the environmental movement is poised to absorb a wave of repression after a decade and a half of disruptive protests that helped force the climate crisis onto the political agenda. It’s a crackdown that began in the private sector and now may be taken on by the federal government.

To understand all this, I want to back up a little bit.

Those of you who follow my work know that eight years ago, the pipeline giant Energy Transfer filed a massive lawsuit against Greenpeace. In a nutshell, the suit argued that the massive, Indigenous-led Standing Rock movement was actually a conspiracy by the historically white-led non-profit Greenpeace. The pipeline company initially sued using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act — a law designed to go after the mafia.

Just after Trump was elected, a version of the case went to trial. By then the RICO claims had been dropped, but a lot of the rest of the case remained in tact. I sat through the trial and published a six-part podcast with Drilled about what I witnessed. And what I saw was that the evidence didn't support the case. The jury bought it anyway. Greenpeace was left with a $666 million judgement, which could be enough to kill the organization in the U.S., if they don’t win on appeal.

Eight years ago, I viewed that Greenpeace lawsuit as too bullshitty to have a chance of winning —  but the company did win. The Capital Research Center may be throwing things at the wall to see what sticks – but the thing is, in this day and age, sometimes things do stick — at least for long enough to create problems.

In the months that followed the Greenpeace trial, the Trump administration began making arguments that sounded awfully similar to what Energy Transfer had filed in court. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, for example, said she directed the IRS to investigate potential funders behind anti-ICE protests, including unions and non-profits.

Then, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and Trump declared open season on left-leaning organizations that he said supported political violence. The day after Kirk’s death, White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, took to Kirk’s podcast, stating, “The last message that Charlie sent me … was that we needed to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country.” He added, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks.”

He wasn’t talking about identifying individuals who actually planned the assassination — this was ultimately about cracking down on ideas that conflicted with the administration’s goals, and that threatened Trump’s allies’ profits.

The White House declared antifa — which is shorthand for antifascist and represents an idea and a movement, rather than any particular group — a domestic terrorist organization. The administration also issued a sweeping memo called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, announcing a national strategy to “to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence.” The memo listed a broad range of ideologies “animating this violent conduct,” including anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, “extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” It ordered the U.S. Attorney General to create a list of domestic terrorist groups and for Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which are FBI teams that include state and local officials, to open investigations.

Threaded throughout the memo were orders to go after funders. For example, the memo demanded the IRS assure that no non-profits are “directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism.” By then, Trump was also asserting that George Soros and his Open Society Foundation, which provides funding to numerous progressive causes, should be investigated under RICO — that same mafia law initially used to go after Greenpeace.

In short, Trump and his allies aren't just going after the people who participate directly in protests or who are actually saying things he doesn’t like — he’s going after their funders and even people who simply declare solidarity with those groups.

Let me just pause to say that post 9/11 there was this thing called the Green Scare, where all of a sudden the Justice Department was labeling environmental saboteurs the no. 1 domestic terrorism threat. A number of environmental groups faced FBI investigations, infiltration, and heavy-handed prosecutions. I wrote about it here and you can check out journalist Will Potter’s book if you want to get deep into it. That happened because the War on Terror meant federal agencies suddenly had all kinds of incentives to go after anything called terrorism. And here we are again.

That lawyer I spoke to, Lauren Regan, represented a lot of Green Scare defendants. I asked her if she remembered a similar attack at that time on funders. “I don’t remember it — at all,” she said. This is something new.

I reached out to the White House for comment, and spokesperson Abigail Jackson sent me this statement: “Left-wing organizations have fueled violent riots, organized attacks against law enforcement officers, coordinated illegal doxing campaigns, arranged drop points for weapons and riot materials, and more. The Trump Administration will get to the bottom of this vast network inciting violence in American communities, and the President’s executive actions to address left-wing violence will employ a whole-of-government approach to end to any illegal activities.”

As Trump has cried out for investigations into funding, he has repeatedly turned to one organization for support: the Capital Research Center. In the most explicit example, the Justice Department directly cited a report by the Capital Research Center when it issued a directive telling US attorneys in California, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit, Maryland, and other places to investigate the Open Society Foundation. According to reporting from the New York Times, prosecutors were told to analyze whether the report’s findings are enough to support criminal cases.

Then, at a roundtable focused on Antifa, Trump again asked that information from the Capital Research Center be shared with the heads of the Justice Department and FBI. He also invited the Steve Bannon co-founded Government Accountability Institute to send information about protest funders. In a recent report titled Riot Inc. Exposed, the institute listed the Sierra Club, Conservation Colorado, the Center for Biological Diversity, NextGen Climate, the Sunrise Movement, and multiple branches of the climate organization 350 as part of a network funding No Kings protests.

The Government Accountability Institute didn't respond to questions I sent them, and neither did the Capital Research Center.

The Capital Research Center’s mission is to examine how nonprofit organizations spend money. It’s been around since the 1980s, and was started by a former vice president of the infamous Heritage Foundation. Over the years, the Capital Research Center has received funding by a who’s who of right wing donors, from the Scaife and Bradley foundations, to the Koch-related foundations, even Exxon Mobil.

The Capital Research Center report named by the Justice Department argued that Soros-funded organizations have poured millions of dollars into “groups tied to terrorism or extremist violence.” Among those named are a number of environmentally oriented groups, including the Ruckus Society, which has provided nonviolent direct action training to Indigenous land defenders, the Sunrise Movement, which has used disruptive protests to push for a Green New Deal, and the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, a network of more than 60 organizations that includes environmental groups like AfroEco, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Communities for a Better Environment, East Michigan Environmental Action Coalition, Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island, Got Green, Indigenous Environmental Network, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Opal Environmental Justice – Oregon, and WE ACT.

Why were these organizations framed as assisting terrorism? According to the report, they participated in direct action protests, or expressed support for Palestinians, or declared solidarity with the movement to stop the Atlanta Police Training Center known as Cop City. They also took positions that align with Indigenous groups fighting for the return of stolen land. For example, the report noted that Sunrise has called Hawaii “occupied territory” and that the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance has called for “the return of all public lands to their original stewards.” By including these details, the report suggests that these are extremist positions. Reading it, I wondered if this had potential to fall under the vague "anti-Americanism" described in the White House's NSPM-7.

More recently, in a blog post published last week, the Capital Research Center’s Robert Stilson zeroed in on Energy Transfer’s lawsuit against Greenpeace. The post went so far as to imply that expressing support for Greenpeace is a red flag for potential tax code violations.

Stilson pointed to a letter of support for Greenpeace, signed by over 400 organizations, and thousands of individuals. He handpicked a sampling of letter-signers, stating, "It is also worth asking whether they might be running afoul of IRS restrictions on illegal conduct by nonprofits."

Among the groups he profiled were Honor the Earth, an Indigenous environmental group that participated in the Standing Rock movement, Direct Action Everywhere, an animal liberation organization that has occupied animal farms and released animals, Extinction Rebellion, which has organized large, disruptive climate demonstrations, and Community Movement Builders, a Black-led racial justice organization that supported the movement to stop Cop City. Stilson also named the Climate Emergency Fund, which provides money to people engaged in civil disobedience, and Sunrise. In all cases he listed the organizations’ funders, as if they, too, should be examined.

Over the past 15 years, a growing number of environmental organizations have provided support or trainings to people involved in non-violent direct actions designed to stop environmentally harmful activities. As the severity of the climate crisis became more clear, many came to believe that change would require the kinds of disruptive actions that marked the civil rights movement.

Stilson argued that a judge’s ruling in 1975 is precedent enough to go after nonprofits that participate in civil disobedience that involves breaking the law. The judge in question denied tax-exempt status for a 1970s antiwar organization that planned protests where people blocked roads and disrupted military-related activity. According to the ruling, the organization existed to “educate and inform the public on the principles of pacificism and nonviolent action including civil disobedience.” But because the organization’s main purpose involved planning and providing information about disruptive protests, the judge ruled they didn't qualify as a tax-exempt nonprofit.

The Capital Research Center is suggesting Trump’s IRS should scrutinize environmental groups in the same way. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, the head of the Capital Research Center, Scot Walter, even claimed that an organization that announced it would bail out people arrested for blocking a road could be considered an accomplice to crimes.

The IRS does offer guidance around mass demonstrations, confrontational tactics, and nonprofits that break laws. It’s complicated and too in the weeds for our purposes here – but you can read about it here.

"The bottom line is unless your nonprofit is designed to substantially engage in illegal activity, which does not serve a charitable or social welfare purpose, your advocacy should not be intimidated by this decades-old IRS ruling," said Ellinger-Locke, the Alliance for Justice attorney.

If an organization’s primary purpose is to break laws, then its status can be challenged. But Regan pointed out that plenty of non-profits that support disruptive protest have survived IRS audits in the past, including Greenpeace.

It turns out that this is another example of what happened to Greenpeace foreshadowing what's happening now. A letter from an organization called Public Interest Watch, sparked Greenpeace's audit in 2005, according to a Wall Street Journal report at the time. The organization — like the Capital Research Center — was established to scrutinize non-profits. It turns out that the year PIW requested the Greenpeace audit, it got most of its funding from Exxon Mobil — which Greenpeace had repeatedly criticized. In the end, according to the Journal, the agency found that "while the activist group had been engaged in unspecified unlawful activities, they weren't Greenpeace's primary purpose and therefore don't affect its tax status."

In fact, the Trump administration so far has been frustrated in its efforts to go after non-profits based on “illegality doctrine,” according to a different Wall Street Journal report. To make it easier, the administration is working on installing Trump allies inside the IRS’s criminal investigations division.

There’s plenty of language in non-profit law that an authoritarian administration could play with. For example, a group can lose nonprofit status if it participated in violence or terrorism. If property damage or the blocking of a road is recast as violence or terrorism, then you can see where this could go.

But again, an actual legal attack is not the only impact to watch out for — it’s the chilling of speech and funding — and, more broadly, the chilling of solidarity. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where people stop signing letters of support for groups being targeted, because they don’t want to become the next target. Funders could stop giving money to organizations that believe civil disobedience is a key lever of social change, because they don’t want to face existential threats.

Regan said that type of pre-compliance is genuinely dangerous. “It teaches the regime that it can get what it wants in using these kinds of tactics and it puts a larger price tag for the organizations that are going to stand up and resist. The costs of resisting the regime are potentially higher when allies become complicit.”

Given the way the last 10 months have played out, we really do not know what’s ahead.

There all kinds of ways people and organizations can be protecting themselves legally and from surveillance. However, Regan said that one of the most important things people can do is to not give up. “One of the goals of an authoritarian regimes is to create despair in the people,” she said. Her advice: “No. 1 have hope, and don’t give up. No. 2 do the work every single day — help your neighbors; help your community.”

Other stories I’m following:

"The Trump administration, and ICE in particular, is tooling up for technological repression that Americans have never been subject to before."

Big thanks to my friend and former Intercept colleague Micah Lee for providing another terrifying presentation on how to protect ourselves from surveillance. (He wore frog-ears the whole time to lighten the mood, jfc).) In this talk, which you can watch or read, he provides some practical advice about the mercenary spyware that is now officially welcome in America, noting that under Trump ICE has access to a tool that is narrowly targeted to spying on encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp. Some of his advice is so simple it hurts – like never put off installing updates on your devices. (Ugggghhh but it's haaard.) Also, turn off your computer every night after you're done using it. (But what about all my open tabs??) Honestly, I'm about to put my plans for the day on hold and just do the things he's advising. I liked this general piece of advice. "Ultimately, what we all need to do, is build an intentional and forgiving security culture," Micah said. "If we want to keep our communities safe, our defenses need to be collective, not individual."

"This particular moment is more dangerous for the rule of law in the United States than the 1970s were."

I was sort of amazed to see this quote in a Reuters piece from Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and former director of the Richard Nixon presidential library. He said that Trump's hard core loyalist cabinet plus a "pliant" Republican-controlled Congress means "this particular moment is more dangerous for the rule of law in the United States than the 1970s were." I'm sure he was referring in part to Watergate. But my mind went immediately to the American Indian Movement. AIM's 1972 occupation of a Bureau of Indian Affairs Building in Washington D.C. and its 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee unfolded in the last couple years of the Nixon administration. I've been reading this book Blood of the Land, by Rex Weyler, about the movement, and it has struck me that as aggressive as law enforcement and private security were at Standing Rock, the FBI and U.S. Marshals were after AIM on a whole nother level. The crackdown was incredibly violent, and used immensely deceptive and invasive tactics. So if this administration is worse that the one in power then, then what's ahead?

"They had schools, universities, sewage treatment facilities, and a desalination plant. All of this was destroyed in this genocidal, ecocidal war.”

There's a ceasefire in effect in Gaza — technically. Yesterday the Israeli military killed over 100 Palestinians. But ceasefire SHOULD mean that people in Gaza are allowed to start to get back to the business of living. In reality, the death toll is only bound to climb, as people attempt to survive in the toxic death zone that two years of airstrikes left behind. This is turning more and more into an environmental story. I hope this means environmental journalists and outlets focus some extra energy on covering the utter environmental health catastrophe Palestinians now confront. Sophie Hurwitz at Grist had a good quickie, about an Arava Institute report that noted that 61 million tons of rubble now covers Gaza. And the Guardian posted a useful rundown of the state of Gaza, including that only 1.5 percent of Gaza cropland can now be farmed and that 92 percent of homes have been destroyed.

Palate Cleansers

I cover topics that are heavy and distressing to take in, so I'm ending these posts with things that make me feel grounded: food, nature, community.

Something Delicious: Persimmons

Persimmons are the best-dressed fruit in town. They are a bright yellowy-orangey-sometimes kinda red color, with a cute little curly-leaf hat. They are not a thing in the Midwest, where I'm from, and honestly, historically, I didn't get them. Is it a tomato? Is it a fruit? I couldn't even bother. But I'm on the west coast this month, and they are in season and everywhere — all over the San Francisco farmers markets, and apparently growing from a tree at a friend's house in Portland. I couldn't help but buy a couple. I don't know the rules, but I had to get rid of the intolerable skin for them to be to my liking. But once I did I learned that persimmons are magical! I'm told there are different varieties with different vibes, but the ones I had were like little sweet, gelatinous jewels inside. I cut one up and sprinkled the pieces on my yogurt and enjoyed my fancy feelings.

Garden Update: Herb Preservation Society

Herbs are the best thing to grow. It's the nicest trick to be able to pop outside and snip a little something to make whatever I'm cooking special. But every spring I encounter a forest of herb skeletons, because fall after fall I fail to harvest everything before it turns cold. I blame that transition period where the pretty part of fall transforms into the gray, ugly, bare-tree wintery part —one of the armpit parts of the year where you don't really want to be outside. So the herbs are abandoned and left to freeze and die without fulfilling their life's purpose. This year, however, my shit was together. Before I left for this trip I snipped all those guys and threw them in the freezer for a soupy winter. Some of them even got olive oil ice cube tray treatment. Did this mean that I was up until 3 am the night before I got on my plane? Yes.

Community Updates: New Environmental Justice Newsletter

There are a lot of places to put your money right now. We should all be thinking about mutual aid to support our own communities, where SNAP benefits are about to dry up. Our neighbors who are immigrants are being snatched off the street or are living in terror — they need support, too. You probably won't be surprised to hear that I also do think do think we should be supporting independent journalism.

Marianne Dhenin is one of the few environmental journalists who has consistently pitched and reported stories about Palestine. Just check out the long list of Palestine stories they lay out on their web site. However, they're a freelancer, and at a lot of outlets where they and I write, freelance budgets are shrinking or disappearing. Marianne used to get a lot of their income from Yes! Magazine, which shut down entirely this year. So Marianne did what a lot of us are doing — they started a newseltter. I just signed up for a paid subscription, and maybe you want to, too.

I'm really excited to see more of their food reporting — Marianne was a finalist for a James Beard award (and won a different award) for their investigative reporting on the Palestinian struggle for food sovereignty. They're also working on a series of interviews with climate advocates working in the Middle East and North Africa. I really liked this interview with Mariam Zuqout, a water and economics researcher at University College London, about the politics of the water crisis in Palestine. After all this talk on defending non-profits – I was especially interested to hear her insights into how the fact that Palestinians end up reliant on non-profits for support limits their sovereignty and autonomy.

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