New Orleans, Las Vegas, Palm Beach ...The new frontier of US political violence

After a horrific start to 2025, America is facing the biggest rise in terror threats since the 1970s

- Ed Pilkington

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 eighthectare 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 "#NoLives Matter", 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 were 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 now in custody and denies 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.