Moore County Sniper, Metcalf Sniper, Nashville Bombing, and Die Hard

A probably not-yet-true conspiracy theory that probably eventually will be.

This weekend some undetermined number of snipers knocked out two power transfer stations in Moore County North Carolina, leaving 45,000 people without power as well as numerous businesses. The Culture War Washing Machine is variously blaming either evil red tribers for wanting to interrupt a drag show, or evil poors for using it as a way to raid a pawn shop. It strikes me, as I look back across this and similar instances, that there may be something deeper going on with this and similar historical attacks, related to the world’s most favorite Christmas Movie.

Let’s begin.

Moore County Drag Show

The blue half of social media has taken as a given that the snipers who knocked out the Moore County power grid were doing so to stop a drag show. This drag show was apparently very controversial in the small town of Pinehurst outside of Fayetteville, and monopolized a tremendous amount of police resources. Local government issued permits for the show, permits for protesters of the show, and had a large number of police activated to ensure neither side of the culture war outbreak got too unruly. By all accounts, no one did get unruly, other than perhaps some raised voices, until the power went out when everyone went home.

The snipers hit multiple transfer stations at the same time, knowing which equipment to hit so that power could not be rerouted. The power may be out as long as Thursday. Four things pop for me, given the known facts so far.

One: Local rednecks probably wouldn’t knock their own power out over a drag show, when they could just show up to protest like everyone else.

Two: Red tribe culture warriors probably don’t have the sophistication to know exactly which equipment to sabotage to bring down the power grid.

Three: They did it when they knew the police were going to be overly burdened managing a culture war protest.

Most importantly, four: If the local, state, or federal authorities became aware that this entire “terrorist operation” was a distraction for some kind of heist, they absolutely would not make that information public because they might empower copycat heists across the country. It’s entirely possible this was just “some people seeing if they could do it,” and okay fine, but I wonder if it wasn’t.

Metcalf Sniper Attack

On April 16, 2013, the Metcalf transmission substation outside of San Jose California was attacked in a very similar manner. I’ve driven past this transmission station on my way to shoot guns at the Field Sports County Park Rifle and Pistol Range in September with Open Source Defense. The gun range uses a tall natural ridge line as a secondary backstop, and anyone on that ridge, which is open space preserve, could easily shoot down into the Metcalf station. Evidence on site indicated that at least some of the attack was made from the grounds of the station itself.

The Metcalf attack was very sophisticated. The attackers cut fiber optic cables to drop communications, broke into the facility, and bullet hosed several banks of transformers with 7.62x39 fire, which for the uninitiated means either an AK-47 or common American clone.

The attack was very sophisticated, with no fingerprints left on any spent casings, flashlight signals, and an early egress such that police responding to the crime found nothing. But the attack wasn’t successful in dropping power to any significant part of Silicon Valley, as central power authorities were able to quickly reroute power to avoid outages. The only areas to lose power were some nearby neighborhoods. Nobody knows who did it or why. Four things pop for me about this one as well:

One: they obviously weren’t trying to prevent some culture war event from happening.

Two: They seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and had a specific plan to get in, get out, and damage a particular section of the plant.

Three: It didn’t apparently work, unless their goal was to knock over someone’s house, which is possible in San Jose but the south end of the city is low rent by comparison to the stuff near the bay.

Four: if their goal was in fact to knock something over during the outage, and if the federal agencies involved did discover that, they would have hidden this information to suppress copycat heists. It’s entirely possible this was just “some people seeing if they could do it,” and okay fine, but I wonder if it wasn’t.

Nashville Christmas Bombing

At 6:30 AM central time on Christmas Day 2020, a bomb detonated in downtown Nashville Tennessee. Authorities ruled it a suicide bombing, having found “tissue” that matched the DNA of the bomber. An extensive review of the bomber’s psychology, personal contacts, profile, and such, showed indications that he was a conspiracy theorist, possibly unhinged, and had worked prior at the AT&T facility which he blew up. He was on record with one acquaintance saying that “life is an illusion.” But again, a few things pop out at me:

One: He had good knowledge of the telecommunications grid that his bomb was intending to, and succeeded in, sabotaging.

Two: He broadcast on loudspeakers his intention to bomb the building for hours beforehand, allowing authorities to evacuate the area. This seems like curious behavior for someone who thinks life is an illusion.

Three: The broadcast of this put the police into an all-hands mode around the location of the bomb, potentially reducing their ability to react to simultaneous crime elsewhere in Nashville.

Four: He did it on Christmas, just like Hans Gruber did in Die Hard, the movie about someone sabotaging a building’s infrastructure in a fake terror attack to steal bearer bonds. An improbable yet nonzero chance exists that this guy is sitting on a beach earning twenty percent, perhaps missing a pinky finger he dropped into the glove box of the RV he blew up to bring down telecommunications in Nashville as part of some heist, and nobody is looking for him because they think he’s dead.

And if this were true, and federal agencies did discover it, they would be highly incentivized to not make that knowledge public out of fear of copycat heists.

If Not True Yet, Eventually Will Be

The chance that each of these acts of infrastructure sabotage were actually some elaborate Die Hard inspired heist plot is diminishingly small. The chance that one of them was a heist is also very small, but is greater than the chance all of them were. And the chance that this sort of thing isn’t going to be used in the future to run a heist is very low, since the future goes on forever. Eventually some master thief is going to figure this out. And when they do, we can be sure that the federal agencies investigating it won’t tell us about it, out of fear of copycat heists.

Are we already in the age of Die Hard?

Hard to say.