The historian Robert Paxton spent Jan. 6, 2021, glued to his television. Paxton was at his apartment in Upper Manhattan when he watched a mob march toward the Capitol, overrun the security barriers and then the police cordons and break inside. Many in the crowd wore red MAGA baseball caps, while some sported bright-orange beanies signaling their membership in the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group. A few were dressed more fantastically. Who are these characters in camouflage and antlers? he wondered. “I was absolutely riveted by it,” Paxton told me when I met him this summer at his home in the Hudson Valley. “I didn’t imagine such a spectacle was possible.”
Read the full article here.
