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Nashville Bomber & Destructive Conspiracy Ideas

Sharon Hill

Complicated biological machine
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
1,821
Location
Pennsylvania, USA
Well, this is awful. Not many national news sites (yet) but local and tabloids are reporting that suicide bomber Anthony Warner may have targeted the AT&T building in downtown Nashville because of paranoia about 5G technology.

https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-new...ber-motivated-by-paranoia-over-5g-technology/

Rumors are that he said he had cancer. Perhaps he thought there was a connection. His dad, also a telecom worker, died of dementia in 2011.

This The Atlantic article shows that practically every new tech is associated with irrational fears.

No one except the perpetrator was killed in the blast on Christmas morning but cellular and internet service was disrupted.
 
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There have been claims Warner had been giving away his assets in recent weeks.

Warner transferred two properties to a Michelle Swing (connection / relation unknown) via quitclaim deed. The latest was his home in Antioch TN, done on 25 November this year. The first was another property in Antioch that he transferred via quitclaim to Swing back in 2019.

If the 2019 transfer had been part of his alleged divestment of assets it may well be that the back story extends farther back than the last few months.
 
"The sources told ABC News that Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, may have been motivated, at least in part, by “paranoia over 5G technology,” but that they also found writings that contained ramblings about assorted conspiracy theories, including the idea of shape-shifting reptilian creatures that appear in human form and attempt world domination. "

https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-new...omber-hunted-lizard-people-other-alien-beings
I'm just speculating here, but social isolation from Covid lockdowns may have pushed an already mentally fragile man all the way over into paranoid delusions. He needed help.
 
I'm just speculating here, but social isolation from Covid lockdowns may have pushed an already mentally fragile man all the way over into paranoid delusions. He needed help.
Plus the additional stresses of legal battles. Without any more 'outward looking' influences in his life it is sadly easy to see how this could happen.
 
Maybe Downtown will be re-released to cash in on the tragedy.

Singer Petula Clark has expressed shock and disbelief that her 1964 hit Downtown was aired just minutes before a bomb detonated in Nashville on Christmas morning.

“I was told that the music in the background of that strange announcement – was me – singing ‘Downtown’! Of all the thousands of songs – why this one?” Clark wrote in a Facebook post. Clark said she loved Nashville and wished she could give everyone in the city a hug.

The explosion took place in the heart of Nashville’s historic city centre. The RV blared a warning that a bomb would detonate in 15 minutes then switched to a recording of Downtown before the blast.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-40198653.html
 
Maybe Downtown will be re-released to cash in on the tragedy.

Singer Petula Clark has expressed shock and disbelief that her 1964 hit Downtown was aired just minutes before a bomb detonated in Nashville on Christmas morning.

“I was told that the music in the background of that strange announcement – was me – singing ‘Downtown’! Of all the thousands of songs – why this one?” Clark wrote in a Facebook post. Clark said she loved Nashville and wished she could give everyone in the city a hug.

The explosion took place in the heart of Nashville’s historic city centre. The RV blared a warning that a bomb would detonate in 15 minutes then switched to a recording of Downtown before the blast.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-40198653.html
If you read the lyrics to 'Downtown', they're about loneliness - if you're lonely, you can at least go downtown to the bars and the bright lights to cheer yourself up. With the Covid lockdown, Warner couldn't even do that.
 
Living 30 miles south of Nashville, people have no idea how this one bomb knocked out communications for business, emergency service, teller machine, credit card services that took in a large part of Tennessee, southern Kentucky, and northern Alabama.

What. If someone wanted to attack the electric or water systems?

We are sitting ducks !

My Verizon phone worked, anything connected to AT&T did not.

Now most services have been restored thank goodness
 
Living 30 miles south of Nashville, people have no idea how this one bomb knocked out communications for business, emergency service, teller machine, credit card services that took in a large part of Tennessee, southern Kentucky, and northern Alabama.

What. If someone wanted to attack the electric or water systems?

We are sitting ducks !

My Verizon phone worked, anything connected to AT&T did not.

Now most services have been restored thank goodness
The bomber worked in IT. He knew what he was doing.
 
One of the surprising/odd things about this, at least in the UK, is how little coverage there was generally and the refusal/reticence to use the word 'terrorist' in any of the coverage. If it had been a lone, for example, Muslim suicide bomber (or somebody from the political left), I'm convinced there would have been no hesitation in the use of the word terrorist left, right and centre. To my mind, it has all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack, and seems to adhere to the definition: 'the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims'.
 
It was an odd one though. A recorded message and a musical interlude is not textbook terrorism. I was half expecting it to be an art thing.
 
... To my mind, it has all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack, and seems to adhere to the definition: 'the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims'.

So far as is known or believed to date, the Warner / Nashville case does not involve the "... pursuit of political aims" bit.
 
So far as is known or believed to date, the Warner / Nashville case does not involve the "... pursuit of political aims" bit.
Or the intent to spread fear. The Timesquoted someone who heard the guy say he wanted to be remembered. Seems mental illness to me.
 
Terrorism seems to imply threatening people (in the view of the news media). I also think that is a wrong interpretation as he DID spread fear (terror) for at least a short time. "Terrorism" has not been widely used in the US coverage either. That is typical when it's a white perpetrator.

All indications seem to be that this dude did not intend to physically harm people directly. To me, it's a decidedly sad situation when society and one's family fails you so much so that you resort to destructive extremes.
 
I don't think that anyone rational would pack a large car with explosives and blow it up in the middle of the city if he cared one way or another about harming other people. For whatever reason. My own take is mental illness, but terrorism is generally defined by those who study and try to fight it as having some basis that the perpetrator thinks of as a political point of view, a wish to persuade by committing the act, and to persuade or change behavior by creating chaos and scaring people. To the sane it will seem far-fetched. If the guy had left a letter about the need for awareness of an international cabal relating to 5G then it might be terrorism. But as far as anyone knows now he left nothing. We don' t even know if he knew where at&t was. There is still no clue about the retired accountant who shot a large number of people from his hotel room in Vegas. 200 years ago they would have attributed all of this simply to evil, which might be the best we can do.
 
Living 30 miles south of Nashville, people have no idea how this one bomb knocked out communications for business, emergency service, teller machine, credit card services that took in a large part of Tennessee, southern Kentucky, and northern Alabama.

What. If someone wanted to attack the electric or water systems?

We are sitting ducks !

My Verizon phone worked, anything connected to AT&T did not.

Now most services have been restored thank goodness

The description of the locus uses the vague US term “a block”.

“...it is difficult to generalize about the size of a city block. Oblong blocks range considerably in width and length. The standard block in Manhattan is about 264 by 900 feet (80 m × 274 m). In Chicago, a typical city block is 330 by 660 feet (100 m × 200 m)...”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_block#Grid_plan

The camper was parked - IIRC - “near a building owned by AT&T, which was a block from their office tower”, so IMHO it’s currently unclear whether the bomber intended to attack AT&T.

When you consider the area of a US block, and the density of modern cities, it would be difficult to find an area where one could do serious damage to 40 buildings and not knock out some part of the infrastructure.

maximus otter
 
"On Aug. 21, 2019, the bomber’s girlfriend Pamela Perry, told Nashville police that Warner “was building bombs in the RV trailer at his residence,” per a Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD) police report." (Full police report at link.)

"Police were called by the woman’s attorney, Raymond Throckmorton III, who was concerned about comments she had made. The attorney pressed the police to check out the girlfriend’s claim and that she was worried that Warner might hurt her. So, the police went to Warner’s house, “knocked on the door but did not receive an answer,” according to the police report. They also “observed that there was a trailer in the back yard, but the yard was fenced off, and police could not see inside the RV.”

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The cops who went to Warner’s House told their supervisors and detectives what was going on, but as the MNPD spokesman told the Tennessean, “They saw no evidence of a crime and had no authority to enter his home or fenced property,” The department’s hazardous devices unit was given a copy of the report. MNPD Spokesman Don Aaron added that the next morning on August 22, the incident report was sent to the FBI to check whether Warner had any prior military connections. Per Aaron, “the FBI reported back that they checked their holdings and found no records on Warner at all.”

The Metro police said there was no evidence of a crime detected, and no additional action was taken.

maximus otter
 
I was just wondering, is Mr Warner the first* online channel self-radicalised CT suicide terrorist?

I am reminded of the 'incel' shootings (but InCel isn't really a CT as such) and of course the Oklahoma city bombings but they seemingly had different backgrounds (McVeigh was part of a group and had joined real life right-wing patriot movements).

*And I sincerely hope - only.
 
This section of Nashville’s 2nd Ave. was built in 1870 almost like row houses, very crowded.

When I was very young in the late 1940s, my mom took me to 2nd Ave. to shop when Nashville was rather rural.

And then there was the impossible snow blizzard of 1951, but that is another story for another time.
 
FT contributor Tea Krulos has an interesting take on this on his website, suggesting this is part of a common thread among far-right Americans

Nashville bomber, Reptilians and 5G
 
Am I the only one who, when confronted with the man's name, always purposely mispronounces it as, "Icky?"

What a spreader of loathsome ideas!
 
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