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Imagine writing this unhinged mental fanfiction for every news article you read. Headline: Man Steals Car "Well, if I fancied myself a racewar enthusiast of course I would _say_ it was for money but it would obviously be in support of creating chaos and undermining the government institutions to allow for our brothers to rise against".
Have you already forgotten about Timothy McVeigh?
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We don't know if they are domestic or not and we don't know the motives.
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Saying something is true does not make it true, but it does make it seem true. This is not a trivial fact.
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The attack on infrastructure itself could constitute terrorism, if the infrastructure attack was intended to scare or intimidate the public to achieve some political objective. Wiktionary's definition of terrorism includes attacks against property: "The use of unlawful violence against people or property to achieve political objectives." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/terrorism
I don't completely agree with that definition. A bank robber may briefly instill terror to the people in the bank, but it's not an act of terror. However, if it's committed by a group (like the Hearst heir) then because it's in support of further activities, I would classify it as terrorism. Often, governments, (not just the US but in general) use the term in order to enlist more sympathy from disinterested civilians…
Political motive is a key part of that definition. Simple greed isn't a political motive, but if somebody started robbing banks because they had an axe to grind with the federal reserve, I think that would probably qualify as terrorism.
It's quite interesting that they also attacked a substation that looked important on a map, but wasn't actually vital. I think some of the early reporting about this incident suggested they "knew what they were doing", but the apparent misidentification of one of their targets perhaps suggests the perpetrators were making educated guesses, without detailed/insider knowledge of how the system worked.
They knew enough to shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace. They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack. It's easier to attack than defend.
Interestingly, I'd wager that very little infrastructure in developed countries was designed with any thought of defending it from it's own citizens.
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I don't completely agree with that definition. A bank robber may briefly instill terror to the people in the bank, but it's not an act of terror. However, if it's committed by a group (like the Hearst heir) then because it's in support of further activities, I would classify it as terrorism. Often, governments, (not just the US but in general) use the term in order to enlist more sympathy from disinterested civilians…
> A bank robber may briefly instill terror to the people in the bank, but it's not an act of terror. Political motive is a key part of that definition. Simple greed isn't a political motive, but if somebody started robbing banks because they had an axe to grind with the federal reserve, I think that would probably qualify as terrorism.
For example OWS was political and caused some property damage [as well as euro climate activists throwing substances at artworks], but I would be loath to classify either terrorism. I guess the action in ATL regarding a police raining facility is domestic terrorism.
"Officials have stopped short of calling it an act of terrorism, presumably because we don’t know the motive of whoever perpetrated the act" There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck. There have also been…
Regarding the sabotage in Washington State, it doesn't make a lot of sense to attack four substations simultaneously just to steal from the cash register of a small business. If I fancied myself to be an antigovernment militia leader who had read all the white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and s…
They were pretty bad at what they were doing.
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They're rare because nobody is doing them. If some group decides that it's a thing to do, it will increase rapidly in frequency. I don't know what the limitations are, and maybe natural disasters will continue to dominate. But I wouldn't extrapolate just because it hadn't been the mechanism of choice so far.
> it will increase rapidly in frequency There's what, 1000-10000x the number of law enforcement personal, national guard, and active military than electrical substations? If these attacks were to rapidly increase over a few days we'd just post guards with guns and cameras at every substation while we pour a thick and tall wall of concrete around all the sensitive bits.
Your build-a-wall plan is even less plausible. Assuming a half-acre per substation, that's over 6000 miles of walls. In non-flat areas, they might have to be quite tall. We're looking at billions of dollars here, but the hard part is likely the equipment and labor, and knock-on economic costs from supply chain disruption.
This kind of chaos and expense sounds like a terrorist's wildest dream, honestly, a cure worse than the disease.
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Terrorism has a specific meaning. All these are what one would call sabotage. It would be terrorism if the saboteurs disabled the substations in support of an attack terrorizing civilians. Example, they shoot up a substation so that police are unable to respond to a siege on some government agency or a hostage situation at a bank.
You can absolutely sabotage as a terrorist though. They aren't mutually exclusive. Damaging property if the motives and outcome align with what we consider terrorism is terrorism. But the meaning of terrorism is rather vague, and broad. If I blow up a substation and it causes blackouts and chaos, that can be terrorism.
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/01/19/surge-in-oregon-washi...
"As a string of attacks on electrical substations unfolded in Oregon and Washington in 2022, the FBI was warning utilities of white supremacists’ plots to take down the nation’s power grid"
"The individuals of concern believe that an attack on electrical infrastructure will contribute to their ideological goal of causing societal collapse and a subsequent race war in the United States,” according to an FBI memo obtained by OPB and KUOW.
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This has been going on for some time. This is not a bunch of environmentalists as some people have oddly assumed in this thread. This is part of a long pattern of right-wing political violence in the US that is occurring throughout the country, not just in North Carolina. Virtually every week, there’s an arrest of a right wing political group, candidate, or activist who is waging a campaign of violence against the American public. Blaming so-called "environmentalists" for what is clearly a repeated pattern of right wing political violence is about as tone deaf as you can get. Read the news.