The Storm Is Here: The Path to January Sixth

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. Those dispatches 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 echoes in Donald Trump’s return to power five years later. Bravely reported and beautifully written, The Storm Is Here is a unique record of the moment at which American democracy began to crumble.

Luke Mogelson has written for The New Yorker since 2013, covering the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq. During the pandemic, he reported from across the U.S. Previously, Mogelson was a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Kabul. He has won two National Magazine Awards and two George Polk Awards.