Published: 6 September 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
JONATHAN FREEDLAND: A new book about the storming of Capitol Hill in 2021 provides remarkable reporting of the attitude to Jews in a movement that can genuinely be described as fascistic.
The Storm is Here, by The New Yorker journalist, Luke Mogelson is a remarkable book, a work of close-up, eye-witness reporting by a distinguished war correspondent.
Except this is no despatch from a far-flung, unfamiliar battlefield. It is an account of the undeclared civil war that now grips America and which erupted into full view with the storming of Capitol Hill on January 6 2021. Mogelson was there that day, embedded among the far Right militants and self-styled “patriots” that battered down the doors, assaulted police officers and rampaged through the halls of the US Congress, determined to overturn a democratic election and keep Donald Trump in power against the expressed wishes of the people.
Mogelson was there because he had been with that same movement for the preceding year or more, spending hour after hour among the Trump-worshipping Right during the pitched battles — the armed storming of the state capitol in Michigan, for example — that, in retrospect, were dress rehearsals for, and warnings of, January 6. He listened to the speeches they made, the slogans they chanted. He heard what they said to him and overheard what they said to each other when they were at their most unguarded.
What emerges is a picture of a movement that deserves to be called fascistic, with that term deployed not as rhetoric or invective but as precise description. It is a movement that longs for the suspension of democracy and rule by violence: Mogelson speaks to armed men and women who tell him, sometimes with a heavy heart, that a reckoning is due, that blood will have to be spilled, that political opponents or journalists or judges — anyone who might stand in their way — will have to be dealt with by the bullet or the noose.
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Photo: Storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021
