Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Andy Ngo Did Nothing Wrong

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Aug. 29, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

25:49

Andy Ngo Did Nothing Wrong

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	Before I go into what this video is about, I was emailed a few days ago by a group called Listening Post Air, and they were asking me what my rates are to advertise on my videos.
	Now, I don't do any kind of sponsorships or paid advertising in my work, so I had to tell them that I'm afraid I'll have to do this shout-out for free.
	Listening Post Air is a non-profit who help military veterans try and reintegrate back into society.
	They know how tough it is to come out of the military and find very little support, and they are looking to help people and raise money to continue helping people.
	I had a look at their website, and they look like they're doing something for a good cause, and I think that there are probably a lot of people listening to this who might well need the help.
	As they say, they're available 24-7 to just be someone to talk to about the things that you've experienced, and obviously what you say to them is going to be held in confidence.
	They're going to be people who are going to have a sympathetic ear to the things that you're going through, so it's better to contact them than do anything else if you're not sure what else to do.
	And if you're not a veteran but you want support as a non-profit, they do accept donations, so the link will be in the description.
	And since I don't take sponsorships, I'm going to have to shill my own merchandise.
	I managed to get a dirty, dirty Smear Merchant's t-shirt using American media like CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times.
	Because I realised that the other Dirty Smith Merchants t-shirt was for the UK media.
	And if we see Tulsi Gabbard wearing one of these shirts, then she watches my channel confirmed.
	I'm well known for my criticisms of the left, but that's because I came out of the left, like many people who are currently being vilified by the left.
	Because the left seems to have gone absolutely nuts.
	But I do consider myself to be a centrist, and so people often ask me, what content should I watch to make sure I don't just become a foaming-at-the-mouth partisan for either side?
	And I usually give them a list of two or three content creators from either perspective, who I watch on a regular basis to keep my perspective balanced.
	And one of those people was David Pacman.
	I used to recommend him quite regularly because I thought he gave quite balanced content, even though it was coming from a left-wing perspective.
	He was always quite moderate and quite sensible.
	And so when I watched this video, I was very disappointed.
	The video is titled, Andy No is Just the Worst.
	Now you may know Andy No as the journalist who was recently assaulted unprovoked by Antifar for merely filming their protest.
	And because Andy No has done such sterling work exposing Antifar for what they are, he has become vilified in his own community, where it has become something of a sport on Twitter to laugh at the fact that he has been assaulted and to egg one another on to do it again.
	David Pacman of course denounces this, but for some reason he buys into Antifar's narrative surrounding Andy No, which just is not true.
	And so I'm going to refute it in this video.
	The most concerning part though is that David's acceptance of this narrative has been clearly the result of absolutely zero research and seems to have been adopted by him as a deliberate lie.
	He seems to wish this to be the case.
	He has had no critical examination of what has happened and he seems to be enjoying the fact that he can denounce Andy as a right-wing partisan.
	Pacman is taking part in the process of creating a villain for his team to attack.
	He is contributing to the problem.
	He is not helping it in any way.
	For some reason, David has to otherize him into the right wing before he begins doing anything, even though, politically, I'm not even sure where Andy even stands.
	And he has to try and denigrate him as being inferior or unimportant, despite the fact that Andy has written for major publications and regularly appears on television, as well as in viral hate tweets.
	Okay, so I haven't been talking much about this right-wing journalist named Andy No.
	It's spelled NGO.
	I've been told it's pronounced no.
	I'm going to pronounce it that way today, and I'm going to talk about him today a little bit.
	Now, I know for a fact that a significant portion of my audience has not even heard of this guy.
	They're not aware of the controversy involving Andy No.
	But at this point, I think it does warrant a discussion, even if you haven't been following the story, because Andy No is just the worst kind of right-wing grifter.
	That's what we'd call poisoning the well, David.
	It's a very dishonest thing to do.
	It does not make you look good, especially when your knowledge of Andy No and his career is so poor.
	Saying someone is just the worst is you expressing your feelings, which have been ill-informed by your presence on Twitter.
	That's what I've learned over the last couple of months.
	So I'm going to explain the entire thing to you.
	Andy No is an early 30s, 32, 33-year-old right-wing journalist.
	His parents came to the United States from Vietnam.
	He's an Asian American.
	He was born and raised in the United States, in Portland, Oregon.
	And he was known prior to June of 2019 in some niche circles for writing for a publication named Quillette.
	Actually, David, he was more well known for writing for the Wall Street Journal, where he was actually brave enough to come to Britain and go to some of the Islamic areas and describe his experiences there.
	You can imagine how controversial this was to radical left-wing activists who seem for reasons unknown to absolutely love Islam.
	And in June, he was propelled to significantly more notoriety and fame because he was assaulted at a protest by Antifa protesters in Portland, Oregon.
	There was a right-wing Proud Boy march in Portland, Oregon.
	There was an Antifa counter-protest, and Andy No was there, and he was attacked.
	He was punched.
	He was milkshaked.
	I mean, really bad stuff.
	I unconditionally denounced it.
	I haven't talked more about the broader Andy No stuff, but the attacks on him, I denounced.
	I'm against violence.
	It's horrible.
	We shouldn't be doing this to anyone, period.
	Okay.
	But you are willing to propagate the set of lies and misinformation that form the narrative by which these people justify physically assaulting Andy No.
	And people were saying, oh, Andy No was baiting Antifa to attack him merely by being there because people know what he's written in the past.
	Okay, that all may be true.
	That is what you, a left-winger, would usually call victim blaming.
	He was assaulted.
	He did not provoke them merely by being there, merely by wearing that short skirt, David.
	He was doing his job as a journalist, recording the events.
	And the violent communist agitators that make up Antifar decided to attack him on the strength of the narrative that you are now propagating.
	Now, when that happened, when he was attacked, of course, predictably, he immediately got a media round of interviews as a result.
	And the media interviews mostly set him up to talk about how violent the left is and how bad Antifa is.
	He was on Dave Rubin's show.
	He was on Joe Rogan's show.
	I think he was on Fox News.
	He was all over the place.
	It's not surprising at all that the media should want to speak to a journalist who is assaulted by a radical communist group in the streets.
	What is surprising is that it was only the right-wing media.
	The left-wing media should also be concerned about this, especially given how it's coming from within their own political faction.
	But here's a clip of him on Fox News.
	You can hear him slurring his words.
	The mob that attacked me with weapons used gloves that had fiberglass material on the knuckles.
	So these weren't just bare-handed fists going to my head and my face.
	They were harder.
	They were weapons.
	The attack on Andy No was the consequence of a misinformation campaign and a propensity to violence that I know that you, David, disavow, but that I'm afraid is just a drop in the ocean compared to the tens of thousands of left-wing activists on Twitter who are pleased to see him hurt and who reveled in it.
	And fascinatingly, a lot of the coverage was identity politics coverage saying, look at this small in stature, gay Asian guy who was attacked by left-wingers, even though he checks identity boxes that the left should be defending or in favor of or whatever.
	I mean, it's a total identity politics argument.
	We know that the right claims to be against identity politics except when they're for it because it benefits them in some way, shape, or form.
	You appear to have that exactly backwards.
	What they are saying is, you are the ones in favor of identity politics and you know that the left is.
	Why don't you care that this is white middle-class kids in Portland attacking an immigrant man of colour, the son of immigrants, of color, a gay man, people who the left would usually describe as oppressed groups, presumably being oppressed by white people, like Andy No was when he was attacked by white people in Portland.
	These identity concerns no longer matter to Antifar because you have otherized him as right wing, showing the hypocrisy and deceitfulness of left-wing commentators such as yourself.
	This is not a case of right-wing identity politics.
	They are holding you to your own standards because the left is consistently failing in this regard.
	And for some reason, you are completely unconcerned with this hypocrisy.
	But then things started to sort of not make sense about Andy No.
	So first of all, he had claimed that the milkshakes that were thrown at him, which I'm against, period, the milkshakes that were thrown at him contained concrete, which of course would conceivably harden and do serious damage to a human body.
	But there appears to be no actual evidence that there was any concrete there.
	So that started to be sort of a weird thing.
	This is factually incorrect.
	It was the Portland police who claimed that there was quick-drying cement in these milkshakes.
	This was not Andy's claim, at least not originally.
	The evidence was testimony from a one officer Kennedy who recognized the substance, was familiar with it, and could see it on some of the victims of Antifar.
	You did no research in this regard, David.
	Then I asked myself when I watched interviews with this guy, why does Andy No sort of speak in a British accent now?
	When if you look at videos from just a few years ago, he had a standard American accent and he was raised in Portland, Oregon.
	It's no crime to adopt a random accent.
	We know, what was it?
	Madonna has done it, right?
	But the people that do that, it's an odd thing to do.
	And often for me, it signals that there may be sort of more to the person.
	It's rare that all they do that raises questions is adopt an accent that doesn't correspond to where they were raised.
	This is just casting aspersions on his character, David.
	I can tell you why Andy has, I suppose, cultivated a British accent.
	It's because he's an Anglophile.
	He likes Britain.
	When I met him in Portland, he actually took me to a British Empire-themed restaurant.
	I couldn't believe such a thing even existed in the town, but apparently it did, and it was very nice.
	There is absolutely nothing here.
	You are simply trying to create a bad impression of Andy in your viewers' minds.
	And again, I have to say, this seems to be remarkable hypocrisy, coming from the faction that wants people to be able to identify as anything that they want.
	Men identifying as women is no problem for you, but Andy trying to sound like he comes from a country that he prefers is weird, is it?
	But then it gets really bad journalistically.
	Oh, does it really?
	Well, I am all ears.
	Okay, Andy No starts reporting that at another Portland, Oregon protest, Antifa attacked right-wingers with hammers.
	He tweeted, Antifa attacks people on a bus, they try to pull them out and hit them with a hammer.
	That is an accurate description of the video that he posted, and as you say...
	And from the video he posted, it sort of maybe seems plausible, but very quickly more videos surface.
	It doesn't just maybe seem plausible.
	The person with the hammer, the video we'll show in a minute, is clearly hitting the people inside the bus.
	Andy did not make a comment as to how they got the hammer, because that information was not revealed in the video that he posted.
	Your criticism here is based on the fact that Andy can't see into the future.
	And you actually see that the Antifa people, we might call them the counter-protesters, were pounding on the windows of a bus containing right-wingers from a white nationalist group.
	And it's actually the right-wingers in the bus who introduce a hammer.
	Literally the opposite of what this guy, Andy No, reports.
	This is a still from your video, your picture of his tweet.
	Antifart attacks people on a bus.
	You admit this.
	They try to pull them out.
	You admit this.
	And they hit them with a hammer.
	You admit this.
	He did not say how the hammer arrived at the scene.
	And if that video was not yet available, how could he do otherwise?
	And the people on the bus, again, they were either right-wing American Guard, which is a right-wing white supremacist group, or maybe Proud Boys are a combination of the two.
	So the story is literally the opposite of what Andy No reports.
	No, it's not, David.
	You are lying.
	Andy No reported that they had a hammer and they attacked people on the bus.
	This is the salient clip from his tweet that you are referring to.
	Now, it is true that the hammer came from within the bus.
	So the right-wing group had the hammer, but Andy No, as we already saw, did not make any kind of commentary as to where the hammer came from.
	He reported precisely what we saw in that video.
	And as you said, it was only after this that further video emerged to show the origin of the hammer.
	Not that this validates a goddamn thing that you're saying, because later in that same footage, you see Antifart attacking the other buses with other metal objects, the equivalent damage of a hammer.
	Both sides are at fault here.
	They both came armed.
	However, it's very clear that Antifar are the aggressors.
	They are the ones trying to drag them off the bus and attacking them as they flee.
	And then what Andy No follows up with is, oh, right, it was the right-wingers who introduced the hammers, but they were doing it in self-defense.
	It is ridiculous that you take issue with him correcting his reporting after new information comes to light.
	That is absurd that you think this is a criticism.
	New information came to light, and he corrected what he had said that was accurate at the time and actually did remain accurate after it, just adding the new information that it was the right-wingers that brought the hammer, but there were other metal objects used as weapons like bike locks and fire extinguishers that Antifar had brought with them.
	Antifar are not the innocent party in this regard.
	And so now you go on to attack Andy's character again, even though he has done absolutely everything right.
	Which is now a completely different story.
	I mean, really a grifter tweeting, quote, the mob rushed the buses as they were trying to leave and began attacking the vehicles with concrete before attacking the people inside.
	The buses could not continue driving because protesters were standing in front.
	In that context, the use of the hammer may have been in self-defense.
	Again, that is accurate from the video clips I have shown you in this video.
	There is nothing wrong with this reporting.
	That's true.
	They were throwing bits of concrete at the buses.
	This is not at all inaccurate.
	It was in self-defense.
	Antifar were attacking them.
	How you can go on to say this is beyond me.
	So this is not a good faith actor.
	He first reports that Antifa brandished hammers.
	Then when it becomes undeniable that it was the right-wingers who brandished the hammers, he says, all right, that's true.
	The opposite of what I reported is true, but it was plausibly in self-defense.
	That is so phenomenally dishonest.
	And I can't believe the joy with which you present this lie.
	This is Antifar brandishing the hammer.
	Just because the right-wingers also brandished a hammer does not make this not Antifar brandishing a hammer.
	Do you understand that?
	They hit people with the hammer.
	They got the hammer from the right-wingers, but they had already brought weapons with them that were the equivalent of hammers.
	So I don't really see the distinction here.
	What difference does it make?
	There is nothing wrong with Andy Noe's reporting.
	And then the cherry on top is that he now has been caught on video commiserating with a far-right group that was planning violence, and he never reported that they were planning this violence.
	The group is called Patriot Prayer.
	They were planning violence.
	No is on video hanging out with them as they plan it.
	He reported nothing.
	And now it has been announced that he is no longer with Quillette, the publication for which he worked.
	Now, Quillette is saying that the separation is not directly related to the fact that he's been exposed as commiserating with right-wingers planning violence and said nothing about it.
	They say he actually left Quillette weeks ago and they're only announcing it now.
	Maybe that's true.
	Maybe it's not.
	I don't know the truth of that.
	Is this meant to be a joke?
	This is the clip that I found from left-wing verified check marks on Twitter whining that Andy was standing around with Patriot Prayer, like he's supposed to go and stand with Antifar, the people who attack him on site.
	I don't know.
	There's a hundred of them there.
	I'll take first three.
	Let's take a beer and say fuck it.
	Okay.
	How many are there?
	If we walk up there.
	How many are there?
	We know her mom because you put on the remember, but I'm not sure.
	Oh, they said, okay, so we strolled by there.
	No, no, they saw me and they know what I'm telling.
	Let's just walk by there.
	No.
	The thing is, he's saying there's like a 50 or 100 guy down the front line.
	I don't think we're going to be able to get this.
	I don't care about going to the airport.
	I don't think they'll rush it.
	I'm definitely not.
	You think they'll rush it?
	I don't think they'll rush it.
	I don't think they'll rush it, but they just, I don't know.
	Like, the feeling is there's some tension there, so.
	You saw them?
	Oh, yeah, they're there.
	They're there, and I didn't recognize a lot of them, but they're, you see the tattoos?
	You see the shirts?
	They're definitely not.
	You're a featherweight.
	You're going to fight in heavyweight?
	Are you going to wait to be heavyweight?
	Yeah.
	But they could just see us and just ignore us, but they would definitely just cross the street.
	They're going to go up.
	And they're going to clamp it.
	And the cops are going to do shit because the cops are fucking on their side.
	And not here.
	But I mean, I say there's no cops around.
	Andy didn't really seem to be doing anything with them as far as I could see.
	But the charge against him is that he didn't report that they were expecting to have a fight.
	Well, why would he?
	I mean, this clip from CNN is from 2017.
	Like in Portland, Oregon, where Antifa had been involved in at least 10 protests ending in violence, according to police.
	And it's wearing on the community.
	It is new.
	It's like this rumble mentality of, I'm going to bring my friends, you bring your friends, and we're going to fight it out in the park.
	Two years later, it is not newsworthy that there are two groups of people who are prepared to have a fight.
	That is expected.
	Antifa have been preparing for it.
	They are the ones who initiate it from their own admission.
	Explain to me the reasoning behind fighting.
	You have to make it so unpalatable to be doing white supremacist organizing that they no longer want to do that.
	And historically, that's what's worked.
	You have to put your body in the way and you have to make it speak in a language that they understand.
	And sometimes that is violence.
	33-year-old Cameron is what you might call a reluctant Antifa member.
	He's a musician and an athletic trainer.
	And he represents what he says are a lot of Antifa protesters who aren't quite on board with all of the violence.
	If you took violence out of the mix, wouldn't you still have the same platform?
	Absolutely.
	So, but why the need to fight?
	For me personally, I can't speak for everyone and raises a flag for anti-fascist action, but for me personally, violence is only to be used as an absolute bastard's word.
	I try to sway people around me.
	I try to convince them, hey, don't just walk up and clock somebody on the street.
	That's not exactly great for optics.
	It's definitely an internal issue.
	And it's one that we're still fighting.
	John Carrico believes violence is a tool that is necessary to Antifa.
	He's an anarchist who considers himself an activist, often starting his day at the food pantry.
	Again, the claim, oh, Andy No was standing with the Patriot Prayer guys when they were expecting or prepared to do violence and didn't report it is just shocking.
	David, you are lying about Andy No and his reporting.
	A victim of this group.
	It's unreal to me that you can just ignore all of this, that you can uncritically take up a narrative driven by liars on Twitter and just run with it without doing any independent research of your own in regards to it, getting all of the facts wrong, and then at the end of your video, putting this.
	This is someone that we are better off seeing for what they are, which is really an unreliable and very partial right-wing.
	We can use the term journalist, we can use the term activist, we can use the term analyst or commentator.
	I don't know exactly what term to use, but now that we've sort of let it all play out over the last couple of months, I think the truth of Andy No is surfacing.
	Honestly, though, David, I think the thing that most annoys me about this whole event, you lying repeatedly, multiple untruths, multiple character aspersions, and the one that annoys me the most from the left, because it's so accurate about you, is calling people grifters.
	Your video was supremely inaccurate, totally unresearched, and full of lies, and it was a sponsored video.
	You got paid to make that video.
	If I were you, I would keep the word grifter out of my mouth.
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