○On New Year’s Eve, federal prosecutors revealed a startling discovery in a Virginia courtroom. He revealed in legal documents that FBI agents searched the Isle of Wight property last month based on a tip from an informant. The Isle of Wight is a county named after the English Channel island, which is often described as rustic and quaint.
What they found on their 20-acre farm was far from pleasant. Investigators stumbled upon what prosecutors described as perhaps the “largest seizure of completed explosive devices in FBI history.”
Owner Brad Spafford had a stockpile of more than 150 improvised pipe bombs, some marked “lethal,” between his home and detached garage. An array of tools, homemade fuses and PVC piping were stored in the garage, and a jar containing explosives found in the freezer was so unstable that a small change in temperature could have detonated it, prosecutors said. insisted.
Inside the home’s master bedroom, they found a backpack with the words “#NoLivesMatter” written on it. It’s a spin on the social justice hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, a popular hashtag among advocates of violent extremism. Inside was a notebook containing recipes for explosives and grenades.
The memo page is made public in court documents. They are covered in Spafford’s small, dirty handwriting. He itemizes a long list of chemicals and provides instructions such as: “Compacted Powder and Crimp Cases – It is very important to ensure that the power is compressed without any air trapped inside the case!”
In a normal week, you might expect a discovery like this to dominate the news cycle. Spafford, who is currently in custody, has denied any criminal intent, but has reportedly expressed support for political assassinations and used a photo of Joe Biden for target practice at a local shooting range.
But within 24 hours of prosecutors’ startling revelations, the pipe bombs stockpiled in Virginia were pushed aside and faded into relative obscurity. As the new year dawned, Americans were greeted with a cruel and harrowing introduction to 2025.
At 3:15 a.m. that morning, Shamsud Din Jabbar, a 13-year veteran of the U.S. Army, raised a black Islamic State flag around a police vehicle that was being used as a temporary barrier. A Ford pickup truck screeched into the famous French Quarter. of New Orleans. Then he rushed into the New Year’s festivities at breakneck speed.
By the time Jabbar, 42, was killed by police at the end of his desperate run, he had driven several blocks down Bourbon Street. At least 14 people died. One witness, whose friend was among the victims, found bodies strewn across a street that he described as “the closest thing to a war zone I can imagine.”
Such an unscrupulous start to the new year couldn’t have ended like this. Less than six hours after the Bourbon Street tragedy, 37-year-old Matthew Libersberger, a former active-duty member of the Army’s elite Green Berets, detonated an explosive device planted on Bourbon Street and shot himself in the head. He shot himself and committed suicide. The truck he was sitting in.
The FBI conducted an investigation after pinpointing the location of the explosion (the front entrance of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas) and the type of Tesla Cybertruck built by Donald Trump’s close aide Elon Musk. Investigations into possible political motivations for the suicide attempt are underway.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Just eight weeks ago, Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief that a presidential election whose outcome left millions of voters in despair had at least ended peacefully. Concerns about large numbers of armed militia members, clashes at polling places, and a repeat of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020, were unfounded.
But two weeks before President Trump, gripped by violent threats and fear of events, brought a toxic cocktail of mass deportation threats and political retaliation to the White House, the country was back here again. Even in a country well accustomed to depressing daily scenes of mass shootings, school shootings, and other acts of public brutality, this week’s spate of ominous headlines is grim and unsettling.
The incredible threat continues. Under cover of pipe bomb discoveries, explosions and New Year’s carnage, the FBI on Wednesday announced it had thwarted a potential firearms attack against the pro-Israel group I-Pac in Florida.
As if that wasn’t already destructive enough, a man was arrested in Payette, Idaho, after trying to ignite a pipe bomb on railroad tracks. The next day, a major interstate in South Carolina was shut down for several hours after an 18-wheeler truck driver issued a bomb threat.
All this on top of a country already traumatized by a large-scale attack. In 2022, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the subject of a home invasion that ended with a hammer attack on her husband, with Paul initially targeting her.
The two assassination attempts against President Trump during the campaign, at a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and at a golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, marked a harrowing debut for millions of young Americans. For the first time in their lives, they were exposed to footage of the president being shot.
Even before the current uproar, Americans were on edge. A YouGov poll conducted on the eve of the election found that 75% of Americans fear the future of the world and 89% are concerned about extremism.
This is a storm that has been brewing for a long time. In August 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray issued a heartfelt shout-out to members of Congress, saying: It’s crazy. ”
The Department of Homeland Security’s latest threat assessment warns that heightened tensions around the presidential election and the toxic polarization it sparked are likely to continue through 2025. Adding in the impact of the Gaza war and other international conflicts, DHS said, “The homeland terrorist threat environment is expected to remain high over the next year.”
With an eerie sense of foreboding, given that the New Orleans attackers were reportedly aligned with the Islamic State, the report notes that foreign terrorist organizations, including the Islamic State, “have no ability to carry out or incite attacks in their homeland.” “We maintain an enduring intention to do so,” he added.
A recent survey by Reuters identified more than 300 incidents of political violence in the United States since the January 6 riots. This represents the largest increase in such threats since the 1970s, which was disrupted by the Vietnam War and the dramatic rise of revolutionary groups such as the Weather Underground.
There is one frightening difference between the troubled 1970s and today, Reuters said. At the time, targets tended to be government buildings and brick and mortar.
Today, it’s a flesh-and-blood human being. The Bourbon Street attackers arrived with a speeding truck, an Islamic State flag and “an intent to kill,” Biden said.
With so many reports of bloodlettings occurring or narrowly averted across the state, it’s hard to see a silver lining. But it exists.
Galen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine who leads a research team studying violence prevention at the University of California, Davis, said that research shows that support for and willingness to participate in political violence will significantly increase in 2023. told the Guardian. There was no noticeable increase last year due to the election.
Researchers have documented that the majority of Americans do not want to participate in violence. Last year, when Wintemute’s team asked whether they would be prepared to fight if a civil war broke out, only 5% of those surveyed said they were likely.
However, Wintemute came with a caveat. “Even if it’s a small percentage of a big number, it’s still a big number,” he says. “Each 1% of respondents represents approximately 2.5 million people.”
John Hollywood, a researcher at the global Rand Corporation think tank, said the investigation into the recent incident was premature and did not lead to an understanding of the nature and significance of the multiple threats. He pointed to findings from ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), which monitors political violence around the world.
Despite concerns about an increase in political violence sparked by the presidential election, ACLED’s report found that 2024 was actually relatively quiet in terms of mobilization of extremist groups.
“We’ll have to wait and see what happens over the next few weeks,” Hollywood said. “However, we believe that the timing of this series of attacks may have been driven, at least in part, by the New Year holidays.”
As both Wintemute and Hollywood remind us, now is a good time to stay calm, stick to the facts, and try to remove anger and bile from the moment. Cue Trump and his comeback, Musk-enabled Twitter feed.
In it, the president-elect responded to the New Orleans attack in a characteristically less than calming manner. “America is falling apart,” he posted. “A violent erosion of safety, national security, and democracy is occurring across the country. Only strength and strong leadership can stop it.”
Time will tell. From January 20th, everything will be under his supervision.
