Following the 6 January storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters who were incited by him to attack Congress in order to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 3 November election, many were quick to assert that the rioters were members of extremist groups such as Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Boogaloo Boys, or white supremacists. Robert Pape and Keven Ruby, both from the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), write that the demographic, educational, and socio-economic profile of the rioters is much more disturbing: a close analysis of those arrested by the police “suggests a different and potentially far more dangerous problem: a new kind of violent mass movement in which more ‘normal’ Trump supporters—middle-class and, in many cases, middle-aged people without obvious ties to the far right—joined with extremists in an attempt to overturn a presidential election.” They add: “What’s clear is that the Capitol riot revealed a new force in American politics—not merely a mix of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass political movement that has violence at its core and draws strength even from places where Trump supporters are in the minority.”

Three weeks after a neo-Nazi was convicted of murdering regional governor Walter Lübcke. In answer to a parliamentary information request from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the Interior Ministry reported that 1,534 crimes against politicians, party members or party property had been reported in 2020, a 9 percent increase on the year before.

In October 2018 and November 2019, Europol conducted two Action Days geared toward meaningfully disrupting jihadist networks on Telegram – a social media platform favored by groups like Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda. A new report aims to understand the impact of the 2018 and 2019 Europol Action Days – first, what they meant for the health and size of the jihadist networks on Telegram and second, how they impacted on the phenomenon of migration to other platforms.

Security and police forces are bracing for violence by the more violent among Trump supporters and an assortment of other extremists, on two dates: The first is 9 February, which is the first day of Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial. The second is 4 March, which was the U.S. original inauguration date until it was moved to 20 January in 1937 (there were five exceptions: George Washington was sworn in on 20 April, and on four occasions, 4 March was a Sunday, so the inauguration was moved to 5 March). QAnon, still reeling from Trump’s loss on 3 November, has been feeding its gullible followers the fantasy that Trump has not really lost the election – but, rather, that he had won, but that he has chosen to be sworn in as president on 4 March, the original inauguration date.

During the 6 January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, violent Trump supporters—reinforced by a broad coalition of right-wing extremists—attacked police, who appeared to be caught unprepared for a violent encounter with a crowd which has been loudly and consistently supportive of law enforcement. In 2020, there were 16 incidents in which police and extremists exchanged gunfire, an increase from the 11-year average of nine per year.

In response to Donald Trump’s election-related insistence that the radical left endangered the country, federal law enforcement shifted resources last year from what experts agreed was a more ominous threat: the growing far-right extremism around the country. Trump’s efforts to focus his administration on the antifa movement and leftist groups did not stop the DOJ and the FBI from pursuing cases of right-wing extremism, but the effect of his direction was nonetheless substantial. The scale and intensity of the threat developing on the right became clear on 6 January.

President Joe Biden’s inauguration comes during the worst stage of the deadliest biological event of our lifetimes. As bad as this pandemic is, imagine if instead it were caused by the deliberate release of a sophisticated biological weapon. About 2 percent of those infected have died of COVID-19, while a disease such as smallpox kills at a 30 percent rate. A bioengineered pathogen could be even more lethal. Our failed response to the pandemic in 2020 has exposed a gaping vulnerability to biological threats, ranging from natural outbreaks to deliberate biological weapons attacks.

In the wake of the 6 January attack on the Capitol, major social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have applied their now-customary methods of content moderation to U.S. users considered to be spreading hate and inciting violence. “More atypically, companies operating the mostly invisible digital infrastructure which platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are built on, also demonstrated their power, taking down Parler,” writes Will Marks, a researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “But death on the internet is short lived,” he notes. “Without Parler or Twitter, disinformation and hatred — coded or overt — will continue to be broadcast.” Marks adds: “At a certain point, the question about what to do with Parler is only part of the broader one about how society should cope with the fact that segments of the population are living in different realities.” This is a problem for which there is no technological solution.

In the days since the Jan. 6 insurrection, calls have proliferated for a national commission to report on the riot and its attendant events. “The calls are understandable and worthy—though some hard thinking is needed before launching any investigation,” Daniel Byman and Benjamin Wittes write. There is “a lot of sense to a high-level and broad inquiry by an independent commission to explore and report on the multifaceted aspects of Jan. 6 that have nothing to do with impeachment or criminal conduct,” they write. They offer a list of at least some of the questions that any commission will need to consider.