The United States enters 2025, rocked by a week of attacks and looming political violence | Truck attack in New Orleans

On New Year's Eve, a federal prosecutor revealed a stunning discovery to a Virginia court. She revealed in a legal document that last month, FBI agents, acting on information provided by informants, searched a property on the Isle of Wight, a county named after the Isle of La Manche is often described as rustic and picturesque.

What they found on the 20-acre farm was anything but pleasant. Agents stumbled upon what the prosecutor said was likely the largest seizure in terms of the number of finished explosive devices in FBI history.

Scattered between the home of owner Brad Spaffords and a detached garage was a stockpile of more than 150 improvised pipe bombs, some considered deadly. The garage stored an array of tools, homemade fuses and PVC pipes, the prosecutor claimed, while a jar of explosive material found in the freezer was so unstable it could have been triggered at the slightest change of temperature.

In the home's master bedroom, they discovered a backpack labeled #NoLivesMatter, a popular hashtag among supporters of violent extremism that is a variation of the social justice hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. It contained a notebook containing recipes for explosive devices and grenades.

The pages of the notes are made public in the court document. They're covered in Spafford's grumpy little handwriting. It details long lists of chemicals, along with instructions such as: Compress powder and crimp casing are very important to ensure the power is compressed with no air space in the case!

In an ordinary week, one might expect such a discovery to dominate the news cycle. Spafford, who is currently in custody where he denies criminal intent, has reportedly expressed support for political assassinations and used photos of Joe Biden for shooting practice at a local shooting range.

But less than 24 hours after prosecutors' stunning revelations, Virginia's stockpile of pipe bombs was relegated to relative obscurity. As the New Year opened, Americans got an abrupt and painful introduction to 2025.

At 3:15 a.m., Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 13-year military veteran in the U.S. Army, screamed a Ford pickup truck flying a black Islamic State flag around a police cruiser used as a temporary barrier in the famous French Quarter. from New Orleans. Then he rushed at high speed towards the New Year's revelers.

By the time his killing spree was over and Jabbar, 42, had been killed by police, he had walked several blocks of Bourbon Street. At least 14 people were killed. Bodies were strewn across the street, what one eyewitness, whose friend was among the victims, described as the closest thing I could imagine to a war zone.

Such an unacceptable start to the year should not end there. Less than six hours after the horrors on Bourbon Street, Matthew Livelsberger, 37, who also had a military background as an active member of the Army's elite Green Berets, shot himself in the head at the same time time he detonated loaded explosives in the truck he was sitting in.

The location of the explosion at the main entrance to the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas and the make of the vehicle, a Tesla Cybertruck manufactured by Donald Trump's chief acolyte Elon Musk, plunged the FBI into a frenzy. investigation into the possible political motivations of the suicidal act.

A memorial for the victims of a deadly truck attack on New Year's Day stands on the sidewalk in New Orleans' French Quarter. Photograph: George Walker IV/AP

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Just eight weeks ago, Americans breathed a huge collective sigh of relief that the presidential election, whose outcome left millions of voters in despair, had at least passed peacefully. Fears of a mass mobilization of armed militias, conflicts at polling places, and a repeat of the January 6, 2020 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol were unfounded.

Yet here the country was again, two weeks before Trump brought his toxic cocktail of threats of mass deportations and political vendettas back to the White House, racked with anxiety over threats and violent incidents. Even for a country well accustomed to the depressing, routine choreography of gun rampages, school shootings, and other displays of public barbarity, the current wave of grim headlines this week has been horrific and unsettling.

Spectacular threats continue to arise. Amid discoveries of pipe bombs, explosions and New Year's carnage, the FBI announced Wednesday that it had foiled a possible gun attack in Florida against the pro-Israel group Aipac.

That same day, as if enough damage hadn't already been done, a man was arrested in Payette, Idaho, while attempting to light a pipe bomb on the railroad tracks. The next day, a major South Carolina highway was closed for hours after the driver of an 18-wheeler truck made a bomb threat.

All of this adds up to a nation already traumatized by exposure to high-profile attacks. In 2022, Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, was the subject of a home invasion that ended in a hammer attack on her husband Paul, initially intended for her.

During the election campaign, two attempts on Trump's life at a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, marked a dark start to million young Americans. For the first time in their lives, they were confronted with images of a presidential figure under fire from critics.

Even before the current crisis, Americans were on alert. A YouGov poll conducted on the eve of the election found that 75% of American citizens were frightened by developments in the world and 89% were concerned about extremism.

A stockpile of homemade explosives seized by the FBI during the arrest of Brad Spafford in Virginia. Photography: AP

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 when he said, “I feel like every day I'm informed that someone has launched a Molotov cocktail on someone for whatever reason. 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 has fueled are likely to persist through 2025. Add to that the impact of the war in Gaza and other international conflicts, as well as DHS said the terrorism threat environment in the country is expected to remain high in the coming year.

With worrying prescience, given that the New Orleans attacker is believed to have aligned with ISIS, the report adds that foreign terrorist organizations, including ISIS, maintain their persistent intent to carry out or inspire attacks in the country.

A recent investigation by Reuters identified more than 300 cases of political violence in the United States since the January 6 insurrection. This represents the largest increase in such threats since the 1970s, that heady decade marked by the Vietnam War and the spectacular rise of revolutionary groups such as the Weather Underground.

There is a frightening distinction between the 1970s and today, Reuters noted. At the time, the target was more government buildings, bricks and mortar.

Today it is people, flesh and blood. In Biden's words, the Bourbon Street attacker came armed with a speeding truck, an ISIS flag and a desire to kill.

Amid so many reports of bloodshed being inflicted or narrowly avoided across the states, it is difficult to see a glimmer of hope. But it exists.

Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine at UC Davis who leads a research team on violence prevention, told the Guardian that their surveys found a substantial decline in support and willingness to engage in political violence in 2023. Despite the volatility after the elections, last year saw no notable increase.

The vast majority of Americans are unwilling to participate in violence, researchers note. Asked last year by the Wintemute staff whether they would be willing to fight in a civil war, if one broke out, only 5 percent of respondents said it was likely.

Wintemute had a caveat, however. A small percentage of a big number is still a big number, he said. Each 1% of our respondents represents approximately 2.5 million people.

John Hollywood, a researcher at global think tank Rand Corporation, said it was too early in the investigation into the recent incidents to understand the nature of the multiple threats and their significance. He highlighted 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 sparked by the presidential election, 2024 has actually proven to be relatively quiet in terms of mobilization of extremist groups.

We'll have to watch what happens in the coming weeks, Hollywood said. But I think at least part of the timing of this wave of attacks could be driven by the New Year's holiday.

As Wintemute and Hollywood remind us, this is a good time to stay calm, stick to the facts, and try to eliminate the vitriol and bile of the moment. Think Trump and his resurgent, Musk-enabled Twitter feed.

In it, the president-elect responded to the attack on New Orleans in a typically un-emollient style. The United States is collapsing, he posted. A violent erosion of safety, national security, and democracy is occurring across our nation. Only force and strong leadership can stop it.

Time will tell. From January 20, everything will be under his supervision.

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