As dawn spread over San Antonio on September 9, 2021, almond-colored smoke began to fill the sky above the city’s Far West Side. The plumes were whorling off the top of a 132-foot-tall cell tower that overshadows an office park just north of SeaWorld. At a hotel a mile away, a paramedic snapped a photo of the spectacle and posted it to the r/sanantonio subreddit. “Cell tower on fire around 1604 and Culebra,” he wrote.
In typical Reddit fashion, the comments section piled up with corny jokes. “Blazing 5G speeds,” quipped one user.
“I hope no one inhales those fumes, the Covid transmission via 5G will be a lot more potent that way,” wrote another, in a swipe at the conspiracy theorists who claim that radiation from 5G towers caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
The wisecracks went on: “Can you hear me now?”
“Free hotspot!”
“Great, some hero trying to save us from 5G.”
That self-styled hero was actually lurking in the comments. As he followed the thread on his phone, Sean Aaron Smith delighted in the sheer volume of attention the tower fire was receiving, even if most of it dripped with sarcasm. A lean, tattooed—and until recently, entirely apolitical—27-year-old, Smith had come to view 5G as the linchpin of a globalist plot to zombify humanity. To resist that supposed scheme, he’d spent the past five months setting Texas cell towers ablaze.
Smith’s crude and quixotic campaign against 5G was precisely the sort of security threat that was fast becoming one of the US government’s top concerns in 2021. Just two weeks after Smith’s fire popped up on Reddit, then FBI director Christopher Wray discussed the latest trends in political violence in a speech marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. “Today, the greatest terrorist threat we face here in the US is from what are, in effect, lone actors,” he said, describing these people as moving “quickly from radicalization to action, often using easily obtainable weapons against soft targets.” And an increasing number of these individuals, Wray stressed, were turning violent after marinating in bizarre conspiracy theories.
In the years since Wray first delivered that warning, political violence in the US has continued to evolve much as he foresaw. Numerous recent attacks have been launched by people whose media diets have conditioned them to believe that government oppressors, permissive liberals, or shadowy cabals must be stopped at all costs. “This conspiracy stuff, it’s not coming from HitlerLover4Chan88 on Twitter anymore,” says Jonathan Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “It’s coming from a blue check, a gold check, a verified account—someone who, for a lot of people, has legitimacy.” He adds that some of those paranoid influencers are even operating in the halls of power. “You’ve got Groypers running Department of Homeland Security Twitter accounts,” Lewis says. “You’re getting legislative bills being passed about climate modification.”
Once convinced that violence is the only moral choice, lone actors are routinely carrying out hit-and-run attacks against pieces of the nation’s technological infrastructure, which remain lightly guarded despite their vast importance. The types of sites being targeted are as varied as the causes that motivate their attackers. In 2022, for example, someone shot up two electrical substations in North Carolina, in a possible far-right effort to disrupt a drag show. Two years later, a Tennessee man was arrested for allegedly plotting to use drones to bomb Nashville’s power grid in hopes of hastening a race war. This past July, a member of a militia group that trafficked in weather-manipulation conspiracy theories allegedly smashed up an Oklahoma radar station. And saboteurs with unknown motives have also been severing fiber-optic cables in both California and Missouri since the early summer. (Gauging the true number of infrastructure attacks has become more difficult since the DHS shuttered its Terrorism and Targeted Violence database in March.)
But Smith—who planned and executed his arsons by himself—appears to have been more prolific than any of these other extremists. The blaze north of SeaWorld was the seventh he’d set in 2021; in the seven months that followed, he would burn another 15. I spent the past year talking to Smith at length about the origin and details of his anti-5G crusade. I did so in the hope of learning how and why some desperate souls are being lured into destroying the guts of modern life.
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