The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible by Luke Mogelson

Author:Luke Mogelson [Mogelson, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593489215
Google: fZVUEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0593489217
Barnesnoble: 0593489217
Goodreads: 59883591
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

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Groups of Proud Boys had begun migrating from the Harrington to the Washington Monument. When I got there, hundreds of them covered the grassy expanse below the obelisk. Now that there was no point in marching to the Supreme Court, they seemed unsure what to do with themselves. After a while, someone suggested, “Let’s take Black Lives Matter Plaza!”

“Whose plaza?” the Proud Boys chanted as they headed down the hill. “Our plaza!” A man with a derby hat and a gray goatee shouted, “Fuck these gender-confused terrorists! They’ll put the girls out first—they think that’s gonna stop us?” He was a Philadelphia Proud Boy named Richard Schwetz, though he introduced himself as “Dick Sweats.” We soon reached Constitution Avenue, which separated the National Mall from the Ellipse, a public park adjacent to the White House. A Black pedestrian approached us on the sidewalk, minding his own business. Several Proud Boys began shoving and jeering at him. As the man ran away, they chased after him, swinging punches at his back. Police officers intervened. It had happened so fast that I had trouble processing what I’d just seen: a pack of white men, some wearing right wing death squad patches, attacking an African American, in the middle of the afternoon, in plain view of law enforcement, steps from the Oval Office.

All but one of the Proud Boys were allowed to carry on. A few blocks away, they arrived at Farragut Square, where half a dozen antifascists—two men and four women—stood outside the Army and Navy Club. Dressed in black bloc marked with medic crosses made from red tape, they were much smaller and younger than most of the Proud Boys, and visibly unnerved. As Schwetz and others closed in on them, they retreated until they were pressed against a waist-high hedge. “Fucking pussies!” barked Schwetz, hitting two of the women. Other Proud Boys took his cue, assailing the antifascists, who disappeared into the hedge under a barrage of boots and fists. Policemen stopped the beating with pepper spray—which, inexplicably, they also used on the bloodied antifascists still lying in the bushes—but they did not arrest any of the Proud Boys, who staggered off in search of new victims.

They soon found one: another Black man, passing through on his bicycle. He wore Lycra exercise gear and looked perplexed by the scene he had stumbled into. Though he said nothing to anybody, “Black Lives Matter” was written in small letters on his helmet. The Proud Boys surrounded him. Pointing at officers watching from a few feet away, a man with a wood staff and a flak jacket said, “They’re here now, but eventually they won’t be. And we’re gonna take this country back—believe that shit. Fuck Black Lives Matter. What y’all need to do is take your sorry asses to the ghetto.”

A man carrying a Confederate flag joined in. “Get your dumb ass out of here,” he told the cyclist.

This was basically the tenor of the next eight hours, as hundreds of Patriots marauded on the streets around the White House.

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