I found the Facebook profile of this guy (“Peter Karasev”) who was just charged with bombing a power substation in San Jose. According to his profile, he is a software engineer with a PhD. And he’s from Moscow, Russia.
(Follow along for screenshots from his profile). 1/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/03/03/authorities-man-bombed-pge-transformers-in-south-san-jose
This is definitely him, based on the photos. His profile says he is from Moscow and he has several photos with firearms and/or energy infrastructure in the background. His children (whom I’ve scribbled over in photos) have Russian names, and he occasionally uses Russian language in his posts. 2/
These are a few more pictures from the Facebook page of the Russian-born suspect in a bombing targeting the power grid in San Jose. As you can see, he frequently posts pictures of energy infrastructure, raising the question of whether he was scouting out these areas for a while. He also had an “inactive” meth lab in his home, apparently. 3/
The targeting of energy infrastructure is a tactic that has been used widely by Russia in Ukraine, so it’s not a huge stretch to imagine the same tactics being used here. These attacks had a devastating impact on civilians in Ukraine. 4/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/06/ukraine-russian-attacks-energy-grid-threaten-civilians
In the US, attacks on the power grid have typically been associated with neo-Nazi accelerationists, who have explicitly advocated for this style of attack. Russia has been known to provide support for accelerationist movements in the West.
The idea behind such attacks on the power grid is to cause massive power outages across large swaths of the country, leading to civil unrest — which extremists hope to exploit for the purpose of inciting a race war. 5/
An “accelerationist handbook” circulating on extremist Telegram channels last summer explicitly called for potential attackers to bypass mass shootings in favor of causing chaotic blackouts by attacking the power grid (a “sitting duck”). The power grid is seen as a soft target, & we haven’t put the necessary resources into hardening & modernizing our critical infrastructure to protect against such attacks.
Attacking just 9 of our 55,000 substations could knock out power from coast to coast. 6/
There was an episode of NCIS that dealt with terrorists doing exactly that.
When I saw the episode I thought how unlikely it was that a country like the USA would permit a such a glaringly obvious hole like that in their security to persist - I underestimated the incompetence and greed of Republicans.
The moral of the story is that if you have Republicans running the show they are a danger to America. They only care about lining their own pockets, ass-licking the Russians and trying to control women's bodies - nothing too important impinges on their consciousness!
