Sarah Beth Clendaniel, who pleaded guilty to trying to attack and destroy the power grid in the Baltimore region, was sentenced to 18 years in prison with lifetime supervision post-release.
Prosecutors said Clendaniel, 36, from Catonsville, planned to blow up power stations around Baltimore to destabilize the government in a white supremacist plot.
According to prosecutors, the attack would have resulted in $75 million in damages and caused power outages for much of the state.
This sentence comes after Clendaniel accepted a plea deal and ultimately was found guilty of the crimes in May.
The podcast Weird Little Guys has an episode about it, but the general gist is that American Nazis are under the mistaken belief that in emergency situations people will turn on each other instead of the well documented behavior of our instincts to help each other and cooperate going into overdrive. From there they believe that we will band together based on race instead of something reasonable like neighborhoods. And so, despite ample evidence from the increasingly frequent natural disasters, they believe a single catastrophe that shuts society down shortly will trigger a race war.
Additionally thanks to a combination of Pax Americana, the nature of the equipment, the massive benefits everyone knows it provides, and the danger of fucking with it, the electrical grid contains a large amount of unattended critical equipment such as substations. Nazis, being losers that are sometimes only half brain dead have figured out that this is potentially the easiest catastrophe to manufacture and as such have begun shooting at substations in an attempt to trigger a race war instead of just waiting for a storm or heat wave to shut down the power for a few days and seeing that people don’t do a race war over that.