"The center is not holding in America right now. As I noted on these pages last week, an armed and agitated right-wing movement is lashing out more boldly and sometimes more violently because of perceived losses in the nation’s “culture war” and very real losses at the ballot box. And the biggest loser of all is egging them on with increasingly unhinged statements from Mar-a-Lago. Experts properly call those urgings stochastic terrorism, but increasingly these feel like that Civil War — albeit a sporadic and asymmetrical one — we’ve been dreading."
Maybe 1/2 of the Coatesville Dems blog is about political corruption in Chester County PA. The other half is from what I perceive to be a growing threat from right wing domestic terrorists that I first noted in 2008.
For a long time I thought I was one of a few people such as historians of the right wing howling in the wind about the domestic terrorists egged on by Trump. See:
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
Will Bunch gets it
"A N.C. terror attack and Trump renouncing the Constitution: The new Civil War is here
This much seems clear: More than 161 years after the first cannonball sailed over Fort Sumter, an American Civil War has again come to the Carolinas. A strange, asymmetrical Civil War, to be sure, and one that has confounded the public and mainstream journalists — who seem confused over how to cover the news out of Moore County — as much as the sheriffs and the feds.
Indeed, a terror attack on the U.S. power grid — which has been long feared from Russian or Chinese hackers, but instead apparently came from some yahoos with AR-15s — seemed to epitomize one of the strangest American moments I’ve ever lived through. Things in the body politic are getting so surreal it’s hard to know what is tragedy and what is farce.
Around the time the shots were ringing out through the piney woods of Moore County, the public spectacle of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, burning $44 billion of his vast wealth not so much to own Twitter, the social-media site so critical for sharing political ideas, but to use his new toy to “own the libs,” took a new turn. Musk used his now-ownership of Twitter’s internal files and his friendship with bro-dude journalist Matt Taibbi to gin up a faux scandal over alleged biased treatment in favor of troubled presidential son Hunter Biden. Most of Taibbi’s findings were over-caffeinated, except for the points that were dead wrong.
The nothingburger that Musk and Taibbi cooked up as the (all-caps!) TWITTER FILES did hit home in maybe the one place it was targeting most: Mar-a-Lago. For Donald Trump — 45th president of the United States, and the GOP 2024 frontrunner to become 47th and apparently last POTUS — the TWITTER FILES were the paper-thin excuse he needed to go where he’s been itching to reach for years: the end of American democracy.
“A massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote on Saturday night, arguing that the inconsequential Taibbi/Musk report somehow rose to a level that President Joe Biden’s 2020 election must be undone in order to reinstall Trump as a supreme leader.
To steal Musk’s favorite phrase, let that sink in. Say the key words slowly. “Termination ... of ... the ... Constitution.”
And yet for the key folks in the American body politic, this hasn’t sunk in. The same so-called leaders of the Republican Party — who fell mute in the bloody aftermath of the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 and more recently when Trump talked turkey on Thanksgiving with a Hitler-admiring antisemitic hip-hop superstar and America’s most vocal Holocaust denier — once again swallowed their tongues as the 2024 frontrunner made totalitarianism his main 2024 campaign promise. A mainstream media that seems to have only two gears — low, and Hillary’s emails — struggled to pull out of the muck of the latest Mar-a-Lago mudslide.
Look, I do understand the dilemma. The Beltway crowd is engaged in magical thinking that all the bat-guano crazy stuff happening out there in the heartland, punctuated by Trump’s battle cry for dictatorship, is only the last throes of a warped and wounded movement that may breathe its dying breath before the first 2024 primary votes are cast. After all, Trump’s meltdown comes as the walls of criminal prosecution — from new federal special prosecutor Jack Smith, not to mention Georgia and New York — are closing in. But also the second possibility — that Trump’s words were the declaration of a second American Civil War that will be embraced by far too many of the more than 74 million Americans who voted for him in 2020 — may be too frightening for elites to contemplate.
The problem is that too many foot soldiers are already waging this Civil War for basically the same reason that Southern states seceded in 1861: A coastal majority that didn’t share their values was threatening their “way of life,” whether that meant an economy based on chattel slavery, or social hierarchies based on prejudice and homophobia.
In Moore County, N.C. — about halfway between Mar-a-Lago and the White House — the terror attack on the power grid happened about an hour into the Downtown Divas drag show at the Sunrise Theater in the community of Southern Pines. Right-wing activists were protesting the event, and online speculation that the terror attack was to shut down the production spiked after one leading drag-show opponent — Emily Rainey, who lost her Army commission after attending Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, rally — posted at the start of the blackout: “The power is out in Moore County, and I know why.”
Sheriff Fields told reporters that deputies did visit Rainey’s home after the attack and had “a word of prayer with her, but it turned out to be nothing.” But while the possible drag show/terror link is still under investigation in North Carolina, it should be noted it happened in the same day that assault-weapon-toting members of the right-wing Patriot Front shut down a planned drag story-time event at a church in Columbus, Ohio, as nearby members of White Lives Matter Ohio flashed Nazi salutes to passing cars. And also that the night before that, a man was arrested outside one of the Detroit area’s largest synagogues for shouting antisemitic threats at Jewish families dropping off kids for day care.
The center is not holding in America right now. As I noted on these pages last week, an armed and agitated right-wing movement is lashing out more boldly and sometimes more violently because of perceived losses in the nation’s “culture war” and very real losses at the ballot box. And the biggest loser of all is egging them on with increasingly unhinged statements from Mar-a-Lago. Experts properly call those urgings stochastic terrorism, but increasingly these feel like that Civil War — albeit a sporadic and asymmetrical one — we’ve been dreading.
We need to treat domestic terrorism on U.S. soil as seriously as we treated the 9/11 attacks, and to take Donald Trump’s dictatorial pronouncements as seriously as those that echoed across Europe in the 1930s. An attack on the power grid should be front-page news, not treated as a quirky right-wing fringe festival. And it’s long past time to end the deference that Trump is receiving as an ex-president and begin prosecuting him for his failed coup and multiple other crimes and misdemeanors. The Civil War is here, and the good guys will lose if they don’t fight back with everything they have."
MORE AT:
Philadelphia Inquirer
First shots of a U.S. Civil War fired in the Carolinas … again | Will Bunch Newsletter
Plus, the scoop on Josh Shapiro’s terrible, not good, transition team.
CNN gets it
“A Department of Homeland Security Bulletin reported by CNN just days before the attack on a North Carolina substation indicated there was a heightened threat posed by domestic violent extremists in the United States against targets including critical infrastructure.
On Nov. 30, DHS renewed a national bulletin warning that lone offenders and small groups motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and personal grievances pose a lethal threat to the United States.
The advisory said in part “DHS maintained that potential targets include but are not limited to public gatherings, faith-based institutions, the LGBTQIA+ community, schools, racial and religious minorities, government facilities and personnel, US critical infrastructure, the media and perceived ideological opponents."
The electric grid has been described as an “attractive target” for domestic violent extremists in US, CNN reported earlier this year, citing an intelligence report.
In 2020 intelligence analysts saw major uptick in online chatter focused on attacking the Power Grid.
Notably in 2020, a 14-page document released in a Telegram channel favored by accelerationist groups seeking to speed the overthrow of the US government featured a White supremacist instruction guide to low-tech attacks meant to bring chaos, including how to attack a power grid with guns.
The document has been cited by Department of Homeland officials and was obtained by CNN.
“The powergrid would be crippled for a very large area. Armor piercing rounds shot into the transformers would destroy them,” the colorful how-to describes.
The writer goes on to frame how massive blackouts would aide in the toppling of society which is a key accelerationist goal.
“But with the power off, when the lights don’t come back on… all hell will break lose, making conditions desirable for our race to once again take back what is ours,” the document reads.
Several unique attempts to attack various grids have been cited by intelligence officials that analyze these specific threats.
Investigators discovered a four-rotor drone July 16, 2020, in Pennsylvania recovered from the roof of a power station, according to a DHS Bulletin in Oct. 2021.
CNN reported earlier this year that in May 2020, three people claiming to be Boogaloo adherents allegedly conspired to attack an electrical substation in Las Vegas as part of an attempt to incite riots and violence amid demonstrations in the city.
The suspects were charged with conspiracy to damage and destroy by fire and explosive and with possession of unregistered firearms.
The unsolved case of the attack on the Metcalf Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) substation in Coyote, California, on April 16, 2013 set the bar for these types of attacks and has been a case study for intelligence officials
The vulnerabilities of the Power Grid have been closely examined by the Department of Energy, DHS and Congress.
According to the National Research Council, tasked by congress to examine these vulnerabilities, the US grid consists of:
- 6,400 power plants
- 55,000 substations
- 450,000 miles of transmission lines
- 3,000 companies
CNN's Geneva Sands, Whitney Wild and Kristina Sgueglia contributed to this report”
FROM:
3:05 p.m. ET, December 5, 2022
DHS bulletin indicated a heightened threat posed by domestic extremists days before grid attack
From CNN's John Miller
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