Climate Activists Cry As Nevada Tribal Cops Destroy Blockade
A video has gone viral on social media, with users celebrating Nevada tribal police officers for driving through climate activists’ blockade that was causing a massive traffic backup on the road to the Burning Man festival.
On Sunday, rangers from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribal Police drove through the activists’ blockade near Nixon, Nevada — arresting several of the protesters as they screamed and cried.
According to the police report, law enforcement was called to the scene of the protest at the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe Reservation on State Route 447 at about 1 p.m. local time.
The protesters were seen holding signs with messages including “Ban Private Jets” and “Abolish Capitalism.” They stood in the road with those signs, blocking people from driving to the festival and causing traffic to build up.
In the viral video of the incident, a police truck can be seen crashing through the blockade as police jump out of the vehicle to arrest the climate activists — who appear stunned at the forceful response to their antics.
“We have no weapons at all!” wailed one female protester as she held her hands up. “We’re environmental protesters!”
The activism group “Climate Defiance” shared the video to X, formerly known as Twitter. While their caption showed that they expected support, their comments section was filled with support for the officers.
“Words fail. Words utterly fail. Today a police truck PLOWED INTO a peaceful climate blockade. These are the people ‘entrusted’ to keep us safe. These are the people we have granted a monopoly on the use of force. How is this ok?” Climate Defiance tweeted.
The viral video has received more than 3 million views and has garnered thousands of positive responses — as many people celebrate someone finally taking action in response to this type of activism from climate protesters. Videos of these types of protests have gone viral in recent years with fed-up drivers shouting at the activists, but police doing nothing to stop the blockades — prompting anger toward the activists online. In this case, people celebrated the police’s decision to destroy the blockade — especially because the activists’ actions had put people in harms way.
“You complain about the ‘monopoly of force’ for police yet you think it’s OK for your activists to unilaterally block people’s movement?” wrote BlazeTV host Lauren Chen.
“Dangerous heat warnings, families idling out of gas, they are lucky they didn’t have murder charges,” wrote another user.
Meanwhile, officials have announced that they are reviewing the actions of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribal Police officers involved in the incident. The five activists who were arrested have since been cited and released. None of them lived in the area where they were protesting. Two had traveled from New York, one from California, one from Washington and one from the country of Malta.
According to The Blaze, “The Burning Man festival is a bizarre annual event in which thousands of people meet for several days in the middle of the desert and eventually set fire to a massive figure of a man.”
