An ideology with roots in white supremacist writings in the 20th century found renewed attention in neo-Nazi online groups in the 2010s and has inspired recent plots, say researchers. 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. (…) 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. (…) 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.
via nytimes: Why White Supremacists Are Trying to Attack Energy Grids