Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.

Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.

In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” 

This is more than just bluster. Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.” 

In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy within.”

“Given how it’s been under Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.”

Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, Palestinian-rights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested.

Just months ago, Cornell University threatened PhD student Momodou Taal with revocation of his F-1 student visa—and, effectively, deportation—after Taal spent much of the previous year attending various pro-Palestine actions. On September 18, Taal and fellow students disrupted a career fair Cornell held that featured weapons manufacturer L3Harris. The university alleged that Taal had shoved police on his way in, a charge he denies.

After public pushback, Cornell backed down on deportation. But Taal has still been banned from campus and is no longer permitted to teach his classes. When we spoke the week of the election, he told me that he was still negotiating the opportunity to use library resources to write his thesis. (“I don’t want to budge on library access,” he said.) 

“Given how it’s been under [President Joe] Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do,” he said. “I think, if the position taken by the [Biden] administration was that these kids should be protected, there would be more of an outcry if Trump then did a clampdown. I think what Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”

One piece of potential infrastructure is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act—a House bill designed to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit the Treasury Department designates a “terrorist-supporting organization.” A version of the bill was introduced last year with broad bipartisan support. But earlier this week, it was voted down on the House floor, as a majority of Democrats were concerned that the bill would hand undue power to Trump to silence his political enemies. 144 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the fast-tracked bill. Nearly all Republicans—and dozens of Democrats—still supported it.

“All of us support stopping terrorism,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Intercept. “[But] if he is on a march to make America fascist, we do not need to supply Donald Trump with any additional weapons to accomplish his ill purpose.” Doggett had initially supported the bill but changed course after Trump’s election.

The “nonprofit killer” bill, as critics have dubbed it, is not dead. It will go back for a vote next week. This time, with a simple majority, the bill will likely pass.

“I think we should anticipate something akin to the McCarthy era in terms of government being turned against certain categories of citizens,” Kalven said of this legislative trend.

The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestine dissent. It is called Project Esther. Nominally a policy proposal to tackle antisemitism on the left, it reads instead as a blueprint for taking down pro-Palestine activists. It suggests deporting “foreign Hamas Support Organization members,” classifying anti-war nonprofits—like American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace—as members of a shadowy “Hamas Support Organization” network that is “attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government.”  

Attorney Zoha Khalili at Palestine Legal, an organization that has spent the past decade providing legal advice and support to Palestinian-rights activists, said Trump’s election gives universities a chance to change their role.

“[Now] it’s one of those situations where, you know, universities who have been repressing student activism might also now find themselves in this position where they have to care a bit more about their students,” Khalili said. “Because of the values that they claim to uphold—wanting diversity, not wanting to have their students deported for political purposes.” 

What worries Khalili most, though, is not so much Trump’s crackdown on protesters in the United States, but how his presidency will harm the people in Gaza on whose behalf Americans protest in the first place. 

“The broader question that is on my mind is: How is the Trump administration going to impact Palestinians on the ground?” she asked. Trump’s plans for the region are unclear—though he has expressed a desire for the war to end, he’s also said he wants to ban refugee resettlement from the Gaza Strip and looks to be stocking his administration with war hawks, including an evangelical end-times Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

“How aggressively Israel is engaging in genocide also impacts the climate here for activists, who are increasingly desperate to try to save people’s lives,” Khalili said. “So the stakes are quite high at the moment.” 

Donald Trump has made it clear that there are groups he’d like to punish.

Much attention has been paid to the president-elect’s planned crusades for his next term against immigrants and transgender people. But less discussed has been another group on the list: protesters. Building off the bipartisan crackdown on anti-war student dissent last year, Trump has made clear he hopes to discipline, and potentially prosecute, civil disobedience with increased force.

In May, he promised a group of donors that “any student that protests, I [will] throw them out of the country.” Trump hoped this would serve as a warning. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students,” he continued. “As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” 

This is more than just bluster. Reuters reported that sources said Trump hopes to follow through on the promise on day one of his administration, by signing an executive order prioritizing deporting “international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas.” 

In Trump’s first term, “his instincts were to bring as much federal power as he could to bear on essentially peaceful protests,” Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute and a journalist who has studied First Amendment law for decades, told me. This time, there will be fewer guardrails. “It was complicated enough before Trump was elected. Now you’re going to have various demagogues in Congress and the Trump administration actually bearing down in various ways on universities and on university students, seeing it as the bastion of the enemy within.”

“Given how it’s been under Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do.”

Many of the plans for targeting protesters are taken from tactics employed by Democrats in recent years. For years, Palestinian-rights activists in the US—and Palestinians in the US, whether activists or not—have often been smeared as terrorists and threatened with deportation and imprisonment. In 2023, a wave of protest was met with a crackdown. The Department of Education pressured schools to stop pro-Palestine student organizing, as Mother Jones reported in September. Dozens of universities across the nation instituted strict new disciplinary codes prohibiting many forms of public assembly. Over 3,600 protesters were arrested.

Just months ago, Cornell University threatened PhD student Momodou Taal with revocation of his F-1 student visa—and, effectively, deportation—after Taal spent much of the previous year attending various pro-Palestine actions. On September 18, Taal and fellow students disrupted a career fair Cornell held that featured weapons manufacturer L3Harris. The university alleged that Taal had shoved police on his way in, a charge he denies.

After public pushback, Cornell backed down on deportation. But Taal has still been banned from campus and is no longer permitted to teach his classes. When we spoke the week of the election, he told me that he was still negotiating the opportunity to use library resources to write his thesis. (“I don’t want to budge on library access,” he said.) 

“Given how it’s been under [President Joe] Biden, it unfortunately normalizes what Trump is then allowed to do,” he said. “I think, if the position taken by the [Biden] administration was that these kids should be protected, there would be more of an outcry if Trump then did a clampdown. I think what Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”

One piece of potential infrastructure is the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act—a House bill designed to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit the Treasury Department designates a “terrorist-supporting organization.” A version of the bill was introduced last year with broad bipartisan support. But earlier this week, it was voted down on the House floor, as a majority of Democrats were concerned that the bill would hand undue power to Trump to silence his political enemies. 144 Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, voted against the fast-tracked bill. Nearly all Republicans—and dozens of Democrats—still supported it.

“All of us support stopping terrorism,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) told The Intercept. “[But] if he is on a march to make America fascist, we do not need to supply Donald Trump with any additional weapons to accomplish his ill purpose.” Doggett had initially supported the bill but changed course after Trump’s election.

The “nonprofit killer” bill, as critics have dubbed it, is not dead. It will go back for a vote next week. This time, with a simple majority, the bill will likely pass.

“I think we should anticipate something akin to the McCarthy era in terms of government being turned against certain categories of citizens,” Kalven said of this legislative trend.

The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025, has also given Trump a workable plan to stop pro-Palestine dissent. It is called Project Esther. Nominally a policy proposal to tackle antisemitism on the left, it reads instead as a blueprint for taking down pro-Palestine activists. It suggests deporting “foreign Hamas Support Organization members,” classifying anti-war nonprofits—like American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace—as members of a shadowy “Hamas Support Organization” network that is “attempting to lay siege to our education system, political processes, and government.”  

Attorney Zoha Khalili at Palestine Legal, an organization that has spent the past decade providing legal advice and support to Palestinian-rights activists, said Trump’s election gives universities a chance to change their role.

“[Now] it’s one of those situations where, you know, universities who have been repressing student activism might also now find themselves in this position where they have to care a bit more about their students,” Khalili said. “Because of the values that they claim to uphold—wanting diversity, not wanting to have their students deported for political purposes.” 

What worries Khalili most, though, is not so much Trump’s crackdown on protesters in the United States, but how his presidency will harm the people in Gaza on whose behalf Americans protest in the first place. 

“The broader question that is on my mind is: How is the Trump administration going to impact Palestinians on the ground?” she asked. Trump’s plans for the region are unclear—though he has expressed a desire for the war to end, he’s also said he wants to ban refugee resettlement from the Gaza Strip and looks to be stocking his administration with war hawks, including an evangelical end-times Zionist ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has declared that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

“How aggressively Israel is engaging in genocide also impacts the climate here for activists, who are increasingly desperate to try to save people’s lives,” Khalili said. “So the stakes are quite high at the moment.” 

Last school year’s historic protests over the war in Gaza roiled campuses and dominated headlines, with more than 3,100 students arrested nationwide. Over the summer, the protests cooled off and students returned home. But college administrators spent the summer crafting new free speech policies designed to discourage students from continuing what they started last spring. Between May and August, at least 20 colleges and university systems—representing more than 50 campuses—tightened the rules governing protest on their property.

The protest encampments that appeared on more than 130 campuses last spring served as a visual reminder of the 2 million displaced people in Gaza. Students held teach-ins, slept in tents, created art together, ate, and prayed in these makeshift societies—some for hours or days, others for entire weeks or months. The free speech organization FIRE estimated last week that 1 in 10 students has personally participated in a protest regarding Israel’s war in Gaza. The protesters demanded that their schools disclose any investments in (variously) the Israeli military, the state of Israel, or the military-industrial complex in general—and disentangle their endowments from war-makers. 

Some student groups won meetings with administrators, disclosure of the terms of their college’s endowment, or representation for Palestine studies in their school’s curriculum. A few schools agreed to work towards divestment or implement new investment screening procedures. Students elsewhere, though, saw no concessions on their goals from college administrators—and were left, instead, to spend months doing court-ordered community service or working through a lengthy school-ordered disciplinary process.  

Prior to last year’s protests, “time, space, and manner” restrictions on campus protest were considered standard practice, said Risa Lieberwitz, a Cornell University professor of labor and employment law who serves as general counsel for the American Association of University Professors. Many universities had pre-existing policies prohibiting, for example, obstructing a walkway or occupying an administrative office. Those policies were usually enforced via threats of suspension or expulsion. This year’s restrictions are different, said Lieberwitz, who previously described the new rules as “a resurgence of repression on campuses that we haven’t seen since the late 1960s.”

Lieberwitz is particularly concerned with policies requiring protest organizers to register their protest, under their own names, with the university they are protesting. “There’s a real contradiction between registering to protest and being able to actually go out and protest just operationally,” she said. “Then there’s also the issue of the chilling effect that comes from that, which comes from knowing that this is a mechanism that allows for surveillance.” Students who are required to register themselves as protest organizers may prefer to avoid expressing themselves at all. 

MIT has lots of rules about ethical funding, about the duty to do no harm with one’s research. And yet, they refuse to apply any of those rules to their own behavior.

“The point of having a rally is to be disruptive, anyway,” said MIT PhD student Richard Solomon, who participated in last year’s campus protests. For Solomon, divestment is personal. Last month, Mohammed Masbah, a Gazan student he refers to as his brother and who spent several months living with his family, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. As Solomon pointed out in a column for the student newspaper, Masbah was likely killed with the help of technology developed at American universities like MIT. 

“MIT has lots of rules about ethical funding, about the duty to do no harm with one’s research,” he told Mother Jones. “And yet they refuse to apply any of those rules to their own behavior, their own research, their own institutional collaborations.” It’s hard, he said, for students to respect protest rules when their school doesn’t respect its own rules, either. (When asked to comment, a MIT representative pointed me to a speech by the school’s president last spring, in which she stated that MIT “relies on rigorous processes to ensure all funded research complies with MIT policies and US law.”)

Beyond demanding that protests be registered, many schools have banned camping on their grounds. Some have required that anyone wearing a mask on campus—whether for health reasons or otherwise—be ready to present identification when asked. Others have banned all unregistered student “expressive activity” (a euphemistic phrase that generally covers a range of public demonstrations including protests, rallies, flyering, or picketing) gatherings over a certain size. Still others have banned all use of speakers or amplified sound during the school week (including, in one case, the use of some acoustic instruments). 

At Carnegie Mellon University, students and faculty were informed during the last week of August that any “expressive activity” involving more than 25 students must be registered—under the organizers’ names—at least three business days prior to the event, and be signed off on by a “Chief Risk Officer.” 

In response, a group of Carnegie Mellon students, faculty members, and alumni lined up on a grassy campus quadrangle holding up signs labeled “1” through “29.” This act, now prohibited on Carnegie Mellon’s campus, drove home the policy’s absurdity—on a campus of 13,000 students, half of whom live on campus, a gathering of 25+ people may be harder to avoid than to initiate.

David Widder, who earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon last year, called the new policy “authoritarian,” and unlike anything he’d seen during his six years at the institution. “We hoped to playfully but visibly violate the policy—and show that the sky does not fall when students and faculty speak out about issues that matter to them,” he told Mother Jones. “We can’t credibly claim to be a university with these gross restrictions on free expression.” 

According to a statement by the university’s provost, the new policy was intended to “ensure coordination with the university and support the conditions for civil and safe exchange.”

Linguistics Professor Uju Anya, who spoke at the rally, pointed out that at least $2.8 billion of Carnegie Mellon’s research funding has come from the Department of Defense since 2008. “We know that our universities have skin in the game now, in the weapons and in the money,” Anya said. “So, ultimately, Carnegie Mellon is in bed with baby bombers, and they don’t want us—the members of this community, who also have a stake in what the university does—to openly question them.” 

At some schools, the conflict over newly instituted protest policies has already made its way to the courts. The ACLU of Indiana announced August 29 that it would be suing Indiana University over an “expressive activity” policy which, like CMU’s, was implemented in late summer. The policy under debate defines “expressive activity” in part as  “Communicating by any lawful verbal, written, audio visual, or electronic means,” as well as “Protesting” and “Distributing literature” and “circulating petitions.” 

The policy limits “expressive activity” to the hours between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. “This is written so broadly, if any one of us was to wear a T-shirt supporting a cause at 11:15 p.m. while walking through IU, we would be violating the policy,” Ken Falk, legal director of the ACLU of Indiana, said. “The protections of the First Amendment do not end at 11:00 p.m., only to begin again at 6 a.m.” Since Indiana University is a public school, it is bound by the First Amendment and can’t limit speech as strictly as a private college. 

Lieberwitz, the AAUP lawyer, said she expects more legal challenges like the ACLU’s this coming year. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard University, protests on college campuses are spiking again, though not at the levels seen last year. On at least two campuses, protesters have already been arrested. And between August 15 and September 3, there wasn’t a single day without some sort of Palestine solidarity action on a college campus somewhere in the United States.

---

The following is an incomplete list of US university protest policies changed between May and August of 2024. 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: As of August 30, unauthorized tent encampments are prohibited. Authorized demonstrations on campus may only be organized by “Departments, Labs, or Centers, recognized student organizations, and employee unions.”

University of Virginia: Updated “Rules on Demonstrations and Access to Shared Spaces” as of August 26. Non-permitted tents are now forbidden, no tent can stay up for over 18 hours, unless “in use for official University or school events,” and anyone wearing a mask on University property must present identification if asked. No outdoor events are permitted between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. 

University of Wisconsin, Madison: Updated its policy on “expressive activity” August 28. “Expressive activity,” defined as activities protected by the First Amendment including “speech, lawful assembly, protesting, distributing literature and chalking,” is now prohibited within 25 feet of university building entrances.

University of California (1o campuses): Camping or erecting tents is forbidden as of August 19. Masking “to conceal identity” is banned. 

California State University (23 campuses): “Camping, overnight demonstrations, or overnight loitering” is banned, as are “disguises or concealment of identity,” as of August 19. 

Virginia Commonwealth University: As of August 9, anyone on University property covering their face must show identification. Encampments are explicitly prohibited, “unless approved in advance by the University.” 

University of Pennsylvania: As of June 7, encampments are banned, as are any overnight demonstrations, and “non-news” livestreaming. “Unauthorized overnight activities” are to be considered trespassing. 

James Madison University: As of August, no “tents or other items” may be used to create a shelter on campus unless approved by the university. Chalking on walkways is prohibited. “Camping” is defined as “the use of any item to create a shelter.”

Indiana University (nine campuses): As of July 29, “expressive activity” is limited to the hours between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m., and any “signs or temporary structures” are now required to be approved at least 10 days in advance of “expressive activity” by the university. 

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: As of August 21, camping is prohibited except in designated areas. 

University of South Florida system (three campuses): As of August 26, “activities in public spaces” after 5 p.m. are prohibited unless students request a reservation. 

Harvard University: Plans to ban “outdoor chalking” and “unapproved signage” are in process as of July 30, according to a draft obtained by the Harvard Crimson. Indoor protests have already been banned as of January 2024. 

University of Connecticut (five campuses): As of August 21, students cannot make amplified sound through speakers or megaphones, or use certain acoustic instruments like “trumpets, trombones, or violins” in public spaces at any point during the day Monday through Friday, with official university events excepted. 

Carnegie Mellon University: As of August 23, an “event involving expressive activity” occurring on campus “must be registered with the University if more than 25 participants are expected to attend” at least three business days in advance.  

Pomona College: As of August 2024, encampments are prohibited, and noncompliance may result in “detention and arrest by law enforcement.” Additional police officers have been hired to patrol campus.

Emory University: As of August 27, camping is prohibited on campus, and protests are prohibited between midnight and 7 a.m. 

Emerson College: As of August 23, protests may only occur between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m., and must be pre-registered with the college. 

Rutgers University: As of August 20, Demonstrations must be held between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. and only in “designated public forum areas.” 

University of Minnesota (five campuses): On August 27, university administrators unveiled new  “guidelines for spontaneous expressive activity,” which state that all protests must end by 10 p.m., must use no more than one megaphone, and that groups of over 100 people must register their spontaneous expressive activity at least two weeks in advance.

Syracuse University: As of August, “unauthorized use or assembly of tents or other temporary shelter structures” is prohibited.

Did your school implement a new protest policy this year? Email shurwitz@motherjones.com.

---

Correction, September 13: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s protest policy as prohibiting protests within 25 feet of university buildings, rather than prohibiting protest within 25 feet of university building entrances.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Wealthy, democratic countries in the global north are using harsh, vague, and punitive measures to crack down on climate protests at the same time as criticizing similar draconian tactics by authorities in the global south, according to a report.

A Climate Rights International report exposes the increasingly heavy-handed treatment of climate activists in Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, and the US.

It found the crackdown in these countries—including lengthy prison sentences, preventive detention and harassment—was a violation of governments’ legal responsibility to protect basic rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association. It also highlights how these same governments frequently criticize regimes in developing countries for not respecting the right to protest peacefully.

“Governments too often take such a strong and principled view about the right to peaceful protest in other countries—but when they don’t like certain kinds of protests at home they pass laws and deploy the police to stop them,” said Brad Adams, director at Climate Rights International.

Across Europe, the US, and the UK, authorities have responded to nonviolent climate protests with mass arrests and draconian new laws that have resulted in long prison sentences. In some instances people who have taken part have been labeled as hooligans, saboteurs, or ecoterrorists by politicians and the media.

Senior human rights advocates and environmental campaigners have raised concerns about the crackdown and called on governments to protect the right to nonviolent protest.

“These defenders are basically trying to save the planet, and in doing so save humanity,” Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, told the Guardian last year. “These are people we should be protecting, but are seen by governments and corporations as a threat to be neutralized. In the end it’s about power and economics.”

The escalating climate crisis has resulted in record-breaking temperatures around the world in 2024, driving food shortages, mass movements of people and economic hardship – as well as deadly fires and floods.

But the report found that rather than taking urgent measures to rapidly reduce the use of fossil fuels and halt ecological collapse, many relatively wealthy countries have instead focused on those trying to stop those raising the alarm by taking part in protests and civil disobedience.

“You don’t have to agree with the tactics of climate activists to understand the importance of defending their rights to protest and to free speech,” said Adams. “Instead of jailing climate protesters and undermining civil liberties, governments should heed their call to take urgent action to address the climate crisis.”

The report’s authors highlighted several examples of developed countries lauding the importance of the right to protest on the international stage at the same time as undertaking harsh and punitive crackdowns at home.

Welcoming a UN report in July this year, the UK government said: “These rights [to peaceful assembly and protest] are essential to the functioning of society, providing a platform for citizens to advocate for positive change. Nonetheless, civic space is increasingly contested as authoritarian governments and actors, who feel vulnerable to scrutiny and accountability, seek to silence dissent.”

Tuesday’s report also found:

• Record prison sentences for nonviolent protest in several countries including the UK, Germany and the US.
• Preemptive arrests and detention for those suspected of planning peaceful protests.
• Draconian new laws passed to make the vast majority of peaceful protest illegal.
• Measures to stop juries hearing about people’s motivation for taking part in protests during court cases, which critics say fundamentally undermines the right to a fair trial.

Climate Rights International called on democratic governments around the world to halt the authoritarian crackdown and protect people’s rights to protest.

“Governments should see climate protesters and activists as allies in the fight against climate change, not criminals,” said Adams. “The crackdown on peaceful protests is not only a violation of their basic rights, it can also be used by repressive governments as a green light to go after climate, environmental, and human rights defenders in their countries.”

Earlier this month, Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance made a bold claim about his new opponent: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance said, “is a guy who says he stands for public safety but actively encouraged the rioters who burned down Minneapolis.” 

This has become a common talking point. Walz’s Republican opponent during his reelection campaign in 2022 made a similar pitch. And since the Minnesota governor’s selection as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, the claim has gone national.

In this case, it was made in Vance’s usual exaggerated tone (a mode the nation has come to know well in the last few weeks of trollish comments). But, even beyond Vance, there are many on the right who say that, as governor, Walz allowed—or even “encouraged”—rioting in Minneapolis in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The assertion is that Walz hesitated to activate the National Guard, and by the time troops arrived in Minneapolis, numerous buildings had burned—including the 3rd Precinct police station.

In a 2020 call published by ABC, Trump said to Walz of his response to protests:  “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim.” 

“It’s absolutely not the case that the governor encouraged the rioters,” said Michelle Phelps, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and author of The Minneapolis Reckoning, a new book about the politics of policing in the city before and after George Floyd’s murder. Such an assertion is a hackneyed ploy, Phelps says, to “affiliate Governor Walz with the most extreme end of the people who were in the streets in 2020.” (Vance did not return a request for comment.)

What Walz actually did after Floyd’s murder made Minnesota the epicenter of a national reckoning on racism and police violence, and is more interesting and complicated. He left many disappointed, on the left and right.

As protests began to escalate in the days after Floyd’s murder, Walz was conflicted about how to respect the right to protest while maintaining order. “The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain and anguish unheard, much like we failed to hear George Floyd as he pleaded for his life,” Walz said the morning after the precinct burned. “But I’m asking you to help us…get the streets to a place where we can restore the justice so that those that are expressing rage and anger and demanding justice are heard. Not those who throw firebombs into businesses.”

As Robert Samuels recently reported in the Washington Post, Walz became close with Philando Castile’s mother, Valerie. They worked together on Minnesota’s now-famous universal school lunch policy. Philando was a beloved cafeteria supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori School in Saint Paul, not far from the governor’s mansion. As far back as 2017, when Walz was preparing his run for governor, Castile warned him of a massive uprising barring action against police killings: “Mark my word, if it keeps on going in this direction, something really bad is going to happen.” 

In the days after Floyd’s murder, with Castile’s words likely in mind, Walz tried “to appeal to the centrist Democrat watching the protests from [the suburbs] who were incredibly relieved when the National Guard was called in, and the people living in Minneapolis, some of whom at that moment were fervently calling for police abolition,” said Phelps. Walz stepped in to send troops but also let much of the authority (or, you could say, blame) stay with local leaders.

Initially, the challenge for a state leader like Walz was whether to override Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and then–Police Chief Medaria Arradondo. In this conflict, the right has latched on to minor infighting among two Democrats hoping to distance themselves from the worst of the protests. 

On May 26, the day after Floyd’s death, protests began outside the corner store where he was murdered. The protesters then marched 2 miles to the 3rd Precinct station where Derek Chauvin worked. MPD officers, soon accompanied by state troopers, awaited them on the roof and began to fire tear gas and less-lethal rounds at protesters, some of whom responded by throwing rocks and water bottles back at officers. In what could be called the iron law of 21st-century protests (cops are called in, their actions lead to bigger protests), videos of the suppression spread widely and brought even more people into the streets the next day.

On the evening of May 27, parts of the crowd began to set fire and loot stores like the Target across the street from the precinct. According to the Star Tribune, that evening Frey called Walz and made a verbal request for the National Guard, and Arradondo emailed state Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington with a request from the MPD. On the morning of May 28, Frey made an official written request. That afternoon, Walz issued an Emergency Executive Order authorizing the deployment of the Minnesota National Guard. 

By nightfall, National Guard members were on the streets of the Twin Cities assisting firefighters and protecting critical infrastructure, but were not involved directly with protesters at the precinct. Frey decided to abandon the precinct to protesters that night, saying “the symbolism of a building cannot outweigh the importance of life.” 

In the waning hours of Thursday night, Walz announced that the state would take control of the response. Early on Friday morning, the National Guard and a consortium of law enforcement agencies rolled in and secured the precinct area.

The problem was not necessarily the need for more police, but a better organized and more humane law enforcement response. 

From there, the dispute between Frey and Walz spilled over into the public domain. After speaking in a private call with him Friday morning, Walz sharply rebuked Frey at a press conference by calling the city’s response “an abject failure.” Frey pushed back, and said that after their call on the evening of May 27, Walz had hesitated to activate the National Guard. The governor’s office hit back, saying the requests were made informally, with directives that were too vague.

Soon after, Walz—like many politicians scrambling to get a handle on the situation—began speaking of “outside agitators.” He falsely claimed that 80 percent of those responsible for the discord were from out of state, and that the protests had taken on a new character. They were no longer about justice for George Floyd, but about “attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities,” he said, before activating the state’s entire National Guard. 

This helped paste over the conflict between a Democratic governor and mayor—and allowed Walz to seal off complaints from a wider coalition of voters. He could be sympathetic to the streets without endorsing their conduct; he could crack down for the suburban voters without alienating the good people marching. As journalist Alyssa Oursler recently put it, in these moments Walz sounded less like the jovial Midwestern Dad that Democrats have come to love over the last month, and more like the 24-year veteran of the National Guard he is.

These conflicts were minor and mostly ignored during the maelstrom of 2020. But now they are being relitigated without much context.

The groundwork for the recent smears on Walz was laid in an October 2020 report authored by the then-Republican-controlled state Senate. In it, senators claimed Walz “failed to act in a timely manner to confront rioters with necessary force due to an ill-conceived philosophical belief that such an action would exacerbate the rioting.” This suggestion to use “necessary force”—call it the Tom Cotton Option—ignores the fact that the Minneapolis Police Department’s response inflicted at least 16 traumatic brain injuries and knocked out several people’s eyeballs, including the journalist Linda Tirado, who is now in palliative care due to complications from her injuries sustained in the protests.

“It felt as if MPD had gone to war with their citizens,” said Robin Wonsley, a longtime organizer turned City Council member who was compelled to run for office after the protests and whose ward overlaps with the areas of Minneapolis most affected by the unrest. “I really can’t even imagine what additional military would’ve done had they been called in immediately, outside of just deepening the grief, trauma, betrayal, and justifiable anger amongst residents.”

In addition to the risk of even greater harm to civilians, the strategy would have likely failed on its own terms of restoring order. “When police come in aggressively, particularly at protests about police violence, that can actually exacerbate the chaos and disorder,” said Phelps. “It’s not clear to me that that harm and damage both by rioters and by the police, would have been minimized had the city or the state come in with more force [right away].”

As the story has been pored over in the national press, the conflict between Frey and Walz has taken a back seat, despite its central role. Walz has avoided specifics. Frey has been diplomatic. “During one of the city and state’s most difficult moments, we collectively tried our best to navigate unprecedented times and to do so quickly,” Frey said in a statement provided to the Washington Post. “Governor Walz is a friend, an excellent governor, and I am proud to support him as Vice President.”

The call for an immediate National Guard deployment also ignores the after-action reports commissioned by the city and state. Both say the problem was not necessarily the need for more police, or troops, but instead a better organized and more humane law enforcement response. 

Violent responses from Minneapolis police, the reports say, contributed to the situation spiraling out of control. The state’s report lays plenty of the blame on law enforcement for escalating the violence. Lawful and unlawful protesters both got beaten, tear-gassed, and hit with less-lethal munitions. In the first few days of unrest, a business owner successfully dissuaded protesters from breaking the windows of a building, but then “it became increasingly hard to do any of that kind of intervention because there was so much tear gas, grenades [distraction devices], and [less-lethal munitions].”

The city’s report—authored by several retired cops at an out-of-state risk management firm—details an “ad-hoc” police response plagued by an inability to follow emergency protocol, vast lapses in communication, a lack of clarity in the command structure, and inconsistent rules of engagement when firing the less-lethal munitions. 

The portrayal of Walz as overly sympathetic toward the protests sounds “laughable” and “totally baseless” to Sheila Nezhad, the development and operations director at the abolitionist organization Interrupting Criminalization, who treated injuries during the protests as a street medic. Nezhad went on to challenge Mayor Frey in the 2021 election, ultimately coming in third after ranked-choice votes were tabulated. “In my campaign, the moments that people remembered the most from 2020 and that were the most traumatizing, was having [military vehicles] roll down their blocks,” said Nezhad. While there were many in the city who felt the situation necessitated a military presence, Nezhad maintains that the National Guard was “absolutely a sore spot for a lot of people.” 

Nezhad also laments that the response to protests did not meaningfully improve after 2020. “Walz didn’t significantly change policing. Instead, he learned how to create a police superpower,” she said. 

In anticipation of the Derek Chauvin trial in 2021, public safety officials from throughout the state introduced Operation Safety Net, a multi-agency law enforcement initiative hatched to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2020. For twelve weeks throughout March and April 2021, thousands of national guard troops and police officers (some of whom came from Ohio and Nebraska) were stationed across the Twin Cities. 

When a police officer shot and killed a young Black man named Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in the midst of the trial, Operation Safety Net was redeployed on the protests in Brooklyn Center, the Minneapolis suburb where Wright was killed. In a standoff outside of the police station, law enforcement made mass arrests and detained journalists without cause while continuing indiscriminate use of less-lethal munitions and tear gas on protesters. A coalition of more than 40 progressive political organizations, including the state’s ACLU chapter, wrote a letter to Walz urging him to immediately disband Operation Safety Net. Later, an investigative series by MIT Technology Review reported that the task force continued long after the Chauvin trial, expanding into “an immensely powerful surveillance machine.”

“This idea that Republicans are hammering away at—that [Walz] is a far-left radical—is really funny in some ways, because the far left radicals in the Twin Cities see him as having done exactly the thing that Republicans are calling for,” said Phelps.  

In fact, ABC News unearthed a conference call from June 2020 that undermines the basic premise of the attack on Walz coming from the Trump campaign. “What they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in and dominated, and it happened immediately,” Trump said on June 1, 2020, in a conference call that included Walz. “You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins,” Trump continued.  “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim.” 

Despite this turbulent first term in office, Walz was reelected in 2022 and presided over a historically progressive legislative session that he rode to national stardom culminating in a vice presidential nomination. But that session, Wonsley, the Minneapolis City Council member, argued, wouldn’t have been possible without a grassroots movement that was injected with new energy after the Floyd protests. 

“Peers of mine went on into positions in the state capitol, and translated their experience into legislative victories that Governor Walz now gets to rave about as he’s campaigning across the country,” said Wonsley. While Wonsley is a Democratic Socialist who does not affiliate with the Democratic Party, she reminded me that throughout American history, social movements have always sought to win concessions from imperfect politicians. “Governor Walz might not have responded in the way that some of us wanted him to in the events following George Floyd’s murder, but I think he has the opportunity to look at the great work that his legislature produced and to carry that forward.” 

Earlier this month, Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance made a bold claim about his new opponent: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance said, “is a guy who says he stands for public safety but actively encouraged the rioters who burned down Minneapolis.” 

This has become a common talking point. Walz’s Republican opponent during his reelection campaign in 2022 made a similar pitch. And since the Minnesota governor’s selection as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, the claim has gone national.

In this case, it was made in Vance’s usual exaggerated tone (a mode the nation has come to know well in the last few weeks of trollish comments). But, even beyond Vance, there are many on the right who say that, as governor, Walz allowed—or even “encouraged”—rioting in Minneapolis in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The assertion is that Walz hesitated to activate the National Guard, and by the time troops arrived in Minneapolis, numerous buildings had burned—including the 3rd Precinct police station.

In a 2020 call published by ABC, Trump said to Walz of his response to protests:  “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim.” 

“It’s absolutely not the case that the governor encouraged the rioters,” said Michelle Phelps, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and author of The Minneapolis Reckoning, a new book about the politics of policing in the city before and after George Floyd’s murder. Such an assertion is a hackneyed ploy, Phelps says, to “affiliate Governor Walz with the most extreme end of the people who were in the streets in 2020.” (Vance did not return a request for comment.)

What Walz actually did after Floyd’s murder made Minnesota the epicenter of a national reckoning on racism and police violence, and is more interesting and complicated. He left many disappointed, on the left and right.

As protests began to escalate in the days after Floyd’s murder, Walz was conflicted about how to respect the right to protest while maintaining order. “The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain and anguish unheard, much like we failed to hear George Floyd as he pleaded for his life,” Walz said the morning after the precinct burned. “But I’m asking you to help us…get the streets to a place where we can restore the justice so that those that are expressing rage and anger and demanding justice are heard. Not those who throw firebombs into businesses.”

As Robert Samuels recently reported in the Washington Post, Walz became close with Philando Castile’s mother, Valerie. They worked together on Minnesota’s now-famous universal school lunch policy. Philando was a beloved cafeteria supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori School in Saint Paul, not far from the governor’s mansion. As far back as 2017, when Walz was preparing his run for governor, Castile warned him of a massive uprising barring action against police killings: “Mark my word, if it keeps on going in this direction, something really bad is going to happen.” 

In the days after Floyd’s murder, with Castile’s words likely in mind, Walz tried “to appeal to the centrist Democrat watching the protests from [the suburbs] who were incredibly relieved when the National Guard was called in, and the people living in Minneapolis, some of whom at that moment were fervently calling for police abolition,” said Phelps. Walz stepped in to send troops but also let much of the authority (or, you could say, blame) stay with local leaders.

Initially, the challenge for a state leader like Walz was whether to override Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and then–Police Chief Medaria Arradondo. In this conflict, the right has latched on to minor infighting among two Democrats hoping to distance themselves from the worst of the protests. 

On May 26, the day after Floyd’s death, protests began outside the corner store where he was murdered. The protesters then marched 2 miles to the 3rd Precinct station where Derek Chauvin worked. MPD officers, soon accompanied by state troopers, awaited them on the roof and began to fire tear gas and less-lethal rounds at protesters, some of whom responded by throwing rocks and water bottles back at officers. In what could be called the iron law of 21st-century protests (cops are called in, their actions lead to bigger protests), videos of the suppression spread widely and brought even more people into the streets the next day.

On the evening of May 27, parts of the crowd began to set fire and loot stores like the Target across the street from the precinct. According to the Star Tribune, that evening Frey called Walz and made a verbal request for the National Guard, and Arradondo emailed state Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington with a request from the MPD. On the morning of May 28, Frey made an official written request. That afternoon, Walz issued an Emergency Executive Order authorizing the deployment of the Minnesota National Guard. 

By nightfall, National Guard members were on the streets of the Twin Cities assisting firefighters and protecting critical infrastructure, but were not involved directly with protesters at the precinct. Frey decided to abandon the precinct to protesters that night, saying “the symbolism of a building cannot outweigh the importance of life.” 

In the waning hours of Thursday night, Walz announced that the state would take control of the response. Early on Friday morning, the National Guard and a consortium of law enforcement agencies rolled in and secured the precinct area.

The problem was not necessarily the need for more police, but a better organized and more humane law enforcement response. 

From there, the dispute between Frey and Walz spilled over into the public domain. After speaking in a private call with him Friday morning, Walz sharply rebuked Frey at a press conference by calling the city’s response “an abject failure.” Frey pushed back, and said that after their call on the evening of May 27, Walz had hesitated to activate the National Guard. The governor’s office hit back, saying the requests were made informally, with directives that were too vague.

Soon after, Walz—like many politicians scrambling to get a handle on the situation—began speaking of “outside agitators.” He falsely claimed that 80 percent of those responsible for the discord were from out of state, and that the protests had taken on a new character. They were no longer about justice for George Floyd, but about “attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities,” he said, before activating the state’s entire National Guard. 

This helped paste over the conflict between a Democratic governor and mayor—and allowed Walz to seal off complaints from a wider coalition of voters. He could be sympathetic to the streets without endorsing their conduct; he could crack down for the suburban voters without alienating the good people marching. As journalist Alyssa Oursler recently put it, in these moments Walz sounded less like the jovial Midwestern Dad that Democrats have come to love over the last month, and more like the 24-year veteran of the National Guard he is.

These conflicts were minor and mostly ignored during the maelstrom of 2020. But now they are being relitigated without much context.

The groundwork for the recent smears on Walz was laid in an October 2020 report authored by the then-Republican-controlled state Senate. In it, senators claimed Walz “failed to act in a timely manner to confront rioters with necessary force due to an ill-conceived philosophical belief that such an action would exacerbate the rioting.” This suggestion to use “necessary force”—call it the Tom Cotton Option—ignores the fact that the Minneapolis Police Department’s response inflicted at least 16 traumatic brain injuries and knocked out several people’s eyeballs, including the journalist Linda Tirado, who is now in palliative care due to complications from her injuries sustained in the protests.

“It felt as if MPD had gone to war with their citizens,” said Robin Wonsley, a longtime organizer turned City Council member who was compelled to run for office after the protests and whose ward overlaps with the areas of Minneapolis most affected by the unrest. “I really can’t even imagine what additional military would’ve done had they been called in immediately, outside of just deepening the grief, trauma, betrayal, and justifiable anger amongst residents.”

In addition to the risk of even greater harm to civilians, the strategy would have likely failed on its own terms of restoring order. “When police come in aggressively, particularly at protests about police violence, that can actually exacerbate the chaos and disorder,” said Phelps. “It’s not clear to me that that harm and damage both by rioters and by the police, would have been minimized had the city or the state come in with more force [right away].”

As the story has been pored over in the national press, the conflict between Frey and Walz has taken a back seat, despite its central role. Walz has avoided specifics. Frey has been diplomatic. “During one of the city and state’s most difficult moments, we collectively tried our best to navigate unprecedented times and to do so quickly,” Frey said in a statement provided to the Washington Post. “Governor Walz is a friend, an excellent governor, and I am proud to support him as Vice President.”

The call for an immediate National Guard deployment also ignores the after-action reports commissioned by the city and state. Both say the problem was not necessarily the need for more police, or troops, but instead a better organized and more humane law enforcement response. 

Violent responses from Minneapolis police, the reports say, contributed to the situation spiraling out of control. The state’s report lays plenty of the blame on law enforcement for escalating the violence. Lawful and unlawful protesters both got beaten, tear-gassed, and hit with less-lethal munitions. In the first few days of unrest, a business owner successfully dissuaded protesters from breaking the windows of a building, but then “it became increasingly hard to do any of that kind of intervention because there was so much tear gas, grenades [distraction devices], and [less-lethal munitions].”

The city’s report—authored by several retired cops at an out-of-state risk management firm—details an “ad-hoc” police response plagued by an inability to follow emergency protocol, vast lapses in communication, a lack of clarity in the command structure, and inconsistent rules of engagement when firing the less-lethal munitions. 

The portrayal of Walz as overly sympathetic toward the protests sounds “laughable” and “totally baseless” to Sheila Nezhad, the development and operations director at the abolitionist organization Interrupting Criminalization, who treated injuries during the protests as a street medic. Nezhad went on to challenge Mayor Frey in the 2021 election, ultimately coming in third after ranked-choice votes were tabulated. “In my campaign, the moments that people remembered the most from 2020 and that were the most traumatizing, was having [military vehicles] roll down their blocks,” said Nezhad. While there were many in the city who felt the situation necessitated a military presence, Nezhad maintains that the National Guard was “absolutely a sore spot for a lot of people.” 

Nezhad also laments that the response to protests did not meaningfully improve after 2020. “Walz didn’t significantly change policing. Instead, he learned how to create a police superpower,” she said. 

In anticipation of the Derek Chauvin trial in 2021, public safety officials from throughout the state introduced Operation Safety Net, a multi-agency law enforcement initiative hatched to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2020. For twelve weeks throughout March and April 2021, thousands of national guard troops and police officers (some of whom came from Ohio and Nebraska) were stationed across the Twin Cities. 

When a police officer shot and killed a young Black man named Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in the midst of the trial, Operation Safety Net was redeployed on the protests in Brooklyn Center, the Minneapolis suburb where Wright was killed. In a standoff outside of the police station, law enforcement made mass arrests and detained journalists without cause while continuing indiscriminate use of less-lethal munitions and tear gas on protesters. A coalition of more than 40 progressive political organizations, including the state’s ACLU chapter, wrote a letter to Walz urging him to immediately disband Operation Safety Net. Later, an investigative series by MIT Technology Review reported that the task force continued long after the Chauvin trial, expanding into “an immensely powerful surveillance machine.”

“This idea that Republicans are hammering away at—that [Walz] is a far-left radical—is really funny in some ways, because the far left radicals in the Twin Cities see him as having done exactly the thing that Republicans are calling for,” said Phelps.  

In fact, ABC News unearthed a conference call from June 2020 that undermines the basic premise of the attack on Walz coming from the Trump campaign. “What they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in and dominated, and it happened immediately,” Trump said on June 1, 2020, in a conference call that included Walz. “You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins,” Trump continued.  “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim.” 

Despite this turbulent first term in office, Walz was reelected in 2022 and presided over a historically progressive legislative session that he rode to national stardom culminating in a vice presidential nomination. But that session, Wonsley, the Minneapolis City Council member, argued, wouldn’t have been possible without a grassroots movement that was injected with new energy after the Floyd protests. 

“Peers of mine went on into positions in the state capitol, and translated their experience into legislative victories that Governor Walz now gets to rave about as he’s campaigning across the country,” said Wonsley. While Wonsley is a Democratic Socialist who does not affiliate with the Democratic Party, she reminded me that throughout American history, social movements have always sought to win concessions from imperfect politicians. “Governor Walz might not have responded in the way that some of us wanted him to in the events following George Floyd’s murder, but I think he has the opportunity to look at the great work that his legislature produced and to carry that forward.” 

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The atmosphere is more festival than crime scene. There’s an accordionist, and two men in beanie hats are playing the drums. It’s a clear spring day in the farmlands of western France. But the people gathered in this field are technically trespassing, and there are signs they expect trouble. Someone has a gas mask slung around their neck. There’s a contingent clad in balaclavas. Others disguise their features with dark goggles or masks, and one group holds up a wide fabric canopy to obscure the view of police drones. At the center of the maelstrom stands Léna Lazare, holding a pickaxe.

The then-24-year-old’s long brown hair is untied; her face uncovered. That’s important, she says. It adds a sense of legitimacy to what she’s about to do. She drives the pickaxe into the ground as the crowd around her looks on. Again and again she strikes at the hard, dry earth. When she can’t dig any more, another person emerges from the huddle to take over. Several meters down, they find what they’ve been looking for: pipes. Beneath the field is a network designed to carry water to a new “mega-basin”—a giant reservoir being built near the village of Épannes. The group is here to rip one of those pipes out of the ground.

The soft-spoken former physics student is a spokesperson for sabotage: “We act when infrastructure has a serious impact on environments and on living beings.”

In other parts of the world, environmentalists target oil giants, airports, and banks to throw sand in the gears of companies they believe are actively warming the globe. For activists in France, mega-basins have become a symbol of how the government is adapting to climate change in precisely the wrong way. In response to intensifying droughts, French authorities have carved giant water storage systems into the countryside for large farms to draw down in dry months. Critics say these mega-basins—which can hold up to about 190 million gallons, the equivalent of nearly 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools—are effectively hoarding water, reserving it for private landowners, leaving rivers parched and local groundwater systems depleted.

That’s why these projects are targets for sabotage, according to Lazare. She talks about “disarming” the reservoirs, as if they, not she and her fellow protesters, were the source of violence. She’s watching from the crowd on this clear day in March 2022 as a man in jeans and a white T-shirt strains to lever a piece of pipe out of the ground with rope. Someone produces an angle grinder. When a section is cut free, the crowd breaks into applause before a man in blue overalls brandishes the severed pipe above his head like a trophy. “At that moment,” Lazare recalls later, “the water gushed out and returned to the Earth.”

Lazare is one of the 200 founding members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre, or Earth Uprisings, a French organization that is the most extreme of a new wave of radical European climate groups formed in the past five years. In France, this soft-spoken former physics student has become a spokesperson for sabotage. “We act when infrastructure has a serious impact on environments and on living beings,” she says.

Now 26, Lazare makes more sense as a scientist than as an activist—mostly quiet and serious and economical with her words. She has a mane of unkempt hair and a soft, flat voice that sometimes gives way to a high-pitched giggle and flashes of steely defiance. “We refuse to be labeled as criminals,” she says. After French interior minister Gérald Darmanin compared some members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre to ecoterrorists and the government outlawed the organization in June 2023, it was Lazare who went on TV to defend the group’s activities.

In the past few years, activists have smashed bank windows, attacked gas stations, broken into oil-pipeline control stations, deflated hundreds of SUV tires, and, just this summer, doused Stonehenge with temporary orange paint. They do this for different aims—to attract media coverage, to argue their case in front of a jury, or to make business untenable for companies they see as responsible for loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, driving calamitous weather events, and courting mass extinction.

If Greta Thunberg was emblematic of an earlier stage of the global climate movement, Léna Lazare signals what comes next. Today’s activists are wrestling with deep disappointment that 2019’s mass climate demonstrations didn’t portend big changes, and a certainty that they are running out of time to prevent climate catastrophe. A combination of urgency and despair is pushing them to actions previously seized by only the most radical fringe of the environmental movement.

Sabotage has been a strand of the modern environmental movement for half a century. In 1975, two homemade bombs exploded in a yet-to-be opened French nuclear power station, delaying its construction by several months. In 1986, activists sank two roughly 430-ton Icelandic whaling ships and used sledge hammers and acid to destroy processing equipment in the country’s only whale oil plant.

In 1998, the year Lazare was born, a group associated with the Earth Liberation Front caused more than $12 million in damage when it torched a mile-long strip of a Colorado ski resort that had been planning to expand into an area considered a potential habitat for a threatened lynx.

Growing up, Lazare’s family—her father was the director of an art house movie theater, and her mother worked in film communications—had friends in Japan, and she felt a strong connection with the country. In 2011, when she was 12, a tsunami triggered a major disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Lazare spent days afterward obsessively reading about leaking radiation and the 15,000 people forced to evacuate their homes. She also read reports claiming those in charge of the plant had cut corners with safety measures in part to save money. And that introduced her to a tension—between what is best for business and what is best for the local environment—that she now finds ubiquitous. “Everything was done to prioritize economic interests before the well-being of the population,” she says.

Seven years after Fukushima, Lazare moved to Paris to study physics at the prestigious Sorbonne University. There she met, and began protesting alongside, fellow student activists. Then, one day in the spring of 2018, she watched police fire tear gas at environmentalists squatting on an abandoned airport in western France, and she began to feel that protests alone were not enough.

“Sabotage is a French term,” says the Swedish activist Andreas Malm. “I think Les Soulèvements de la Terre are the cutting edge of the climate movement in Europe right now.”

That year, Thunberg started the peaceful school strike that made her famous, and Lazare launched her own group. Paris Environmental Disobedience, or Désobéissance Ecolo Paris, was about figuring out ways to be strategically disruptive. The group tried out a few small, risk-averse actions like daubing banks in a type of easy-to-remove black paint, says Lazare, but they ended up talking about breaking the law a lot more than actually breaking it.

At around the same time, the mainstream climate movement was starting to gain momentum with peaceful tactics. Millions of young people began marching in capital cities across the world, making it clear they did not want to inherit a ruined planet. When the protests arrived in Paris in early 2019, Lazare joined them. She became a national coordinator for Youth for Climate, the French equivalent of Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, appearing on TV and in newspapers talking about the climate crisis and her decision to stop traveling by plane.

All the while, she was restless. “It wasn’t moving fast enough,” she remembers. By the end of that year, Lazare had dropped out of university. “We must reinvent ourselves, lead people toward civil disobedience, mount more radical actions,” she told the French magazine Politis. She was trying to get her comrades to take the leap toward sabotage. “It was about daring to damage material stuff,” she explains. Until then, she says, that was a line the mainstream climate movement had not been ready to cross.

Then the pandemic distracted the world from the climate. France went into lockdown. Lazare was in Japan, taking a break from protesting, and couldn’t get home for six months. When she finally made it back she got her hands on a book about environmental protests that had just been released, called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

A few years earlier, its author, the Swedish academic and activist Andreas Malm, had been working on a book about ancient Egypt when his country experienced its worst wildfires in modern history. Upwards of 60 fires were burning, from the Arctic north to the southern island of Gotland. And it wasn’t just Sweden: Parts of Greece, California, and the UK were all burning too.

Malm could no longer justify “geeking out on this moldy old historical stuff while the world was literally on fire,” so he forgot the book on ancient Egypt and instead wrote a treatise arguing that sabotage is necessary for the climate movement to make real progress. “The situation is so dire, we need to go beyond absolutely peaceful civil disobedience and start experimenting,” Malm says. The peaceful marches shouldn’t stop, he argues. Rather, the climate movement needs to develop a radical flank—one that will also apply pressure on policymakers and politicians to work more closely with moderate activists.

In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, he compared this dynamic to the US Civil Rights Movement. In his telling, it was the threat of Malcolm X’s growing popularity that had spurred successive presidents, first John F. Kennedy then Lyndon Johnson, to work with Martin Luther King Jr.

This kind of flank, he wrote, was about harming property and not people—something he considers a red line, morally and strategically. “The one point where it becomes complicated,” he says, “is when you have cops protecting the things you want to destroy.” Police, in other words, may be an exception to the rule.

Lazare isn’t fully aligned with Malm, who has advocated an “ecological Leninism” of top-down state intervention in the economy. “We don’t agree at all politically,” she says. But his book had a profound impact on her—in an Instagram post from 2021, she poses for the camera with the words “Let’s Blow Up Pipelines” across her shoulders. Malm, for his part, has been to Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s protests and expresses an ideological affinity. “Sabotage is a French term,” he says. “I think Les Soulèvements de la Terre are the cutting edge of the climate movement in Europe right now.”

Sabotage might be a French term, but it is a tactic that is spreading across Europe. Around the same time Lazare was digging up pipes, in early 2022, the 30-year-old psychologist Lars Werner was trekking through the German countryside, a portable ladder stashed in his bag. It was the culmination of months of poring over maps, looking for places where oil pipelines were likely to jut out of the ground in his home country.

Werner was part of Letzte Generation (Last Generation), a climate-activist group best known for its road blockades, where members sit and refuse to let traffic pass until they are arrested. A veteran of those protests, Werner and his colleagues were “ready to go to prison,” he says, to grab the public’s attention. Now, he wanted to apply that idea to sabotage. The plan wasn’t to damage the pipeline permanently; he just wanted to break into a control station and stop the flow of oil.

A photo from that day, posted on Instagram, shows Werner grasping a black emergency valve and looking solemnly into the camera through small round glasses. That spring, he says, the group broke into a total of 35 pipeline control stations around the country. (Response to the pipeline protests was tepid, Werner says. Media coverage was sparse—not helped by the fact that the company that owned the pipelines, refinery PCK Raffinerie, refused to say whether the oil supply had been disrupted.)

“People are desperate,” says British doctor and activist Patrick Hart. “The more desperate people get, the more extreme tactics they will use.”

Not long after Werner’s first pipeline protest, a British doctor named Patrick Hart joined a new UK group called Just Stop Oil, which called for “bold action” until the government pledged to stop licensing new fossil fuel projects. Before sunrise one day in August 2022, Hart arrived at a gas station on the outskirts of London and started smashing the price screens on each pump using a hammer and chisel. Then he sat down and waited for the police to arrive.

Hart chose the fuel pump’s screens, he says, because they were the only part of the gas station he believed he could damage without risking a spill or harming another living being. In addition to gas stations, Just Stop Oil members have attacked famous paintings, stormed sports venues, and sprayed powdered paint on Stonehenge to send the public a message: You might want to forget that climate change is happening, but its most dramatic consequences are yet to come.

As he talks, Hart returns to variations of the same refrain: The world is on course for catastrophe, and if we continue to rely on fossil fuels, billions of people will die. “I don’t know how many times I need to say this, but like, we are so fucked.” Getting more opportunities to convey this message is, to him, the whole point. His actions generate a lot of press interest, which in turn gets him a lot of interviews—like this one. “Every time I get an interview, I say humanity is headed for annihilation,” he says. “If we don’t change now, then we have absolutely no hope.”

When I meet Hart in London, he’s wearing a smart blue suit. He’s on his way to court for releasing plumes of orange powder onto the pitch at a rugby game at Twickenham Stadium. At the time, this is just one of four cases he’s fighting—it’s unclear whether any will end in jail time, but if they do, he says he’s prepared. “People are desperate,” he says. “The more desperate people get, the more extreme tactics they will use.”

This cast of climate saboteurs live in different countries and speak different languages, but they have so many similarities. They want to show their faces, to explain that what they’re doing is a rational response to the current crisis. We’re not the violent ones, they say. Real violence is committed by companies that are wrecking our planet for profit. Sabotage must target property, never people. The environment must not be permanently harmed.

Of course, the bombs placed in the French power station in the 1970s didn’t stop the country from growing into Europe’s biggest generator of nuclear power. Whaling continues in Iceland. The Colorado ski resort burned by the Earth Liberation Front was rebuilt. Oil still flows through the German pipelines shut off by Werner, and gas through the English pumps smashed by Hart.

But Lazare claims her actions are causing real disruption. By last spring, she had taken part in three acts of sabotage against the mega-basins: in Cram-Chaban, in Épannes, and in Sainte-Soline. Les Soulèvements de la Terre is doing more than just attracting media attention, she argues. The group has inspired copycat attacks that have vandalized mega-basins throughout western France. She claims this has pushed up the cost of building mega-basins; construction companies now have to pay for security guards and motion detectors to guard against people like her. And it’s not just the owners of the mega-basin that are keeping an eye on Les Soulèvements de la Terre.

““Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” Lazare tells me.

In March 2023, Lazare helped organize a second protest at the mega-basin under construction near Sainte-Soline in western France. At least 6,000 protesters were met by some 3,000 French gendarmes in full riot gear, creating a barrier between the crowd and the half-built reservoir. Some demonstrators turned back; others attempted to push through the cordon, trying to reach and sabotage the site.

The ensuing violence shocked France. Police fired 5,000 tear gas canisters in just under two hours. Soon protesters were covered in blood; according to Les Soulèvements de la Terre, more than 200 people were injured. Two people were left in a coma. Organizers claim someone lost an eye. Police say 47 officers were hurt and four vehicles burned. “A lot of us felt completely traumatized about what happened,” says Lazare, who says she stayed behind the front line helping to look after the injured. A friend of a friend had been hit in the leg by a tear gas stun grenade. The open wound was streaming with blood. It took the ambulance hours to arrive; Lazare felt totally overwhelmed.

Andreas Malm was in the crowd that day too—watching a real-world exploration of the limits of violence cited in his book as demonstrators clashed with police. “I think this was the right thing to do,” he says of the activists’ decision to try to push through police lines. “It would have been a surrender to the armed forces of the state to just say, ‘OK, you are protecting this piece of property with overwhelming military force, so we’re just giving up and going home.’”

The day became known as the Battle of Sainte-Soline. Media coverage brought Les Soulèvements de la Terre a new level of notoriety. And surveys showed that the public blamed both the protesters and the police for the violence. (Lazare says a small minority of protesters threw Molotov cocktails.)

Then, in June 2023, the French government used the violent event as justification to ban Les Soulèvements de la Terre. Two months later, a court intervened, giving the group permission to continue operating until its case could be properly reviewed.

In August 2023, exactly one week after the court intervention, I cycle for two hours through the sweltering countryside of western France to meet Lazare. Activists are gathering in the village of Lezay, a few miles from Sainte-Soline, for a 10-day bicycle convoy to Paris, partly to protest the mega-basins and partly to express their support for Les Soulèvements de la Terre after its brief ban. This corner of rural France is bracing for a new heat wave; the geological research office is warning of another summer of record-breaking drought. Villagers stare as I pass, perhaps assuming I’m one of the people the government calls ecoterrorists.

By the time I arrive in Lezay my clothes are damp with sweat, my head foggy. I find hundreds of Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s supporters in a field on the outskirts of town in a victorious, yet cautious, mood. People carry flags that read: “We are all Les Soulèvements de la Terre.” The police are there but keeping their distance. A helicopter circles above.

Lazare emerges from the crowd, clutching a half-eaten sandwich and wearing bright silver shoes. When we finally find a patch of field that is not carpeted in sheep droppings, she kneels in the grass and in her soft, methodical way explains why it’s time for the climate movement to take more radical action.

Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass.

Part of Lazare’s job is to soften Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s image. For years she appeared in French magazines as the new face of radical eco-activism, but she became Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s official spokesperson only when the group faced the prospect of being shut down. Now Lazare is among a small band of people who deliver speeches at protests or explain their motives to the press.

“The government tries to say Les Soulèvements de la Terre is one of these dangerous ultraleft groups,” she says, twisting blades of grass between her fingers as she talks. They want the public to picture violent men, she explains. Lazare knows she does not conform to that image. And neither do her supporters, lying in the grass with their bikes, behind us. There are children, gray-haired hippies, a contingent of tractors, dogs, and even a donkey. A big white horse pulls a cart in circles, a speaker inside vibrating with music.

Later that day, I join around 700 Les Soulèvements de la Terre supporters cycling along quiet country roads, weaving our way past sunflower fields, wind turbines, and rivers that have run dry. Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass. Owners of small farms open their gates, welcoming us in to refill our water bottles and use the facilities. There is a DJ on wheels who blasts The Prodigy as we roll toward the next town. Three months later, in November 2023, that same top court in France overturns the government’s decision to ban the group, ruling it disproportionate.

That is a brief respite in the legal onslaught facing the movement, as European authorities formulate their response to the wave of sabotage sweeping the continent. In November, Lazare and a fellow Les Soulèvements de la Terre spokesperson are due in court for refusing to attend a parliamentary inquiry into the 2023 protests, including the Battle of Saint-Soline. They face two years in jail. The same month, Patrick Hart comes before a tribunal to decide whether he should lose his medical license as a result of his activism.

Last year in Germany, Letzte Generation’s members were subjected to police raids, and in May 2024, the public prosecutor’s office in the German town of Neuruppin charged five of the group’s members with forming a criminal organization, citing in part the 2022 pipeline protests. Werner hasn’t been charged, surprisingly, but he hopes a public trial of his fellow activists will spark a countrywide reckoning over Germany’s use of fossil fuels and finally give his sabotage of pipelines the impact he wanted all along.

As their members are dragged through the courts, it seems more important than ever for these groups to have public support. That’s why the people lining the small country roads are so important to Lazare. She needs their blessing. “Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” she tells me. Sabotage needs to inspire copycats, which means it needs to shake off its reputation as a sinister, criminal act.

After the first long day of cycling, we pull into a field. Activists have set up a campsite with a bar, a pay-what-you-can canteen, a stage for climate lectures, and live music. There is the accordion again, that festival atmosphere. “I think it’s important for activists to go sometimes by night, masked, and commit sabotage,” says Lazare. “But in Les Soulèvements de la Terre, we want to do this in the middle of the day, not anonymously, but collectively, with joy and music.” Joyfulness, she says, is key to the whole idea.

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The atmosphere is more festival than crime scene. There’s an accordionist, and two men in beanie hats are playing the drums. It’s a clear spring day in the farmlands of western France. But the people gathered in this field are technically trespassing, and there are signs they expect trouble. Someone has a gas mask slung around their neck. There’s a contingent clad in balaclavas. Others disguise their features with dark goggles or masks, and one group holds up a wide fabric canopy to obscure the view of police drones. At the center of the maelstrom stands Léna Lazare, holding a pickaxe.

The then-24-year-old’s long brown hair is untied; her face uncovered. That’s important, she says. It adds a sense of legitimacy to what she’s about to do. She drives the pickaxe into the ground as the crowd around her looks on. Again and again she strikes at the hard, dry earth. When she can’t dig any more, another person emerges from the huddle to take over. Several meters down, they find what they’ve been looking for: pipes. Beneath the field is a network designed to carry water to a new “mega-basin”—a giant reservoir being built near the village of Épannes. The group is here to rip one of those pipes out of the ground.

The soft-spoken former physics student is a spokesperson for sabotage: “We act when infrastructure has a serious impact on environments and on living beings.”

In other parts of the world, environmentalists target oil giants, airports, and banks to throw sand in the gears of companies they believe are actively warming the globe. For activists in France, mega-basins have become a symbol of how the government is adapting to climate change in precisely the wrong way. In response to intensifying droughts, French authorities have carved giant water storage systems into the countryside for large farms to draw down in dry months. Critics say these mega-basins—which can hold up to about 190 million gallons, the equivalent of nearly 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools—are effectively hoarding water, reserving it for private landowners, leaving rivers parched and local groundwater systems depleted.

That’s why these projects are targets for sabotage, according to Lazare. She talks about “disarming” the reservoirs, as if they, not she and her fellow protesters, were the source of violence. She’s watching from the crowd on this clear day in March 2022 as a man in jeans and a white T-shirt strains to lever a piece of pipe out of the ground with rope. Someone produces an angle grinder. When a section is cut free, the crowd breaks into applause before a man in blue overalls brandishes the severed pipe above his head like a trophy. “At that moment,” Lazare recalls later, “the water gushed out and returned to the Earth.”

Lazare is one of the 200 founding members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre, or Earth Uprisings, a French organization that is the most extreme of a new wave of radical European climate groups formed in the past five years. In France, this soft-spoken former physics student has become a spokesperson for sabotage. “We act when infrastructure has a serious impact on environments and on living beings,” she says.

Now 26, Lazare makes more sense as a scientist than as an activist—mostly quiet and serious and economical with her words. She has a mane of unkempt hair and a soft, flat voice that sometimes gives way to a high-pitched giggle and flashes of steely defiance. “We refuse to be labeled as criminals,” she says. After French interior minister Gérald Darmanin compared some members of Les Soulèvements de la Terre to ecoterrorists and the government outlawed the organization in June 2023, it was Lazare who went on TV to defend the group’s activities.

In the past few years, activists have smashed bank windows, attacked gas stations, broken into oil-pipeline control stations, deflated hundreds of SUV tires, and, just this summer, doused Stonehenge with temporary orange paint. They do this for different aims—to attract media coverage, to argue their case in front of a jury, or to make business untenable for companies they see as responsible for loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, driving calamitous weather events, and courting mass extinction.

If Greta Thunberg was emblematic of an earlier stage of the global climate movement, Léna Lazare signals what comes next. Today’s activists are wrestling with deep disappointment that 2019’s mass climate demonstrations didn’t portend big changes, and a certainty that they are running out of time to prevent climate catastrophe. A combination of urgency and despair is pushing them to actions previously seized by only the most radical fringe of the environmental movement.

Sabotage has been a strand of the modern environmental movement for half a century. In 1975, two homemade bombs exploded in a yet-to-be opened French nuclear power station, delaying its construction by several months. In 1986, activists sank two roughly 430-ton Icelandic whaling ships and used sledge hammers and acid to destroy processing equipment in the country’s only whale oil plant.

In 1998, the year Lazare was born, a group associated with the Earth Liberation Front caused more than $12 million in damage when it torched a mile-long strip of a Colorado ski resort that had been planning to expand into an area considered a potential habitat for a threatened lynx.

Growing up, Lazare’s family—her father was the director of an art house movie theater, and her mother worked in film communications—had friends in Japan, and she felt a strong connection with the country. In 2011, when she was 12, a tsunami triggered a major disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Lazare spent days afterward obsessively reading about leaking radiation and the 15,000 people forced to evacuate their homes. She also read reports claiming those in charge of the plant had cut corners with safety measures in part to save money. And that introduced her to a tension—between what is best for business and what is best for the local environment—that she now finds ubiquitous. “Everything was done to prioritize economic interests before the well-being of the population,” she says.

Seven years after Fukushima, Lazare moved to Paris to study physics at the prestigious Sorbonne University. There she met, and began protesting alongside, fellow student activists. Then, one day in the spring of 2018, she watched police fire tear gas at environmentalists squatting on an abandoned airport in western France, and she began to feel that protests alone were not enough.

“Sabotage is a French term,” says the Swedish activist Andreas Malm. “I think Les Soulèvements de la Terre are the cutting edge of the climate movement in Europe right now.”

That year, Thunberg started the peaceful school strike that made her famous, and Lazare launched her own group. Paris Environmental Disobedience, or Désobéissance Ecolo Paris, was about figuring out ways to be strategically disruptive. The group tried out a few small, risk-averse actions like daubing banks in a type of easy-to-remove black paint, says Lazare, but they ended up talking about breaking the law a lot more than actually breaking it.

At around the same time, the mainstream climate movement was starting to gain momentum with peaceful tactics. Millions of young people began marching in capital cities across the world, making it clear they did not want to inherit a ruined planet. When the protests arrived in Paris in early 2019, Lazare joined them. She became a national coordinator for Youth for Climate, the French equivalent of Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, appearing on TV and in newspapers talking about the climate crisis and her decision to stop traveling by plane.

All the while, she was restless. “It wasn’t moving fast enough,” she remembers. By the end of that year, Lazare had dropped out of university. “We must reinvent ourselves, lead people toward civil disobedience, mount more radical actions,” she told the French magazine Politis. She was trying to get her comrades to take the leap toward sabotage. “It was about daring to damage material stuff,” she explains. Until then, she says, that was a line the mainstream climate movement had not been ready to cross.

Then the pandemic distracted the world from the climate. France went into lockdown. Lazare was in Japan, taking a break from protesting, and couldn’t get home for six months. When she finally made it back she got her hands on a book about environmental protests that had just been released, called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

A few years earlier, its author, the Swedish academic and activist Andreas Malm, had been working on a book about ancient Egypt when his country experienced its worst wildfires in modern history. Upwards of 60 fires were burning, from the Arctic north to the southern island of Gotland. And it wasn’t just Sweden: Parts of Greece, California, and the UK were all burning too.

Malm could no longer justify “geeking out on this moldy old historical stuff while the world was literally on fire,” so he forgot the book on ancient Egypt and instead wrote a treatise arguing that sabotage is necessary for the climate movement to make real progress. “The situation is so dire, we need to go beyond absolutely peaceful civil disobedience and start experimenting,” Malm says. The peaceful marches shouldn’t stop, he argues. Rather, the climate movement needs to develop a radical flank—one that will also apply pressure on policymakers and politicians to work more closely with moderate activists.

In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, he compared this dynamic to the US Civil Rights Movement. In his telling, it was the threat of Malcolm X’s growing popularity that had spurred successive presidents, first John F. Kennedy then Lyndon Johnson, to work with Martin Luther King Jr.

This kind of flank, he wrote, was about harming property and not people—something he considers a red line, morally and strategically. “The one point where it becomes complicated,” he says, “is when you have cops protecting the things you want to destroy.” Police, in other words, may be an exception to the rule.

Lazare isn’t fully aligned with Malm, who has advocated an “ecological Leninism” of top-down state intervention in the economy. “We don’t agree at all politically,” she says. But his book had a profound impact on her—in an Instagram post from 2021, she poses for the camera with the words “Let’s Blow Up Pipelines” across her shoulders. Malm, for his part, has been to Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s protests and expresses an ideological affinity. “Sabotage is a French term,” he says. “I think Les Soulèvements de la Terre are the cutting edge of the climate movement in Europe right now.”

Sabotage might be a French term, but it is a tactic that is spreading across Europe. Around the same time Lazare was digging up pipes, in early 2022, the 30-year-old psychologist Lars Werner was trekking through the German countryside, a portable ladder stashed in his bag. It was the culmination of months of poring over maps, looking for places where oil pipelines were likely to jut out of the ground in his home country.

Werner was part of Letzte Generation (Last Generation), a climate-activist group best known for its road blockades, where members sit and refuse to let traffic pass until they are arrested. A veteran of those protests, Werner and his colleagues were “ready to go to prison,” he says, to grab the public’s attention. Now, he wanted to apply that idea to sabotage. The plan wasn’t to damage the pipeline permanently; he just wanted to break into a control station and stop the flow of oil.

A photo from that day, posted on Instagram, shows Werner grasping a black emergency valve and looking solemnly into the camera through small round glasses. That spring, he says, the group broke into a total of 35 pipeline control stations around the country. (Response to the pipeline protests was tepid, Werner says. Media coverage was sparse—not helped by the fact that the company that owned the pipelines, refinery PCK Raffinerie, refused to say whether the oil supply had been disrupted.)

“People are desperate,” says British doctor and activist Patrick Hart. “The more desperate people get, the more extreme tactics they will use.”

Not long after Werner’s first pipeline protest, a British doctor named Patrick Hart joined a new UK group called Just Stop Oil, which called for “bold action” until the government pledged to stop licensing new fossil fuel projects. Before sunrise one day in August 2022, Hart arrived at a gas station on the outskirts of London and started smashing the price screens on each pump using a hammer and chisel. Then he sat down and waited for the police to arrive.

Hart chose the fuel pump’s screens, he says, because they were the only part of the gas station he believed he could damage without risking a spill or harming another living being. In addition to gas stations, Just Stop Oil members have attacked famous paintings, stormed sports venues, and sprayed powdered paint on Stonehenge to send the public a message: You might want to forget that climate change is happening, but its most dramatic consequences are yet to come.

As he talks, Hart returns to variations of the same refrain: The world is on course for catastrophe, and if we continue to rely on fossil fuels, billions of people will die. “I don’t know how many times I need to say this, but like, we are so fucked.” Getting more opportunities to convey this message is, to him, the whole point. His actions generate a lot of press interest, which in turn gets him a lot of interviews—like this one. “Every time I get an interview, I say humanity is headed for annihilation,” he says. “If we don’t change now, then we have absolutely no hope.”

When I meet Hart in London, he’s wearing a smart blue suit. He’s on his way to court for releasing plumes of orange powder onto the pitch at a rugby game at Twickenham Stadium. At the time, this is just one of four cases he’s fighting—it’s unclear whether any will end in jail time, but if they do, he says he’s prepared. “People are desperate,” he says. “The more desperate people get, the more extreme tactics they will use.”

This cast of climate saboteurs live in different countries and speak different languages, but they have so many similarities. They want to show their faces, to explain that what they’re doing is a rational response to the current crisis. We’re not the violent ones, they say. Real violence is committed by companies that are wrecking our planet for profit. Sabotage must target property, never people. The environment must not be permanently harmed.

Of course, the bombs placed in the French power station in the 1970s didn’t stop the country from growing into Europe’s biggest generator of nuclear power. Whaling continues in Iceland. The Colorado ski resort burned by the Earth Liberation Front was rebuilt. Oil still flows through the German pipelines shut off by Werner, and gas through the English pumps smashed by Hart.

But Lazare claims her actions are causing real disruption. By last spring, she had taken part in three acts of sabotage against the mega-basins: in Cram-Chaban, in Épannes, and in Sainte-Soline. Les Soulèvements de la Terre is doing more than just attracting media attention, she argues. The group has inspired copycat attacks that have vandalized mega-basins throughout western France. She claims this has pushed up the cost of building mega-basins; construction companies now have to pay for security guards and motion detectors to guard against people like her. And it’s not just the owners of the mega-basin that are keeping an eye on Les Soulèvements de la Terre.

““Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” Lazare tells me.

In March 2023, Lazare helped organize a second protest at the mega-basin under construction near Sainte-Soline in western France. At least 6,000 protesters were met by some 3,000 French gendarmes in full riot gear, creating a barrier between the crowd and the half-built reservoir. Some demonstrators turned back; others attempted to push through the cordon, trying to reach and sabotage the site.

The ensuing violence shocked France. Police fired 5,000 tear gas canisters in just under two hours. Soon protesters were covered in blood; according to Les Soulèvements de la Terre, more than 200 people were injured. Two people were left in a coma. Organizers claim someone lost an eye. Police say 47 officers were hurt and four vehicles burned. “A lot of us felt completely traumatized about what happened,” says Lazare, who says she stayed behind the front line helping to look after the injured. A friend of a friend had been hit in the leg by a tear gas stun grenade. The open wound was streaming with blood. It took the ambulance hours to arrive; Lazare felt totally overwhelmed.

Andreas Malm was in the crowd that day too—watching a real-world exploration of the limits of violence cited in his book as demonstrators clashed with police. “I think this was the right thing to do,” he says of the activists’ decision to try to push through police lines. “It would have been a surrender to the armed forces of the state to just say, ‘OK, you are protecting this piece of property with overwhelming military force, so we’re just giving up and going home.’”

The day became known as the Battle of Sainte-Soline. Media coverage brought Les Soulèvements de la Terre a new level of notoriety. And surveys showed that the public blamed both the protesters and the police for the violence. (Lazare says a small minority of protesters threw Molotov cocktails.)

Then, in June 2023, the French government used the violent event as justification to ban Les Soulèvements de la Terre. Two months later, a court intervened, giving the group permission to continue operating until its case could be properly reviewed.

In August 2023, exactly one week after the court intervention, I cycle for two hours through the sweltering countryside of western France to meet Lazare. Activists are gathering in the village of Lezay, a few miles from Sainte-Soline, for a 10-day bicycle convoy to Paris, partly to protest the mega-basins and partly to express their support for Les Soulèvements de la Terre after its brief ban. This corner of rural France is bracing for a new heat wave; the geological research office is warning of another summer of record-breaking drought. Villagers stare as I pass, perhaps assuming I’m one of the people the government calls ecoterrorists.

By the time I arrive in Lezay my clothes are damp with sweat, my head foggy. I find hundreds of Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s supporters in a field on the outskirts of town in a victorious, yet cautious, mood. People carry flags that read: “We are all Les Soulèvements de la Terre.” The police are there but keeping their distance. A helicopter circles above.

Lazare emerges from the crowd, clutching a half-eaten sandwich and wearing bright silver shoes. When we finally find a patch of field that is not carpeted in sheep droppings, she kneels in the grass and in her soft, methodical way explains why it’s time for the climate movement to take more radical action.

Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass.

Part of Lazare’s job is to soften Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s image. For years she appeared in French magazines as the new face of radical eco-activism, but she became Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s official spokesperson only when the group faced the prospect of being shut down. Now Lazare is among a small band of people who deliver speeches at protests or explain their motives to the press.

“The government tries to say Les Soulèvements de la Terre is one of these dangerous ultraleft groups,” she says, twisting blades of grass between her fingers as she talks. They want the public to picture violent men, she explains. Lazare knows she does not conform to that image. And neither do her supporters, lying in the grass with their bikes, behind us. There are children, gray-haired hippies, a contingent of tractors, dogs, and even a donkey. A big white horse pulls a cart in circles, a speaker inside vibrating with music.

Later that day, I join around 700 Les Soulèvements de la Terre supporters cycling along quiet country roads, weaving our way past sunflower fields, wind turbines, and rivers that have run dry. Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass. Owners of small farms open their gates, welcoming us in to refill our water bottles and use the facilities. There is a DJ on wheels who blasts The Prodigy as we roll toward the next town. Three months later, in November 2023, that same top court in France overturns the government’s decision to ban the group, ruling it disproportionate.

That is a brief respite in the legal onslaught facing the movement, as European authorities formulate their response to the wave of sabotage sweeping the continent. In November, Lazare and a fellow Les Soulèvements de la Terre spokesperson are due in court for refusing to attend a parliamentary inquiry into the 2023 protests, including the Battle of Saint-Soline. They face two years in jail. The same month, Patrick Hart comes before a tribunal to decide whether he should lose his medical license as a result of his activism.

Last year in Germany, Letzte Generation’s members were subjected to police raids, and in May 2024, the public prosecutor’s office in the German town of Neuruppin charged five of the group’s members with forming a criminal organization, citing in part the 2022 pipeline protests. Werner hasn’t been charged, surprisingly, but he hopes a public trial of his fellow activists will spark a countrywide reckoning over Germany’s use of fossil fuels and finally give his sabotage of pipelines the impact he wanted all along.

As their members are dragged through the courts, it seems more important than ever for these groups to have public support. That’s why the people lining the small country roads are so important to Lazare. She needs their blessing. “Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” she tells me. Sabotage needs to inspire copycats, which means it needs to shake off its reputation as a sinister, criminal act.

After the first long day of cycling, we pull into a field. Activists have set up a campsite with a bar, a pay-what-you-can canteen, a stage for climate lectures, and live music. There is the accordion again, that festival atmosphere. “I think it’s important for activists to go sometimes by night, masked, and commit sabotage,” says Lazare. “But in Les Soulèvements de la Terre, we want to do this in the middle of the day, not anonymously, but collectively, with joy and music.” Joyfulness, she says, is key to the whole idea.