Andy Ngo, author of Unmasked, details how Antifa, militant pro-Hamas groups (like those pushing "blood and soil" ideology), and Islamic extremists—funded by billionaires like George Soros via nonprofits such as Students for Justice in Palestine—coordinate violent protests against Western democracies, targeting journalists (e.g., Montreal’s Guillaume Roi) and university officials. Police defunding post-2020 and the rollback of anti-masking laws enabled tactics like Portland State University’s $1M library siege, while Hamas/Hezbollah flags now appear openly, signaling extremism’s normalization. Ngo warns of a generational radicalization strategy, comparing it to ants dismantling a structure, as politicians fail to counter far-left and Islamist threats, leaving free speech under siege. [Automatically generated summary]
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Here's today's podcast.
Tonight, an in-depth interview with Andy Ngo, the investigative reporter who tracks Antifa.
It's May 17th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, the Rebel News team has covered these university encampments across Canada and even in the United States, and we've seen a coalition.
It's a mix of people from different backgrounds.
We saw it in the United Kingdom, too.
They're not all new Canadians or immigrants to America or the UK.
Now, that is a large part of it in London.
But in other cities like New York, it's mainly woke white liberal college kids.
And in other parts, including in Montreal, it is absolutely the backbone of these protests is Antifa, the folks who in years past were protesting everything from Occupy Wall Street to climate action.
And I thought we would delve a little bit more into that because just today, our reporters in Montreal, Guillaume Roi and Alexa Lavoie, were attacked, not violently, but they were spray painted and their gear was destroyed by masked Antifa thugs.
Not Palestinians, not Muslims or Arabs, just local communist activists who understand that the front line of the battle in 2024 happens to be the Hamas issue.
As our friend James Lindsay says, the issue is never the issue.
The revolution is the issue.
And I think there's one man in the world, at least in North America, who knows more about Antifa than anyone else.
Not only has he been covering them up close for years, but unfortunately, he has been a victim of them as well.
You might recall a few months ago, I went to Portland to attend briefly the trial of Andy No versus a gang of Antifa thugs who chased him down on the street and physically attacked him.
Andy No is the senior editor at Postmillennial, and he's the author of the best-selling book called Unmasked.
And isn't that the truth?
That's the chief tactic of Antifa is to hide themselves.
Andy No joins us now via Skype.
Andy, great to see you again.
And I want to thank you for putting yourself on the line.
Most journalists operate from a desk or from a room far away from the front lines.
You literally are on the front lines of covering Antifa, aren't you?
First of all, thank you so much for that kind introduction and highlighting this very important subject to your viewers.
Unfortunately, Antifa have mobilized again.
I had said in the past that there would be another George Floyd type of moment.
I didn't anticipate that a geopolitical issue in the Middle East would be the George Floyd moment for this year, but unfortunately, that's what it is currently.
We have a coalition around the world of revolutionaries who, for different political agendas, would like to see America and its friends destroyed.
The hatred that they are expressing towards Israel, genocidal hatred, I might add, is the same hatred that they feel for the United States, for Canada, the whole liberal world order they would like to see destroyed.
And in this coalition, we have different new groups of people coming together or strengthening some of their bonds, I should say.
They've worked together in the past.
Unsurprisingly, there are the anarchists and communists of Antifa.
These are the people who often use the tactic of wearing all black, covering their faces, and bringing weapons and coordinating violence against targets in media.
You also have within this coalition militant ultra-nationalist Palestinians who espouse an ideology that is actually really the same as the Charlottesville alt-right, this blood and soil type of worldview that the land, the Palestinian land, is only for Arabs and belongs only to Arabs and everybody else needs to get out or be killed.
You also have Muslim extremists part of this coalition, and they organize in various nonprofit groups, some of whom have been accused by federal prosecutors in the past of financing jihadists and jihadist projects in the Palestinian territories.
And for these Muslim extremists, they view the war that Israel has against Gaza not just as a regional conflict, but rather a religious one.
So they have a different agenda.
So all these groups, they have different goals ultimately, but the big goal is to see a destabilizing of the United States, a radicalization of new people so that they can have another generation of foot soldiers, shop troops, I would call them, to engage in acts of violence and intimidation against the public, against politicians, against various leaders.
We have extremists now showing up at the homes, the family homes, for example, of those who serve on the board of various universities.
So this is the type of escalation in their tactics, in addition, obviously, to the encampments, violent occupations.
And if you go to any of these encampments, you see the type of messages they are leaving around in their graffiti and vandalism.
They're calling for people to be killed, to be murdered.
The University of Washington in Seattle, which has an ongoing three-week encampment right now, one of the messages is kill your colonizer.
And it uses the red upside-down triangle symbol that Hamas use for the various targets that they use to kill communities on the 7th of October.
So this is a very violent extremist movement.
And the legacy media establishment media is using euphemisms to describe it, as they did in 2020.
Currently, now we're seeing the protests being described as pro-Palestine protests, pro-human rights protests, or anti-war protests.
In 2020, they were describing the riots as mostly peaceful or racial justice protests.
You know, I've been to a few of these and I've tried to ask questions of people I encounter.
And I find that most of the ordinary folks I talk to are pretty poorly informed.
I mean, I don't want to laugh about it, but when I was in New York at the Fashion Institute of Technology, that was a downtown sort of fashion university.
There were kids or students waving a flag that was not the Palestinian flag.
I said, what flag is that?
They said it was the Palestinian flag.
It was not.
They don't know what the river to the sea means.
They don't know any of the history.
And so part of me thinks, oh, this is a pretty shallow movement.
It's just a club or a clique or a cult.
But then there are some deadly serious organizers, I think.
Let me ask you this.
How much of this is organic?
And how much of this is professional activists, including funded by, oh, I'm going to mention the name George Soros, because I know he funded some of the Black Lives Matter movement in the past.
We've seen recent allegations that Iran and even China have funded some of this.
Help me sort the truth from the allegation.
Is this organic or is this bought and paid for?
And if so, who's doing the buying and the paying?
The encampments, as you've noticed, are large and take a lot of resources to organize, to maintain, and also to continue to supply with food and tents and various type of resources.
All that takes a lot of money, and how it's being done is through various streams of funding.
So one way, one thing that I've researched a lot, particularly in my reporting in the 2020 riots, is the role of GoFundMe, Cash Up, and Venmo in these ad hoc groups that spring up on social media for the cause, the cause of the month, the cause of the week, cause of the day.
And people can give anonymous small donation amounts or even large.
And sometimes you can see how much they're giving, even if you don't see the name of who the individuals are.
This is particularly dangerous because this type of anonymous giving can involve state actors.
We just don't know who they are.
Some of the bigger sources of funding that have come in, as you have mentioned, have involved billionaire far-left philanthropists like George Soros and others through the various charity foundations that they funnel money into various nonprofit groups that run various projects.
Some of the groups that are receiving big money is the Students for Justice in Palestine, for example, in Jewish Voice for Peace.
JVP is one of the groups involved in many of the university encampment protests.
And these are people who are not students, but professional agitators.
The professional outside agitators is a huge component of the encampments.
It doesn't absolve the students of their role in their extremist organizing.
But how it works is that you have students working explicitly with outside seasoned professional agitators.
And the role of Antifol in particular is to provide a lot of the propaganda that's coming out in these encampments.
They have tables set up where they provide these, they call them zines, short from magazines.
These are printed pamphlets and booklets.
Some of it is actually literal Hamas media office propaganda.
That was at the University of Irvine, University of California in Irvine, which had an encampment this week that was violent.
There was local journalists who went in and took photographs of some of the text propaganda before they were discarded by police.
And so there's so much ideology behind the encampments.
There's organization, obviously.
There's big money, there's small money.
I think the public really kind of underestimates the danger of what these encampments do because they're not just isolated incidents.
Each of these uprising movements build on top of one another.
They involve the same networks or similar networks or allied networks.
And what they write after action reports that go out on their far-left blogs, instructions for how to besiege a building, how to break into buildings, how to de-arrest your comrade, which is a way of organizing attempts to actually physically remove a comrade who's been arrested from the custody of police.
And so the United States, Canada, many Western countries around the world have a far-left extremist problem that is being underreported, being denied, unfortunately, by not just media, but also the so-called hate watch groups and the counter-extremist groups and academe groups, nonprofits, organizations, disciplines, and universities that are tasked with actually researching extremism and informing the public.
They've intentionally ignored one huge part of the problem to the point now where Americans are so poorly informed and misinformed, are so poorly informed and misinformed about far-left extremism that they don't even know or remember that in the 60s and 70s, the United States experienced a lot of domestic terrorist attacks by communist revolutionary groups.
Portland's Police Crisis00:05:57
And many of them were among the FBI's most wanted.
Some of them were convicted and spent years in prison.
Some of them fled abroad to enemy states like Cuba.
And many of them, who, once they were released from prison, released out of prison, then entered academe and have continued to play an outsized role in radicalizing students and espousing the ideology that they did before for violent revolution.
It's like Barack Obama's mentor, Bill Ayers, who went on to become a media darling and a professor.
You know, you've said so many interesting things there.
I was following along your coverage of the siege, the encampment, and I think it was the University of Portland, where they correct me if I've got my university wrong, where they took over a multi-story library.
Is that the one?
Yes, that's at Portland State University.
So that happened earlier this month, beginning in May, for four and a half days.
First, they created an encampment outside, which was allowed and supported by the university president.
Unsurprisingly, many of these universities are filled with weak leaders, left-wing leadership who are sympathetic to the cause and think that by allowing these encampments to happen, that they're doing something good.
Well, unsurprisingly, after just a few days of encamping, camping outside the library, as the numbers grew, then they had enough people to actually besiege the building itself.
The library was destroyed over four days.
The estimates right now from Portland State University is that it can cost upward to a million dollars because of the extensive damages, the stolen books, the damaged books.
The fire extinguisher system was destroyed, the cameras that were destroyed.
There's some videos and photos released by the Portland police of the extensive damage inside by far list extremists.
And the library, unfortunately, won't open until the autumn term at the earliest.
So that means the students right now at Portland State for their midterms for the finals won't be able to study in the main library at the biggest research university in Portland, Oregon.
That's astonishing, and that's heartbreaking, and that's infuriating.
One of the things I remember you saying at the time was that Portland had defunded its police to the extent that you weren't sure if they had the resources, the manpower, the skills, the physical equipment to retake the library.
And that Portland, which in the past had relied on other nearby police forces, didn't have those assets.
And correct me if I've got my facts wrong, I'm just trying to remember what you said some weeks ago.
And that's terrifying to me that you have effectively an on-the-ground militia that can go toe-to-toe with the cops.
Did I get you right on that?
I mean, we saw the New York Police Department go into Columbia.
The New York police is like an army.
It's bigger than many countries' armies.
They have sophisticated squads, sophisticated equipment.
They weren't going to be stopped by a few hundred students at Columbia, but maybe in Portland State, they would.
What's your view on the weak resources of police, and even more importantly, the decision by mayors and police commissioners and police chiefs not to deploy their forces?
What's your view?
What are the facts about that?
So, in cities like Portland and Seattle, the consequences from 2020 are devastating and can still be felt in public safety.
In addition to defunding the police at that time, the politicians and the residents, unfortunately, created an environment of such anti-police sentiment that it was really demoralizing for law enforcement to stay.
So, officers quit, they resigned, they transferred to different police departments.
And for some cities, like Portland, the numbers of officers remain catastrophically low still.
And the response times for 911 life or death situations is very long.
And there just are not enough police officers.
So, when I wrote a tweet a few weeks ago, that I predicted that Portland police would struggle.
I mean, Portland State University has its own public police department on campus, and they didn't have they were also had faced defunding.
And so, they only had a few officers on hand.
They had to rely on the Portland Police Bureau for help.
And this video during the time when police finally responded after four and a half days of the siege, you can see that there weren't enough police officers there.
So, most of those who had been destroying the library simply fled through the front door, literally, the library.
They just fled with their weapons and shields and masks on into downtown.
And afterwards, police release these blurry video screenshots asking if any people can help identify any of them.
So, the people who have done this type of extensive damage at Portland State will likely not face consequences.
On top of that, we currently have a prosecutor, a district attorney named Mike Schneider, who came into office in 2020, who before office and during office has been very open about his sympathies for leftist politics and Black Lives Matter and the rioters in downtown in 2020.
Normalization Of Political Violence00:05:56
So we have this whole system where the whole rule of law in some places in America essentially broken.
And also the normalization of political violence has created an environment where people who engage in First Amendment protected activities, such as having a conservative rally or a Christian rally or rally against Hamas.
And these are real life examples in Portland.
People who organize those events, who show up to those events, are subjected to violence by Antifa with impunity.
That's incredible and it's terrifying.
And I didn't understand at first the phrase black block.
I thought it referred to a team.
I thought it was a name, but it's actually a tactic, isn't it?
To dress head to toe in black, no distinguishing characteristics, no watches or shoes or hats that could be identified.
The idea is to make it very hard to prosecute.
And when you sneak out the front door, you won't be caught.
Am I correct to say black block is a tactic as opposed to an identity or a name of a group?
Correct.
It's a tactic that could be used by any group, but it's mostly associated with violent radical anarchists like Antifa and their allied groups.
And the whole intention behind it is to evade accountability for organized criminal activities.
Various cities in America, such as New York City, used to have actually anti-masking statutes.
In the past, it was used to be used against the KKK so that people who were engaging in harassing type of behavior at their extremist rallies could actually be identified by law enforcement and prosecuted.
Unfortunately, with the pandemic and the normalization of masking, these anti-masking statutes have been rolled back everywhere in America.
And now people just accept that people show up to these demonstrations with their identities hidden to intimidate people and to commit crimes.
Yeah.
You know, in Canada, a lot of the masks are Kafiya masks in the style of Hamas.
I find it deeply, I feel like it's an unraveling.
I mean, when you look someone in the eye, when you look at someone, there is a kind of social connection.
And I think when your face is hidden, you become emboldened to be anti-social.
It's easier to be rude to someone when they don't know who you are, when you're anonymous.
That's why people are so brave with online comments, because you get the feeling you're anonymous.
When you're out in society, you're not anonymous.
But when you can wear that black block mask or the kefia, you can be someone you're not really.
You can be bold or brave would be a positive way to say it, but you can be violent, thuggish, anti-social, threatening.
You can do things thinking you can get away with it.
And unfortunately, it looks like you can.
That's why your book is called Unmasked, Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.
Well, Andy, let me ask you this.
How is it all going to end?
Because literally every day, it looks like another campus has one of these Hamas encampments erupting.
Is this going to be another summer of hate like we saw in 2020?
Is this going to continue?
Like, what would be the natural stopping point?
Because the bad guys don't want to stop.
They're doing great.
With any type of protest movement, at some point it will ebb and flow.
And the time will, the encampments will end at some point.
The situation on the ground involving Israel and Gaza will end at some point.
That war will come to an end at some point.
However, the groundwork has been laid for a very long time to radicalize people into supporting revolutionary violent extremist causes to the point where they can just easily activate for some other cause.
The next time there's conflict involving Israel and Hamas, for example, the next time there's some type of viral police interaction that's caught on video.
And all these, I describe them as similar to ants slowly eating away at the body.
You don't realize it because the attacks are small and they're happening at different places and you don't realize the damage that it can do over time.
We're already seeing now how the politics in America and Canada have already changed to the point where people in the mainstream feel comfortable expressing support for terrorist groups for acts of terrorism against civilians.
Before they would use dog whistles and such.
Now they're quite open with it.
At some of these encampments and these rallies against Israel since the 7th of October, we've seen flags for Hamas.
We've seen flags for Hezbollah.
We've seen those who praise various figures in Hamas.
So they're not even hiding it anymore and it's moving to the mainstream.
And that's my, I think that's the most disturbing aspect of this is the effects long term and that our politicians are unfortunately unwilling and or unable to confront the reality of far-left extremism, Islamic extremism.
Flags in the Mainstream00:00:39
I think you're right.
I think what you're saying is scary and I wish it weren't true, but I think it is true.
Andy, we're very grateful to you for spending so much time with us.
Stay safe.
I know that Antifa regards you as a priority target.
They physically attacked you before.
You've attacked back peacefully in the court of law.
So they regard you as enemy number one, which is why one of the reasons why your journalism is so valuable is that you have the courage behind it.
So thank you, my friend, and keep in touch.
Thank you.
All right, there you have it.
Andy No, the senior editor at Postmillennial and New York Times best-selling author of his book on this subject called Unmasked.