Dallas-Based Energy Transfer Proves the Playbook to Silence Dissent is Still In Use

Rev. Edwin Robinson is a community organizer, political strategist, and coalition builder rooted in the belief that ordinary people, especially Black, working-class, and faith-driven communities, hold the collective power to dismantle systems of oppression and build a more just society. He is the Founder of Bridge North Texas, a 10-year regional campaign to build political, narrative, and economic power in North Texas, and currently serves as the inaugural Community Organizer in Residence at Brite Divinity School’s Center for Theology and Justice. Below is an op-ed he submitted about how large corporations can work to squash freedom of speech.


Earlier this year, Dallas-based Energy Transfer, the fossil fuel giant that just reported more than $1.3 billion in Q1 profits alone, took Greenpeace to court. Not just the U.S. branch, but its international arm too, claiming the groups were responsible for the 2016 Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Energy Transfer went into a North Dakota courtroom looking for $300 million, but the jury handed them a stunning $660-plus million windfall in damages.

This verdict came despite Energy Transfer presenting zero evidence linking Greenpeace to the organization of the protests or to any incidents of violence or property damage. Even one of Energy Transfer’s current board members, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, acknowledged in a recent opinion piece that the resistance at Standing Rock was peaceful.

This type of bogus lawsuit has a name: SLAPP, Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. It's a legal bullying tactic used by millionaires and billionaires to sue dissent into submission. It’s a tactic that’s been recycled throughout history—a tactic Black and working-class America is intimately familiar with. 

When attack dogs, fire hoses, and lynch mobs lost their public appeal, the powerful didn’t stop trying to crush dissent—they just changed tactics. They couldn’t hang us from trees anymore, so they started arresting us. They jailed King in Birmingham. They beat and brutalized marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They spat on and humiliated students, mothers, teachers, and clergy for daring to sit at segregated lunch counters—and then charged them with criminal trespass. Just last year, HBCU students in North Carolina were arrested for trespassing while peacefully demanding safer housing.

The same charges once used to punish civil rights heroes and icons of peaceful social progress in this country, and around the globe, are still being weaponized today against Greenpeace and so many others. Different era, same tactic.
Energy Transfer is just doing it with more lawyers and better PR.

They’re dusting off the old Bull Connor playbook—but instead of dogs and hoses, it’s lawsuits and lobbyists.

And if one billionaire can try to bankrupt a 54-year-old legacy organization like Greenpeace for supporting a movement it didn’t even lead—then the constitutional rights of the 98% are in serious jeopardy.

When corporate power is allowed to criminalize peaceful and nonviolent protest, we all pay the highest price. And when that price is our right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat healthy, nutritious food, that’s a little too rich for my blood.

A recent independent study on environmental racism in North Texas confirmed what we already knew: working-class communities are consistently exposed to the worst air quality, the most industrial waste, and the least protection. It’s even worse in working-class communities that are predominantly Black and/or Brown. We suffer the consequences, but rarely get a seat at the table where decisions are made. And if this verdict stands, it will be yet another attempt to shut us up before we can demand one.

So no, this lawsuit isn't just about a few protestors standing where they shouldn’t and saying things people didn’t like. It’s not even about Greenpeace. It’s about creating a legal blueprint to silence any resistance to the wheels of commerce and wealth creation, even if it costs us the very air we breathe or the water we drink.

For centuries in America, protest has been one of the few paths to progress for Black people, women and every disenfranchised minority group. From the pulpit to the picket line, our voices have built this democracy. So when billion-dollar corporations start using the courts to punish those voices, it’s not just a legal issue. It is a betrayal of the rights we all hold dear. It’s a real and existential threat to democracy itself.

Our constitutional rights are under attack. If we don’t speak up now, we’ll find ourselves fighting just as hard to keep them as our ancestors did to win them.

Energy Transfer may think they’ve scored a victory. But history keeps a far better record of the truth than courtrooms.