John Horgan, a Georgia State University professor and the d…

“You had your gawkers..tourists...instigators, your preachers. ..you had your guys in military fatigues who ...came with a plan. They were organized & they were looking to get their chance at infamy.

Those are the kinds that I think about between now and Jan. 20.”

“It’s a rallying cry.

I’m not worried about the people that were caught up in these arrests.

I’m not worried about the people that were at the protest.

I’m worried about the Timothy McVeighs who are out there now realizing that their time has come.”

“They are radicalized.
They are mobilized.
They are bereft of direction because their leader for whom they are clearly ready to give their lives has lost [his] platform.., so now they’re trying to figure out what to do, and it makes them unpredictable.”

‘After the IRA tried to kill Margaret Thatcher in 1984 and she survived, they said,

“Remember, we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always.”

That’s where we are right now.’

“One of the implications of just how polarized we have become is that those of us who are not Trump supporters view them as being a monolithic group. And of course, they’re not like that. They are far more diverse.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that some Trump supporters will view those images with absolute horror and will try to distance themselves from it, for sure.

But there are others who will look at those images and will take solace, and a sense of pride for their impending victory.”

the next year?

“Violence, mistrust, & utter confusion... we have no ability to understand the consequences on us. If we don’t take misinformation & disinformation seriously, & if we don’t treat it like the public health crisis it is, we’re never going to find our way out ...”

“we do not have any real sense of just how bad things are.

This is ..affecting every single person in the country. ..there is absolutely no plan to deal with [it]...

And this insurrection is only a symptom of the consequences of allowing disinformation to go unchecked.”

“The fact that millions of people are willing to believe that the election truly was stolen.

The fact that hundreds of people were willing to lay down their lives for Donald Trump. I mean, we can’t even have agreement over what constitutes facts anymore.”

“What began as sound bites and clichés like “fake news” and all of these things that we just dismissed as farce a few years ago—this is the accumulation of that.”

“...the reality is we’re going to have to figure out how to have conversations with people again. We’re talking about basic stuff here.”

‘Failure to decisively and aggressively address a coup and Trump’s role in this is simply saying, “That was your dress rehearsal. That was your dry run. You can now do it for real next time.”

There has to be consequences.’

‘There absolutely have to be consequences because failing to do so will simply be tacit encouragement to the extreme right-wing sphere. As if to say, “OK, you just need to come back and do it better next time.”’

John Horgan, a Georgia State University professor and the director of the Violent Extremism Research Group, has never been more

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