Allow me to re-emphasize that part of why I am focusing on these three areas: they are easy to ignore.
There have been years of people disputing the science of climate change, even though that often involved outright lies. It has been similar to what happened with the tobacco industry burying their studies that showed smoking was hazardous to health. They had a vested interest in hiding that information, because it would have affected profits.
Profit is not the only motivation. When there is something else causing damage, it is often racism.
The news media being less responsible does not help, so that is something we are going to have to remember as well.
Now, you might have seen the title and imagined things like a someone shooting up an Asian-American owned massage parlor or someone yelling at women wearing hijab on public transportation, but also being ready to kill.
Those are real things, with real fatalities, but it could still be easy to hear about it and feel terrible but still feel that it is unlikely to affect you.
Regardless, I am referring to something different.
For example, did you know that on Christmas Day 2020 there was an explosion in downtown Nashville that damaged several blocks of businesses?
Did you know that Christmas Day 2022 there was an attack on the Washington State power grid?
And, did you know that the Washington attack was one of at least nine attacks on electrical substations over a three month period?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/electrical-substation-attacks-nc-wa.html
The Nashville explosion was not an attack at an electrical substation. However, it was a bomb planted near an AT&T location that seemed designed to take out infrastructure.
The reporting has been downplayed; a motor home explosion with no fatalities. It is easy to imagine someone was cooking meth and something went wrong, even if you did hear of it, and your power stayed on, and your phones kept working.
It was a motor home, set to explode with recorded warnings (and some possible human traces found later).
It goes back to it getting worse. Nine or more attacks in three months is a lot.
So far there has been no mention of white supremacy. In fact, the KPTV article says that the motivation was robbery. Well, that could be true; when the white separatist movement really started taking off post-Vietnam, they did a lot of robberies, but they were doing them to fund the movement.
The other thing they started doing really well is that while they were connected to each other and helping and teaching each other, technically when they did something it was generally "acting alone", at least to outward appearances.
Timothy McVeigh claimed to be acting alone, or to have only coerced some help, but there are other elements there that indicate that was a lie.
That pattern, as well as attacks on infrastructure, have a guidebook out there in a 1978 novel called The Turner Diaries. I am not recommending that you read it, but I am recommending knowing that there are people who do want to burn it all down. It's nice that they often look incompetent, like on January 6th, but they can still manage to do quite a bit of damage, and it is getting worse.
I can recommend reading Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Katherine Belew. While it focuses on the 80s and 90s, there will be patterns that you notice as you start seeing other things.
And you should start paying attention to those other things.
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