Feb. 7, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
50:15
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| You know, when you talk about the protests that happened in 2017 by some far-left people at that time, like, as bad as it was, I thought at that time, I actually quite miss it, because at that time it was people just yelling and making a scene and trying to interrupt events. | ||
| Unfortunately, since then, the political violence has continued to devolve, not just in Portland, but actually through Many American cities and throughout 2020, Portland and Seattle became the epicenter of far left American violence, where in my home city, the city you've been to several times to speak, there were more than 120 days of recurring nightly violence. | ||
| So you're in Los Angeles. | ||
| I know there was some rioting that happened after George Floyd died. | ||
| Imagine what you saw there happening for four months straight. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is an American journalist best known for covering the Antifa protests in Portland and author of the new already best-selling book, Unmasked, Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. | ||
| Andy Ngo, my friend, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| It's so nice to be speaking with you again. | ||
| Last time we met in studio was shortly after I was beaten. | ||
| Yeah, you were hurting. | ||
| I mean, you were actually still in quite a bit of pain and you were medicated and everything else. | ||
| I actually think that's probably the best place we can start because I was trying to chronicle just the amount of time that I've known you. | ||
| And I think I sort of came aware of you. | ||
| We've sort of risen in the online world or whatever it is. | ||
| Starting in around 2015 or so. | ||
| In 2016, or 2017, I did an event at Portland State University, and obviously you're from Portland, that's where you do most of your work, and have uncovered most of this Antifa stuff there. | ||
| I did an event with Christina Hoff Sommers, the feminist, and Peter Boghossian, the philosophy professor, and Antifa was there. | ||
| It was the first time that they had ever protested anything that I had been part of. | ||
| They called me a homophobe, of course. | ||
| They called Christina a misogynist, of course. | ||
| They called Peter a white supremacist, of course. | ||
| And we did an event that, you know, had to have a lot of security and there was a lot of tension and police had to escort us and the whole thing. | ||
| Anyway, I mention all of that because I met you right after the event because you were covering it and you were... | ||
| You know, you were sort of just, with all due respect, my friend, you were like a kid journalist, and you were just kind of figuring out your thing, and now you've become the center of what's going on with Antifa. | ||
| So first off, my hat off to you. | ||
| And now that I've talked enough to start the show, can you talk just a little bit about that? | ||
| Just sort of where you started with this whole thing? | ||
| Because now everyone just thinks you're part of it, but you were just a scrappy kid trying to do journalism. | ||
| Yeah, that's right, Dave. | ||
| Actually, I was part of the student group that organized the event that invited you. | ||
| So just four years ago, I was just this student journalist, part of the free expression group at university who was a fan of yours. | ||
| And It's been such a privilege to not just become better friends with you over the years, but then to rise up in our careers and our work, because it's really linked. | ||
| And I think when you talk about the protests that happened in 2017 by some far-left people at that time, As bad as it was, I thought at that time, I actually quite miss it. | ||
| Because at that time, it was people just yelling and making a scene and trying to interrupt events. | ||
| Unfortunately, since then, political violence has continued to devolve, not just in Portland, but actually through many American cities. | ||
| And throughout 2020, Portland and Seattle became the epicenter of far-left American violence. | ||
| Where in my home city, the city you've been to several times to speak, there were more than 120 days of recurring nightly violence. | ||
| So you're in Los Angeles. | ||
| I know there was some rioting that happened after George Floyd died. | ||
| Imagine what you saw there happening for four months straight. | ||
| That's what happened in Portland. | ||
| And it's still ongoing now. | ||
| It's just become weekly. | ||
| It's picked up speed this week alone. | ||
| We had, let's see, three riots in Portland involving Antifa. | ||
| So when you started seeing this, right? | ||
| So you, as you said, you were part of a student group. | ||
| You invite a couple people that we all considered ourselves good liberal moderates. | ||
| And I remember before the event, because there was this threat of violence, they had to hide us in a room and we had a police escort that had to take us from one room to the event. | ||
| By the way, the event ended up being spectacular. | ||
| It's online. | ||
| We'll link to it in the bio here. | ||
| And it was fun. | ||
| And, you know, fortunately, there was no violence, but people were angry outside. | ||
| So that was sort of the beginning of all of this. | ||
| Then over the last couple of years, it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. | ||
| What was it about it that you saw that you knew that this was gonna happen? | ||
| Because you've been tracking it the whole time. | ||
| Well, I knew it wasn't just a university or campus phenomenon, what we were experiencing since going back to around 2015. | ||
| The ideology that was justifying these outbursts of Uh, far left rage and sometimes violence on campuses would inevitably spill out to the wider cities where these universities are and where these students were returning to. | ||
| And so, uh, and that's exactly what happened very quickly in Portland. | ||
| And I think the turning point particular for it's moving, spilling out, pouring out from academe into the streets. | ||
| Um, what's the surprise election winner, Donald Trump. | ||
| So that just. | ||
| gave an excuse for all the excesses of the far left to go out and wreak havoc in the name of anti-fascism, | ||
| anti-racism and social justice. | ||
| And they were given the legitimacy they needed through the mainstream media | ||
| and through unfortunately left-wing Democrat politicians. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So for people that just see the videos now, and we've all seen the videos of what's going on | ||
| in Portland and Seattle and everywhere else. | ||
| For people that are sort of just watching from the outside that haven't been to events, you know, I've been protested many times. | ||
| You actually helped another video that I was part of go viral when I was up in Canada. | ||
| And Antifa showed up and they were protesting that woman in the walker trying to cross the street, calling her a Nazi. | ||
| It turned out, of course, that her husband was a veteran of World War II, literally fought Nazis. | ||
| But these are the types of things that you've seen over and over. | ||
| For people that don't really pay attention though, that just see those little viral videos, and unfortunately you don't see them on mainstream enough, what is Antifa? | ||
| See, the videos I don't think truly show the threat we're facing. | ||
| Some of them do, but I mean, like, these extremists carried out an insurrection in my city where night after night they were going with knives and guns and explosives and organizing themselves into different units in a marauding gang, essentially starting fires and They eventually killed somebody. | ||
| But to answer your question, what is Antifa? | ||
| It is a movement in ideology and shadowy networks of people who call themselves anti-fascist, but actually espouse an anarchist, communist, extremist ideology. | ||
| So there's a lot of meaning in their acts of violence. | ||
| I know it can look kind of meaningless and without purpose. | ||
| But for example, the attacks on the federal courthouse in Portland last July that lasted for weeks when they tried to burn down that federal facility, that was because they viewed the American criminal justice system as a system of enslavement, of racism, a remaining relic of white supremacy. | ||
| That's why they were doing that. | ||
| That's why they attacked law enforcement and called for its abolishment. | ||
| That's why they go after property rights as well. They view capitalism as intrinsically | ||
| linked to racism. | ||
| And so, like, bit by bit, they've gone after not just, like, literal institutions in America, | ||
| but actually, I think, more fundamentally, the founding ideals, the rule of law, freedom of expression. | ||
| I mean, Antifa are probably most known for their anti-freedom of expression, | ||
| and that they believe it is not just appropriate, but a righteous response | ||
| to be preemptively violent to people who have wrong think or espouse the wrong views. | ||
| And this was literally what many of us were talking about for years, saying, you know, if you label everyone Nazis, and then you say it's okay to punch a Nazi, well, you've given yourself the excuse to basically not only physically attack people, but burn down buildings and everything else. | ||
| What do you make of all of the people? | ||
| And we heard this a lot. | ||
| I mean, I heard this a lot from my own people. | ||
| Oh, Dave, this is just a college campus thing. | ||
| This won't leak out into reality. | ||
| Clearly, they were not correct. | ||
| I wish they were right, but we've seen, I mean, the critical ideologies that have been mainstreamed in university, these are then carried into not just Government by people who then end up being advisors and staff who work on campaigns and people who get elected to city government become leaders and police departments. | ||
| Probably the most important thing is that that ideology then takes root completely in journalism. | ||
| So if you look in the mainstream press, you can see What's particularly happened, like America's paper Brecker, The New York Times or The Washington Post. | ||
| And you just see how it's a hard left political monoculture that is extremely intolerant and has provided so much legitimacy to far left extremism. | ||
| I mean, it's these papers who have published These really culturally significant opinion pieces in news reports as well that are sympathetic or provide a justification for property destruction, looting, and all that in the name of social justice. | ||
| Online news sites and magazines are no better. | ||
| They also argue for the need for violent protests. | ||
| So they're undoing a lot of What were norms in the United States? | ||
| And I think this is where Antifa has had the most success, not in necessarily their acts of violence and destruction, which they have done so much, created so much misery from that, but actually that tenets of the ideology have found footing in the mainstream left and have been giving a certain legitimacy in society. | ||
| And the other thing people have to realize is that For those who sympathized with, when I talked to people who were supportive of sympathizing with the Capitol Hill siege riot on the 6th of January, their response was often, well, for months and months, BLM and Antifa got to riot in response to their grievances with violence, and that was cheered on, and nothing happened to them, so why do we have to be peaceful? | ||
| So this is the danger as well that it creates antifascist extremism, creates reactions on the right and the far right that can lead to a lot of violence, and we've already seen a lot in 2020, and I don't think it's slowing down this year. | ||
| Yeah, do you sense that that double standard where when the lefties, you know, burn down buildings and attack private property and stop cars in the street and make people, you know, denounce white supremacism and the litany of other things happen, do you think the double standard from the way the media covers that to the way they covered the Capitol, obviously, without excusing any of the violence of the Capitol, That really is just completely burst forth. | ||
| Like to me at this point, CNN is not a place of journalism. | ||
| The New York Times is not a place of journalism. | ||
| Like, are you willing to go that far on that? | ||
| Well, what made me furious in seeing the condemnations from journalists, influential thinkers, politicians in response to the riot on the 6th of January is I wonder, Why they were at best silent when my city was under siege, when federal property in Portland, what those rioters did on the 6th, they did that and worse last year. | ||
| Why were they silent then, at best? | ||
| And then at worst, some of them actually were promoting these crowdfunding campaigns to get some of these accused riot suspects back on the streets. | ||
| Right, so quite literally, I mean, there were Hollywood celebrities and quote-unquote journalists putting money in and crowdfunding to get rioters that had done violent acts, illegal acts, to get them out of jail. | ||
| Not that they would have really been prosecuted in Portland or Seattle anyway. | ||
| However, I'm fairly certain if, you know, anyone on the right, if Glenn Beck or Ben Shapiro had done a GoFundMe to get some of the January 6th people, even if they hadn't been violent, out of jail, I think it might've been taken a little differently. | ||
| Are you shocked how quickly the liberals have just folded on this thing? | ||
| You know my feelings on this sort of, that this is what we've seen Antifa do to the left is sort of, it's the death end of liberalism sort of. | ||
| And I've watched so many of my friends just not be able to understand that. | ||
| Are you shocked that liberals seem to have no defense mechanism against this? | ||
| I'm not shocked anymore given what's happened in the past five years. | ||
| When liberals systematically failed to really defend what the academy should be about, that was the first sign, right? | ||
| If they're not willing to defend freedom of expression, speech in academic institutions, I don't think they would defend it outside of that. | ||
| So I'm not shocked, but I think The reason why anti-fascists have become really powerful is because they do have many, many synthesizers and supporters on the mainstream left, people who don't understand or don't know anti-fascist violence, extremist ideology, who really think that these are just merely people who are anti-fascist, who are going out to protect people of color on the street from neo-Nazis. | ||
| I think And it's a welfare ignorance, because, I mean, yes, a lot of the media has been so reckless in their coverage of Antifa, but there's also been some good coverage. | ||
| And, you know, my work has been printed in mainstream publications and all that. | ||
| But it's just, I mean, the rule that's been laid out is essentially you can do anything and everything, including kill for the alleged cause of racial justice and social justice. | ||
| So when you lay that out as, like, the context for all these things to happen, there's no ability for the left to really be able to counter, you know, and it should be pretty easy. | ||
| But, you know, Antifa, people think that if you're against them, that means you're pro-FA, if you're against BLM, that people will accuse you of being against black Americans instead of Diving into looking at what these movements actually espouse and what they do. | ||
| Have you been able to break down some of the numbers on this? | ||
| Like how many of them actually are there? | ||
| How many of them are actually taking part in the violent attacks? | ||
| Versus I think a lot of the people, when I see like they're sort of allies, In the media, like I would look at somebody like Jake Tapper. | ||
| I don't think he's like a promoter of Antifa. | ||
| I wish he, I think he probably wishes they didn't exist, but he's the type of guy that just won't really tweet when they're burning down a city. | ||
| But if the right wing does, you know, anyone on the right does anything, it's insurrection. | ||
| So have you been able to figure out just like how many foot soldiers there are versus how many just sort of self hostages in the media who just don't want to get attacked? | ||
| You know, just sort of a general breakdown of the amorphous thing. | ||
| So exact numbers across the U.S. | ||
| would be, I think, impossible to calculate just because there's no, in terms of a lot of these Antifa organizations, we have actually no idea how many people are involved. | ||
| In my book, I look specifically because I got leaked public documents internally from Rose City Antifa, which is the Portland Antifa organization, the largest one in the U.S. | ||
| So I can give estimates for, let's say, Portland. | ||
| Because we have so many data points of recurring nightly riots, how many people come. | ||
| And for that, it can range anywhere from as little as 50 people to thousands. | ||
| I notice consistently, though, the number of people who are actually donning their black uniforms, which is part of the Black Bloc tactics, and those who are committing acts of violence, that number's really, even at its peak, No more than a couple hundred. | ||
| So if there was a political will, and that's the important word here is political will, to stop this wanton extremism and violence and destruction, it can be done easily. | ||
| However, the mayor really actually continuously was giving sort of Excuses for them saying like, oh, I understand that you're protesting against racial injustice and systemic racism. | ||
| And just any time you buy into that narrative, you're giving legitimacy to that cause. | ||
| So and unfortunately, Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, didn't just it wasn't just his rhetoric. | ||
| It was actually him and city council were implementing policies such as restricting local law enforcement from actually Working with federal law enforcement when these riots were happening both simultaneously on federal and city property. | ||
| Seattle as well as Portland banned the use of tear gas in responding to rioters. | ||
| So what do you think is going on in the head of a guy like Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler? | ||
| Here's a guy who basically says to them as they're burning down his city, okay, we understand you're protesting racism. | ||
| Then he also handicaps his police officers. | ||
| as you said, he takes away some of the tactics they can do. | ||
| Then Antifa literally shows up at his apartment complex and starts attacking the building. | ||
| So he has now since moved. | ||
| He also gets harassed now at restaurants. | ||
| There's a bunch of videos on that kind of thing. | ||
| And then finally, a few weeks ago, he said something to the effect of, | ||
| we're gonna have to stop this violence. | ||
| But what do you think is actually going on in his head? | ||
| Does he really believe it? | ||
| Does he not understand how law enforcement works? | ||
| Is he completely incompetent? | ||
| Like, what's going on? | ||
| And not only him, you've got the mayor in Seattle and a bunch of others. | ||
| I think these are people, given their extremely prestigious education backgrounds, that they recognize that this is a fringe, violent, extremist movement. | ||
| But because they are, first and foremost, politicians, politicians in the case of Ted Wheeler, he ran for re-election a few months ago. | ||
| They are justly afraid of being accused of being against BLM or being against the cause of anti-fascism. | ||
| I think it really comes to cowardice. | ||
| So because of that, they've given enough space for these extremists to work in the city to the point of where they're even afraid of them. | ||
| I mean, Ted Wheeler in January of 2021 was assaulted by some anti-extremists when he was eating at a restaurant. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is a guy who literally has basically let them do whatever they want. | ||
| I mean, that's the irony, of course. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| That's right. | ||
| Can you talk about how BLM, how Black Lives Matter, the movement, is connected to this? | ||
| Because I think people are very confused about the associations there. | ||
| BLM is a separate movement and ideology in terms of what they are trying to accomplish in the US, but they share Enough common goals with Antifa that, as for now, there's a partnership, in my opinion, and depending on the chapter, it's more explicit than others. | ||
| The DC chapter of BLM, which is one of the largest in the country, is probably the most explicitly, openly allied with Antifa. | ||
| But you see this in terms of Antifa will volunteer to be security for these BLM demonstrations, and that's why they're so Able and easily able to co-op these demonstrations and to turn them quickly into riots that's happened in Minneapolis. | ||
| You know, all it takes is the breaching of a business, the shattering of a window. | ||
| And then, you know, you already have a whole bunch of agitated thousands of protesters. | ||
| A lot of them was take the opportunity to loot. | ||
| And then once that's done, some antifa will then just throw in a Molotov cocktail and burn the building to the ground. | ||
| But the cross-pollination ideology is important. | ||
| The intersectional ideology of BLM has cross-pollinated with Antifa's anarchist communism. | ||
| So the traditional Antifa, going back decades now, did not historically espouse this sort of hierarchy and total poles of oppressions that you see in a contemporary movement like BLM. | ||
| However, they share that in common now. | ||
| And for that reason, that just gives Antifa yet another mantle and shield to deflect from, because now they're saying, you know, they're not just against fascism, they're against police brutality, against black people. | ||
| You know, the Chancellor Exactly the same as the BLM chants. | ||
| And whenever you see anti-thug graffiti and messages calling for police to be killed, you will see Black Lives Matter and BLM written as well. | ||
| So as of now, I consider them, at least in American context, linked entities. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there an example of a mayor or a city that has had the beginnings of one of these uprisings that has responded properly? | ||
| I can't think of one, but I suspect maybe somewhere in Texas or Florida, maybe? | ||
| Yeah, so, well, it's primarily been red states who have responded better in quelling violence that was getting out of hand. | ||
| Just because even if it occurred, even if the riots were occurring like in A liberal progressive city like Austin, let's say, or Phoenix or something. | ||
| They're still under Republican leadership as a governor. | ||
| So, you know, there's the the use of the National Guard is on the table and all that. | ||
| But even so, they've been pretty well, I think, Wisconsin later on. | ||
| seeing when there were riots breaking out in Kenosha which unfortunately resulted in deaths. | ||
| They were able to shut that down at least after several days rather than weeks because well they were able to see what happened in neighboring Minnesota before and what was currently ongoing in Portland and Seattle. | ||
| But yeah it's in terms of like a blue city and like a blue Uh, City Council and Mayor, I struggle to think of any that. | ||
| responded very well immediately and early on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So, you know, we started by talking about that first event in Portland State. | ||
| Well, then I saw you about a year and a half later in Portland again. | ||
| I saw you when I was on tour with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| And again, we didn't know each other that well, but we met right beforehand. | ||
| You said, oh, I'd love to sit down with Jordan for a few minutes. | ||
| And I was able to get you backstage to chat with Jordan. | ||
| I believe that there is a connection Somehow, between the message that Jordan was putting out there of clean your room and take responsibility for your life and all of those things, and the counter to that, the sort of nihilist destruction that these people brought. | ||
| Did you, because there were, especially in Portland, that was probably our biggest protest. | ||
| Seattle, we had some, but I think Portland was probably the biggest one, at least in the United States. | ||
| There was also in Amsterdam, a pretty big one. | ||
| But... | ||
| Do you see that, that the message that Jordan was talking about of personal responsibility was so counter to them and that's really why they hated him so much? | ||
| Even though I would go out there sometimes with a cap and sunglasses and talk to them and they usually didn't know why they were there protesting or they would just be out there and angry and they weren't sure what was what. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's been a shame that because of the, Dr. Peterson was ill and was out of the public space for a few years now. | ||
| We really could have benefited, I think, publicly from his wisdom and voice on everything that was going on. | ||
| I think, ultimately, for a lot of the- Because they really hated him. | ||
| I mean, they really were mobbing us online, the whole thing. | ||
| I think for a lot of the henchman-type people who are involved in Antifa's street violence, they're hooligans, the ideology and message that they have internalized is completely antithetical to the message of self-responsibility that Dr. Peterson espouses. | ||
| So these are people who, instead of cleaning their room or getting their lives in order, And many of them are really vulnerable people, people who are dealing with mental health issues. | ||
| You'll see a lot of them are recently transgendered. | ||
| Many of them are vagrants and all that. | ||
| So instead of being given a message of improving their own lives and the people around them, they have been polled until A cult-like ideology that teaches them to resolve their grievances through violence, not just against other people, but against society and the wider world, which is why the only thing that they are actually good at is destruction and creating misery. | ||
| When they seized territory like they did in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, CHAZ, all they were able to do was create an area that led to attempted rape, | ||
| multiple homicides, shootings, fights, lawlessness. | ||
| Yeah, and the mayor, of course, let it happen until they started showing up at her house, | ||
| and then she got rid of Chaz pretty quickly. | ||
| Wait, can you talk about the transgender element to that? | ||
| Because, you know, you often post pictures of some of the people that have been arrested, and it's very clear. | ||
| A lot of these people, as you said, they're vagrants. | ||
| Many of them seem like they're on drugs or addicts of some kind or another, but the transgender piece seems sort of interesting, because we've all seen pictures and videos of that. | ||
| What's the connection there? | ||
| So disproportionately, the number of people who have been arrested and charged at the riots that happened in Portland have been disproportionately trans in some way. | ||
| And so I don't think that's significant because unfortunately, the transgenderism has also become a political ideology in the United States. | ||
| And it's been very, very closely linked to critical race theory. | ||
| And critical race theory, I think, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to people believing that the response to political disagreements is violence, for example, and threats and all that. | ||
| So I think there's a link between A and B, between why we're seeing so many trans people. | ||
| And the other thing is, a lot of them, it's on my view, treat it as sort of A lot of them, as you see, are white, and they don't have a lot of identity markers that would make them an oppressed class of people. | ||
| But to suddenly identify as trans, to be non-binary, for example, then they're suddenly queer, whereas otherwise they would just be a heterosexual white person. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Otherwise, in essence, they would be the very thing that they've come to hate the most, which is a bizarre existential crisis, I suppose. | ||
| So let's flash forward then to another year. | ||
| So I saw you then in 2018 with Jordan, then I saw you in 2019, and then there was the sort of famous incident when you got attacked. | ||
| Can you just recap that moment for people that don't remember? | ||
| So, I was primarily known regionally in the Pacific Northwest since 2017 for a lot of my coverage of the Antifa protests and riots. | ||
| And that eventually made me a target, particularly when I was coupling my video coverage with reporting and writing columns that were getting published in some of these big papers. | ||
| And I was very clear in describing what I viewed as a violent extremist movement that was veiling itself behind social justice and carrying out acts of violence against law enforcement and private citizens in the city. | ||
| And for that, that made me a target. | ||
| And in June of 2019, when I was covering a protest turn right in downtown Portland, they saw an opportunity to In a coordinated fashion, beat me multiple times on the head. | ||
| It led to brain hemorrhage. | ||
| When I was trying to walk away, they then threw all these liquids in my face so I couldn't even see. | ||
| So that's where the milkshaking part came from. | ||
| So I went on your show, I think, about a month. | ||
| After that, and you could, if you look close, I still have swelling and a bit of a scab on my eye, but it was the brain injury that was most serious. | ||
| And so I had a whole year of various medical treatments to address the deficiencies that were caused as a result of that. | ||
| And what's tragic about all of this is that part of it was caught on video. | ||
| It was literally in front of the justice center, which is the central police precinct and the sheriff's office. | ||
| Not a single person's been arrested, so. | ||
| And if I remember correctly, at some point throughout that, you sort of went to the police officers, and they didn't do anything, right? | ||
| Yeah, it was actually early in the day, because before people beat me in the head a couple hours before, they were beginning to throw their shapes at my head and all that. | ||
| And I would walk to law enforcement, who were watching, and I'd point out, this individual right here in that colored backpack just assaulted me. | ||
| I would like to make a report and I would like for you to identify this person because they're still right there and the response every time as it was then and afterwards and before was always that they wouldn't get involved, that they have been given instructions to stay on the periphery and to not step in. | ||
| So there's been a breakdown in not just morale for police but like The whole, just rule of law period in some of these places, Portland, Seattle, it's like, I mean, overnight. | ||
| Did you get the sense that police wanted to help more than they could? | ||
| Because when I've been to some of these things, I always get the sense that police wish they could do more. | ||
| Wish that their leaders would allow them to do more, in other words. | ||
| Yes, the beat cops, these are the ones who I have the most sympathy for, but I mean, policing, you follow the chain of command. | ||
| And police chiefs and captains and those high up are, in addition to being officers, they're also politicians in a way, because their career as, you know, the face of the police department is a political position. | ||
| And so, you know, that's why you were seeing police chiefs and getting the knee during some of these BLM protests and being so deferential to these violent extremists. | ||
| Because that's what's popular right now. | ||
| So I think, yeah, leadership in these urban areas have been wanting, also a lot of them wanted sheriffs as well, wanted to vocally show that they were anti-Trump as well, and that they were pro the cause of racial justice. | ||
| Therefore, I think that affected the response from law enforcement down. But also there's lots of initial | ||
| resources as well. We've been having officers resign en masse and take early retirement as well. | ||
| And as a result of that, in many, many American cities, there's just been a huge upsurge | ||
| in homicides, shootings, violence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we see this in almost every progressive city. | ||
| And now we know also that the new recruits, I mean, it's like, why would you want to go into law enforcement if your mayors or your governors aren't going to have your back? | ||
| You know, I know that just because I know you personally, I know that some of the sort of fame or notoriety that this has come with is not what you were looking for. | ||
| And when I saw you that day, you know, a couple of weeks after you were attacked, you were obviously having some mental difficulties, some cognitive stuff that I'm thrilled to see you're better, obviously. | ||
| But you've sort of become part of the story, which is a weird thing for a journalist. | ||
| And Portland, they post about you, you know, I mean, quite literally things like kill Andy Ngo. | ||
| I mean, there are awful things. | ||
| The mobs that come after you online, like I get a lot of hate, but your hate might trump my hate, Andy. | ||
| I think it's possible. | ||
| Can you talk about that, about just how personally that's been for you and how it's sort of sucked you into the machine here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, antifascist extremism is not just their violence on the streets. | ||
| A huge part of their intimidation is done through online or things that are borderline not illegal, such as showing up at people's homes, making it known that they know where you live, for example, writing your address in public places and writing kill and murder and, you know, They wanted me to live under a constant fear, and it's unfortunate that they did succeed in that. | ||
| Because at times when I was just carrying out regular activities in life, like going to the gym or grocery shopping, one of their members or sympathizers would recognize me and post and use some of these hashtags that were then re-shared | ||
| really quickly with the intended goal to sort of do a cyber swarm where through online | ||
| information they show up in real life to harass people. That's actually how they were able to assault Tud | ||
| Wheeler. One of them happened to see him at a restaurant. So it's throughout 2020 I've been, | ||
| I was really on borrowed time in They had fully doxed me, threatened to kill me many times. | ||
| All of this is reported to police and nothing ever happened. | ||
| And so... Did you ever try to escalate it beyond local Portland police? | ||
| Like, did you ever talk to the FBI or anything like that? | ||
| I did report a lot of it to the FBI and I never even heard back. | ||
| They took an initial report and nobody followed up with me. | ||
| Not even once. | ||
| It's just incredible. | ||
| So let's talk a little bit more about the online component of this. | ||
| Because I know finally in the last couple of weeks, it looks like Twitter did remove a couple big Antifa accounts. | ||
| We can all debate the merits of free speech and whether they were coordinating violence and all of that sort of thing. | ||
| But where else are they coordinating? | ||
| Because I know if I tweet something that's sort of against Antifa, and then I suddenly get literally thousands of responses, often telling me to, Go kill myself or they're gonna come get me or whatever it might be. | ||
| There's obviously some level of coordination. | ||
| There are things happening, not just on Twitter. | ||
| Do you know about those sort of networks? | ||
| Yeah, so I write about that in the book. | ||
| A lot of the organizing actually is done right in the open through Twitter and being banned, it's not really much of a handicap to them because these accounts are all anonymous anyways and they're plugged until they're | ||
| connected to one another beyond Twitter through things such as Signal and Telegram. | ||
| So when a major account is banned and they open up just another one immediately that is | ||
| announced through these channels so then they immediately get new followers. | ||
| But in Portland in particular, Twitter was a platform where most of the riot organizing happened, so you had like all these ad hoc anti-thug groups that popped up in the summer of 2020 that provided crowdfundraise for riot gear, Food was a big thing and not insignificant because that helped attract vagrants who formed a big part of their units for rioting money for travel. | ||
| They went to other cities. | ||
| There was some of them who went to Kenosha, some of them who went to D.C. | ||
| And all of this is being done in the open and on platforms like GoFundMe, on Cash App, on Venmo, and probably the most successful campaign in Portland, like Minnesota, was there was a bail fund that was set up so that immediately Of the few people who actually had bails set because their charges were so serious, they would immediately get bailed out. | ||
| Immediately. | ||
| And then the charges would be dropped anyways. | ||
| So they would get the money back and they would reinvest on another thing such as giving grants to other Antifa chapters. | ||
| So this is what I mean. | ||
| This issue of allowing it to go on so long is that these systems and networks will last long beyond Summer of 2020 and a lot of it unfortunately is also out of the reach of law enforcement such as the encrypted communications that happen on Signal or Telegram. | ||
| Right, and we know that a whole bunch of Hollywood celebrities were promoting those GoFundMes to get these guys out. | ||
| And am I mistaken, but didn't Kamala Harris actually promote one at one time? | ||
| She did. | ||
| She did, I read about that in the book. | ||
| So she tweeted out a link to her millions of followers for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which was the group that paid the bail for accused rioters in Minnesota. | ||
| But it wasn't just rioters that were being bailed out. | ||
| This organization was also paying the bail for Accused murderers, accused rapists. | ||
| I mean, just staggering stuff. | ||
| What about the relationship though with big tech? | ||
| Because obviously after the Capitol Hill riots on the 6th, we know what happened with Parler. | ||
| Their servers were taken out by Amazon. | ||
| We know Trump was banned by basically everybody. | ||
| As I said before, a couple Antifa accounts have been taken out, but they really do play footsie with these things. | ||
| And as you just said, Twitter is probably the main culprit here. | ||
| Yeah, so they've taken down a few Antifa accounts, but these are just drops in the bucket. | ||
| I mean, Rose City Antifa is still on. | ||
| The Youth Liberation Front is still on Twitter. | ||
| And these are groups that were instrumental in years of violence in Portland. | ||
| But the thing with big tech is, I mean, their bias is no secret. | ||
| I think it's just it's the same thing with journalism. | ||
| The staff, the people who are making up the workforce of these large corporations, they're largely influential to, excuse me, sympathetic to the cause of what they believe these extremists are doing. | ||
| Right, which then causes them to allow a lot of this stuff to just slide while on the other side, they certainly wouldn't be as accommodating. | ||
| What do you think is, sort of coming with all of this. | ||
| Because, you know, there were a lot of people as 2020 ended, there was a real feeling, at least in the mainstream media, like, oh, all right, we got rid of Trump. | ||
| You know, now BLM can calm down, Antifa can calm down, things will get better. | ||
| Clearly after the 6th and now everything that we've seen in our 20 some odd days of January 2021, like, it doesn't seem like things are gonna calm down. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, it didn't calm down starting in November. | ||
| In November, in Portland, in response to Biden winning, the people who took to the streets weren't Trump supporters in Portland. | ||
| They were Antifa. | ||
| And they marched around. | ||
| They just severely damaged the church and the riot. | ||
| The National Guard was finally activated for the first time that night. | ||
| Too little, too late, in my view. | ||
| I think what's going forward is that everything is like the path has already been paved. | ||
| Um, the mainstreaming of enough tenants of their ideology, the allies that they've gained in important institutions have been made. | ||
| Um, and of course, then the, um, the refined and perfected blueprints for insurrection has also had had months and months of opportunity to improve. | ||
| So, and establish itself. | ||
| So, um, this whole I mean, the whole pretext that gave Antifa their meteoric rise in 2016 was in response to Trump, which they said was the rise of American fascism. | ||
| I mean, that was rubbish at the time. | ||
| It was a lie. | ||
| Unfortunately, that argument was given legitimacy through the mainstream press. | ||
| With Trump out of the way, it's immaterial anyways, because their opposition really is not to Trump, it's to the United States and what its founding ideals are. | ||
| So these agitations to attack the U.S. | ||
| will continue, and they've latched on currently to attacking law enforcement, because that's going to be around regardless of what administration would be in power. | ||
| Yeah, do you think Biden will do anything with this? | ||
| I mean, again, this is where my frustration with the last few liberals is just, it's totally out in the open. | ||
| I kept warning everybody, like, this isn't gonna stop. | ||
| This isn't gonna stop. | ||
| And now you have a guy playing footsie with all of those ideologies who's putting critical race theory back into the system. | ||
| So let's not pretend that he's gonna do anything to stop any of this stuff. | ||
| Biden, to his credit, has been very clear when asked about political violence, he denounces it, but I mean, it's not- But didn't he say Antifa is just an idea? | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| It's just an idea. | ||
| He did, but let me qualify my praise of him. | ||
| I don't think it's him who's really an executive. | ||
| You can see it's the DNC. | ||
| So, you know, when there was the inauguration day riots in Washington State and Oregon, By Antifa, Jen Psaki, the press secretary, was asked about that, and she didn't really have a response. | ||
| She didn't condemn it either. | ||
| I think, like, that lack of, I guess, moral clarity so far by the administration is, it's like, well, you know, like, what these rioters are doing were very similar to what the rioters did on the 6th of January, but why do you not treat it as important? | ||
| Why does the administration not view it as important? | ||
| So, I mean, Like Antifa is just going to be able to kind of go under the radar of the mainstream press and the administration in D.C. | ||
| as they're carrying out acts of carnage continually in other major American cities on the other part of the country. | ||
| Yeah, Andy, before we wrap here, we should talk a little bit about what happened at that bookstore in Portland, because your book, which comes out this week, and again, the link to it is right below, you are selling, I don't even know if you have the numbers, you don't have to share them with me right now, but we know internally through the publishing houses, you're doing all right at the moment. | ||
| The book is taking off, in many ways, in large part, to these crazy protests. | ||
| By the way, something very similar happened to me back in April, where they all coordinated to ruin all my book reviews, but then that causes a backlash, and then people actually read the book and they go, oh, this isn't that dangerous. | ||
| But in Portland, they were protesting a bookstore. | ||
| There was all sorts of stuff happening over there. | ||
| Can you just tell people that story? | ||
| Because it's just like a perfect little microcosm of everything that's going on here. | ||
| Yeah, in January this year, in response to the book coming out soon, the Antifa in Portland chose to surround and protest for six days Portland's largest bookstore, Powell's Books, which is quite an important institution in the city. | ||
| And it's not just about them protesting the book. | ||
| I mean, who cares that they don't like the idea of it, even though they haven't read it? | ||
| They were calling for it to be banned, and the bookstore partially gave in to that. | ||
| They announced preemptively that the book would not be sold on any of its shelves, but Antifa weren't happy with that because they wanted it removed from the online catalog as well. | ||
| I mean, that was not surprising to see. | ||
| It's disheartening and disturbing to see, obviously, for modern people calling for books to be banned, even when they haven't read them. | ||
| But I think I guess the silver lining that is their protest helped bring a lot of attention to this book that was coming out. | ||
| And so a lot of people weren't even aware that Unmasked was coming out. | ||
| So I'm really thankful to people who have pre-ordered it so far. | ||
| And I'm really thankful that you allow me to come on your show again and talk about why this is so important and what this book is about. | ||
| Yeah, well, Andy, I just wanna say, personally, I'm thrilled for your success. | ||
| I'm beyond thrilled that you're healthy again, and that we have people like you out there, because I know you from years ago, and you just wanted to do journalism, where in a time when everyone does quote, unquote, Journalism, so I'm glad you're doing well. | ||
| I know you deal with a lot of craziness in the midst of this whole thing, and just seeing your success is an example that if you stand up for what you believe in, that good things can happen. | ||
| So listen, people, don't burn this book, Unmasked, Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. | ||
| We've got the link to it down below, and I look forward to seeing you again, my friend. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about the media instead of nonstop yelling, check out our media playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out the full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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