Radical, right-wing extremists have increased terrorism over the past several years.
This weekend brought a new problem: a group of extremists in North Carolina targeted a community power station. The attack has left tens of thousands of people in darkness and without heat when temperatures are dipping down to the 30s overnight.
Raw Story reported Sunday that the press conference with Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields revealed that they reached out to one woman, Emily Grace Rainey, who bragged she knew information about the attack and who was celebrating it as justice for those mocking God. When the officers went to speak with her, they joined her in prayer.
Rainey wrote about the interview on Facebook saying she told the sheriffs, "that God works in mysterious ways and is responsible for the outage. I used the opportunity to tell them about the immoral drag show and the blasphemies screamed by its supporters. God is chastising Moore County."
Prior to the November election, Newsweek reported that there were a number of online manuals that help extremists find ways to sabotage American energy infrastructure.
“The persons that done (sic) this — or the persons — knew what they were doing,” Fields said. “Absolutely.”
It's the kind of thing that FBI Director Christopher Wray had warned about when briefing the U.S. Senate after the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. He warned the leaders that there is a rapidly growing threat of American violent extremism, and law enforcement was scrambling to deal with it. It's just under two years later and the problem has always grown worse.
There were concerns amid the Russian hacks during the 2016 election that Russians could do the same to the U.S. power grid. What North Carolina learned over the weekend is that it only takes accurate aim to open fire on key pieces of a power station to attack a community.
The FBI reported in March that Russian hackers were "scanning the systems of energy companies and other critical infrastructure." They said that they were concerned it was a "current" threat to the United States. The hackers haven't brought anything down, but domestic extremists have.