Just eight weeks ago, the country had heaved a sigh of relied after the presidential election went peaceably
On New Year’s Eve, a federal prosecutor revealed to a court in Virginia an astonishing discovery. She disclosed in a legal document that last month FBI agents acting on an informant’s tip-off searched a property in Isle of Wight, a county named after the island in the English Channel often described as rustic and quaint.
What they found on the 20-acre farm was anything but pleasant. The agents stumbled upon what the prosecutor said was probably “the largest seizure by number of finished explosive devices in FBI history”.
Scattered between the owner, Brad Spafford’s, house and a detached garage was a stockpile of more than 150 improvised pipe bombs, some marked “lethal”. The garage stored an array of tools, homemade fuses and PVC piping, the prosecutor alleged, while a jar of explosive material found in the freezer was so unstable it could have been triggered by the slightest change in temperature.
Inside the main bedroom of the house they discovered a backpack labelled “#NoLivesMatter”, a hashtag popular among advocates of violent extremism that is a twist on the social justice hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. In it was a notebook containing recipes for explosive devices and grenades.
Pages of the notes are made public in the court document. They are covered in Spafford’s small, crabby handwriting. He itemises long lists of chemicals, alongside instructions such as: “Compress powder and crimp case – very important to ensure power is compressed with no airspace in case!”
In any ordinary week such a find might be expected to dominate the news cycle. Spafford, who is currently in custody where he is denying having had any felonious intentions, had allegedly expressed support for political assassinations and had used photos of Joe Biden for target practice at a local shooting range.
But within 24 hours of the prosecutor’s jaw-dropping revelations, the Virginian stockpile of pipe bombs was shunted aside into relative obscurity. As New Year’s Day opened, Americans were given a brutal and distressing introduction to 2025.
At 3.15am that morning a military veteran with a 13-year career in the US army, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, screeched a Ford pickup truck bearing a black Islamic State flag around a police vehicle being used as a temporary barrier into the celebrated French Quarter of New Orleans. Then he barrelled at high speed into new year’s revellers.
By the time his deadly run was over and Jabbar, 42, had been killed by police, he had travelled several blocks of Bourbon Street. At least 14 people were killed. Bodies were strewn along the street in what one eyewitness, whose friend was among the victims, described as “the closest thing I can imagine to a war zone”.
Such an unconscionable start to the new year was not to end there. Less than six hours after the horror of Bourbon Street, Matthew Livelsberger, 37, who also had a military background as an active-duty member of the army’s elite Green Berets, shot himself in the head at the same time as he detonated explosives loaded into the truck in which he was sitting.
The location of the blast – at the front entrance of the Trump International hotel in Las Vegas – as well as the make of the vehicle, a Tesla Cybertruck manufactured by Donald Trump’s side-kick-in-chief, Elon Musk, sent the FBI into a frenzy of investigation into possible political motivations for the suicidal act.
It was not meant to be like this. Just eight weeks ago Americans heaved an enormous collective sigh of relief that the presidential election, whose outcome left millions of voters in despair, had at least passed off peaceably. Fears of armed militias mobilising in droves, of conflict at the polling stations, and of a repeat of the 6 January 2020 insurrection at the US Capitol had been unfounded.
Yet here the country was again, two weeks before Trump brings his toxic cocktail of threatened mass deportations and political vendettas back into the White House, gripped by anxiety about violent threats and incidents. Even for a country well acclimatised to the depressingly routine choreography of gun rampages, school shootings and other displays of public barbarity, the current spate of lurid headlines this week has been gruesome and destabilising.
The spectacular threats keep on coming. Tucked in among the pipe bomb discoveries, explosions and new year’s carnage came the FBI’s announcement on Wednesday that it had thwarted a possible firearms attack in Florida on the pro-Israel group Aipac.
That same day, as if enough devastation had not already been wrought, a man was arrested in Payette, Idaho trying to ignite a pipe bomb on the train tracks. The following day a major interstate highway in South Carolina was closed for hours after the driver of an 18-wheeler truck made a bomb threat.
This all comes on top of a nation that is already traumatised by exposure to high-profile attacks. In 2022, the then House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was the subject of a home invasion that ended with a hammer attack on her husband Paul initially intended for her.
During the election campaign, the two assassination attempts on Trump – at a rally in Butler county, Pennsylvania, and at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, marked a grim debut for millions of younger Americans. For the first time in their lives they were subjected to images of a presidential figure coming under fire.
Even before the current spate, Americans were on tenterhooks. A YouGov poll on the eve of the election found that 75% of US citizens were scared about the way the world is going and 89% concerned about extremism.
This is a storm that has been long in the making. In August 2022 the FBI’s director, Christopher Wray, uttered a heartfelt cry to Congress members when he said: “I feel like every day I’m getting briefed on someone throwing a molotov cocktail at someone for some issue. It’s crazy.”
The latest threat assessment from the Department of Homeland Security warns that the heightened tensions around the presidential election, and the toxic polarisation that it stoked, are likely to endure throughout 2025. Add in the impact of the Gaza war and other international conflicts, and the DHS said that “the terrorism threat environment in the Homeland is expected to remain high over the coming year”.
With ominous prescience, given that the New Orleans attacker is reported to have aligned himself with IS, the report added that foreign terrorist organizations, including IS, “maintain their enduring intent to conduct or inspire attacks in the Homeland”.
A recent investigation by Reuters identified more than 300 cases of political violence in the US since the January 6 insurrection. That amounts to the biggest increase in such threats since the 1970s, that heady decade roiled by the Vietnam war and the dramatic rise of revolutionary groups such as the Weather Underground.
There is one chilling distinction between the troubled 1970s and today, Reuters noted. Back then, the target tended to be government buildings, bricks and mortar.
Today it is people, flesh and blood. In Biden’s words, the Bourbon Street attacker came armed with a high-speed truck, an IS flag, and “a desire to kill”.
Amid so many reports of bloodletting inflicted or narrowly avoided across the states, it is hard to see any silver lining. But it does exist.
Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine at UC Davis who leads a research team looking into violence prevention, told the Guardian that their surveys had found a substantial decline in support for, and willingness to engage in, political violence in 2023. Despite the volatility of the election, last year saw no notable uptick.
The vast majority of Americans are unwilling to participate in violence, the researchers record. Asked last year by Wintemute’s team whether they would be prepared to fight in a civil war, should one break out, only 5% of those surveyed said that was likely.
Wintemute did have a caveat, though. “A small percentage of a large number is still a large number,” he said. “Each 1% of our respondents represents about 2.5 million people.”
John Hollywood, a researcher for the global thinktank the Rand Corporation, said that it was too early in the investigation into the recent incidents to understand the nature of the multiple threats, and their significance. He pointed to the findings of ACLED, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, which monitors political violence around the world.
ACLED reports that despite fears of increased political violence stirred up by the presidential election, 2024 in fact turned out to be relatively quiet in terms of the mobilization of extremist groups.
“We will need to watch what happens over the coming weeks,” Hollywood said. “But I think at least some of the timing of this spate of attacks may be driven by the new year’s holiday.”
As both Wintemute and Hollywood remind us, this is a good time to remain calm, stick to the facts, and try to take the vitriol and bile out of the moment. Cue Trump and his renaissant, Musk-enabled Twitter feed.
In it, the president-elect responded to the New Orleans attack in characteristically less-than emollient style. “The USA is breaking down,” he posted. “A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it.”
Time will tell. From 20 January, it will all be on his watch.
