- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
People in a quiet neighborhood in Carthage, a town in Moore County, North Carolina, heard a series of six loud pops a few minutes before 8:00 p.m. on Dec. 3, 2022. A resident named Michael Campbell said he ducked at the sound. Another witness told police they thought they were hearing fireworks. The noise turned out to be someone shooting a rifle at a power substation next door to Campbell’s home. The substation, operated by the utility Duke Energy Corp., consists of equipment that converts electricity into different voltages as it’s transported to the area and then steered into individual houses. The shots hit the radiator of an electrical transformer, a sensitive piece of technology whose importance would likely be understood only by utility company employees. It began dumping a “vast amount” of oil, according to police reports. A subsequent investigation has pointed to a local right-wing group, one of a wave of attacks or planned attacks on power infrastructure.
By 8:10 the lights in Carthage went out. Minutes later, a security alarm went off at a Duke Energy substation 10 miles away, this one protected from view by large pine trees. When company personnel responded, they found that someone had shot its transformer radiator, too. Police found shell casings on the ground at the site and noticed someone had slashed the tires on nearby service trucks. The substations were designed to support each other, with one capable of maintaining service if the other went down. Knocking out both facilities prevented the company from rerouting power. Police described the two incidents as a coordinated attack. About 45,000 families and businesses remained dark for four days. This was a burden for area grocery stores and local emergency services. One woman, 87-year-old Karin Zoanelli, died in the hours after the shooting when the blackout caused her oxygen machine to stop operating. The North Carolina Medical Examiner’s office classified the death as a homicide.
The attack on Duke’s facilities in Moore County remains unsolved, but law enforcement officials and other experts suspect it’s part of a rising trend of far-right extremists targeting power infrastructure in an attempt to sow chaos. The most ambitious of these saboteurs hope to usher in societal collapse, paving the way for the violent overthrow of the US government, according to researchers who monitor far-right communities.
Damaging the power grid has long been a fixation of right-wing extremists, who have plotted such attacks for many years. They’ve been getting a boost recently from online venues such as “Terrorgram,” a loose network of channels on the social media platform Telegram where users across the globe advocate violent white supremacism. In part, people use Terrorgram to egg one another on – a viral meme shows a stick figure throwing a Molotov cocktail at electrical equipment. People on the forum have also seized on recent anti-immigration riots in the UK, inciting people there to clash with police. In June 2022, months before the Moore County shootings, users on the forum began offering more practical support in the form of a 261-page document titled “Hard Reset,” which includes specific directions on how to use automatic weapons, explosives and mylar balloons to disrupt electricity. One of the document’s suggestions is to shoot high-powered firearms at substation transformers.
To me, it seems largely because right-wing extremists are violent revolutionaries across different regions and classes, from the very poor to the very rich, that share overlapping ideologies that are antagonistic to the state and racial “others.” They are largely decentralized, very active, cellular, and have established a large, global communications network. This is a very serious problem and a clear and growing threat.
Most lefties are revolutionary in posture or “ideal” only, can’t agree on what to do to get to that ideal, and in their actions more often tacitly support a return to a so-called “progressive” status quo than anything truly radical–though they’ll consistently express how very revolutionary their ideals are.
In terms of judging someone by their actions rather than their words, the right seems revolutionary, the left seems reformist. But that’s just my observations on the cultural terrain over the last decade.
I’m sure that will make a lot of keyboard-leftists angry, and I know how frustrating it might seem, but it is just my opinion. Simply put: who would you be worried about? Who is the FBI more worried about? Who are the US, UK, and Canadian governments, for example, more worried about?
If Fox News has to make things up about you to make you threatening and no one else cares, you’re probably not the revolutionaries.
Also a solid percent of lefties are historically literate and understand that theres also the threat of say a bolshevik style backstabbing. Combine that with the fact that more work has been kept through gradual and tactical reform and ya end up with a reformist heavy group, which makes sense the reason we backslid on say labor rights was due to a generation of lead poisoned idiots not a failure of the old union organizers.