ON the day that rioters stormed the US Capitol Building in Washington DC, pipe bombs were planted at the local offices of both the Democratic national committee and the Republican national committee just a few blocks away.

Thankfully neither bomb went off. If they had, their existence may have been more than a footnote in that day’s shocking news. But both were made by people who knew what they were doing. And the fact that both of America’s political parties were targeted was a reminder that there are some extremists on the far right of American politics who don’t care which political party people might be a member of. They see both as the enemy.

Listening to Leah Sottile’s Battle for the Capitol (Radio 4, Monday) was a sobering insight into the mentality behind some of the protesters who stormed government buildings on January 6, leading to the death of five people.

If most of the protesters were Trump supporters angry at the election result and the narrative the outgoing President had spun about election theft, there was also a hardcore of militia members willing to do real damage. (You do wonder if they had found Vice President Mike Pence whether that gallows they erected would just have been symbolic.)

Sottile, who was also responsible for last year’s excellent documentary Two Minutes Past Nine, an investigation into the Oklahoma bombing by Timothy McVeigh, here probed where America is right now and highlighted real concerns that January 6 was just a beginning.

Everyone she talked to – including former Homeland Security analysts and ex-militia members – feared that America faces a real threat from far-right terrorists.

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“I feel like our country is in very big trouble right now,” admitted Kelvin Pierce, son of William Luther Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, a novel about white insurrection in the US which is a key text for white supremacists and was an inspiration for McVeigh back in 1995.

The fact that Donald Trump failed in his bid to overthrow the legitimate election result will only fuel the flames was one of the fears raised.

“There’s so many fires to be put out where do you start?” former militia member Kerry Noble asked.

Closer to home and the moment that tripped me up this week came on Wednesday, the day after it was announced that we had surpassed the figure of 100,000 deaths due to coronavirus in the UK.

At the end of the Today programme on Radio 4, the actor Rory Kinnear, whose own sister Karina had died from the virus, read a selection of the names of those we have lost. Such a simple idea, but hugely affecting. All those lives. The human cost of this disease spelt out in name after name.

Listen Out For: Desert Island Discs, Radio 4, Sunday 11am. Chef Monica Galetti is Lauren Laverne's castaway.