Ezra Levant recounts Andy Ngo’s August 3, 2021, testimony in Portland, where Antifa thugs—dressed in black block attire—detected, stripped, and brutally attacked him after livestreaming the assault. Hotel staff ignored pleas for help despite luxury surroundings, while CCTV confirmed multiple attackers, some later named in Ngo’s lawsuit. Antifa doxed Ngo, forcing his family to flee Portland, yet mainstream media, police, and prosecutors stayed silent, with a Democratic judge dismissing key evidence. The trial marks the first legal challenge against Antifa, exposing systemic failures in protecting journalists amid tolerated violence. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, a journalist who is attacked by Antifa fights back in court.
He's suing them.
I'll give you the latest.
It's August 3rd and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
shame on you you censorious bug oh hi there i'm on the road again I don't know why I just can't stay still in one place, but I'm not in Hungary or Marseille or some exotic place like that.
I am in lovely Portland, Oregon.
Let me turn around slowly the beautiful Willamette River, parks all around, families out.
It's a glorious summer day.
It really looks like an incredible place to grow up and raise a family.
So much of the Pacific Northwest is this way.
It's a little bit like Vancouver.
But like Vancouver, it suffers politically.
It has one of the most woke city and state governments in America.
It has defunded its police.
It has allowed riots in the streets.
And in fact, the Democrat political authorities have winked and turned a blind eye to a violent street gang called Antifa.
Now Antifa was the name given to an actual anti-fascist movement in Europe two generations ago.
They were generally communist, in fact, but they claimed to be against fascism.
I don't know if they were.
I don't know enough about them historically, but I do know this.
The people who call themselves Antifa today actually are the fascists in so many ways.
First of all, they embrace violence on the streets, like fascists do.
Second of all, they're a kind of paramilitary associated with political parties.
They sort of carry out the will of political parties to enforce them through terror and sometimes direct action.
That's a little bit like the brown shirts in the Nazi Party some 90 years ago.
And interestingly, these Antifa thugs operate with police generally not interfering.
The police are being defunded.
They're on the back foot in cities like this.
They have enough of their hands full to deal with, quote, regular crime.
And it seems like they've been instructed not to touch Antifa.
As I arrived in Portland today, this is the first time I've ever been in this beautiful city, I was stunned by how on so many street corners and underpasses and even in parks, not this glorious park, but ones right nearby, there are hundreds, probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands of homeless people in tents in shanty towns, semi-permanent shanties built literally under underpasses.
It's heartbreaking and sad.
Such a beautiful city, such a wealthy city, and yet that drug use and small, low-level crime is just accepted as normal here.
It's the same in San Francisco, Los Angeles.
We see that happening in Vancouver and Toronto now too.
It really is heartbreaking for such a beautiful place.
But while police have their hands full with that, it's Antifa that engages in violent crimes.
Antifa's Violent Crimes00:02:47
I want to show you some images of what Antifa did to an independent reporter called Andy No, spelled NGO, Andy No, who tried to document what they were doing.
Andy and his family hail from Vietnam.
They're immigrants, you could say they're refugees.
They came here for the American way.
Andy himself is progressive by many measures, but he didn't like the violence done in the name of the left by Antifa, and so he would document it in an undercover type way.
He would go out to their riots and film them.
But of course, he had to be very careful because they would turn against him.
So sometimes he himself dressed like the black block.
That's a phrase that doesn't refer to a teen so much as a way of dressing where you completely cover your entire body in unremarkable black garments so that no one can describe you.
No one can differentiate you.
You're not showing your face.
You're not showing a logo on your clothing.
You have nothing that can be identifiable.
Of course, they wear face coverings.
They love the COVID-19 masks.
Sometimes they even wear goggles to make themselves not only completely non-identifiable, but also to give themselves the fake courage that bullies get when they don't have to take any responsibility for their actions.
And they would hunt in packs.
And of course, often when there's a mob like that, they get courage from each other.
You see it in mobs that engage in looting.
What happens with Antifa mobs when they engage in beatings also?
And that's what happened to our friend Andy No.
He went to cover an Antifa riot and they had already fought with him once before.
They had already attacked him once before.
And they detected him somehow, even though he was in black block.
Maybe it's because he was hanging around and taking pictures of them instead of just of the cops.
And they identified him and a group of four of them walked up to him and said, who are you?
What are you doing?
And they started to follow him.
And then as Andy No testified in court today, they ripped off his face covering and his goggles and identified him and then chased him through the streets of Portland.
But not in some back alley, not in some far-off industrial area, right in a beautiful part of downtown Portland with luxury hotels nearby.
They chased him through the streets.
Andy testified how he ran into the streets and tried to bang on cars saying, help me, call the police, and no one would.
He ran into up to hotels and their doors were locked and they wouldn't let him in.
He finally went to one hotel, got in, begged them to call 911 for him.
Antifa's Assault on Justice00:14:44
They wouldn't.
They wanted to kick him out.
And that's interesting because on the one hand, I can sympathize with the hotels keeping him out.
Here's a guy.
Other than his face, he's dressed all in black like Antifa.
And he's saying wildly, call 911, call the police.
And I think people in Portland have been numbed to crime and they've been taught, don't get involved.
Only bad things can happen if you get involved.
Just walk away.
Don't try and stop the crime.
Just don't let it get involved with you.
So one hotel locked him out.
Another hotel tried to kick him out and wouldn't call 911.
What's terrifying is that the Antifa came into the hotel shouting at Andy, demonizing him.
Well, they were the demons, threatening to do such atrocious harm to him.
They had actually pummeled him on the streets.
He basically crawled into the hotel.
Get off my portraits.
Okay, Holocaust tonight.
I can't wait for you to come out, Andy.
You thought the milkshakes were bad last time.
We're going to beat the fuck out of you, you bitch.
Y'all, Andy No is here at the Nines Hotel.
Andy knows inside the hotel called the cops on everyone saying that he's going to get killed out here.
Scum! Scum!
Nazi scum!
You see my taste, Andy?
Andy!
You see that face?
You see, my son, say it's all out of the reason.
Hey, can you see that?
Yeah!
The 13 person jury was enraptured as he was listening to this, and I found some hope there.
I looked at this jury carefully because Portland is a very lefty, hippie kind of place.
But I thought in this jury were probably the most reasonable looking people you could hope to assemble in this kind of a city.
I suppose that means there weren't any they-them folks with pink and green hair.
Although you should never judge a book by its cover, Portland has an Asian minority, and there were at least three Asian minorities on the jury, which I thought was hopeful because there's an aura of anti-Asian bigotry to the way they went after Andy, and I'm hopeful that that jury will at least be sensitive to it.
I listened to this testimony by Andy No all day, and I found it absolutely persuasive.
Andy is a very authentic person, and his testimony was heartbreaking.
But what was so incredible and so effective, I thought, is that after Andy would testify what happened to him when he was beaten, testify what happened to him when he was chased, testify what would happen to him when he went into the hotel, after every time he said that, and we had to take him at his word, there was closed-circuit TV footage of that very incident.
And in some cases, obviously, there's no audio when the closed-circuit TV is showing what happened.
It's just showing four men, ten men beating up one person.
And that's the thing about Antifa.
They really are marginal, terrible people.
I don't want to use the word the dregs of society because I think we have to believe that there's a spark of God in every person, no matter how low, no matter how evil.
Everyone has some chance of vindication and coming back to the path, a chance of redemption rather.
These are the worst people in the city.
These, frankly, many of them are damaged goods themselves, but they have been weaponized by Antifa.
They have been given a militant purpose.
They've been given an outfit.
They've been given cash.
They've been given direction.
They've been given a team and leadership.
The worst people in the world.
And imagine 10 of them swarming a physically small independent journalist just because he dared to criticize them.
And they beat him within an inch of his life.
And to hear him testify to that, you think, is that really how it went?
And then you see it on closed circuit TV.
You see 10 thugs dressed in black beating the daylights out of a journalist just because he dared to criticize them.
And many of those black block attired Antifa to this day have never been identified.
But a few of the stupider ones or the more arrogant ones or the cockier ones actually took off their helmets and they were visible on the closed circuit TV and they have been named in Andy No's lawsuit as well.
Antifa itself is named but a handful of individuals who made the foolish mistake of revealing themselves.
They really are cowards, all of them.
The black lock is a coward's attire, but it does work, doesn't it?
Which leads us to the old point of objection to face coverings is face coverings are contrary to our norms in Western civilization.
We want to look people in the eye.
Want to see the other person and having people maraud through the city with their faces covered in black dress and black head to dough.
That's not just antisocial, that allows horrific crimes to happen, as happened to Andy No.
There was another act of hubris on the part of Antifa is that they love to boast.
They boasted on Twitter in real time about chasing Andy No down.
They boasted about pummeling him, about chasing him into a hotel, and they also live streamed themselves.
These people, for them, this was the greatest achievement of their life to have a 10-on-one bullying of a young journalist.
But they caught themselves in their own footage.
They couldn't help but boast.
Here, take a look at some of the incredible imagery shot by these Antifa thugs themselves, utterly corroborating what Andy Ngo said they did.
Get out of here!
Get out of here!
Andy was sent to the hospital, but the Antifa thugs didn't stop then.
They continued to hound him, not just at the hospital, but his family, going to his family, his elderly parents' house.
They drove him out of the city.
He had to seek refuge in safe houses across America, and he actually moved to the United Kingdom for about a year just to escape the threat from Antifa thugs on the ground.
And that's what's so frustrating.
The prosecution of Antifa and the named Antifa thugs is not being done by the prosecutor, by the district attorney, or by the government in any way.
There were no police witnesses in court today.
This was a private civil action launched by Andy No because no one else would come to his aid.
Like I say, Antifa is sort of a protected gang like Hitler's brown shirts were in Nazi Germany in the 30s.
And so the politicians and the police and the prosecutors and the media are all at the very least at ease with Antifa.
In some cases, actually encourage them.
Actually, encourage them and certainly protect them.
If you compare how the January 6th, I suppose some of them are rioters, but many of them were just meanderers.
They've been jailed for literally years.
The Proud Boys had one scuffle in the streets, and they're deemed a terrorist group.
But Antifa really is a terrorist group, really has killed people, really is an unrepentant force for violence, and they parade around as if they have the key to the city.
And it falls to Andy No, an independent journalist, to sue them on his own.
Now he has the help of Harmie Dillon's public interest law firm, but still, where are the police?
Where are the prosecutors?
Well, they're defending Antifa.
That's where.
Where are the American journalist lobby groups, the industry associations, those that talk about freedom of speech and protecting journalists from being picked on?
Where are those who defend the First Amendment?
I remember whenever Trump would say a mean word about the press, calling Jim Acosta and CNN fake news.
They would all be up in arms about how this is a devastating threat to the independent press.
I didn't see a single one of them in court today, certainly not intervening for Andy No, and let alone making a public statement about it.
Where were they?
I don't think they mean it when they say they're for a free press.
they only are for a free press that criticizes conservatives when it's a conservative journalist like Andy No, they at best will turn a blind eye when the Antifa is on the prowl.
It was very interesting to me the security in the court and how the judge had to constantly break because there was a new security threat.
One of the things that Antifa specializes in is what's called doxing.
Doxing is sort of a neologism that means revealing private information about someone as a political punishment.
Like I say, they doxed Andy No's parents' house.
They doxed many of his friends.
They drove him out of the city through fear.
And it was clear to me that listening to the judge today, that was one of the fears on her mind.
The courtroom was full of Antifa.
They weren't wearing masks, although a couple of them had COVID masks on, but they didn't have their courageous black block on today, and they were a hideous mess.
They're exactly how you think they would look.
I tell you, if you want to see some scary pictures, look at the pictures of Antifa when they are occasionally arrested in their police mugshots.
They really are terrifying misfits of society, but you put them in a uniform that hides their identity and makes them part of a street gang, and they suddenly turn strong and courageous.
Anyway, there was a lot of them in the court today, and the judge repeatedly stopped, and sheriffs came in, and there were rules, and you had to have your phone turned off.
I suspect that what was happening is that Antifa was doxing the jurors, was trying to find out the names and identity of the jurors, just like the mafia would do.
How terrifying it would be to be a juror, to have your name, address, family details published online by some anonymous Antifa account.
I think that's what was going on.
I think that's why the judge announced at the end of court today that there would be no cell phones whatsoever allowed, even if they were turned off.
They all would have to be handed over to sheriffs before going into the courtroom.
What else could it be other than worries of the jurors being doxed?
That would terrify an ordinary person because this town has lived under that terror for more than a decade.
This city is used to being terrified.
And these jurors are quite brave to sit on a panel hearing the case against the terrorists.
And yeah, I'll call Antifa terrorists.
It's exactly what they are.
I was glad to be here.
I saw a couple of other independent journalists in the room.
Our alumna, Katie Davis Court, was there.
She, of course, is a colleague of Andy No's at Postmillennio, so she was covering it.
I saw another writer for The Spectator, Melissa Chen, there, and a few other friends of Andy No.
But like I say, I didn't see anyone from any mainstream outlet whatsoever.
I understand there might have been a photographer there from a mainstream publication in Oregon, but I'm not sure how long that lasted.
It's a very interesting case, and I came down here because I wanted to show my support for Andy No.
But what I found out was the fascinating story that Andy No not only survived basically an assassination attempt by Antifa, but he's shown the courage and the intelligence to take the battle to Antifa using the laws of civil assault and intentional infliction of mental distress,
but also that RICO statute, that racketeer-influenced corrupt organization statute used to get at gangs like the mafia.
And I think that if that works, it'll be really now the judge is a Democrat appointee.
And the judge, in so many cases today, upheld objections by the Antifa lawyers to keep out key evidence from Andy No.
Look, I'm not a judge.
I don't know American law that well at all.
So I'm not going to say the judge was wrong, but I couldn't help notice how often she upheld major objections to her objections by the defense to major points in the plaintiff's case.
And I feel like it's tilting the playing field a bit.
But that said, watching the jurors as they saw the closed-circuit TV of 10 men attacking Andy No, watching the jurors as they watched the shrieking, demonic sounds of these Antifas smash themselves outside the window of the hotel in which Andy finally took refuge.
I've got to say that that would make an impression on anyone, even a Democrat, and no matter what, the judge manages to exclude.
Now, I've just heard the case for the plaintiffs today.
Tomorrow, the prosecute, sorry, the defense will cross-examine Andy No and try and poke holes in his argument.
We'll see how it ends.
That jury holds in its hands a lot of things, not just validation and compensation for Andy No, but they would be the first jury I'm aware of to condemn and punish Antifa.
I've never heard of a case like this before.
A lot is turning on this battle in this beautiful city.
And even though I won't be here tomorrow, I must return back to Canada.
My obligations there, we'll be following it as best we can.
For all of us at Rebel News, to you at home, good night.