The Storm is Here

Luke Mogelson

The Storm is Here is an eyewitness reckoning with American far right's mounting radicalisation over the course of 2020, building to the 6th January storming of the Capital and beyond, tracking the dynamic between the bottom-up - the militias and their ilk - and the top-down - Trump and the media's incitements - in the context of a pandemic, an election, and a social justice movement from the left that became the ideal bogeyman.

Until a year ago Mogelson was a war reporter whose prizewinning journalism from Iraq and Afghanistan had gained him an international reputation. He asked to return to the US to report on the political extremism and polarisation that was gripping the country. Within days of his landing George Floyd had been murdered. Mogelson spent the rest of the year following Black Lives Matter protests, the Antifa movement and others on the left, and the radical right, from QAnon, Bugaboo, the Proud Boys and the Republican party. He visited cities where peaceful protest met police violence and where radical factions fought hand to hand on the streets. He reported as if from a war zone.

Wide-ranging and ambitious in narrative scope, The Storm is Here identifies the nexuses between Trumpism, right-wing conspiracies, Christian fundamentalism, and white nationalism, mapping out the evolution of these ideological currents throughout 2020, as they shifted from sparking an anti-lockdown movement opposed to public-health measures during a pandemic, to supporting a law-and-order movement opposed to racial justice and police reform, to fueling a stop-the-steal movement opposed to the American democratic process and its institutions.

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