The Holiday Terror Plot No One Is Talking About

This week, of course, marks the fourth anniversary of the January 6th attack and insurrection at the US Capitol. It launched the biggest criminal investigation ever in the FBI’s history, with some 1,500 prosecutions so far and, the FBI says, another 200 or so still underway. That effort yielded major courtroom victories against leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers that, for now—at least until Donald Trump moves to pardon them—has largely decimated the senior leadership of both far-right white supremacist groups.

Noticeably, though, no senior leadership or inner-circle of the Trump administration has been brought to justice for their role in encouraging or inciting the January 6th insurrection.

There’s a reason for that goes beyond simply Merrick Garland fumbling the most important prosecution in the history of the United States.

The media, the federal government generally, and the Justice Department and the FBI specifically, all have spent decades pretending that far-right violence and extremism just “happens.” That there’s no ideology or organized effort behind it, that far-right extremism is just some sort of naturally occurring and random trait of certain offenders—like that some suspects have brown hair and others have blond hair.

And that’s where this week’s January 6th anniversary ties into three other apparent terror plots that we learned about and witnessed over the holidays that haven’t received proper context in the media’s coverage, three events that show that we are still under-reacting to the rising threat of far-right political violence in the United States, three events that show how unprepared we are for the months ahead as a nation, and three events that underscore—again—the danger posed by Trump’s choices of Kash Patel to head the FBI and Pam Bondi to serve as attorney general.

On New Year’s Eve, Seamus Hughes, who is the nation’s master at uncovering obscure court documents hiding in plain sight, uncovered a literally explosive case: An FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force had arrested a Virginia man with the largest cache of finished homemade explosives ever found in the bureau’s history. Brad Spafford was found with 150 homemade explosive devices, including pipe bombs, and had “in conversations with [an FBI] informant, [Spafford] allegedly expressed a desire to ‘bring back political assassination’ and had been using a photograph of President Joe Biden for target practice at a shooting range where he was pursuing a 300- to 400-yard sniper qualification. Following the July assassination attempt on President-elect Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Spafford allegedly remarked to the informant, ‘Bro, I hope they don’t miss (Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala (Harris).’”

Notably, the case only came to public attention because of Hughes digging—and not because the FBI held any sort of press conference about the case or released a press release trumpeting an apparent major success in keeping America safe from terrorism.

I’ll give you one guess what race the defendant was.

And one guess what part of the ideological spectrum he appears to be from.

Dig into the court documents and some of the bombs were stored in a backpack with a patch reading “#NoLivesMatter,” a phrase that the New York Times explains as a “slogan had the same name as a nihilistic, far-right ideology that largely exists on encrypted online messaging apps like Telegram.”

As someone who spent years covering the FBI at the height of the post-9/11 war on terror, it’s literally inconceivable to me to think that the FBI would successfully disrupt a major al-Qaeda or radical Islamic terror plot or terrorist-in-waiting without holding a shiny fancy press conference.

For years, the FBI and counterterrorism experts have been warning about the rising threat of far-right extremists and the increasing globalization of white supremacy. But many of those warnings have been downplayed and backpedaled as the FBI and DHS have come under political pressure from Republicans. The result is that we wildly under-recognize as a nation the consistent narrative and links among far-right violent extremists in the country. (For instance, I wrote extensively about another Trump-inspired terrorist, who sent pipe bombs to numerous Trump enemies, a person I’ve longed called “MAGA Patient Zero.) Notably, when Joe Biden commuted the sentences of nearly all the federal death-row inmates over the holidays, two of the three he left untouched were far-right white supremacists: The Charleston church shooter and the Tree of Life synagogue shooter, both of whom emerged from the same toxic stew of talk radio and social media.

In many cases—most famously with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh—prosecutors and investigators have gone out of their way to portray extremists and domestic far-right terrorists as “lone wolves,” but as scholar Kathleen Belew points out, there’s really no such thing: “The idea of the lone-wolf terrorist is something that I have argued against for many years now. We have gotten better in general about identifying that when a shooter talks of being inspired by white power, then we’re looking at a networked and coordinated act of violence, even if those connections are mainly or exclusively online.” Similarly, beyond the specifically organized and odious Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, the Justice Department has approached the 1/6 prosecutors as if there were simply several thousand “lone wolves” who decided to storm the Capitol at the same time.

There’s a specific reason for that: The far-right, since its reemergence in the 1970s and 1980s, has advocated for what it calls the “leaderless resistance,” a push to effectively give plausible deniability to the movement’s leadership when individual believers are radicalized and inspired to violence. As Belew explains:

Which brings us to the second terrorism incident of the holidays: Army veteran Matthew Livelsberger drove a rented Tesla Cybertruck to the Trump casino in Las Vegas, shot himself, and blew up his vehicle in a fiery explosion on New Year’s Day that seemed initially like a particularly poor metaphor for what 2025 will bring. It’s a messy case, to be sure, but he’s white, a Green Beret, and apparently supported Trump, and so the media has mostly seemed to categorize the incident as a particularly high-profile and unfortunate chapter in the scourge of post-9/11 veteran suicides. Places like the New York Times are writing front-page stories with headlines like “Signs of C.T.E. Vexed Soldier In Vegas Blast.”

Except that he left behind writings that told a clear ideological story. Here’s the manifesto he left:

Other writings attacked President Biden, Kamala Harris, DEI initiatives, and called on Americans to “rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans!” Calling for a “purge” of your political opponents sounds pretty ideologically-driven to me.

In fact, if you know your far-right extremism, you’ll recognize that the phrase “hard reset” actually comes out of the same world of the Telegram-enable far-right accelerationist neo-fascist “Terrorgram” movement that appears to be part of the worldview of the Virginia pipe-bomb maker. Terrorgram even publishes a digital magazine called “Hard Reset” that, as Wikipedia explains, “glorifies white supremacist attacks and gives explanations for sector-specific critical infrastructure targeting.”

To put that more bluntly: In 24 hours over New Year’s we appear to have learned of two separate terror plots, one successful, one thwarted, that grew out of the same far-right ideology.

Much like the Virginia-press-conference-that-didn’t-happen, it’s again impossible to imagine that if the Cybertruck driver had been brown or Muslim, driven to a property owned by the president-elect using a vehicle made by the president-elect’s highest-profile supporter, blown up the vehicle, and left behind writings espousing radical Islam, ISIS, or al-Qaeda rhetoric that the media and investigators wouldn’t have immediately and loudly labeled it a terror attack. You probably would have seen high-profile national security leaders speak publicly about it, too.

Actually, we don’t need to imagine.

An almost analogous situation ALSO occurred on New Year’s hours earlier — another Army veteran rammed his rented truck into the partying crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 15 people. The perpetrator, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, died in a shootout with police after crashing his truck and had an ISIS flag in his truck and had posted social media videos saying he was inspired by ISIS.

It was a horrifying and familiar attack, as such vehicle-ramming incidents have been a trademark of ISIS radicals for years. Al-Qaeda actually published an article in 2010 in its online magazine encouraging such attacks, telling would-be terrorists to use vehicles as “mowing machines,” and apparent ISIS adherents carried out similar such high-profile deadly attacks in New York and Nice, among other places.

No one hesitated to call Jabbar’s New Year’s attack a terror incident, and President Biden even spoke about it. Everyone seemed able to make the intellectual leap that a high-profile violent attack on public life in America, where someone left behind information indicating an ideological motive or tie, met the definition of “terrorism.”

The difference in the New Orleans attack, as opposed to the Trump casino cybertruck explosion or the Virginia pipe-bomb cache, is that it’s an ideology we as a country have decided to treat as dangerous.

We have decided, across our politics, that it’s too awkward to confront the real, deadly threat to America that is far-right white supremacy. That it’s too inconvenient and difficult to call out the leaders, creators, and amplifiers of the hate-filled messages that enable far-right extremism in America.

Why does this matter? Because in the midst of being lied to about what the biggest threats to our country are—and, starting in a few weeks, it’s going to get a lot worse.

We’re about to be lied to, as a country, about terrorism and what are the biggest threats facing our country. We have an incoming president who is dead set on erasing, excusing, and even celebrating the violence of the far-right—a man, who, having failed to be held to account for attempting to overthrow the peaceful transition of power four years ago, has now made that attempted coup a key part of his narrative and called it a “beautiful day” and a “day of love,” a man who is considering blanket pardons for the 1,500 would-be warriors who showed up at the Capitol to do battle on his behalf on January 6th, 2021.

That same man wants to put in charge of the nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies leaders like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, who are not only manifestly unqualified for their roles, but are ideologically aligned and sympathetic to the worst corners of far-right extremism. The US militia movement that gave rise to McVeigh, the far-right violence of the 1990s, and the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys of 2021, is still out there and woefully underpoliced, in part because it, also, is ideologically aligned with much of the nation’s law-enforcement. The FBI has had enough trouble talking openly and honestly about the threat of far-right violence and whose behind it—and the Justice Department has ever since the 1990s consistently cowed away from going after those who provide the ideological cover for far-right extremists to kill and terrorize Americans.

This is a particular historical shame because, as almost any veteran of the Justice Department will proudly tell you, President Ulysses S. Grant started the Justice Department to combat the terrorism of the right-wing, white supremacist Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War. Today, our government sadly lacks that moral clarity.

An FBI and DOJ led by Patel and Bondi will only obfuscate the link between political violence and the far-right further and, in fact, will almost certainly turn away from vigorously investigating and prosecuting domestic terrorism by white people. If the FBI under Chris Wray can’t even bring itself to hold a press conference announcing—again—the LARGEST SEIZURE OF READY-TO-USE EXPLOSIVES IN ITS HISTORY, what chance is there for domestic terrorism investigations under Kash Patel, a loyalist MAGA staffer who has never led a federal agency and has spent more years of his life doing far-right podcasts and cosplaying as a “Deep State” inquisitor than he has working in law enforcement? Kash Patel even writes childrens’ books to promote conspiracy theories.

Do you think you’re ever going to see a courtroom chart like this, about Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers who attacked the Capitol, from a Pam Bondi-led Justice Department?

The truth is that while you’re probably going to read about “resurgence” of ISIS in the weeks and months ahead — it’s entirely conceivable to me that a future New Orleans-style attack might be used by this incoming administration as the pretext for wide-ranging crackdowns on civil liberties and, say, borders and immigration — ISIS does not pose an existential threat to American life. (In fact, I’ve argued that one of the things we got very very wrong about al-Qaeda after 9/11 was succumbing to the fear.)

There is only one extremist ideology that does pose an existential threat to American democracy: Unfortunately, as this week’s January 6th anniversary reminds us, it’s the one we’re about to install in the White House.

Thanks for reading.

GMG

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