A Baltimore County woman has pleaded guilty Tuesday for conspiring to attack and destroy Baltimore region’s power grid last year.
Sarah Beth Clendaniel, from Catonsville, pleaded guilty to conspiring to damage or destroy electrical facilities and to being a felon in possession of a firearm, according to the Maryland Department of Justice.
She is now facing a maximum of 20 years in prison on the conspiracy charge and 15 years on the felony charge, followed up to a lifetime of supervised release for the conspiracy charge.
What is it with far right nutters trying to destroy the grid? What are they getting out of it?
Russian bots got to them
Punish the government, get attention, accelerate the coming raçe war, etc. They don’t live in reality.
Most probably trying to incite riot, looting and unrest as a direct result of a city wide black out.
They don’t even know: they aren’t organized enough to actually have thought that far. Right now, it seems that it’s just A 50:50 mix of shitposting IRL (in that this has the same vibe as someone buying into a meme, and running with it) and some form of protest.
iirc, the organization came from preparing to overthrow the government and cause chaos - and basically just “come prepared, ready to fight like hell” - around the January 6 riots. However, then they kinda dropped that overall plan in favor of having Pence certify the election results (which didn’t work out but…), except a few of the most die-hard members like her decided they didn’t want all that planning to go to waste. Having been handed that weapon (knowledge of how to really hurt an entire city), they were loath to not use it against their “enemies” (liberals, as exemplifed by city folk).
A “rebel without a(n organized) cause”, if you will. Any responsible gun owner knows the limits of when to draw their weapon (only when you are prepared to use it) and especially to actually discharge (only after you’ve positively identified the target, to avoid friendly fire). However, whoever radicalized her released the danger that she could unleash, without seeming to care about what chaos could ensue later, i.e. she is like a bullet fired from a gun, being uncontrollable after that point.
But anyway, January 6 has now been rewritten as being “peaceful”, so that retroactively makes her into a “lone actor”, until they find a better fit or use for her story.
I read something, after someone shot up that substation in North Carolina, stating that you’d only have to severely damage some absurdly low amount of power substations to completely kill the US power grid. I’m pretty sure the number was single digits and could be accomplished with available small arms. So it’s a feasible attack on unprotected infrastructure that could be accomplished with a pretty small force and isn’t really subject to time constraints or anything.
As far as end goal, idk I guess once the power utilities and Internet are down we’ll all have a racewar or something and the Nazis would win. I’m not too sure even they are positive about that part.
Might just be something to do. It’d be a pretty significant historical event.
Most substations are defended by a chain link fence with maybe some barbed wire at the top. There are plenty of tools that could disable them, both firearms and otherwise. I can’t speak to how many you’d need to take out to collapse the national grid, but I can tell you that region wide problems can be caused with an attack on one or two. Our infrastructure is ridiculously vulnerable.
They’re itching to tap into their 500 gallons of Prepper’s Milk and Jerky stew. They want their larping to be real so hard. It pairs well with the religious nutters that think by killing others, they’ll be allowed in Their God’s Heaven. It’s mind-boggling.
It’s out of a need/desire to “fix” what they see is wrong with society. They are angry that the world isn’t what they want it to be and will do whatever it takes, violence included, to bring us back to their version of what makes a good society.
They have been brainwashed by Fox News and other alt-right pundits. But before you feel bad for them, remember that they were racists before and Fox News, et al, just radicalized them into terrorism.
Why we haven’t labeled Fox News as a terrorist group yet is beyond me.
Ok, and how does an attack on the energy grid bring us back to their version of what makes a good society?
“If I can’t have nice things, then no one can.”
Or
“We’re going to force everyone to live the way I want. We’ll start over if we have to.”
This is the kind of shit that happens when the public education system gets gutted in an attempt to make the public ignorant and easily manipulated by politicians who are either too stupid to recognize the damage or too evil and corrupt to care. Countries like Russia love it though, because it makes their efforts to damage and destroy the United States much, much easier.
It makes the populace wonderfully easy to puppeteer, which is great for governments both domestic and foreign. Russia and China are having a great job spinning up contention in the US and setting groups of opposed people actively at each other’s throats. Organisers for groups and events end up being unrelated foreign actors who there just to intensify the conflict and push the two sides in to direct confrontation wherever possible.
“Fuck the libs.”