Episode 132: The No Ngo Zone (Annie Kelly's Andy Ngo book report)
Frightening London class exhibited here, as our in-house PhD politely analyzes Andy Ngo's latest book: Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.
↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓
https://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com
Episode music by Pontus Berghe, Doom Chakra Tapes (http://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com), Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com), Hasufel (http://hasufel.bandcamp.com)
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 132 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Andy Ngo Antifa Book episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, as every week in the QAA cult, we held our BIC lighters to tea candles and selected one of our members to be sacrificed to the gods of content.
The name called out in the darkness this week is Annie Kelly, our beloved British correspondent.
I'm sorry, Annie.
She will be covering Andy Ngo's book-length post entitled Unmasked Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.
Will she survive Andy's anti-Diluvian mind palace?
Or will she reveal her own transatlantic plan to destroy America?
But before all that...
For my first story, CPAC speaker Angela Statton King promotes QAnon from the stage.
So this past week we saw the annual return of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.
Thousands of Republicans, pro-Trump political pundits, and conservative activists gathered for three days in Orlando, Florida for this year's event, which was themed America Uncancelled.
By far their dumbest one yet.
Do they always have like titles like that?
Yeah, absolutely.
Next year it's going to be- It's always about what they're most mad about.
They're just focused on that.
Sounds like a Netflix comedy special.
One panel on Sunday featured former congressional candidate Angela Statton King.
King is a QAnon promoter and has openly endorsed Pizzagate and the Wayfair conspiracy theory.
She even once tweeted, the storm is here.
She spoke about her experiences of sexual abuse and how they encouraged her in the direction of QAnon.
Being outspoken and being one of those conservative values, being that freedom of speech, how are you dealing with people trying to go through Twitter and cancel you?
Let's address it.
So we know that in this election there were some things going on in regards to the conspiracy theories with Q, right?
And I think that me as a person, before I ever got into the conservative movement, I've always been an advocate, even if it's for abused children or whether it's for those people that are incarcerated.
So I think that any allegations coming forward in regards to any type of abuse when it comes to children deserves to be investigated.
It deserves to be made aware of.
And I think that, you know, once we find out, you know, whether this is true or not, then we can move on.
But we at least have to be able to address it.
So right now, you guys may see out in the media a lot of people wanting to cancel me For addressing allegations of child abuse, you're talking to someone that is a survivor of sexual abuse, so that's something that I definitely take to heart.
We have to cancel the cancel culture, right?
Cancel the cancel culture!
Yeah, good times.
So to say that maybe you shouldn't trust a non on 4chan for reliable information, that's cancel culture.
I'm canceling you saying that maybe you should think about the information that you're processing.
A quite hilarious encounter with the British press, actually, Annie.
You might like this.
She accepted to be interviewed by The Guardian, and the article that resulted from it is just the description of how she ended up getting so furious that she walked out on them.
Because they were like, well, aren't you promoting that Wayfair is trafficking children?
And she's like, what do you mean I'm promoting that?
It's true!
Or like shit like that.
And so it just quickly got out of hand and she walked out on The Guardian.
For my next story, French government raises concerns over the rise of QAnon.
So the French newspaper, Le Figaro, reported that the French agency tasked with tracking sectarian movements, which goes by the acronym MIVILUDES.
How do you pronounce that?
It's MIVILUDES.
Okay.
Okay, you're not going to retake it.
Nope, nope, it's all you.
So they apparently have received about 15 reports over recent weeks related to QAnon.
The agency said that the rise in the number of reports was highly concerning in an internal memo which was viewed by that newspaper.
Like many countries, France has its own unique QAnon and conspiracist ecosystem.
In France, the main gateway into QAnon is a website called Decoders, which is spelled with a Q where the C should be.
It's actually Les Décodeurs.
Oh, okay.
The Decoders!
That sounds so cool.
Yeah, they're like part of a little gang.
So I checked out that site, and it seems to feature live streams of French QAnon followers doing decodes.
But unlike the American QAnon live streams, the French, true to the stereotype, they smoke while they decode.
Yes.
As we do.
Or as I do.
You know, I bring a little bit of class to this dirty American joint.
But yeah, I love some of these posts that they're reading.
I'll read a couple here.
QAnon is the scapegoat created by the media so that they could attack Q. The entity known as QAnon doesn't exist.
So that's straight from a Q drop.
That's straight from a Q drop.
Yeah, straight from a Q drop.
So QAnon followers, they're big on this thing where there is no QAnon.
There's Q and there's the Anons.
And I mean, they latched on to this really weird idea.
They never objected to the term QAnon until they were told to by Q last year.
But 8kun is mentioned twice here, just on this screen.
So, I mean, yeah, I mean, the French QAnon is apparently, I mean, kind of a big deal.
I guess, obviously, not as big, as popular as it here is in the U.S., but the main figure behind... They have a Travis view.
Do they?
Yeah, this guy called, like... Travis.
Tristan Mendez.
Oh, yeah.
He's followed by a few people, not Travis, but some of our colleagues are aware of this man.
I guess Travis doesn't care about France.
He just would rather let QAnon take over that country.
No big loss.
For my next story, QAnon promoters back away from March 4th, date of the inauguration.
So in just a couple days after this podcast is released, it'll be March 4th.
And as we've discussed before, many QAnon followers have expressed the belief that this will be the date that Trump is inaugurated for a second term.
This comes from sovereign citizen beliefs.
It's obviously all nonsense.
But as the date approaches, I think it should be noted that many QAnon promoters, I've noticed, have decided that actually March 4th is no good.
For example, this was posted by one prominent QAnon channel on Telegram with nearly 200,000 subscribers.
No one from this channel or any of the channels that we have come to engage with and respect are advertising anything relevant to an alleged March 4th event.
The fake news media is pushing this narrative to launch their next false flag and blame it on the truth movement.
So again, another weird little internal rift over March 4th, but I guess we'll see what happens.
Yeah, I think one thing to point out is that this is consistent since the beginning of the movement.
I mean, when we saw the Save the Children rallies get organized over the summer of 2020, immediately all of the same people that are saying this about March 4th said that it was a false flag organized by You know, enemies of QAnon to make them look ridiculous.
So they're just hedging their bets in advance.
Let's look at it plainly.
There's a big disappointment setting in.
They're not super happy about certain things that have happened.
And they have to turn their mind to their own future, their platform, their credibility among other people.
And they are not excited about what's inevitably going to happen next, which is a series of QAnon people will speak to cameras and they're going to look ridiculous.
Also, they don't like picking an event date that is so close into the future.
It doesn't give you proper time to bake.
It can immediately be revealed as false.
I find that in some of these communities it's better to pick dates that are very, very far down the line.
Yeah, and I'm not trying to say that it's not a date that we, you know, that it's a date we should ignore or whatever.
Because, you know, obviously it's not great that a bunch of people are booking at a hotel to come and they think, like, watch, you know.
But the reality is, I've been to that Trump hotel in D.C.
I've been to that lobby.
They're going to drink $15 beers and commiserate over the fact that they all love Trump and it's so nice to be around people who agree with them on QAnon.
Like, that's what we saw QAnon people themselves when they organized it as a thing against the deep state got the permission from Washington DC and then assembled under the fucking Washington Monument as they were surveilled by the FBI no doubt it seems highly likely at the very least based on that van and so this kind of like this entire atmosphere of both seeming like a real issue and never really becoming one is basically what QAnon is in it's a stasis and and we're caught in this murkiness until
Smart people with zip ties and or a president like kind of encourage these people that don't usually do this kind of thing to you know like walk through walk through the Capitol.
So it's it is it's like an explosive situation but it's also the danger around the fourth I think is is I don't know it's just unlikely that there'll be anything resembling what happened on the Capitol.
That's very optimistic.
Yeah, another J-drop.
Well, we'll find out if Julian is right.
And if he is, he will be celebrated as a hero.
And if it's not, we'll edit it out of the episode like it never happened.
Yeah, you should do two takes.
Here's my second take.
We are incredibly sad to announce that the upper level of the Trump Hotel has been taken over by a gang of armed QAnon followers.
They have made several demands.
They do have Chelsea Clinton up there, and we don't know what's going to happen next.
Unmasked QAA Book Report.
Hello there, my sweet and gentle listeners.
It's your UK correspondent Annie here.
Once again I am turning my gaze to the United States, because my old nemesis, partisan hack Andy Ngo, has just released a book, and after assembling a crack team to manoeuvre a fiendishly complicated heist, I managed to get a copy.
Long-term listeners of the show may remember a previous episode we did about Noah in the summer of 2020, when I felt compelled to take him down a peg or two on account of him getting treated like an expert on Antifa by media pundits.
Well, he's back, with a book dramatically titled Unmasked, inside Antifa's radical plan to destroy democracy.
And surprise, surprise, he's getting invited on mainstream media channels to talk about it again.
Antifa, they call themselves anti-fascist but they're just, they're anarchist communists so they don't recognize the legitimacy of any nation-state and the principal enemy they view is the United States and also to an extension her allies such as Britain and other western liberal democracies.
So they view the United States as this imperialistic state that upholds white supremacy and fascism through systems of oppression, such as capitalism, the protection of property rights, etc.
And they attack law enforcement because they don't view the American criminal justice system as legitimate.
But it's not You know, it goes beyond that into acts of actual domestic terrorism.
My city, throughout 2020, for more than 120 days, we had nightly occurring riots that happened day after day after day against city and federal property.
So I know the world recoiled in horror when they watched what happened on 6th January in the Capitol.
That happened and worse every day for months on end in my city and there was no condemnation.
And this was the bizarre thing, I mean bizarre doesn't even do justice to it, I mean I think we were all horrified by what happened with the storming of the Capitol by those Trump supporters and of course that's leading to these impeachment trial in the Senate that's going to be coming in February, but it there does seem to be One rule for one and one rule for the other.
Now, the argument on the day that Washington D.C.
saw those protests and that storming of the Capitol, the argument being that if they had been, say, Black Lives Matter protesters, they would have been treated very differently by law enforcement because if they'd been black, not white.
And yet we have actually seen very different law enforcement, very different media coverage when we see particularly Antifa, but also Black Lives Matter protests, almost sort of saying, well, These people feel passionately, somehow it's justifiable, it's understandable, but I imagine when it's your business or your home that's been burnt down, or you're living in fear every night, the people coming into your neighborhood to do that, that it doesn't really matter what the cause is, there's still the same level of fear.
Yeah, the arguments that if the protesters or rioters have been left-wing or far-left and they would have been treated much harsher, that's absolutely not true.
You can look, for example, how they were treated, let's say, in Seattle, the largest city in Pacific Northwest, when BLM and Antifa actually claimed territory as a separate sovereign city-state, CHAZ, for more than three weeks.
The federal response from that and the state response was essentially to let them go and do it.
And this area, the No Go Zone, which they set up a hard border that was manned by armed militias, devolved into chaos and multiple homicides and shootings.
It's absolutely extraordinary and I think a lot of people will be saying, that's funny, I didn't really read much about this in the media, I didn't really hear much about it.
Because it didn't happen!
I mean it is worth saying, I actually just read this just like yesterday, a report got released recently which said that of the BLM protests last summer, I think like 92% were peaceful.
So for him to even compare that, I feel like there was a lot more focus on the riots.
I definitely would have assumed just from media coverage that it would have been less than 92% peaceful.
So it's totally wrong.
Yeah, I also don't remember people around the storming of the Capitol being beaten to the ground by groups of cops with their truncheons.
Yeah, I mean, that was the whole point.
That was how they got in, right?
Now, I don't want this episode just to be a repeat of everything I said in the previous episode we did on No, but it is worth giving a little context on who he is before we delve into this treasure-tome of political literature.
Andy No is a self-described journalist, who has worked at conservative online outfits like Quillette and the Postmillennial.
Possibly his biggest and most influential platform, though, are his social media accounts, where he both livestreams and gives running commentary on protests and counter-demonstrations, usually around the Portland area.
It was at one of these protests where Noh was attacked by several people and required urgent medical attention.
In this respect, Noh is part of the new breed of right-wing social media personalities, whose brand is less about their work itself and more about what happens to them.
Even this is something of a selective simplification though, because the truth is that Andy is not a passive bystander.
He just wants you to think he is.
Time and time again, verifiable evidence emerges of Andy risking the safety of the left-wing protesters he reports on.
For example, when a clash happened between the far-right group Patriot Prayer and Antifa, activists outside the Cider Riot pub, video was released showing that Andy had been present when Patriot Prayer planned to attack the venue, but neglected to mention anywhere that this was a coordinated assault.
Worse still, he then released the name and arrest record of an Antifa woman who had had her neck broken in the ensuing fight between the two.
This pattern of protecting the identities of far-right activists while releasing as much information as he can find on the leftist activists that oppose him to a huge social media following means that anti-fascists, not incorrectly, identify him as a threat.
Now, none of this is to say I was cheering watching the video of him getting assaulted, I hate violence and I hate watching people be afraid.
But I do think it's necessary to contextualise why it happened, which is that that crowd viewed no as an enemy activist there to hurt them.
All of this background is important before we then go into Andy's book, which I have the privilege of having read in its entirety.
Now I should make clear that just because I think the author has a bias, it doesn't mean I think he can't write a good book about the subject.
I actually think some of the best writing has a bit of that polemic quality.
Unfortunately, Andy is just quite honestly not a good writer, or a researcher, and probably most crucially, he is fundamentally incapable of grappling honestly with his own role in the wider context of street movements in the US.
Let's start from the very beginning of the book.
Whose streets are streets?
The crowd of left-wing protesters chanted as they marched in the heart of downtown Portland, Oregon in June 2019.
Some of them wore red shirts and bandanas to broadcast their allegiance to Marxism.
They paraded red flags printed with a rose logo, a symbol of the democratic socialists of America.
They were joined by dozens of people dressed head-to-toe in black.
These were the radical anarchist communists.
Most of them wore masks, long before the COVID-19 outbreak made them a norm of public life.
Many also wore helmets and carried melee weapons.
Together, the crowd of around 400 brought traffic to a standstill, by now a regular occurrence in the City of Roses, as Portland is known by.
As usual, the police stayed away.
They knew whom the streets belonged to.
Yeah.
Man, this roving gang.
It matches his description of the Chaz as having armed guards that are like a perimeter.
It's like, I actually remember the videos of some of these idiots, including Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boy, literally just walking in there.
Just wandering in with a fucking GoPro out.
It was just complete bollocks, as they would say.
He's describing these folks like they're the Foot Clan.
Yes, that's it.
From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
100%.
Orokusaki!
I noticed, I noticed on the ground robotic rodents chattering at my ankles.
The mousers, the Antifa mousers are at the walls again!
On the horizon, a large metal sphere.
On what seemed like tank treads at the center.
It looked very technological, almost like a techno-drome.
At the center, a cranky brain.
That is Bernie Sanders.
From the very outset of Andy's book then, we can tell he's already writing for an audience who have never been to a protest before.
Stuff like chants and bringing traffic to a standstill may be a particularly terrifying sign of Antifa's commitment to destroying the nation-state for his audience of Republican boomers, but it takes a little more than that to designate something a terrorist group or compare them to jihadists, two things Andy does throughout this book repeatedly.
Yeah, the crazy jihadists that are just kind of preparing little pieces of cloth with aloe vera in them to put in their eyes.
Passing out sunscreen and water bottles.
Here, don't forget your water bottle, buddy.
Terrifying.
Here's a little pack of Oreo cookies.
But you can already tell we're suffering from a bigger problem than that from his first paragraph, though.
Because despite writing an entire book dedicated to the subject, Andy still really can't define what anti-fit is.
And when he tries, he ends up either contradicting himself or giving a definition so broad as to be basically meaningless.
Let's have a look at one attempt.
Antifa, pronounced AN-TEE-FA and short for anti-fascist, is a relatively new American phenomenon, but their ideology and violent strategies have been honed and refined for decades in Europe.
Simply put, Antifa are an ideology and movement of radical pan-leftist politics whose adherents are mainly militant anarchist communists or collectivist anarchists.
A smaller fraction of them are socialists who organize through political groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and others.
Labels aside, their defining characteristics are a militant opposition to free markets and the desire to destroy the United States and its institutions, culture, and history.
They have to live in America after that.
If they destroy the country, it's just the pleasure of living in rubble, I guess, for these demons?
So, simple enough, right?
They're simply a single ideology which happens to actually encompass several different ideologies, but also a movement.
They're defined by militant opposition to free markets, which I think is like when Bain shoots up the stock exchange in that Batman film.
Antifa are known for their demands of higher tariffs, I think, yeah.
Batman!
Batman, you invested in Dogecoin one day too late!
And yeah, let's not forget a desire to destroy the history of the United States, which I have no idea how you could practically achieve.
Now, some of you might be thinking, Annie, you're missing a really key point there.
He mentioned violent strategies.
That's clearly the specific category which binds all of these ideological aspects together.
And you're right, that would be a really key point.
And maybe even a fair one, to say that even though Antifa contains several disparate ideologies, you, in this book, are grouping them together with their willingness to commit violence against those they deem fascists.
Andy, however, is very clear that that's not what he's doing.
However, not all of its followers participate in violence.
In fact, most don't, and instead work on delegitimizing liberal democracy and the nation-state through, quote, charity and relentless propaganda.
Since Trump's election win, the manifestation of Antifa in the United States and Canada, and to a lesser extent in other Western countries, has mutated into a unique contemporary breed of violent left-wing extremism, influenced by BLM, intersectionality, And other vogue left-wing theories from academe, American Antifa have become a more virulent strain that appeals to the mainstream left.
Nowhere in this definition is there any reference to fascism, which you think might have something to do with it.
And this is a key feature of the book itself.
Andy goes on to describe several protests that have happened in the US, particularly those that have featured property damage or violence, but avoids, wherever possible, any reference to what sparked them off.
Where he does bring up what actually brought all the anti-fascists to the yard, he is clearly resentful of having to do so.
Referring to blatantly far-right street gangs like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys and hilariously euphemistic terms like a conservative group.
Reading this book, conservative became my watchword to immediately google the term and see what overtly alt-right group or event Andy was talking about.
This pattern of playing fast and loose with definitions continues, because Andy clearly wants to blame Antifa for as much death and destruction as possible.
So he sketches out this very confusing timeline of cause and effect, where Antifa are both responsible for the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 happening, by spreading misinformation around police shootings, all of the subsequent property damage, And also what he views as an insufficient police response to those protests.
That's right.
According to Andy, Antifa have infiltrated local government in cities like Seattle and Portland and ordered them to stand down in order to allow the rioters to burn down the cities.
That's a pretty credible achievement for people who don't believe in liberal democracy.
Yeah.
They did it by logging on to, like, the city council meetings about funding the police and pretending to be goats that just made, like, goat noises and then told the police chief to, like, suck a dick or whatever and then just, like, hang up.
I'm not joking.
This was happening here in L.A.
There was a recurring goat.
Was it?
In fact, the very first council meeting that my wife was just, like, watching, the first person who spoke to them was the goat.
And I'll never forget it.
Pretty good stuff.
Gave a good ribbing to the police chief.
But yeah, clearly just violently displacing the police chief who, by the way, wore a mask even though he was just at home.
And then people started calling him a coward.
the episode OK, we're cancelling the episode.
Clearly Antifa are more powerful than I thought.
They're deploying goats and other animals from the farm.
Personally, I think Antifa infiltrating local government is less likely than the idea that those local officials suspected that beginning a massacre of large groups of protesters might just serve as fuel to the fire.
But then, according to the book, I would say that, as a journalist and an academic, two of the most Antifa professions.
Andy continually rails against these disciplines as either being Antifa activists themselves or useful idiots.
Here he takes issue with the common and pretty much factual reports that say Antifa isn't an organisation.
What the writers of these reports seem not to understand is that Antifa is a phantom movement by design.
It is leaderless and structured to be functional through small independent organisations known as affinity groups and individuals.
Thank you!
Only the ideology needs to be propagated for lone wolves or groups to be inspired.
Part of that ideology involves extensive training on digital security.
That is, using encrypted tools, apps, and web browsers to completely evade detection by authorities and others.
Oh, like going on fucking... Signal.
Yes.
He's literally just describing every journalist at this point that is doing even like the basic stuff.
Everyone's on Signal though.
It's not even just journalists.
I guess everyone is Antifa.
That's the real thing is it's spreading.
It's spreading almost organically like it's just a general belief that nobody likes fascists.
It's just, it seems to just hover a specter.
A specter is haunting this creation.
It's the specter of Antifa.
Fascism.
It is no surprise that scant evidence materialized in the early days of the investigations into accused rioters and Tifa are trained to hide their political affiliations, which is why so many of them were arrested and abducted into police cars.
I think he's also just describing the cops here, right?
They were just tearing off their badge numbers and just like in France.
They just cover them up.
They don't give a fuck.
Yeah, they just put pieces fucking tape over it.
Yeah, so I think the police are kind of Antifa, actually, kind of, in a way.
He's probably gonna get to that, right?
Yeah, I'm sure.
Part of the police is Antifa?
No, he is pretty confident that, like, yeah, they're... Or rather, he says, like, it's like, the police are good, but the, like, people who are in charge of them are Antifa.
Right, they're pressured by their Antifa bosses.
I see, I see.
So just to be clear, Andy is saying that the lack of evidence to support the idea of Antifa being organized actually just proves how organized they are.
I don't know about you guys, but my internal conspiracy theory alarm just started beeping like mad at that line.
You can tell them because you can't tell them.
Yeah.
I mean, it's literally just like you, right?
Like, it's just like, well, obviously we wouldn't see anything about it because it's so secret.
Yeah.
But that's true because, you know, we did see that vote counter at the Arizona rally say that she was looking for the signs, like the people looking at their clothes and stuff for symbols.
Now we're all scanning each other.
What is that person Antifa?
Are they a Proud Boy?
Are they QAnon?
What are they?
Is it a Biden voter?
Everything's the same.
You know, I miss the days when the only reason you were looking at somebody's t-shirt was to read the no fear slogan that was written on it.
All of America used to have no fear, and now we have all fear.
Yeah, we had No Fear, we had Stussy, which I think is still popular.
Is that a feeling, like a German word or something?
We had Big Johnson t-shirt, there was Big Johnson, there was Big Dog.
We had Big Dogs.
Bugle Boy, I mean these were the symbols that we were decoding in the 80s and 90s.
The history of America is that every American was basically Alfred E. Newman with giant sunglasses and a big bull mastiff.
And we used to have music blaring and tanks and cool shit.
Now we have nothing because they gutted the mining towns.
I remember we would go on vacations and like see, you know, you know, middle aged guy, you know, sunburned guys wearing big Johnson T-shirts.
And my mom would like cover me in my brother's eyes and be like, oh.
So now that we've got a sense of who Antifa are, which is anyone identifiably left-wing, the book turns its attention to sketching out a history of how Antifa emerged.
This is actually possibly some of the most decent work in the book, I think mainly because Andy is clearly not familiar with the subject material and has had to do a smidgen of extra research rather than just talking about tweets and New York Times articles he finds objectionable.
There also starts to become a very conspicuous presence of an editor in places.
Now, I will admit that this is basically a conspiracy theory of my own.
I have no knowledge about the editing process of this book.
But as someone who has marked a lot of essays and has had a lot of my own work edited, I just get a feeling when Andy starts writing about Weimar Germany that somebody's stepped in.
I'll show you what I mean.
Travis you're gonna have to read read about the German Communist Party hmm how bad they are for fighting the Nazis literally Oh boy, how do you pronounce that German word?
Antifaschist.
It's antifaschtisch.
Antifaschistisch.
It's antifaschistisch.
Antifaschistisch.
Antifaschtisch.
No, faschistisch.
In May 1932, the German Communist Party announced the formation of the Antifaschtistische Aktion, a new paramilitary communist group.
This is the original Antifa and the group that contemporary Antifa around the world take inspiration from.
The paramilitary was created to bring together a coalition of communists at the community level to oppose and fight political opponents.
Though calling itself the Anti-Fascist Action, those who served as decision makers on its executive boards consisted of members of the German Communist Party and other allied communist groups.
Simply put, the Anti-Fascist Action was a communist organization under a thinly-veiled new name.
It held rallies and developed its own propaganda.
The two-flag logo used by today's Antifa groups is based on the original Red Flag's logo of the Anti-Fascist Action.
The two red flags symbolize the union of communism and socialism.
Like the other communist paramilitaries before it, the Anti-Fascist Action was involved in political street brawls.
They also acted as security and self-defense for communists who live together in select neighborhoods and apartment buildings.
Just incredible how fascism itself is like this black hole in his writing.
It just doesn't exist.
He hates writing about it.
He hates mentioning it.
Look at this.
This is his finest moment.
A coalition of communists at the community level to oppose and fight political opponents.
Which political opponents were anti-fascist?
In 1932, in Germany.
Specifically.
And then it's like, it just so happens that all of them were communists and socialists.
Well, isn't that interesting that the people you're trying to revile were the only people fighting what we now know was a giant genocide, essentially, in the making?
But he's certainly like watching his words here.
Yeah, he's being very careful.
Now, there's nothing technically wrong with that bit, although I find it strange that Noah is so hellbent on distinguishing communism and Antifa here, when the first few chapters of the book have made clear he views them both as one and the same thing.
But the really strange part, for me, comes a paragraph later.
While the Communists were occupied with fighting the Social Democrats and Liberals, the appeal and power of the Nazi Party continued to grow.
By July 1932, the Nazis became the largest party in Parliament, with 230 seats.
By January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor.
Two months later, the Reichstag or Parliament passed the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler's government the legal authority to be a dictatorship.
Let me just like tinfoil about what I think happened with that paragraph.
Communist and Social Democrat parties were both banned, leaving the Nazis with no political opposition as they implemented their expansionist and genocidal agenda.
Let me just tinfoil about what I think happened with that paragraph.
It's all pure speculation on my part.
But something about the way he lays all of that timeline out and seems to flip between implying Communist opposition to fascism is how the Nazis got in, before immediately saying the exact opposite, that it wasn't enough Communist opposition to Nazis that meant they got in.
And then there's this very weird, clunky, out-of-nowhere line about communist efforts to take control of the state.
All of this just makes me feel like something about the Reichstag fire was edited out here.
It's very strange to be like, as the Nazis rose to power, the communists failed to grab power.
It's like, what do you mean?
It's really weird.
Like, it comes out of nowhere.
Like, wait, so, yeah, where were the militias in the street, like, you know, smashing the windows of, like, the Jewish businesses and stuff?
Like, was that... Were there also communists doing their own thing?
Was everyone just trying to take over at the same time, but then they didn't really fight a war?
It's very, very muddy history, at best.
Yeah, for our listeners who aren't asocial World War 2 nerds, the Reichstag fire was an act of arson at the German Parliament building that was blamed by the Nazis on a supposed communist plot, essentially acting as an impetus for them to enact an authoritarian state.
Now, weirdly, when it comes to the British history of anti-fascism, Andy is much better, even, dare I say it, reasonable?
To a point, at least.
He accurately sketches out anti-fascist activism's connection to the punk and skinhead music scenes here.
He even references an actual historian, who it seems he genuinely took the time to interview, as well as giving a decent, if short, biography of Oswald Mosley, who was a WWII-era fascist politician here, who formed the BUF, or British Union of Fascists, and their various clashes with anti-fascist street movements here in the UK.
Again, I mean, I should say, the whole section on the UK is a little over two pages.
It's clearly not Andy's interest, and you get the sense he doesn't really like writing about it.
He just wants the accent.
Part of me feels he was so keen to get this right because he was humiliated writing about the UK before, when he wrote an entire scaremongering piece for the Wall Street Journal on how London had been Islamified or whatever, but he didn't even bother to check whether alcohol-free zones were in fact anything to do with religion, which they're not.
But even this decent grasp of historical material must come to an end, and it does so in a way that is both historically revisionist and, really fascinatingly, illustrates Noe's worldview.
Antifa literature and propaganda cite the Battle of Cable Street, and later other clashes against the National Front and British National Party, as a prime example of how mass violent direct action can stop fascist organizing.
But this is wrong.
What stopped the far-right parties from organizing was their falling out of favor with voters due to their extremism.
Mosley's British Union of Fascists lost significant popular support for its open embrace of antisemitism.
This is not even remotely what happened.
Mosley and the British Union of Fascists weren't rejected for being too racist, they were just incredibly cosy with Hitler at a time Britain was literally fighting a war against him.
Mosley and his wife even ended up in jail because the government was so worried about them either spying or covertly inciting support for the Nazis during wartime.
But it's interesting that this is either what Andy thinks or says he thinks happened.
Because it reveals a right-wing worldview which sees communism as something that needs to be vigorously, militantly opposed, but fascism as something the democratic body politic just spontaneously rejects like an autoimmune response.
It's this ideological position which I think prevents Andy from being able to write a genuinely interesting book about the current political moment.
He sees himself as not simply a journalist but a lone warrior against creeping communism.
This means he's almost pathologically unable to locate his own role in a lot of the problems he diagnoses, even the ones I happen to agree with.
I'll use the example of misinformation on social media, which is clearly a big bugbearer of Andy's, and one of mine too.
He continuously highlights examples of left-wing or anti-fascist misinformation around police violence, riots and street violence.
Some of the problems he points out I genuinely agree with, like the haste some activists seem to have to blame any poor optics on police or white supremacist infiltration.
This undoubtedly happens by the way, but it's not something you should authoritatively claim without evidence.
And he also has the presence of mind to briefly mention that right-wing misinformation exists too, even if he only gives it a paragraph.
With the exception of a few senators and congressmen, Republicans didn't really start caring about Antifa until the riots in 2020.
Democrats and the mainstream media, on the other hand, have done everything to obfuscate or deny Antifa's existence.
The paradox this sets for the public is that Antifa are simultaneously over and underestimated.
That is, the threat of Antifa violence is often exaggerated and has led to small panics, such as when armed citizens in Montana and Idaho in June of 2020 held rallies to keep Antifa out over unsubstantiated online rumors.
Then in September 2020, Antifa were blamed in viral online rumors for starting devastating wildfires in Oregon.
There's a risk of the American right turning Antifa into a boogeyman that is then blamed for everything.
That is a mirror reaction to Antifa blaming all ills on non-existent fascists.
They don't exist, folks.
Fascists are not a thing.
The body politic excretes them elegantly, like a small pellet.
The thing is, though, even when he tries to be fair, Andy cannot admit the full extent of the problem because he has been one of the major instigators and inculcators of this panic.
Let me give you an example of how he does this.
On the 29th of July, 2019, Andy tweeted a picture of two flyers alongside a caption that read, Antifa is leading a border resistance militancy training tour that will converge on a 10-day siege in El Paso, Texas.
The promotional image shows border enforcement officers being killed and government property firebombed.
Organizers asking for white comrades to pay for others.
His post quickly got picked up by the conservative media, including the Daily Caller, who led with the headline, Four days later, Patrick Crucious walked into a Walmart in El Paso and opened fire, killing 22 people.
The manifesto he left on 8chan showed he was motivated by anti-immigrant conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement.
That didn't stop the Daily Caller article, entirely based on Andy's tweet, being shared around conservative social media with the hashtag El Paso Shooting, to supposedly prove that the terror attack was perpetrated by Antifa.
John B. Wells says, Published four days before the hashtag El Paso Shooting, a far-left movement is reportedly planning a siege of El Paso, Texas to raise awareness of alleged abuses at the border.
Hashtag Walmart shooting.
Hashtag El Paso shooting.
Twitter user named Muta says, Looks like the deep state wants to focus on El Paso, two birds with one stone.
Do a false flag and they can talk about gun control and the border.
Report, far left groups plan siege on El Paso, Texas to push border resistance.
Rorschach says, So it's likely that rogue groups are coordinating Antifa terror campaigns in El Paso and Dayton to commit violence under the guise of Trump supporters.
At Senator Ted Cruz, how is that RICO racketeering investigation going into Antifa?
Hashtag Antifa domestic terrorists.
Despite many of these conspiracy theories being shared in Andy's direct replies and inspired by a tweet he did, he did not issue a clarification.
In fact, that dubious honour was left to the Daily Caller, who had to bashfully add a correction to the article which read, Correction.
While various Antifa-sympathetic groups have promoted and encouraged this event, there is insufficient evidence to say Antifa is planning or involved in the event.
That language has been removed and clarified.
A spokesman for the organization putting the event together flatly denied Noh's description.
Quote, We have no affiliation with Antifa.
We are not offering militancy training.
We are having educational workshops about what is happening on the border and how to work better inside of communities.
It's not militancy training in any way.
The spokesperson told Lead Stories, a fact-checking site, It was an entirely manufactured conspiracy theory, all based around some bolshie posters Andy had seen for activists who work with people crossing the border.
For Andy to turn around then and complain about social media panics around Antifa feels like a fair enough, if mundane, point.
But he by necessity can't get into any kind of detail on how those actually happen, because then he might implicate himself.
Possibly the most interesting part of the book is Andy's own autobiography, as since the book is so terrible for understanding Antifa, the only real source of insight we get is into Andy himself.
There's a very genuinely moving part where he talks about his parents, both Vietnamese refugees who met in a prison camp, and the patriotism they showed for their new homeland in the States.
That's something I can understand with a refugee family of my own.
I even found myself wondering if my family had fled a communist regime instead of a Nazi one, how my politics might be different.
But however tempting it might be to just say we're two sides of the same coin, I really don't think that's true.
Andy, as his book shows, is not really interested in understanding his opponents.
He wants them crushed.
And perhaps the most chilling part of the book is when he comes to saying how.
Take a look at this bit towards the end, where he comes close to correctly identifying what might possibly be causing such a groundswell of discontent in the youth.
Fear and hatred drive left-wing people to Antifa's extremist ideology.
But there is more.
They have grievances that need to be acknowledged.
Some of it is indoctrinated through education and culture, but not everything can be blamed on that.
Grievance ideologies resonate with Millennials and Gen Z because of an economic reality they experience, crushing student debt, job insecurity, and the inability to ever afford a home.
I can understand why those who lose faith in the American idea, in liberal democracy, turn to extremist ideologies for solutions.
The corruption in politicians and state institutions at times rattles my own confidence in the American rule of law and democracy.
Wonderful point, Andy.
So how would you fix it?
Would it surprise you if he said less free speech and less elections?
The first he justifies with a classic spiel about how cultural Marxism is indoctrinating our youth.
One of the most disempowering mind viruses infecting America and the West at the benefit of Antifa is grievance ideology.
Through its control in every cultural and educational institution, it primes people to become perpetual victims.
It makes them see grievance in every interaction.
It turns pain and ignorance into hatred.
It turns people into oppressors.
Efforts by the Trump administration in September 2020 to address critical race theory via an executive order to ban federal contractors from teaching the poisonous ideology is a good first step.
But how do we address it in K-12 education?
Higher education?
The rest of society?
The problems witnessed in Portland and other left-wing cities is not the lack of laws, but the lack of law enforcement.
When the far left says the American legal system is broken, I actually agree with them, but for different reasons.
Why are district attorneys, who are elected politicians, determining who gets prosecuted?
They have every incentive to bow to the whims of the mob in order to stay in office.
There must be better independent oversight to hold rogue prosecutors accountable.
So it's here that I begin to question Andy's commitment to the liberal democratic values he keeps claiming to hold so dear about the United States, and wonder if he's not missed the forest for the trees a little.
I've been trying to be as fair as I possibly can to him, but if he's going to insult my intelligence with this authoritarian nonsense about dismantling liberal democracy to protect it, I might just drop the anti-anti-fascist schick altogether.
It's also quite telling that he has no problem with identifying material conditions like debt and job insecurity, which might gear people towards more violent political strategies, but he seems to have run out of ideas when it comes to practically fixing them.
I suspect this is because he has already dismissed all of those solutions and the politicians proposing them as communist and therefore Antifa.
So well done, Andy.
Because if nothing else, writing a book is difficult.
And this one looked especially difficult, but it seems to be doing very well.
In fact, during the research for this segment, I uncovered the unsettling news that it was number three on the NYT's bestseller list for a while.
So expect at least some of this stuff to be coming out of your conservative relative's mouths next time you gather round for the family Zoom.
I couldn't let you go though without having you read the closing sentences, which will probably remain etched in my mind for as long as I live.
Take it away, boys.
Antifa seek to destroy the American philosophy and the literal state itself.
They are finding some success.
For those who are drawn to their siren calls of anti-racism, anti-fascism, and equity, look to... Equity in fucking... Come on.
Oh, oh, equity.
Oh, I love liberal democracy, but I'm also going to put equity in fucking quotes.
Look to where their ideas have been put into practice.
No one inherits a utopia or civilization.
They inherit ash, blood, and feces-stained rubble.
Literally the final line of the book.
Feces stained rubble.
One last image to send you off with.
These people can barely hide that they would like to just basically euthanize the entire homeless population.
That's really like, it's just all this like weird shit of like, look how disgusting and the tents look like the cities are overrun and like, It's all just like, I wish I could squash these bugs, you know?
Very, yeah, Andy.
Which is also just a lot like certain 1920s thinkers of a certain political persuasion.
I'd have to say right now that Andy, if you were aiming to describe your mind better than by saying ash, blood, and feces-stained rubble, I just want to congratulate you on really nailing that.
Very florid.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
If you want a second episode every week and access to our archives, please go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month.
Streams happen on twitch.tv slash QAnonAnonymous and our website is QAnonAnonymous.com for everything else.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's auto-tune.
There is this theme going around the mainstream media that is clearly bullshit and it's clearly based upon a lot of clickbait fake news that's getting circulated around the Q movement.
Uh, by what I call Injected Anons, and I don't just call them that, but Q calls them that as well.
Go look at one of their drops from, like, October, I think they mentioned it.
Uh, Injected Anons being inserted into the movement to spread really dumb stuff, and it gives the mainstream media an excuse to attack us.
To weaponize, they weaponize these narratives that goes around.
But anyway, so one of those is March 4th.
March 4th has been a thing for a few weeks now and I'm not going to get into the backstory here of where it came from.
I might do that in a video describing it later this week, a little bit deeper of a dive.
But so the idea somehow started going around that on March 4th, that's the real day that big happenings are going to happen.
And that's when Trump's going to be inaugurated and the real inauguration and something big is going to happen.
I will name some of the people that have been promoting these theories.
One of them was Charles Ward.
Yeah, that guy.
And maybe a few others associated with him, but I did hear in a video that Charles Ward said that.
And then some other people that have been known to spread clickbait and very bad... I'm not just gonna call it misinformation, but I would even go to say it's disinformation, because the frequency It is, it's a form of like mental abuse that some of these people are doing to their audience, in my opinion.
