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Aug. 29, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:27:24
Delingpod 34: Andy Ngo
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Welcome to the Dellingport with me, James Dellingport.
And I know I always say how excited I am about this week's guest, but I really am excited about this week's guest.
His name is Andy Ngo.
I know I've pronounced it wrong, Andy.
Just say it once so we know how it's really pronounced.
Andy?
The Vietnamese way is Ngo, but I accept Ngo.
Ngo.
Ngo.
How's that?
Ngo.
Ngo.
Close.
Close.
I'll accept it.
Thank you.
Good.
Yeah, so obviously you've answered the question about where you are from ethnically or Vietnamese.
Your parents were refugees?
Yes.
From, like, the Vietnam War?
Yes, from the former South Vietnam.
So, my father was sent to re-education camp after the country reunified as a communist state in 1975.
My mother's family was middle class, so they were considered bourgeois and they had the properties and business confiscated.
And she was a teenager at that time and they were sent to labor camp.
And my parents left in 1979, originally first came to Indonesia at a UNHCR camp, a refugee camp and waited and went through the long legal process for settlement elsewhere.
And I'm very grateful that the United States ultimately accepted them.
Yeah.
Well, so you've got some history with the communists then.
I do.
So your parents suffered at the hands of communism.
Now, of course, you've suffered at the hands of, well, would you call them communists or fascists?
I'm not sure there's much difference, is it?
But we'll talk about that a bit later on, about your horrible experiences at the hands of Antifa.
But first of all, I wanted to talk to you about, you live in Portland, Oregon.
Now, I've been to Oregon briefly.
I was in the 90s and I went on a road trip with an American friend of mine.
We were looking for Oregon Pinot Noir, which apparently is famously jammy and it was quite a thing in the 90s.
I don't know whether it still is.
But anyway, I thought of Oregon as a kind of, what, sort of quite rustic, probably the kind of place you'd get nice...
Cafes selling nice cakes and things and probably sort of artisanal produce, that kind of thing.
But Portland, from what I see of your films and things, seems to have turned into a kind of battleground.
Tell me more about it.
I'll start off with the wonderful things about Portland.
It's a very progressive city and it attracts lots of creative people.
Artists and cooks and musicians.
Everybody's always trying to outdo one another to redo something traditional in a brand new way.
For example, who can come up with the craziest ice cream flavours or doughnut flavours.
These things have always made Portland quite a nice place to visit and to live in, even.
At the same time, because it's a political monoculture, it's entirely progressive, this has now bred this I think what happened after 2016 when Donald Trump was elected or won the election,
I should say, in November Because it was such a shock to the country and the world, Portland in particular, just the people went crazy.
Went postal.
Yeah, you could say.
There was violent rioting on the streets.
There was a million dollars in damage done to property and businesses.
And that was the first time that I came eye to eye with this nebulous movement called Antifa.
That was when In the streets of downtown, it seemed kind of like a war zone.
I remember it was quite shocking seeing people starting fires on the streets, running around with bats while wearing masks and destroying properties and anything that they thought was a representation of capitalism.
The election of Donald Trump is just a pretense for violent extremists to go out and destroy.
But since then, the problem that we've been having continually over and over are that violence against property now has migrated to violence against individuals, against bodies, against people.
Can we just rewind a bit?
You grew up in...
Have you spent all your life in Portland?
Almost all, right.
So presumably you can remember a golden era when Portland was about groovy ice cream flavours and, I don't know, artisanal coffee rolls and whatever else you get in kind of lefty hipster zones.
Was that the kind of thing?
Yeah, Portland has expressions they adopt and Portlanders are really proud of it.
They say, keep Portland weird.
That was what, you know, made Portland quirky.
It's nice.
We have the cafes, the coffee, the, like I said, the bizarre ice cream and donuts, donut flavors, and the progressive politics that came with this.
And then at the same time, now we're seeing the dark face of what comes with this sort of...
I think what I described is that there's no counterpoise.
So the ideas on the left and far left...
They just sort of radicalize in their own echo chambers.
It's like you can never be too extreme.
As I discussed and have spoken with people who are sympathetic to Antifa or They really can't even pinpoint a time when their activities or protests or violence crosses the line.
For them it seems like, really, they live by any means necessary.
To shut down what they view as fascist.
But the definition of fascist is constantly changing and basically now it's used to apply to any ideological opponent.
It doesn't even happen.
Was Antifa essentially the yin to President Trump's yang or vice versa?
Did Antifa exist as a viable force before Trump got elected?
Yes, so Antifa as a movement sort of descends from anti-racist skinhead subculture from the 80s.
And they claim to carry the legacy of the anti-fascists from the interwar years.
That's something I disagree with, but that's what they say.
They're a part of that history.
And they've always existed as a fringe movement, particularly in Western Europe.
It's been quite active in Germany.
But 2016 in the United States became such a huge propaganda win for them because they pointed to the election of Donald Trump as a very clear example of what they viewed as ascendant fascism.
And so that was used to radicalize and recruit people in a way that I don't think they've had numbers in this size ever before.
For sure not in America.
What makes Antifa hard to describe is they're not a formalised organisation of where there's a membership or anything.
It's really nebulous and it's a coalition of people who can identify anywhere from being a communist to an anarchist to a socialist.
Right now in America, in the political world, what some lawmakers are struggling with is, if we are going to define Antifa as an extremist movement, how do we do that when it's not a group in the same way as the KKK as an organization, for example?
Yes, so there's no official membership.
Correct.
There's no, obviously they keep no records.
So suppose I wanted to join Antifa.
Presumably all I just need to do is turn up with a mask.
And a willingness to commit extreme violence, and I'll be in.
Is that right?
Yeah, although from what I've learned, they have different factions and what you could call maybe cells or chapters in different cities.
So in Portland, there actually is a It's a pseudo-organization.
It's called Rose City Antifa.
And they're the organization that claimed the beating and robbery of me in June of this year.
And they have a Facebook page, Twitter page, and they do organize, and they host their own events, they have their own fundraisers.
On the one hand, even though Antifa is an ideology, not a group, in some places they have taken on elements of being more formalized as a group.
And that's where there's been no research until this.
It's really recent.
These organizations are all new in recent.
And so there's been for sure no academic research.
And in terms of like Even the local authorities are struggling to grasp and understand what we're dealing with here.
Well, I can see one reason why there's been not much research into Antifa, and you're going to tell me the story about what happened to you that day.
So, start at the beginning.
Okay.
So, since 2016, there's been these Every few months, some right-wing groups will organise some type of demonstration in Portland.
For example, it could be something as simple as a flag-waving event or one where speakers are just shouting over a ball horn.
Very informal events.
These groups are tiny.
However, any time there's a right-wing presence in Portland, the Antifa response is overwhelming.
And they put out all this propaganda about how the people who are coming in are literally armed, violent, white supremacists, willing and able to kill people at any time.
And we need to come out in such numbers to defend ourselves and push them out.
And so when they're using that type of language, the average Portlander who is left-wing and progressive, who may not be more aware of the extreme radical ideas of Antifa's movement, but broadly align with their opposition to the right-wing or the far-right, they'll come and support them.
Some of them will do the, a small number of them will do the black block, which is the wearing of the mask and the black from head to toe.
And they do that so that when some of them commit crimes they can easily melt back into the group.
Antifa, there's been so much focus on just the street violence and the hooliganism and what I'm trying to focus to bring more attention to is their actual ideology because the number of people doing violence on the streets is very small but what's concerning to me is that their ideology is gaining some type of mainstream momentum You can see,
particularly in American media, the number of pundits and journalists who whitewash and sort of normalize the tactics and beliefs of Antifa.
So that's a little bit of the background.
On June 2019, at the very end, I was covering that Antifa protest.
They were protesting a Proud Boys flag-waving event.
And I work as a journalist.
I write, I've written for the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the New York Post, a number of mainstream publications.
And I also do video work.
So that day was really no different, as I've covered before.
Although, as my profile has risen, Rose City Antifa and their allies have voiced their displeasure with my criticism of the extremism.
So they had been sort of ratcheting up a lot of online threats against me.
And on the 29th of June, I came with goggles.
And my camera.
I was excited to try out a new GoPro.
I originally put on a helmet that day.
A lot of journalists now will come to Portland with bulletproof vests and helmets and I chose to not have any of that because I really wanted people to see that You can see my face.
You know who I am.
I'm not here to fight.
I'm here to document what's happening.
But in their eyes, these people are so radicalized in their beliefs.
They don't know anything about me, but they've been told that I'm a Nazi or a propagandist.
So when I first got there, they began to throw What I think were milkshakes on me.
Cups of this white liquid on my head and in my face.
And this was...
Done right in the, really, yards away from the police.
This was in a park, and the police were on the perimeter.
And I reported it to police right away.
I would point out the suspect.
I said, this person right here.
And the police, every time, would let me know that they would not intervene, would not detain, question, or speak to the suspect, because that could incite the crowd.
And this is what I've been told over and over.
I had been attacked previously, earlier this year, before the June...
And I was told the same thing.
So that was my frustration for that day with the police.
But I continued on.
I was just like, okay, dumping liquids and stuff on me, I can take it.
Fine.
What shocked me...
And it's completely, I think, shocked the world what happened soon after that was once they started marching, they were chanting, no hate, no fear.
And we were in the heart of downtown Portland, right in front of the justice center, which houses our sheriff's office, courtrooms, Portland police precinct.
So right in front of all these institutions that represent the rule of law or literal institutions that uphold the law, This is where this mob of people in black block attacks me in a very brutal way.
So the video that went viral, it captures only the second half.
So the first thing that happened was somebody, or maybe perhaps more than one, hit me really hard in the back of the head.
With a fist?
I think so.
I don't know what it was.
I'm a very passive person.
As you've interacted with me, you can probably sense that.
I've never been in a fight.
So I didn't even know what had happened to me first when I was knocked forward and before I could even gather my footing.
Then all the punches kept coming to my face, more to my head.
In the course of that attack, they had ripped my earlobe, so I was bleeding.
And then the mobs started pelting all the eggs and other hot objects in what was ostensibly milkshakes.
So I couldn't even see which way to leave.
All I was thinking throughout this was like, is this really happening?
The police must be coming in too.
They'll help me at any point.
It never happened.
And so I stumbled away and started losing my balance, sat on the ground.
Somebody called the police, the ambulance.
The ambulance couldn't come and get me because the streets had been shut down by the rioters who were now moving forward to another part of downtown.
So, I wasn't the only one that was attacked that day.
You may have seen some of the other video which included them hitting an older man on the head and his face was completely bloodied from that attack.
There was another man who was hit on the head, I think with a crowbar or some object like that and had really severe lacerations on his head.
So, you know, like...
These brutal scenes of political violence, it is routine in Portland.
It's banality.
We just came over from a weekend, the 17th of August, of more political violence.
The mayor described that one as mostly peaceful.
His metric for that was that nobody died.
That's where we are in Portland.
So, when you were experiencing this, were you frightened or was it just more so quick that you didn't really know what was going on?
It was so quick that I didn't know what was going on.
I did a live stream when I was sitting on the ground and waiting for the ambulance to come, which never did, by the way.
I had to walk back to the Central Police precinct to get help.
But there's that video that I stream, which is still on my Twitter, and then I could see my face in it.
I'm like, oh, wow, I'm bleeding.
My eyes are starting to swell with blood.
This was a lot more severe than I thought.
Once I was taken to hospital in emergency, they did a CT scan of my head because of the nature of the attack, which was targeting my face and the back of my head, which confirmed a brain hemorrhage.
I didn't even really know what that meant.
I was like, okay, when do I get to leave?
And they were like, oh, you're not.
We're keeping you here.
We're going to have to, and you're not going to be able to sleep either.
I was really tired.
I wanted to rest and They had to keep checking on me every hour to use neurological tests because the brain bleed is potentially deadly.
So since then I've been working on recovery.
I've been having issues with memory.
I have various forms of therapy to go through.
And there's just been...
Like seeing the response online, there was a very large outpouring of support of course.
But at the same time there was a lot of people who justified the...
Beating a robbery of me, so that I wanted it, brought it on myself.
These were the same people who believe Jossie Smollat, the same people who talk about believing victims of assault.
But I think I was the wrong type of victim because I didn't like my views.
So that was disheartening to see, but also put into stark clarity the polarization Among some thought leaders in America.
I don't know much about the American healthcare system, but presumably, are you on the hook for all your medical costs?
So fortunately, there was a GoFundMe that was started by Michelle Mockin, a conservative American writer.
Very kind of her.
And through there, there was such a large outpouring of support that I'm taken care of because of that.
I'm really lucky that, you know, the other people who were injured that day, I don't think they had that same outpouring of support.
And if I had been somebody who didn't have the following that I had, I would have just fallen through the cracks again, like the many other such a sense in Portland that have been.
A tax before me who have no ability to really get the story out there.
And so there's a legal fund that's been launched for me by a non-profit, Publius Lex.
And, you know, for people who want to join into helping me seek justice, because it's been over seven weeks since what happened, there's not been a single arrest.
Not one.
Nobody's been held to account.
So I've grown very cynical about the police investigation for that, so with the legal fund...
Presumably the police must have...
Do they take video footage of these events?
Well, it happened right in front of the Justice Centre, so I would assume that there would be lots of CCTV footage.
There was footage that was recorded from the people around me as it was happening.
So there's lots of footage.
I think some of the issues that compound finding suspects were that most of the people who were beating me were masked.
Yeah, but I know how the internet works.
I know how 4chan works.
Basically, those autistic kids can work out anything.
I've seen stuff on the internet of...
Anti for being unmasked.
We know who they all are.
It's easy for the police to find out who they are.
Here's the frustrating thing.
Yes, one person was identified conclusively, but he has not been arrested yet.
Yet.
I come from...
England, obviously.
And we look across the pond at the American cops and we think they're basically like Judge Dredd.
They don't take prisoners.
And I find it really shocking that you can be beaten within an inch of your life, being given brain damage, for God's sake, in front of the county courthouse, whatever it was.
What did you say?
The administrative HQ of the police and so on.
And...
The bad guys get away with it.
Yes.
I thought that even in left-wing cities, there were at least enough right-wing people who wanted to become cops.
You're saying that all the cops are progressive loons as well?
No.
I've been very careful to not blame the rank-and-file officers.
They're following orders and instructions for how to police in Portland.
And Portland has a very particular and strange governance system in that our mayor is also a police commissioner.
That's an old system, I think, that was inherited from the days of the Wild West.
Most cities in America have changed that long, long ago because you can see the variables that would lead to conflicts of interest because the mayor is up for re-election.
He can easily fall victim to the political desires and bias of the constituency.
In Portland, as a progressive city, it's very anti-police.
They absolutely hate police.
So it's my perception, based on things that the mayor have said previously after other Antifa attacks, not just on people, but even on government institutions where he doesn't want police to enforce the law.
But is...
What's the demographic of Portland?
Is it just kind of white liberals?
I'm very glad you asked this question.
I don't get asked it a lot, but I think it brings up an important point.
So Portland is a white majority city.
It is, yes, white liberals, white progressives.
And the demographics, I think, is actually relevant to this discussion.
It's been described as one of America's whitest cities.
And what I've encountered over and over living there Growing up there and particularly in more recent years is that because of the politics as well as the demographics, it creates fertile ground for really toxic white guilt in a way that causes them to...
Treat all people of colour, or they think people of colour, just by virtue of ethnicity as victims.
And so they like overcompensate, want to go all out to be protectors and saviours.
I think that has an element of why these numbers show up in such large masses at any of these demonstrations.
I mean, on the 29th of June when I was attacked, the Proud Boys event had maybe less than two dozen.
dozen people probably right you know and you have like the showing of hundreds and hundreds of people in opposition it's just um i think you know one part of it is virtue signaling but this is like virtual signaling on steroids where there's an element in a in a fringe of those people who are willing to literally go out with weapons and attack and maim and hurt people that they think are
Do you not think they appreciated the irony of demonstrating their caringness by beating up the son of Vietnamese refugees?
Yeah, so I try not to play too much into that identity politics game, but what's fascinating is that on the last day of Gay Pride, You know, what happened to me as a gay person of color getting beaten up like that by primarily white people, I assume.
Most people in Antifa are white.
And to them, they just view...
What's telling is that the words they use to describe me, collaborator, bootlicker, traitor.
So they don't view, like, my so-called, like, vulnerable traits no longer mean anything because I'm collaborating with the enemy.
Right.
Yes.
So, there was some very vicious stuff, particularly said about, as I've talked a bit more about my family's experience living through the homoxys revolution, There's been those who are sympathetic to Antifa who have said that my family deserved the experience in the labour camps and the re-education camps because they were traitors to their own people.
By the way, have your parents ever talked about what they went through in the labour camps?
Just bits and pieces here have like vignettes of some of the more traumatic experiences.
They don't really go in depth, I think.
And for me growing up, that made me...
I wish I wasn't...
I lament that it wasn't until my adulthood that I started learning more about my family's history.
Because it made me...
Because I learned my family's history, it made me appreciate where I was born, where I hold citizenship.
Because just by...
You know, if things were just slightly different, I would have had a very different life and not have had the opportunities and freedoms that I do.
And so...
For me...
My message to Portlanders is I don't have the same luxury as them to view Marxist ideologies, particularly revolutionary Marxist ideologies with the same rose-coloured glasses.
These people, for them, it's just theoretical.
They have no experience and no connection to people who know what it's like to live through one.
Yes.
We've got the same thing in Europe.
A lot of the people...
People who are most immune to the idea that communism hasn't been tried properly yet.
People from the former Eastern Bloc, people from Poland, places like that.
You look at Hungary, look at Poland, Czech Republic, places like that.
They don't want any of this kind of...
Well, they don't want any of the soft totalitarianism of the European Union, which they see as a kind of version of the Soviet Union.
And they don't buy into the idea of big government and...
Fascist movements and communist movements, because they've seen it all before, and I think it's bad news.
I have a question for you as an Englishman.
Did it surprise you to see that milkshaking phenomenon spread so quickly from Britain to the US? Totally, totally not.
And one of the things I found quite disgusting, but not at all surprising, given how the left rolls...
Was the way that mainstream leftist commentators made light of...
I can't remember who it was who said that it was...
I think one person described it as ludic.
That's right, some female commentator, some sort of guardian commentator, described it as ludic, like a wanky university word for playful.
Actually, having said that, I've just used ludic in one of my pieces I've just written, but in a different way.
But, yeah, it seems to me that all this justification for violence is coming from the left, not the right.
I don't know of any...
Right-wing commentator, not even evil far-right Nazi bastards who write for Breitbart like me.
We don't like the idea of political violence.
None of us ever, ever endorses it.
We think it's disgusting, horrible.
We abhor it.
Whereas for people like Owen Jones, to pluck an example from the air.
Owen Jones, the cuddly, bush baby, go-to guy for the BBC whenever they want a bit of edgy left-wing politics.
There's Owen Jones popping up, you know, like a little jack-in-the-box.
And, as you know, he's advocated violence on several occasions for the right kind of people, you know, like Nazis.
But it seems to me that the definition of Nazi...
On the left these days is anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders, pretty much.
Now, you showed a certain admirable, well, generous, I would say, magnanimous solidarity with Owen Jones when he was allegedly attacked recently by a far-right gang.
But as far as I've seen, we've had no evidence that he was targeted by a far-right gang.
It could just have been a night after the pub that went a bit wrong.
Any thoughts on that?
Well, you know, I think as a defender of the presumption of innocence for people who are accused of crimes, I think the flip coin of that is People who say they're victims, we need to give them the presumptions that they're telling the truth as well rather than, you know, coming out and believing right away that they're lying.
So I want to show Mr.
Owen's good will in that I'm taking him on his word that he was a victim of politically motivated violence, in which case him and anybody Who expresses any views to what they say or what they write, that can never be a pretext in a liberal democracy for accepting violence against individuals, ever.
My concern that what I'm seeing in Portland is a harbinger, what happens when that When the support for violence against people you find to have odious views, when that belief is normalized and mainstream, you have then people who not just participate in the violence on the streets against people, but celebrate it, encourage it, and welcome it.
And there's so many variables in this that's making it the problem that we're seeing.
For example, you know, I think it's Like, the far right obviously has a history that is burnt into our consciousness of what that looks like in terms of when it's the brutality of that type of violence.
You're talking about the Nazis now?
Yes.
Right, okay, so we've got that example from history, but that was, what, 1933 to 19...
That was a while ago.
Yes.
It seems to me that even more so than us nostalgics who love a bit of World War II weaponry and heroics and stuff, it's almost as though the left really, really needs World War II to justify their ongoing fight against this enemy that no longer exists.
I once went, by way of a digression, I once went to Tirana in Albania.
When the country had just opened up, I was on the second flight allowed from the west into Albania.
So this was just after Enver Hoxha had gone.
It was still a complete communist hellhole, a bit like North Korea or whatever.
And the biggest tourist attraction, indeed the only tourist attraction in Tirana at the time, was the museum.
And the museum consisted of room after room of exhibits showing the epic struggle against the fascists.
And this was all the left had, really.
It was like, OK, so we're living in complete squalor.
We've got no property rights.
We're miserable.
The food's absolutely horrible.
No one would want to live here, but it's all worthwhile because we fought the fascists.
And I wonder whether that isn't what's going on now, this idea of punching a Nazi.
I mean, where did that one go?
That was presumably an American idea, this...
Yeah, that started because during when the alt-right figure, Richard Spencer, was giving an interview of that video where somebody ran up and hit him in his head.
And because that became a very viral moment, people thought it was funny because his views are deplorable, so therefore this violence against him was justified.
It was the same thing with the milkshaking.
I think you described how one of your commentators described it in Britain and in America.
A lot of our commentators described it as a cute form of political dissent.
Yeah, yeah, cute.
And it's like, it's like milkshaking is actually really insidious because in a mob setting, when somebody throws that on you, it mocks you.
As the personal target for everybody else.
So there was a lot of people on the 29th of June who didn't know who I was, at least by my face.
Maybe they knew my name, but they didn't know what I looked like.
But once the first person started throwing that at me, then everybody was like, that's the guy.
It's like when wasps attack and they spray you with that...
Pheromone or something, which is a signal to all its other bastard friends to come and attack you too.
That's a good analogy.
I didn't know how that was.
Yeah, yeah.
Unless I made that up.
It ought to be true, even if it's not, because that's how those stripy bastards roll.
But, look, it's an assault on your person, whether it's a milkshake or a fist.
Apart from anything else, it's a nasty, sticky, sugary substance.
Even if it hasn't got...
Didn't your milkshake attack have...
Where that claim came from was the Portland Police.
They had issued a statement on Twitter saying that they had come across information that some of the milkshakes may have had dry cement mixed into it.
And that caused a big frenzy with people on the left accusing the Portland Police of lying.
Portland Police issued clarifications that one of the lieutenants had noticed on one of the cups the smell, consistency and feel of quick-drying cement.
So they were...
They were trying to be cautious and to warn people that potentially that's what some of the drinks may have had mixed in.
However, it was never conclusively confirmed.
No samples were gathered.
That's a mistake by the Portland Police.
The stuff that was done on me, however, that's been collected as evidence.
So we'll see if a lab can determine exactly what all that stuff is.
What I do recall happening is that when all that stuff was being thrown in my face, it was burning a lot.
Right.
In sensation.
In a way that milkshakes don't normally.
Yeah.
But at the same time, I had been punched and there were abrasions all over my face as well.
So it's hard to say.
We'll see.
Where the evidence leads.
Are you going to be okay?
I mean, what does your treatment entail?
Do you have to have blood clots drained or anything like that?
No, no.
Fortunately, I was discharged from the hospital after 30 hours because the doctors kept monitoring me every hour and then Depending on if you pass or fail some of these cognitive tests that they have, that would tell them if they needed to do further tests on my head or on my brain.
And I was progressing in a way that they were pleased with.
So, fortunately, yeah, they didn't have to do any serious surgery, but the serious recovery for me had things been related to various...
I call them cognitive hiccups.
Issues with balance, issues with memory, issues with...
In one of my recent speech therapies, this was quite a shock to me.
The therapist was showing me images of common objects like cups or a dog or a cat or a pencil and then she measures my time and being able to say what it is.
And most of them I did fine and some of them I knew what the object was, but I couldn't recall the word.
I was just like, this thing is used as the...
where you hang your clothes on.
I couldn't recall what it was called, for example.
And that was just like...
So that brought my score down and showed that I needed further treatment.
But it was just that, that...
It made me so...
Like...
Sad that...
A journalist living and working in a major American city would be attacked in this way.
Nobody's held to account.
And that it's still happening.
Well, yeah.
Do you not have a case against Portland police?
Surely they have a duty of care to protect citizens, especially citizens being assaulted right under their noses.
So, well, I have a lawyer and a legal non-profit that's taken me on because I believe that my civil rights were violated.
But, you know, I'll withhold from saying, you know, accusations.
We're at the point now where we're gathering evidence, which is why there's a legal fund.
So, to the listeners here, if you want to help me seek justice, please join the legal fund.
Where do they find your legal fund?
What's it called?
Publiuslex, P-U-B-L-I-U-S-L-E-X-U-S dot com.
And that link is also on my social media.
Right.
So that'll be a while while they're gathering, well, making the case.
Right.
Yeah.
And what about the bigger picture?
What do you think should be done to Antifa?
Can anything be done?
Yes.
So, in America, There's really no such thing in the legal sense of designating a group, a domestic terrorist organization.
Free speech protections are so wide and broad that that would raise certain constitutional issues.
So you may have been seeing things that Donald Trump or other politicians are saying is kind of I welcome the attention and publicity that it brings on Antifa, but I think what people need to recognize is Antifa is not an organization, it's an ideology and movement.
It's made up of many different groups.
I think what politically needs to happen is that the FBI and other authorities that investigate terrorism and criminal activities, they need to look at Antifa ideology in the same way they look at neo-Nazi and anti-government movements.
They can't ban those groups.
There's no such thing in the US as a prescribed group.
If the investigators and authorities are better able to understand the ideology, then they can look and see which groups are espousing it to monitor the activities.
Because it's about the actions, the criminal actions here that is key.
And they are engaged in criminal activities, and they have money, and they have sources of funding.
These are all things that need to be investigated and uncovered.
I mean, what fascinates me is all these events that...
Rose City Antifa and the allies keep organizing.
It costs money in the sense that their own uniform is printed with their logos, for example, or they have their own logo printed masks.
They have their shields and other weapons that is given out to their members.
We need to find out where's this money coming from.
I mean, some of the events have been...
George Soros, obviously.
I mean, isn't everything?
I don't know.
But, yeah, I can imagine this.
Well, there's so many left-wing slush funds, aren't there?
There are.
So that's the thing.
I'm bringing up the nonprofit that's representing me because the legacy civil rights organizations have left behind and forgotten a segment of the American population.
I think because these groups have become so partisan that They're advocating really for left-wing issues in the clients that they're willing to take on.
It's a bit like the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which presumably, was it ever a kosher organisation?
Was it ever reasonable?
I don't know, but presumably it's got even more far left than it was originally.
Yeah, some people, I mean, they have done good work, which they need to be given credit for.
I think the issue with SPLC, particularly as a journalist, is that its methodology in identifying hate groups is really flawed, and they've gotten it wrong many times where they've had to issue corrections as well as they've been sued before by, well, imagine there was, which may have heard about that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was great.
The system that they have set up is basically, you know, they're funded through donors and they have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, literally.
And so the more that they're able to make Americans fear hate in America, the more donations they get.
So they have all the incentives in the world to really make it look like there are so many violent right-wing extremists in the US. You mentioned the word hate.
Hate seems to have been redefined by the left from being a motion of directed anger to mean basically Conservative people who are alive and breathing.
And pretty much any conservative or anyone who's not on the left who's alive is the embodiment of hate.
Isn't that the new, the way things work nowadays?
Yeah, I think that that type of black and white thinking seemed to really come from the grievance disciplines in the universities, but it's been mainstream into society, into American politics and pop culture.
For example, having a traditional view on gender or sex now is seen as hateful.
Unfortunately, when it was contained within the university, it was one thing, but what we're seeing now is that that type of worldview is...
It's central.
It's ubiquitous, isn't it?
It's ubiquitous and central to not just some politicians, but it's taken root in the Democrat Party, for example.
Do you know what's really spooky?
In the moments since we were last talking, this has appeared magically on the table.
Now, you and I know why, don't we?
Yes.
Because they were out of batteries, our film crew, and they had to...
But I suddenly thought, actually, there's interesting things I want to say.
One of them is that...
You're a fan.
You actually listen to the podcast, don't you?
You are the special fan that enjoys the podcast.
Yes.
And one thing I really don't do enough of is plugs and adverts and money-generating things.
Before it's too late, the podcast festival, Podcast Live, is coming up on...
October the 5th special listening friend.
I think if you Google podcast live and I'm doing a special set with Dick and Dick Dellingpole.
It's possible there will be special guests, but I know one special guest will be a canine special guest.
And we're having lots of competitions.
And I'm going to give you a sneak preview of one of the competitions.
I want to see who can bring the most interestingly famous friend along with them.
I mean, I think there'll be prizes.
There'll be prizes for the most objectively famous person there.
But also, for example, say you played...
The drums with, I don't know, pot pollute itself or something.
That would be quite impressive.
It'd be quite obscure, but it'd be quite cool, wouldn't it?
Or, I don't know, if you were Eddie the Eagle's ski jumping trainer, that would work, wouldn't it?
Or if you were in the Jamaican bobsleigh team that was featured in Cool Runnings, I guess that would...
So, that kind of thing.
So, I think we're going to have competitions and fun.
And I know that, Andy...
If you didn't live in America, you would be there like a shot, wouldn't you?
Yes, you would be.
Thank you for that endorsement, which I forced out of you.
I feel that we haven't made enough of the alleged attack on Owen Jones, because I have to say, when I first read, my immediate thought when I read that Owen Jones had been attacked by far-right, alleged far-right targeted gang, whatever, was...
Hatred and fury, actually, at the far-right gang.
Because we know how Antifa behave.
We know how the left rule.
They are disgusting.
They love violence.
They believe in it.
It's very much part of their makeup.
Which, of course, goes back to the violent revolution.
I know our friend Brenton O'Neill thinks that Marxism is harmless and cuddly, but actually he was preaching violent revolution, wasn't he?
In order to get the ascendancy of the proletariat, you may need violence on the way.
You can't make a moment without breaking eggs and all that Leninist crap.
I don't like it when people purporting to represent the Conservative point of view commit violence against the left.
I think that this is just like giving material to the enemy, giving material to people like Owen Jones.
So that was my immediate response.
And I felt the same when those people chucked some...
Have you heard of Femi Sorry?
No.
A dick.
He dresses like a kid and he's very violently pro-European Union and he appears at all sorts of events and says pro-European things.
I think he's being funded by the EU probably to do this kind of stuff.
But anyway, he was picketing some Brexit party event and...
Some idiots threw some water at him and I thought, do you realise how stupid you are?
You are doing what Femi wants.
You are giving him the...
Go away, phone.
You are giving him victimhood material which the left craves in order to demonstrate that the right is just as evil as the left, and otherwise it wouldn't happen.
Where was I? Yeah.
Owen Jones.
So, a lot of right-wing people, a lot of conservative voices have rallied round.
Owen Jones after his alleged targeted far-right attack.
But I have this friend in America who is going to appear on the podcast one day when he comes over.
He's a black American who thinks like...
He's like my brother from another mother.
He's absolutely...
He's totally...
He's so sound and right on.
And he emails me occasionally.
And he sent me some thoughts about this.
I'm just going to try and find his thoughts now, because they're quite interesting.
Oh, I know why I can't find it, because I've got a podcast in my search field.
Sorry, listener.
Special viewing friend.
Oh, yeah.
He says...
He may be wrong, of course.
He said, I wonder if I might ask a few questions.
How does Mr Jones know that the attack on him was premeditated, indeed?
He claimed not just to have been struck from behind, but to have been struck in the back with a flying kick.
How does he know how the attack was delivered if it came from behind him?
How did Mr Jones come to know the political motivations of his attackers?
May we see the information which led him to hit this conclusion?
Was any part of this incident captured on CCTV? Now, maybe I'm being unfair in reading this stuff out, but here I am talking to a guy who was given brain damage by Antifa, by an obvious far-left gang.
They were wearing masks, they were thugs, they were nasty.
All you were doing, your only crime was to commit journalism, right?
Now, Owen Jones was out in a pub at 3am.
He got attacked.
And he's telling everybody that these were definitely far-right people.
And what's more, this is being picked up by the left as an indictment of the right generally.
Every Conservative is somehow responsible for the attack on Owen Jones.
Well, I've never endorsed violence.
And I'm not seeing this endorsement of violence coming from the Conservatives.
Are you?
Well, so of course the partisans on the left who are ideologues are going to politically exploit the story for their own gain.
They do that a lot.
I don't know enough of the details about what happened to Mr.
Jones beyond what he has alleged publicly.
Like I said earlier, I'll give him the goodwill of believing his words and I would like to see at some point The police issue a statement perhaps on what they find in their investigation.
However, unrelated to what is alleged to have happened to Owen is that I've written about I think we're going to talk about hate crime hoaxes quite a bit.
That's one of the other beats that I cover that inflames a lot of people and makes my critics very angry at me.
And I think some of the questions that were asked in the email were spot on.
You know, removing Owen from the picture to anybody.
But I think those are questions that are particularly important to ask when the victims are also very outspoken political activists.
So, when some people were asking me, for example, like, there were lots of questions about, did Andy lie about his injuries and all that?
The BuzzFeed did a profile of me and they wanted to see my medical paperwork because they had doubts too.
And I thought, okay, you know, like, on one level it felt hurtful to, as a victim, where it was caught on camera, to have to, like, You know, prove myself again.
But I was like, okay, you know, I write about hate crime hoaxes.
I think transparency in this is important.
I will do that.
So I showed that paperwork to the BuzzFeed writer and he included that clip, what he read from it in the BuzzFeed profile.
And he was certainly somebody who was critical of me in the piece.
So I just...
And did he retract?
Did he give you a fair hearing thereafter?
Or did he say, well, I was wrong, but I was kind of right, really?
The piece that he wrote was critical but it was professional.
I think there are honestly some Hit pieces that are put out that are truly written in bad faith, like where the purpose, the only purpose is to make, to mould this person into being really like a villainous type person, whereas there can be people who, journalists and writers, either on the right or left, who are critical but fair of the figure of their profile.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you showed him the documentation and he gave you a sort of Fair-ish hearing.
Sorry, I interrupted.
Tell me more about your investigations of these, what were they called, fake...
Fake hate crime.
I call them hate crime hoaxes or hate hoaxes.
Well, in America, it's such an interesting phenomenon.
There's been so many of them.
These are the stories that the activists left don't want people to be hearing about because it runs counter to the victimhood narrative.
Believe the victim.
Always believe the victim.
We know that.
It's important to believe the victim but it's also important to keep The merits of the accusations at the forefront, right?
So what's outrageous about so many of these hate crime hoaxes in America, particularly on university campuses, is that they're so obviously questionable and dubious of the beginning, but nobody has the guts to be asking some of these basic questions of like, can you provide but nobody has the guts to be asking some of these basic questions of like, I mean, yeah, like...
The telltale signs of hate crime hoaxes is that it involves frequently a political activist, sensational claims, lack of evidence, and often a campaign to raise money.
I write about these issues because I think The way that people are focusing on hate in America is like a joke.
It's finding offense at the smallest things and believing the most outrageous of stories like what Jussie Smollett claimed.
I think it makes a mockery of people who truly experience Hate crimes.
Well, sure.
So you're saying that Jussie Smollett was just the tip of the iceberg?
Yes, absolutely.
So tell me how you go about investigating these hate crime hoaxes.
So probably the best writer on hate crime hoaxes from an academic perspective would be Professor Wilford Riley.
And I have interviewed him numerous times.
So he sought to quantify I think a lot of hate crime hoaxes in America, and in his database he has hundreds from just 20 from the past few years.
And it's way more than are being reported.
I think a lot of them what happens is that they get the initial Large focus in the media on the allegations of the hate crime, and then once it's reviewed to be a hoax, or likely a hoax, there's just kind of very little attention.
Some of the patterns that he finds from his data, when I reviewed it, is that they're disproportionately happening among university students.
So those arguably who are the most privileged in societies are the ones who are feeling so oppressed that they will manufacture instances of repression for attention.
And is there a breakdown of gender or race or religion or is it across the board?
I have to...
Well, this is a sensitive topic because in terms of the religion, Professor Wilford Riley did find that Muslims are over-represented in terms of a religion.
Well, that's why...
Because I just recalled the incident where the girl came to have been attacked because she was wearing a hijab or something and it...
There's been many of those claims.
It provoked the similar sense of outrage that the Owen Jones thing did.
It was like, you know, everyone was offended.
And there was a kind of, there's something that conservatives do.
And we talked about this in the car on the way here, didn't we?
About how there is nothing that Conservatives enjoy more than demonstrating how sweetly reasonable they are and how they bend over backwards to accommodate, which is a fair enough defence mechanism given the shit that Conservatives get.
But at the same time...
Conservatives are first onto the outrage bus over these incidents and often what they're doing is adding fuel to a fire which is a fake fire.
Yeah, I think because the left, you know, has won the culture war, it's just there's such a perception in the mainstream that people who identify as conservative or who vote in American context, who vote Republican, so many people view them as bad people that there's this desire reflexively to...
To broadcast, hey, we're decent people.
We're going to condemn violence against even people, you know, violence against people we disagree with, whoever.
And it does oftentimes lead them to jump on false positives or things that turn out to be hoaxes.
And that's embarrassing for them.
But understandably, I guess, I do understand the argument that you want to tread more carefully on On being sensitive to the claims of somebody who says they are a victim of some type of hate crime or violence.
Yes.
I understand that.
And it's unfortunate that so many hate crime hoaxes have made people now cynical and skeptical of people who come out when they say they're a victim.
Legitimately a victim.
There's now always kind of this...
This cloud of doubt over...
Yeah, yeah.
Wasn't Mattress Girl, wasn't that one of the...
That was the notorious hate hoax, yes.
Yeah, things like that.
UVA rape, there's so many...
Do you not think one of the reasons that Milo had to be taken down was because he was very hot on things like Mattress Girl.
He was very good at calling out the left, and he had to be destroyed.
So I have, you know, my disagreements with Milo's style, but putting that aside, I think he became a figure that was like the number one target for the establishment media because he was effective.
He was effective at reaching young people at universities.
He'd become a cartoon character.
In the early days, when he was inventing himself, he described this process to me.
He said, you know, I'm going to get my hair blonde.
He was very pleased when he appeared as a cartoon character in a graphic novel.
This was always part of the game plan.
I think it's quite a good way of packaging conservative ideas in the form of a...
A graphic novel.
Because after all, graphic novel readers, at least readers of graphic novels that haven't been written by talentless female hacks who've just been given their jobs because they're female and they're woke, I think they tend to be young men who are open to the possibility of conservative ideas.
Do you think that...
Like, conservatism is so, it comes from such a long line of intellectualism.
Do you find that this new form of way of reaching young people tramples on that intellectual tradition?
I don't give a fuck about the intellectual tradition, actually.
I think, you know, and I'm really glad you're asking me some questions, because actually I hate these things to be one-way interviews.
It's that I'm really not interested in definitions of what conservatism is.
Because it seems to me that when I've read attempts about what conservatism is, they often involve what I consider to be Tedious, centrist bollocks like conservatism is whatever the Conservative Party in Britain currently believes and that we're a broad church and one nation conservatism and stuff like this, which is not where I'm coming from.
I think we're fighting a war.
I mean, the culture wars, I think, are what really matter at the moment.
I don't think parties' political labels matter and I don't think...
Ideological labels matter because, I mean, what am I? Am I a South Park conservative?
Am I a libertarian?
Am I a classical liberal?
I don't really know.
And am I alt-right?
Maybe I was alt-right before Richard Spencer came along and ruined the...
Labels, I find, are unhelpful.
But I think, what is it we should all believe?
I think we should all believe in liberty.
In limited government, in lower taxes, in free speech.
I think there are certain things that ought to be obvious.
I think we should all abhor political violence.
I don't know.
What was the question again?
I don't even remember, but with what you're saying, it leads me to another question.
A moment ago, we were discussing how many prominent conservatives would be very quick to condemn their own side or to virtue signal against them.
Chucking bits of meat, chucking the children to the walls so that the sled can move faster over the snow.
But don't you find that that could actually be a strength?
Because self-introspection is really important.
Ideologues on the left, most of them, maybe not most of them, some of them, prominent ones, are so unwilling to that, for example, let's say bringing it back to Antifa, unable to condemn Antifa.
On the Democrat side, those who are running for president as candidates, There were only three who came out to express solidarity for me.
I see your point.
The left is quite incapable of condemning even extremes.
But the thing is, where are these extremes that conservatives should properly condemn?
Lots of conservatives in this country love to distance themselves from Katie Hopkins, say.
Or, yeah, Milo when he was a thing, they distanced themselves from Milo.
But I'm thinking, look, if Milo or Katie Hopkins said something or did something really objectionable, then you would condemn the objectionable thing that they said or did.
But to sort of write them off from the argument, because it's convenient to do so, seems to me to be cowardly and wrong.
It's a bit like saying, during a war, Well, I don't mind conventional forces, regular troops, but special forces.
Some of the shit they do is just really nasty.
Is it really fair cutting the throats of sentries and machine gunning them in their beds like the SAS did in the Western Desert?
And I'm thinking, well, look, you need all sorts of talents with different skills in a war.
And I mean, actually, the analogy is not quite right, because obviously Milo and Katie Hopkins aren't going around slitting crates and stuff.
But I do worry about my side's, our side's tendency to throw our most effective fighters to the wolves in order just to appease the enemy.
I think that's wrong.
I wanted to ask you, so I suddenly remembered.
Tell me about Proud Boys.
I know nothing about Proud Boys.
Are they far-right?
Who are they?
They're often described as far-right.
I describe them as right-wing because far-right carries certain connotations and I'm more careful about using that term.
I don't think that they are a hate group as SPLC calls them.
And it's...
In my experience in interviewing them and spending time with them when I work on stories related to some of the protests that they organize, they're made up of primarily working class men who a lot of them have not had the privilege of a...
A university education.
Correct.
And are not...
Careful with their language.
So they express themselves in a way that is really crass and can easily be seen as extremely offensive.
And I think because those statements they post either on their personal social media or things that they say in interviews, it's really easy for journalists from New York or D.C. when they're interviewing them for some big mainstream story to cast them as extremists.
Really, they're a drinking club and their views are the West is great and the traditionalists.
I think the language, you could argue, is problematic and some of them have been charged for I'm not sure if it comes so much from the group's ideology rather than just the fact that it's a group of young men who are acting sometimes as a group and when it's like in a setting of
like Antifa coming to fight they're coming to finish the fight and so it's a you know I get so much pushback from people online for my nuanced view on the Proud Boys because they really view them as like violent white supremacists and I think like I mean in the US we do have like a fringe
of violent white supremacists and those are very very different from what the Proud Boys are both in ideologies and their actions and how they organize so to group them all together under the same label I think is unhelpful I think it's inaccurate and it feels also it feels radicalization on the far left as well because the people A lot of the people who are coming to these demonstrations are not necessarily in support of Antifa,
it's more of like they really believe the rhetoric of the stuff that's put out that there are violent white supremacists coming to Portland as decent people come to show that we're not going to welcome them.
And I think some of those labels that are placed on the Powerboys, I think, are frequently inaccurate.
I think there's many things to be critical of them.
Let's be accurate in our criticism rather than resorting to...
inflammatory hyperbole or relying so much on the SPLC who, as we said earlier, has an incentive structure to overplay and exaggerate the threat of right-wing extremism in the US for funding purposes.
Right, yes.
So, presumably I mean, when the Proud Boys send a little tiny bus of, what, maybe a dozen Proud Boys into Portland, it's a bit like when you're a kid and you see a wasp's nest and you get some stones and you chuck it in the wasp's nest and then run like hell.
Presumably it's that kind of buzz.
It's more that.
You've chosen the most progressive, is your word, lefty Hard left, even, town in America, probably.
And you're going right into the hornet's nest, aren't you?
Yes.
That's what they're doing.
Their events are meant to be provocative.
And people, I mean, in their opening state, that's why they do it.
Because they're making a stand for free speech.
They want to show that they, as American citizens, regardless of city, can host an event anywhere and should be free from violence from other people.
Violence and repression.
And that, just as a principled statement, is something I agree with.
To me, apart from my personal disagreements with whatever extreme groups on the right or left, it's really none of my business if people are assembling lawfully and peacefully.
Whether it be from people from the right or people from the left, so it's Portland has a problem now.
They really believe in this idea of when they say self-defense, it's meaning we're going to come out and physically confront these people.
Yeah, preemptive self-defense.
Preemptive self-defense, by any means necessary.
Literally, some of them with weapons.
The stuff that happened on the 17th of August just this past weekend was some of them came with concrete, slabs of concrete that they broke.
This was Antifa and used it to hurl at the bus that these right-wingers were in.
One of the videos that went viral showed them sort of mobbing the people inside the bus and spraying bear mace inside.
It's important to note that one of the men inside the bus did have a hammer.
I think it could be argued from the context of everything that was happening with things being thrown at the bus that it was potentially self-defense.
I don't know.
There are people on both sides coming with weapons and this is just the breakdown of the rule of law when people feel emboldened either to bring weapons to attack people or feeling like in order just to speak and assemble peacefully we have to come armed with whatever melee weapons to potentially fight back against people who want to kill us.
This is something that can no longer continue in the city of Portland and it seems like based on the statements that the city officials have said after this past riot is that they've learnt nothing.
It's just like...
Sounds like it, yeah.
I can't see it ending any time soon.
Do you have any thoughts on Charlottesville?
Yes, I think it was a disgusting display that harkens back to a very ugly history in America.
At the same time, the number of people who gathered for that was actually very small.
What it was, it was a national calling for all these alt-right people to come together and at their best they could only amass a small number of people.
I think in that instance you could look at it as a failure of policing because what led to the murder of Heather Heyer when she was hit by the car driven by the James Fields who was convicted and sentenced for that killing was that the way the police had failed in keeping the group separated so there were people who came ready
for physical confrontation and it happened and it led to a death and it was entirely preventable should have been preventable Was Charlottesville an Antifa versus far-right?
I don't know enough about it.
Were the right-wing people nasty right-wing people, or were they...
Yes.
They were?
Yeah, they were.
Even a lot of right-wing figures did not show up to that event because there was the fringe far right who were there.
Right, okay.
And yeah, we need to make that very clear.
And you know, some of the chants that were coming out were...
Antisemitic, racist, and these were hardcore white nationalists, really those advocating for blood and soil, keeping that type of rhetoric.
And so, I think, you know, on one hand, there was this, you could argue that it was It's noble for such a strong counter-protest to show that this type of presence here is not welcome.
However, when you're responding to speech with physical violence, that crosses a barrier.
It's no longer like, I mean, if the other side had, if their own counter-demonstrations remained A counter-demonstration rather than a desire for physical confrontation, then things would have been very different.
But just because of how polarized America is, there are people who want bloodshed.
Did Trump misplay that one, would you say?
Oh gosh, I don't know if I should weigh in.
We don't have to.
Well, what I see is that he's been misquoted as a norm now.
Like every time he is, whether it be Joe Biden or whoever, they misquote him intentionally as saying that white nationalists were equal with those who came out to oppose him.
I don't think based on the full context, What he was saying as part of the larger speech, that's what he was saying.
So I think people are being disingenuous and purposely misquoting him for political reasons.
Right, you don't have to get any further than that.
You mentioned that Antifa has an ideology.
What is it?
So they're made up of anarcho-communist and I'm trying to better understand this ideology because it seems like it would be contradictory but it's this Symbiotic relationship between extreme anarchists and hardcore communists.
And the violence that they do on the street is actually towards furthering their goal.
They're actually trying to agitate for a revolution.
So from the outside, it may seem like just stupid street violence and vandalism, but they really believe that We are living in the latter days of fascism and the conflict is going to happen in the future by By bringing these brutal forms of violence either against the state,
individuals or property, instead of inching closer and closer and closer to that climatic battle, it's going to make us run quicker there.
Oh, okay.
So they really do, like the hardcore ideologues really believe they're part of a vanguard that's going to usher in this revolution.
Most of the people who describe themselves as anti-fascists aren't really aware of the extremist ideology, but if you look at the literature that they have that they disperse at some of their book fairs, at their meetings...
They have book fairs?
Yeah, there are anarchist book fairs.
There's a lot of very extremist literature there.
I mean, you could, you know, we have...
Authorities or academics have the frameworks for researching violent extremist ideologies and I would like to see that applied to Antifa.
I think in some ways in how they organize, recruit and radicalize many parallels with Islamism as well.
So, I don't see them as just a benign movement of so-called anti-fascists.
I mean, I don't even give them that propaganda when I'm calling them anti-fascists.
I say anti-fug because it's...
I want to separate that from anti-fascism, which, you know, to the average person would sound like a very noble thing.
Yeah, well, of course.
And it was ever thus.
I mean, I think the hard left has often tried to start to brand itself Anti-fascists, and that goes back at least as far as Stalin.
I mean, the red in the Nazi flag is the red of communism.
That's how close they were.
If you were living in Germany in the early 1930s and you were unemployed and angry and male, it was pretty much a toss-up whether you joined the fascists or the communists or the Nazis.
They were...
Yeah, another thing that I want to say is, like, Antifa as a movement, they're really great at doublespeak.
So you see it in the name itself, Antifa, and it trickles down to everything else.
So, like, the physical self-defense, right, is actually preemptive, premeditated violence.
Yeah.
Like, and I mean, it's a tradition that they actually do take from communism.
Like, you know, one example I can think of is that the Berlin Wall, the propaganda, the title for that was the anti-fascist defense barrier.
Yes.
Yeah?
Yeah.
So...
This is the type of doublespeak that most of the public are not aware of.
In Antifa's worldview, there's no room for the Labour Party or the Democrat Party either.
They absolutely hate parties.
They're not liberal in any way.
They hate the politics of the liberal parties as much as they do conservatives, in that they view them as just all of the same system, under the same systems and structures of the oppression.
That's going to be our pull-out quote, that Antifa are not liberal.
I think a lot of people would be very surprised to hear that.
Are you going to...
Are you safe in Portland?
I mean, it's your home, but...
Unfortunately, I've been doxxed and I'm still receiving ongoing threats of violence, all of which have been reported to police, by the way.
I write all about hate crime hoaxes.
One of the red flags of somebody who could be lying is that they refuse to report it to authorities.
I've reported everything to police.
Some of the threats are really scary and it's a bit surreal.
Like, living there now and I go out and I get recognized.
It comes with a certain amount of anxiety.
I mean, some of the attention is positive, some of it's negative.
And the fact that some of these extremists know where my family lives is scary.
It's meant to really intimidate me into silence.
You know, it just...
I was living a normal life not that long ago and now things have changed a lot so I don't know how much longer I can stay in Portland because of that.
Andy, I think this is really sad and I think what you're doing is incredibly heroic and it's been very interesting meeting you and discovering just how kind of unobtrusive and mild You are.
I mean, I think what you've done is extraordinary.
And I really hope that you...
I mean, do you get appreciation?
You get support from...
For what you do?
I do, and a lot of hate.
I think...
Well, here's how I see it now.
I think that the hate that's really coordinated, particularly from, like, a lot of journalists who identify as left-wing or leftists or socialists, is that...
Because I'm a reasonable person, they view me as somebody who is really threatening because I can reach out.
The things that I write and say can have an appeal to moderate liberals, moderate Democrats, and they find that as a threat.
It's much easier to demonize me as a Fringe, violent extremists on the far right, which I'm not.
And so I think they're going forward.
What I'm seeing is they're doing everything they can to really try to frame me as such.
I'm just thinking though, if you're gay, all the gay areas in America are basically left-wing strongholds, aren't they?
Yeah, so not only am I persona non grata in Portland, I'm persona non grata in the gay community.
Yeah, you couldn't go to The Village or Castro.
Yeah, exactly.
Castro, I mean, that's really left-wing, isn't it?
Berkeley.
I'm so sorry.
What about New Orleans?
Doesn't anything go in New Orleans?
I've been there a long time ago when I did a Kushina release.
I was working with a charity, so at that time I didn't do any of the gay tourism, so I don't know what it's like.
I'm sure it's dried out since then.
Well, it's been really good talking to you, and thank you very much.
It's been an absolute privilege and pleasure to meet a real hero.
Thank you.
Put it there, do you?
Well, that's it for another week.
Special listening friend, special viewing friend, don't forget to come...
Have I mentioned the podcast festival?
There's no reason not to mention it again.
London...
What is it called?
Podcast Live on October 5th.
Dick...
Possibly a dog.
Lots of special friends.
It's going to be fun.
It's going to be real.
So book your tickets now and use the special code which I'll give you one day when I can be bothered.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.
I love Denny Poe.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Danny Paul.
I'll listen another time.
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