Antifa is the muscle, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other non-profits help pick the targets, and anyone who points out their totalitarian intolerance is called a fascist, promptly canceled, or burned in effigy. That’s the crazy Leftist triangulation playing out these days on the streets of Portland and in many other riot-prone American cities. Journalist Andy Ngo knows this all too well.
The angry red communist comrades of antifa and BLM have tried to cancel the Portland-based journalist but Ngo told PJ Media that it obviously hasn’t worked out too well for them. Antifa “protesters” beat him senseless and sent him to the hospital with brain damage in 2019, engaged in a sustained smear campaign against him due to his coverage of the group, and basically put out a hit on him, but Andy Ngo’s still standing. And thriving.
Instead of being canceled, Ngo wrote a book about antifa and BLM. Unmasked: Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy has just hit bookstores.
Antifa tried to cancel @MrAndyNgo but he decided 'naw, I think I'll write a book about you guys instead.' #winning
Get yourself a copy of Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy https://t.co/FptrHoNd9H
Listen here: @adultinthe https://t.co/YFnGWkIbfL pic.twitter.com/nIhqLchuxd— Victoria Taft – Parler, Minds, Facebook, 5VTShow (@VictoriaTaft) February 2, 2021
Though I’ve watched the Portland protest scene go from the chill Friday-at-4 drum circles to shrieking animal rights protesters, Occupy encampments, May Day melees, and antifa trying to burn down my hometown, Ngo’s book is a valuable resource and well told.
The origin story of the group in the 1920s and 1930s, and its officially becoming a paramilitary group in 1932, is highlighted. The American version of the antifa group started in Minneapolis in the 1980s as a Leftist skinhead group called the Baldies.
And today, as Ngo discusses in Unmasked, antifa still is a paramilitary group. They train both mind and body, and don’t brook differing opinions. Whatever violence the group does, whether or not they started it – as they almost always do – it is considered “self-defense.”
A network of bookstores and shell organizations hide the training sites and communicate plans to other parts of the country. The radical bookstore featured in the “Portlandia” TV series was where many antifa groups have been trained, according to Ngo.
Antifa uses some cloak-and-dagger, but a lot of antifa members plan riots, beg for food for “mutual aid” for the rioters, call on comrades to bring equipment to start fires, and grub for bail money on social media, all under Jack Dorsey’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s noses.
The mainstream media swoons. The Washington Post did a fashion spread on antifascist wear using real antifa and BLM militants as models. The media in Portland highlighted the local colorful characters at the riots and gave short shrift to the fact that they’re helping burn down the local cop shop or federal courthouse. Ngo says politicians pick up the media cues and embrace the violent thugs rather than be labeled a racist. They even gave an antifa group, SnackBloc, which supplies food to rioters, a $140,000 grant from federal COVID money thanks to the Oregon Health Department.
Ngo told PJ Media the 2016 election sent antifa into hyperdrive. “Antifa was able to move to the mainstream aided by new liberal allies because collectively they all had a shared enemy: Donald Trump,” he said.
And they’d convinced themselves of a crazy conspiracy theory even dumber than the one about Donald Trump being a Russian secret agent: that Trump was basically Hitler.
They really did believe it was ascendant American fascism and they needed to respond asap or else a holocaust was imminent. That type of legitimacy that was given by mainstream press allowed them to to not just exist but to explode in numbers but also to embolden them to carry out more and more acts of violence with impunity.
In Seattle, Portland, and Berkeley ,they were under pressure to not go so hard on far Left militants because we were told that if you were against antifa that was pro-fascism.
Mike Strickland was the first journalist attacked by antifa at a Portland antifa/BLM protest in the summer of 2016 and was tried, convicted, and sent to jail for pulling his legally concealed handgun to stop them. He didn’t fire a shot, but Strickland promptly was prosecuted. Ngo, then a student at Portland State University, was at that protest. He testified in Strickland’s defense. Ngo never imagined he could get into a scrape like Strickland, but three years later, antifa came for him. He’d apparently not learned the lesson.
Video footage of a members of a large Antifa mob taking turns beating the shit out of @MrAndyNgo and throwing milkshakes at him. pic.twitter.com/Fhrvis7MEk
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 29, 2019
Ngo didn’t put up a defense and, instead of being sent to jail, was sent to the hospital with brain damage. Antifa laughed – out loud, and in public.
Rose City Antifa, the group of anarchist militants responsible for organizing Saturday's protest in Portland where Andy Ngo was assaulted, has posts celebrating his attack, and another begging for cash to pay the bail money for members who were arrested for violence. pic.twitter.com/8nsxzeDI5t
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 30, 2019
National publications, such as Rolling Stone and Salon used a local alternative weekly “blog,” as Ngo puts it, to smear him using epithets with which we’re only all too familiar: racist extremist. “And then so whenever you google me now and [view] my Wikipedia page, all you see are these false accusations,” he explained. “All of this has been an attempt to get me canceled; to make me out to be someone I’m not, make me out to be a far-right extremist.”
More perversely, Ngo says there’s a symbiotic relationship between antifa and non-profits, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, that adopt the targets of antifa and put them on their hate watch list, a dishonor Ngo has had the misfortune to occupy. Ngo, who’s Vietnamese and gay, doesn’t get a pass from the Leftist intersectional crowd. Instead, they’ve remade him into some sort of an extremist. His crime? He tells the truth about antifa and BLM.
Breaking: BLM rioters are starting to break apart the barricade around the Rochester police station. pic.twitter.com/6Sno3wNKAU
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) February 1, 2021
“What makes it hard to go after these group is just by the way they brand themselves,” Ngo says. “There’s this binary thinking that if you’re against” the philosophy of the group that calls itself Black Lives Matter “that you must be pro-hate speech, pro fascism.”
BLM comes in for scrutiny in Ngo’s book as well. Though we disagree on some of the details of when it first allied itself with antifa, I believe they’ve basically been tied at the hip since 2014, Ngo’s backgrounder on the group is a must-read. The group was present or responsible for 91% of the riots over the summer, according to one report.
I asked Ngo at the end of our interview, which you can listen to for yourself, if he had to come up with a motto that gets to the heart of antifa, what would it be? He said he would draw it from the group’s own ten points of belief: “For their world to live and thrive, America has to die.”
Victoria Taft is the host of “The Adult in the Room Podcast With Victoria Taft” where you can hear her series on “Antifa Versus Mike Strickland.” Find it here.Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, MeWe, Minds @VictoriaTaft
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