I’ve been waiting to see what, if any, new information was going to be reported on the RV bombing in Nashville yesterday morning before doing a post. Very little factually useful information has been reported so far. Earlier today I put together a preliminary assessment for a close friend who is a supervisory patrol officer in the police department he works for. This is the same guy I’ve mentioned in comments before who I teach martial arts with and who used to be that department’s SWAT team leader and sniper. I’m going to copy and paste a slightly modified version of that assessment below for you. It had three parts and I’m going to actually start with what was part two of the assessment, follow it with part three, and then finish with part one.
The second thing that stands out to me is that I’ve so far not seen anyone report that someone has taken responsibility. There is no reporting that a manifesto was posted on one of the chan boards or somewhere else. If this was someone like the New Zealand shooter – an extreme rightist who is heavily involved in the online extreme right shitposting and trolling communities – I’d have expected a manifesto to have been posted, highlighted, and reported on by now. If this was an extremist politicized Islamic based attack, I’d have expected one of the obvious groups to have taken credit by now. As of 1:15 PM EST on 26 DEC, neither of those have taken place. This leads me to worry that we’ve got one of two potential types of perpetrators. Either someone more similar to Eric Robert Rudolph – long radicalized and indoctrinated, with a very detailed set of grievances, good impulse control, and the ability to operate in ways that do not require a lot of attention to himself – or someone with a very specific grievance against one of the businesses or companies in the building adjacent to where the RV was parked or the building’s owner. AT&T does have a major data processing center there, but they’re not the only company in that building.
The third thing has less to do with the bombing and more to do with how the news media covers this stuff. By mid afternoon CBS’s Homeland Security correspondent wasn’t just tweeting that the Nashville Police and the FBI had a “person of interest”*, but was also tweeting the guy’s name and a description of him. This was followed shortly by a bunch of other people tweeting pictures of the guy’s house. In over 20 years – since that idiot profiler Clint Van Zandt*** misidentified Richard Jewel as the Centennial Park bomber, which allowed the news media to focus on the wrong person letting Rudolph get away and continue his terrorism campaign for seven more years – the news media hasn’t been able to learn not to run with initial details that may have no actual significance to the events they’re covering. In this case the immediate connection is that the person that law enforcement wanted to talk to had a RV similar to the one used in the bombing parked at his house for a couple of weeks. So did one of my neighbors. The fact that the RV my neighbors rented or borrowed for a camping trip is no longer in their driveway DOES NOT MEAN THEY BLEW UP A STREET IN NASHVILLE ON CHRISTMAS MORNING!!!!!!
While the BBC is carefully reporting that the FBI thinks, at this time, that it may have been a suicide bombing because of the human remains found at the bomb site, and that the FBI is not looking for anyone else at this time, it still does not mean that is a final assessment. And the fact that Catherine Herridge of CBS is tweeting that this is the leading theory is meaningless. Herridge couldn’t accurately report on what she had for breakfast or which shoes she is currently wearing. Why CBS decided it was a good idea to hire a hard right reporter with a sweet tooth for every silly conspiracy theory that emerges from the conservative digital and social media ecosystem away from Fox News is beyond me. Regardless, once they get the DNA back from the remains found at the bomb site they’ll know if their current working theory is accurate or if they are back to square one. Of course this assumes that someone didn’t kill the person whose home they searched earlier today in order to steal the guy’s RV and left the body in the RV so that it would appear to be a suicide bombing, which would allow the actual perpetrator or perpetrators to get away. I think that’s less likely, but it is still a possibility.
And now we get to the first part of the assessment. Before I went to work for the Army, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on domestic terrorism in the US. While there was a complete empirical theory I built out of existing criminological, political science, and sociological theories and then tested it statistically, there were also three case studies to qualify what had been quantified. The primary of those three case studies was Eric Robert Rudolph. In the findings, I then contrasted what we were seeing domestically with examples of terrorism in other nation-states by what we would call foreign non-state actors. This comparison of domestic and foreign extremists and the terrorism they were undertaking was the focus of my work until I went to work for the Army five years later.
Right now we’ve got two things that stand out, given that there’s been very little new news since late yesterday afternoon/early evening. The first is the use of the warning, as well as what appear to be strings of gunfire broadcast before the warning and count down. Rudolph was one of the first domestic terrorists in the US to use warnings before his bombings. By one of the first, I specifically mean the first on the extreme right. Rudolph’s behavioral drivers were rooted in the fact that he was a religiously motivated racist, anti-Semite, homophobe, anti-feminist, anti-government xenophobe. Rudolph had been raised in – indoctrinated and radicalized from the time he was child – the Christian Identity movement and the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. The Church of Jesus Christ Christian is the religious arm/component of the Aryan Nations. It provides the theology and dogma in teaching and preaching not just for the Aryan Nations, but several other extreme right movements in the US. Its core theology and doctrine** is an extreme, violent, racist, and rigid version of charismatic Pentecostalism that was fused with the British Israelitism/Anglo Isrealitism theology that had bounced around England and the US since the Victorian period. Woodrow Wilson was an Anglo Israelite, so this wasn’t something that was just on the extreme fringes of American Christianity. Decades after Wilson’s presidency and death, in the early post WW II period, Anglo Israelitism was fused with a white, segregationist charismatic Pentacostalism and that gave us the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. And while the Aryan Nations is now little more than the name and several different men fighting over who has the right to it in an attempt to grift off of it these days, the Church of Jesus Christ Christian is still active. Small compared to other evangelical and charismatic sects of American Christianity, but active.
Rudolph’s terrorism was rooted in a solid blend of extreme right and extreme religious, in this case charismatic Protestant ideas, theologies, ideologies, and dogmas. Just like those of the directly tied to the Aryan Nations Order I and Order II. As we all as the anti-government behavior of the Weavers – specifically Vicki Weaver as she was the actual driver of her and her husband’s anti-government, racist, and anti-Semitic behavior as she was both the brains in the family and the one who had fervently adopted the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian and pulled Randi into it. Rudolph was also tied into the Army of God, which also existed then and what’s left of it exists now in this nexus of far right and religious Christian extremism in the US. But what makes Rudolph important here is his use of issuing warnings before his bombs would go off.
Prior to Rudolph this tactic had been used solely by extreme left terrorists. Specifically, because these groups were partially or totally Marxist in their ideologies. They wanted their violence to inspire a popular or proletarian revolution to sweep away what is and establish a new socialist state and society. Even the groups that were anti-colonialist and nationalists – like the IRA – were also partially or wholly Marxist in their ideology. And since they wanted to inspire a popular uprising, they couldn’t be indiscriminately killing the populace that they needed to motivate willy nilly. So they tried to carefully target – kidnap the right official or elite or notable, assassinate the right official or elite or notable, blow up a building or structure that is a symbol of the tyranny of the elites and notables – without causing mass casualties. If you just use Northern Ireland as the case study, if you look at violence coming from the Catholic independence groups like the IRA, the PIRA, INLA (what were originally called the Republicans because they wanted Northern Ireland to be rejoined to the Irish Republic) before a lot of them devolved into organized crime groups, they were very careful in who they killed and what they blew up. The casualty and death tallies for their groups is comparatively low. When you pull the numbers for the Protestant loyalist groups, both those that wanted to just remain in the UK and those that got fed up with Britain and believed it was betraying them to the Irish Catholics and also targeted British officials, the casualty and kill numbers for their attacks are through the roof. While the Catholic independence groups would call in a bomb threat so they could symbolically blow up a building once everyone had been evacuated, the Protestant loyalist groups would just blow it up. They’d kill a building full of Protestants if it allowed them to kill their lone Catholic target. And this pattern – that extreme left terrorists were much more discriminating in their targeting, while extreme right, extreme religious, and extreme right and religious terrorists were not discriminating at all – holds all over the world.
Since Rudolph, the tactic of calling in a warning or providing one has become commonplace on the extreme right in the US. Just working from memory, I’m almost 100% positive that it was actually included in a revision to the Army of God manual. What Rudolph did in adapting this tactic was to use it not to get people out of the way so few if any were hurt in his symbolic violence intended to motivate the masses to rise up, but rather to draw law enforcement and first responders, the news media, and others into the kill zone. This tactic has now been used dozens of times over the past 20 years or so as we’ve seen an increase in extreme right domestic terrorism in the US.
And now we continue to wait for more information to be released. Right now we have no idea if this is domestic terrorism or someone angry at one of the businesses in the building adjacent to where the RV was parked or the owner of the building or someone hoping to commit suicide by cop or someone hoping to draw in law enforcement and first responders and commit a mass casualty suicide attack. What we do know, unfortunately, is that these things have a tendency to spawn copycat attacks. And that is what law enforcement needs to keep an eye out for right now.
Open thread!
* I’ll let Ken White explain the problem with the use of person of interest, which law enforcement only started to use after the TV show became popular.
Just a reminder that “person of interest” is an utter bullshit null-content post-9/11 dystopia phrase. https://t.co/zhVLEdQgaH
— ISSUEALLTHEPARDONShat (@Popehat) December 26, 2020
** Christian Identity theology, which is the core of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian’s theology, dogma, and doctrine is a combination of two things. The first is that the 10 lost tribes of Israel were not lost. Rather they sailed out of the Mediterranean, up the coast of Europe, down the Thames, and established the ancient city of Londinium, which is where the modern London is situated. There they reestablished themselves and started the Anglo-Saxon race. As such, Anglo-Saxons (read this as white European people) are the real Chosen People, not the Jews. Christian Identity takes this and adds a racist and anti-Semitic component. Specifically that the Jews are really the children of Satan, which is derived from the Jews being a “synagogue of Satan” mentioned in one of Paul’s epistles. Existence is a fight between the real Chosen People and the Jews and it is hard to distinguish them because only people who can blush – white people – are the real Chosen People and really have souls. Since Jews present as white and can blush, they are able to trick those not in the know. Anyhow, according to Christian Identity the Satanic Jews and their soulless minions – Africans/people of African descent, Asians/people of Asian descent, Hispanics/people of Hispanic descent and people of mixed ethnicities, which the Christian Identity folks call “mud people” seek to take over the world and rule on behalf of Satan. This all departs from traditional Anglo-Israelitism, which included the whole ten lost tribes thing, but recognized Jews as still part of the Chosen People, just not pure blood anymore, leading to a sort of bizarre antagonistic and hostile to Jews philo-Semitism by the English and then American elites who held these views, like Woodrow Wilson. The final component of Christian identity is a racialized, racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and nativist/xenophobic version of charismatic evangelicalsim/Pentacostalism. The seminal work on all of this is Michael Barkun’s Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement.
*** Van Zandt so screwed this up that in May 2003 he was still blaming Jewell. On the Sunday morning TV talk fests! I was attending the XL Senior Conference at the US Military Academy in May 2003 as an invited guest and participant. It was the kickoff for the newly opened Combatting Terrorism Center, which I had a small involvement with as it was being set up. They had just arrested Rudolph as the conference was starting and we all had some fun talking about Van Zandt’s appearance on one of the Sunday news shows blaming Jewell for the fact that it took seven more years to catch Rudolph because Jewell had made himself such an appealing suspect that just fit every different assumption in Van Zandt’s profile. So it was Jewell’s fault, not Van Zandt’s that Rudolph was at large and active for seven more years. This was then, as it is now, a load of bullshit. Van Zandt is a moron. Behavioral profiling is a scam. It was a scam at its creation:
On November 16, 1940, workers at the Consolidated Edison building on West Sixty-fourth Street in Manhattan found a homemade pipe bomb on a windowsill. Attached was a note: “Con Edison crooks, this is for you.” In September of 1941, a second bomb was found, on Nineteenth Street, just a few blocks from Con Edison’s headquarters, near Union Square. It had been left in the street, wrapped in a sock. A few months later, the New York police received a letter promising to “bring the Con Edison to justice—they will pay for their dastardly deeds.” Sixteen other letters followed, between 1941 and 1946, all written in block letters, many repeating the phrase “dastardly deeds” and all signed with the initials “F.P.” In March of 1950, a third bomb—larger and more powerful than the others—was found on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. The next was left in a phone booth at the New York Public Library. It exploded, as did one placed in a phone booth in Grand Central. In 1954, the Mad Bomber—as he came to be known—struck four times, once in Radio City Music Hall, sending shrapnel throughout the audience. In 1955, he struck six times. The city was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. Late in 1956, in desperation, Inspector Howard Finney, of the New York City Police Department’s crime laboratory, and two plainclothesmen paid a visit to a psychiatrist by the name of James Brussel.
Brussel was a Freudian. He lived on Twelfth Street, in the West Village, and smoked a pipe. In Mexico, early in his career, he had done counter-espionage work for the F.B.I. He wrote many books, including “Instant Shrink: How to Become an Expert Psychiatrist in Ten Easy Lessons.” Finney put a stack of documents on Brussel’s desk: photographs of unexploded bombs, pictures of devastation, photostats of F.P.’s neatly lettered missives. “I didn’t miss the look in the two plainclothesmen’s eyes,” Brussel writes in his memoir, “Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist.” “I’d seen that look before, most often in the Army, on the faces of hard, old-line, field-grade officers who were sure this newfangled psychiatry business was all nonsense.”
He began to leaf through the case materials. For sixteen years, F.P. had been fixated on the notion that Con Ed had done him some terrible injustice. Clearly, he was clinically paranoid. But paranoia takes some time to develop. F.P. had been bombing since 1940, which suggested that he was now middle-aged. Brussel looked closely at the precise lettering of F.P.’s notes to the police. This was an orderly man. He would be cautious. His work record would be exemplary. Further, the language suggested some degree of education. But there was a stilted quality to the word choice and the phrasing. Con Edison was often referred to as “the Con Edison.” And who still used the expression “dastardly deeds”? F.P. seemed to be foreign-born. Brussel looked closer at the letters, and noticed that all the letters were perfect block capitals, except the “W”s. They were misshapen, like two “U”s. To Brussel’s eye, those “W”s looked like a pair of breasts. He flipped to the crime-scene descriptions. When F.P. planted his bombs in movie theatres, he would slit the underside of the seat with a knife and stuff his explosives into the upholstery. Didn’t that seem like a symbolic act of penetrating a woman, or castrating a man—or perhaps both? F.P. had probably never progressed beyond the Oedipal stage. He was unmarried, a loner. Living with a mother figure. Brussel made another leap. F.P. was a Slav. Just as the use of a garrote would have suggested someone of Mediterranean extraction, the bomb-knife combination struck him as Eastern European. Some of the letters had been posted from Westchester County, but F.P. wouldn’t have mailed the letters from his home town. Still, a number of cities in southeastern Connecticut had a large Slavic population. And didn’t you have to pass through Westchester to get to the city from Connecticut?
Brussel waited a moment, and then, in a scene that has become legendary among criminal profilers, he made a prediction:
“One more thing.” I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see their reaction. I saw the Bomber: impeccably neat, absolutely proper. A man who would avoid the newer styles of clothing until long custom had made them conservative. I saw him clearly—much more clearly than the facts really warranted. I knew I was letting my imagination get the better of me, but I couldn’t help it.
“One more thing,” I said, my eyes closed tight. “When you catch him—and I have no doubt you will—he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit.”
“Jesus!” one of the detectives whispered.
“And it will be buttoned,” I said. I opened my eyes. Finney and his men were looking at each other.
“A double-breasted suit,” said the Inspector.
“Yes.”
“Buttoned.”
“Yes.”
He nodded. Without another word, they left.
A month later, George Metesky was arrested by police in connection with the New York City bombings. His name had been changed from Milauskas. He lived in Waterbury, Connecticut, with his two older sisters. He was unmarried. He was unfailingly neat. He attended Mass regularly. He had been employed by Con Edison from 1929 to 1931, and claimed to have been injured on the job. When he opened the door to the police officers, he said, “I know why you fellows are here. You think I’m the Mad Bomber.” It was midnight, and he was in his pajamas. The police asked that he get dressed. When he returned, his hair was combed into a pompadour and his shoes were newly shined. He was also wearing a double-breasted suit—buttoned.
And it is a scam now!
James Brussel didn’t really see the Mad Bomber in that pile of pictures and photostats, then. That was an illusion. As the literary scholar Donald Foster pointed out in his 2000 book “Author Unknown,” Brussel cleaned up his predictions for his memoirs. He actually told the police to look for the bomber in White Plains, sending the N.Y.P.D.’s bomb unit on a wild goose chase in Westchester County, sifting through local records. Brussel also told the police to look for a man with a facial scar, which Metesky didn’t have. He told them to look for a man with a night job, and Metesky had been largely unemployed since leaving Con Edison in 1931. He told them to look for someone between forty and fifty, and Metesky was over fifty. He told them to look for someone who was an “expert in civil or military ordnance” and the closest Metesky came to that was a brief stint in a machine shop. And Brussel, despite what he wrote in his memoir, never said that the Bomber would be a Slav. He actually told the police to look for a man “born and educated in Germany,” a prediction so far off the mark that the Mad Bomber himself was moved to object. At the height of the police investigation, when the New York Journal American offered to print any communications from the Mad Bomber, Metesky wrote in huffily to say that “the nearest to my being ‘Teutonic’ is that my father boarded a liner in Hamburg for passage to this country—about sixty-five years ago.”
The true hero of the case wasn’t Brussel; it was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison’s personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early nineteen-thirties: a generator wiper at the Hell Gate plant had been knocked down by a backdraft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn’t. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee Kelly spotted a threat—to “take justice in my own hands”—that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber’s letters. The name on the file was George Metesky.
Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick.
There’s no criminological, sociological, and/or psychological empirical validity to behavioral profiling. It was bullshit in 1940 and it is bullshit in 2020.
Cheryl Rofer
It’s also possible that the bomber blew himself up accidentally, although broadcasting the warnings seems to argue against this. Will be interesting to see the DNA results.
Wouldn’t be the first engineer hoist on his own petard.
Steeplejack
Seven miscellaneous episodes of Cowboy Bebop coming up at midnight EST on the Cartoon Network.
Now to read the post.
RepubAnon
Sounds as though profiling can go into the same bucket as bite mark experts, “wonder dogs”, and other “junk science” claptrap used to railroad suspects into prison.
Patricia Kayden
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: It happens. Could’ve had a heart attack or stroke and wound up foiling his own plan. Or the bomb went off too soon. Or he tripped and knocked himself out trying to get out of the RV.
Adam L Silverman
@Patricia Kayden: Unfortunately that’s likely to be like the seventy some odd percent that support medicare for all until you actually explain to them what it means. And then they don’t.
Adam L Silverman
@RepubAnon: The only time that I know of that bite mark analysis worked was when then Leon County Sheriff Department Detective Lenny Territo was able to match the bite marks on one of the victims to Bundy.
Full disclosure: I know Lenny. My Dad hired him as a professor in the Criminology Department at USF when he retired and finished his doctorate.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: Also, I’m pretty sure the first person hoisted on their own petard was the munitions engineer that developed the idea.//
Another Scott
I think you are right to be cautious, but Reuters is already reporting like the authorities know who did it.
https://reut.rs/2L1jjKk
We’ll see how the story changes over time…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
CaseyL
I didn’t know calling in a warning ahead of time was used by multiple groups; I only knew about the IRA doing that. I’m not at all surprised that RW terrorists use “advance warnings” to increase, rather than decrease, the body count.
The Nashville incident is just baffling. It’s the most liberal-ish city in Tennessee, but that’s not saying much. If the explosion wasn’t an elaborate suicide, I can’t figure out what the point was. A practice run? If the perp is the one whose remains they found, I guess the practice run didn’t work out so well.
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
Said about the same thing on twitter earlier today. It’s easily possible that it was a suicide, on purpose or accidental. Someone said it would be hard to say it was a suicide with a warning, but the warning started what, 15 minutes before the thing blew up so violently that there’s nothing but small bits and something that resembles human remains. If it’s the suspect, it could be the thing went off before he was ready, or it was a suicide. I saw the picture of the street, that was no small device, that was either something very powerful or a lot of something less so. Either way that was a big bang to do that much damage. And I’ve not seen anyone say it might have been murder. Also a possibility.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: The FBI has a working theory of the case. I think Reuters, as well as several others, are over reporting this. They’re presenting it as a done deal. It may well be, but they won’t know until they get the DNA results back. And even then one can make equally plausible explanations, as I did in the post, unless they have other evidence they have not yet publicly released that confirms their theory.
Mary G
I was struck by the fact that AT&T keeps such important infrastructure in downtown Nashville, so essential that 911 went out in numerous locations, the flights from the airport had to held up for a while, and cell service is still messed up. Wouldn’t it be better off out of the city where they could have a big fenced perimeter that ensures a truck bomb can’t do so much damage? And is there so little redundancy that these functions can’t have fail safes in other buildings/cities? Should corporations whose primary objective is to make money for shareholders by squeezing expenses to the bone even be in charge of this?
Cheryl Rofer
@Ruckus: I will bet it was ammonium nitrate. That would be the reason for using the camper, to get a lot of it in. And the very sharp bang was characteristic.
The FBI labs are analyzing samples as we speak and calculating how much it took.
Mary G
If the guy had any internet presence at all, someone would’ve found it by now, surely?
Adam L Silverman
@Mary G: My cellular service was spotty yesterday morning and afternoon and I’m a good 12 hour drive, give or take, from Nashville.
Wyatt Salamanca
Adam,
Given the hysterical, breathtaking idiocy tv news anchors and reporters display when covering incidents of this type, I’m extremely grateful that John Cole had the wisdom to persuade you to become a BJ front pager. You provided more cogent, thoughtful analysis in this post than the wall-to-wall coverage of a confederacy of dunces appearing on all 3 cable news channels. Thanks for all your outstanding posts in 2020. I’ve learned a great deal from you this past year and look forward to learning even more in 2021. Have a Safe, Healthy, Happy New Year’s celebration!
Adam L Silverman
@Wyatt Salamanca: Thank you for the kind words! A safe, healthy, and happy New Year’s to you too!
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
Although I’m not at all versed in explosives, I do know some chemistry and that does make some sense.
Anyway, I’ll wait for the experts to confirm the findings, I’m just making suggestions, because so much I’ve seen has people looking for all kinds of reasons for something like this and those reasons always seem to fall into 2 categories, political stupidity or personal desperation/retaliation. And personal desperation/retaliation seems to be a bit more common. YMMV.
Adam L Silverman
And now there’s this:
frosty
@Steeplejack: OT: This is the first time I’ve seen you here and it’s been a week or so (?) but thanks for the suggestion to watch A Matter of Life and Death. You were right, the first 5 minutes hooks you. A good flick with a good ending.
Bill Arnold
@Adam L Silverman:
While waiting for the DNA announcement, I keep refreshing this heavy.com piece. What do people think of it? (and are they reliable?)
Anthony Quinn Warner Named as Nashville Bombing Person of Interest (Jessica McBride, Updated Dec 26, 2020 at 11:56pm)
The bits about “quit claim deed” transfers (two properties, to a woman in CA), one Nov 25 2020, are interesting.
Looking at Lin Wood’s feed today (other reasons) I see in replies that the RW swamps and their feeds are generating/circulating dubious theories and perhaps outright disinformation. One I saw was related to Dominion voting machines, another that the explosion wasn’t in the camper, etc. Ugh.
Feathers
@Mary G: Read a Twitter rant about how cell phone companies had managed to get laws changed (or not updated) so that they have gotten away with not financially supporting local 911 infrastructure. Not sure of the details, but this jibes with my recollection of questions/problems that occurred with the switch from land lines to cell phones. This was being blamed for the lack of redundancy which led to a wide swathe of localities having 911 be totally knocked out.
@RepubAnon: This. So much of forensic “science” is just bullshit somebody dreamt up and a prosecutor signed on because they thought a jury would buy it.
There is so much in policing and out criminal justice system that needs to be knocked down and rebuilt on new foundations.
DWHarper
It was obvious from the beginning… Knowing that the business district will be empty and then warning anyone else around, Wagner was there to wreak havoc on ATT the corporation probably about the 5G crap, trying not to kill anyone but himself… Old white guy with a grudge… will be seeing more of this some way or another…
Adam L Silverman
@Bill Arnold: It’s just a rehash and summary of what other journalists have reported. There’s no new information there. It is the person Jamali is referring to in the tweets I posted above.
randy khan
@Mary G:
All of that infrastructure has been in place for decades, sometimes up to 100 years. It’s historically been really hard to move things like 911 routers once they’re put in place because you then have to move all the lines that connect to them. (One interesting consequence of this is that phone companies often have had big buildings that over time ended up being much too big for the equipment in them – switches that used to be mechanical behemoths can now fit comfortably into a space the size of a suburban bedroom (although they still need very good air conditioning.)
Phone companies are gradually consolidating facilities – the switch building nearest my house no longer has a switch in it – but it takes a long time and is quite an effort. New companies that compete with the traditional phone companies have an easier time, and sometimes have only two or three switches for the entire country (one of which usually is a backup).
Ian
@Mary G: I doubt they had this in mind when they chose the location of the building.
randy khan
@Feathers:
911 infrastructure is pretty centralized in general – everybody routes their calls to a thing called a selective router, and historically there’s one per 911 center. As 911 slowly moves to IP, there will be more redundancy (there’s already redundancy in the connections to and from the router), but money tends to get spent on things other than boring infrastructure, and municipalities have a tendency to divert 911 money to other things. (This is something the FCC has been trying to fight the last few years.)
namekarB
This is the most illuminating commentary I have come across regarding the Nashville bombing. Bonus points for debunking behavioral profiling. I just roll my eyes whenever I hear or read somebody speculating on woulda coulda shoulda.
debbie
Someone enhanced that photo of the RV driving through Nashville and got a blurred photo of the driver. Assuming he’ll ever be found, it would be interesting to see if it’s at all accurate.
ETA: Thanks for the insights into Rudolph. I won’t be sleeping well tonight.
Ruckus
@randy khan:
Back about 9 yrs ago my landlord was a high security internet/website provider for local governments. I was told by the manager that they bought a building with excess room because they knew they would be growing and needing a second 2000 sq ft server room. In one year the capacity of the available servers doubled so that they didn’t need to build a second server room in the building they had brought. Phone companies had the same concept, the equipment kept getting smaller and going from mechanical to electronic.
Mary G
Scott Walker is a tool and a moron. He tweeted a picture of a pizza he supposedly had tonight at his local joint, but it’s just a closeup of a pizza he had in October 2019 that he had also tweeted about.
Adam L Silverman
@Mary G: Or, as Q tells us, was this tweet really about the children he trafficked as part of a Satanic pedophilia ring that he is part of?
Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to!//
Amir Khalid
@Cheryl Rofer:
If I may: the word Shakespeare used was enginer — meaning a plotter.
Amir Khalid
@Mary G:
Why does Scott Walker think anyone wants to know about his pizza dinners?
Redshift
Wow, exactly the same way punditry works!
Citizen Alan
@CaseyL: IIRC, the Weather Underground always called in their bomb threats. During all the kerfluffle about Obama having occasionally been in the same room as Bill Ayers, it was mentioned that the only people to have ever died in a WU bombing were incompetent WU members who blew themselves up.
Citizen Alan
@CaseyL: I’ve been wondering if it wasn’t meant as an infrastructure attack. Didn’t it take down a significant percentage of cell phone and internet service across Central Tennessee?
See also Mary G’s comment.
Winston
Rudoph’s idea of advance warning was to set a small bomb off next to an abortion clinic, wait in the bushes until law enforcement arrived and set off a larger bomb. There is a good documentary on Netflix. “Manhunt Deadly Games”. Also “Manhunt Unabomber” on how language analysis from a profiler was instrumental in getting Ted Kaczynski’s brother to identify him. Interesting that the documentary stated that they are both in the same prison block.
JanieM
@debbie: That image is surely photoshopped. Among other things, it’s all wrong spatially — the guy’s head, as depicted, is half the height of the windshield, and it’s not positioned the way an actual driver would be positioned. Plus the Peter J. Ehlich Twitter account dates all the way back to…Christmas. He misspelled the person Warner signed his house over to as “Michael” rather than Michelle, but then again, I can’t find a seemingly reputable news source that even mentions the house transfer.
The guy seems to be trying to play Adam Silverman on Twitter, and doing it very, very badly. ;-)
Noskilz
My suggestion on the gunshot recordings is that if he really wanted to minimize casualties and increase the odds of his evacuation being effective, gunshots are something the locals would definite call in for police to investigate. Nashville has had a fairly regular run of shooting incidents in recent months and that isn’t something they – either the locals or police – would be likely to ignore. From the reporting, the gunshots seemed to be something that happened at the beginning, presumably to attract attention.
Origuy
@Amir Khalid: Apparently Walker was encouraging people to go out and eat in restaurants.
Chetan Murthy
@Origuy: If only this sort of shit were classed as criminal mischief. If only.
Rokka
This is The President’s Analyst ll (Plan Rasputin)
Christmas? Check
Comm chip paranoia? Maybe
Female bot warning? Check
Attack TPC? Check
Redshift
@Origuy:
And faking it to encourage politicized risky behavior in others while staying safe himself. Of course, we all knew he was an asshole already.
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
I told a friend yesterday that “Find myself living in material for an Adam Silverman post” was not actually on my Christmas list. I wonder who felt life here in one of America’s COVID hotspots was dull enough we needed some excitement.
Reports from the scene suggest the gas mains were ruptured by the initial blast. I don’t know if that increased the damage in the area, or if it just complicated things for the emergency workers.
As Adam says, we still don’t know enough about the who & why to say anything as to motives. While the casualty count is fortunately low—whether by design or not, although timing this 6:30 AM on Christmas morning in an area with lots of bars & restaurants but only a few people living in upper-floor loft apartments suggests that maximizing casualties wasn’t a primary goal—the consequences of the damage to AT&T’s data center are significant and not just local. As a demonstration of the havoc you can create with an attack on infrastructure, this is impressive. I hope there aren’t too many people taking notes.
Given the range and diversity of people in Nashville these days, there’s no end of possibilities for motivation.
As to why AT&T had such an important structure downtown, AT&T already had facilities in the immediate area when the damaged building was put up (I can’t recall if that was the late 1970s but I think so, as does my old landlady, who was born & raised here). At that time, property values were pretty low downtown generally and especially on Second Avenue—it was built well before the Second Avenue redevelopment project really took hold, and AT&T may well have managed not just a good deal on the land but some considerations from local government for building there—and I doubt security from truck bomb attack was a major factor in the planning. The late 1970s was well before the idea of cell phones as a replacement for landlines, or the Internet as a big item for business, general government, or individuals was seriously considered. I suspect they just added on uses without thinking it over much—they had the building; new construction costs money, so why spend it if you don’t have to?
Because we’ve been without internet access, or even cable yesterday & today, and cell service has been a crapshoot, I’m still behind on most of the details. I look forward to finding out who decided we needed more excitement.
Emma from FL
And I am still trying to wrap my brain around Anglo-Israelitism.
encephalopath
They need a VIN off some scrap of the RV (I’m assuming there is no plate to be found) so they can trace the RV back to its last registered owner. Then they can figure out where and to who it went from there. My guess is that whoever blew up the RV didn’t go to the DMV to register it first.
dimmsdale
Hey, Adam. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling like I don’t get trustworthy perspective on stuff like this until you’ve weighed in, so I’m glad for your post. Was wading through Twitter trying to figure out who the reliable sources on this stuff are–do you have any go-to’s you’d care to pass on?
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
Why does Scott Walker think anyone cares if he’s alive?
CaseyL
@Redshift: I can’t get my mind around the crap they have in their heads. What was the thought process involved? What audience did he think he was addressing?
Winston
@Ruckus: Wisconsin is a fur piece from Nashville, after all.
Ruckus
@CaseyL:
Thought process? He has a thought process?
Does it consist of 3 words – Be An Asshole?
frosty
@Rokka: The President’s Analyst! TPC! “I’m not paranoid, they’re all spies!”
Great to see someone else has seen this movie, although it’s been decades ago for me. A classic!
mrmoshpotato
@Mary G:
‘Nuff said.
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
@Emma from FL: I think it’s part of the English version of American Exceptionalism, built up to justify their imperial destiny. Because “We are both lucky and bloody-minded acquisitive bastards” isn’t nearly as inspiring. I suspect the Spanish in the 16th century had something like that going for them; the Romans in the Late-Republican/Augustan eras certainly did.
Chetan Murthy
@a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio: Magellan: “God, Gold, and Glory”.
smike
@a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio:
OT, but I’ve been wanting to ask you, if I may, how your nym came to be. Here goes:
How did you nym come to be? I liked it the first time I saw it.
Kent
I haven’t really been paying attention to all the details. but Nashville seems kind of an odd choice for either right-wing or left-wing crazies inspired by any sort of national issues. It’s not any sort of Federal institution or lightning rod target.
Feels more like someone went really far down the rabbit hole of conspiracy nonsense like Q-Anon or the Unabomber or some such shit that doesn’t necessarily make rational sense.
Ruckus
@Kent:
Does blowing up an entire city block in the middle of a city make any rational sense at any time?
Political, non-political, murder, suicide, revenge, does any of it make any rational sense to do this?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: There’s a major microwave facility for the telephone company in downtown LA, it was more noticeable back in the 70’s and 80’s before other buildings were built around it. It’s still there. The phone company had office there dating back to the 20’s. My guess is that it’s centrally located close to where most of the folk that use it are and since it’s already there, it’d be pretty expensive(both in money and possible down time) to move.
Kent
@Ruckus: None of it is rational. But we understand more about certain extremist motivations driven by race, religion, anti-government extremism, that sort of thing.
But I won’t be surprised if it turns out to be some white guy.
Viva BrisVegas
@frosty: If you liked A matter of Life and Death, you might try The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp as well as A Canterbury Tale. All three films made during WW2 by Powell and Pressburger.
Then follow those up with The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus.
Hob
@Citizen Alan:
Wasn’t it the case that if those people had not blown themselves up, their bombs were meant for an unwarned attack with a goal of mass casualties– a deliberate change in tactics specifically because they felt their previous, gentler and higher-minded strategy had been a mistake?
Ken B
@Redshift: And psychics.
sab
@Hob: Good point.
Warblewarble
“I take no responsibility” Donald J. Trump
J R in WV
Thanks for sharing your experience and research on this kind of terror attack with us. I feel much more educated than I did before seeing this!
So glad Cole found you to bring professional knowledge to the jackal community!
sab
Adam,
Thanks for being here. ” Professional” news sources are being nuts and unprofessional, and also misinformative. Thank you for your continuing professionalism.
m.j.
This isn’t really speculation. It just occurred to me, I think I’ve seen this in a movie or TV show where a bomb across town is used to distract from another crime like a robbery.
bjacques
@Adam L Silverman: I wonder if that’s really a clue, yet. AT&T would have been a major employer in the area, so that connection might just be a coincidence. And even the human remains could have been of whoever walked past in the apartment camera footage but stuck around out of curiosity. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I try to wait 24-48 hours at least for stories like this to shake out. Don’t always succeed…
evodevo
@Mary G: You’d think so, wouldn’t you… our cell phone service was out for almost the entirety of Xmas day because of it, and we live up I-75, 45 miles south of …. Cincinnati. So it took out communications over at least a two state area. THANKS AT&T!!
artem1s
Because of the RV, my first thought about similarities was of Oklahoma City, not Eric Rudolph. I can’t remember now if Rudolph had any ties to the militias that also financed McVeigh. But those militias were part of the group in Dublin who got caught planning to kidnap the Governor of MI. Maybe AT&T proximity is a coincidence? Surely there are municipal buildings in that part of town as well? The lack of anyone taking responsibility when it was obviously planned out, is really odd. That alone leaves room for lots of speculation by media, so seems to indicate that the physical building isn’t the point – maybe that it was Christmas is more important to the bomber/s? That seems really odd for the usual Christian right suspects – but who can fathom what motivates the insane?
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
The person has a history of making bombs and a history of publicizing his bombs — it has to be Adam Sandler.
evodevo
@frosty: Yes…very underrated, IMO…very droll and, actually, plausible in some weird way LOL …. loved James Coburn…I may have to break down and rent it to watch again…
CliosFanBoy
Adam, I’m going to need a source on Wilson as an Anglo-Israelite. He was certainly an Anglophile but he was no anti-Semite.
CliosFanBoy
@Citizen Alan: and some poor kid pulling an all-nighter at a lab in Wisconsin.
Luthiengineer
Adam: Off topic, but are you willing to share/pm what martial art you teach, and what city the dojo is in? I doubt that I’m close enough to attend, but right now I’m in my kids ‘McDojang’ learning TKD in Burke, VA. It’s nice to get belt promotions quickly…but that’s not really what I’m interested in, and my 50-year old hips are probably going to limit how high I can kick anyway.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Cheryl Rofer: Since we are into hypothetical; accidentally shot himself in the reported burst of gun fire, then blew himself up. My experience with the hard right is for all their Second Amendment Right talk they are pretty ignorant about firearms.
Laura Too
@debbie: https://www.concentricadvisors.com/blog/commentary/who-is-sam-hyde-identifying-disinformation-and-conspiracy-during-a-crisis-situation
We live in interesting times.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Adam L Silverman: So possibly revenge against AT&T.
Since it would be irresponsible not to speculate, I am going to speculate the father was fired from AT&T for harassment, dies from eating to many cheese burgers dipped in mayo, his son of course blames AT&T as a libertard globalist femnazis that killed daddy and blows himself up.
Laura Too
Late as usual, but if you are still around, huge thanks Adam! You always bring a clarity that is greatly needed. And lots to mull over.
debbie
@Laura Too:
Another goddamn Internet Sensation! Thanks.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@artem1s: Think to keep in mind about domestic terrorism is it’s deliberately structured to be lone nuts. Since the leaders of this lunatic groups can be held responsible for ordering violence (and that means property seizures which makes these grifters sad) they stir up their followers until one of them lose it and does something on their own. So each domestic terrorist is acting on their own internal agenda.
Laura Too
@debbie: LOL, yes.
Betty
@Adam L Silverman: A couple who had left the scene started coming back after the announced time and were nearly back in the blast zone when the bomb went off. It is plausible that he got caught with an ahead of schedule explosion, after waiting until he thought the area was clear with enough time left for him to get out. Then there wasn’t.
cmorenc
@RepubAnon:
…or the “blood spatter analyst” Duane Deaver whose dubious, misleading testimony in the Michael Peterson murder trial in Durham, NC later led to his conviction being overturned.
debbie
@cmorenc:
Or Cameron Todd Willingham who was executed as a result of some “artful” arson interpretation.
patroclus
@CliosFanBoy: Me too. Wilson was a well-known Presbyterian, the son of one of the founders of the Presbyterian Church of the U.S., who served as “clerk” (sort of the chief operating officer when the Moderator of the General Assembly isn’t active) for numerous years. In such an important position, he would have had to adhere to the Westminster Confession of Faith pretty closely and that contains nothing even remotely similar to Anglo-Israelite beliefs. Wilson (the son) could have had wacko religious beliefs but it probably would have been reported at some point during his lengthy academic and political career. A source for that sort of allegation would almost certainly exist. I await with interest such a citation. Until then, it seems like a slur and should either be backed up or deleted.
taumaturgo
Since the topic is bombing, a short premier on one of the few things America does best. https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/10/the-american-cult-of-bombing/
Frankensteinbeck
Ooh, I want to try the ‘baseless speculation’ game!
The bomber will turn out to be a follower of Q. The oddities of this crime will turn out to reflect that. Like every Q-berk, they have their own bizarre twist on the canon, but the trick is, like most Q-berks, they don’t know that. Why that spot? Some incomprehensible twist of gibberish, along the lines of “Hillary Clinton hides the bodies in downtown Nashville.” Something that bizarre. The warning is so regular folks don’t get hurt, only the Evil Ones. But the trick that brings it together is that there is no manifesto, no message, because the Q-berk thinks everyone knows. Like bombing a mosque, the message is supposed to be obvious.
henqiguai
@Luthiengineer: (#78)
Aikido. Somewhere in Florida (general area of Tampa – St. Pete?) Don’t recall from many references in the past.
And on those bad hips; you need to find a southern kung fu style; not a lot of kicking, mostly at or below the waist. Wing Chun seems to be popular in a lot of places.
Barry
@Kent:
“I haven’t really been paying attention to all the details. but Nashville seems kind of an odd choice for either right-wing or left-wing crazies inspired by any sort of national issues. It’s not any sort of Federal institution or lightning rod target. ”
At the risk of being redundant, what good did blowing up the Murray Bldg in Oklahoma City do for The Cause?
Ella in New Mexico
Yet another fantastic, sensible and thoughtful deep dive, Adam. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and experience with us, as usual, just when we needed it.
UncleEbeneezer
Thanks for the informative post Adam. Since you Opened the Thread: just curious if you have any thoughts on the recent calls for an Assange pardon?
TLDR- There was an NY Times Op-Ed by Laura Poitras claiming Assange is being unfairly persecuted and charges are a threat to journalism/whistleblowers etc. I believe you previous position was: he’s not a journalist and charges (at least some of them) are for stuff not covered in free-press protections.
Kathleen
@Mary G: ATT has all of its central offices located in downtown areas and always has. Many of its networks used to be redundant and designed to revert to alternate routes. At least that’s how it was when I worked there in the 70’s/80’s/90’s. I have no idea how the VPN technology and fiber transmission handle that today.
J R in WV
@Barry:
Why, it started the uprising of the Qa… wait,
No, the Patriotic Front was to unite with the United Klan and combine… wait,
wait,
No, I don’t have a clue what he thought it would accomplish.
Maybe just a crazed violent murderous mutherfuqer?? Same in Nashville…?
It also leaves the question, what did all the murky hidden folk who helped Timothy put that “mission” together THINK it was meant to accomplish?
Kathleen
@?BillinGlendaleCA: When AT&T and the local companies were all part of the Bell System, ATT built offices for the long distance interstate portion of the service and the “Bell Operating Companies” also built central offices downtown which connected local lines from companies/residences to the ATT central office. Then divestiture happened and the ATT and BOC’s separated but the local access still had to be provided to ATT.
J R in WV
@Kathleen:
Even in Charleston WV there is a bland tan brick office tower downtown, maybe 12 or 14 floors, really big Cat powered generator on the roof, NO windows, which is why I can’t say how many floors it really is.
Big ATT world symbol near the top, single door where tiny number of people arrive to work inside. Big microwave horns up on the roof as well.
Switch(s?) for sure.
The fact that Charleston is a fairly small town doesn’t mean they wouldn’t put a big switch centre there. Have never asked friends who worked for tele networking firms about it, don’t want to put them in an awkward position…
Kathleen
@J R in WV: I know ATT has presence in Charleston and many many other “smaller” cities. Fun fact – the old central offices don’t have windows to protect them from bombs, or so I’ve heard. It may have been a Cold War thing.
Kathleen
@J R in WV: I know ATT has presence in Charleston and many many other “smaller” cities. Fun fact – the old central offices don’t have windows to protect them from bombs, or so I’ve heard. It may have been a Cold War thing.
jonas
I forget who said it — maybe it was our very own Adam S.? — but basically everything reported about an attack/disaster like this in the first 24-48 hours is invariably wrong because it’s based on nothing but pure speculation, usually in the context of whatever bee is in the public’s bonnet at the moment (Islamic terrorism, domestic radicalism, QAnon, etc.). Starting about 72 hours, some stuff may start coming into focus for LEAs, but even then it’s sketchy. Unless there’s some unusual break in the story, like a friend or neighbor coming forward with a key piece of information that identifies a suspect (and not just a “POI”), it’s probably about a week before any reporting can really be considered informed.
eachother
Thank you Adam. Excellent article.
The technique of whatever the whole message turns out to be was delivered at volume setting 11.
A disquieting end to the silent night.
AWOL
@evodevo: James Earl Jones method acting. Pat Harrington. Carroll O’Connor. A one-time director. The film is so offbeat it doesn’t even register as a bona fide cult film to guys like Danny Peary, to the best of my memory these days. I need to rewatch it too, but two thousand stations and nothing on.
Adam L Silverman
@CliosFanBoy: @patroclus: The citation and reference for Wilson being an adherent of British-Israelism is in Barkun’s book, which is the definitive scholarly, refereed, and published work on the development of racialized white Protestantism in the US. Until British-Israelism or Anglo-Israelism was fused with a racist variant of charismatic evangelicalism/pentacostalism in the years immediately after WW II, it and its adherents were not overtly anti-Semitic. They were, at worst, condescendingly philo-Semitic. Sort of a patronizing older brother/we’re the descendants of the 10 tribes you thought were lost – younger brother/you’re the descendants of the two tribes that merged (Judah absorbing Benjamin). Moreover, it was not explicitly tied to any one Protestant denomination. In England, of course, it was closely associated with Anglicanism. But it wasn’t taught as part of Anglican theology and dogma. As it travelled to the US it was adopted by a number of mainstream Protestants. It was to this original variant that Wilson subscribed, not adhered to as a theology or a dogma.
On another note, it is one thing to ask if I can tell you where I’ve derived the information because you’re curious. It’s another to accuse me of making shit up to smear someone who has been dead for over 70 years. It is also important to remember that Wilson was an authoritarian, an out and out racist, and managed to transform the US into a quasi-authoritarian state and society from 1916 through 1920 in order to create support for the US to enter into WW I and to then sustain the US’s involvement. He established what we would today call a department of propaganda, had people snitching on their coworkers, neighbors, and family members, had German-Americans rounded up and interned for teaching German or speaking it or conducting parts of their worship services in it. And that too is exceedingly well documented. I’ve posted on it here before with links. So you can just go look that up for yourselves.
OGLiberal
The AT&T/Verizon building next to the WTC in NYC is huge and damage to it caused all kinds of comm issues.
I remember as an elementary school kid in the late 70s going to the NJ Bell building a few towns away on a class trip. There were still physical operators and switches. Old brick building, several floors, not a lot of windows. Has Verizon sinage these days although have no idea what is actually in there.
Adam L Silverman
@UncleEbeneezer: Neither Assange nor Snowden should be pardoned. Poitras and Greenwald’s bullshit on this is caused by one of three things:
Snowden was never a whistle blower even in the informal sense of the term. Assange was never a good government and transparency activist. There is substantial documentation that Assange was always a neo-fascistic, bigoted, misogynistic nutbag with delusions of grandeur and significant megalomania. There is solid, but less detailed and therefore less substantial given the classified nature of the information, documentation that Snowden stole everything that he could. That he did not just take the documentation on the surveillance programs that were being conducted in violation of US law, but, rather, he took everything. All the cyber tools – offensive and defensive – and then bolted with them. First to Hong Kong and then to Moscow. And by doing so he delivered everything he stole into the hands of the PRC and Russia. The PRC and Russia then used what they’d been given to immediately go on the offensive and in the case of Russia, continued to use Assange as the conduit to leak the most damaging information that could be stolen or falsified. This is what neither Poitras, nor Greenwald can admit because it would demonstrate that they are either two of the most gullible people on the planet or that they 1) allowed themselves to be used because it brought them fame, wealth, and power, 2) actively participated because it brought them fame, wealth, and power, or 3) actively participated because they actually believe that what Snowden and Assange did and are doing is the right thing to do.
Geminid
@evodevo: Beto O’Rourke looks very much like James Coburn ca. The Magnificent Seven.
dirge
@OGLiberal: The AT&T/Verizon building next to the WTC in NYC is huge and damage to it caused all kinds of comm issues.
A friend who’d worked there told me they had a spur off the subway system for bringing in tankers for the diesel backup generators.
On 9/11, everything there continued to work for quite some time — nearly 24 hours IIRC — before the clogged A/C vents brought it all down, degrading phone service regionally, and interrupting a couple years of continuous uptime for a few internet services I was running out of my living room at the time.
Frank Wilhoit
@Adam L Silverman: There’s a book in the commonalities between Wilson and G. W. Bush. I don’t have the chops to write it but the idea is free for whomever wants it.
As for patronizing philo-Semitism, recall that Disraeli (like Mendelssohn and many others) had to “convert” in order to have a career. Jews were not allowed to sit in Parliament until — umm, was it the Reform Bill of 1867?
Adam L Silverman
@Frank Wilhoit: Yep and yep. My favorite historical irony is that both Disraeli and Judah P. Benjamin, now know as the Dark Prince of the Confederacy, both made an almost identical statement when called out for being Jews. Disraeli in Parliament and Benjamin in the US Senate. From memory they both replied with something similar to:
debbie
Hopefully this 15-year-old link to Benjamin’s and Disraeli’s remarks hasn’t become totally discredited.
Larry Rosansky
@DWHarper: Amazing lack of reporting on the likelihood that the AT&T pop was the target, especially given the damage and the outages. Not even speculation, which the media is usually happy to engage in.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@taumaturgo:
JFC, are you for real? This was potentially a domestic terror attack on US soil and you felt it was ok to grind your particular axe on American foriegn policy?
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: Not to get in the middle of a battle that I know little about, but could you have been mis-remembering John Wilson rather than Woodrow?
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Almost Retired
Thanks very much for this post, Adam. I just initially assumed the 2nd and Broadway location was chosen because it’s a tourist hot spot – akin to blowing up the Hollywood and Highland “mall” here in Los Angeles (although the prime suspect there would be organized architectural critics). I hadn’t considered the communications-disruption angle.
Geminid
@Geminid: And James Coburn blew up a lot of stuff in a Fistful of Dynamite (1971). Coburn played former IRA bombmaker. The plot thickens….
greenergood
@Adam L Silverman: This is the dispute I cannot get involved with on FB with friends, not FB ‘friends’ but real friends who I’ve not been able to see for months who want to exonerate Assange – and I just have to remain silent – because I think he was wrong, but I also don’t agree with the threat of extradition to the US – it seems all too convenient. But I’m also intrigued by the Anglo-Isrealisation information. I know that both the English Conservative Party and the English Labour Party have very influential ‘Friends of Israel’ contingents, but are these left over from this very strange-sounding group that believed that Israel’s lost tribes made it to England? That is just so strange!
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
@smike: It’s late, but I started with fidelio, and added the thousand flouncing lurkers to goad a troll who showed up here—maybe in 2016? It was an election year, anyway. That was a phrase they used to put down the people who disagreed with them, dismissing a good many as such.
Death Panel Truck
Where were you when CBS hired Sharyl Attkission?
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
@artem1s: The municipal buildings are a few blocks away, as are the state capitol building and several state offices. I haven’t seen any indication of serious structural damage to these, although their data systems maybe screwed up.
Hob
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): It’s an article of faith among a certain type of leftier-than-thou dude that everyone else besides that dude, his friends, and his favorite Twitter feeds, is completely ignorant of any of the bad things America has committed, and that’s the only reason everyone else might be concerned about another bad thing happening. If you get stabbed and you say Ouch, it must mean you’re a naive normie who thinks no one else has ever been stabbed, or you think it was fine when other people were stabbed by your forebears. So of course it’s time for that dude to educate you.
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
@Barry: The attack on the Murrah Building was specifically intended as retaliation on the FBI & ATF, and the US government generally for the attack on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco—I think the Ruby Ridge shootings were another issue.
In terms of damage to Federal offices it was spectacularly successful as a vengeance attack.
SteverinoCT
I have an “office” in the old SNET/SBC now Frontier building in downtown Hartford. It’s a converted conference room with desks for me and my supervisor. The rest of the floor is unused, fitted as an operation center. We’re there on the fourth floor because we have a former equipment room, in one corner of a different floor that is set up as a cube farm. We have some racks for use as a data center. On yet another floor is where all the telco stuff gets done, filled with arrays of racks and switches and bundles of wiring. All unused. The actual work occurs in a corner with all the fiber and stuff. The building is vast and empty. Across an alley is another building, now converted into apartments.
I am very glad to be telecommuting.
Geminid
Now I read that police have shut down a highway near Lebanon TN after a box truck was found broadcasting a warning similar to the one in Nashville. From CNN by way of Mediaite. Weirder and weirder.
Fraud Guy
I’m now being told that the attack was done via drone, that there is video proof of a contrail streaking towards the blast site, which was across the street from the RV, and that it was planned to attack the Dominion servers seized from Germany that were being forensically audited under a contract with AT&T, which is also owned by the Deep State.
Oh, and John McCain and George H.W. Bush were killed by military tribunals.
Reality is getting farther and farther away from these people.
Geminid
@Geminid: Local coverage of today’s incident can be found by looking up “Lebanon tn news.” The local tv station has footage of a robot approaching a box truck parked by the side of the road.
Heywood J.
Really interesting in-depth analysis of this odd event. Hadn’t thought about Eric Rudolph for a very long time, but the thing I remember most about him was actually his brother, Daniel, videotaping himself sawing off his own hand as a warning to the gubmint agents looking for his brother. Craziest goddamned thing.
Adam L Silverman
@Death Panel Truck: Washing my hair. It takes a lot of work to look this grim and grizzled.
Adam L Silverman
@greenergood: Barkun talks a bit about it in the sections on the original – not anti-Semitic – version in his book. There is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that this pseudo-historical/mythological belief is what led several British officials and Wilson to support a homeland for the Jews. That it was there responsibility as descendants of the ten tribes for the descendants of the two.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: I’m not. Two completely different involvements with the same philosophy on different sides of the Atlantic.
CliosFanBoy
Which is why I asked.
As for being an authoritarian, he was, as with race, well inside the mainstream in the 1910s. hell, TR and the Republicans thought he was too SOFT on war opponents and German-Americans. We lose sight of how authoritarian the US was before 1960 or so.
patroclus
No one’s going to read this, but thanks for the clarification, Adam. Woodrow Wilson was certainly an authoritarian during WWI with his propaganda department and tacitly encouraging the ostracism of those men that didn’t “volunteer” to go off to war. And re-segregation of the Commerce Department (and other U.S. agencies) at the outset of his first term was certainly a racist policy. Not to mention hosting the premiere showing of Birth of a Nation and commenting that its baldfaced whoppers about Reconstruction were “all too true.”
But being an adherent of the psuedo-anthropological Anglo-Israeli nonsense is a new one to me. Even if it was an allegedly more benign version of what Herbert W. Armstrong (and other late-20th Century idiots) has/have done with/to it. My view is that he was influential in the events leading to the Balfour Declaration because he had been exposed to Zionist writings; not because he believed that the English were really the chosen people and had read and believed John Wilson’s nonsense. Barkun apparently believes differently – maybe he has some more evidence, which I haven’t seen.
To me, it is counter-intuitive that a Presbyterian (given the Scottish derivations) would believe what is essentially English pabulum. The Scottish Presbys were historically suppressed by the (Anglican) English and were considered the principal “Non-Conformists” in the realm for centuries – at times, even more so than the Roman Catholics. But then again, there was a certain amount of assimilation, so it’s possible that at least some of them bought into the idea. Similarly, James Wilson (WW’s Dad) grew up in Ohio but ultimately, in 1861 after having moved to the South, helped formed the PCUS; which was originally the PC-CSA, that is, the Southern Church, and spent much of his life trying to justify secession as a moral necessity. Their “theory” was that the Northern Church attempted to force all American Presbyterians to support the Union and that “freedom from authoritarianism” justified them. Lincoln kind of trumped them with the Emancipation Proclamations and the 13th Amendment and secession ultimately became – historically – as an allegory for the defense of slavery. But then came Restoration and the continued attempted justification. I can now see how James Wilson could reach out to John Wilson’s writings about a “chosen people” and broaden that out to include all whites (or at least the English and Scottish descendants) and then imbue some of that junk into his son. It’s possible, at least.
The PCUS persisted – until 1983 – and I was born into that Church. Which, by that time, had largely become mainstream and liberal, despite its secessionary past. Thankfully, the PCUS vanished and we merged then back into the PCUSA (the Northern Church) although it took numerous decades to accomplish. We now have numerous African-American members, female pastors, are gay-friendly and are certainly not anti-Semitic. Woodrow and James Wilson would probably not recognize us.
Interestingly, “the New Jerusalem” remains the favorite English patriotic hymn (according to polls there). Based on poems by Blake and composed in 1916 at a low time of WWI, its lyrics definitely seem Anglo-Israeli even today (albeit the “benign” version).