First shots of a U.S. Civil War fired in the Carolinas … again | Will Bunch Newsletter

One dream dies, and a better one begins. Saturday’s loss by the U.S. men’s soccer team to the Netherlands at my beloved (despite Qatar) World Cup was disappointing but not soul-crushing. That’s partly because the super-young Americans will be hitting their prime in four years, but mainly because my bucket list fantasy of seeing the World Cup in person should finally happen on American soil in 2026. Hooray!

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The coordinated attack came just a couple of hours after nightfall had descended on the region. The strikes on at least two key electrical substations around 7 p.m. plunged more than 45,000 people into Stone Age-level darkness on a chilly December Saturday night.

Cars backed up in several downtowns without traffic lights. Some crowded into a hastily assembled shelter, among the thousands desperately seeking warmth during the short days and long nights. Schoolkids were ordered to stay home. A reporter found one man outside his darkened home, huddled over a fire pit and muttering, “It’s really cold.”

The stories read like a foreign correspondent’s dispatch from war-torn Ukraine, but the front line where this successful assault on the power grid took place over the weekend was actually Moore County, North Carolina — an exurban expanse on the edge of the Piedmont that gets its innate conservatism from the outskirts of Fort Bragg and the wealthy retirees who flock to the golf resorts of Pinehurst.

Moore County’s GOP sheriff Ronnie Fields told reporters Monday that gunfire severely damaged the two substations in a “targeted attack” by people who clearly “knew what they were doing.” Some 50 hours later, authorities — including the FBI, which has been called onto the case — don’t have any suspects or even a motive for the attack, and unanswered questions have overwhelmed what we know so far.

This much seems clear: More than 161 years after the first cannonball sailed over Fort Sumter, an American Civil War has again come to the Carolinas. A strange, asymmetrical Civil War, to be sure, and one that has confounded the public and mainstream journalists — who seem confused over how to cover the news out of Moore County — as much as the sheriffs and the feds.

Indeed, a terror attack on the U.S. power grid — which has been long feared from Russian or Chinese hackers, but instead apparently came from some yahoos with AR-15s — seemed to epitomize one of the strangest American moments I’ve ever lived through. Things in the body politic are getting so surreal it’s hard to know what is tragedy and what is farce.

Around the time the shots were ringing out through the piney woods of Moore County, the public spectacle of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, burning $44 billion of his vast wealth not so much to own Twitter, the social-media site so critical for sharing political ideas, but to use his new toy to “own the libs,” took a new turn. Musk used his now-ownership of Twitter’s internal files and his friendship with bro-dude journalist Matt Taibbi to gin up a faux scandal over alleged biased treatment in favor of troubled presidential son Hunter Biden. Most of Taibbi’s findings were over-caffeinated, except for the points that were dead wrong.

The nothingburger that Musk and Taibbi cooked up as the (all-caps!) TWITTER FILES did hit home in maybe the one place it was targeting most: Mar-a-Lago. For Donald Trump — 45th president of the United States, and the GOP 2024 frontrunner to become 47th and apparently last POTUS — the TWITTER FILES were the paper-thin excuse he needed to go where he’s been itching to reach for years: the end of American democracy.

“A massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote on Saturday night, arguing that the inconsequential Taibbi/Musk report somehow rose to a level that President Joe Biden’s 2020 election must be undone in order to reinstall Trump as a supreme leader.

To steal Musk’s favorite phrase, let that sink in. Say the key words slowly. “Termination ... of ... the ... Constitution.”

And yet for the key folks in the American body politic, this hasn’t sunk in. The same so-called leaders of the Republican Party — who fell mute in the bloody aftermath of the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 and more recently when Trump talked turkey on Thanksgiving with a Hitler-admiring antisemitic hip-hop superstar and America’s most vocal Holocaust denier — once again swallowed their tongues as the 2024 frontrunner made totalitarianism his main 2024 campaign promise. A mainstream media that seems to have only two gears — low, and Hillary’s emails — struggled to pull out of the muck of the latest Mar-a-Lago mudslide.

Look, I do understand the dilemma. The Beltway crowd is engaged in magical thinking that all the bat-guano crazy stuff happening out there in the heartland, punctuated by Trump’s battle cry for dictatorship, is only the last throes of a warped and wounded movement that may breathe its dying breath before the first 2024 primary votes are cast. After all, Trump’s meltdown comes as the walls of criminal prosecution — from new federal special prosecutor Jack Smith, not to mention Georgia and New York — are closing in. But also the second possibility — that Trump’s words were the declaration of a second American Civil War that will be embraced by far too many of the more than 74 million Americans who voted for him in 2020 — may be too frightening for elites to contemplate.

The problem is that too many foot soldiers are already waging this Civil War for basically the same reason that Southern states seceded in 1861: A coastal majority that didn’t share their values was threatening their “way of life,” whether that meant an economy based on chattel slavery, or social hierarchies based on prejudice and homophobia.

In Moore County, N.C. — about halfway between Mar-a-Lago and the White House — the terror attack on the power grid happened about an hour into the Downtown Divas drag show at the Sunrise Theater in the community of Southern Pines. Right-wing activists were protesting the event, and online speculation that the terror attack was to shut down the production spiked after one leading drag-show opponent — Emily Rainey, who lost her Army commission after attending Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, rally — posted at the start of the blackout: “The power is out in Moore County, and I know why.”

Sheriff Fields told reporters that deputies did visit Rainey’s home after the attack and had “a word of prayer with her, but it turned out to be nothing.” But while the possible drag show/terror link is still under investigation in North Carolina, it should be noted it happened in the same day that assault-weapon-toting members of the right-wing Patriot Front shut down a planned drag story-time event at a church in Columbus, Ohio, as nearby members of White Lives Matter Ohio flashed Nazi salutes to passing cars. And also that the night before that, a man was arrested outside one of the Detroit area’s largest synagogues for shouting antisemitic threats at Jewish families dropping off kids for day care.

The center is not holding in America right now. As I noted on these pages last week, an armed and agitated right-wing movement is lashing out more boldly and sometimes more violently because of perceived losses in the nation’s “culture war” and very real losses at the ballot box. And the biggest loser of all is egging them on with increasingly unhinged statements from Mar-a-Lago. Experts properly call those urgings stochastic terrorism, but increasingly these feel like that Civil War — albeit a sporadic and asymmetrical one — we’ve been dreading.

We need to treat domestic terrorism on U.S. soil as seriously as we treated the 9/11 attacks, and to take Donald Trump’s dictatorial pronouncements as seriously as those that echoed across Europe in the 1930s. An attack on the power grid should be front-page news, not treated as a quirky right-wing fringe festival. And it’s long past time to end the deference that Trump is receiving as an ex-president and begin prosecuting him for his failed coup and multiple other crimes and misdemeanors. The Civil War is here, and the good guys will lose if they don’t fight back with everything they have.

Question: Is all the coverage of Trump’s every tweet, statement, utterance really necessary. I feel like his ridiculousness is elevated when it could be discarded. — Via Debbie Bergen @DebbieBergen484 on Twitter, which still exists.

Answer: Debbie, this is why elite journalists get paid the big bucks — to exercise the right level of discretion and to put the story of our ex-president and wannabe dictator in proper context. You’re absolutely right that every dishonest “truth” that’s bleated from Mar-a-Lago does not merit a 72-point headline, or typically any coverage at all, But the bigger story of American fascism, and Trump’s interplay with a large QAnon-poisoned social movement, is too important to ignore. Thus, it is troubling that his “terminate the Constitution” threat was under-covered by outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post. Taking the Trump threat seriously while not needlessly amplifying the hourly insanity is a tightrope that must be walked these days, unfortunately.

It’s fair to say that Pennsylvania has never elected a new governor who was less challenged than November’s Democratic landslide winner, Josh Shapiro. No one from his own party opposed him in a primary. The right-wing extremism of his GOP opponent, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, also kept the focus off what our current attorney general might do as governor. Shapiro never even went before the public for a debate. I note this because last week the governor-elect unveiled his transition team of power players who’ll advise him on policy and personnel picks for his looming administration, and his picks reek of the arrogance of a politician who’s getting too used to not caring what others think — especially the base of his own party.

To be sure, Shapiro’s transition team loosely looks like other governors before him. He didn’t completely ignore core Democrats like environmentalists or the teachers’ union. Of course the candidate who set a record for fundraising rewarded some of his big donors, and it’s a tradition to throw in a few folks from the opposing party. But Shapiro seemed determined both to burnish his center-right credentials and recognize long-time friends even if their appointments felt like a stick in the eye to some Democratic activists.

Public-school advocates hoping to soften Shapiro’s pro-voucher position aren’t thrilled with hedge-fund billionaire Joel Greenberg — a longtime top donor to “school choice” candidates and business partner of the GOP’s top money man Jeff Yass — on the education panel. Ditto for justice reformers seeing the (probably inevitable) pick of Philadelphia FOP leader John McNesby for law enforcement. The rehabilitation of former Abington school superintendent Amy Sichel — who retired shortly after local anger over her dealings with Donald Trump billionaire pal Steve Schwarzman over a gift and a botched high-school renaming — is one of many head-scratchers.

But the worst judgment is a seemingly callous disregard toward the issue of sexual harassment. In a state with many respectable, moderate Republicans, Shapiro reserved a slot on the finance and insurance team for Val DiGiorgio, the former state GOP chair who resigned in 2019 after a female candidate shared the sexually explicit messages he’d sent to her. Likewise, the governor-elect reserved a space on his business development squad for former state Democratic chair Marcel Groen, who Gov. Tom Wolf forced out of that job in 2018 after a column I wrote about his poor handling of sexual-harassment allegations in the party. “Why is he on this list?” asked Philadelphia activist Gwen Snyder , who Groen accused in a letter of fabricating a sexual assault allegation at the Philly 2016 Democratic convention. Shapiro’s predecessor in Gov. Wolf had an admirable zero-tolerance policy toward sexual harassment and assault. The incoming governor appears to be abandoning that. I’ll say it yet again: Do better, Josh Shapiro.