The Storm Is Here

An American Crucible

By: Luke Mogelson

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

The New Yorker's award-winning war correspondent returns to his own country to chronicle its accelerating civic breakdown, in an indelible eyewitness narrative of startling explanatory power

After years of living abroad and covering the Global War on Terrorism, Luke Mogelson went home in early 2020 to report on the social discord that the pandemic was bringing to the fore across the US. An assignment that began with right-wing militias in Michigan soon took him to an uprising for racial justice in Minneapolis, then to antifascist clashes in the streets of Portland, and ultimately to an attempted insurrection in Washington, D.C. His dispatches for The New Yorker revealed a larger story with ominous implications for America. They were only the beginning.

This is the definitive eyewitness account of how—during a season of sickness, economic uncertainty, and violence—a large segment of Americans became convinced of the need to battle against dark forces plotting to take their country away from them. It builds month by month, through vivid depictions of events on the ground, from the onset of COVID-19 to the attack on the US Capitol—during which Mogelson followed the mob into the Senate chamber—and its aftermath. Bravely reported and beautifully written, The Storm Is Here is both a unique record of a pivotal moment in American history and an urgent warning about those to come.

©2022 Luke Mogelson (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Frightening, important, well told

Everyone talks about how divided, polarized, and hyper-partisan our country is, but even if you watch and read the news I doubt most people know the full extent of the violent, authoritarian movements that threaten our world. Mogelson does a spectacular job of relating the whole picture, the competing pressures, the global pandemic, the historical context, the names of the players, the money that’s being made. I cannot do this book justice. It isn’t always a pleasant story to listen to, but it’s incredibly eye-opening. It’s important to understand what happened on January 6th and the groups that still plan to “save” America through violence and intimidation.

Behind The Scenes With America’s Collective Psychosis

This is the best, most depressing, most horrific and bravest account yet of 2020 and the Jan. 6 riots. As Mr. Fogelman says, if there is another American civil war, it will be waged by people who are laboring under delusions. Required reading.

Beautifully written and narrated.

If you want to understand - deeply- Jan 6th, including from the mob perspective, this is your book. If you want to appreciate the power of disinformation and the susceptibility of the disaffected to it, this is your book.

If you do not yet understand why you should be afraid for your country, this is your book.

Scary and anger inducing

This book brought me back to January 6th where, while working a few miles away from the Capitol a group of delusional fascists tried to destroy our democracy. What has angered me all the more since is the feeling that it was just a dress rehearsal. Reading about the characters involved, I still cannot fathom how we let them get this far

A most essential read

I don’t think I’ve ever been this afraid after reading a book since reading “The Alienist” and that was a historical novel; this is happening now! The politics, the reactionaries, the violence in thought word & deed and the deep felt foolery that has been perpetuating for too many years is fomenting a new war for the control of our democracy and our freedoms which we have taken for granted since WWII. I recommend this book to anyone who doubts that herd mentality isn’t a danger to every citizen both present and future.

Engrossing

I thought I understood what led up to January 6, 2021. But this book showed me a greater depth and history and perspective that I didn’t have before. The chapter where the author is at the Capitol on January 6 was harrowing all over again. It was a hard book in some ways, but I’m so glad that I have listened to it. I have a deeper understanding now of the forces at play in American political life.

Brutally honest, eye-opening look at the USA

This is a devastating, though not unexpected, look at the United States in in 2022. The insurrection is in the rear view mirror but the political unrest that caused it is still around us. This eye opening account is a must read/listen.

A dispassionate and troubling portrait of far right rage

A deeply insightful narrative of the Jan 6th mob from a war correspondent who embedded himself in it. He compares the self-described defenders of America with freedom fighters he reported on from foreign wars. In other war zones, warriors articulate a rational ideology for their fight, where as here, the far right’s thinking is fueled by delusion. Regular people caught up in a toxic net of misinformation and QAnon hysteria, are whipped into a frenzy of losing their country in a zero sum game.

A must read

Have read a lot of books about the recent political disaster but this gets into both sides with interviews ranging from the Proud Boys,KKK to Antifa and BLM. Reporter covered protests from Michigan to Portland. A must read to get a real feel of our times. Does not appear positive

Terrifying, gripping and essential.

Luke Morgenson gave the earliest eyewitness view of the Jan 6 riots in The New Yorker in early 2021.
He had already done plenty of homework as a war correspondent in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Then, he took his war reporter’s perspective and military training experience to the people, the places, the minds and hearts of the street players in America’s incipient And evolving civil war.
He pays repeated visits to the battle spaces of such as Portland, Minneapolis, and Lansing — preludes to the crescendoing insurrectionist riots on Nov 14 and Dec 12, 2020, and the awful culmination of Jan. 6, 2021, which is now a marker and prologue to a new ominous phase. A student of and intimate witness to civil wars, he concludes with a morbid insight on a peculiar American exceptionalism: this civil war is based less on concrete and rational grievances than on delusions — from racist Obama birtherism spread by Trump to QAnon conspiracies embraced by millions.
Trump’s damnation is self-evident but Biden gets some blistering (and, I believe, justified) criticism on the chaotic and heartbreaking Afghan withdrawal toward the end. Yet this is not a both-sides book; the author recognizes that our crisis is now existential. The storm is here.
I have read this book as the third in the following quartet of new and urgent books: This Will Not Pass by Martin and Burns (which damns the complicit who know better such as Graham and Rubio); They Want to Kill Americans by Malcolm Nance; The Storm Is Here, and, finally, They Knew by the masterful Sarah Kendzior, the St. Louis Cassandra who predicted Trump’s presidency in 2015 and the events since then. Kendzior, a scholar of Central Asian oligarchies, saw the Uzbek and Turkmen patterns in the Trump presidency, which she persuasively if provocatively describes as a transnational criminal enterprise masquerading as a government. (Have read extensive excerpts but not that full book.) No neat solutions emerge in any of these four books. other than an implicit primal scream for us to be engaged citizens locally and constructively if we wish to keep our Republic a democracy — or indeed keep our Republic at all.