> There were 70 reports of emergency electric incidents and disturbances caused by suspected physical attacks, sabotage or vandalism from January to August 2022, Grid’s analysis of the most recently available data from the Department of Energy found. That figure represents a 75 percent increase from 40 such reports in all of 2015, the first year for which comparable data is available.
That being said, this isn't new, it just wasn't reported on as much as before.
I'm surprised there isn't some automated drone-based system to detect and track the shots fired during an incident like this. Are we seeing any tech-based solutions to this yet? We've known about the risk to infrastructure like this since forever.
Well, you don't need a drone to detect a shot, but once a shot is detected, they could be used to track the source and take pictures and/or follow the perpetrator to their car or even further.
Given that the US is currently in a deep war with Russia and has spent billions helping Ukraine, I believe it is only normal that Russia finances turmoil in US with at least a couple hundreds of USD millions.
Just find extremist people in the US and finance them. It is a standard thing in war. The reason the Bolsheviks won was because they were supported by the german government, as they were in war against Russia.
Yes, it feels like a Russian operation carried out by proxies.
The motive (and timing - it's winter) is the same as in attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure - degrade quality of life for civilians in hopes of creating chaos & unrest
I have no idea why you are getting downvoted, as there is a lot of good evidence supporting your position. The book "Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare" by Thomas Rid spends a great deal of time talking about this. I think the evidence so far shows that the power station attacks are likely linked to loosely affiliated white supremacist groups. It is unknown if Russia is funding them, but if you recall, Russia was linked to several secessionist groups in the US, with the head of the California group eventually moving to Russia.
Curious, how can you tell that there are downvotes? I’m using https://news.ycombinator.com/ And don’t see anything in the UI about votes, either up or down.
> This sure looks like domestic terrorism, hard to believe this is ordinary vandalism.
Agreed 100% and framing it as vandalism feels like a disservice from the reporting.
> I would expect they have cameras, maybe they don't have good coverage.
It's also hard for cameras to cover every threatening angle. Any goon with a drone or a rifle can cause some from of damage to a power station, after all.
It's easy enough to cover the substations in cameras, but a hoodie and a mask is all that's needed to thwart cameras. The Jan 6 bomber is still unidentified.
An AR-15 has a 600 yard range. It's also easy enough to cover the area with cameras, but the beltway snipers shot from within the trunk of a car -- making a rolling sniper's nest.
Perhaps, although a power company spokesperson did say that the damage was done by “people who likely had familiarity with the systems.” (Or something to that effect.)
> Agreed 100% and framing it as vandalism feels like a disservice from the reporting.
The difference between vandalism and domestic terrorism, in this case, is intent. Since the reporters don't know the intent, calling it domestic terrorism would be speculation, which we need less of in reporting. Sticking to the facts is important.
Cannabis farms and retailers (1200+) in WA have to have cameras covering every square foot of the facility where controlled substances are. Surely we can do that for energy.
I’m pretty sure that that coverage is just inside their area of operations. Someone can be far outside of a substation and fire a rifle into it to do damage. that is a large area to cover with cameras.
This reads like satire:
“ Investigators probing the attacks last month at substations in Moore County, North Carolina, zeroed in on two possible threads: extremists' writings in online forums encouraging attacks on critical infrastructure, and recent disruptions of LGBTQ+ events across the nation by domestic extremists, law enforcement sources told CNN.”
Why on earth would you sabotage the electrical grid to disrupt LGBT events? Why don’t they have a thread for Americas numerous foreign enemies? Is that not a possibility?
Because a religious group in North Carolina did that, the power station powering the town with a drag show got shot up, and then they claimed "god works in mysterious ways" when interviewed by the police.
"did that" meaning did the attack? I don't think the article says that.
> Authorities in Moore County ... have not linked the coordinated attack to a drag queen performance
The quote you gave is from someone who promoted a protest. She was claiming that God destroyed the substation. It's not impossible that this means one of her group actually did it, but it's not the same. It's more like some religious figure in 2001 saying that 9/11 happened because of God's wrath against gays or something.
Yeah that yarn about the anti LGBTQ extremism is a GREAT example of the causal misinformation cycle we often find ourselves in.
It is readily falsifiable (the police talked of her like a day after the shooting and decided she is just a crank spouting off on Facebook…the end), it has absolutely no merit, zero.
It was repeated/suggested/amplified WAY early with zero evidence by notable LGBTQ twitter personalities because it fit a narrative in THEIR head. Then it became THE narrative…
And now despite absolutely no connection whatsoever you see it weeks later in adjacent news stories and even here on HN.
I'm glad other people can see this too. I keep being disappointed by modern journalism, and to be clear I mean from multiple sources across political divides. I hear a cacophony of lament towards Fox News, particularly Tucker Carlson. Yeah, I agree. But I put Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon under the same microscope. It makes me feel like I don't fit in anywhere. I guess I'm too much of an engineer. Just give me the data and I'll parse it myself. Everything else seems to have become corporate and ideological manipulation. "Oh, you're already angry about person X (of should be), just wait until we tell you their latest tweet. You'll practicaly sponteously combust (or should according to us)."
The ones that like to critique a certain someone for fomenting hate seem to be fomenting quite a lot of it themselves lately. I'm not convinced there is as much racial divide as I'm told by the news. Nor as mich divide in regards to gender.
Sorry, long response. I'm just really frustrated at being so consistently lied to by "official sources".
what you’re looking for is not journalism. it’s reporting. few do just reporting because it doesn’t accumulate clicks. journalism does. journalism also sometimes really highlights some deeper issues than just a report (think watergate). but almost all journalism is today clickbait.
Was there any evidence implicating a religious group besides one woman's Facebook post? Certain people say stuff like this all the time. ("The hurricane is God punishing gay people.") Unless there is much stronger evidence, pushing this angle smells of poor journalism to me.
>Because a religious group in North Carolina did that, the power station powering the town with a drag show got shot up, and then they claimed "god works in mysterious ways" when interviewed by the police.
That doesn't mean she or anybody religious did it? Please reread what you posted.
Yes, but some sorts make for a worse world, among those are the people who are sexualising pre-pubescent children. Drag shows belong together with burlesque and other explicitly sexual things in a wholly adult world, not in the places where they are now being pushed.
You should attend a family-oriented drag event. Mormon friends of mine were taught the missionary position, in church bible study, as pre-teens. These drag shows don't even come close to that.
People keep saying it's not okay to sexualize kids but it's perfectly normal for, say, grandpa to ask a 5 year-old if he's got a girlfriend yet. But telling a boy that it's okay to not be attracted to girls? That's going too far.
What about people who are informed and decide they don't like these attempts at sexualisation? People who consider those attempts to be a bane on society are not uninformed, they just disagree with this trend. I disagree with this trend and I'm glad my children were not exposed to it.
They misunderstand the ideas discussed in those forums. Its about political violence against inanimate objects (infrastructure) that actually represents a attack vector of societies future.
Destroying a substation could also be perceived as furthering independence and increasing societies resilience to a soon failing government.
Most of the violence encouraged, is against pipeline infrastructure, which one has to admit is already causing a ecological mass-genocide. So our all consuming society model is the radical dangerous faction in this view and the shortsighted majority the attacking group.
It is a theme in some forums, and its hard to argue against it, without sounding like a techno-messiah madmen, who over promised over the last 30-40 years. Fusion is not here, the free market caused more problems then it did solve, the elites who applaud themselves for creativity, are compared to previous generations impotent, responsibility shy and attempting to run away from the mess.
Its also a convenient scape goat to have, if one privatized public services into monopolies, which now fail to perform.
I ve heard the lgbt+ also set the Reichstag ablaze.
Because the point isn't JUST to disrupt LGBT events. It's to scare people and ultimately prevent further events both by making that community self censor AND by intimidating neutral people to oppose them.
Some of them are very bright. It's worth remembering that grievances are often just proxies/decoys for people to network and organize around rather than genuine ends in themselves.
Foreign enemies? There is a lot well-documented violence by Americans against other Americans, especially attacks on religious minorities, racial minorities and LGBTQ people. Foreign acts of aggression within the US are exceptionally rare.
Same reason that the set of people who go to protests about drag queen story hours happens to overlap with the set of people who protest about vaccine conspiracy theories and mask mandates, and happens to overlap with the set of people who are especially nationalist etc. Perhaps it just seems like satire because you have not given much thought to political radicalism in the last few years.
> Why on earth would you sabotage the electrical grid to disrupt LGBT events? Why don’t they have a thread for Americas numerous foreign enemies? Is that not a possibility?
What on earth would a 'foreign enemy' have to gain from a local electrical grid attack in the US, Mr McCarthy? Against the risk of getting discovered and thus sanctioned/invaded/whatever, disrupting a town's electricity supply for a few days doesn't make any sense, even for Putin's Russia.
"vandalized". I have a strong suspicion that if a different sub set of the population committed the exact crime the headline would include the word terrorism.
But I think for some people there is a workaround. Where I live we are on Natural Gas. Years ago, the furnace there was rather old and needed to be replaced due to a leak. But that furnace would work fine without electricity, it had what I think was called a magneto. So with power outages, we at least has heat.
The State made these furnaces illegal to install, so now, the new one would stop working with power outages. Why can't people with oil/gas be allowed to install furnaces without the need for electricity. In many places it is too tight to install a generator.
My gas fireplace will run without power, but the fans will not, so it will run much, much less efficiently and take hours to warm a room from the ceiling down. However, my gas furnace will not run because it needs the large electric fans to circulate the air from the furnace in the garage to the registers in each room in the house.
I used to have a freestanding gas fireplace that worked great in a power outage, because even though the blower didn't run it could still radiate from all sides.
Since this is hackernews, you might truly appreciate the simplicity and
nearly-the-most-elegant-solution that is the mechanical joy of these guys right 'yere :D :https://youtube.com/shorts/AK4c3REFerw?feature=share
A natural gas furnace without a blower? That's what you really need the electricity for. There are pure natural gas appliances, such as decorative fireplaces and water heaters, which do not need a fan and use a thermocouple to power the control board.
> But that furnace would work fine without electricity
Without electricity, how would the furnace communicate with the thermostat, and how would the blower fan motor operate? Convection goes up, but not necessarily out, and without a blower fan there's risk of the furnace overheating.
I find it odd that radiant heat is so uncommon in the US and most of Canada, even in buildings without AC, whilst in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe it’s the most common form of heating. Anecdotally I much prefer radiant heat to forced air.
The air circulation from forced air keeps the mildew down. I once had an apartment with radiant heat. The windows would collect condensed water and the sills were all moldy. Forced air also keeps the CO2 levels in the room in check.
You can have air circulation independent of the heating, which has the advantage of keeping the mildew down all year round. In fact that's the norm on newly built buildings in France, you have radiators for heating and an active air circulation system.
Can confirm, I have radiant heat and we have to watch out for condensation on windows especially in the bathroom or where curtains are drawn. We have an air exchange as well and it does help but not 100%
You generally still need electricity for radiant heating - there's a pump moving water through the radiators.
But I think it's pretty easy to understand why it's unpopular. First, AC is popular in the US, so a system that can reuse the same ducts is a lot less expensive than something entirely separate. Secondly, it's a lot simpler and cheaper to service. If your hydronic heating system freezes or develops an airlock or springs a leak, you might be looking at five-figure repair costs.
Ever see radiator in action ? The ones I have uses steam. Water would boil in the furnace and pressure would force the steam up to the radiators. Then the steam would condense, heating the apartment and the water would flow back down to the furnace to be re-heated again.
In the old furnace, every so often you would have to add water, depending on how cold it is outside.
The house was build over 110 years ago, so electricity was not too common back then. I probably think the source of heat back then was a coal furnace.
I find that radiant more evenly heats a space - there's no obvious warm air flow from a vent like you'd get with forced air. It's also near silent (except for your boiler) and doesn't blow dust about.
That’s likely it: high efficiency (“condensing”) burners need a powered vent for the draft. The amount of heat extracted means a “natural” draft is chancy.
And for ignition since they don’t use/waste a pilot light.
Ideally we'd wait until we have evidence of who did it and what their motivations are, rather than just jumping to whichever conclusion fits our existing biases.
On the other hand, we don't live in an ideal world. If it is terrorism, then the perpetrators have an interest in avoiding capture so there's probabilities of false negatives as well as false positives.
We know that people who espouse terrorism not only fantasize but produce instructional materials on this sort of thing, so we should admit admit it as a possibility and try to estimate the probability of it being a factor here.
Normally a terrorist group claims responsibility and makes demands. Vandals generally don’t. Call it what you like, but it’s unknown who is responsible.
> Normally a terrorist group claims responsibility and makes demands
Making-demand (AKA hostage-taking) terrorism was mostly a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in the form of flight hijackings, and was usually carried out by state-affiliated terrorists, who had an objective to negotiate for prisoner releases.
The violence/fear-as-the-objective type of terrorism has been the predominant since the Oklahoma City bombing onwards to the Salafist terrorism of the last few decades and through to the current spate of white-supremacist motivated terror attacks (i.e. Buffalo). There was quite a bit of this sort of terrorism going on in the US prior to the Civil Rights movement, too, but we didn't have the word "terrorism" to apply to things like lynchings.
Claiming responsibility is not useful for domestic terrorists as they can then be easily captured compared to those who reside in hostile states. Also, claiming responsibility also has the effect of reducing panic and confusion, which is the opposite of what these groups want to accomplish. Timothy McVeigh didn't claim responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombings. He was tracked down (despite his use of aliases to rent the truck) by FBI agents:
While I can sympathize with people suggesting these initial reports shouldn't overreach, I agree that it seems like a stretch to call attacking infrastructure 'vandalism' - it seems qualitatively different than throwing a rock through a window, somehow. But of course labeling it domestic terrorism doesn't explain who did it, or why.
The article posted above actually devotes two whole paragraphs to speculating about this, but the reality is that because CNN doesn't know the motives of the perpetrators, it would be irresponsible to name them terrorists. As internet blowhards who know literally nothing about the story, and hold ourselves to no standards at all, we can go ahead and call it terrorism though. Damn terrorists!
While I agree that's what it is, I don't get upset that it's not plastered as such in headlines.
I think the first time most Americans heard much or cared about terrorism was 9/11. The word has -very- strong emotional attachment - hatred, fear, anger, sadness, etc. In the interest of not causing nationwide panic, I can understand why they're just calling it vandalism.
Others may say we -should- be panicking, and I can't necessarily disagree, only explaining one possible reason media is hesitant to use that word.
> I think the first time most Americans heard much or cared about terrorism was 9/11.
Not at all. During my lifetime, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Unabomber's arrest were all prominent enough for me to remember when they happened. I still remember hearing my grandmother express concern about the Michigan Militia when she saw a belligerent guy wearing camo pants.
So, I remember these events(vaguely), but not a lot of talk of terrorism specifically. Do you happen to recall if the media specifically labeled them terrorists at the time?
The 1993 WTC bombing was definitely labelled terrorism. I remember it as a bit of a shock, that Americans didn't realize people in the Middle East were really pissed at us about something. Oklahoma City was quickly labelled terrorism, many originally assumed it was Mid-East in origin again and were shocked that it was domestic terrorists. I don't remember the Unabomber incident much, but I do remember there was much attention given to his manifesto.
I think we need more information before we can proclaim it terrorism with certainty. If it was say teenagers with guns or something, that is probably not terrorism, that's stupidity. But I do think it wasn't an accident and was likely planned, attempted to stew disorder. But the world is complicated, people do things to try to blame the other side. There is actual right wing accelerationism, but we need a little more evidence before we can confidently say what this is in headlines.
What’s really scary is that Mylar balloon clusters, like the ones at party stores or grocery stores, released at strategic spots at the same time, would take it all down. You can’t possibly guard against that or a few drones with cheap space blankets. Real nightmare fuel.
usually with terrorism there is an claim of responsibility, and an expression of aggrieviation. to my knowledge, no public display of responsible whos, and whys, have occured
> usually with terrorism there is an claim of responsibility
"In the past two decades, fewer than half of all terrorist attacks have been either claimed by their perpetrators or convincingly attributed by governments to specific terrorist groups."
> also the definition of terroism has been applied with a broader brush over the recent years [perhaps 10 years?]
What's your source for this? Events classified as "terrorist incidents" per year in the U.S. regularly exceeded 100 in the 1970s, but haven't exceeded 65 in 10 years ending 2017.¹
“Terrorism” is just the 21st century rebranding of the 20th century’s “anarchism”. People used “anarchism” and “anarchist” frequently during the 20th century.
Anarchism has an actual political meaning, with lots of literature.
Terrorism isn't a consistent ideological position. People don't openly advocate for what they self describe as terrorist states, terrorist literature and philosophy, terrorist thinkers and political party. There's no terrorist bookstore, but here in SF I can go down to Haight St and find an anarchist bookstore ...
On the other hand I think terrorist is an appropriate description for a Timothy McVeigh or a Kaczynski. I would say those are more violent than most 19th-20th century political anarchists.
Is causing trouble not really terrorism? What if the scale changes from 14,00 to someone taking down key pieces of the power grid and NYC goes without power for a day? If this happened in my neighborhood I’d want the authority in charge to absolutely treat this or any attack on infrastructure as terrorism.
> What if the scale changes from 14,00 to someone taking down key pieces of the power grid
Still not terrorism.
> I’d want the authority in charge to absolutely treat this or any attack on infrastructure as terrorism.
Sure, but only until they determine what it really is.
Terrorism is hard to define exactly, but some required elements are that it be an attack on civilians (an attack on military or police is never terrorism). And it must have a goal of some kind, they must want to change something, by making people scared of another attack.
If you attack people because you hate them, that's not terrorism unless your goal is to change some law or reality (for example make them scared to leave their homes). If you just attack out of hatred it's bad, but it's not terrorism.
Terrorism doesn't have much to do with outcomes. If i accidentally flew a plane into the twin towers while drunk, it's not terrorism. It's a lot of things, but not terrorism.
If i was homer simpson and caused a nuclear incident due to negligence, it's still not terrorism.
In Canada the Federal government is quick to call truckers terrorists, but reluctant to call left wing activists destroying and threatening oil and gas developments or road infrastructures over climate change and environmental issues.
Jan 6ths got the T word thrown around.
Perhaps it can be viewed as a word used to selectively threats to the powerful or their narrative.
Accelerationists implicitly believe they'll survive whatever happens on the way to their envisioned Paradise, and are willing to sacrifice others to get to whatever end state they have in mind. It's fundamentally a belief of privileged, insulated people who don't care about those less fortunate than themselves.
i was open to buying into left related accelerationism until i remembered my history books. Power vacuums are rarely filled by who you want them to be filled by, and too many are hurt in the process.
I just meant in in my high school history books and one world history class i took in community college. Other than that I wouldn't say I've really "read history books". I'm sure I've read about other events as I went through life though.
> Power vacuums are rarely filled by who you want them to be filled by, and too many are hurt in the process.
I wish more people learned from history.
Punch the Fascists? Well, the Left tried that in Weimar Germany, and it ended with the Fascists in charge.
Have a Socialist Revolution? You end up with Lenin and Stalin, or Mao and Deng, or, for extra points, the Khmer Rouge, a regime so insane even their fellow Socialists in Vietnam invaded them to end their brutality; even if you insist none of those people were True, Honest Socialists, that's part of the point, isn't it? They're the people Socialist Revolution ended up putting into power.
What is to be done? Maybe, just maybe, not something which puts the most violent out in front.
I was kind of wondering what you were talking about. On it's face it seems like justification for atrocities committed by Marxists for ideological purposes.
You've made a very good point about the dangers of failing to learn from history, and I think that if you spent an hour or so researching how Hitler actually came to power in the Weimar Republic, you'd be able to appreciate it.
Actually, you said something hyperbolic that was spectacularly false, which you seem to have no intention of acknowledging. If one has a defensible point, it's usually much better to go ahead and make that point in the first place. As it stands, you'll have to hope that someone else makes it to me on some other day, I guess, if it matters to you.
I think that’s a gross oversimplification of the history of political violence in Weimar Germany. Much of the Nazi’s rise to power in Weimar Germany came from their paramilitary forces, the SA and SS. The state was unable to control or suppress those forces. Most other political parties had their own paramilitary wing, including right wing parties besides the Nazis and left wing parties like the KPD and SPD. Left wing parties unilaterally standing down their paramilitary forces while other parties didn’t wouldn’t have prevented the Nazi rise to power.
This also seems misleading with respect to Hitler's rise to power, which had far more to do with the weakness of Weimar Germany's institutions and the cynicism of the ruling classes than the SA or the SS, although I agree with your point about the political violence of the time in general.
I just want it to be clear, I still consider myself a leftist, but I'll never buy into stuff like "we just need to let these folks run things until we're ready for communism".
While I'm glad that accelerationism is being discussed, this description does a poor job at laying out the map of the ideological territory. The thing it inadvertently does is confuse accelerationism with right-wing accelerationism.
> Accelerationism is the most inherently violent and dangerous ideology circulating in the global white supremacist extremist movement.
This for example is not untrue, but it omits the basics necessary to understand the broader context.
Accelerationism is a practical strategy able to be incorporated into any ideology. While right-wing accelerationism seeks to foment civil breakdown that results in a white ethno state, left wing accelerationism seeks to let the breaks off if capitalism in the hope that it will self implode and the resulting devestattion can be harnessed to bring about a communist utopia.
Between and around these lie myriad other accelerationist tendencies each with its own version of what will happen after the status quo self-annihilates. My point is that leaving out all of this is a huge omission and we haven't even gotten to Nick Land and the CCRU yet!
There's an important lesson to be learned here, in that the intricacies and subdivisions of your fandom only matter to you, and nobody else cares. Just like metalheads insist on profound differences between thrash and doom that no non-metalheads will ever notice, nobody cares about the differences between left- and right-accelerationsism when the practical effect-- destroying civilization and all its comforts, probably killing millions and leaving us in a miserable hard-scabble existence-- is the same.
I'm not sure we know HN the same way. The HN audience I know generally enjoys peering into subcultures and understanding the intricacies of their conceptualizations from the inside. I can't think of an audience more aligned with picking apart subtle distinctions than this one.
Why use the term accelerationism when sociopathy would describe those people even better? It's a dangerous disease, not just a mild difference in opinions.
Yeah, we don't need to go overboard here and nuke them from orbit. This is criminal, investigate, arrest, prosecute. It doesn't need an overreaction. We just need a reaction from our police forces.
The FBI's definition of "terrorist" has been criticized by academics in the past. For example, attacks on property and attacks on humans have been grouped together leading to stuff like "vegan extremists free help some factory farm pigs escape" and "rightwing extremist shoots up a hospital that provides abortion access" (a shockingly common event tbh) both bring grouped under the same label.
Whatever you think of vegans or factory farming, I think most people would agree these are pretty different categories. In a past review the FBI analyzed their data by grouping it into "leftwing", "rightwing", and "salafi-jihadist" categories of domestic terrorism. Leftwing violence was still the smallest out of these (and with the exception of 2001, rightwing violence led), but not by much given that the vast majority events under that category were "ecoterrorism"
And that's just domestically. Internationally most countries know the label is a joke and purely a political tool used against anyone the US doesn't like. The "ecoterrorist" label is particularly brutal as it's been used to justify the state's murder of many indigenous activists, particularly in the Amazon
Almost immediately after the NC ones happened, there was generated consensus online that this was the work of conservatives upset at a drag show happening somewhere in the state.
That’s where politics comes in: instant outrage at beyond-unproven, unfounded speculation.
Whoever did this were assholes. What their political leanings were is not yet discovered.
Whether rightwing extremists did or did not actually act out the plot is hard to prove. We'll have to wait for the FBI's investigation for that. What's not hard at all to prove is the very public threads of rightwing extremists encouraging attacks on public infrastructure so I think it's important to have these discussions
This report[0] on domestic violent terrorism came out in 2022 before the NC attack and talks about how rapidly far-right terrorism has grown in the past decades
> Salafi-jihadist and white supremacist attack planners attempted to target different critical
infrastructure sectors, with the former focusing on the commercial facilities, government facilities,
and emergency services sectors, and the latter predominantly focusing on the energy sector.
> Since 2019, white supremacist attacks plots against critical infrastructure systems have distinctly
increased.
> Between 2016 and 2022, white supremacist plots targeting energy systems dramatically
increased in frequency. 13 individuals associated with the movement were arrested and charged
in federal court with planning attacks on the energy sector; 11 of these attack planners were
charged after 2020.
Your comment felt unprompted and the accusation of "[instant] generated consensus" is hard to prove and I don't think any GP implied anything like that
Look at the time stamps of HN, Twitter, or FB comments on the day of the NC attacks.
Either law-enforcement investigations happened vastly faster on that particular day than ever before, or people were leaping to and sharing outraged conclusions. You’re right that I can’t prove law enforcement hadn’t solved the case that quickly that day.
As for unprompted, the post above mine directly asked “where does politics come into this?”
Conservatives, currently, have a significant problem with folks doing violence and domestic terrorism. Left wing had it in the 1970s (although to be fair the data has shown the right tends to kills more folks even going back to then).
https://www.grid.news/story/technology/2022/12/06/the-north-...
> There were 70 reports of emergency electric incidents and disturbances caused by suspected physical attacks, sabotage or vandalism from January to August 2022, Grid’s analysis of the most recently available data from the Department of Energy found. That figure represents a 75 percent increase from 40 such reports in all of 2015, the first year for which comparable data is available.
That being said, this isn't new, it just wasn't reported on as much as before.