We remember what happened in Washington on January 6th of last year, and security experts say similar events are happening all over the world.
Professor Dean Alexander, director of the Homeland Security Research Program at Western Illinois University, told WBBM in the past few years violent attacks on legitimate governments have been seen from Australia and New Zealand to Indonesia, Thailand, England, Germany, and Slovenia and elsewhere.
He said the world has seen "several dozen cases of parliaments being attacked either very aggressive protesting, threats of violence, to actually breaching perimeters, breaking into parliamentary grounds, arson."
The pandemic has fueled much of the unrest.
"The primary impetus for these types of attacks, were groups, individuals either aligned directly with a political group, or extremist group, fringe group who embraced different extremist tenets and they opposed by-in-large different pandemic measures by the sitting government or in some cases the lack of adequate pandemic measures," Alexander said.
"The important aspect is appreciating that these challenges do exist and trying to avoid embracing extremist tenets and threatening and utilizing violence, the pandemic is problematic enough and leveraging violence or threatening violence is not going to reduce the problem," Alexander said.
And Alexander explained when the seeds of doubt are sprinkled across democracy, that can lead to extremism.
"When you question the legitimacy of elections, when you question the legitimacy and goal of sitting governments and you question basic institutions, then some of these folks may look for an answer and the answer may be this other group that they have become affiliated with this, this fringe group or this pseudo solution that they can embrace and say 'this is going to solve their issue.'
And he continued some specific fringe movements seen in the United States have taken root across the globe.
"We've seen internationally, U.S.-based or contrived for lack of a better term, conspiracies, whether it's sovereign citizens or QAnon, that's actually shown presence in dozens of countries so those are contributing factors to the perception that there is fragility in the democratic system," he said.