July 9, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:15:22
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| All right, everybody, we are live on the YouTube. | ||
| I'm very happy today because I have a friend of mine. | ||
| who might be beating me in the hair game today. | ||
| He's an actual journalist, a guy that I don't have to do this when I say journalist. | ||
| You're a real journalist. | ||
| I think most of the people watching know you at this point. | ||
| Andy Ngo, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| Okay, there's a lot to talk about, obviously. | ||
| Everyone has seen now this clip from about a week and a half ago. | ||
| You were up in Portland, where you live and do most of your work, covering events of the Pacific Northwest. | ||
| You were covering an Antifa rally and basically the mob turned on you. | ||
| So I'm gonna just toss it up that way and I'll let you take it from there. | ||
| Why don't you just explain what the rally was, what you were doing there as a journalist, and then we'll kind of go from there. | ||
| So the demonstration was on the 29th of June, and in that viral footage of the mob beating on me, that was actually the second half of the beating. | ||
| I don't know if there's video footage of what happened before, but there were more hits to my face than head. | ||
| I had been Threatened and intimidated and harassed and assaulted by Antifa people for several months now, all of which have been reported to police. | ||
| And these are ongoing investigations. | ||
| I personally felt like the police didn't seem to take this with any seriousness. | ||
| My previous reports. | ||
| But when I came that day, you know, I was thinking, okay, there's probably going to be hostility, more insults, people blocking my cameras. | ||
| But I didn't think that I would end up in the emergency room with a brain hemorrhage. | ||
| That actually forced me to accept how brutal this movement is. | ||
| Um, and I think that's a good thing. | ||
| It's been really difficult to continue to force myself to do a lot of these media appearances, but I'm doing it because I want to hopefully move the national discourse on Antifa. | ||
| I want them to be more familiar with what this movement is, what they want, what their political ideology is, and how violence is used towards their goals. | ||
| Okay, so I want to talk more about your personal history and some of your beliefs and what got you into this because one of the things that I found most interesting, I mean, after watching the horrific, you know, violence that happened to you, that seemed almost secondary to me once I knew you were basically okay. | ||
| Because it was the media reaction, suddenly people, blue check people on Twitter calling you a fascist, and he's a conservative, as if that somehow excuses it, or that you were asking for it, or that you instigated it, or the rest of it. | ||
| But before we get to all that, can you just tell people, when did you get interested in Antifa? | ||
| When did you start covering this? | ||
| Did your journalism desires sort of put you in that direction? | ||
| Because a lot of people have no idea. | ||
| The YouTube community, I think, has some sense of what's going on with Antifa, but I don't know that the average person does. | ||
| Yeah, well first, I'm doing better than before. | ||
| You see that the bruising and abrasions on my face has healed a lot, but the main injury was primarily to my brain, and I'll be having neurophysical therapy going forward, so there are some long-term difficulties I'll be dealing with that are not so visible. | ||
| So what does that actually mean? | ||
| I don't even know if I was going to ask you about it directly, but so what does that mean? | ||
| I mean, how are you feeling right now? | ||
| I know the swelling's down, and I'm glad to see you're not I'm going to have some memory issues probably for up to six months. | ||
| I was told that when I was in hospital. | ||
| I had speech difficulties the first week. | ||
| When I watched some of my interviews on CNN and Tucker Carlson, that's not how I normally speak, so I'm glad that I'm And more to my normal self sitting in front of you now, because it was hard to see myself that way, re-watching some of those interviews. | ||
| Did you have to force yourself to do those hits on Tucker and some of those other things, and the CNN one and the rest? | ||
| Because obviously you were not up. | ||
| I mean, I noticed your speech was a little slower and more deliberate. | ||
| Yeah, I did have to sort of force myself because I knew with how fast the media cycle moves, if I come out and speak within a couple of weeks, it's not going to have the same impact. | ||
| And, you know, the story is so much bigger than just what happened to me. | ||
| It's this movement, which I look forward to getting into. | ||
| Hopefully, moving forward, things At least in the public minds will begin to look at Antifa more differently. | ||
| Okay, so when did you first start? | ||
| Or why don't we just start with this? | ||
| When did you get into journalism? | ||
| When did you become a journalist that I don't have to put quotes around? | ||
| It's a pleasure, actually. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I was a multimedia editor at the student paper at Portland State Vanguard when I was doing my graduate studies there. | ||
| I originally thought that I was studying political science. | ||
| I thought I would go into academia and work for a think tank. | ||
| doing research, type of stuff like that. | ||
| But when I was starting my program at Portland State was also around when Donald Trump entered | ||
| the campaign season and he won the election. | ||
| And November 2016 in Portland, we had very violent rioting in the city. | ||
| It's, I mean, it's funny now. | ||
| You look back at that time, people were saying that if Hillary won, the right would not accept it. | ||
| But what I saw was the left in my city not only being unable to accept the election results, but responding to it with violence. | ||
| So they did a million dollars in damage, started fires across downtown they went around with bats destroying cars and businesses and i was so i covered that that night uh... for the student paper doing video and it was such it was so surreal it felt like in this major american city it seemed more like something you would see out of iraq or afghanistan with all the explosions that were going around uh... it was | ||
| Pure anarchy. | ||
| And that was the first time I became familiar with Black Bloc and Antifa, people who mask up in order to do crimes and remain anonymous. | ||
| Was that also the first time that you actually did that sort of journalism, like with a GoPro or whatever kind of camera, like out in the field? | ||
| Or had you been doing that sort of stuff, just covering other things before that? | ||
| That was my first time covering a protest, as I recall. | ||
| It was just with my mobile phone, so it was very informal. | ||
| Before that, we had some student protests on campus that shut down some events related to pro-Donald Trump stuff. | ||
| So I took an interest that year in, I guess, culture wars. | ||
| Yeah, I think I met you probably right around then. | ||
| It might have been a little bit before. | ||
| I spoke at Portland State with Peter Rogozian, who's been on the show, and Christine Hoffsommers, who's been on the show. | ||
| And you came, and I think you were covering the event. | ||
| And Antifa, I think it was Antifa, had a press release or whatever it is that they, you know, flyers that they hand out saying that Dave Rubin's a homophobe. | ||
| Peter Berghozi is a white supremacist, and Christina Huff Summers is a misogynist or something. | ||
| And we had a ton of security. | ||
| And they had to hide us in a separate room away from the venue just to do our little talk, | ||
| which of course ended up being perfectly peaceful and fine. | ||
| So it's a little strange up there. | ||
| Yeah, what, so can I explain like what Antifa is for? | ||
| Yeah, let's go, let's go. | ||
| Most people here are just familiar with the people who wear the masks and show up at these demonstrations, right? | ||
| But they actually really underestimate what this movement is. | ||
| Antifa gives themselves the misnomer of anti-fascist. | ||
| I never give them that propaganda win by referring to them as that. | ||
| I call them Antifa. | ||
| I never call them anti-fascists. | ||
| They're masters of doublespeak. | ||
| So you see it reflected in the name Antifa 2. | ||
| Their usage of words do not have the same meaning as how the public understands it. | ||
| So when they say self-defense, it's not actually self-defense. | ||
| Self-defense to them is premeditated offensive violence. | ||
| And so, Antifa calls themselves anti-fascist. | ||
| They believe that they're in a cosmic battle against the far-right and neo-Nazis and fascists. | ||
| They have a very coherent political ideology, and I think the public underestimates that. | ||
| They think that they're just a group of silly people cosplaying and doing stupid stuff on the | ||
| streets. | ||
| That's actually not what it is. | ||
| So what is that ideology then? | ||
| Their movement of anarchists and communism, they're agitating for political revolution. | ||
| And the violence, though, sometimes is indiscriminate, it's actually not arbitrary. | ||
| It's working—they're creating chaos and polarization in society and undermining institutions that make up the nation-state, so that, I guess, in the ideal world, in under anarchy and chaos, | ||
| they would be able to rewrite the rules and put themselves sort of in control of society. | ||
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So I think one of the things that people are a little confused about | |
| is how organized this is. | ||
| Is this a top-down thing? | ||
| Is it a bottom-up thing? | ||
| So when you were out there the first time, did you have a sense, as you're watching what you described as a million dollars worth of damage right after the election, did you have a sense that this was being orchestrated by somebody? | ||
| How coordinated was it? | ||
| Has that changed in the last two and a half years? | ||
| It's not a top-down movement. | ||
| Antifa as a movement is made up of, it's, I don't know if you would call them members, but I would call them their activists, are pulled from several different, many different groups. | ||
| So they're pulled from different workers' unions, they're pulled from anarchist groups, they're pulled from communist groups, socialist groups. | ||
| The core group of Antifa militants, the ones who are out there doing the violence, is actually really small. | ||
| So they're the ones who are responsible for beating me ten days ago. | ||
| But more concerning, and I hope we have time to talk about this, is the larger concentric circle of what I call non-violent Antifa. | ||
| These are people who work in news, as journalists, as writers, and as verified social media people who work to mainstream, whitewash, and approve of Antifa tactics from the mainstream. | ||
| And I think in that PR propaganda battle they've been quite successful People now think political violence is okay and kind of cute. | ||
| I mean, it started with, you know, the punching a Nazi meme. | ||
| I mean, that sounds—that might sound fine and all, but then when that label of being a Nazi is thrown on someone like me, then the mob feels justified in attacking me. | ||
| And usually, you know, the most Dangerous people the ones who think they're doing it for a righteous cause whether it be antifa jihadists or whatever More recently we see the the normalization of the the milkshaking and in that the video of what happened to me like | ||
| I think of people like Carlos Maza who put out a very disgusting message about... This is the Vox journalist who not only tried to get Crowder basically kicked off YouTube, he's also the one that lobbied Pete Buttigieg not to do my show because, you know, I'm a far-right maniac. | ||
| So this is an irony. | ||
| He was complaining that he was a victim of bullying, basically, by Stephen Crowder. | ||
| Yet, I mean, his—what he does is bully other people, and not just bully, but encouraging political violence. | ||
| So, the way Antifa does violence on people is they first try to blind them, either throwing something in their face or distract them, usually bear mace or pepper spray. | ||
| In my case, it was stuff like the— Milkshakes, we don't know what it was, all the liquids, they throw that in your face so you can't see, and they start hitting you, so then you don't even know which direction the punches are coming from, you know, and they're all dressed in black with the mask. | ||
| And what happened to me was steps away from the Justice Center in downtown Portland. | ||
| This is the irony of it all. | ||
| So like I could, while I'm getting beaten, In trying to open my eyes, I could still make out the steps to the Justice Center, which houses the Sheriff's Office, the Central Precinct, and no police came to my aid at all during that time. | ||
| So... Sorry, so let's back up to what you talked about with the way that... | ||
| OK, we have the sort of underbelly of it, which is the activists that are on the street causing violence. | ||
| But I think this media portion of it, I think, is really, really fascinating, because this is something I've sort of been tracking in another way for quite some time. | ||
| So the reason you mentioned Carlos Maza, because he's an activist from Media Matters who now works at Vox and pretends to be a journalist. | ||
| And I don't like talking about people. | ||
| I mean, this is the thing. | ||
| I always try to talk about ideas, not people. | ||
| But he was sending out tweets just within the weeks before this saying, milkshake them all, right? | ||
| That was the one, meaning that you milkshake the bad guys, and Andy Ngo is a bad guy in his estimation. | ||
| But can you talk about how pervasive the ideas of Antifa or of excusing violence or of labeling, I mean, the amount of labeling that I watched of you after this, that you're a fascist or that you're not a journalist. | ||
| This is what other journalists were saying. | ||
| He's not a journalist. | ||
| He's a fascist. | ||
| He's a conservative. | ||
| I want to ask you some of your political views as well. | ||
| But can you just talk about how that How that bubbles into the newsrooms of these places, newsrooms, I don't know, it's usually, they're probably mostly writing from their own homes, but like, how did this get so that all these blue check Twitterati that have seemingly have some influence in the mainstream now are sympathetic to this violent group? | ||
| Well, I recently published a great piece by Dr. Owen Lenihan, who's an Irish academic who looked at the relationship between journalists and the Antifa subjects they were covering. | ||
| He found, among some very influential ones who work in mainstream media, that not only are they providing favorable coverage that they're basically being | ||
| true leaders. | ||
| I recommend people read that piece and his paper that he wrote for that | ||
| is under peer review right now for an academic journal. | ||
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But what was so... But how do they think they're getting away with it? | |
| Because for those of us that have been paying attention to it, it's pretty obvious what they've been doing. | ||
| But how do they think they can get away with it? | ||
| They are no longer journalists by any objective standard. | ||
| I think they get away because they've been Working, taking steps towards mainstreaming a lot of Antifa tactics and ideologies in a way that, well, once it becomes normalized, people just don't even question it anymore. | ||
| It's just kind of part of normal progressive political thought or whatever, and that's what I mean, what I'm really concerned about is, and Dr. Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot, is this country is rightfully very sensitive to recognizing the excesses of the right and being extra sensitive to the far right and that type of rhetoric. | ||
| In the dog whistle of Satya Sena, right? | ||
| I would argue overly sensitive that they've expanded many things that are not hateful to be included as hate speech. | ||
| But I think there's a blind spot when it comes to far-left activism and ideologies. | ||
| So much so that even extreme far-left militancy is seen as a just cause. | ||
| But do you think that's as simple as because of the fact that most of these journalists, the blue check journalists and the people that work at Vox and HuffPo and BuzzFeed, that they're all lefties. | ||
| So they either are excusing it because they're kind of down with it. | ||
| It's like they're watching those people do the dirty work that they don't then have to do. | ||
| They can just kind of cheerlead it, as you're saying, through their own articles. | ||
| Either that or Yeah, I mean, one of the tactics is if you speak out against Antifa, then you're accused of being sympathetic to the far right or carrying water for the far right. | ||
| I mean, that's what I've consistently seen happen to any of the decent liberals over | ||
| the last couple of years. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, one of the tactics is if you speak out against Antifa, then you're accused of | ||
| being sympathetic to the far right or carrying water for the far right. | ||
| That's what I'm accused of. | ||
| It's part of the strategy, and it works, unfortunately, in silencing people and making certain people | ||
| seem like they're untouchable. | ||
| This movement lies a lot. | ||
| What's been really eye-opening for me is, I mean, it's one thing to tell, like, half-truths, right, or to put a spin on stuff, but a lot of these activist leaders have no problem outright just making up wholesale lies about their political opponents. | ||
| I still don't want to gloss over exactly what happened to you and what it was like that day, so we'll get back to that. | ||
| But were you shocked at the way the media treated you after? | ||
| That basically what I saw happen was you got support mostly from people on the right, You know, conservatives and libertarians, but that basically all of the rest of the mainstream media, whatever it is, like the Brian Stelters of the world and the CNNs and the rest of it, they had to be guilted into even putting you on. | ||
| And when they did put you on their shows, Stelter didn't put you on, but he did reference it at the end of his show in the quickest, sort of most ridiculous way. | ||
| But CNN did put you on on their morning show, which I think it was because we all sort of guilted them into it. | ||
| Everyone was saying is CNN, I'm gonna cover this, where's the New York Times? | ||
| And it was like they waited and waited and waited, and then eventually had to do it, or eventually acquiesced, because they didn't want to look totally ridiculous, or the New York Times, which wrote a ridiculous piece about you, that they all framed you as conservative, as if that was their way of kind of winking, like, this is kind of okay, he's conservative. | ||
| Do you consider yourself conservative? | ||
| Are you conservative? | ||
| I actually don't, I know you fairly well, but I don't know any of your political beliefs, but I thought that that tactic by them, and the fact that it ran across everything, he's conservative. | ||
| Kind of okay. | ||
| The media reaction to what happened to me took on a life of its own that I wasn't expecting. | ||
| It was disappointing to see it framed as a partisan story, because it really wasn't. | ||
| I mean, this is a press freedom issue. | ||
| No journalist or no American, no citizen, no human, regardless of his or her views, being at, covering at a public demonstration should be met with that type of reaction from people. | ||
| And I didn't really understand quite so much why so much media needed to always qualify that I was a conservative. | ||
| They perceived me as a conservative journalist. | ||
| The New York Times went even further because I screenshot a portion of the article. | ||
| Their implication was that you were asking for it, really, that you go into these things trying to rile it up and then that you then try to raise money off it. | ||
| That was really the implication of the New York Times story. | ||
| There are some stories that refer to me as provocateur or that I have a history of skirmishes and clashes with Antifa, which is, um, that language makes it seem as if, like, I go in to fight people and then, like, I have a history of fighting with them, which is absolutely untrue. | ||
| They've always targeted me with them going on the offensive. | ||
| Every attack that I've Endured and suffered has been completely unprovoked and for | ||
| them And this is what I mean it comes back to how they define | ||
| how antifa defines self-defense so self-defense for them It's not protecting yourself when somebody is | ||
| violently attacking you it's that My ideas are an attack on them a form of violence | ||
| It goes to people who argue words of violence, right? | ||
| So they, in their ideology, believe that I committed violence towards them through my writings and my views. | ||
| Therefore, they are justified in going after me to protect themselves. | ||
| It's sick. | ||
| It's twisted. | ||
| As for CNN, I appreciate that they invited me on. | ||
| They were the only center-left broadcast to invite me on, and I wonder if it has to do with the fact that several of their TV hosts have said very positive things about Antifa and excusing the violence. | ||
| Can you mention them? | ||
| I mean, I'll do it if you don't want to do it, but I think it's worth mentioning. | ||
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Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo have said positive things about Antifa. | |
| Cuomo, there's a ridiculous quote of his just in the last month or two. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| I mean, what do you make of that? | ||
| These are supposed... No, I know Don. | ||
| I mean, what do you make of these people saying these things? | ||
| These are prime-time CNN anchors saying positive things about what in essence is a domestic terrorist group. | ||
| These are people who, I believe, are saying this stuff out of ignorance. | ||
| You know, they're from an elite class of media, and they work in New York City or D.C. | ||
| They don't experience or witness the street brutality of this movement. | ||
| So, their conception of Antifa is—you know, they bought into the propaganda, so it's more theoretical. | ||
| Oh, these are people who are anti-fascists. | ||
| They're opposing neo-Nazis. | ||
| While I don't support violence, I think their cause is justified. | ||
| We hear a lot of that over and over. | ||
| What people need to be aware about Antifa is they're not just against the far-right neo-Nazis. | ||
| They're against liberal democracy. | ||
| They're against the concept of the nation-state, which is why they've worked so hard to delegitimize the police, attack the police, attack the rule of law. | ||
| It's all towards their goal. | ||
| They attack border enforcement, ICE and all that. | ||
| It's not just And they're against liberal democracy as well. | ||
| I need to nail that down. | ||
| So like, you know, you think that they might not be going after you with you now because you share a common political opponent, let's say the right or the far right. | ||
| But they, I mean, the thing that, you know, moderate leftists, moderate Democrats believe in and cherish, Antifa opposes as well. | ||
| That's what I've been trying to explain to people, not just related to Antifa, but what's going on with the more radical elements of the left, is that you guys think if you just don't talk about them that it buys you a little more time, but actually they're going to come for you too, because eventually A moderate lefty is gonna have an original thought that is against the woke thing. | ||
| And I think that's what it is. | ||
| You're not woke. | ||
| You're not a far left progressive. | ||
| So then the only way that the media can frame you is as a conservative. | ||
| I mean, do you consider yourself conservative? | ||
| I know this is a sidebar in a weird way, but watching it happen across the media, where everyone, I even brought it up, even on Fox, they called you a conservative on a thing that I did, on a segment that I did. | ||
| And I made a point of saying that I know you and I don't know you to be a conservative. | ||
| I've never heard you say that. | ||
| I don't know all your political beliefs. | ||
| When Fox was doing it, I think it was to signal to their audience, this guy's kind of one of us. | ||
| But when the lefty media does it, they're doing it because they want to go, oh, it's kind of excused because he's one of them. | ||
| So everyone does it for their own sort of purposes. | ||
| But what do you even consider yourself politically, even though that's actually, it's completely irrelevant in a certain regard, other than they've made it an issue? | ||
| My work is out there on record, so however people want to label me, fine, go ahead. | ||
| But I've written and do work for very mainstream places. | ||
| I mean, I went from being a student journalist to contributing to the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the Spectator, American Spectator, the New York Post. | ||
| The video content I produce has been provided to the Washington Post, to Reuters. | ||
| So, however people want to fix a label to me from their own political agenda, they do their own thing. | ||
| I don't identify myself in that way so much, but I will talk about my lived experience to use the language of progressives a bit. | ||
| I think my critical coverage of Antifa and other far-left militant movements is informed by my family's background. | ||
| My parents were refugees to the United States from Vietnam, and they actually lived through a Marxist revolution. | ||
| They were from the South, and they experienced life after the country reunified as a communist state and they face so much persecution. | ||
| My mother happened, my mother and her family happened to belong to the wrong class, right? | ||
| So they had all their properties, business confiscated, and they were taken to labor camp. | ||
| My father was sent to re-education camp. | ||
| And so I don't view Radical communism, or Marxism, or any of these related ideologies with the same rose-colored glasses that a lot of my fellow citizens do in Portland. | ||
| The socialist movement there is very, very active, and I would say there's a stronger visibility of them than even regular conservatives by far. | ||
| These are primarily young, white people, educated. | ||
| They have no experience of what it's like to live through a Marxist revolution, so they think of it much more as a nice theoretical idea, rather than talking to people who have experienced what it's like. | ||
| So, that family background and experience that my parents have gone through, their trauma that they passed on to their children, right, | ||
| myself and my sister, informs how I cover Antifa. | ||
| And I think there's a, like I said earlier, there's a certain blind spot | ||
| in this country for | ||
| the far left. | ||
| They don't understand or know the history of what that can lead to | ||
| when it goes completely unchallenged. | ||
| And I want to make it important that I don't think that these ideas should be censored at all, but it's important we talk about it honestly. | ||
| And right now there's just a lot of propaganda going on and revisionism about Radical Marxism. | ||
| So since you said it so eloquently, using their language, let's use some of their ideas. | ||
| So one of the ideas out of this Marxism and post-modernism and all of this is identity politics. | ||
| I mean, that seems to be the core of all of this, right? | ||
| Now, if we were to play the identity politics game, as you just said, you're Vietnamese, your parents were refugees, You also happen to be gay, big goddamn deal. | ||
| I know you don't want extra credit for it. | ||
| But what did you think about the way the media even treated that? | ||
| That if this had been Jussie Smollett, which was a hoax, that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker and AOC and basically all of the candidates used a hoax to show that a black gay man, it shows what an evil, racist, patriarchal society America is. | ||
| They all had no problem saying that. | ||
| They had no problem using the Covington kids when it seemed like white Christian kids were going against a Native American elder. | ||
| But in your case, as a double minority, and I know you don't want to play that game, it's important that we at least address the strangeness or hypocrisy around the fact that Everybody was silent. | ||
| And as a matter of fact, the only two candidates who addressed it was Andrew Yang, who I think is a pretty decent guy, gave a kind of limp-wristed, nobody should be attacked over violence kind of thing, but at least he addressed it. | ||
| And then Eric Swalwell, who just dropped out yesterday or today, I guess, he sent out, well, I disagree with many of Andy Ngo's ideas, but nobody should be attacked. | ||
| And I tweeted him, I said, well, which ideas do you disagree with? | ||
| Because it was just this pathetic way of saying something. | ||
| It was a but in there. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| And Joe Biden. | ||
| Oh, and Biden ended up doing it, what, two days ago with a press release. | ||
| So Biden waited like 10 days to say, you know, don't be violent to journalists, basically. | ||
| You know, I express gratitude towards these three politicians for speaking out in support of me. | ||
| Also, Ted Cruz has, as well as Rick Grinnell. | ||
| But particularly for Democrats, and there are very few who came out in support of condemning the violence against me. | ||
| I appreciate it, even as a small gesture, because it's unfortunate that The political climate is so ugly that a lot of their colleagues in their party don't feel that it's | ||
| politically safe to speak out against what happened to me. | ||
| And what's a sad irony, I guess, is that these are the same people who, the ones who remain silent are the ones who came out batting for Jussie Smollett right away. | ||
| But how does that make you feel, just as a gay person, how does that make you feel? | ||
| The way they've used gay people for their own benefit. | ||
| And in this case, again, I know you don't wanna play this game, I just, I can see it in you, | ||
| and I don't like playing this game either, but just to use their stuff against them. | ||
| How does that make you feel? | ||
| Even the fact that HRC, that woman basically went after you, and then only, I'm blanking on her name, | ||
| Charlotte Clymer. | ||
| Yeah, went after you, in effect, and then only after I suspect some legal threats, then put out a mealy-mouthed retraction. | ||
| But HRC is supposed to stand up for gay people. | ||
| Here was a gay man being attacked by a mob, and they chose to throw you under the bus. | ||
| Where was the rest of the gay media? | ||
| Where was the rest of all the activist organizations? | ||
| Anybody? | ||
| Did anybody? | ||
| Did Advocate write a piece defending you? | ||
| Or Out Magazine? | ||
|
unidentified
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So it feels like we're through the looking glass. | |
| The legacy gay rights lobby is, I would argue, they made themselves irrelevant. | ||
| They made themselves so partisan. | ||
| They've given up on their principles. | ||
| And so I think And how that manifests so clearly is the communications staffer, Charlotte, for Human Rights Campaign, which is probably the largest gay rights lobby in the United States. | ||
| After I was attacked, came out and called me a weasel and said that I was looking for that type of reaction and essentially that I deserved what happened to me. | ||
| But it's just important, because I don't want to gloss over this. | ||
| The point is, she could have just sat it out. | ||
| She could have just ignored what happened altogether, but she chose to go after a gay man who was just attacked. | ||
| And again, I hate saying it through this lens, because I hate talking about these things this way. | ||
| But she made that choice of doing it. | ||
| Well, I think it demonstrates this use of so-called minority communities or marginalized people as a political tool for power. | ||
| And it has nothing to do with actually defending their rights. | ||
| I mean, Human Rights Campaign, you know, they constantly complain about how there aren't enough LGBT people in journalism. | ||
| And here you have somebody Myself, who works in this field and was attacked brazenly by a mob of masked individuals, and your communications person responding like this? | ||
| I mean, she has come out with an apology later. | ||
| I imagine probably because she faced I mean, it looks bad for the organization, right? | ||
| So, at least they have some type of... But do you accept, I mean, just personally, do you accept those breadcrumbs? | ||
| When a politician sends out a but tweet, I don't agree with him, but... Or when they send out, you know, a week later when they half-apologize because you know that the public pressure forced you to do it. | ||
| I mean, just you personally. | ||
| Is that good enough for you? | ||
| I say I appreciate it because In Portland, you know, the politicians here are supposed to represent me. | ||
| The mayor, I have not heard from the mayor at all. | ||
| He hasn't reached out to me. | ||
| And nobody on city council. | ||
| And none of the politicians in the state of Oregon either. | ||
| So... | ||
| That these other people, even saying these small statements just as a gesture, I appreciate it because those closer to me in my own city have remained silent. | ||
| And the silence is deafening. | ||
| So yes, these are just breadcrumbs. | ||
| It's just generic platitudes, whatever. | ||
| But I think it still, it takes a certain amount of bravery now to do that if you're part of the left, I think, to defend somebody who people perceive to be on the right. | ||
| Yeah, God, what an absolute disaster. | ||
| If only someone had been talking about this on YouTube for the last couple of years, that this was gonna happen, you know? | ||
| So, all right, let's talk about Portland itself, though. | ||
| So first, actually, can you just tell me a little bit more about your process when you go out into one of these situations? | ||
| Because there were a lot of these, the blue check, Twitterati. | ||
| He's instigating it, he wants to get hit, he wants to get beaten so he can use it for fundraising, all these things. | ||
| Can you just talk about what it's like? | ||
| I mean, the average person, I know, I don't think I would do it, what you've done, and I've seen you do it many times. | ||
| Just go out there and try to videotape. | ||
| That's all you do. | ||
| I've never seen you really get in anyone's face, certainly violently attack anybody or instigate anyone with words. | ||
| You're trying to document what's going out there. | ||
| But can you just talk a little bit about your process, how you think about, uh-oh, if it starts to get violent, what you're gonna do, Yeah, it's fascinating to see high-profile people on social media who won't even their | ||
| Defamatory motives and claims that I behaved a certain way. | ||
| How I conduct myself is always very professionally. | ||
| I go to these events. | ||
| Before that day, I used my phone as my video camera. | ||
| On that day, I was excited to try out my new GoPro, but that was robbed during the beating. | ||
| I just go and I record. | ||
| I don't interact with the people. | ||
| I don't say anything. | ||
| I stay within the public spaces. | ||
| It is important to recognize that there is, now that anybody can start a YouTube channel, there are certain people who come in to be really provocative. | ||
| They, you know, literally shove a camera in somebody's face and ask them inflammatory questions. | ||
| That's not my style. | ||
| And those people should not be attacked either, because they're not breaking the law. | ||
| At a public demonstration, anybody can Record and speak to anybody, right? | ||
| And it's within the rights of the people who don't want to be recorded to walk out of frame or move away. | ||
| The way the Antifa responded to me was like a series of escalations on that day. | ||
| So before I was mobbed, attacked, in the morning in the park where they were, they had congregated, when I was just walking around they had sent their goons, basically, In the masks, in the black outfits, to surround me at various points, to prevent me from walking around. | ||
| Or they would use their bodies to try to block my cameras. | ||
| Where are the police at this point? | ||
| When they see a mob, basically, of masked people stopping a citizen, forget that you're a journalist, stopping a citizen from walking down the street, where are the police? | ||
| Feet away, watching and doing nothing. | ||
| So I had been milkshaked in two separate instances that morning, one to the head and one to the face. | ||
| And both of that, I was live streaming on my phone at the time when it happened, so people can see the footage on my Twitter. | ||
| Both were reported to police. | ||
| And, you know, the suspects Runs away, but is still within the area. | ||
| So I'm letting police know, hey, it's this masked person right here. | ||
| I don't know who it is, but I can point this individual out. | ||
| They let me know this day, as they've let me know many times, that they will not approach, question, detain the suspect because it could incite the crowd. | ||
| So that just gave the mob, basically, it empowered them because they knew that they could Do more and more within literal eyesight, sometimes even an arm's length away from police, and do it with impunity. | ||
| So the police were basically flat out telling you they were not going to do anything? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Short of, I suppose, if someone had hit you with a crowbar right in front of them, I guess they would have done something? | ||
| Or in effect, they didn't? | ||
| So basically, they let me know that they would only intervene when there's threat of serious bodily, imminent bodily injury or death. | ||
| Which is crazy, because one of those milkshakes, for all you know, it could be boiling hot water. | ||
| It could be anything, right? | ||
| It could be acid, it could be anything. | ||
| And there's so much injury you can do to somebody short of killing them, right? | ||
| So, I mean, I was able to walk away from the beating, but I ended up with a serious brain hemorrhage. | ||
| And so, Portland is, to set the context for your listeners all around, and viewers all around the world, it's a progressive bubble. | ||
| And in many ways, it's a very beautiful city, and it's a hipster city, lots of great restaurants and green trees, lovely. | ||
| At the same time, because it's this political monoculture, people don't really realize how extreme some of the views on the far left that are normalized in the city. | ||
| So Antifa, unfortunately, has quite a bit of I would call like legitimacy by a lot of people who would not participate in violence, who wouldn't necessarily condone the violence, but view it as for a good cause. | ||
| And Antifa hated me because I was one of the journalists who was going in and actively challenging that narrative. | ||
| So were you afraid that you already, because you've done videos about them, because you're one of the guys that's out there and you've been outspoken about it, that you're going to expose what they're doing? | ||
| When you've gone to these subsequently, have you been more afraid, or has your sense gone off that, oh, I could actually be a target now? | ||
| Because they know my face. | ||
| They know what I look like, and I'm out there, and now they could turn this on me very easily. | ||
| Because they believe that words are violence, as you said. | ||
| The fear I had was more so of being bear mace as has happened on May Day and getting stuff thrown at me, which now I look back and I feel very naive for thinking that they wouldn't escalate it to a beating, right? | ||
| And also, I thought, OK, this is going to be in the heart of downtown. | ||
| Police had been aware for weeks that Antifa had been calling for people to come for physical confrontation. | ||
| That was the word they used. | ||
| They put out posts and advertised their event on social media. | ||
| That's another issue, that social media doesn't treat them as a violent extremist movement. | ||
| I guess I thought the police would do their job, you know? | ||
| So in that moment when you were getting hit, how close were the police actually at that particular moment? | ||
| Do you even know? | ||
| During the mob beating? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It seemed like none of them were there. | ||
| They were watching the protesters earlier, but then at some point either moved away or chose not to intervene. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| After the beating was done, I just kept thinking the police at any point were going to come in and help me. | ||
| It never happened. | ||
| And as I'm trying to walk away, people are continuing to throw stuff, eggs and hard stuff and milkshakes at my face. | ||
| And I had to walk all the way across the park, across the street, and before I... | ||
| I couldn't walk any longer. | ||
| I was losing my balance. | ||
| I sat down in front of the courthouse, and then the medics that were associated with the police, the SWAT medic team, came up to me, and I thought I was like, finally, I was going to get help now. | ||
| I think I was live streaming that moment. | ||
| The first thing I said was, where the hell were you? | ||
| And then after they asked me a few questions, somebody had called an ambulance, but they let me know that I had to walk Back to the precinct, back to where the mob was, where I was just beaten in order to get help. | ||
| And that was... That's what the medics told you? | ||
| Yes, that was very shocking to me, because I don't know what was going on, but, you know, the rioters were continuing to move further down this time. | ||
| Maybe they were so short-staffed that they had to go back, you know, to monitor that group. | ||
| But they left me alone and told me to go walk back to where these... So, just let's be real clear, the bloodied journalists who had just been attacked... Yeah. | ||
| Who barely could walk at this point, and you didn't know at the time, but you had a brain hemorrhage. | ||
| They told you to go back to where you were attacked, and then that's what you did? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So you walked back there, and then there, what was it, the same people, or was it different people that then took care of you and got you in the ambulance? | ||
| The ambulance was waiting there. | ||
| I think the ambulance couldn't pick me up, this is just my speculation, but the streets were shut down by this unlawful demonstration. | ||
| Which they've let happen many times before, we've seen many. | ||
| That's the norm. | ||
| Can you explain that a little bit, what they've done just in terms of stopping traffic, I mean actually just, which is illegal by the way. | ||
| Yeah, so I wasn't the only one beaten that day. | ||
| There's been so many viral clips that have come out of Portland of Antifa and their allies attacking people with impunity in the streets, and their demonstrations are never permitted. | ||
| So these are unlawful demonstrations. | ||
| They shut down traffic, and they literally shout, whose streets are streets? | ||
| And the police cow, the mayor is cowed by them. | ||
| In October of last year, there was a viral footage of them shutting down a busy intersection in downtown and hitting people's cars and threatening drivers with violence and using all these racial slurs against some of the drivers. | ||
| And there was an elderly man who tried to drive by and they wouldn't let him, but he drove through them anyways. | ||
| And then they attacked him. | ||
| Like, and that wasn't the first time either. | ||
| There was other incidents of them just using weapons on citizens in public. | ||
| And by the way, the blue checked Twitterati on that one tried to make it seem like he was the bad guy. | ||
| He didn't know if he was going to be killed right before that. | ||
| He had no idea. | ||
| He did what he had to do. | ||
| So, I mean, this is my plea to the city's leadership. | ||
| I don't know how many—I asked them how many more people have to be injured before they actually enact some policy changes. | ||
| I mean, the mayor—nine days after my attack, the mayor finally did a press conference and came out with Just platitudes condemning violence. | ||
| He wouldn't even express support for the police chief had proposed that Portland should ban the wearing a mask while in the commission of a crime, which makes absolute sense. | ||
| He couldn't even express support for that. | ||
| So do you think, okay, so Ted Wheeler is the mayor of Portland? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I get what you're saying about sort of why the lefties acquiesce to this stuff. | ||
| But do you think he's actually... Do you think he wants this to happen? | ||
| I mean, it strikes me that at this point he is so negligent. | ||
| Like, this guy should have to step down. | ||
| I see no way that someone like him shouldn't have to step down. | ||
| He is allowing vigilantes to run his city. | ||
| Do you think this is what he wants? | ||
| And that's why he won't make a real statement about this. | ||
| Have you tried to reach out to him? | ||
| I assume you have. | ||
| Not since the attack. | ||
| Or your team hasn't, you haven't. | ||
| Well, let's let this be the public. | ||
| Ted Wheeler, you're welcome to come in here. | ||
| I'll be happy to facilitate the conversation or I'll just get out of here and you two can do it without me. | ||
| But what do you think his motivation actually is? | ||
| Does he want his city to burn? | ||
| I mean, what do you really think? | ||
| There are a number of variables that is creating this storm in Portland, and it should be a harbinger for other people watching around the country. | ||
| So, Ted Wheeler also—Portland has a weird political system. | ||
| He's also the police commissioner. | ||
| That's a conflict of interest. | ||
| He's also up for reelection. | ||
| Poland is a very progressive city that's quite radical and anti-police. | ||
| So you have all these variables together. | ||
| It creates the conditions for somebody who's supposed to be leading to sort of turn a blind eye to political violence on the left, right? | ||
| I think he's fearful of His constituents who are supportive of Antifa. | ||
| And to date, he's never said Antifa by name. | ||
| He had no issue naming some of the right-wing groups during his presser just yesterday or the day before. | ||
| But he would not name Antifa, and that's very strategic. | ||
| So my impression of him, his political background, my sense is that he's a A mainstream Democrat, but he recognizes that to remain in power, to have political influence in Portland, you have to play favor to Antifa and the militant far left. | ||
| Have you ever seen violence like this when you're covering the sort of what they would describe as the far-right version of this, or when you've seen some of these nationalist groups? | ||
| What's walking into that? | ||
| How is that different than walking into an Antifa event? | ||
| The right-wing groups are covered Extremely negatively and inaccurately in the local press. | ||
| They make it seem as if these groups are just meeting on the streets of downtown and then fighting random people. | ||
| Usually what happens is they hold their own rally or protest or march or whatever. | ||
| And what is it that their beliefs usually are? | ||
| Patriotism. | ||
| Sometimes they're condemning Ted Wheeler. | ||
| It's just a whole bunch of right-wing things. | ||
| And it should be stated that a lot of the demonstrations from the right-wing groups are provocative, as well. | ||
| I mean, the 29th of June, there was a Proud Boys flag-waving event, which was completely peaceful. | ||
| There was no conflict there. | ||
| They were at one part of the city, and another part of the city, there was a men's rights activist group. | ||
| Very small. | ||
| So Antifa comes in and they... But wait, I just want to understand what the violent part of that is. | ||
| I'm not trying to sit here and excuse far-right violence. | ||
| So you said patriotism and they don't like Ted Wheeler and maybe a men's rights group. | ||
| But what's the part of that that's far-right or what's the part of that that's potentially violent or something? | ||
| I'm genuinely just trying to understand. | ||
| Because everyone says that that's where the violence is coming from, if you listen. | ||
| to the main narrative. | ||
| So what is the violent part of that? | ||
| Or what is the far right part of that? | ||
| I think, so Portland has had a lot of these right-wing demonstrations since 2017. | ||
| And at that time, Patriot Prayer, run by a man called Joey Gibson, | ||
| his events were open to the public and they attracted some genuine people from the far right. | ||
| And I don't think he did a very good job at that time in the beginning of keeping those extremist elements out. | ||
| And certainly this is an issue of when you organize free speech events or whatever and you portray yourself as | ||
| conservative or right wing, you're going to draw a certain element from the population | ||
| that is fringe on the right. | ||
| I think to Gibson's credit now, he has tried to mainstream his views and the way he organizes. | ||
| And it seems genuine. | ||
| I don't know him very well. | ||
| But that reputation has always followed him in all these groups, because they used to do stuff together as well. | ||
| So people are then using the fact that because these events in the past have drawn out extreme alt-right people to the events. | ||
| That's all of what that right-wing movement is about, and it's not. | ||
| You know, I... But again, I'm not trying to excuse that element. | ||
| Like, that element that is a racist element absolutely should be exposed and talked about and all of those things. | ||
| But are those people being violent also? | ||
| Like, when you've gone in and covered them, or when other journalists, or just when passers-by go by, are these guys violent? | ||
| It's a little hard to figure out. | ||
| I mean, it just is. | ||
| I think this is the simplest way to answer it. | ||
| So, Antifa comes in to start the violence, start the fight, and these right-wing guys will finish the fight. | ||
| And some of them can be very brutal. | ||
| So, in their view, it's self-defense. | ||
| I mean, it's street brawling, you know? | ||
| I don't condone that activity either. | ||
| But in and of itself, I'm just really trying to understand this, in and of itself if you | ||
| went to cover one of those events, you don't feel that you would be attacked or they would | ||
| just let you stand there and do your thing? | ||
| I've never witnessed them attacking journalists, even journalists that are hostile to them who | ||
| come from progressive media. | ||
| And the right-wing activists and leaders are actually quite willing to engage and speak with the progressive press. | ||
| Actually, the opposite is not true. | ||
| Does Ted Wheeler have any opposition? | ||
| There's got to be an election coming up at some point. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I haven't been... | ||
| I've been so concentrated on, focused on my healing and Antifa. | ||
| I haven't really paid attention to, I guess, the political battles that are now playing out in City Hall, right? | ||
| I hope that with me continuing to speak out and doing, in the media covering this, that Maybe enough people in Portland will wake up and be like, well, you know, I don't support the right wing or whatever, but this is a problem that we have in this city. | ||
| And recognizing that this group is more, they're not like these righteous, self-defense type of movement. | ||
| It truly is a violent revolutionary Marxist Movement agitating for revolution and the modus operandi is violence. | ||
| And so, it's like you said earlier, you might be spared now, but later they'll come for you as well. | ||
| But, I mean, we've been dealing with the violence in the city now since 2016, and there still seems to be Widespread, tacit support for Antifa. | ||
| What's it like for you to be thrown into this? | ||
| For a journalist, from the amount that I know you and having some drinks with you and we sat in a Portland bar and you were talking about wanting to meet somebody and just being a regular human. | ||
| It's been hard to live and work in Portland. | ||
| but then to suddenly be the news cycle, which wasn't your intent, | ||
| to not only have to deal with the physical wounds of it and the emotional wounds, | ||
| but then to also be the story. | ||
| What has the last 10 or so days been like for you? | ||
| It's been hard to live and work in Portland. | ||
| I've been personally on Grata for a while now. | ||
| As my profile has risen, I've also gained a lot of haters. | ||
| Um... | ||
| So it's difficult to be so widely disliked in the place you call home. | ||
| And being gay as well, you know, so much of the gay community has been pulled into this This world view of intolerance and it's unfortunate. | ||
| So I don't have much community in terms of friends or other gay people. | ||
| And that is difficult. | ||
| At the same time, the experience with the beating has shown me who my friends are and those who are willing to come out to support me, not just privately, but in public as well. | ||
| And now I'm dealing with a certain amount of anxiety that I didn't have before because I haven't stated this publicly, but I've been dealing with more threats of violence after the attack. | ||
| Just people Promising to make sure that I won't walk away next time, or that if they see me in the streets, they're gonna repeat what happened. | ||
| How are these threats coming in now? | ||
| This is email, this is social media? | ||
| It's coming through email, it's coming through social media, all of course anonymous, reported to police as well. | ||
| You report these to the Portland Police? | ||
| Portland Police, yeah. | ||
| And we pretty much know they're not going to do anything. | ||
| Have you reported any of this to the FBI or anything like that? | ||
| When I was doxxed in May, I reported that to the local FBI and I didn't... | ||
| I never even received a return call. | ||
| I told them I needed to speak with them, too, because there was only so much they could take out from the initial report over the phone. | ||
| And they said, maybe somebody will call you back. | ||
| They never did. | ||
| So, you know, I feel like I'm not getting much institutional support. | ||
| And, yeah, so now I have a certain amount of anxiety even being in public in my own home city, right? | ||
| I haven't gone out too much, but when I have, it's like I just experience a certain amount of trauma of, like, that person's walking quickly behind me. | ||
| Are they going to hit me? | ||
| You know, like, a lot of these thoughts are kind of irrational. | ||
| It's so frustrating that Antifa has been able to do that to me. | ||
| And I've been asked, you know, are you going to continue to do the same work as you're doing before? | ||
| In August there's going to be another protest planned. | ||
| And my initial response in my mind has always... I want to say, of course I'm not going to change. | ||
| You know, I've been fearless before. | ||
| They tried to intimidate me into silence. | ||
| It hasn't worked. | ||
| It won't work. | ||
| But now I recognize, you know, like, they nearly killed me on the 29th. | ||
| I can't be so naive as to think that police will actually be protecting citizens, law-abiding citizens anymore, which is a terrible thing to accept, right, for any citizen. | ||
| So, going forward, things are changing, and it's unfortunate. | ||
| I tell this particular next part because I think it's important that people... The morning that I left to cover that Antifa demonstration, I originally had on a helmet because they had been escalating stuff in the previous months, and I was thinking maybe just to be safe I'll wear a helmet. | ||
| But I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I just thought, I didn't want anybody there in the group to get the impression that I came there looking to provoke and to be a combatant. | ||
| So foolishly I took off the helmet. | ||
| I left it at home. | ||
| This is the thing about the black block. | ||
| It's not just a strategy to cover your face and wear black so you can do crimes and melt back into the crowd. | ||
| It's also to erase any sense of individuality as well, because now they're operating as a group. | ||
| And when they first started being very hostile to me last year and surrounding me, I remember at that time I was just thinking, they have, they don't know who I am. | ||
| They've heard incorrect information about me. | ||
| Maybe I can look at them face to face, you know, in the eyes and let them realize that I'm not the villain that they think I am. | ||
| But I was unsuccessful and I think the black block prevents that. | ||
| You know, you're wearing sunglasses so you don't even know who you're talking to. | ||
| You can't even look into their eyes. | ||
| And that's been, it's been, I think that's how they're able to dehumanize me to the point where they would attack me like that. | ||
| They don't see me as human. | ||
| They have created a phantom. | ||
| What do you think it is about you that makes you do this? | ||
| Why you? | ||
| allegedly did or said untrue. | ||
| And so, you know, some of the most dangerous people are the ones who think they are doing it for a righteous | ||
| cause. | ||
| And that's what Antifa is. | ||
| What do you think it is about you that makes you do this? | ||
| Why you? | ||
| I mean, somebody would look at you and go, you know, mild-mannered, soft-spoken. | ||
| You're a sweet guy. | ||
| You're not physically imposing. | ||
| you're not physically imposing. | ||
| Why you? | ||
| I just, it seemed like there was a very serious blind spot in the media before I left militancy | ||
| and I was frustrated by that. | ||
| You know, there was so much focus on not just the far-right, but just right-wing organizing. | ||
| And at the same time, what I was seeing happening around me was militants from the far-left, and not really getting fair coverage or accurate coverage. | ||
| I just thought, well, If nobody's gonna do it, I'll go out and do it. | ||
| And... A lot of colleagues have told me, like, in the past, like, Andy, you should stop. | ||
| You know, like, these people have made their hatred for you known and they threaten you and have hit you before. | ||
| Don't go out and do it anymore. | ||
| I ignored those warnings and I went out just because maybe I'm naive. | ||
| I just kept thinking that, you know, the police are always nearby. | ||
| They're not going to let something really serious happen to me, but they did that day. | ||
| I feel very let down. | ||
| I don't blame rank-and-file officers. | ||
| I know they're following orders, you know, so... | ||
| This next part of this long journey and challenge after this initial stuff will be the legal struggle, so I'm very lucky to have representation by Harmeet Dhillon. | ||
| But, you know, if the evidence leads to suing the city, the police, the mayor, you know, if the evidence supports that, this is a very expensive and long battle. | ||
| And the legacy civil rights groups are not serving a certain segment of the population who have their civil rights violated. | ||
| Yeah, where are they? | ||
| Where are they? | ||
| Double minority, if we want to play that game. | ||
| Has anyone reached out to you from any of these organizations? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| So, you know, with people listening and watching, if they're wondering how you can get involved next, Hamid Dhillon, my attorney, has a non-profit, probliuslex.com. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Guys, let's get the link to that in the description right now. | ||
| p-u-b-l-i-u-s-l-e-x dot com and I'm their first client so it's going to take a lot of money and | ||
| resources but hopefully it won't have to come to that you know the city does the right thing | ||
| first thing I want to see those who attacked me who aided them brought to justice | ||
| So what would be the right thing? | ||
| Because I know nobody wants to go through a lawsuit. | ||
| Look, Harmeet's an incredible First Amendment lawyer and she's fighting all sorts of stuff. | ||
| I've talked with her about several things that I've been involved in over the last but I know that's not your preference, | ||
| is to have to get involved with that. | ||
| It's just endlessly expensive, it's draining, you have other things you wanna do. | ||
| What could the city of Portland, if Ted Wheeler is watching this, | ||
| what could he do to start setting this thing right? | ||
| Well, one, the police investigating it fully, finding out who these masked assailants are, | ||
| charging them, convicting them, and then making changes | ||
| in how they actually police protests. | ||
| For one thing, it should be a no-brainer that being masked while committing crimes should carry additional penalties, right? | ||
| Not allowing people to unlawfully shut down streets, as they've been doing with impunity over and over and over. | ||
| And the mayor keeps saying, you know, Basically they allow this because we're a city that we're a beacon of free speech. | ||
| It's actually the reverse. | ||
| Free speech doesn't give people the right to physically attack people and intimidate others. | ||
| Literal intimidation and menacing, not microaggressions or whatever, right? | ||
| So, yeah, the mayor is using this use of free speech to basically justify his inaction. | ||
| That's frustrating. | ||
| But I want to see the criminal prosecutions of the people who attacked me. | ||
| And then from there, you know, hopefully there won't have to be a long legal battle. | ||
| The city can do the right thing. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| I mean, but we'll see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I know you did CNN, you've done a bunch of Fox things, you've done some of these podcasts. | ||
| MSNBC, did they reach out to you? | ||
| Have you done anything over there? | ||
| I think there was a effort by some leftist journalists and center left journalists to delegitimize me | ||
| as a journalist because they recognize that freedom of the press is quite sacred | ||
| and it would be a huge blow to the Antifa propaganda if people realize the truth | ||
| that they actually do attack journalists. | ||
| I'm not the first. | ||
| In the city itself, it's been caught on video. | ||
| They have gone after local television news as well because they report on these protests quite accurately and just doing straight news. | ||
| They target them as well. | ||
| Now they have, you know, some people, journalists who write favorably about Antifa, say like, oh, I wasn't attacked, you know. | ||
| Don't make it seem like they're just attacking journalists. | ||
| I was fine. | ||
| They don't target certain journalists for a reason. | ||
| The television news crew now come with security. | ||
| So, I mean, earlier I laid out my resume. | ||
| I work on the editorial team of Quillette. | ||
| Very lucky to be a part of that. | ||
| So it's like, I mean, if I'm not a journalist because I also do column writing and express my opinion, then, I mean, if that's the precedent these people want to take at some point, it's going to be turned back on them. | ||
| Well, of course. | ||
| And it's also just an absurd precedent. | ||
| So when I'm watching these Journalists say, well, he's not a journalist, or he's a conservative, or he's a fascist. | ||
| The implication being, well, what are you saying? | ||
| So you're allowed to attack people who aren't journalists on the street? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| Are you allowed to attack conservatives? | ||
| Even if someone was a self-proclaimed fascist, are you allowed to attack them? | ||
| And I suppose their answer is yes. | ||
| I think it is yes. | ||
| The provocation to them can be just existing with the wrong ideas. | ||
| You saw how they I mean, it's still surreal to me to see the mainstream response to the Covington Boys, right? | ||
| Like this visceral hatred for somebody because of the look on their face or the hat they were wearing. | ||
| In my coverage of Antifa and the people who joined that militancy movement and those who | ||
| have strong sympathies for it, I think it does draw in a lot of people with personality | ||
| disorders and those who are sociopathic as well. | ||
| I mean, it takes—you have to be mentally unwell, I think, to so easily dehumanize other | ||
| people that you don't even know. | ||
| And this is where, like, sometimes I try to humanize these people that I'm covering who hate me so much. | ||
| You know, like, there's people who have reached out to me who have recognized some of them when they're briefly unmasked, and be like, I knew this person from back then, they were struggling with this or that. | ||
| I'm just like, So I recognize they're manifesting their pain in this way, and it's unfortunate they're choosing it in violent hatred for the other. | ||
| This country, there's a lot of healing that needs to happen. | ||
| There are elements that are really pushing polarization for the political ends, and I'm concerned about Where it's leading, where it's continuing to lead. | ||
| Portland is a warning to other cities of what happens when you have a factless political leadership and governance that allows this to fester on and on and on. | ||
| And with 2020 coming soon, I'm scared about what might happen if they don't accept the election results again. | ||
| So Michelle Malkin, who some people would say is a far-right provocateur. | ||
| I'll leave it up to people to say whatever they want. | ||
| She started a GoFundMe for you. | ||
| First off, did you know her before this? | ||
| It's raised something like $200,000. | ||
| I was thrilled to donate and to share it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Did you know her? | ||
| Did you expect that kind of outpouring? | ||
| I mean, thousands of people donated. | ||
| That's a lot of money that'll help you with medical costs and a whole bunch of other stuff. | ||
| I did know her. | ||
| I expressed... I have so much gratitude for her. | ||
| She is such a brave woman and... I only preface saying that, you know, some people say she's this because that's the way we're all treated now. | ||
| I don't think she's far right. | ||
| She is... | ||
| Fearless in the work that she goes and does. | ||
| She's, like me, has written a lot about hate crime hoaxes. | ||
| And I think that's how we originally connected online, our shared interest in that. | ||
| You know, I think she said somewhere publicly that she didn't get a lot of support when she was starting out in her career as a young woman in this field. | ||
| She's made it her choice to try to advocate for other young people now that she's in a position of, you know, she's accomplished and has influence and all that. | ||
| And I owe so much to her for, you know, on her own, she started this GoFundMe. | ||
| When I was in hospital and all that, I didn't know really what was going on in, you know, the outside world. | ||
| But to see, like, somebody genuine, somebody that, somebody that we, I haven't met her face to face, but take, you know, care for a stranger, basically, in that way is, You know I'm trying to look at the positive side and the silver lining of like after the beating because these people came out and including yourself has defended me and spoken publicly and supported me as others tried to denigrate me and I just want to thank Michelle for that. | ||
| She didn't have to do it. | ||
| She didn't need to do it, but she did it. | ||
| And I hope when I'm older and more experienced that I can express that type of mentorship to somebody younger and working in this field. | ||
| Because it can be really brutal and hard, especially if you have a dissident opinion. | ||
| Well, I just want to say to you that I consider you a friend. | ||
| I considered you a friend before this, but you know, I've had a couple moments over the years of doing this show where I'm sitting across from somebody where they've been thrust into something that maybe they didn't choose. | ||
| Somebody like a James Damore, Lindsey Shepard, or even Jordan Peterson, or Brett Weinstein, where the world hit them. | ||
| Not because they were a bad person, but because they stood up for something. | ||
| And I know in most cases, you don't really want it. | ||
| I mean, I can see it in you. | ||
| It's not, this is not what you want, but I sense you're going to do something incredible with this. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| There's nothing you can do about it now. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And it's like, I have a feeling you'll be back out there, maybe in a slightly different | ||
| capacity or with some other precautions or something like that. | ||
| But anything I can do to help along the ride, I'm here for you. | ||
| And I thank you for coming in. | ||
| And I know you're still having some of the physical effects and all that stuff. | ||
| I told you, I know you're staying in LA for a couple of days. | ||
| I said, get to the beach. | ||
| But I know you're looking to do some other things and some other meetings and all that. | ||
| Would you get to the beach for ... Could you do an hour maybe in Santa Monica? | ||
| You'll do an hour in Santa Monica? | ||
| I need to relax. | ||
| Yeah, a little relaxation. | ||
| Well, thank you, Andy. | ||
| You guys can follow Andy. | ||
| It's at MrAndyNo on Twitter. | ||
| We are going to put the link. | ||
| Can you just spell it out for me one more time for the nonprofit? | ||
| P-U-B-L-I-U-S L-E-X dot com, Publius Lex dot com. | ||
| Publius Lex dot com is the non-profit that will be helping some of his legal fund. |
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