Would you believe I didn’t even find out about the event until nearly 12 hours after it happened? Yeah, I had apparently stayed off social media so well on Christmas day that it wasn’t until near 5PM that I learned anything had even occurred in my states capital!
So, we know the deal – early on Christmas morning an RV exploded in downtown Nashville right outside of a major AT&T network center. From what I can tell (recall it’s about 4PM on December 26th that I’m writing this so information is naturally scattered) there were reports of gunfire or something in the area and, when police got there, they found the RV parked with a warning message playing from it, telling people to evacuate the area.
As the bomb squad was contacted, it exploded, damaging quite a bit of the surrounding area and knocking out that AT&T network center, as best we can tell – right now I can’t make any long distance calls, although I can receive them and both my home and cellular data connections are fine (a friend who lives just north of Nashville, however, has no internet access at the moment) — this is all something I may get into in the near future, since I somewhat know how the phone and data networks operate, but that’s besides the point here.
This was a very odd event, to say the least. You pick the least likely day for anyone to be in the area (Christmas) and broadcast a warning messages before the thing blows up? Oklahoma City this isn’t, not by a longshot. No, this person only wanted to destroy specific property, it would seem. Very clearly, then, I would think they were targeting the AT&T infrastructure.
The fact that a message was not only left, but was in good English, also told me right off the bat this was likely a domestic act, which seems to possibly be validated in very recent reports of a suspect in relation to the event being taken into custody just an hour or so ago. Again, always take breaking news with a grain of salt but such quick leads being checked in lends validation to the idea.
The question is, why? Well, there are many possibilities, beyond outright insanity, but I’m thinking it has to do with the well documented fact that AT&T works hand in hand with the NSA on citizen surveillance and this person was targeting them for that reason. Again, nuance about why this was decided upon is extreme speculation at this point – it would be as part of the 5G conspiracy theories, it could be because of anything related to the current political situation (what a clusterfuck, right?) Who knows.
That’s the entire thing though, who really knows beyond whomever did this? As the armchair detectives of Reddit throw out their theories (none of which I wish to entertain, recall how wrong they were with the Boston bombing, among other events) and conspiracy nuts think that it has something to do with voting machine fraud (because of course it does) I wait for the facts, hoping that I’m at least somewhat right in what my initial thoughts were, as it reminds me my thinking process works.
I’m glad, so far as we know currently, there were no fatalities and minimal injuries. I know there is cat missing after all this, and I hope that kitty makes it home safely.
I’ll continue to cover this as news breaks. It hits a bit too close to home. Remember I’m in Memphis, and Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, is only about 300 miles away. I could be there by the end of the night if I wanted to without much trouble, so…. yeah. This is basically in my backyard, as they say.
More to come, as always.