https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/531662-emergency-crews-respond-to-explosion-in-downtown-nashville
Normally I don't pay much attention to bombings, mass shootings, etc., but this one is really intriguing. The RV which exploded had loudspeakers on it which first apparently played loud gunshot noises to wake everyone up, and then it started playing a message warning people to evacuate. It also exploded in a non-residential area, at a time when the area would not have much traffic. Because of these measures, it seems that nobody was seriously injured, but the explosion did cause a massive amount of property damage, affecting several city blocks. The RV was near an AT&T facility, and damage to this facility caused widespread outages in Internet & phone service, though it's not completely clear that this facility was the target.
There are just so many interesting possibilities as to who could be behind this:
1. Initial reporting is that there may have been human remains found near the blast. This has not been confirmed. Maybe this was just a really flamboyant suicide?
2. This could could an attempt by a US enemy to sow division. Trump-aligned people will think that it was a leftist plot (maybe a false flag by the deep state, or an attack by an IRA-like left-terrorist group), while anti-Trump people will think that it was white-nationalist or QAnon domestic terrorists. I will be especially inclined to think that this is the case if we don't get much more info about who was behind the attack; doing an attack like this without leaving traces would be very difficult, so that points to a very sophisticated attacker, and leaving the issue perpetually hanging so that both sides can fight about it forever suits the motives of a foreign-nation-state attacker.
3. This could be the opening salvos of some terrorist group. By doing it this way, you can multiply the efficiency of all of your future attacks, since you can put loudspeakers on a vehicle very cheaply, and if only 1% of them actually explode, this is enough to cause widespread terror and disruption in potentially hundreds of cities. The whole setup of this attack was more sophisticated, well-planned, and constrained than I'd expect from the big terrorist groups of the past such as ISIS, which is interesting. If it was a terrorist group, then I'd expect them to eventually take credit for it and use it as a recruiting tool, though note that other terrorist groups will probably also falsely claim credit for the attack soon enough.
4. The whole point might've been to create a distraction for something else which hasn't been found yet. The damage to the AT&T facility took out Internet and phone service (including 911) and also made everyone look in one particular direction for a long time. This would be very convenient if you were infiltrating a facility 20 miles away at the same time, for example.
5. You never know, but:
a) I tend to think that this was too sophisticated for the QAnon or anti-5G people.
b) A bunch of big, terrifying attacks could conceivably be used by Trump as part of a coup to stay in power. But I don't think that Trump's inner circle is competent or far-looking enough to do this, I don't think that Trump is ambitious enough for it, I don't think that enough of the military/bureaucratic apparatus would support him in any case, and I don't think that something like this would stay secret for more than a few hours in Trump's notoriously leaky administration.
c) While there have been a few true false flag attacks by the US government in the past, they're incredibly rare, and they're done secretly by small conspiracies within the intelligence community, not as a matter of policy. I won't completely rule out that this is some action by groups within US intelligence, but this isn't an idea I'd take seriously without seeing a lot more evidence. I'm also not sure what the motive would be. (Trump supporters might say that it's part of a plot to make Trump leave office, but that'd happen anyway... This line of thinking points back to the "promoting division by a foreign state" hypothesis.)
More info will presumably come up as time goes on; right now, everything is very preliminary. I'd find it pretty unbelievable if there is no surveillance camera footage of the RV being put into position, for example. Surveillance cameras are so ubiquitous nowadays that it should probably be possible to trace the path of the RV at least to the edge of the city, though it will take a lot of time to collect all of the footage. It's also not clear to me at this point whether the RV was right outside the AT&T facility, or whether it was half a block or more away -- different news outlets report different info here, and this info is important for determining whether the AT&T facility was specifically targeted.
What do you think? I look forward to hearing the insane theories of BADecker and others, along perhaps with some less insane theories.
