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Feb. 4, 2021 - Epoch Times
49:44
Andy Ngo: Infiltrating CHAZ; Antifa’s Plot to Destroy America; “Unmasked” | American Thought Leaders
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In Portland, they rioted for more than 120 straight days last year attacking Independent journalist Andy Ngo has spent the last four years studying and reporting on Antifa.
Every night, thousands of people try to burn down the federal courthouse in downtown.
Even though Andy Ngo has been doxxed, harassed and beaten by Antifa so badly that he ended up hospitalized with a brain bleed.
He still went undercover into CHAZ, the lawless autonomous zone that lasted for three weeks in Seattle last year.
Tonight, Andy Ngo breaks down the inner workings of Antifa, which he details in his new book, Unmasked, Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.
They view the U.S. as so irredeemable in that, not that it can even just be reformed or fundamentally changed, but that it must be destroyed completely.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
And before we get into the interview, please make sure to subscribe to our mailing list.
The link is in our description below, so we can stay connected no matter what happens.
Andy Ngo, so great to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you for having me back.
I've been looking forward to speaking with you again.
Well, absolutely.
When I got the preview of your book in the mail, Unmasked and Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, I was, of course, fascinated, as I know you knew I would be.
A kind of a force of sorts to me, looking into all different areas that I haven't seen put together in this sort of way before.
So congratulations on writing this book.
But let's get more to the point.
On Inauguration Day, there were violent protests in both Seattle and Portland.
From what I can tell, Antifa was heavily involved.
And from what I can tell, they're anti the current president, Joe Biden, and even the Democratic headquarters of the Oregon Democratic Party were attacked.
I don't know if this destroyed is the right word.
What is going on here?
What happened on Inauguration Day, if we had listened to prominent politicians in the media, is that we were led to believe that Trump supporters would take out to the streets again to reject the peaceful transfer of power and that they would riot.
That didn't happen, but it ended up happening.
In the last inauguration, Antifa and their extremist allies on the far left rioted, particularly in their centers of influence in America, which is the Pacific Northwest currently.
So in Seattle and Portland, there were simultaneous riots that were pre-planned and organized and also advertised weeks ahead of time on Twitter.
And Twitter did nothing to take down some of these accounts that were promoting these riots.
So in Portland, what should be shocking, but unfortunately it's not, is that they gathered and then took over the street, shut down traffic, and marched just unimpeded to the headquarters of the Democratic Party of Oregon.
So this is their main facility for the entire state.
And they destroyed it.
They smashed out every window.
Some of them actually came with firebombs, but they were apprehended by police later, so they didn't torch down the place, but they appear to have had the intention.
There were a lot of journalists there, and go figure, the journalists didn't actually record the destructions.
They just followed the rules of looking the other way and then essentially giving cover.
So there are probably about 150 of them.
And then at night, they rioted and tried to break into the ICE facility in southwest Portland.
In Seattle, there were street protests.
People started fires on the streets.
They attacked law enforcement.
But this has been the nightmare Groundhog Day story of Seattle and Portland for months and months since last year.
My frustration with the response from those who had the harshest of words to describe what happened on the 6th of January when rioters seized the Capitol Hill building is that they were silent when people using the same tactics and wars seized entire territories in major American cities.
My book on masks is coming out.
I write about my time in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, otherwise known as CHATS. That was territory that was claimed by Antifa BLM as a separate and sovereign nation-state apart from the United States.
In December, Antifa claimed territory in a residential area in Portland.
In Portland, they rioted for more than 120 straight days last year, attacking City, county, and federal property.
The worst was when, for more than a month, every night, thousands of people tried to burn down the federal courthouse in downtown.
And they seriously injured so many federal officers who have been sent in from DHS. And the response from the media at that time is that the police were Gestapo.
They were secret police.
They were Part of Trump's secret army.
They defended the rioters who came with knives, guns, explosives, electric power tools.
2021 is not starting off much better.
I need to remind everybody, because they're probably not aware, because the media ignores us.
We've had now five riots in Portland alone by Antifa since New Year's Eve.
All of the conditions that allowed for the riots to continue and for the criminals to not be punished, those variables are still there.
And this whole claim that they were merely opposing the fascist Trump regime was from the beginning always the pretext.
Andy, this is incredibly fascinating because everything you just described is a very short version of your book.
Your book goes in-depth into all these different realms, into the realm of why the mainstream media treat Antifa this way, and I suppose the corollaries and the rioters at the Capitol a different way.
Or why law enforcement seems so permissive with respect to these riots, or why public officials seem that way.
But it seems to throw this kind of a spanner into a lot of the arguments that I've been hearing over the past year, to think that these folks are attacking the Democratic Party.
I've heard all sorts of allegations repeatedly that the Democratic Party gives cover to Antifa.
And in fact, you talk about that a little bit as well.
So how does this work?
This seems like a very weird juxtaposition probably to many.
Yeah, I think the book seeks to also clarify some misconceptions about Antifa.
I think one of the biggest misconceptions that comes usually from the right is that Antifa are Democrat voters and that they are a paramilitary wing of the Democrats.
I think when you describe it that way, it creates this perception that there's Like a mutual support for one another when that's not quite the case.
I think what's happening is that the Democrats believe that they can use and exploit the violent extremism of Antifa to sort of justify their own excesses and sort of thinking foolishly that these people are in some ways their friends because they share a mutual enemy either against Trump or Republicans.
But as we've seen now and we've seen before, the entire agenda and project of the Antifa ideology, that is anarchist and communist, It is to destroy the United States and to destroy its system.
So when they say burn it down, burn the system down, they really do mean that.
And that system is the rule of law, it's systems of governance, elected representatives, all of that.
They want to get rid of all that.
So in their world, there is no room for Democrats.
And you can see actually, so in Portland, the Portland mayor, Ted Wheeler, Since he came into office at the beginning of 2017, has really played soft with Antifa, and it was under his watch that this movement continued to grow, that the political violence on the streets became normalized and routine.
Well, they recently assaulted him when they had the chance.
They actually actively hunt him down and seek him.
They've rioted outside his home before.
They brought explosives to the condominium that he lived in, forced him out of his home.
The people held violent protests outside the home of the Democrat mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, and she was one who called the Chas a summer of love.
So there is no Democrat who could really, truly Be an ally in their eyes, because they view the U.S. as so irredeemable, not that it can even just be reformed or fundamentally changed, but that it must be destroyed completely.
In their own words, for their world to live and thrive, America has to die, which is why they attack all of its institutions, civil society, the norms, and more importantly, the ideas that make up America.
Chilling, of course, to hear.
But I want to take a moment before we continue to establish your credentials in all of this, and frankly, your interest.
You actually do something very interesting in your afterword in the book where you talk about your parents' journey to America and how they juxtapose their experience in America to their experience in their home country of Vietnam.
I thought that was really fascinating.
Tell me a little bit about how you got into this, journalism, this specific beat, because obviously it is very much your beat now, and just your general inspirations.
I don't have the luxury of a lot of my American peers and colleagues who work in journalism of Viewing the revolutionary communist ideologies with rose-colored glasses.
I think it's easy to come to that perception if you are born and raised in the US and educated in the American education system and go to university.
My parents lived through a Marxist revolutionary regime change.
They were from the former South Vietnam.
Both of them were sent to prison camps.
And the story of communist totalitarians sending their dissidents either to death or to prison camps is not unique to Vietnam.
Anywhere they've actually acquired power at the state level, they've done that.
You look at China, the Soviet Union, and so on and so forth.
And so that there is a homegrown movement of people who not just Excuse the excesses of communism, but actually really relish in that historical violence and want to implement it.
To me, the alarms are going off.
I started covering Antifa as a student journalist back when I was a graduate student at Portland State.
I'm working the beat of various Portland-related stories.
On the election night in November 2016, I was out covering the reaction in my city in Portland to the protests, and what I saw was It's truly shocking in that we had three days of riots with people who not only could not accept the results of the democratic election,
but actually choosing to respond to their political grievances with violence.
That was the first film I saw Antifa in their black bloc uniforms carrying out organized attacks on property, starting fires.
And those 72 hours were quite shocking.
Of course, I mean, we've had that times much, much more in 2020.
But throughout 2017 and 2018, 2019, just the violence in Portland was so brutal, and people were treating it as routine.
And my frustration with the local journalists is that they were actually Essentially repeating the talking points of Antifa in that militant opposition to people on the other political side is valid and wanted, and that violence taken upon oneself is a needed response.
In the words of Antifa, they said they're against fascism and that they're just opposing the far-right and white supremacy and neo-Nazis.
What I saw was that they applied a very, very broad umbrella for whoever was a fascist, and that included mostly decent people who were just conservatives, patriots, Trump supporters.
They didn't differentiate any of them, and they responded with carrying acts of violence against them.
The response from the city was to essentially coddle this violent extremist movement.
Then we had what we had last year, When this movement actually claimed territory, not just in Portland, but in Seattle.
And so the chickens have come home to roost and It's now the new administration under Biden.
It's not going to get better.
This perception that Nancy forgot what they wanted because Joe Biden won is false.
They rioted in Portland and Seattle in November after the election when Biden was announced to be the winner.
But if you're just listening to mainstream media, legacy media, you wouldn't even know this is happening.
Actually, I was looking at some of the social media responses to stories that make no mention of Antifa and the riots that occurred in Portland and Seattle.
And they mentioned these were anti-Biden protesters.
And the responses from the people in the comments were, they thought these were Trump supporters taking to the streets and rioting.
This is how misinformed the public is.
And so this has become my weight and my burden to bear in that I cover this, and it does come at a very heavy personal cost.
I've been seriously beaten in 2019 by Antifa.
That resulted in a brain bleed.
Over a year of various treatments at the hospital to address the deficiencies I had as a result of that brain injury.
And they showed up to my home.
They released my address.
They wrote my address on a wall when they occupied territory in December at the Autonomous Zone in Portland.
They tried to terrorize their opposition, if not outright kill them.
I have to remind people that Antifa is a movement that has killed.
They killed in Portland last summer on one of their rise.
They killed a Trump supporter, a man by the name of Michael Reiner.
I write about this in the book.
After that, he fled out of state to a small town in Washington.
He eventually got killed by federal law enforcement.
But he did leave behind a sort of manifesto on his Instagram, which was taken down, but I was glad that I saw it and saved it beforehand.
And his own words, quote, I am 100% Antifa.
And he's not the only one who's carried out deadly violence in the name of antifascism.
There have been very, very prominent Democratic leaders, I believe, who have even said things like, Antifa doesn't really exist.
We know from reading your book and other work that we've done, that it's not really a single organization either.
It's multiple organizations that share a kind of ideology.
I'm wondering if you can break that down a little bit for me.
Partially what makes them extremely dangerous and difficult to tackle from a law enforcement angle is that they are decentralized and autonomous.
But there are actual formal groups, many of them.
I write about it in the book.
Rose VT Antifa is the largest and oldest Antifa group.
It's the Portland Antifa group, and they actually have a presence on Twitter with many thousands of followers.
And documents that were leaked to me from somebody who went through the recruitment process to become a member really lays It dispels this myth that we've been given that There's no such thing as an Antifa member.
Well, there actually are Antifa organizations.
Rose City Antifa is one.
You could look at all the groups or cells that make up the Torch Network.
They follow a very similar curriculum in that people actually go through a membership process that involves radicalization, going to training, having extremist literature to read.
It's actually very similar to how Islamists will radicalize regular Muslims into their worldview.
But what makes Antifa particularly difficult is you can't take out one head of it.
There's no al-Baghdadi equivalent in Antifa.
And that's by design.
They function autonomously on their own, based on one shared, similar ideology between one another.
And so the issue In addition to those who deny that Antifa even exists, they get the basic ideology wrong.
It's become a meme that they just repeat over and over that Antifa is simply anti-fascism.
But anarchist communism has nothing to do with being against fascism, looting and killing people, and Carrying knives and bombs and guns to protests and riots, that has nothing to do with being against fascism or the far right.
It's just, again, always a pretext for the violent extremist ideology that's been given legitimacy by, unfortunately, many Democrats and many journalists.
I think the biggest victory that Antifa has is not that they've been able to essentially face Very little legal consequence, but rather that parts of their ideology have been mainstreamed.
Well, it's really interesting.
I'm sure, Andy, you're familiar with Marcuse's principle of repressive tolerance.
This has been something that actually has come up multiple times over the past few interviews that I've done.
And as you're describing this, basically, I'm seeing this principle in play all over the place.
And in your description just now, I'm seeing it again in play.
What do you think?
And I suppose we should clarify what it is, too.
Yeah, so Marcuse was a German philosopher, very influential in 20th century American leftist politics.
One of his very seminal works, you just mentioned Repressive Tolerance, provides an intellectual argument for why speech, essentially, and expression from the right should be silenced.
And it provides this ideological framework for the far-left today and the hard-left who believe that it's not just enough to counter opposing views with your own views.
You have to shut down your opposition.
But there's really no line for where that shutting down ends.
Going back to 2015-16, we saw that in the form of radical student activists allied many times with Antifa shutting down speakers at university using intimidation, harassment, and sometimes violence.
Eventually, that escalated to people being assaulted in the streets.
All the while, that was actually lauded by many liberals, which is what I mean when I say Antifa has found a lot of victory, because this is a very core tenet of their ideology, that the response to what they say is fascism is to be violent.
And of course, how they define fascism, as I said a moment ago, includes really anything that opposes their ideology.
So, yeah, what are your thoughts on that?
Well, no, absolutely.
It makes perfect sense.
And I think that actually comes out quite a bit in your book, maybe not explicitly, but it's just so prominent.
Basically, the justification provides not just an ideological, but supposedly a moral framework for the use of violence.
And the other part, which I find fascinating, you said it really well, That's right.
A section of the book focuses on the history and founding of Antifa.
It's important for people to know that it's not Even though, as Americans understand it, it is a new phenomenon, but its origins go back much further in that the original Antifa, capital A, was a paramilitary of the German Communist Party in the interwar years of Germany.
They were established to essentially be the street thugs for the Communist Party in that they didn't just fight Nazis.
That's a misconception.
Their main opposition at the time was the Social Democrats, the center-left liberals.
So they carried out acts of what we're seeing repeated today, really.
Attacks on political rallies, killings and counter-killings, street brawls.
All of this leads to a destabilization in society and a polarization in society.
The wider public are not going to tolerate this endlessly.
At some point, regular people, regular families will want to just live their life in peace.
That's the subtext of the danger of Antifa, really.
They can have a lot of success in destabilizing local jurisdictions, but when it comes to, let's say, a storming of a White House or something and taking over through a coup, that's highly unlikely given the might of the American military.
I think the subtext of what is extremely dangerous about Antifa is that when they are normalizing tenets of the ideology that people are Should resolve their political grievances through violence.
That's how you undo the founding philosophies of America, when you attack the idea of freedom of expression as a protected human right, when you attack the right to property.
So all these riots Create counter-reactionary forces and also polarization in society.
And I think, based on a lot of what I'm...
When I talk to some people, when I look at things online, responses from the far right, it seems like Antifa are creating the demons that they say they are there to put.
Because, for example, you can...
Look at places in the Pacific Northwest where people can just riot day in and day out with no consequence, literally.
The district attorney has actually decriminalized felony rioting.
The response from people who are sympathetic to those who stormed the Capitol Hill was that, well, If these people on the far left can do that day in and day out with no consequence, no censure, why can't we?
All of this is just leading to a weakening of the rule of law, and I think the attacks on law enforcement's institution and the American criminal justice system is explicitly for this goal.
Confidence in the legal system to wane so that they can posit an alternative.
Now, as a Bantifa, they believe that they can run societies without any government at all, that they can create their own communist communes.
But as we saw in Chaz, what happens when they seize territory is that In the absence of any governance, warlord-like figures rise up.
There are clashes with each other.
People kill one another.
They created a hard border and manned it with an armed volunteer security militia.
And so this is the future that Antifa envisioned for the world.
You don't have to think of it as just an entirely theoretical look at what happens when they actually gain control and power over an area.
Well, and this is a very, very interesting chapter, Andy, in the book.
You actually went undercover in BlackBlock so that you wouldn't be recognized into CHAS for, I think, about a week.
And that's, again, a very, very fascinating chapter in the book.
Tell me a little bit about that.
What can people expect to read in there?
When I was there on the ground, what was really shocking to me is the reality I saw and experienced with my own eyes and being there was so different from what was the reporting out by the mainstream press.
I remember the Daily Beast was giving this impression that it was just a festival fair type of event that was family friendly.
You had Ben and Jerry's go in with the big old truck, giving out free food.
People were pouring in tens of thousands of dollars worth of donations and giving food and supplies and all that so that this could keep going.
And then when the sun set and the media left with their security, what happened were fights were breaking out all over.
They had these tents that were set up in the occupation.
And from what law enforcement said, there was an attempted rape.
People tried to burn down what was renamed of the Seattle Police East Precinct, which is right at the heart of this occupation.
It was all boarded up and abandoned.
It was I don't take joy in this, but I knew it would be literally within hours that people would die, because you had people going around with weapons openly and brandishing it at other people.
You had these different warring factions that were developing.
Police refused to go into the area, and they held thousands and thousands of people hostage in this really densely packed area.
So It was just so shocking to see what journalists were trying to put out in the media to give good press for this.
And that's in part what allowed it to go on for more than three weeks.
And there were multiple shootings, several homicides.
It's still chilling and so dystopian when I think about it.
And unfortunately, it wasn't just Chaz.
And when that's about clean territory, In Portland for a week in December, they set up booby traps, they set up a hard border, barricades, they had their own armed militia who were keeping guards at these gates.
They had weapons stockpiles for areas.
This is happening in major American cities.
It should be front-page news, but if not, you could be on the East Coast or in California and actually have no idea what's been going on in some of these cities and the lives of so many people that are impacted.
Yeah, this response of many of the legacy media, as I also like to describe them, and certainly the corporate media, has been to put powder on its face, so to speak, or even ignore it, or make it sound like you said.
This is obviously the mayor's statement, but a summer of love type situation, not the Journalism like entertainment,
like academia, like K-12 education, these are within the These are under the cultural hegemony of the left.
Journalists, the majority of them, I would say, are sympathetic to what they believe are the wider aims of Antifa and the far-left, which is for racial justice, for fighting for Black lives—all these really noble-sounding things.
And so they provide cover to them.
And so, you know, that's a situation where you can have everybody remembers the name of Heather Heyer, who was killed in Charlottesville in 2017.
But nobody knows the name of Aaron Danielson, who was killed by an Antifa in Portland, shot dead after he had been stopped by this armed man.
And that's That's the power of the media.
People remember what Dylann Roof did when he killed people at the church.
People don't remember that Conor Betts in Antifa in Ohio carried out a mass shooting in 2019.
People don't remember or recall or are aware of that Dylan Van Sponsen in Tacoma, Washington, came armed with a rifle and homemade firebombs to attack the Tacoma ice facility.
Media, news stories, it's a zero-sum game.
You only have so much resources to focus on these stories.
Other things are being ignored.
What makes it particularly worse is that people like myself and people like Epoch Times who focus on these issues then get actually demonized and smeared by the mainstream media.
I still write for mainstream publications.
I contribute to New York Post.
I've written news reports for Newsweek.
I've done Collins and the Wall Street Journal.
But if you Google my name, you look at my Wikipedia, you would think that I was some fringe extremist.
This is all based off lies and smears that get coordinated between different journalists, and then activists will use these opinion pieces as citations on your Wikipedia to destroy one's reputation.
I would hope that one day there would be a come-to-Jesus moment for journalists who have really empowered these violent extremists, but unfortunately, that's not going to happen.
If anything, they're seeing that they're helping their friends.
And in the book, through some of these leaked documents from Rev.
CP Antifa, I was actually not too shocked to see that there was an academic and a so-called journalist who was on the Teaching curriculum for these secret Antifa meetings in Portland.
You can find out more about that in Unmasked, but that sounds shocking.
It should be scandalous, but it's not.
Antifa does have a lot of support by extremist academics who actually teach and influence young people.
And unfortunately, many journalists, if they're not actively defending Antifa, some of them are actually members of this movement.
I mean, and this is incredibly, I guess, again, fascinating, disturbing, and of course, very familiar at the Epoch Times, unfortunately, to this type of demonization, character assassination.
It's not enough to say, hey, just look at our journalism, right?
Or Andy, you could say, just read my book, just read my journalism.
It doesn't work like that, it seems.
That's right.
So Andy, I think one of the things that your book really exposes, and I think it does it in a better way than I've seen done before, is that these are actually highly, highly organized groups and highly, highly organized methodology.
You describe, for example, the use of innocuous-looking weapons like water bottles that are frozen, Now, a water bottle doesn't sound like a serious weapon, but a frozen water bottle launched at your head at close range could be a very serious weapon—marbles and so forth.
You talk about instruction manuals from multiple of these organizations with just deeply, deeply disturbing instructions.
Tell me a bit more about how this organizing works and, frankly, One more thing I'll just add.
You had actually posted, from what I recall, the sort of invitation posters to these rallies and riots that happened in Portland and Seattle before that.
So it's not like these things weren't known, they were going to happen.
These things were very openly organized and attracted significant numbers of people with the aim to do violence, it seems.
Antifa, like other terrorists, for example, the Islamic State group, they will carry out their communications through encrypted channels on Telegram and Signal.
That's where a lot of the planning happens, away from law enforcement's eyes.
A lot of it also happens out openly in the public, such as just on Twitter.
You just mentioned these flyers.
It wasn't just for the riots that happened on Inauguration Day.
You can go back to more than 100 flyers that were made for the riots in Portland.
They would announce where people would meet, at what time, and those are advertised on Twitter and Facebook.
And these accounts did not get taken down, even though they were openly inciting violence, criminal violence.
Then the other thing is the funding.
People think that for such an organized movement that is able to maintain and sustain months and months of riots, it takes out of supplies, resources, etc., that there must be some Rich people backing them up, backing them up financially, when instead it's actually much more simple than that.
It's not a big secret conspiracy.
You see how they fundraise openly.
They would use GoFundMe.
They would create sort of these front groups that provide with very innocuous names like PDX Bail Fund, Portland Bail Fund, Minneapolis Freedom Fund, these organizations that then Get shared within their networks.
Unfortunately, within these networks will include people in mainstream politics who would then donate and advertise these links.
In Minnesota, for example, the rioters there raised over $35 million.
These were to bail out people who were arrested in the course of the riots that had entire Neighborhoods torch to the ground in Minneapolis.
The bail fund also pays for people accused of other crimes like attempted rape, attempted murder.
In Portland, $1.3 million was raised through GoFundMe.
Big tech is helping them, either willingly or not.
So they're organizing, it's actually much more simple.
Another thing is that they face no Opposition, really.
They have journalists who are sympathetic to them.
They have law enforcement that essentially has been made feckless.
They have the taxed support of usually local city councils and even the mayors, whoever.
And then Big Tech takes no effort.
By Big Tech, I'm referring to Twitter, Facebook, but also GoFundMe, Cash App, Venmo, all these things that sort of help where they do their mainstream organizing, their open organizing on, they don't get taken down.
So there's no opposition to them.
So, of course, they're able to continue the momentum and do what they're able to do.
Who's actually opposing them?
You have one journalist, me, and even then, they've been able to chase me out of my own home, essentially.
We have a huge issue on our hands and the really frustrating part is we're not talking about a very large number of people who are involved in the criminal activities.
It's relatively small.
It looks big because if you're looking at the arrest records, particularly in Portland, because a lot of these people, as I said earlier, are getting arrested four, five, six, seven, eight times and just turning out over and over, sometimes within the same day.
They release the morning.
The charges are dropped, so they go back to riot at night.
So it's a small group of people, but I think what makes them...
Particularly powerful, in addition to not having any opposition, is that they have a lot of people who are sympathetic to their cause.
And so that's why I put so much effort into finding out who are some of these people who are arrested at these riots.
Oh, some of them are professors.
Oh, they're registered nurses.
They work at the hospital that provided treatment for me after I was beaten by Antifa.
You know, it's like they work in white-collar positions as attorneys.
That's the power of Antifa, that they've been able to pull in lots of normal people who really think that we are under the threat of fascism, and that the appropriate response to that is to take up arms and to harm others.
You mentioned the term terrorists earlier.
Would you describe Antifa as domestic terrorists?
I do.
They are domestic terrorists.
It's also an international terrorist movement in organizations as well as networks who are linked.
The Antifa in America didn't just start from scratch.
They took tried and true methods that were First seen in Western Europe, particularly in West Germany, and then Sweden and France and other countries.
They're applying it with much success in the American context.
Part of the book I write about how they've been able to really take over, essentially, soccer Culture in the Pacific Northwest, Portland and Seattle both have official Major League Soccer teams.
If you go to these games, you will see Antifa propaganda everywhere.
People wear it, they fly it.
The fan clubs are also fully propagating this ideology.
They put it on their symbols as well.
They're doing everything right in front of us.
I mean, a fraction of it is done secretively, and I document that in the book.
But most of it is actually done openly, and nobody's really blinking an eye.
You talk about this in the book, but what is the relationship between Antifa and Black Lives Matter?
When I say that, I mean the organization Black Lives Matter, not people who believe in the truism that obviously Black Lives Matter.
In 2020, we saw and experienced the consequences of the cross-pollination of one another.
In Portland, I had seen an informal alliance building since 2017 in that Antifa and Black Bloc were providing armed volunteer security for these BLM rallies in Portland.
But we saw this being then done in other cities in 2020.
The DC chapter of Black Lives Matter quite openly has called for people to go to Antifa events through their Twitter account.
Antifa had a perfect opportunity to also exploit the racial grievances of Black Americans when these riots were breaking out.
So video that was coming out of Minneapolis, New York and other cities were showing how Antifa would set off a chain reaction that would lead to Looting, and then eventually the burning down of buildings entirely.
And really all it takes is the initial smashing of a window, just so that there's a physical breach inside a business, and then opportunists and other people go in and loot.
And then from there, Antifa just simply use a Molotov cocktail or something to start a fire.
There was a symbiotic relationship between BLM and Antifa extremists throughout these riots, and then eventually Antifa were then using the exact same chants as BLM in writing BLM wherever they were rioting.
I consider them, at least in America, really the same linked entity.
BLM, Antifa is what I call them.
They're hard to separate now.
And actually, to somebody who doesn't know much about BLM, they might be confused and be even offended about what I just said, because they think of BLM as the truism, as you just said.
Rather than as an organization explicitly founded by self-identified revolutionary Marxists.
I'm talking about the three women who co-founded the organization.
You can look at their own statements and how they identify ideologically.
The official statements that have been put out by BLM Respecting the communist regime in Cuba, venerating cop killers and Marxist revolutionaries like Assata Shakur.
So BLM is a radical extremist group.
They don't even hide it.
They've just been given so much cover by the press that people just think, really, like they think Antifa are merely anti-fascists.
They think BLM are merely racial justice activists.
Andy, so who did you write the book for?
I wrote the book for people who cherish the liberties and freedoms that they have living either in America or another liberal democratic state.
I think there's this hubris with young people who are born and raised in prosperous Western countries that What they have is the norm in that their rights can never be taken away.
They don't think about the ideas that it took to build a civilization like what we have in the United States and some other places.
How coming to a consensus that you don't solve grievances through violence against one another.
That's actually not natural to humans.
You can look at how much of the world of people who live in failed states, how they organize is kind of like how Antifa organize, creating their own militias and tribes and protecting and guarding their own territory and killing other people who go into it.
So just seeing the founding ideals of America under such I grieve a lot.
So I write the book for people who are seeing what's happening to their country and just wondering what the hell is happening.
And where is this threat really coming from?
I want people to truly understand Antifa for the violent extremist movement and ideology and networks of organization that they are.
Well, Andy, I've had a really, really good time, albeit a difficult time, reading the book.
I look forward to finishing it, and I'll recommend it to all our viewers.
The book is Unmasked.
Andy Ngo, thanks so much for joining me again.
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