"Joshua Fisher-Birch, a researcher with the Counter Extremism Project, cautioned against prescribing unsolved attacks on power stations to a certain ideological bent. Some of the attacks could have been from people hoping to steal wire, he said, or those who are simply destructive. One suspect in an attack on power infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest that cut the lights off for 14,000 people on Christmas Day said he hoped to burglarize a business after knocking out power.

But ideas about attacks on critical infrastructure are discussed constantly in Neo-Nazi messaging groups.

“There are definitely conversations happening on Telegram and happening in places where Neo-Nazi accelerationists congregate where they are discussing these attacks,” he said, “and they’re saying, ‘What can we learn from this?’""