Three men with ties to white supremacist groups were sentenced to prison last month for planning to attack a power grid in the northwestern United States.
Last year, federal law enforcement officials charged two people with conspiracy to destroy an energy facility and accused them of creating a racist plot to cut power in Baltimore, a predominantly Black city.
And in February 2022, three men also connected to white supremacist groups pleaded guilty over a scheme to target substations around the country in an attempt to cause “economic distress and civil unrest,” according to the F.B.I.
These plots, though unsuccessful, are part of a larger trend by far-right extremist groups in recent years to try to create chaos by bringing down the energy infrastructure that keeps society functioning, according to experts in extremism.
Plots from white supremacists became more common.
There is a long history of extremist attacks on critical infrastructure in the United States. Of attacks on the energy sector made in the last half-century, most were carried out by unidentified actors. Where assailants were identified, a third of attacks were carried out in the 1970s by people associated with the New World Liberation Front, a left-wing extremist group, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
But more recent plotted attacks on the energy sector have emerged from the opposite political extreme.
A 2022 study by researchers at George Washington University that analyzed planned attacks on infrastructure from 2016 to 2022 found that such plans among white supremacist groups “dramatically increased in frequency” in that time. Over the course of those years, 13 individuals associated with white supremacist groups were charged with planning attacks on the energy sector; 11 of those 13 people were charged after 2020.
While there has been an increase in threats by individuals with ties to white supremacist groups, the few attacks on power grids in the United States that have successfully caused outages in recent years have not been tied to such groups.
The authorities believe that the two men who were arrested in connection with a power station attack in Washington State in 2022 were trying to provide cover for a burglary. No one has been arrested in connection with two attacks on power stations in North Carolina in 2022 and 2023, and no motive was disclosed in court documents for why a suspect damaged a power substation in Oregon in 2022.
Their ideas originated in the 1960s.
The ideas to attack energy infrastructure shared online among today’s neo-Nazi and right-wing groups are mostly rooted in writings and ideology dating back to the 1960s, according to Jonathan Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
The new wave of violent, far-right plots often stem from the writings of James Mason, a neo-Nazi leader who produced a newsletter called “SIEGE” in the 1980s. Mr. Mason, who joined the American Nazi Party as a teenager, pushed for more underground and lethal approaches to achieve white supremacist goals in the United States.
Rather than using the existing political process to implement racist policy, which white supremacist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, worked to do in the 20th century, Mr. Mason wrote about wanting a “total war” against the system, a tenet of an ideology called “accelerationism.” Mr. Mason and his followers believed that a full collapse of American society was necessary to rebuild it with their extremist platform and “make way for the creation of a white ethnostate,” Mr. Lewis said.
Extremist experts found that today’s interpretation of these writings have manifested in a determination to destroy the energy sector.
Mr. Mason’s ideas, known as “siege culture,” began to circulate again in 2015 on an online forum called Iron March, which started in the early 2010s and was a hub for neo-Nazi groups and like-minded people to communicate and share ideas.
“It’s not the Klan who wants to have a headquarters and do some marches and try and get legislature passed that is inherently racist,” Mr. Lewis said. “The core of their ideology is that the system itself is inherently broken, that there is no political solution.”
Two of the three men who were sentenced last month for their plot to attack a power grid met in 2017 on Iron March.
The forum was shuttered in 2017, and today, these groups have mostly moved to communicating on Telegram, an encrypted messaging application that allows users to broadcast videos and messages to people with similar interests.
This online, fractured ecosystem of right-wing plotters has become known as “Terrorgram.” The community often passes around documents and digital magazines that include doctrines, propaganda and instructions for terroristic strikes.
“I’m not surprised that we are seeing an uptick in these arrests at the same time that we’re seeing an uptick in the pro-sabotage propaganda,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
Threats have been foiled, but are hard to tackle.
As far as experts know, the planned power grid attacks from far-right extremist groups have been intercepted by federal enforcement agencies before they could take place, but Mr. Segal, who researches and tracks right-wing extremist rhetoric online, said that does not mean they won’t be successful in the future.
“Often things start and stop and fail, and they learn from it,” he said. “And this propaganda is continuing.”
Mr. Lewis, from George Washington University, said the decentralized nature of the online forums makes it difficult for law enforcement and tech companies to respond to far-right extremism. Today’s far-right domestic terror groups don’t all have a leader and a logo that are identifiable.
This has forced police to catch these plots through undercover agents or informants. Mr. Lewis said it’s a bit like “Whac-a-Mole” trying to find and arrest individuals and small groups plotting infrastructure attacks.
“The barrier to entry here is not very high,” he said. “You just need one neo-Nazi who is online, on his computer, reading manifestoes of far right extremists, and who gets inspired to pick up his gun that he legally owns and drive out to some substation somewhere and start shooting.”
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