Brunswick Beacon, 02.23.23
Charles Manson was a white supremacist who carved a swastika into his forehead. His murders were intended to spark a race war he called “Helter Skelter.” Manson is dead, but “Helter Skelter” isn’t.
In 2020, four white supremacists were charged in NC with targeting America’s electrical grid. They admired Manson and met through neo-Nazi message boards. In 2022, three neo-Nazis pleaded guilty to targeting electrical substations to stoke division and ignite racial conflict. Department of Homeland Security says white supremacists are America’s “most persistent and lethal threat,” developing “credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure, identifying the electric grid as a particularly attractive target.” There were 163 electrical grid attacks last year.
NC’s electrical grid has suffered three attacks in three months. A Maysville substation was attacked last November, cutting power to 12,000 people. In December, two Moore County substations were attacked, blacking out 45,000 residents, some for a week. Last month, a Randolph County substation was attacked.
This month, the FBI arrested the founder of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division for conspiring to attack five Baltimore substations to inflame “racially-motivated hatred.” He used videos about NC’s attacks in his planning, kept a framed picture of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and idolized Manson.
Terrorist attacks by far-right extremists quadrupled from 2016-17 after Trump baselessly claimed America’s first black president wasn’t born here and Mexican rapists are invading America. In 2018 Trump said “I was 100% right. That’s why I got elected.” After Charlottesville’s white supremacist tiki-torch mob chanted Nazi slogans “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us,” and a neo-Nazi murdered 32-year-old anti-racist protester Heather Heyer with his car, Trump called them “very fine people.”
Tucker Carlson promotes white supremacist “Replacement Theory” on Fox. Republican officials embrace it. Liz Cheney warns: “GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism. What begins with words ends in far worse.”
Like “Helter Skelter.”
Claudia Tidwell
Leland
Comments