Originally published at: 18 years for white power accellerationist with Baltimore terror plan
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From another story:
The plot to blow up several BGE substations was developed with Brandon Russell, who will go to trial for his case in November. He is the co-founder of Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi organization.
Prosecutors say Clendaniel has been in communication with her co-defendant, Russell, through Dallas Humber, an alleged transnational terrorist group leader from California. Humber is accused of soliciting hate crimes, the murder of [Federal officials](mailto:https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leaders-transnational-terrorist-group-charged-soliciting-hate-
crimes-soliciting-murder), and conspiring to provide materials to terrorists. The communication between Clendaniel, Humber and Russell persisted until July 2024.
More lengthy prison sentences coming up shortly. Hopefully.
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So when will we hear of the entire network of violent white nationalist would-be terrorists getting their prison sentences? This woman didn’t act on her own, none of them act on their own.
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She’s become the poster girl for white supremacist terrorists’ fascination with attacking the power grid (particularly sub-stations).
From what I understand, this is a common trope in their community, going back to the days of The Turner Diaries. It’s widespread enough that some power companies are starting to pile sandbags around transformers to prevent their being shot at through the fences.
She also has to forfeit her guns, which seems like something that wouldn’t need quite so much paperwork given the circumstances, but there you go.
Another price Americans pay for the right of insecure dweebs to amass collections of firearms.
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She seems nice.
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Said her lawyer, per the NYTimes: “Her inherent goodness may at times be buried beneath destructive ideologies, but it is not destroyed,”
yeah, she might want all minorities to be murdered, but she really likes puppies???
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supervised release for the rest of her life
That seems important, because I really don’t think she’s going to exit prison as less of a white supremacist.
She really cares about (cis het, Christian) white people! I mean, in theory. In actuality, not so much.
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Is there some reason why the sentences aren’t running consecutively?
Unless Team Fed is vastly overstating the strength of the evidence they used to get a plea deal; it would seem like there is basically no reason to be in a compromising mood.
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It’s sort of a weird trope because the level of justification is wildly uneven.
As a method of taking down power grids it’s alarmingly effective. Even quite prosaic rifle fire(ie. not some sort of exotic anti-material gear; just friendly ‘modern sporting rifles’ as they’ve been rebranded) will at least penetrate the housing of a transformer and cause coolant leakage and at least risk of damage to the windings(either direct or from arcs and shorts); and transformers are relatively widely distributed, ill-monitored; and the bigger ones have substantial lead times to replace.
There’s already a modest but concerning backlog of cases where parties unknown picked a substation, shot it up, and left without being noticed or subsequently identified; with times to restore service stretching into multiple days and requiring specialty items(like truck-mounted portable transformers) that are themselves not in generous supply.
As a method of kicking off the racial holy war and/or self-destruction of decadent society the record is…markedly less impressive. People have been losing power to various flavors of inclement weather and enduring both lack of power and the aforementioned weather largely without incident for decades; more or less going back to electrification. Significant economic and logistical disruption; often a few deaths among those dependent on electrified medical services or most thermally vulnerable; but that’s about it.
Had someone actually managed to hit 5 substations in the Baltimore area in quick succession there would likely be some very, very, unhappy supply chain conversations going on, possibly all the way back to grain-oriented electrical steel; but the theory that Baltimore would obviously tear itself apart because obviously only a continuous supply of Aryan Current can keep a 57% black population from turning into a zombie movie with more drug gangs is the lunatic part.
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White supremacists seem weirdly certain that a power failure will instantly lead to an all-out race war. It’s like they watched that episode of the Twilight Zone where the aliens mess with the electricity and everyone turns on each other, and just fell hopelessly in love with imagining themselves as the smug Martians watching over it all and laughing at the puny Earthlings who instantly turn to violence when the slightest problem arises.
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They believe we’re all just as filled with hate and the drive for violence as they are. They believe that human beings “state of nature” is violence. Which is bullshit.
They have no sense of empathy and can’t think beyond their own stunted world view to the idea that most of us aren’t just like them, ready to kill at the drop of a hat.
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this is what i just don’t get. if sudden power outages would cause wide-spread racial animosity, then why - as others have already asked - doesn’t the country burst into flames after every single weather catastophe that hits in especially racialy agitated areas of the southeast us? tornadoes, hurricanes, floods… power goes down, where is the mass disruption to social order? where are the “primitive animals” those accelerationist presume will act so abominably?
i will offer this anecdote from my own multicultural neighborhood, after the hurricane Irma: my own neighbors are Bahamian, Cuban, Venezualan and Colombian - and (OMG!) Haitian! when we spent a week without power, every single person looked after their neighbors! we brought out chainsaws, generators, petrol and propane. we made sure that nobody unchecked or unaccounted for.
what gives these total shites the idea that a simple power outage would make people want to kill each other?
that stupid book “turner diaries” can not answer that, unless - as you say - they actually believe that every person is just as filled with the hate and racial animosity as they.
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In 2022 the Ukrainian government nationalised a bankrupt transformer manufacturer to try to speed up replacement of transformers destroyed by Russian missiles.
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They are not just pessimistic, but are actively, deeply misanthropic. They hate all of humanity, not just specific people they see as enemies.
The idea that violence is not just sometimes necessary, but positive and regenerative has a deep and long history on the right and especially among white supremacists.
What a wonderful thing to see happening… That kind of behavior is far more common among human beings, if you ask me, and actually IS hardwired into our social behavior… that sort of behavior would have been critical for surviving in many cases prior to “civilization” and even since then… we’re just hardwired for communal action.
Reminds me of this Gogol Bordello song…
I think they absolute believe that to be the case, at least for the people hardcore into white supremacy. It might be borne out of some tragic circumstances of their childhoods, or just out of their own awfulness, but it’s the core of their identity, and so it’s difficult to root it out of their minds as a reality.
And it strikes me that this is really just a weaponization of our communal impulse… rather than seeing each as in community when we’re in proximity to one another, that impulse is focused on particular, surface-level characteristics (like skin color, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc) in order to allow some people to empower themselves at the expense of some made up out-group…
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But projection is basically the asshole version of empathy. It is trying to project the future behavior of others by imagining what you would do in their shoes. So if you’re filled with violent impulses and barely manage to contain them, you figure that other are the same. If you’re basically a good person, you figure that most people are basically good inside. We pretty much model other people’s internal thinking on our own because our own internal life is the only one we have real access to.
I would argue that caring for others and being a complete asshole are both survival strategies that the process of evolution has bequeathed us all with. Even craze white supremacists venerate the sort of “brotherhood” of a community of like-minded people. But of course whether kindness or violence dominated our worldview varies widely between and within people. As an ideology, white supremecy appeals, as you said, to those who are deeply misanthropic.
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I’d be curious whether it’s even that distinct from how ‘empathy’ commonly works in practice.
I’ve run into a fair number of basically decent sorts, who think of themselves as empathetic and care about others; but whose practice of ‘empathy’ is basically just projecting themselves into the other person’s situation and then treating them as they would wish to be treated were they in that situation according to how that situation would make them feel.
It’s clearly not an ‘asshole version’ of empathy; and it’s even a pretty adequate substitute for actually being empathetic in the theoretical sense if you are dealing with others who fall into basically the same region of approximate psychological normalcy as you do; since using how you would feel as a proxy for how someone else feels is pretty accurate if they feel much as you do; but it quite dramatically turns from looking like empathy to looking like distressed-and-well-intentioned confusion when they run into a case that really isn’t them.
If you are just projecting and you are a dramatically bad or weird or both person in one way or another the fact that you actually have extremely weak ability to discern or model other people’s states of mind will become evident more or less swiftly and dramatically; because using the heuristic of assuming that everyone else is as awful as you is blatantly contrafactual and will lead you to absurd results in short order; so projection certainly seems to be most visible in various flavors of egregious asshole or weird psych case; but there is also the case of the mostly benevolent and mostly normal projector who typically passes for empathetic because they really do care and are ordinary enough that just assuming that others must feel as they would does not lead to absurd conclusions in the bulk of ordinary cases; but leads to wildly uneven performance between, say, ‘empathizing’ with a friend who is worried about what one of their children has been getting up to in a way that’s basically the same as how they would worry about one of their own getting up to that; and just hitting a blank wall of visible incomprehension when trying to help a relative who has been doing some hoarding and could probably use a professional look at those anxiety behaviors; or attempting to relate to someone with an autism spectrum disorder that they do not have.
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Once a woman I had a restraining order against filed a retaliatory (baseless and quickly dismissed) request for a TRO against me. In between the time she filled out that paperwork and the time an irate judge gave her a tongue-lashing for abusing the court system to harass me the police who served me with notice checked to make sure I didn’t have any guns, because if I had they’d have to be confiscated while the process played out.
My point being that if any rando can get another person’s guns taken away that easily it shouldn’t be so damn difficult to confiscate guns from someone facing charges for freaking terrorism.
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- Hates the government.
- “Volunteers” to live under government supervision where she can’t even take a shower without permission.
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