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.
Okay, but I’ve been disregarding that distinction because it doesn’t matter – or if it did, it would only be in the sense that the FBI etc. would attack groups trying to do what you’re talking about even more aggressively than they do protestors. You’re asking about why lefty terror organizations aren’t a thing, and I’m telling you that it’s because, when lefties are getting shot 57 times just for protesting, lefties trying to do actual terrorism would get turned into smoking craters in short order and nobody’s that suicidal.
Meanwhile, in stark contrast, the same Powers That Be treat right-wing terrorists with the softest and gentlest of kid gloves, and that’s how they’re able to continue to fester.
then I guess there is no hope 🤷♂️
There is, but it would require a big Overton window shift and a lot of manpower.
I’d cite MLK’s “Poor People’s Campaign” as an example of the sort of magnitude you’d need, but, well, we all know what happened to him once he started talking about class instead of just race. Clearly, the lower bound is higher than that.
The rich are only getting more powerful. They are scrambling to bleed us dry financially, keeping us slaves. Maybe they are starting to see a shift, but whatever their reasons are–they are winning. They are the ones who need to fear walking down the street.
All this talk like this on open forums just puts you on a watchlist. Remember the NSA is scrubbing the internet for shit like this.
Good.