Guards & Gates Aren't Enough To Protect The US Power Grid From Extremists Set On Destroying It

Let's Work On The Culture & Politics: A Plan For How To Do That

Last weekend, at least one person intentionally shot up two electrical substations in Moore County, NC… taking out the power to nearly the entire county’s “customers.”

At the height of the outage, 45,000 customers were without power — which includes more than 45,000 people as it is families and businesses. Power was restored to all by Thursday, but the damage to health, businesses, and community is significant.

Are Questions About Adequate Security The Right Questions?

Some in media have done the victim-blaming bit… asking if substations and other electrical infrastructure are protected enough.

Uh, no, they’re not. Should they have to be?

• Maybe we should be asking why we have a culture that’s embracing the widespread availability of firearms capable of doing this kind of damage?

• Maybe we should be talking about a widely supported culture war that’s embracing right-wing extremism connected to groups that promote disabling electrical infrastructure? It’s a culture war led by elected officials, big media, famous people, interest groups, lobbyists, think tanks, and several billionaires. It’s a culture war that’s empowering and embracing hate, authoritarianism, nihilism, and their own power.

• Maybe we should be talking about the domestic insurgency likely behind this that’s metastasized in the US… especially since the insurrection and coup attempt?

• Maybe we should be talking about empowered hate groups and individuals who feel validated and emboldened to take extremist action when they’re embraced by famous people such as Donald Trump and Kanye West, and enabled by power-brokers like Elon Musk?

• Maybe we should be talking about political gridlock in the US for well over a decade? About how we’re not working to solve big problems like infrastructure security and resilience; while the social fabric weakens, and our country becomes more vulnerable in a huge array of ways?

• Maybe we should be talking about how especially Republican politicians aren’t dealing with any of the everyday, real threats to our American way of life like vulnerable electrical grids… and spend most of their time fomenting a culture war and inciting division?

Security is an illusion, and it’s almost always a cost/benefit analysis.

We can never get to 100% security… so how much security are we willing to spend on, invest in, and put up with to mitigate at least some of the risk? The answer always changes.

The question when it comes to protecting electrical grids from assault weapons isn’t much different than the question when it comes to US schools — both of which are everywhere. Would there ever be enough money, guns, guards, and gates to protect either system? No.

What else could mitigate some of the risk, with spectacularly less spending on security? Having laws that make it more difficult for nearly anyone to get military-grade assault weapons.

That ship has clearly sailed, though, at least for the foreseeable political future with a now dead-even, tie-breaker US Senate (see the Senator Sinema flakiness reported today) and a Republican majority US House. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about realistic, achievable ways we could try to minimize some of the risk… and drive the agenda to help us get there.

The thing is, there won’t ever be enough money or will to put up the volume of guns, guards, and gates people would want to protect the US electrical grid, or even to protect our schools. Or any US infrastructure.

We can “harden” some of it with security measures… but much of US infrastructure is systems-oriented and distributed — not concentrated in easier-to-guard centers or fortresses.

We can take measures to make our electrical systems and other infrastructure more resilient, and there’s been big work in that area. We should be doing more… but some of that is the kind of big picture, collective, problem-solving work that we need government to work on — and that we need national conversations about. It’s the kind of thing we haven’t been doing for well over a decade now, and it’s making us weaker and more vulnerable as a society and as a country. The NC power substation attack highlights exactly that.

In fact, what we’re dealing with instead now is not only not collectively solving problems, but a growing insurgency in the US; made up of empowered far-right extremists. At least one set of such folks have been actively scheming and prepping ways to take down parts of the electrical grid — or the whole thing. On purpose. It’s called “Accelerationist Theory.”

“Accelerationist” White Supremacist Threats To The Electrical Grid

On Monday, the Rachel Maddow Show highlighted an as-yet-unsolved electrical substation attack outside of San Jose, CA in 2013 that’s very similar to last weekend’s NC substation attack. MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight did a follow-up report on Thursday, including reference to a CNN report that “Investigators are zeroing in on two possible motives centered around extremist behavior in NC power stations attacks, sources say.” (More from the Alex Wagner Tonight show on Thursday is on this 12/14/22 post).

From that CNN article,

“One thread involves the writings by extremists on online forums encouraging attacks on critical infrastructure. The second thread looks at a series of recent disruptions of LGBTQ+ events across the nation by domestic extremists. The FBI and the NC State Bureau are assisting in the investigation.”

It’s not clear this week which factor was the big motivator in the NC attack — or it could be both. That would fit, too, and is certainly possible.

So what is the extremist thinking here?

Maddow highlighted this recently-disrupted electrical grid disruption plot by three men from OH, WI and IN/TX:

Maddow reported that in February of this year, “Three men… pled guilty to a plot to do much the same thing, inspired by white supremacist ideology. Department of Justice press release: ‘Three men plead guilty to conspiring to provide material support to a plot to attack power grids in the United States. Domestic terrorism plot was in furtherance of white supremacist ideology.’ And the plea agreement in that case again from earlier this year spells it out. It says, ‘In the fall of 2019, two young men — one aged 20, one aged 24 — met in an online forum. One suggested to the other that they hatch a plan to take out electrical power substations in various parts of the country to try to set off civil unrest and to hopefully try to set off a race war in the United States.’

“This is from the plea agreement… ‘The plan was to attack the substations with powerful rifles that would penetrate the electrical transformers. Members of the group estimated that would cost the government millions of dollars to recover. In addition the defendants believed that time associated with replacing the substations would cause confusion and unrest for Americans in the region. There were also conversations about how the possibility of the power being out for many months could cause a race war. Additionally without power across the country, they hoped it could cause the next great depression. People wouldn’t show up to work, the economy would crash, and there would be a ripe opportunity for potential white leaders to rise up.’

“That plea agreement unsealed by the government earlier this year explains how these young men decided they would need to cause a big explosion as a distraction. They wanted to set off some kind of big explosion that would tie up the police and distract police from what they were going to do to the power substations which is something again that they hoped would cause millions of dollars of damage; something that would take months to be able to repair.”

There’s more detail in the interview below.

It’s hard to imagine that our own neighbors right here in the US would want to so deeply disrupt the lives, jobs, health, schools, and economy that the rest of us are so dependent upon.

Yet that’s exactly what at least one person decided to do in North Carolina last weekend: attack lives, health, stores, businesses, schools, public safety, and so many other things.

It’s not an isolated case, though. This is a known threat in the law enforcement world. Check out this bit from former FBI Assistant Director (retired) Frank Figliuzzi:

“There’s been increased chatter and even specific instructions as recently as last year in something called ‘The Accelerationist’s Handbook’ that shows you how to do this. The theory behind this the idea — the bigger idea here — is that you can quickly destabilize society and get to chaos if you pull the plug literally.

“They see electricity… as the great equalizer in society that makes everybody kind of equal. They don’t like that, so they want survivalists and white nationalists (this is the far right side of accelerationist theory; ‘cause there’s a far left side too but the the far right side has been chatting about this ad nauseum for the past couple of years) thinks that you pull the plug and you get to the chaos to destabilize society and the guys with the weapons — the guys who’ve trained on weekends… to become survivalists — they get the power at that point.”

Here’s that interview, from Deadline White House:

Deadline White House @DeadlineWH

"The bigger thing going on here is the knowledge it takes to know what you're shooting at, what equipment, the relay system, the backup that's gonna happen to the next substation when the first one you shoot at goes down" - @FrankFigliuzzi1 w/ @NicolleDWallace

Figliuzzi has been making the rounds on a few media platforms this week talking further about this threat, and Thursday’s Alex Wagner tonight show did another excellent walk-through of the “Accelerationist” thinking with Figliuzzi. Video is not easily available, but it was just a different way of talking about all of the above (Update: this 12/14/2022 post has some of the transcript from that Thursday show).

Infrastructure Is The Heart Of Modern Society

Infrastructure is at the heart of a functional, thriving, civilized society. It just is.

The white supremacists seem to recognize that basic truth given what’s outlined above… but the rest of society doesn’t bother much with making sure our infrastructure is functional, resilient, redundant, and funded. Yet we are dependent on it for nearly everything about modern life.

The extremists didn’t need to do deep analysis to know that civil society falls apart pretty fast when the power goes out; or when there is any kind of infrastructure disruption with cascading effects.

For example, when the power goes out — water systems often fail. Grocery stores and restaurants and cafeterias lose food, as do hundreds or millions of homeowners. Things can go downhill pretty fast. People can’t get gas at gas stations for generators if the gas stations are also without power and don’t have generators themselves — which most don’t. It’s not worth the investment for how often their power goes out.

During Hurricane Katrina, things were such a mess in terms of interconnected infrastructure failures that local law enforcement and state National Guard occasionally tried to “reappropriate” fuel or mobile kitchen assets that the interagency federal response sent to the catastrophe area for specific disaster response purposes. In a crisis, people with the guns think they can take what they want — even government people going up against different government agencies.

So What Do We Do?

I would argue that we need to fight differently.

I think we need to get in the culture war fight, and advocate clearly for the kind of society we want — for ourselves, for our kids, for our families, for our friends, and for people we don’t know. This country can be so much more than what it’s become.

I would argue that we need to fight for a functional, flourishing society where the most powerful, wealthiest, and best-armed don’t get all the power. And don’t get to take out the power, either.

I would argue that we can push harder to make extremism uncool and to push it back into the shaodows.

We can raise a ruckus about how we need an all-of-society effort to make sure we’re finding and shining bright lights on the evil plans of extremists to take this society down. We can do more. It starts with recognizing it, talking about it, not shying away from it, and taking it on directly.

These people are terrorists. We don’t know the exact cause of the NC power substation attack, but we know enough to know it was intended to terrorize in some way.

They want us to be on defense.

They want us to be scared; and to hide out. They’re coming out more and and more frequently now on streets everywhere in this country… armed to the teeth, and covered up in everything short of a Klan hood.

Why aren’t they hiding out?

Because they’ve been empowered by very powerful people for nearly a decade. It amped up when President Obama was in office; and it’s metastasized. Trump, Elon Musk, Kanye West, FOX News, OAN, talk radio… they all empower the extremism. They embrace it. They foment and inspire it. They rile it up. They’re going to keep at it, as it’s got to keep intensifying for them. Anger is addictive, and their audience wants more.

Would these extremists, hate-mongers, and terrorists go back into their hidey-holes if we pushed back on them — big time?

They likely would. We know this because it’s happened before in our own country.

Time for us to get hyperactive about pushing back.

We can.

An energized, well-organized, fired-up majority can counter an authoritarian movement. It can counter radicalized extremism. An empowered majority pushes the power of that majority over the power of the most extreme and the loudest. We can empower that majority.

We can better organize and fire up that majority. We can build better, bigger, and stronger coalitions. We can fight for what we want. We can drive the narrative. We can bring new pressure, and new partnerships.

We can advocate loudly and clearly and with big emotion for the big dream of what this country can be — a true multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religion democracy made up of people from all over the world where we value humans, and where we create a society where we all have a better, more egalitarian chance to thrive and flourish. Everybody.

Well, everybody but the terrorists. We don’t need the terrorism; and we do need a functional society that follows the rule of law — and effectively counters threats to society with consequences for those who try to hurt it. It’s time for us to champion the greater good.

Let’s Go

Shift the Country is starting a series of daily workshops starting Monday night, 12/12, to start building this kind of more-organized majority coalition.

It’s going to need to be bigger than anything that’s been done before, because guess why?

The threat of authoritarianism and extremism is getting bigger and not smaller — so we need to go bigger, too.

And we have the majority of the population. The power of the people.

We can mobilize and inspire that power in new and different ways. We’re going to figure out how together; based on the Shift the Country 5-Thing approach.

Daily brainstorming & shift-building events start Monday night, 12/12/22. They’ll be announced here on Substack later today, and on Eventbrite (they’re under construction now). The idea is to get people together to start working on what we can do. Every day will build on the prior day… and we’ll spin off working groups once we get enough traction in any particular area.

And we’re off and running!

• Shift the Country’s post-election website overhaul is finished — woohoo!

• There’s a printable version of the website in this PDF “Big Shift Guide” here.

• We’re launching a Substack chat today. This will be for mobile app only — iOS and Android only.

• And we’re on Post.News; a new social media channel!

We’re considering Mastadon and Discord… but first we’re going to start doing these daily call things through December and see what we start to build together.

This is going to be messy. We will need very many big brains.

You can’t do unprecedented stuff without a bit of mess. It’s not going to be easy. But living through an insurgency isn’t.

We’ll do better if we start acting the part, countering that insurgency, and championing a different direction we can take this country in.

I don’t know about you — but I don’t intend to let insurgents, insurrectionists, white supremacists, bigots, and conspiracy theorists drive the future of this country just because so far they are the loudest and most organized.

We can defeat them, and push them back in the shadows.

Let’s go.