An eyewitness account of how over the course of a year of pandemic, economic collapse, and feral hatred-stoking and conspiracy-mongering by the President and his campaign, a large segment of Americans became convinced that they needed to rise up against dark forces on the Left that were plotting to take their country away, and then did just that.
This remarkable work of reportage weaves together the strands of MAGA Nation ... holds up the traditional role of journalist as neutral observer and finds it wanting...In their pursuit of truth, intrepid reporters such as Mogelson light our path forward.
Mogelson’s account of his return to the US has a great deal more edge to it, given his experiences in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, and amid horrifying outbreaks of disease in west Africa. There is nothing wry in his description of the United States, in the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, unable to contain a pandemic that would go on to kill more than a million Americans ... Mogelson writes with the descriptive fluency and eye for detail that you would expect of a reporter with his credentials. But what makes this book more than a dystopian travelogue is his ability to tease out connections across history and make illuminating global comparisons ... Mogelson digs back through history to expose the roots of the national malaise.
Going beyond the events of Jan. 6, [Mogelson] shows how such protesters often proudly bond in communities of imagined apocalypse. More broadly, he traces a disturbing link between mobilized extremists, the dominant faction of the Republican Party, and the big lie ... Powerful though it is, The Storm Is Here has a few flaws. At times I felt dizzy moving among continents, American states, extremist groups and animating issues. For my taste, the author doesn’t take enough time — camera down, phone ringer off — to ask why this is happening ... The storm is here, Mogelson’s important book warns us, in the threat of public violence and at the ballot box. It’s here because a loss has for too long gone unrecognized, and because a lie that ties itself to this loss can feel more compelling to some than a truth that ignores it.
