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.
Smith grew up in a three-bedroom trailer in northwest San Antonio, the only child of a carpenter and a nurse’s assistant. He entered high school with dreams of making a career in the military, but his life swerved when his father slipped into alcoholism after a construction accident. With his dad lost in the haze of drink and his mother rarely home due to her 12-hour work shifts, Smith searched elsewhere for belonging. He dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to devote himself to a new group of friends whose sole interests were drugs and petty crime. “The attention they gave me inspired a fierce loyalty,” he says. “There’s not much I wouldn’t do for them.” At the age of 18, he went to prison for burglarizing a house while blacked out on Xanax. He would spend the bulk of the next six years behind bars after blowing parole and picking up multiple drug and firearm charges; his father died of cancer while he was locked up.
When Smith was paroled from his third prison stint in November 2019, he resolved to make a break with his troubled past. He moved back into his mother’s trailer and landed a cooking job at Golden Corral. He also started a relationship with 18-year-old Coley Lane Dupre, a former elite gymnast who’d recently turned rebellious; she had moved next door to Smith after walking out of drug rehab. All was going smoothly until March 2020, when the pandemic shuttered Smith’s restaurant and the gymnastics studio where Dupre coached. Their new lives were forced into suspended animation, leaving the couple to fill the days with getting high and scrolling.
During one of those bleary sessions, a videoclip from episode 1,308 of The Joe Rogan Experience, which had originally aired in June 2019, popped up in Smith’s Instagram feed. The clip begins with Rogan pausing to light a joint, which gives his guest—Eddie Bravo, an anvil-headed jiujitsu master known for spouting conspiracies about 9/11 and a flat Earth—the opportunity to pose a question: “What do you think of, um, 5G and all that scare? You think that’s legit?” Rogan pronounces himself “terrified” of the wireless networking technology, which was then starting to become widespread in the US. “How much long-term testing have they done?” he asks, without specifying the potential effects he fears. “Zero?” Bravo then urges Rogan to visit a website that contains the government’s “400-page plan for the world,” a document that he says contains revelations about 5G that will “get your fucking head blown off.”
The clip was short on details, but it reminded Smith of a man he’d befriended in prison in 2014. This inmate had been an avid reader of books about magnets and electricity, and he’d often rambled about a sprawling communications “grid” that he said was being built for nefarious reasons. Smith had never paid much attention to these convoluted rants, but the two famous podcasters seemed to be echoing his friend’s concerns.
When he plugged queries about 5G into search bars, Smith quickly became alarmed. Social media was awash in posts asserting that 5G towers, which use higher electromagnetic frequencies than their 4G forerunners, had weakened human immune systems, leaving them unable to fend off the Covid-19 virus. (Several nations where 5G was not yet available in 2020, such as Iran, were among the most devastated by Covid.) Prominent figures like the actor Woody Harrelson claimed on Insta-gram (falsely) that China was dismantling its 5G towers to curb Covid’s spread. As Smith’s social-media algorithms adjusted to his affinity for these posts, he became aware that arsonists in the United Kingdom had set fire to more than 60 cell towers in the spring of 2020. This spate of violence had been inspired in part by the YouTube sermons of a British pastor and crypto consultant who preached that “the radio frequencies we are being exposed to are killing the people.” (The pastor gained legitimacy by claiming to be a former executive at Vodafone; he had in fact been a salesman for the telecommunications company for less than a year, well before the rollout of 5G.)
Smith’s suspicions only deepened when he noticed that his favorite 5G content often vanished within hours of being posted. “If you said anything connecting 5G with Covid, you were censored, Facebook is taking your post down, it was fact-checking you,” he says. “And I’m like, why are they so worried about censoring people on the subject? And that’s kind of what resonated with me.” Smith concluded that powerful forces were concealing the insidious truth about 5G.
With no shot at landing another restaurant gig in the midst of the pandemic, Smith backslid into selling drugs as the spring of 2020 wore on. He roamed San Antonio’s eerily deserted streets, delivering cannabis, cocaine, and other intoxicants to customers hunkered down in their homes. During his rounds, he noticed that 5G towers were some of the only structures still being built. He occasionally pulled over to ask construction workers why they were risking illness and death to expand the rollout of 5G. When they told him to scram, he considered their rudeness yet another red flag.
When Smith wasn’t out dealing, he was usually alone in the trailer with Dupre—his mother was working even crazier hours than usual at a hospital flooded with Covid patients. The couple would watch videos from InfoWars impresario Alex Jones and the British conspiracy theorist David Icke, the latter of whom is notorious for claiming the world is secretly controlled by reptilian humanoids. These sources were now espousing increasingly dark and elaborate stories about 5G that portrayed the technology as central to a scheme to enslave entire nations. One popular narrative held that governments had unleashed the Covid-19 virus to force people into isolation, thereby giving construction crews the time and space to build out 5G networks. When a vaccine was eventually developed, the radiation from 5G towers would interact with graphene oxide nanomaterials that were integrated into the injections. This would give governments the power to control how their citizens behave or even to annihilate them en masse if they ever revolted. “If 5G continues and reaches where they want to take it,” Icke warned in an April 2020 interview, “human life as we know it is over.”
This story, often peddled by people who sold garments or knickknacks that purported to repel 5G radiation, made perfect sense to Smith. He’d formerly never had a shred of interest in politics—“My mindset was always, oh, it has nothing to do with me,” he says—but the technophobic content he was now consuming had melted his apathy. “The way that China is right now with the technology and the surveillance, I saw America turning into the same thing eventually,” he says. “Our freedoms deleted, stuff like that.” He made Dupre similarly fearful by showing her several patents that employ the phrase “voice to skull,” which the couple interpreted as evidence that the government could use 5G to implant thoughts in an unsuspecting populace. (The patents in question do not make this claim.)
On the evening of Friday, July 17, Smith was en route to a customer’s house when the police pulled him over for a routine traffic stop. He was arrested for drug and firearm possession, two charges that seemed certain to result in the revocation of his parole and a return to prison. But Smith realized that he probably wouldn’t be cited for a parole violation until court reopened on Monday morning. So Dupre scraped together enough money to bail him out on Saturday, and the couple went on the run.
The grim realities of life on the lam complicated Smith and Dupre’s efforts to further their study of 5G. They mostly crashed in local drug houses, where Smith’s profession always made him a welcome presence at first. But something would inevitably go awry after a few days or weeks of rooming with mercurial meth abusers. Both were assaulted and robbed at gunpoint, and Smith and Dupre had to flee one toxic situation after another.
As the stress of being a fugitive chipped away at Smith’s psyche, he pondered how to recapture a sense of purpose. “I wanted to be a better person,” he says. “I’m still doing these things, I’m still in this lifestyle. But part of me was wanting to help people.” In late November, he decided to take a new step: Instead of passively absorbing information pushed to him by podcasters and algorithms, he would investigate a 5G tower in the wild.
Smith and Dupre spent a night combing San Antonio for a tower to explore. Most of the structures were inaccessible, protected by chain-link fences topped with razor wire. But the couple finally found an unsecured tower tucked away in a suburban neighborhood. As they approached the site, they were frightened by its loud and eerie hum. (The noise from 5G towers is generated by cooling fans and electrical components.) They believed they could detect sinister waves of energy wafting through the air. Dupre was so rattled by the tower’s aura that she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. “Babe, it feels ugly,” she said to Smith as she turned away.
Smith pressed forward, however, and laid hands on the tower’s cylindrical metal base. In that moment, he was overwhelmed by sadness at how many people were ignorant of these monstrosities in their midst. “That’s when I really made the decision,” he recalls. “I snapped. Like, man, I’m going to do something about this.”
Now that they’d resolved to swing into action, Smith and Dupre discussed how best to battle 5G. They toyed with the idea of launching their own podcast or educational website. But they settled on producing homemade batches of so-called orgonite crystals, which are touted in alternative-medicine circles as having the ability to dampen electromagnetic fields. In the cluttered kitchens of the drug houses where they were hiding, the couple filled muffin tins with tinted resins and snippets of whatever metal they could find—curls of steel wool, coils of copper wire. These would harden into translucent lumps that Smith and Dupre began placing next to San Antonio’s 5G towers, an act of subversion they called “gifting.” Dupre took to creating crystals shaped like hearts or flowers, which she handed out to strangers in the hopes of opening their eyes to the horrors of 5G.
But Smith quickly soured on gifting as too tepid an approach. He was becoming increasingly radicalized as he learned about individuals who’d made tremendous sacrifices to oppose mobile technology. He particularly admired John Robert Patterson, an Australian telecommunications technician who believed he’d suffered adverse health consequences from overexposure to electromagnetic fields. In 2007, Patterson infamously stole an armored personnel carrier and used it to ram seven mobile towers in Sydney before surrendering to police. The rampage did nothing to slow the growth of Australia’s wireless industry, but Smith liked how Patterson kept preaching about a massive cover-up of mobile technology’s hazards even after leaving prison.
Smith also paid close attention to the December 25, 2020, bombing in downtown Nashville, during which a loner named Anthony Quinn Warner blew himself up in an RV. The FBI concluded that Warner was motivated by both suicidal desperation and an incoherent set of conspiracy theories, including his belief that the government has been covering up an alien invasion. But Smith focused only on the fact that Warner chose to detonate his vehicle in front of an AT&T network facility—proof, he thought, that 5G was the real intended target.
In February 2021, a massive ice storm knocked out much of the power in San Antonio for days. Smith took advantage of the blackout to trespass at several 5G towers, using bolt cutters to slice through their fences. He studied the fiber-optic cables that extended out of the facilities’ base stations and ran for yards in the open before snaking into the towers’ access hatches. He realized it would be easy to set those exposed cables on fire. He imagined the flames racing up the towers’ innards and consuming the antennas located a hundred feet or more above the ground, transforming them into torches that would mesmerize San Antonians. “I didn’t have any other way to try to get people’s attention,” he says. “I thought maybe, hey, if I burn this over here, maybe someone will see it and be like, ‘Hey, why is someone burning these down?’ And they’d look into it.”
On the morning of April 10, Smith pulled up to a 5G tower behind a discount eyeglass shop; he’d picked the location so he could make a quick getaway via I-410 across the street. He lit the fuse of a crudely assembled Molotov cocktail and tossed it over the fence. To his dismay, the makeshift bomb landed a bit wide of the cables, causing only minor damage after smashing apart on the ground. Smith fled the scene in such haste that he dropped his lime-green lighter. As he peeled out toward the freeway, he knew he’d have to hone his methods if he was serious about changing the world.
To become a better arsonist, Smith trekked into a barren corner of the South Texas countryside to run some tests. He tried out grenade-like devices filled with homemade napalm, which he made using a recipe he’d found on the internet. But he ultimately determined that he’d never achieve his desired results by throwing incendiary devices from a fence line—the failure rate would be too high, regardless of the bombs’ design. He instead needed to break into the tower sites so he could burn the cables up close. That would mean spending five minutes or more on the scene, thereby exposing himself to detection and arrest.
Smith came up with a simple yet effective modus operandi that would minimize his odds of getting caught. He would scout targets using Google Earth, zeroing in on towers next to wooded areas where he could retreat after setting a fire. He also obtained a wardrobe of costumes he could wear to make it seem like he belonged inside a tower’s perimeter—he stockpiled construction-worker outfits and security-guard uniforms, most of which he acquired in exchange for drugs. As long as he could get away with using his bolt cutters on the fences, no one was likely to question him as he knelt next to the towers and covertly stuffed their cable hatches with accelerant-soaked rags.
Smith became a rather busy arsonist starting that April: Over an initial six-week period, he hit one tower by a tattoo shop, another outside an upscale apartment complex, and a third at the end of a residential cul-de-sac. Dupre accompanied him on the last of these missions, but she couldn’t bring herself to shimmy through the hole in the fence that Smith had cut. Unlike her boyfriend, she was scared to dirty her hands with actual property destruction.
After this nerve-racking experience, Dupre pleaded with Smith to halt his arson spree. She did so in part because things were finally looking up for the couple: Thanks to a reference from a prominent San Antonio rapper he knew, Smith had landed an off-the-books job as a handyman at a small commercial building, and the landlord was letting him and Dupre stay in one of the vacant units. Dupre didn’t want Smith to ruin this semi-stable situation by bringing more heat on himself. But Smith was now too deep in the throes of anti-5G fervor. “It gave me meaning,” he says of the fires. “It gave my life more of a meaning, being able to fight against something.”
In late May, Smith set out to torch a tower in the neighborhood of Oak Hills. Perhaps overconfident after having eluded capture for so long, Smith lingered for a while before lighting the gasoline-soaked rags he’d stuffed in the cable hatch. When he finally flicked his lighter, he accidentally ignited the fumes that had built up in the enclosed space. The flames whooshed back into his face, burning off much of his hair and turning his flesh a cherry red.
Smith stumbled away in agony, knowing that he couldn’t go to an emergency room for help. In a panic he called Dupre, who was working the late shift at a 7-11. She grabbed several jugs of water, locked the store behind her, and sprinted back to the apartment to tend to her boyfriend’s wounds. The couple eventually felt they had no choice but to call Smith’s mother, who put herself in legal jeopardy by coming over to provide care.
For much of the summer, Smith feared that the physical damage he’d suffered was permanent. Yet even before his face regained its normal complexion and his eyebrows began to resprout, he felt compelled to get back to his arson campaign. Now more cognizant of the risk of self-immolation, he looked for safer ways to start his fires. He found good advice on the website for WarriorUp, a “research project” dedicated to sharing “techniques for sabotaging capitalist infrastructure and extractive industries.” Taking a cue from an article entitled “How to Destroy Cell Phone Towers,” Smith cut up an old tire so he could use the shards in lieu of rags—the rubber caught fire more slowly than cloth. (For the same reason, he also switched to using diesel as his preferred accelerant.)
During one of his attacks, Smith snagged a souvenir that caught his eye: a warning sign that read, “Radio frequency fields near some antennas may exceed the FCC occupational rules for human exposure.” The Federal Communications Commission mandates the posting of these signs for the benefit of maintenance workers who must occasionally climb to the peaks of towers. But Smith mistakenly thought this language amounted to a government confession that civilians within a wide radius of a tower are in constant danger. He delighted in showing off the sign when evangelizing to fellow miscreants about 5G’s role in transforming the US into a repressive dystopia. He could only hope his audiences were listening more intently to his lectures than he’d listened to his prison friend back in 2014.
Jesse Moncada, the lead arson investigator for the San Antonio Fire Department, wasn’t terribly concerned when he inspected the singed 5G tower behind My Econo’s $39.95 Optical on April 10, 2021. Whoever had started the fire that morning was clearly an amateur—their Molotov cocktail hadn’t packed much punch, and they’d foolishly dropped their lime-green lighter at the scene. His best guess was that the culprit was a vagrant bent on causing minor trouble.
“But then it happened again,” says Moncada, who joined the fire department in 2001. “And we started seeing the same pattern and same modes of burning.” Curious as to why someone would be fixated on destroying 5G towers, he contacted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for assistance. The agency told him about the cell-tower fires that had occurred in the UK in April 2020, a brief criminal epidemic that had made US federal authorities aware that conspiracy-driven terrorism would inevitably be on the rise. “We assess that violent extremists probably will target a range of telecommunications infrastructure,” the Department of Homeland Security had warned in a May 2020 memo. “More coordinated attacks by multiple individuals in adjacent areas could amplify these incidents.” The document also noted that these extremists were likely to be influenced by a hodgepodge of beliefs: Some would be white nationalists who’d been chattering online about their opposition to Covid restrictions, while others would be radical environmentalists who’d embraced the anti-technology manifesto of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski.
Now aware that he was likely dealing with a form of terrorism rooted in online disinformation, Moncada had fingerprints lifted off the lighter he’d found at the first crime scene. They matched those of Smith, who had been wanted on a fugitive felony warrant since the previous July. At another burnt tower, Moncada also found a black glove that contained flecks of Smith’s DNA. But it was one thing to know the arsonist’s identity, quite another to find him: Smith was a ghost drifting through San Antonio’s underworld, leaving few if any traces as he cycled through an endless stream of prepaid phones.
Hoping to glean a license plate number or accomplice’s description that might help reveal Smith’s location, Moncada contacted the security teams at affected companies such as Verizon and T-Mobile. “But what made it difficult was they didn’t want anybody to know that their towers were being damaged,” he says. “I didn’t get enough help from them. So it was difficult for me to put everything together, because I didn’t have any video footage or witnesses.”
By the spring of 2022, the number of 5G arsons was nearing 20, and Moncada began collaborating with both the Texas Rangers and the FBI to solve the case. These larger agencies helped process more DNA evidence—at a tower that burned in March 2022, for example, Moncada recovered pubic hairs from a pair of boxer shorts that Smith used to start the fire. But there seemed little chance of stopping the attacks unless Smith made a mistake.
His ego inflated by his months of success, Smith took to thinking of himself as an “urban gray man,” capable of committing his arsons with supreme speed and stealth. He would often persuade an unwitting acquaintance to drive him to within a block or two of the tower he’d picked to torch. He’d hop out of the car and say he had to make a quick drug sale, then change into the reflective vest and hard hat that he kept in his backpack. He’d snip the fence, start the fire, and slip into the woods as the flames began to swell. He’d then strip off his construction-worker gear, pull a baseball cap low over his eyes, and circle back to the car as if nothing unusual had happened. As they pulled away, he’d peer out the window at the clouds of smoke now rising above the city.
Smith’s personal life was growing messy as he became ever more focused on leading the revolution against 5G. He lost his handyman job in early 2022, a development that forced him and Dupre to relocate to a friend’s apartment. The couple’s romance was also beginning to falter, in large part because Dupre had tired of centering her life around the use of Xanax and methamphetamine. “I was miserable,” she says. “I hated every second of it.” Smith, meanwhile, started seeing another woman named Callie Holland, who had recently moved down from Missouri with her daughter. On one of their dates, she watched him burn a 5G tower.
As he passed the one-year anniversary of his first arson, Smith was feeling nothing short of invincible. On April 29, 2022, he chose to deviate from his usual cautious approach and set fire to a tower next to a heavily trafficked Walmart Supercenter. When Moncada arrived on the scene to investigate, he reviewed the store’s security footage and spotted a red 2017 Chevrolet Cruze zooming out of the parking lot moments after the fire’s ignition. The car was registered to Holland, who had previously been arrested, though not charged, for a drug violation—precisely the sort of person who might run in the same sordid circles as Smith.
In the wee hours of May 13, the San Antonio police detained Holland as she left a Mexican restaurant. She admitted that she’d loaned her car to Smith two weeks earlier, and she spilled all she knew about her part-time lover’s crusade. “Holland advised that Smith stated the US government is out to get him and that the 5G towers give off radiation and control minds,” a Texas Ranger wrote in his report. “Holland stated that Smith watches a bunch of videos of 5G towers on YouTube.”
Most importantly, Holland provided the investigators with a phone number for Smith that was only a week old—a critical piece of information that Moncada had been seeking for months. By noon that day, Moncada had obtained a warrant to “ping” Smith’s phone—that is, to triangulate its location using the same towers that Smith reviled as tools of oppression.
A US Secret Service agent performed the ping, which indicated that Smith was at an apartment complex behind a Lowe’s home improvement store. A phalanx of police officers, Texas Rangers, and FBI agents immediately descended on the area in search of the arsonist who had set fire to 22 5G towers since April 2021.
At 1:20 pm that afternoon, Smith emerged from his apartment and hopped into a friend’s Cadillac CTS. As they rolled away from the curb, the car was surrounded by dozens of law enforcement agents with handguns and rifles drawn.
Smith had always known this day would come, and he’d often contemplated how he would react. He liked the idea of going down in a blaze of glory, of martyring himself for the anti-5G cause—there was romance in the concept of becoming a more extreme figure in technophobic lore than the Australian who’d bulldozed the Sydney towers. Given that he was armed with a loaded handgun, that outcome was certainly an option. But in the face of such an awesome amount of firepower pointed right at him, Smith froze.
“This is the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Smith could tell I looked quizzical when I heard him utter those words, and he quickly qualified his statement by adding, “I know that sounds crazy.” The place where we were meeting, the visiting room of a desolate south Texas prison, was entirely devoid of cheer. But Smith, whose forehead still bears scars from a long-ago pistol whipping, explained that despite his grim surroundings, he has never felt better. Drug-free for the first time in ages, he now spends his days studying college-level chemistry, reading the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and listening to political podcasts like Pod Save America. He counts himself blessed that he didn’t choose to commit suicide-by-cop. “I needed a wake-up call,” he says. “I needed to get away from everything and rethink everything and have a chance to sit down and reevaluate.”
He also considers himself fortunate to have a shot at leaving prison before his 40th birthday. After he pleaded guilty to six counts of arson in federal court, prosecutors were keen to turn him into an example and sought a 15-year sentence—far longer than recommended by the advisory guidelines. “The sentencing guidelines do not contemplate a 22-tower arson spree meant to shut down the cellphone system to follow a bizarre anti-government philosophy,” wrote the lead prosecutor, who specializes in counterterrorism cases. “The increased focus and attacks on this critical infrastructure by extremists and conspiracy theorists like the Defendant has the potential to wreak extensive societal damage and disruption.”
Frightened by the prospect of spending a decade and a half in prison, Smith sent handwritten requests for help to several organizations that he thought might be sympathetic to his plight. The recipients included Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Smith knew that at an anti-vaccine rally in early 2022, Kennedy had declared that 5G was designed to “harvest our data and control our behavior.” No one ever replied to Smith’s entreaties, but the judge still cut him a break: He was sentenced to 78 months of federal time, to be served concurrently with a state sentence that’s currently projected to run until 2030. (When he was arrested in May 2022, the fugitive Smith was carrying a half-pound of cannabis in addition to his handgun; he will be eligible for parole on the state charges next year.)
Dupre was arrested for arson, too, after admitting to Moncada that she’d been with Smith when he torched a tower in May 2021. That case was eventually dismissed, however, and Dupre has transformed her life in the time since. Now clean and sober, she trained to become a substance-abuse counselor at San Antonio College and recently took a job at a recovery center. “I need to correct my karma and help other addicts,” she told me.
She has extricated herself from the darkness of her former life, but Dupre remains convinced that 5G poses an existential threat. She is far from unique in holding onto that belief. This past June, for example, arsonists set fire to six cell towers in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Other Covid-related conspiracy theories have endured and mutated, too. In June, a Minnesota man was charged with assassinating a state lawmaker and her husband, later saying he had meant to punish those who supported Covid vaccines; later in the summer, an Atlanta man who believed he’d been harmed by one of those vaccines opened fire on the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, killing a police officer.
“I don’t know how to say this without sounding crazy, but I just don’t trust the technology,” Dupre says of 5G. “I don’t think that they’re just cell phone towers.” She also has sympathy for the choices made by Smith, with whom she maintains a close platonic friendship: “I support him 100 percent. I’m not saying what he did was right, but I’m not saying it was wrong.”
Smith maintains his vehement opposition to 5G, but the more pressing object of his concern these days is AI—the newest fixation among young extremists now sprouting from the same media ecosystem that radicalized Smith. “It’s clear to them that AI will be utilized in order for the government to maintain its control, to enhance its ability to surveil, to monitor, to track, to interfere with our privacy,” says Arie Perliger, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who studies domestic terrorism. Crude individual attacks against AI data centers seem inevitable as the technology increasingly upends the routines of American life. The question is whether such violence will elicit more public sympathy than Smith’s fires, even if perpetrated by militants who espouse outlandish political beliefs; the grain of truth in AI paranoia is many orders of magnitude larger than the one at the core of the anti-5G movement.
“If I had one message I could communicate about my beliefs, it would be, ‘Why would the most creative and imaginative beings on Earth wish to create something that would make us obsolete?’” Smith told me. Once an enthusiastic supporter of President Trump—he says he nearly went to Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021—he now worries the current administration is glad to let giant AI companies make humans subordinate to machines.
Smith dreams of launching a podcast about the dangers of technology, though he acknowledges that people will be reluctant to listen to someone with his unsavory background. He insisted to me that he deeply regrets setting his fires, because doing so harmed his ability to become a trusted political voice. Yet toward the end of our time together in Texas, Smith asked if I wanted to see something cool. After making sure no guards were watching, he rose from his seat and smiled as he hiked up the left pant-leg of his white prison jumpsuit. Splashed across his entire calf was a beautifully rendered tattoo that he’d recently had inked by a fellow inmate. It shows a 5G tower engulfed in flames.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.
