A North Dakota jury of nine righted a 10-year-old wrong on Wednesday, when it awarded $667 million in damages to Energy Transfer Partners, the operator of the Dakota Access Pipeline for costly demonstrations staged by left-wing activists in 2016-2017. The damages are split among several arms of Greenpeace ($404 million from Greenpeace USA and $131 million each from Greenpeace Fund Inc. and Greenpeace International), a climate activism group that provided funding, publicity, and logistical support to the activists.

In a long-running lawsuit, Energy Transfer had sued Greenpeace for $340 million in damages, alleging that Greenpeace’s actions delayed the pipeline’s construction, increased costs, and tarnished the company’s reputation.

From April 2016 to February 2017, left-wing activists, media, and politicians flocked to rural North Dakota, where they opposed the construction of an underground oil pipeline beneath Lake Oahe on the Missouri River, upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe reservation. The pipeline runs from the Bakken oil fields in northwest North Dakota, through South Dakota and Iowa, to a terminus in southern Illinois.

Demonstrators erected a protest encampment at the site, holding frequent rallies to denounce the project. They also engaged in obstructive and destructive activities, such as chaining themselves to excavators and damaging construction materials, forcing Energy Transfer to invest in heavy security precautions. The demonstrators eventually escalated to confrontations with law enforcement, and well over 100 demonstrators were arrested.

Behind these activities, Greenpeace was bankrolling the whole endeavor, paying outside protestors, training them in tactics, providing supplies, and making false statements about the pipeline, the companyalleged in its lawsuit.

In a now-familiar pattern, this left-wing demonstration confused its purpose(s) and obscured its source(s). Native American activists opposed the pipeline out of concern that a leak would damage their burial grounds, a claim that received much sympathetic coverage from the mainstream press. But much of the protest’s energy came from young supporters of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, who likely were more passionate about the alleged evils of oil companies.

This misdirection is evident on the demonstration’s official Wikipedia page (a site which has become little more than an archive of politically correct narratives), which describes the controversy as “a series of grassroots Native American protests.” This description accords little with the jury’s conclusion, that an international climate group bankrolled the whole enchilada.

For its part, Greenpeace argued that it played only a minor role in the demonstrations, and they plan to appeal the jury’s verdict on that basis. Whether they succeed in this appeal or not, this highlights the problem with holding any one group responsible for the left-wing demonstration system, which actively multiplies groups, making it difficult to trace the source of the organization and funding.

Instead, Greenpeace argued that the lawsuit was a “strategic lawsuit against public participation” (or SLAPP), thus suppressing their right to free expression. But, aside from the fact that Greenpeace fundraised off the lawsuit, there’s one giant problem with that theory. SLAPP lawsuits “are filed for the sole purpose of bullying the ‘defendant’ out of exercising fundamental rights,” wrote law professor Lisa Litwiller in the Journal of Court Innovation, a project of the left-wing Center for Justice Innovation. “The SLAPP plaintiff, having no intention of winning the lawsuit, simply wants to silence the SLAPP defendant.”

Accusing a company of filing a SLAPP lawsuit becomes a lot less credible when, you know, they win the jury trial.

This fact did not deter left-wing activists from complaining that the result ignored free speech rights. After the verdict, one activist lawyer called it “the worst First Amendment case decision I have ever seen” and feared that an appeal to the Supreme Court could overturn decades of free speech jurisprudence.

Meanwhile, Energy Transfer offered a different interpretation. “This win is really for the people of Mandan [N.D., where the trial took place] and throughout North Dakota who had to live through the daily harassment and disruptions caused by the protesters who were funded and trained by Greenpeace,” the company said in a statement. “It is also a win for all law-abiding Americans who understand the difference between the right to free speech and breaking the law.”

This verdict is significant because of the formative role the pipeline demonstrations played in the development of leftist activism culture. Before there were BLM riots, before Jane’s Revenge, before there were pro-Hamas protests, before “Stop Cop City,” there was the Dakota Access Pipeline. The reason why the Left can seemingly summon an army of activists to demonstrate the cause of the hour is, I believe, largely due to this one protest.

The movement born in Occupy Wall Street (circa 2011) matured and developed in this North Dakota protest. Occupy Wall Street formed contacts; the Dakota Access Pipeline protests formed organizations, field-tested tactics, and convinced a generation of dissatisfied youngsters that the best way to achieve real-world change was not through political persuasion but through destroying the property of others.

The greatest outrage of all is that the Dakota Access Pipeline demonstrations didn’t have to drag on for nearly a year. In fact, the government was within its rights to disperse the assembly as soon as it crossed the line into illegal behavior, such as trespassing, disorderly conduct, and destruction of property.

But, in an eerie foreshadowing of President Biden’s greater inaction, the Obama administration failed to act decisively. They sympathized with the cause, and they needed the demonstrators’ votes. So, they sheltered behind the excuse that people have a right to speak freely and be heard, as the obstructionists racked up millions of dollars in costs for a private company. Within weeks of President Trump’s inauguration, federal law enforcement cooperated with state and local authorities to disperse the protests.

Nearly a decade later, the bill has finally come due. The costs which this “protest” inflicted upon a private company have now been assessed as damages against one of the largest organizations that made this demonstration possible. Greenpeace complained that the damages initially sought by Energy Transfer — $340 million — would effectively end its U.S. operations, since it totals 10 times the group’s annual operating budget in the U.S.

Consequences are consequences. Alex Jones faced similar devastation when a court forced him to auction off his media business, Infowars, in a settlement with families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting (although the sale has not yet been approved). Perhaps if one activist group is forced to seriously reckon with the consequences of their actions, other groups will be more careful to keep their protests within the bounds of the law.

In any event, Greenpeace helped to facilitate a “protest” subculture based around destroying property and ruining businesses for virtually any reason — one still roiling the streets of America’s cities. Now, a jury has ruled they must pay.