In a series of commentaries during his top-rated television program FOX News host Tucker
Carlson has said out loud something that many of us have been thinking: "Our food, water, energy, and infrastructure are being degraded. Who knows why? If you didn't know any better you'd think there might be a war going on."
This is something that many conservatives in the national security field have been thinking and discussing among themselves, but few have been willing to go on record and say it out loud: America is under attack.
Part of that reluctance may be attributable to the difficulty in answering the obvious follow-up question: Under attack by who?
Before we answer the “who” let’s take a look at some of the attacks and where logical analysis of the evidence takes us.
As Tucker explained during a recent program, “Over the last two years, the FBI has investigated more than 40 cases of rail sabotage in Washington State alone in one state. Now, a lot of those attacks involve so-called shunt devices. Those are wires stretched between tracks that interfere with the train's electrical signals and cause derailments.
“In one incident just before Christmas in 2020, a shunt caused a train to derail in Custer, Washington. That train spilled 30,000 gallons of crude oil and forced locals to evacuate their homes. Well, that's not the environmental disaster that Joe Biden talks about because, of course, he can't buy solar panels and the Chinese to fix it, but it was, objectively speaking, an act of terrorism. The interesting thing is very often, in fact, in the majority of cases, people who commit acts of terrorism against infrastructure, whoever they are, are never punished and the ones who are caught aren't really punished.
“One woman who tried to destroy trains using a shunt got out of jail after only a year. Oh, so no one's paying any attention and no one really seems to care because what does that have to do with environmental racism and climate? Possibly, as a result of that attitude, there are an awful lot of train derailments in this country, many more than you may realize.
“In the last calendar year, more than a thousand trains went off the tracks in the United States. How's that for a metaphor? Just today, two more trains derailed. One of them was in South Carolina and one was in Texas near Houston. The train near Houston was also carrying hazardous materials, as so many trains are. What's going on here exactly? We're not even going to guess, but we can tell you the chaos is not limited to our rail system. There have also been many recent attacks on our power grid. Very few of those attacks have been widely reported. Last year there were more than 100 attacks of them in the United States, attacks on our power grid.
“In North Carolina this winter, for example, nearly 50,000 people lost their power in freezing temperatures when somebody shot up two energy substations and so on. Why is it not a big story? Oh, it's not a story at all.
“And of course, at the same time, we've also seen a series of bizarre accidents befalling the food industry, threatening our food supply. That would include unexplained fires and plane crashes and processing plants to chicken feed, that seems to stop egg production. Boy, next they'll be coming for the water. Oh, wait, they are.
“Less than a month into the Biden administration was also a highly sophisticated attack on the water supply outside Tampa.
CBS REPORTER: Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri says a water treatment plant operator first noticed the remote access hack. The bad actor increased the amount of sodium hydroxide or lye in the water supply from 100 parts per million to more than 11,000 for the 15,000 residents of Oldsmar, Florida. The increase of sodium hydroxide in the water supply could have caused vomiting, chest and abdominal pain.
PINELLAS COUNTY SHERIFF BOB GUALTIERI: This type of activity and this type of hacking of critical infrastructure is not necessarily limited to just water supply systems. It can be anything.
“Oh, an attack on our water supply. That's weird. I didn't read that in the New York Times, but what's interesting. Not to connect the dots or anything, that was not the only attack on our water supply that year. In January 2021, there was a similar effort to poison the water treatment plant that serves the San Francisco Bay area. An unidentified hacker accessed the facility's computers remotely. According to NBC, "After logging in, the hacker deleted programs that the water plant used to treat drinking water."
“Now, fortunately, in this case, somebody noticed it. The next day the attack was discovered in those programs were reinstalled, so nobody got poisoned, but they kept trying. There were similar hacks of water treatment facilities in California in August of 2021. There was one in Maine in July of 2021. There was one in Pennsylvania in May of 2021; in Nevada, in March; in New Jersey in September of 2020; in Kansas in March of 2019 and so on.”
And there’s more. To Tucker’s list we can add the research of others, including sources not associated with conservatives.
As WIRED reported, physical attacks have targeted the U.S. electrical grid in at least four states in three months.
Andy Greenberg, a senior writer for WIRED, reported, “Duke Energy, reported gunfire at another facility, a hydroelectric power plant in South Carolina. And combined with two more incidents of hands-on sabotage of US power facilities that occurred in Oregon and Washington in October and November, the vulnerability of the US grid to old-fashioned physical harm has begun to seem like a serious threat.”
According to Mr. Greenberg’s reporting:
No damage seems to have occurred in the South Carolina case, and in the earlier incidents in Washington, the utilities involved described the cases as “vandalism.” But the intruders in Oregon carried out a more deliberate attack, cutting through a perimeter fence and damaging equipment, according to the Oregon utility, causing a “brief” power outage in one case. And in yet another, separate collection of incidents, Duke Energy saw half a dozen “intrusions” at substations in Florida, according to documents seen by Newsnation. Federal law enforcement is investigating the cases.
The incidents are reminiscent of what Mr. Greenberg called “another strange, isolated attack” on the California power grid in 2015, when a sniper fired on an electrical substation and triggered a blackout to parts of Silicon Valley along with $15 million in damage. These newer cases, while still relatively small in scale, show just how disturbingly vulnerable the American power grid remains to relatively simple forms of sabotage, concluded Mr. Greenberg.
Our friends at the Center for Security Policy (CSP) have spent years warning elected officials and policymakers about the vulnerability of our power grid and electric distribution infrastructure.
As CSP Executive Vice President Tommy Waller explained in a recent article, these attacks happen much more frequently than most people realize.
Physical attacks on the U.S. grid occur at a frequency of more than one per week according to Michael Mabee, who tracks data on electric outages reported to the Department of Energy (DOE).
According to Mabee’s analysis of DOE data, from January 1, 2010, through August 2022, there have been at least 919 physical attacks on the U.S. grid and the rate of attacks is increasing.
In some cases, these acts are not terrorism but criminal and involve the theft of copper.
In other cases, such as the well-documented 2013 attack in on the Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) Metcalf substation in San Jose – the attackers did not want to steal copper but rather sabotage the grid, causing costly, life-threatening blackouts. Despite promises from PG&E to improve security, the same substation was breached again in 2014.
We find it interesting and baffling that in a series of attacks spanning a decade the FBI hasn’t made any arrests, and the government at large – Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, etc. – has made no strides in hardening the grid or increasing security at vulnerable installations, such as the isolated substations that were the subject of the recent attacks in North Carolina.
From our perspective these attacks bear all the hallmarks of the kind of domestic asymmetric warfare carried out by two overlapping Far Left terrorist movements – ANTIFA and anti-capitalist ecoterrorist cells. Both movements share a heavy presence in the American Northwest states of Oregon and Washington and are known to travel vast distances to participate in “direct action” riots, such as those in Atlanta recently.
As independent journalist Andy Ngo (one of the real experts on Antifa) explained in an article for The American Spectator:
Antifa, the extreme anarchist-communist movement, has rioting down to an art. The first broken window is the blood in the water for looters to move in. When the looting is done, those carrying flammable chemicals start fires to finish the job. Footage recorded in Minneapolis and other cities show militants dressed in black bloc— the antifa uniform — wielding weapons like hammers or sticks to smash windows. You see their graffiti daubed on smashed up buildings: FTP means ‘Fuck the Police’; ACAB stands for ‘All Cops Are Bastards’; 1312 is the numerical code for ACAB.
Last night, rioters reached the gates of the White House, possibly the most secure location on Earth. There, they chipped away at the barriers piece-by-piece while law enforcement struggled to respond. One Secret Service officer reportedly had a brick thrown at his head. Footage recorded at the scene showed him blood-soaked. Police were eventually able to repel masked rioters by using pepper spray and tear gas. That worked, for now.
The militants uprising across the country want a revolution and they don’t care who or what has to be destroyed in the process. If their comrades die, they are elevated as martyrs in propaganda. Death is celebrated.
At its core, BLM is a revolutionary Marxist ideology. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, BLM’s founders, are self-identified Marxists who make no secret of their worship of communist terrorists and fugitives, like Assata Shakur. They want the abolishment of law enforcement and capitalism. They want regime change and the end of the rule of law. Antifa has partnered with Black Lives Matter, for now, to help accelerate the breakdown of society.
The ”breakdown” of society is the nihilistic goal of ANTIFA and their allies, and what better way to achieve that goal than to attack the infrastructure that allows modern society to function? Yet, for reasons unknown these two Far Left terrorist movements have remained largely uninvestigated and unpenetrated by the FBI and other domestic security organs of our federal and state governments.
The Capitol Switchboard is (202) 224-3121 we urge CHQ readers and friends to call House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, tell Chairman Comer you want a thorough investigation into these attacks and who is behind them.
Tucker Carlson
food
water
energy
infrastructure
sabotage
terrorism
Center for Security Policy (CSP)
U.S. power grid
theft of copper
Department of Homeland Security
Department of Energy
Department of Defense
ANTIFA
anti-capitalist ecoterrorist cells
James Comer