Republicans now driving grid attacks

Since the alleged jihadist attacks on September 11, 2001 homegrown terrorists have killed twice as many people in the United States than foreign-influenced militants have. 

But in 2011 and 2012 hackers known as LulzSec took down web sites owned by Rupert Murdoch, Booz Allen Hamilton, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Arizona lawmen, Apple, Sony, the city of Orlando, Florida, and the governments of Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia and Iran, among many other targets including Yellowstone County, Montana and the Department of Justice. 

In 2014 among 382 law enforcement agencies 74 percent reported anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdictions, according to the New York Times. Former teevee host Ted Koppel was an NPR contributor for decades so to pump his new book he sat for an interview on The Diane Rehm Show in 2015 and told listeners he's convinced that an inevitable cyber attack on the US could take down the grid for days, even months causing food shortages and mayhem. 

Now, fueled by Donald Trump and Republican politicians like Kristi Noem, Harriet Hageman, Dorothy Moon and Ammon Bundy white christian nationalists are the latest perpetrators of malicious attacks on the grid.

In reports filed to the [Department of Energy], power grid operators identified 200 instances of vandalism, suspicious activity, sabotage or physical attacks in 2023, comprising 58% of all reported incidents. Over the past decade, roughly half of these attacks happened in the West. They planned to use that chaos “to create a favorable operating environment to conduct an assassination.” In the far-right movement, this twisted logic falls under the banner of an ideology called “accelerationism”: the belief that accelerating the collapse of society will enable white people to take over and rebuild the world they want. [How attacks on energy substations play into the hands of extremists]

In 2023 in my home state of South Dakota Riggin Lynn Scheer was unmasked as a Nazi. 

Now, three people have been arrested in northeastern South Dakota after bombs and firearms were discovered with assistance from the FBI although motives for their use have yet to be determined but entries on Chris Gamble's Faceberg page are saturated with hate-filled vitriol punctuated with input from fellow suspect, John Felice.