It Could Happen Here - Power Station Sabotage, with Molly Conger

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

Molly Conger joins Robert, Garrison, and James to discus the recent attacks on power substations and how they relate to growing awareness of accelerationist plots against critical infrastructure.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by

an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Ah, It Could Happen Here is a podcast. And it is kind of happening here. Because there was just an attack on several power substations in the city of North or not city in the state of North Carolina

that left something like 40,000 people without power for several days I believe at the moment at least one person died as a result of this there have been car crashes it's pretty fucked up and we are going to be talking about that. Obviously, as a result of this, number one, there were a lot of immediate suspicions that came out that this was tied towards a drag queen story yeah, we're going to talk about that and everything around that right now. We have on the episode for today, myself, Garrison Davis, James Stout,

and we are also bringing in friend of the pod, researcher, and woman about town, but not this town, a different town, because we live on opposite sides of the country, Molly Conger. Molly, I've been saying your last name wrong for years, even though we've been friends for quite a while now. I don't know why I never said anything. It's come up so many times. Yeah. So Garrison, you've kind of been taking point on putting together this one.

So I'm going to let you kind of take the reins, unless you want me to direct this more. But i do think kind of the place to start is are we watching a gigantic right-wing insurgency unfold uh or is this a more complex case and obviously the answer is the latter as it is anytime someone poses a question like that no is we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna pick this the simple more scary more inflammatory option and leave it at that um yeah do a tweet let's get the send tweet no so yes um the aftermath of the north carolina attack has kind of it's gotten a lot of people to learn about infrastructure attacks for the first time and get really scared about them and realize that this is a problem and then start bringing up past

incidents where this has happened and trying to draw this like overall pattern which isn't entirely incorrect but the way they're going about it is not very responsible nor really well informed yeah so one of the things we've seen is like the there have been a lot of attack like it does seem accurate to say that over the course of the last year or two there have been more attacks on power infrastructure um but that doesn't mean we have we have lots of data on this there has the past five years there has been a pretty strong increase in the number of attacks on power stations. And it's also true that this is a thing the right has been, the far right, like the Nazi right in particular, has been trying to get people to do for longer than anyone on this podcast has been alive. This goes back to the Turner Diaries, even pre that stuff.

This is in Siege. This goes back to the Turner Diaries, even pre that stuff. This is in siege. And this is, you know, there has been very recently this summer, a couple of pieces of fairly well put together Nazi propaganda that was advocating for people to carry out attacks like this. And the reason is that it's easy and it's high impact. It's very easy to fuck up a power substation. All you need is a gun.

And it's very easy to get away with it because most of them have effectively zero security yeah and it explained how to do it as well right sorry molly like it it was literally a guide to fucking up a substation yeah because there's specific we're not going to give you guys a guide to fucking up power substations on this podcast but it's not hard. That's next week. Yeah, that's next week in our three-parter. It's on the Patreon. You're going to be on the Patreon.

Yeah, that's the Patreon special episode, how to destroy power infrastructure for fun and profit. No, but I think, too, if you're trying to propagandize people to take action, you know, we've all seen plenty of manifestos from people who carried out mass shootings trying to propagandize people to take action in that effect. But we've also seen the chats when somebody fails, right? Like if somebody doesn't get what they call a high score, if somebody carries out a mass shooting that doesn't result in very many deaths, it's embarrassing for them.

But this is, for the perpetrator, relatively low stakes. If you you fail no one will know if you miss no one will know um if you hit the you know if you hit it and it just looks like vandalism and the power doesn't go out no one will know that you failed and you can try again later you don't die uh and that's that's the title of one of the one of the um pieces of propaganda that i sent you right the title of it is make it count which is um an abbreviated form of a quote from siege uh which is you know in it's a nazi insurgency manual from a couple of decades ago the general um gist of the quote is that you know the price of failure is death so whatever you choose to do make it count so this is a way to relatively low stakes for the perpetrator

way to have a very high impact with low risk of personal failure. And what I did find, and we'll get off, we'll move to the broader topic in a second, because I think focusing too much on the Nazis right now is going to frame things the wrong way. But one of the things I did find interesting about that piece of propaganda was the acknowledgement and the introduction that carrying out these mass shootings is not going to accomplish our broader goals in part because people have gotten inured to them whereas destroying power infrastructure if you can fuck up the grid they believe that's going to like and i think obviously this is a silly line of thought but they think it's going to like lead to the i mean this is always what they think it's going to lead

to like the race war that they want right that's That's that's the thinking there. So it is in that equation is like A to B to C. Like, yeah, then question mark, question mark race war. Yeah, they're Nazis. You know, they're Nazis. They're not right about things. But the the fact that all this propaganda is out there, the fact that they've been talking about this so long is part of why everyone is convinced that like there's this massive new insurgency that's just broken out and that that's what all of these attacks are, which doesn't mean that none of them are. It's also worth noting that the year before this happened in the same state in North Carolina, a group of Nazis were arrested by the feds for trying to attack power infrastructure. And they also had plans on the Pacific Northwest where there have been, in Washington and Portland, attacks on some power infrastructure. There also just so happens to be... A lot of Nazis here, yeah.

Both the Carolinas and the Pacific Northwest are home to a lot of people who self-describe as militant neo-Nazi accelerationists. And what I think we should do now before we get too much off this, and we can return to this topic, is talk about the fact that, and this is kind of the important context,

a lot of people who aren't Nazis fuck up electrical grids all the time. It's actually very easy and people seem to just enjoy it. It's American pastime. I think there's been a lot of missteps people have taken in talking about this. And kind of, you know, some people have gotten scared and have kind of, you know, not looked at this fully analytically in a way that is actually really helpful because there's been a lot of kind of retrospective misinformation going around on attacks that have happened in the past few months that have only

really gotten reported on or noticed in the wake of the North Carolina attack, which has kind of caused this narrative to come out that since the North Carolina attack, there's been like a bajillion of other attacks happening in quick succession, which actually isn't true. So that's, I first think I want to talk about the types of stuff that is, that people are generally getting wrong about this because it's a good, a good deal. People are misunderstanding some of what's going on here. So there was this, you know, pretty, uh uh story made by a new station in florida that came out a few days ago uh talking about how it's all caps substations targeted report shows

intrusions at duke energy power stations in tampa bay and elsewhere in florida so very scary obviously because duke energy is also the place in North Carolina that was attacked. Founded by the guy who invented the modern cigarette, by the way. I learned that from you. It is based, Garrison, yes. If you look at the actual story,

these intrusions that they're talking about happened last September. They did not happen a few days ago. And then also, similarly, for the first time, there was reporting on a whole bunch of substation attacks in the Pacific Northwest. That reporting was dropped after the North Carolina attacks, in part because a memo was posted by a few different news sites that they probably did open records requests in the wake of the North Carolina attack. They found this memo, on it. And now people have this, you

know, have learned, learned, learned about this other thing that happened in November. So, but people who don't, who really are only looking at headlines or only looking at tweets, um, or posts wherever, right. Uh, they look at these attacks and they look at, you know, the succession of them, uh, becoming public after the North Carolina thing. And they're kind of drawing this narrative that these things have happened one after another. And it's part of this brand new wave of things. And it is part of a wave of things in the broad sense, but it's not all happened within the past two weeks. The first thing is like when it's super easy for a disinformation and misinformation to spread very rampantly in the aftermath of these types of attacks and these types of incidents, you know, some of these probably are not attacks.

And it's really easy to kind of glom onto a narrative that's compelling and scary. And if you just dig a little bit deeper, you'll realize there's a whole bunch of context that you're missing. So that's always an important first step when these things are happening. Yeah, and it's part of the story here, and I think part of why it's important to understand that the surge in attacks on power infrastructure is a thing, but it's not necessarily tied to the fact

that Nazis are attacking the power infrastructure. Is that it's easy to do. It's easy to do casually. And this has been known for a while. About a decade ago, 2013, there was an attack in the Bay Area on, I think, was it two power substations? Yeah, I think so. The Metcalfe sniper.

Yeah, the Metcalfe sniper. We don't know how many people were involved. Suspected, it's suspected more than one. Yes, yes. Sniper. And this was a very, if this was a practice attack, a training attack, then it was a very effectively carried out one because we still don't know who did it. incidents have has been mythologized in a lot of extremist circles as like an example of here's a successful thing that is replicable and you can get away with it yeah this is this is one of the most highly referenced incidents of infrastructure attack on you know across you know whether you're

like a anti-civ luddite or whether you're a neo-nazi accelerationist this is this specific 2013 attack is highly referenced and we'll circle back to this towards the end but i guess i'm going to quote from a recent report by the george washington university on power substation attacks um they are they are extremely common they are they are becoming increasingly common since 2016. White supremacists are not the only ones who do them. They were also, from 2016 to 2019, a whole bunch of ISIS-inspired terrorism also hit some stations across the United States. They are not exclusively done by white supremacists.

And there's also, sometimes they're just shot at by random people with guns yeah and to be from a road sign let's be honest so the medcalf attack it's not impossible that it was just an unusually lucky group of yahoos who wanted to shoot some power infrastructure we have no idea i think the number of rounds fired directly into the system probably makes that unlikely. Almost every intelligence agency will disagree with you on that, Robert. Yeah, but you know what? They didn't catch the rich. They didn't catch

shit. But to Robert's point, I think there is some value in remembering that a drunk guy in the woods might love to fire a gun at something that's going to spark. And if you're going to shoot a gun, you might as well shoot it a lot no i i probably wouldn't shoot it 200 times no it was very it was it was very anyway i i there is we and we talked about this a bit in our planning there was one attack and molly you probably could recall the year better than i was

but it was a couple of years ago where the guy attacked a power substation because he and he talked about this at length in his trial he thought people were on their phones too much i sent this one to you the other day my i i loved i love to find a court record i love to spend all my all my pocket change on pacer and they've given me access to the law library. So I spent all day today looking for any case where not just charged or convicted, any case where USC 1366, 18 USC 1366 was brought up. So 1366 is the federal statute for damaging or conspiring to damage an energy facility. So energy facility means power lines, power substations, coal mines, nuclear facilities,

any place where power is made, right? So it's a pretty broad statute. And so I looked up a few dozen cases where that was on the table to sort of bring the temperature down and say, like, OK, aside from Nazis trying to cause a race war, what are some other things that lead to somebody getting charged with this? Other motivations, other scenarios. And that case was Jason Woodring. Jason Woodring in August 2013.

He tried to use a, this is a quote from some news coverage at the time, tried to lasso a train with a cable attached to a high voltage tower. Honestly, uncritical support. Just front of the pod. He is still in prison. Write to this man. Send him letters. We'll do a t-shirt fundraise.

Everyone was too distracted by their screens, by their phones, by their gaming. And he just wanted people to remember what's important. So he tried to lasso a train with a high voltage wire. Now, I probably don't need to add this. He was a big enthusiast of methamphetamine. He has some court ordered substance abuse treatment. And we wish him nothing but the best. I think he's going to be just fine um but i so i found some other cases where there was an intentional attack with

the you know with the stated intention of bringing down the grid but for like non-nazi reasons yeah i mean in the early 2000s um a bunch of elf activists were charged with 1366 for arsons to energy facilities um this is an odd one in 2019 a guy named stephen mccray uh was sentenced for attacking uh one substation by shooting out the cooling fins and as part of his plea agreement he admitted to three other attacks um he got caught because he told a friend of his that he'd been shooting shit up and his friend was concerned and went to the fbi and they had his friend record some of their conversations oh bad friend yeah yeah and so he he said things like um his stated motive was attacking corporate america so something would be done about global warming. He wasn't otherwise noted as an environmental activist,

but he was concerned about the corporations, which I don't know if that's sort of Alex Jones coded language about the globalists. That could have come from a couple of different places. Yeah. Lizard people, maybe. Right before his arrest, he told his friend that he was planning a brand daddy event that would make national news and shut down the whole West Coast. Okay.

Well, that's probably why he didn't say it. The friend went to the FBI. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes. Don't tell that to your friend. Yeah. Or anyone, if you're planning to do that.

Your friend is still snitching you. That sucks. But, like, don't tell that to your friend. Yeah, or anyone if you're planning to do that. Your friend is still snitching you. That sucks. But like, don't, don't tell that to your buddy. Although, according to the Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator, which is another tool I really enjoy, he was released in September. That's good. I hope he's doing better.

That's what he's striving. I'll say, because this, I think, helps to make the point that like, this is not all or mostly Nazis doing this kind of thing. A lot of people want to do this about the, you know, these sort of, I found a third case that sort of fits the same pattern.

A guy who shot out a transformer for reasons I can't quite discern based on the court filings. But again, in all three of these cases, the miles Maynard case in Alabama in 2008, Jason Woodry in 2013, Stephen McRae in 2019, they all had court ordered psyche vows. And in McRae's case, there were questions about his competency to stand trial. Miles Maynard died shortly after being released from prison.

These are people who were not well. Yeah. Not that being unwell or having a substance use problem makes you shoot at a substation, but these aren't explicitly ideological. These are people who just got an idea in their head and didn't control it well. Yeah.

And I think part of when you're kind of looking at just any of these attacks and you're trying to discern as stuff pops into the news, is this likely part of a, an insurgent trend or is this like some dudes fucking around one of them would be like what was the how much like how much effort and planning does it look like went into the metcalfe attack looks like quite a lot i would say the most recent portland and washington attacks given the extent to which there were break-ins look like it was organized they seem very a lot of steps had to had to go in so uh yeah let's have an ad break and then we'll go into some more actual details of

the North Carolina attack and some of the Pacific Northwest ones. And then kind of circle back to why people are talking about accelerationism so much. Yeah. You know, who loves planning a series of infrastructure attacks, the sponsors of this show attacks on the infrastructure of infrastructure attacks. The sponsors of this show. Mm-hmm.

Black Grail. Attacks on the infrastructure of your wallet. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.

Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast we're back and nothing that we said before the break can legally be called incitement um it's a joke it's fine So now we're gonna talk a little bit more about the details of the

North Carolina attack and some of the attacks in the Pacific Northwest and yeah, just get into some more of the actual details that have been going on with these most recent attacks that have kind of caused people to speculate on various things. So the agencies involved in investigating

the North Carolina Moore County attack have disclosed very little information about what's happened. They've said that the equipment was hit by gunfire and that the shooters appeared to know what they were doing. Investigators have found nearly two dozen shell casings from high-powered rifles in the area.

Around 45,000 people lost power, and that power outage lasted for at least five days as the company tried to replace these very large pieces of equipment, many of which were damaged beyond repair. So investigators are zoning in on two threads of possible motives centered around extremist behavior for the attack that happened last Sunday. One of these is writings by extremists on online forums encouraging attacks on critical infrastructure, as well as a series of recent disruptions of LGBTQ plus events across the nation by domestic extremists, according to law enforcement sources disclosed to CNN.

So these are the two things that people are looking into. Initial speculation of the night of the shooting centered on right-wing backlash towards a drag show that was set to be held that same day at a nearby theater. The drag show was shut down as it was going on because the power went out. And there was a local activist made some cryptic comments on their Facebook and they then received a police visit. The police prayed with them about it.

I also like that this person this person who who made these cryptic posts um was also an army psychological operations officer so former she's uh she left they literally worked in psyops she was asked to leave yeah yeah yeah i don't think she was like her job was psyops and this was the was the person that posted about this being tied to the drag show. So take that as you will. This person's group earlier that day had a protest involving armed individuals in military gear to, you know, back against the uh the drag show so but but yeah so the the those are the two threads investigators are looking into is one accelerationist uh rhetoric and writings that has gotten more popular the past few years and then two may be connected to

this wave of of like anti-queer stuff let's see um one one one interesting kind of thing of note is that uh three weeks before this attack another substation was deliberately disabled in eastern north carolina uh this this attack happened on friday november 11th it shut down electricity uh for about 12000 homes and businesses. Power was restored in a few hours, though. This one was easier to fix. In a statement posted on the company's website for a few days after the incident,

they described it as vandalism, and the company said that vandals, quote, damaged transformers, causing them to leak coolant oil, but the statement does not explicitly say what the method was. Yeah, and this is, again, not uncommon

because you're trying to find people who might have, that's part of how you can make a case against people is if you can prove they know details of the case that aren't publicly possible. There's a reason why they're not going to say what caliber the weapon is or whatever. Yeah, they did say it wasn't the same as the one used in the Metcalfe attack, which was 7.62 short or whatever. Yeah. They did say it wasn't the same as the one used in,

in the Metcalfe attack, which was 7.62 short. So yeah. Yes. The, the gun that was used on the December North Carolina attack was different than the casings found at, at,

at the 2013 one. In fairness, doesn't mean much. It does not mean much at all. It doesn't. I know there was a lot of initial sort of anger and frustration over the use of the word vandalism in the initial reporting um i think it's fine to use that word because when you don't know what happened all you can see that happened is that

someone damaged property we don't know the motivations behind it we don't know that they intended to knock out power because like we said sometimes people in the woods just shoot at shit because it looks funny so i think it's fair to not want to use that word but i think in initial reporting especially from authorities especially from people who could get sued for libel later down the line the word vandalism is not incorrect no and it's this is like i i think if you're at if you want to know, like, what would immediately set someone off that, like, something is likely not vandalism, well, the Metcalfe attack is good because so much was fired at the Transformer. I would say if, like, a thing that would make me think maybe this is just some Yehu fucking around is if it's 30 rounds or less fired and there's no attempt to actually break onto the facility. 30 rounds because that's kind of

a standard capacity magazine. Which one's done? The reason why, because the North Carolina attack in December did not have many rounds, but the reason why it isn't, we do know it's intentional, is two substations were hit.

Like one person hit one, then traveled and went to another it was like i've just seen like a lot of a lot of people sort of expressing this outrage it's been you know as we're tying these other incidents to it you know the ones in florida the ones in pacific northwest when we have very little information it's okay to call it vandalism because that's yeah the baseline right that you don't have to use if you start using terrorism for every minor incident it it dilutes it it's not helpful it creates hysteria i just wanted to get that on the table yeah and i mean like yeah so even in like uh november the fbi was issuing warnings um of of reported threats to electricity infrastructure

by people espousing racially or ethnically motivated extremist ideologies to, quote, create civil disorder and inspire further violence. So FBI was sending bulletins to private industry multiple times in the past two months. There's been a lot of bulletins being sent out, which is, I think, part of why this, in the aftermath of the attacks with all these public record requests and more reporting on it where people are realizing how much of a thing this actually is um i think and and and attacks like these on on substations or other power grid infrastructure are definitely more common than what you might think and do seem to be increasing in frequency on in the in the broad

sense and some of some of them are, certainly, as we know from arrests that have taken place, are part of decentralized right-wing attempts at an insurrection. That's not wrong to say. It's just the problem is larger and more complicated than that. And to some extent, it's a problem of...

I would be shocked if part of the explanation for why this is happening so much more is not that Americans have a shitload of guns. And during the pandemic, people were bored and kind of going crazy. Like, you know, people have no chill. Yeah, they have no chill. They're stuck at home and you're out in the middle of nowhere and it's easy to do and you want to see something spark. That's part of the problem, right? Yeah, I mean, and they have been increasing since 2015 there's uh there were 70 reports of emergency electric

incidents and disturbances caused by suspected physical attacks sabotage or vandalism from january to august of 2022 um that figure represents a 75 increase from 40 percent uh around uh reports in like 2015 which is the first year that there's comparable data for. And it's also worth really noting that there is, and was as soon as this happened in Metcalf in 2013, suggestions were made as to a really easy way to make it harder to do this, which would not be wildly expensive, which is to put sandbags in front of the coolant systems, which will block most conventional rounds. And at that point... High tech. Yeah, not high tech, not hard to accomplish.

And it would also let you know, anyone who is going to get around those sandbags is going to be ideologically committed, right? For whatever reason. You could shoot a sandbag still. A reason why there is so many of these attacks is because a lot of these very important pieces of infrastructure are highly visible

and really only protected by a chain link fence. So in a lot of cases, an attack can be carried out without even entering any kind of restricted grounds. You can point a gun through a chain link fence and do the thing. Or be hundreds of yards away, right? You could be a kilometer away.

A.308, you could be easily several hundred yards away out of the range of any camera, and you could take enough pot shots to destroy it. It has that kind of penetrative power. A.30-06, you know? Not hard. A hunting rifle that your granddad has. Yeah.

Anyone who shoots elk regularly could do this, you know um yeah not hard hunting rifle that your granddad has you know yeah anyone who shoots elk regularly could do this you know without any without without any realistic way of catching them if you're out in a rural area i'm kind of shocked that these people actually didn't like in terms of like i don't know like um there's there's this we can talk about this later but obviously the area they're in has a very high concentration of very heavily trained people in unconventional warfare but oh yes we should that isn't that is a factor in north carolina is that all of this is occurring on the outskirts of fort bragg and a year ago people who were active duty marines attempted to carry out a similar attack and were not yes do we want to talk about a little bit about

that specifically about robin sage or is that too yeah yeah um because i think it's relevant certainly like the first thing i thought when i thought about this area was like oh shit that's right by southern pines i think maybe the the show was supposed to happen in southern pines which is kind of central to the united states army special forces community and a few times a year there people newly qualifying to be sf soldiers will do an exercise called robin sage and it's our it's military larping yeah well like the times yeah yes it's the military doing larping uh but also not the military right so like people i'm sure will be familiar, people who enjoy Twitter.com will be familiar in the fact that the United States

has sometimes helped rebel movements across the world to overthrow governments. That's the thing that it likes to do. Yeah, it's shocking. Every revolution, in fact, has been fomented by the United States and the CIA specifically because people can't think for themselves.

So what they do in robin sage is they practice training a rebel movement that's comprised of civilians right or untrained fighters uh so these people will go out in small teams infill and then they'll meet a bunch of people who are not soldiers they might be former soldiers they might be local volunteers they might be people from the area um and they will train them for a few days right just like they would if they were actually training up like a guerrilla army and then they'll do a simulated attack which you might recognize as potentially a bad idea which which we now might be seeing as an issue because someone someone did an attack

so like you have in that area a ton of sf troops right and who span the political spectrum and a ton of randos who have been trained by sf troops in guerrilla warfare right unconventional warfare is what they call it and if you were doing unconventional warfare this would be a very effective thing to do right that's why there's been this massive panic about cyber attacks on the grid especially since the start of the war in ukraine very funny we panicked about cyber attacks when in fact you could just go shoot it uh you don't need to be that complex but that's right it's a weak point and and you would know that if you've been practicing unconventional warfare and so like this happening in this very specific area yeah kind of raising flags for me

it's not super weird that this is the second time in the course of a year that there's been an attempt or a successful attack on North Carolina power infrastructure. Right? Like it's not surprising. This is, at the very least, the DHS is not surprised about this. Earlier this year, they've issued many alerts warning that domestic violent extremists

are planning to target the power grid. In February, three people had to plead guilty, which we already talked about. In 2020, there was those people arrested in Idaho. They were planning attacks on power stations and highlighting locations of transformers

and other substations and other power infrastructure and planning to take them out and then using the blackouts to go do other crimes including assassinating ideological opponents so like there's there's been a lot of there's been a lot of extra focus on people's plans to do infrastructure attacks and uh you know plans on like hey this seems like a problem and people have been talking about it more because it does seem to there is at least increasingly high high profile cases um and at least in the case of this past one in north carolina the dhs is currently saying that it does appear to be deliberate um and they're investigating to see if it is tied to ideological

motives. But again, it is worth emphasizing that not all of these things are these types of incidents. An example of something that I think has been misreported on is this recent attack, or it's not an attack, but it's been reported as an attack in South Carolina. On December 7th, there was an individual in a truck that opened fire near a Duke Energy facility. Employees witnessed this truck pull up. It was around 5.30 p.m. This guy opened fire in what appeared to be a long gun and then sped away. No one was hurt. There was no outages. There was no reported property damage. And currently, sheriffs are saying that this was a completely random act

that wasn't even targeted at the power station. They said that the only connection between this shooting and the power station was their proximity. This wasn't an actual attack on a power station. This was just a coincidence. But because this was just a coincidence but because this was a few days after this attack in north carolina people can read headlines about someone

shooting outside a power station in south carolina and get turned into this big thing and you're like that's actually not what's going on you need to look a little bit closer no similarly with this stuff in florida uh you know there's been a lot of retroactively trying to apply this accelerationist idea onto those instances as well when there's simply not the evidence. Yeah, it's – one of the things you have to – like as talking about the folks who are like insurrectionary, one of the force multipliers they have is that the united states has a tremendous amount of people who are just assholes and have guns um and that's just their own guns guns they stole from the military that that is also a factor specifically in north carolina yeah james's point about the proximity to fort bragg though you know right so fort bragg and camp lejeune obviously different branches the military different parts of the state of north carolina but you know there was that

attack last month it was near camp lejeune we have the camp lejeune, obviously different branches of the military, different parts of the state of North Carolina. But, you know, there was that attack last month. It was near Camp Lejeune. We have the Camp Lejeune cell that was wrapped up. They're actually still awaiting trial on the third superseding indictment. And they were stealing guns, right? Or at least attempting to. That's how they got caught. They were stealing guns from the military. The initial indictment was for illegal, for trafficking illegal guns.

Yeah, yeah. The Marine Corps lost a ton of plastic explosive at 29 palms uh last year as well like a very large amount which is is concerning yeah a startling quantity of high explosives right and so i was combing court records for anything mentioning fort bragg looking for other cases related to this specific geographical area, because the Moore County is literally right outside Fort Bragg, which is where the U.S. Army Special Forces are hanging

out. And so this would not be the first time we had radicalized soldiers out of Fort Bragg. I mean, you go back to the 80s. Michael Tubbs, a founding member of the League of the South, did his first terrorism when he and some other Special Forces buddies committed armed robbery of machine guns from the army for the Klan with the intention of using them to start a race war? Yeah.

But then in August of this year, a special forces soldier named Killian Ryan was indicted for lying on his security clearance application. He had already been granted a security clearance, mind you. He had been granted this clearance. But it turns out, ooh, he was a Nazi. I don't know how the security clearance process didn't catch the fact that his email address was naziace1488

at gmail.com that he registered with his cell phone number. Oopsie doopsie. But they did not catch that. Well, you know, sometimes oopsie doopsie but they did not catch that easy to overlook sometimes it's hard to check you know there's lots of simple mistakes that anyone could make

so you know you see this wasn't a surprise to DHS and it shouldn't be these are their mistakes I also did want to note as we're talking about these special forces guys and the potential of them being radicalized I also did want to note as we're talking about these special forces guys and the potential of them being radicalized there's also

Timothy McVeigh well Timothy McVeigh was regular army but he washed out a special forces yeah he didn't quite make it but what's his name yeah yeah there's this is this is like not a...

This is not an uncommon thing. I am currently writing a story that includes a large section about a Marine that tried to steal equipment from military bases to then go do a mass shooting at a synagogue. Yeah. And this guy was a Nazi before he joined the Marines. We've got to shut down the Marines

until we figure out what's going on. We have got to shut this down until we figure out what's going on. So true. Yeah, and you've got Eric Rudolph, the guy who carried out the Olympic Park bombings in 96 was with the 101st airborne division he was an air assault specialist um and he carried out the bombing of the olympic park in atlanta georgia

and then went on the run for months i think yeah and he was a nazi by the way oh it was he was on the run for a long time yeah it took a while really details all the squirrel and nut eating he did in the woods yes uh and by the way he carried out a number of other bombings including a bombing event he carried out a bombing of an abortion clinic he carried out the bombing of a lesbian bar um we talked about this earlier this year on uh yeah yeah we we did part of one of our many series we talked about this guy we had we had we had a whole episode dedicated to him i i do want to briefly talk about some of the stuff happening in the pacific northwest as well and how this

ties in and how there is as opposed to some of the incidents that were like the incident in south carolina stuff in the pacific northwest while happening previous to the north carolina attack does seem to be deliberate um and it has there has been some interesting pieces of information that have come out in the past few days so. And there has been some interesting pieces of information that have come out in the past few days. So the electrical grid has been physically attacked at least six times in Oregon and Western Washington since mid-November. Attackers used firearms in at least some of the incidents in both states, and some power customers in Oregon and Washington experienced at least brief service disruptions as a result of the attacks.

Just two days before the North Carolina attacks, the FBI and Oregon's Titan Fusion Center issued a memo that warned utilities about these recent attacks and how there could be more of them, saying, quote, power companies in Oregon, Washington, have reported physical attacks on substations using hand tools, arson, firearms, and metal chains, possibly in response to an online call for attacks on critical infrastructure. Continuing to say that in recent attacks, criminal actors bypassed security fences by cutting the fence links, lighting nearby fires, shooting equipment from a distance, or throwing objects over the fence and onto the equipment and the aim according to the memo is quote violent anti-government criminal attack uh which is kind of a catch-all term that these people use for a

whole bunch of kind of white supremacist affiliated accelerationist violence it's kind of a silly term because these people really aren't anti-government they just they just want it's a they're fascist they're anti this government because they think this government's too liberal um but but yeah so there was there was an attack on a substation in clackamas county on thanksgiving morning the power company calls this a deliberate physical attack um this is the one where two people cut through fences and use firearms to shoot up and disable numerous pieces of equipment. A security specialist for the company wrote this kind of brief on it and has mentioned how that

there are local people who are affiliated with, you know, larger networks of extremist groups that have called for such attacks and have provided instructions on how to do these types of things um and saying quote there's been a significant uptick in incidents of break-ins related to copper and tool or materials theft but now we are dealing with quickly escalating incidents of sabotage um so that's the kind of that, that's the brief from the security specialist who works at this power company. Four days after that Thanksgiving morning attack, there was another incident

at a Portland General Electric substation, also in the Clackamas area. So these things happened pretty close to one another in the same county. Some of the same people were affected. A few details on this one have been released, but the PG&E team said that quote, our teams have assessed the damage and have

began to repair the impacted facilities. Knocking out the lights, it can be an end goal, right? It's dark and everyone's inconvenienced and there's an idea that, you know, making things worse will help fence sitters radicalize towards

the right and become accelerationists themselves. But the darkness, it's not its own end goal for some of these people. In the Camp Lejeune cell, in the Collins case, they specifically spelled out in some of their planning discussions that the darkness was step one. Once the lights were out, once infrastructure was damaged, the police were distracted, communications were down, people couldn't use their cell phones. They would use that period of chaos to carry out a series of targeted assassinations. And that's not a new idea either. I found a case from the 90s even. This case from the late 90s, the North American militia, it was a splinter group from the Michigan militia Wolverines.

Randy Graham and Ken Carter went down in this case. They were reconning targets, including power stations, TV stations, a military base, federal buildings. And their plan was to knock out communications and power and use that period of chaos to kill several federal judges and politicians. So this is a recurring theme. This case was in the 90s, and then we have that recent case, the Collins case. Those guys haven't even been tried yet. And the stated intention is to use that period of chaos to do additional crimes of terrorism.

And, I mean, there has been more incidents that definitely do seem to be intentional. Like beyond the ones in Oregon, there was also ones in Western Washington that included setting the control houses on fire forced entry and sabotage of intricate electrical control systems causing short circuits by tossing chains over the overhead bus work and a ballistic attack with small caliber firearms so that's that's a lot of stuff going into uh uh yeah of like like

in terms of like planning and preparation going into something that's happening that's a perfect example yeah and if you're as a general rule if you are encountering one of these stories and you're trying to determine should i put this in my head as something that is maybe part of something bigger or something that might be people fucking around that's the kind of stuff to look for is like how much effort went into it? How elaborate was it? Does it seem like planning was involved? I would say another thing is like,

does it seem, is it timed for something like Thanksgiving, right? Like it's not an accident that they picked Thanksgiving to attack a substation because if you're trying to do something that's going to have an impact, doing it on a day like that

where everybody's at home, people are, and there's also a higher power draw in general. like there's a lot of reasons why someone would want to do that but it all points towards this is something that's part of an organized uh set of actions as opposed to the normal thing of americans attacking their own power infrastructure for no good reason yeah which we love to do we do do you know do you know. Which we love to do. Do you know what else we love to do, Robert? Consume goods and services,

Garrus? That's right. We love consumption. Like honks. Yeah. And our hero-based Lasso King would say that's part of the problem. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, we're back. All right garrison take us take us home which hopefully is not fort brag no yeah pivot this podcast is run by the uh user sock yeah hopefully hopefully not so so yeah the the past year we've seen federal authorities multiple times warn about these types of threats to critical infrastructure. faith-based institutions, LGBTQ plus communities, schools, racial and religious minorities, government facilities, and personnel, and U.S. critical infrastructure. So it's definitely something that people are talking about more as incidents do seem to be getting more common. Now I'm going to use some of the research from a uh not an article but i guess

not quite a study like this uh i don't know how to describe it uh in an analysis piece i guess from george washington university's program on extremism entitled uh mayhem murder and misdirection violent extremist attack plots against critical infrastructure in the United States. So since 2019, white supremacist attacks and plots against critical infrastructure do seem to have distinctly increased. Between 2016 and 2022, white supremacist plots targeting energy systems dramatically increased in their frequency. 13 individuals associated with the overall white supremacist movement were arrested and charged in federal court with planning attacks on the energy sector. 11 of these attack planners were charged after 2020. The rise of accelerationist ideology and doctrine during the

past decade did likely fuel these increased attacks within the white supremacist milieus that are targeting critical infrastructure and the energy sector in particular. So if you look at the data from 2016 to 2022, if you look at 94 cases of individuals who are alleged to have planned, quote, violent extremist attacks, 59% of those people were identified as white supremacists, and 37% of those incidents involved some level of planning, specifically planning attacks on critical infrastructure. Now, six of those 16 white supremacist plotters had discernible, tangible connections to named groups and organizations like the base, Adam Woffin Division, and the National Socialist Movement. like the base, Atomwaffen division, and the National Socialist Movement. And 14 out of the 16 people were known participants in a greater kind of online network that connects various like cells or even just aesthetic styles

common among the neo-Nazi accelerationist movement. So, and one of the more kind of interesting data points is the number of white supremacist plots that are specifically focused on the energy sector, related to nuclear reactors, materials, with the waste sector, and of course, power substations. There's 13 cases of individuals who reportedly planned to conduct attacks on a variety of energy infrastructure from small assaults on local on local power lines to potentially devastating attacks on power grids or even nuclear facilities and uh and those represent 87 percent of the white pharmacist related cases in which critical infrastructure was targeted so most of that is specifically on power grids like that's that is that is what these focus on and the first case within this data point range of 2016 to 2022 uh dates back to 2017 when a former florida national guardsman

and the founder of adam waffen division was arrested in florida and charged with um you know unlawful possession of explosive devices and explosive materials uh One of this guy's roommates, who was also a member of Adam Waffen, told jurors that this guy intended to target a number of different locations for explosive attacks using this material, including a Jewish synagogue, power lines, and a nearby nuclear reactor site. And this guy in his apartment had propaganda

and book materials on the functioning of nuclear reactors and other uh power supply stuff so like you know it's these types of things that people study on and then plan out to do and what we're seeing more commonly now is a very intensive propaganda team putting together kind of manuals on how to do these types of things both both like in both for like to inspire you to do it but also like instruction manuals like here's here's where you should shoot here's like here's how to actually do it and it's it's they're unfortunately designed quite well oh yeah and that's something that is newer uh that is a direct product of the types of aesthetically driven propaganda

that has flourished on sites like Telegram, and they're getting quite good at making propaganda. It's not just random books strewn upon your apartment anymore. It's very well made documents on how to do this

that you can download online. The three men who just pleaded guilty in february for their their conspiracy to attack power facilities one of those men jackson say wall in the um in the original complaint it says you know um cook had recruited his friend say wall to join the cause from the outset cook believed say wall's graphic design skills could be an asset to the group's propaganda effort. So he was recruited to the cell because he was good at graphic design. Now, I've read these manifestos.

I would not say the graphic design is good, but it's certainly better than sort of a cut-and-paste scene, right? There's a clear digital design element here. And that's on purpose. And they know that that's how they're going to get eyes on this stuff i mean robert we both read all those manifestos in the last couple of days they are certainly a step up they are what they what they make me think of is when i first when i first got into reporting on extremism it was because i went through every issue of like isis's magazine to beat right after the um the bada k And it's, number one, like, there was when that Adam Woffin guy killed his roommates

and he had converted to Islam and was, like, very much into ISIS. There was this, like, surprise from people who don't think a lot about this stuff. But a lot of these guys had a lot of admiration for the way that ISIS put together their propaganda campaign, which included a lot of very detailed guides for how to do things like carry out rent vehicles and carry out vehicular attacks, right? Like this is, you know, this is the way terrorism works. And these guys are taking a little bit of a different tact. But again, not that, like, as Molly pointed out, there were a number of ISIS inspired attacks on power infrastructure, just didn't get a ton of, of,

of play, but like none of this is like all of this is, is in line with the trends that we have seen globally in the way in which insurgent movements function. Yeah. And I think, you know, this well-produced easily spread propaganda and these online networks that

they created to spread this propaganda mean that we're not just you know we have these cases of these organized cells that got caught but it's not just organized cells that have the capacity to carry out these attacks because any idiot in a telegram group can open that manifesto with the detailed instructions for carrying out an identical attack so this is called disseminates and becomes contagious there's this there's this people talk about a lot online now about stochastic terrorism. And some of us here might be a little bit to blame to that. But a lot of times they're they're getting it wrong because what's what what these Nazis are doing. This is inspirational terrorism, which has been a thing for as long as terrorism has existed.

I mean, that's why they have their calendar of saints, you know? Yeah, exactly. And there's a lot of debate about like when to use stochastic terrorism, but kind of in my mind, when I tend to think it's appropriate is when the attempt is to kind of use the way algorithms on various sites on the internet work to spread propaganda that's meant to cause, that's meant to inspire attacks, because that is, it's a type of inspirational terrorism,

but it's clearly a new evolution of it, because of its reliance on those networks. But this is, again, we're getting into the weeds. Is there anything else you wanted to kind of get into here, Garrison? I mean, no, I kind of wanted to wrap up by talking about some of the Terragram stuff. So I think we kind of hit on a lot of stuff that I wanted to mention. I mean, in 2019, two years after that first attack in 2017, and two years later, a Bumary man

was arrested for planning to blow up power grid substations. He was a member of Adam Woffin. And we already talked about the two other kind of main incidents that are well known from 2020,

and then stuff that just got... There was court cases as recently as February 2022, which we also mentioned in terms of their plans to take out power stations to then carry out assassinations. So those are the two other incidents that I wanted to mention. But yeah, I mean, it's, I think the other kind of aesthetic similarity, I think, is that I think we actually are seeing some of the, some of the recent terrorgram stuff also take cues from not only like ISIS and Islamic terrorism, but also some of the types of anarchist writing that have,

that have, has gotten more popular since you know uh elf type stuff like where i think we're seeing some of some of the aesthetic stylings feels very reminiscent of like early crime think um some of it some of it is is similar to things around um the types of like eco sabotage manuals that thats that were very popular in the 90s and 2000s you know some of the techniques are very similar because both eco-terrorists and accelerationist

Nazis both find value in attacking things like power substations or you know burning down 5G towers that's a big emphasis of this recent like almost 300 page uh manifesto and instruction manual they focus a lot on how you know in early 2020 regular people felt inspired to burn down 5g towers people who are not otherwise extremists

and how how do we get people who are regular people to get to that point where they're willing to damage public infrastructure and that's kind of a lot of what that 300 page kind of manifesto slash manual tries to talk about anyway it sucks

if we want to end on a hopeful note I think I have at least sort of a small bright spot for us. It's in the original affidavit for the search warrant into Liam Collins, the, the, the head of the camp Lejeune cell. So in that original affidavit for the search warrant in his case, the FBI agent writing the affidavit says that they first started looking into Collins

because he was doxxed in the Iron March leaks. Yes. So we were reading those doxes and they said, oh, wow, a Marine who's a Nazi, we should talk to him. So, you know, when doing this work in identifying these people from these leaks and sort of the slog of picking through, like, maybe this guy's a fucking nobody, but we will identify them so that our communities can keep an eye on them. That work matters. That work made it into Newsweek and it made it to the FBI. It's a weird filter system, but eventually this guy got caught before he committed a massive nationwide

act of terror. So keep doxing Nazis. It works. In a similar incident, there was an officer of the Lafayette police department that joined, I believe, this exact same terrorist cell that was then doxxed by anti-fascists. And then he turned and snitched on his fellow Nazis. Right. So the investigation opened because of a doxx and they got a powerful cooperating witness because of another dox.

It makes them nervous. If eyes are on them, they can't conduct covert operations. So keep doxing your local Nazis. No, I mean, like it can it can literally be like in terms of these cells planning to do assassinations of people. It can actually save people's lives if these people are actually serious and are willing to to carry out their plans that they are you know actively training for actively preparing materials for um this type of work is is some of the most solid anti-fascist research that people have that people have done it absolutely saved lives yeah i've no doubt about that we'll continue to save lives so docs nazis and you know if if you're drunk out in the woods and one of your buddies

says hey why don't we shoot a power substation don't do it just shoot cans just shoot cans stop signs it's a the american stop signs expired fire extinguishers those are fun to shoot let me tell you all of the anti-civ people turn off this podcast in a fit of rage and then realize that they're listening on a phone and then have a moral crisis. So, yeah. To the anti-civ people who have built a radio out of sticks. And then realize

that podcasts don't come out through the radio. Tragic. Anyway, the episode is over. That's what you think, Robert. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day

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