“That noise you hear? It’s power,” Christine Lewis told me above the faint buzz emanating from the Cowlitz electrical substation in western Washington. Lewis, the senior manager for transmission and distribution at Tacoma Public Utilities, was explaining how this substation — a sprawling city block’s worth of asphalt and scaffolding — regulated the entire region’s power.
As we stood outside, the October sky threatened rain. Everything around us was the same color: the clouds overhead; the metal boxes, drums and coils and the tangle of wires connecting them; the barbed wire-topped chain-link fence that surrounded the whole compound — even the gravel-covered ground.
There are scientists who study how to design waste sites so that they can communicate, without words, the dangers they’ll pose to people thousands of years from now. A nuclear repository, for example, might be surrounded by menacing spikes, “forbidding blocks” or gigantic thorns. Modern electrical substations are built purely for function, but the effect is similar: The signs on the fence read “Caution” and “Keep away,” but the message is already clear — that ominous electric hum, the intimidating design. Substations are off-limits to the public for good reason: Trespassers risk electrocution. Even trained experts have been injured or killed. “There’s nothing in this system that’s designed to protect an employee,” Lewis said. “Everything in an electrical system is designed to protect the electrical system.”
Cowlitz is one of nearly 70 substations owned by Tacoma Public Utilities. Substations play a crucial part in transmitting the energy that flows from generating facilities — power plants or dams — into the neighborhoods they serve, Lewis explained. TPU’s energy is generated at multiple locations across the state, then sent hundreds of miles to substations like this one. According to Lewis, the energy coming into Cowlitz is transmitted at 230,000 volts, nearly a thousand times that of an outlet in a typical U.S. home or business. The substation serves as a way station, where the equipment lowers the voltage to a level suitable for residential and commercial use: The high-voltage “high side” power that pours into a transformer comes out the “low side” at a usable voltage.
As Lewis spoke, I realized not only how little I know about energy generation, but how little I’d even thought about it. I just take it for granted when the power shows up and feel annoyed when it doesn’t. That’s pretty typical, Lewis assured me. “Everybody’s like, ‘I just want to be able to plug my phone in,’” she said. “We’ve gotten pretty used to it; it’s nice. Thomas Edison did a good job.”
It’s this ubiquity that makes energy infrastructure an attractive target for attacks, whether by vandals, domestic terrorists or hostile foreign governments. In a 2019 paper, scholars from University of Chicago and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland described it as a “valuable target”: An outage derails business as usual, causes fear and confusion, hobbles our ability to coordinate and communicate.
And it doesn’t require military force or even much expertise to bring down the grid — another reason it’s targeted. “Most energy infrastructure is extensive, relatively easy to attack, and difficult to protect, which reduces the cost of attacking,” the researchers wrote. Look around any town: The infrastructure supporting the grid is hiding in plain sight. All the utility poles strung with power lines, perched on by crows and hummingbirds; the metal transformer boxes along public thoroughfares; the substations, tucked into wooded suburbs, abutting local parks and bike paths — they’re not only easily accessible, they’re inconsistently guarded, offering low-hanging fruit to would-be saboteurs.
In the 1980s and ’90s, environmental activists and anarchists attacked transmission towers and power lines across the Western United States to protest fossil fuel-burning utilities, convinced that a world free of them would allow nature to regenerate and heal. But lately, a new group has discovered energy infrastructure: white nationalists.
Substations are off-limits to the public for good reason: Trespassers risk electrocution. Even trained experts have been injured or killed.
Department of Energy data suggests suspicious energy grid disruptions are on the rise, especially in the Western U.S., historically a white supremacist stronghold. In reports filed to the DOE, power grid operators identified 200 instances of vandalism, suspicious activity, sabotage or physical attacks in 2023, comprising 58% of all reported incidents. (Other reports cited factors like severe weather, cyberattacks or equipment failures.) That represents a large increase over the last five years. In 2017, just 9.3% of reported disturbances noted suspicious circumstances, a number that rises to 20-to-30% from 2018 to 2021. Over the past decade, roughly half of these attacks happened in the West.
The FBI made arrests in three different white supremacist plots involving substations, all interrupted in 2020. In one case, three men who met through a neo-Nazi chat room planned to shoot up substations to take down the national energy grid. They were caught only because a man the group was recruiting lost his phone; the person who found it found Nazi propaganda on it and turned it over to the police. In the government’s sentencing memorandum for one of the men, prosecutors said they “planned to attack substations with powerful rifles that would penetrate the transformers” because they believed it would “cause confusion and unrest” and cost the government millions. “There was even discussion that their plan could succeed in producing a race war and the next Great Depression,” the memo says. All three pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists; one still awaits sentencing, and the other two are serving five- and seven-year prison terms.
Another three men were arrested at a Las Vegas Black Lives Matter protest with Molotov cocktails in their car, according to a Department of Justice statement. The government alleges that the men, who claimed to be members of the far-right “Boogaloo” movement, had also plotted to firebomb a substation. Two pled guilty and were sentenced to between four and 20 years, while a third received life in prison.
The FBI also charged four men in another 2020 plot that involved conspiring to destroy an energy facility, as well as stealing military gear to carry out the attack. Two of them pleaded guilty; the other two pleaded not guilty and are still awaiting trial. Court documents allege that two of the co-conspirators met online in a neo-Nazi forum and recruited others, and the group shared photos of themselves giving the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute. In a detention hearing for one of the accused, Chris Little, a special agent for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), testified that one of the men had compiled a list of assassination targets associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Little testified that the person also handwrote a list of intersections in cities across the West, including Boise, Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. Every intersection contained energy infrastructure.
The men, Little testified, wanted to create an outage because it “diverts the police, causes chaos from the outage itself, causes damage to the equipment, takes a long time to replace and causes an outage of significant length.” They planned to use that chaos “to create a favorable operating environment to conduct an assassination.” In the far-right movement, this twisted logic falls under the banner of an ideology called “accelerationism”: the belief that accelerating the collapse of society will enable white people to take over and rebuild the world they want.
NOT ALL ATTACKS can be tied to terrorism, although extremists are more than willing to exploit them. In 2022, for example, more than 15,000 people in the Puyallup, Washington, area woke up on Christmas Day without power. Four electrical substations were disabled that day. By January 2023, officials had arrested two men and charged them with conspiracy to damage energy facilities. Police identified Matthew Greenwood and Jeremy Crahan through substation security footage and cellphone tower data.
In a post-arrest statement to police, Greenwood admitted carrying out the attacks, with Crahan as his accomplice. The outages, Greenwood told authorities, were meant to be a cover for robberies. According to court documents, after attacking the first three substations, Greenwood and Crahan broke into a Thai restaurant and stole $100. After that, they attacked another substation. Over the next few days, unbeknownst to them, FBI agents watched as they skulked around other substations. Court documents allege that they also planned to topple trees onto power lines to cause more outages but never followed through.
That didn’t stop people from speculating about their motives. “Damaging four power substations to burglarize a store is about as believable as storming the Capitol to use the bathroom,” one Reddit user commented. Dozens of comments were posted in local groups and on the sheriff’s office’s Facebook page, accusing the men of being terrorists.
But Greenwood’s girlfriend, Holly Fisher, told the Seattle Times that her partner was not a terrorist. She was eight months pregnant at the time, and Greenwood “was out of work and scared about not having money to support their child,” she said. In desperation, he and Crahan hatched their scheme after seeing other attacks on TV.
I reached out to Greenwood and Crahan multiple times via email, but neither replied. Lance Hester, Crahan’s lawyer, initially replied to my request for an interview but stopped responding to my messages; he told The New York Times that there was no evidence his client had right-wing ties.
By September 2023, both men had pleaded guilty and been cleared of any links to domestic terrorism. “The investigation was able to rule out any ideological motive based on the defendant’s statements, actions, and a review of their social media and electronic communications,” said Emily Langlie, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Washington. “Investigators found no indication that these two defendants had an issue or purpose to their crimes other than to obtain money to support (a) drug addiction.”
Despite the lack of evidence for extremist motives, the case showed how swiftly extremist ideas can propagate, and how little the true motives matter: Even if neither Greenwood nor Crahan were extremists, their actions unwittingly advanced extremists’ agenda. Any attack plays right into accelerationist aims, said Bennett Clifford, an extremism researcher who co-authored a 2022 report on extremism and attack plots for George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “Extremists are seizing on the fact that other individuals are conducting successful attacks and perceived successful attacks on the energy grid,” he said. It doesn’t matter who is attacking the grid; each attack has the power to erode public trust in critical infrastructure and encourage other would-be attackers — bringing us one step toward societal collapse. “They see all of these things as putting one more grain of sand in a big bucket,” Clifford said, “and to mix my analogies here, one of those things, in their view, will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
According to Clifford, recent infrastructure attacks fall into roughly three categories. Some have clear ties to extremists, including white supremacists. A 2022 report by researchers at the university’s Program on Extremism noted that white supremacist plots to attack energy infrastructure are on the rise nationwide. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has also taken note of such attacks. In May 2023, the agency published a National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin acknowledging that “some DVEs (domestic violent extremists) have praised and leveraged (the recent attacks) to call for more attacks on critical infrastructure.”
The second category includes people like Crahan and Greenwood, whose stated motives are non-political.
And the third involves cases in which the attackers remain unknown. This comprises the vast majority of attacks: In a database compiled by extremism researchers that lists 941 planned energy infrastructure attacks between 2000 and 2023, only around two dozen cases had known perpetrators, some of whom, like Greenwood and Crahan, had targeted multiple locations.
These three categories — extremist attacks, non-extremist attacks and attacks whose motives remain unknown — “all feed into a very strange feedback loop” in extremist circles, Clifford said. “The way they talk about all of these three things is almost the same.” Regardless of the motive, each incident shows just how vulnerable the grid is and how easy it is to pull off an attack without getting caught, Clifford said. And that feedback loop can inspire extremist circles and non-extremists alike. “If the individuals in this Washington state case had seen other attacks on crucial infrastructure in the news and decided, ‘Hey, this might be a good way to conduct our own activities’ — well, that’s the other half of the feedback loop.”
Fantasizing about a substation attack is one thing, but how much do you need to know to carry one out? The DHS’s bulletin warned critical infrastructure operators that extremist groups were increasingly sharing “online messaging and operational guidance promoting attacks” that included “detailed diagrams, simplified tips for enhancing operational security, and procedures for disabling key components of substations and transformers.” How were they getting their information? Could it really have been as easy as just Googling it?
Reporter’s note: While attacks on energy infrastructure appear to be on the rise, there are few sources available tracking those attacks. The Department of Energy requires utilities to file reports about disruptions, but those don’t include the aftermath of those disruptions, like arrests and motives, and also don’t include plots thwarted by authorities. To address those gaps, three scholars have compiled a database tracking energy infrastructure attack plots between 2000 and 2023. Investigators: Michael Loadenthal, Research Professor, The University of Cincinnati; Alexandria Grace Olsen, Independent Researcher; Lea Marchl, Independent Researcher
THAT’S WHERE I STARTED, anyway: “How to blow up a substation.” I was relieved to discover that detailed instructions were not among the very first hits. Instead, I saw links to Reddit threads where people asked the same question, blog posts discussing other recent attacks, and a 764-page guide detailing the design of rural substations, published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2001.
The other info — the hardcore stuff, like the zines the Department of Homeland Security mentioned in its warnings — was a little harder to find, but not by much. I started by following some far-right figures on Telegram, a messaging app the Washington Post has called “the most prominent platform for the right-wing fringe.” Before long, my feed was full of conspiracy theories about COVID vaccines, wild claims about 5G and links to conservative blog posts about Hunter Biden.
Once you enter the accelerationist corners of the internet, it’s not hard to get sucked in. After I started following far-right figures, I began following the accounts they shared posts from, too — groups with names like “The End Times,” “No BS Free America” and “Millennial Woes.” As those groups led to others, the posts became darker and more hateful. Some groups posted propaganda encouraging white people to “take back” the Pacific Northwest as their homeland; others advised members on achieving self-reliance by building generators, farming and stockpiling supplies for society’s inevitable collapse. On the Telegram channel Zoomerwaffen, a portmanteau of Gen Z’s nickname and the neo-Nazi group “Atomwaffen,” screeds about brown people, Jewish people, transgender people, liberals and women appear alongside videos of cute cats and memes about video-games. Despite being banned more than half a dozen times, the group still has more than 27,000 members. As I read through post after vile post, I noticed how desensitized the posters had become to using slurs, invoking violence and war, and spinning convoluted conspiracy theories.
Some members might not even realize that the ideas they’re being fed come from extremists; in accelerationist groups, the term itself is rarely explicitly mentioned. But the posts’ underlying assumptions often clearly derive from accelerationist beliefs: that society has gone off the rails, and that anyone who is paying attention should be actively preparing for, rooting for and working toward its collapse. In this ideological ecosystem, white supremacist, xenophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, fascist and accelerationist ideas coalesce, and as group members scroll through posts with these implicit beliefs day after day, it shifts their norms about what kinds of views are acceptable and common.
Group members openly discuss hypothetical attack methods, some even offering to connect people who are “serious” about direct action and warning true believers to look out for federal agents trying to infiltrate groups. Many shared documents: a 300-page document on tactics in counterinsurgency originally published by the U.S. Army, a 1993 pamphlet published by the far-left group Animal Liberation Front, and a series of zines published in the early 2020s. The magazines were branded as part of the “Terrorgram” network — a network of militant accelerationists who proselytize and recruit via Telegram.
At the root of these screeds lies hate, and an incitement to act on that hate through physical violence. “If you’re reading this document, you are hopefully a man of action and not one of the countless men of empty words and threats,” one zine begins. And it continues: “Collapse of this current system is the only means of saving our White race.” Energy, it says, allows people — including the non-white people that the writer repeatedly denigrates and insults — to live comfortably. “With the power off, when the lights don’t come back on … all hell will break lose (sic), making conditions desirable for our race to once again take back what is ours.”
“While the series of Terrorgram publications have directly encouraged and helped facilitate attacks on infrastructure in general and electrical infrastructure specifically, we have not seen any definitive links between perpetrators and the publications or its networks,” said Michael Loadenthal, a professor of research at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Public and International Affairs. (Loadenthal helped create the previously mentioned database cataloging attacks on energy infrastructure.) “What we do see is a lot of practical, applied knowledge transfer that seeks to lower the bar for potential attacks and make these disruptive actions more accessible to less experienced saboteurs.” The advice in the document is remarkably similar to plots that were thwarted, as well as to attacks that were carried out. This suggests that, even if perpetrators didn’t read the same document, their ideas drew from the same well of white nationalist propaganda as Terrorgram’s creators. One document provides precise steps for disrupting critical infrastructure, including substations, and specifically suggests targeting three or more substations simultaneously to cause outages in a wide area. It also recommended felling poles to knock out power. This, seemingly coincidentally, is part of what Greenwood and Crahan planned to do.
And while there’s no indication that Greenwood and Crahan participated in accelerationist circles online, those circles were certainly talking about them. On Telegram, some users applauded them for successfully taking down four substations; others dismissed them as failures because they were caught. Rinaldo Nazzaro, founder of the neo-Nazi group The Base, told his thousands of followers that such efforts were less powerful if accelerationists couldn’t take credit for them.
I asked Tacoma Public Utilities’ Christine Lewis what she made of the sabotage, and she said that industry insiders jokingly compared the perpetrators to the bumbling bandits in the film Home Alone. Then she got serious. Their actions told Lewis that they knew nothing about the real risks of what they were doing. They were lucky to walk out alive.
AS SUBSTATION ATTACKS continue to make headlines, energy specialists are discussing how to prevent future incidents. For the last five or so years, the focus has been on stopping cyberattacks, but in the last year it’s shifted toward physical security, said Jarod Bleiweiss, a sales specialist at the NAES Corporation, which provides third-party consulting, staffing and other support to power companies. Security measures largely fall to individual energy companies or utilities to determine; both the North American Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC), the nonprofit corporation that writes standards and regulations for the industry, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the agency that approves and enforces those regulations, have been criticized for dragging their feet on implementing tougher regulations in general. The last time FERC approved stricter physical security standards was after an attack on San Jose, California’s Metcalf substation in 2013, which caused more than $15 million in damages and served as a “wake-up call” for security analysts. After attacks that left 40,000 North Carolinians without power in December 2022, FERC directed NERC to reassess those standards. NERC’s report, released in April 2023, concluded that no changes were necessary.
Bleiweiss said that, in his experience, this is typical: NERC often provides suggestions for best practices but leaves it to individual companies or utilities to decide what’s best for them. Given the huge variability of systems out there, what works for one company may not make sense for another. Everyone wants ballistic walls for protection, he said, but if you’ve got a substation serving 1,000 customers in rural Wyoming, is it really feasible to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on upgrades? “Ultimately, the costs get passed down to the customers — that’s something that could double electric rates,” he said. “So NERC is not going to come down and say everyone must do the same thing.”
Most substation attacks have been relatively unsophisticated; people shoot at the equipment or cut through chain-link fences at unguarded rural outposts. And some companies are working on improving security, replacing wire fences with sturdier walls or installing new surveillance camera systems. Lewis told me that TPU has always patrolled its substations but declined to give further details, citing security reasons. Stronger defenses could deter would-be attackers, but ultimately, with over 79,000 transmission substations across the U.S., it’s impossible to protect every single one.
A more effective, though more complicated, response requires addressing the root of the problem: Understanding what drives these men. Of the 31 known perpetrators in Loadenthal’s database, 26 are male, and all but one are white. And of the 25 white men, 14 have known far-right ties.
“Modern-day right-wing extremists have been really good at weaponizing the doubt, insecurity, frustration, et cetera, et cetera, of their potential adherents,” Loadenthal said. “I think that that kind of counter-infrastructural violence is more related to the wider national and even global sense of collapse and insecurity than it is to anything done by some internet-based neo-Nazi.” Given society’s seemingly insurmountable problems — climate change, a global pandemic, mass shootings and perpetual war — the world can feel pretty bleak. A dysfunctional government and rampant inflation combined with stagnating wages have left many Americans feeling unmoored. It’s not just a metaphor when we say our society appears to be going off the rails; it’s actually happening, with trains literally derailing, unleashing toxic chemicals and eroding the public’s faith in government. As Loadenthal put it: “People are really at the ‘Fuck it, let’s try something’ stage of social change. Because nothing has really worked that they’ve tried before.”
In all their anger and frustration, some have turned to extremism and violence. This phenomenon is not new; research on radicalization suggests that people are more likely to turn to violent extremism in times of uncertainty, or if they or a group they belong to have grievances with the status quo. COVID was an especially fertile time for the proliferation of extremist beliefs, as people lost loved ones, jobs and their general sense of stability. Radical conspiracy theories offer explanations for the inexplicable, and violence can give people a sense of purpose in the face of helplessness. And as the pandemic forced many of us into social isolation, time spent online skyrocketed — providing a convenient way for radicals to recruit new followers.
“With the power off, when the lights don’t come back on … all hell will break lose (sic), making conditions desirable for our race to once again take back what is ours.”
For most people, the descent into radicalization is gradual. Loadenthal says that extremism researchers often compare it to a funnel. First, you start seeing the conspiratorial memes and fringe theories, and then, over the course of weeks and months, social media algorithms draw you deeper into the rabbit hole, feeding you more and more content that not only nourishes your sense of grievance about the rising cost of living, climate disasters, political instability and social change, but also assigns blame for everything: It’s all because of immigrants, global conspiracies, Joe Biden. Not everyone descends all the way into the funnel — not to the point of destruction or violence — but those who burrow deeper eventually acclimate to an entirely new reality with a different set of norms.
Packaging insidious beliefs as edgy memes can make it all feel fun and exciting, and this draws people even further in. “A common trait among hateful memes is the (strategic) blending of hate speech with humor, which downplays prejudice, obscures the underlying hatred, and may ultimately lead to the normalization of hostile beliefs,” the researcher Ursula Kristin Schmid wrote in a 2023 study on hateful memes. White supremacists have even used the tactic to recruit teenagers.
Camaraderie can also draw people in, too. There’s often a kernel of truth that seeds each falsehood or catastrophization; some of the accelerationists’ issues are things that worry me, too. As I scrolled through far-right group posts on Telegram, much of what I saw disgusted me, but every once in a while, I’d see something that resonated: a meme lamenting the rising cost of housing or income inequality.
Other groups have used similar tactics for their own goals, or even proposed other types of acceleration to fix society’s problems. Currently, wealthy tech moguls embrace ideologies like effective accelerationism, the belief that technology is the only solution, so we should encourage the free and unimpeded development of artificial intelligence. Some of these rich and powerful men hold the same default assumptions as accelerationists, just dressed up in a tech company-branded Patagonia vest — that society is in shambles, and extreme measures are necessary to save it.
But what is it that drives some people toward destruction? Some clues lie in the people these groups are targeting. The Terrorgram manifestos circulating online explicitly address their audience: white men. They blame their problems on minority groups — Black people, Asians and Jews, among others — and suggest that America would be better off if we returned to the days when only white men held power. The manifestos goad the reader to be a “real man,” a “man of action” — someone willing to die for a righteous cause. They read like a triple-dog dare to stand up for the ascendency of white people and male superiority, a provocation to “man up” and do something about the problems they see.
And if you happen to find yourself in an insecure or desperate position, these appeals might speak to you. They provide a clear blueprint for making a mark on society, promising would-be attackers that they will be celebrated as heroes for committing violence. In one Telegram group, a popular accelerationist encourages readers to “embrace hopelessness,” and to “die fighting anyway rather than live as a system slave and coward.”
Just as Greenwood and Crahan’s actions supported accelerationist aims regardless of their motives, their stated reason — a robbery spree — implies that they felt the same frustrations that accelerationists do: economic precarity and hopelessness. Every time I reached out to the men, I told them I wanted to hear their side of the story. How hard up do you have to be that blowing up substations seems like a viable option? And if we had better support systems for people in economic peril — the kind of people who are arguably most at risk for extremist ideologies — would Greenwood and Crahan have realized they had other options?
YOU MIGHT SAY the question is moot. It does not change the fact that the damage was done — millions of dollars’ worth of equipment was destroyed. About 15,000 people lost power on Christmas morning, and the workers who were called in had to leave their families on the holiday to deal with the emergency.
And then there is the psychic damage: the fostering of terror, regardless of the two men’s intentions. The day after the attacks, the power went out again in Puget Sound. “Mass power outage, another terrorist attack, or weather?” someone posted on Reddit. If people start assuming that all such incidents are deliberate, a form of terrorism, even attacks that have no connection to terrorists will be seen as terrorism, too.
Last year, also on Christmas, there was yet another outage. It was a calm day, the rain a light mist. The weather seemed unlikely to be the cause, so I thought of Crahan and Greenwood: Was this a copycat attack? I wasn’t the only local who worried about sabotage. In a Reddit thread about the outage, one Seattleite claimed to work in the energy sector. “This is 100% our first thought now if the power goes out on a holiday,” they said. If the goal of terrorism is terror — to cause fear and unrest, to edge us all closer toward a belief that everything is broken and that giving up is the only rational response — then these reactions suggest the extremists already have a foothold in our collective consciousness.
In the face of all this, what does justice look like? Our legal system has a rigid toolset to address wrongdoing, and in this case, it made use of it. First, there are the financial amends: Greenwood and Crahan have been ordered to pay over $235,000 in restitution to Puget Sound Energy and the city of Tacoma. Then there’s carceral punishment. Crahan was sentenced to an 18-month prison term, while Greenwood was given more leeway. In his sentencing memo, the public defender assigned to his case details the physical and emotional abuse he faced as a child — he was neglected by his mother and began smoking meth with his father at 13. In late 2022, Greenwood was in his 30s, and his life had only gotten more complicated. His unhoused brother died on the streets; he himself was months behind on rent, and he knew he’d soon become a father. Crahan, the documents say, was Greenwood’s one true friend, and together, they hatched a plan to make a little cash.
“Modern-day right-wing extremists have been really good at weaponizing the doubt, insecurity, frustration of their potential adherents.”
After his arrest, Greenwood and his girlfriend moved to Spokane to create some distance between his old life and the new one he’s trying to build. He entered treatment for addiction, joined a local church, started learning a new trade. He’s a dad now, proudly posting his infant’s photos on Facebook, and his family has found housing through local programs. People shouldn’t have to get arrested for blowing up substations to get the help they need, but in Greenwood’s case, it appears to have been a catalyst for change. “Before this, I didn’t even know that there were programs that could help people like us, that could help us get into housing and treatment,” he wrote in a letter to the judge. “Now I know of places I can turn to if I were ever in a crisis again.” Who knows what would have happened if Greenwood — or any of the other people who have tried to wreak similar havoc, regardless of their motivations — had experienced intervention sooner?
Because of his background and the positive changes he’s made in the year since his arrest, Greenwood’s public defender and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, who brought the charges against him, recommended sentencing him to three years’ probation, which the judge granted. Greenwood was already on pretrial release to undergo inpatient drug treatment, so his sentence means he’ll remain at home. For a year, he will be allowed to leave the house only for work. Prison, the prosecutor and defender agreed, would only derail his progress.
It’s not uncommon for defendants to write letters to judges; it makes sense to plead for forgiveness, for mercy. In a nearly 900-word letter, Greenwood detailed the lessons he’s learned, invoking God and expressing gratitude for the opportunity to start over. “I caused the damage. I don’t know how I can make amends to the community. I can’t replace Christmas,” Greenwood wrote. “All I can do is say that I’m sorry.”
And what more is there? Greenwood made a terrible decision, and he’s taken responsibility for it. Letting people move on and make new and better choices is a form of hope. Refusing to allow extremists to take credit for disruption, to erode our faith in our systems and other people, is also a form of hope. If the root of accelerationism is a desire to watch it all burn, the opposite is a desire to help put it all together again, to build something new and better.
This year, on Christmas, Greenwood was home with his family in Spokane. In a photo his fiancée posted on Facebook, he wore a red and green knit hat with the word “JOLLY” embroidered on the band, smiling into the camera with his sweetheart perched beside him and their daughter in his lap. A Christmas tree, densely decorated with mirrored ornaments, twinkled behind them. The lights were on.
Note: This story was updated to correctly reflect the affiliations of an extremism researcher who compiled a database on planned energy infrastructure attacks.
This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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This article appeared in the May 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Lights Out.”
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