What’s keeping terrorism experts awake at night?

This keeps me up at night. Have you come across this expression of pained anguish lately? This isn’t about conversations with friends or loved one’s on Covid, returning to work or never working again. I’m talking about news stories on national security and terrorism, where experts and counter-terrorism officials are interviewed and feel duty-bound to disclose that they can’t sleep at night.

The number of these individuals who haven’t had a decent night’s sleep of late is frankly quite alarming. ‘This keeps me up at night,’ terrorism scholar John Horgan told Slate’s Aymann Ismail last November. He was referring to the gathering storm of far-right extremism in America. ‘I think we’re truly in free fall, and don’t have any sense of how to grasp this,’ he said.

Three weeks later, it transpired that Elizabeth Neumann, the former lead at the Department of Homeland Security in the US, was also sleep deprived.