Federal reliability officials have described a real increase in physical incidents and have reviewed whether the standard written after Metcalf still matches the threat. Separate from that, law-enforcement assessments over recent years have warned that some domestic violent extremists discuss infrastructure. This paper will not repeat methods, maps, or wish lists.

The two findings travel together because both use the word infrastructure. That is not a reason to treat a reliability review and a law-enforcement assessment as one document. One is about equipment and a standard. The other is about what some violent extremists have been assessed to discuss. This paper will not supply that discussion, and it will not pretend the review was a criminal complaint.

Metcalf is the name attached to that standard. It marks a substation attack that officials answered with a reliability standard. This paper will not retell how the equipment was damaged. The public fact used here is the one reliability officials have already stated: incidents rose, and the standard was reviewed against the threat.

Proportion matters. A drilled lock at a rural yard is a crime. It is not, by itself, a national blackout or a license to panic a city. Officials who inflate it, and officials who shrug at the trend, both fail.

Inflating one drilled lock into a national collapse teaches a city to panic at the wrong size. Shrugging at a rising count of incidents teaches the people who run the yards that the trend is only a nuisance. The crime is real at the size it actually is. A blackout, if there is one, is a separate fact and has to be shown before anyone speaks as if the city were already dark.

A cause still waits on a document. A post about infrastructure and a dark neighborhood can share a week without being the same event. Treating every outage as that plot, or every such plot as a failed grid, makes the Unrest problem worse than the incident that was actually logged.

What readers can do is ordinary: report what you see at a fenced utility yard, and do not trespass to investigate it yourself.