Last year we covered multiple incidents of attacks on electrical substations around the United States leading to some significant power outages. The perpetrators were rarely apprehended, leading to questions of whether or not there was some larger conspiracy taking place, seeking to destroy the country’s already shaky electrical power grid. Now the Justice Department has announced that several people have been arrested and sentenced in a plot to take out multiple substations around the country. In an unexpected twist, the motives of the men were apparently driven by racism, with the group being self-proclaimed Nazis and white supremacists. (Yahoo News)

A Dublin man and another man identified by federal prosecutors as white supremacists who plotted to attack the U.S. power grid were sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court in Columbus.

Christopher Brenner Cook, 21, of Dublin, was sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison. Jonathan Allen Frost, 25, who had addresses in Katy, Texas, and West Lafayette, Indiana, was sentenced to five years in prison.

A third man convicted in the scheme, 22-year-old Jackson Matthew Sawall, of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, will be sentenced at a later date.

You can read the full report from the Justice Department here. The men who were sentenced were Christopher Brenner Cook, 20 and Jonathan Allen Frost, 24. A third man, Jackson Matthew Sawall, 22, had previously pleaded guilty and is still awaiting sentencing. Cook and Frost were sentenced to 92 months and 60 months respectively.

There doesn’t seem to be any question that the men were bonafide white supremacists (a rarity these days), but they also don’t seem to have been the brightest bulbs on the tree. If they were really trying to fight a “race war” (a term that they used in their online chats), wouldn’t you suppose that they would pick specific targets where they could directly attack Black or Hispanic victims? When you knock out the power grid, you’re impacting everyone, including white people.

There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that they were serious about their efforts and were moving forward with their plans. Rifles were purchased and distributed with the intention of shooting up transformers as we’ve seen in previous attacks. The members of the group were issued “suicide necklaces” filled with fentanyl. They apparently planned to eat the necklaces if they were cornered by law enforcement and wrote about their willingness to die in the furtherance of their cause.

Organizing this effort online also wasn’t the smartest move. If they followed current events at all, by this point they should have realized that the FBI is tracking and infiltrating every group perceived to potentially be plotting anything. It would almost be shocking if they didn’t have a federal agent in their chat group.

So to address the title question, do these arrests mean that the attacks on the country’s power grid have been “solved?” Sadly, that’s not the case. These maniacs never made it past the planning stage and the attacks have continued to show up in places around the country. They were likely just copying the actions of others.

But the confessions of the men do show that we still have some serious nutjobs wandering around out there in the wild. The transcripts of their chats show that they were planning to simultaneously attack multiple substations around the country. Hey hoped for widespread blackouts that would last for weeks or even months. They believed that the subsequent unrest would lead to rebellions or even a race war. Of course, they never actually got around to attacking anything, so I suppose we’re lucky that they managed to receive sentences of five to seven years.