Joe Manchin Protester Praised After Cursing at Senator in Wild Viral Video

A clip of a protestors confronting Senator Joe Manchin, the moderate West Virginia Democrat, went viral on social media Friday.

Manchin, the senior senator for West Virginia who has served since 2010, has long been noted as one of the most moderate Democratic members of the Senate. Throughout the administration of President Joe Biden, he rose to national prominence as one of the few Democrats refusing to support some of the president's more ambitious and progressive policy goals—causing them to stall out in the narrowly divided Senate.

Manchin has also come under considerable fire over the years for his opposition to some green energy policies and efforts to combat climate change. This has been pinned by many Manchin critics on his family's private coal business, and his state's heavy economic reliance on coal mining. The family company is currently run by his son as a blind trust.

On Friday, the activist group Climate Defiance shared a clip to X, formerly Twitter, of their members confronting Manchin during a meeting at the Harvard Kennedy School with vulgar language and weighty accusations. The group's bio describes it as a "youth-led group using direct action to resist fossil fuels."

"Joe Manchin, you sold our futures and got rich doing it, you sick f***," one of the group's members, a young man, can be heard saying in the clip. "How dare you, you have sold our futures."

In response to the vulgar insult, Manchin stands up and goes to confront the individual but is held back by another man, who forcibly pushes the young man out of the room and onto the ground. The senator then asks if they can go somewhere, sit down, and talk about things, to which a member of the group insists they will not sit and lambasts him for "receiving more money from fossil fuels than any other senator."

The video had garnered more than 3.1 million views on X as of the time of publication. It was trending on X on Saturday morning, with a number of users sharing and commenting on the confrontation.

Newsweek reached out to Manchin's office via email on Saturday morning for comment. Any responses received will be added to this piece in a later update.

Manchin has previously said that his efforts in the Senate are directed at protecting a key West Virginia industry. He's also pointed to the blind trust, saying he has no control over the family business.

The clip of the confrontation promptly went viral, with numerous users on X praising the group's efforts.

"Manchin is under fire here and I love it!" user Kamila Kennedy wrote.

"SEN. JOE MANCHIN IS THE POISON IN DEMOCRACY: He called himself a Dem, when nothing could be further from the truth," user Samia Ali Salama wrote. "He'd love to beat-up a protester. Manchin caused much harm to those in WVa & America."

"Joe Manchin has betrayed West Virginians for decades, enriching himself by selling their future to the fossil fuels industry," user Piyush Mittal wrote. "He doesn't like it when they confront him with this fact."

Some others on the platform, meanwhile, were critical of the protestors' actions.

"Not a Manchin fan by any means, but these kinds of stunts are immature and move no one toward the cause they supposedly are fighting for," Democratic strategist Chris D. Jackson wrote.

"Here's the key here to showing that they're being performative and don't actually care about climate issues: They show in the video that Joe Manchin - a sitting US Senator & key stakeholder in anything that becomes law in the US - offered to talk to them and they rejected it," user Blake Allen wrote.