Aug. 25, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I think it's one thing to be a ignorant, willingly ignorant, and accept sort of the on-the-face claims that these are people protesting for racial justice or black lives. | ||
| You can't really make that, you can't put together It's harder to make it work when these groups are people who are, for example, holding up flags of Hamas or Hezbollah. | ||
| That's not a euphemism, that's actually what they are in support of. | ||
| But regardless of that, we still see... | ||
| I saw some of these interviews from Democrats when they were being asked, for example, the day after Netanyahu spoke, the day after some of the American flags were stolen and set on fire outside Union Station in DC, and then all these federal monuments were defaced with pro-Hamas statements, some Democrat lawmakers on the Hill were asked, What are your thoughts on this? | ||
| And they kind of squirmed if you watch some of them. | ||
| They said things about free speech, which is a red herring because we're talking about, this is not about speech, this is about conduct, and particularly criminal conduct, right? | ||
| It's not a free speech issue to steal somebody else's property instead of on fire. | ||
| It's not a free speech issue to vandalize property. | ||
| But I don't know what more it needs to take for Democrats to feel more comfortable in condemning. | ||
| All right, guys, I'm off the grid for August, but I'm still Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is The Rubin Report. | ||
| And joining me today, pre-taped before I left, is a journalist, I don't have to put air quotes around, a senior editor of the Post Millennial and author of the New York Times bestselling, Unmasked, Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, is my old friend and gotta be 12th time on The Rubin Report, Andy Ngo. | ||
| Andy, how are you? | ||
| I'm okay. | ||
| Thanks for having me on, Dave. | ||
| Twelve? | ||
| That seems roughly right to me. | ||
| Does that seem right to you? | ||
| I don't know how many times it's been. | ||
| It's been a lot, but we've been in contact since going back to 2017. | ||
| It really goes back far. | ||
| I still remember those early days. | ||
| Yeah, it might be before 2017. | ||
| I think it was closer to 2015, actually. | ||
| You were but a young student at Portland State University trying to get into journalism, and you attended an event that I did with Peter Boghossian and with Christina Hoff Sommers. | ||
| And it was sort of the beginning of Antifa and all of these campus protests and everything else. | ||
| And look, you made something of yourself. | ||
| Very proud of you. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| Anyway, as my audience knows, I am off the grid for August, so we are pre-taping this, so anything we're going to talk about for the next 50 minutes or so, obviously some of it is subject to change. | ||
| But as I leave right now at the end of July, it seems to me that what you've been writing about for a long time, warning about what was sort of happening on the radical left and between Antifa And these sort of fringe groups online that materialize in a lot of these blue cities, it really has burst forth into, I would say, open Marxism in America. | ||
| Do you feel that that is a fair estimation? | ||
| Well, the Marxism ideology aspect has already been open for many, many years, particularly in academe. | ||
| That type of activism is not particularly surprising. | ||
| I think what you are observing and what others are observing, like many normies, is that the militancy has taken a particular turn. | ||
| I think the events of the 7th of October has been quite an eye-opening experience, particularly for a lot of liberal Jewish Americans, you know, who have been lifetime Democrat voters and are seeing people who they think are on their side either sympathetic to the events of the 7th of October and or actually sympathetic to Hamas and more recently explicitly calling for Hamas terrorist attacks. | ||
| That's what's happened at some of these violent protests that have happened in the American capital where federal monuments are vandalized and the messages that are left there are not ambiguous at all. | ||
| There are things like saying Hamas is coming and adopting the Hamas red triangle symbol which was used In some of the maps for the summits of October marking particular communities, kibbutzs that were set upon and when people were mass slaughtered. | ||
| So I think this is probably what you're observing. | ||
| I think describing as Marxism is one part. | ||
| Another type, another aspect to it is revolutionary communism, left anarchism as well. | ||
| This coalition of these malcontents in America who benefit from the stability that is provided in America and the First Amendment and all these various protections and going out and calling for that entire system to be overturned and for their political opponents to be killed and maimed. | ||
| So this is all part of the, and Antifa by the way, is part of these concentric circles. | ||
| So you have all these different ideologies and militants that are coming together with One shared agenda, which is to see the toppling of the United States, and they have a lot of useful idiots in the Democrat Party and in the media, sympathizers and fellow travelers as well, I would argue, who act as their propagandists. | ||
| So you've been writing about this for years, and not only writing about it, I mean you've been living through it in that you've been a target of these people. | ||
| They've come after you physically, they've, you know, threatened you online, all the litany of things that one can go through. | ||
| You've been through and probably some things that we don't know about as well. | ||
| Are you surprised at where we're at right now, or do you think this was just This was just going to be here. | ||
| We were eventually going to get to a place where in certain cities, you're allowed to basically take over whenever you want. | ||
| You're allowed to destroy monuments. | ||
| You're allowed to burn things down when you want. | ||
| You can burn the flag on the July 4th. | ||
| You know, on July 4th, you can go to the Liberty Bell and you can deface that. | ||
| I mean, does any of this surprise you at all? | ||
| Or is this just obvious? | ||
| As he said, I've been covering far-left extremism for years now, going back really to 2016, when my city, Portland, Oregon, was set on fire in the November election because people couldn't accept the election results at that time when Trump had won. | ||
| I'm surprised and I'm not surprised to see the developments. | ||
| I mean, the main thesis of my reporting for all these years, of my book as well, Unmasked, is that political violence on the left is being mainstream and made into something that we should just sort of all accept as a normal act of peaceful protest and all these euphemisms that are used to cover it. | ||
| What is surprising, though, is that I thought that So what's been particularly effective about the far left is that a lot of their activism is, they latch onto something that sounds very noble and justified and legitimate, like Black Lives Matter, fighting for racial justice, fighting for social justice, fighting against fascism. | ||
| All these type of things are propaganda terms as part of how they are able to deceive the wider public. | ||
| I think what did surprise me is that when the line was crossed into them actually allying themselves with terrorist organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah, I really thought that that would be a turning point in sort of the mainstream discourse. | ||
| Perhaps, maybe because... Wait, so what you mean though, what you mean though is that they would have continued to have done it, the people on the ground, but you think the mainstream would have pushed back more than they have, as it pertains to this. | ||
| Yes, I think it's one thing to be ignorant, willingly ignorant, and accept sort of the on-the-face claims that these are people protesting for racial justice or black lives. | ||
| You can't really make that, you can't put together It's harder to make it work when these groups are people who are, for example, holding up flags of Hamas or Hezbollah. | ||
| That's not a euphemism, that's actually what they are in support of. | ||
| But regardless of that, we still see... | ||
| I saw some of these interviews from Democrats when they were being asked, for example, the day after Netanyahu spoke, the day after some of the American flags were stolen and set on fire outside Union Station in D.C., and then all these federal monuments were defaced with pro-Hamas statements. | ||
| Some Democrat lawmakers on the Hill were asked, What are your thoughts on this? | ||
| And they kind of squirmed if you watch some of them. | ||
| They said things about free speech, which is a red herring because we're talking about, this is not about speech, this is about conduct, and particularly criminal conduct, right? | ||
| It's not a free speech issue to steal somebody else's property instead of on fire. | ||
| It's not a free speech issue to vandalize property. | ||
| But I don't know what more it needs to take for Democrats to feel more comfortable in condemning. | ||
| We have seen some statements, particularly from Biden, also from Kamala, who did come out and were critical of what happened. | ||
| I guess that's one small step, perhaps too little too late though. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think just personally, I think this is what they want out of the base and they're using it for their own political gain. | ||
| So I don't think we'll get anything other than some kind of useless statements. | ||
| But I suspect you think that if perhaps a bunch of people in red hats were to burn a trans flag outside of the White House, they might actually be arrested. | ||
| Yes, I think federal authorities and also DC authorities have been, it appears that they are very They don't apply the law the same, depending on the political motivations of the suspects. | ||
| And, for example, a lot of the riot suspects, I should say, who have been arrested over some of the recent Palestine demonstrations that are in D.C., those cases are handed by Local D.C. | ||
| jurisdiction rather than being handed off as like a federal prosecution case, in contrast to the January 6th rioters, which those were all federal cases, and the ones who were convicted were given very, very long prison sentences. | ||
| That's at the federal level. | ||
| You can look at the local level. | ||
| You know, it's no surprise to you that in places like New York, where Columbia University was violently besieged for many, many days by people who are not even students, people who smashed up Hamilton Hall, for example, with hammers and all these other weapons, that the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, who, when he was running, benefited from Sorrell's money, I mean, Bragg has chosen to drop the prosecution for almost all those cases. | ||
| The handful of people that were prosecuted in the end, 13 I think out of several dozen, were given sweetheart plea deals where they'll just get probation for six months and then the misdemeanor charge will be dismissed as part of the deal. | ||
| So from New York to Portland to Seattle, that's sort of what happens to people who engage in leftist political violence. | ||
| Do you talk to police officers? | ||
| Like, I think most people get it at this point that a lot of these blue cities have these DAs that are sympathetic to these ideas and have defunded the police and all the rest of it. | ||
| You mentioned Soros there. | ||
| But I speak to police officers, especially New York City Police Department, where I used to have a lot of friends. | ||
| Most of them are no longer part of the NYPD. | ||
| They've either resigned or retired or left altogether. | ||
| The police want to do policing. | ||
| And that this is definitely coming from these administrations. | ||
| Is that the impression that you're getting? | ||
| There are a number of variables here that are creating some of the conditions that I just described. | ||
| So, police, if they're not politically supported by the residents, the citizens of where they live, if they're not supported by elected officials on city council or in the county or at the state level, It makes their work very, very difficult to do. | ||
| It creates an environment where officers are demoralized. | ||
| And of course, a lot of what officers do in terms of, like, from arrest to the point of, like, prosecution, if a district attorney or a prosecutor is not willing to prosecute, it doesn't really matter if you carry out arrest because then the cases are just, it's just immediately dropped. | ||
| For example, that's what happened in 2020 and 2021 in Portland. | ||
| We have a leftist district attorney there, Mike Schmidt, who chose not to prosecute over 90% of the riot-related cases. | ||
| So police are risking life and limb, they're getting injured carrying out some of these arrests because they're working in a mob environment where people are carrying weapons, they hate police, they try to attack the police. | ||
| And then they get somebody and they make allegations of certain crimes and then the prosecutor chooses not to prosecute. | ||
| So you see how there's a breakdown in the system as I describe it here. | ||
| So you can have, in the best of circumstances, the best leadership of a police department and then have things not function at all. | ||
| Unfortunately, what we've seen in some left-wing cities is that Police chiefs are appointed by mayors who, police chiefs who, whose leadership skills are not so good, you know, they are appointed there because they fit some type of DEI criteria, as a lot of police departments aren't, have really been pressured to, to put on black leadership, particularly after some of the, the riots in 2020, or they put on left wing, | ||
| By left-wing, I mean those who are sympathetic to the cause of the leftist rioters, put them in positions of leadership in particular agencies, and then you have a whole, as part of that, further breakdown of the system. | ||
| Is there any evidence in any of these cities, whether it's Portland or Seattle or LA or San Francisco, and we can go through the long list of them, I would include Boston in that now, maybe even Denver to some extent. | ||
| Is there any evidence that any of this is turning around anywhere? | ||
| That there have been administration changes and police department changes that are fixing these problems or is everything just still sliding in the wrong direction? | ||
| There are some positive developments, I'll say. | ||
| Positive for those who care about the rule of law and care about public safety. | ||
| So in Portland, for example, earlier this year there was an election for next year's district attorney. | ||
| Mike Schmidt, who benefited in his most recent campaign from a lot of Soros money and a lot of leftist money, ended up losing to a moderate Candidate. | ||
| So going on next year, Portland, Multnomah County, where Portland is, will have a moderate district attorney in contrast to somebody who is openly self-identified progressive. | ||
| In Seattle, a couple years ago, Seattle's city attorney, which is their prosecutor, radical leftist, was replaced by a moderate Republican, actually. | ||
| But a prosecutor is also kind of only one. | ||
| It's an important part, but not the full part of this whole system work. | ||
| All these types of things have to work together. | ||
| I think on the West Coast, the Democrats there are more the self-identified progressive ones. | ||
| They're more about sort of adhering to ideology, I would say. | ||
| For me, observing as an outsider, when I look at the Democrat leadership, for example, say New York City or Boston, yeah, they're all Democrats, but they also are willing to compromise and get things done. | ||
| For example, the mayor of New York City, He's had to come out, for example, and speak out against the mass migration of illegal foreign nationals into New York City, that that's been extremely destructive, damaging to public safety and a resource issue as well, an infrastructure issue for New York City. | ||
| I don't know, for example, if Some cities like in, I don't know, Berkeley or Portland or Seattle, they had an influx of the migrants that New York City has had, if their leadership would be willing to come out and change tunes. | ||
| They're too wedded to certain leftist ideals. | ||
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Right. | |
| Is the problem with that though, that you could take a place like New York and it's like, yeah, Eric Adams occasionally now does say something sane, like we can't have everybody come here and taking resources and everything, but he doesn't do anything about it. | ||
| So it's like, yes, I suppose that's nice, but in a weird way, it's just, it's just slow rolling the inevitable destruction. | ||
| So my understanding of New York City is that, you can correct me if I'm wrong, the buses that were busing in migrants are no longer actually allowed to go into New York City. | ||
| In fact, what's happening is that the buses, because of, I think it was like a city council ordinance or change, instead they're stopping like in Newark. | ||
| So basically next door and the migrants are coming in Right, you literally just get on the train for 20 minutes and you're in New York City. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But still, it's more of like the mayor's trying what he can. | ||
| And I'm not, look, I'm not like defending his record. | ||
| My point is just like, Even he has had to change his rhetoric and enact what little type of things he can and what little power he is able to do. | ||
| That is in stark contrast to statements he's made in the past and other New York City officials have made about the state and the city being a sanctuary city and welcoming all, no matter who, no matter how many. | ||
| And of course, when the reality hits them, it's not sustainable. | ||
| Unfortunately, as you point out, the damage may be done. | ||
| The damage is ongoing. | ||
| It's up there undoing and, you know, the people who have to suffer are the working class poor of these jurisdictions. | ||
| What do you make of this sort of at the national level for the Democrats? | ||
| Because we're going to release this on August 19th. | ||
| So we're within a week of the Democratic National Convention. | ||
| Again, I've been off the grid for a couple of weeks at this point once we air this. | ||
| So I'll go on the assumption that Kamala is the presumptive nominee. | ||
| I think she has put forth some of the worst sort of Marxist ideas imaginable. | ||
| She has a horrific track record that's My personal opinion on all of this. | ||
| I mean, do you think there's any way the Democrat Party staves off nationalizing all of these bad ideas? | ||
| Or is this it? | ||
| Well, when in the three and a half years that Kamala Harris has been VP, we actually haven't seen too much of her in public. | ||
| And I think Biden's people recognizes that she's a terrible public speaker and that she was a liability potentially to his administration. | ||
| So she was given sort of all these smaller tasks and whatever. | ||
| I mean, the one big task she was given was a border she spectacularly failed on. | ||
| I think people have forgotten in the three and a half years that she actually was really, really radical, particularly in leading up to the Democrat primaries and in the last presidential election. | ||
| And now, you know, these videos are surfacing. | ||
| I think what it shows, you know, her taking these very radical views, whether it be defunding police, crowd helping to crowdfund for violent riot suspects who carried out allegedly arson attacks and looting and attacks in Minneapolis like like people died as a result of that and she fundraised for the people who were arrested after people had died so people can match up the timeline she didn't want for example | ||
| federal law enforcement to be in Portland, Oregon to protect the federal courthouse during the Antifa insurrection | ||
| that set the courthouse building on fire. | ||
| If those officers were not there, that building would have burnt down along with all the people inside. | ||
| She wanted, she said on her record that she wanted to, on the record that she wanted to ban fracking and all these | ||
| really radical things and go on and on, banning private health insurance, so on and so forth. | ||
| These video clips are coming out. | ||
| I think what they show is that she's not a principled leader and that she'll take on positions that she thinks will get her votes and in a position of power. | ||
| And that's actually something really dangerous because, you know, an executive position in the United States for the president has a lot of power. | ||
| And if she's able to change on a whim, depending on what she thinks will make her popular, that's dangerous for America. | ||
| I hope voters recognize that and remember that about her record. | ||
| She's been, you know, as we are speaking, she's been coronated. | ||
| There's a huge social media virality about her and of course all the press is putting out these fluff pieces and she's made into this cool aunt celebrity type figures. | ||
| I hope that in the coming days and weeks that that That circus will subside a little bit and we can get actual journalists to write a bit more about her record and investigate a bit more of what is her political legacy. | ||
| She's been in the public space for a very long time, in California politics, in the federal government. | ||
| So I just look forward to this clown show being over right now, in the last week. | ||
| Speaking of clown show, you mentioned journalists there. | ||
| Every time I bring you on the show, I say the same thing. | ||
| You're a journalist that I don't have to put air quotes around. | ||
| What do you think has happened to journalists? | ||
| Where did the journalists go? | ||
| Was there a moment that it really went haywire? | ||
| How come you didn't fall down that path? | ||
| So, I think once you are part of like a liberal establishment, the prospect of getting kicked out | ||
| of that, particularly if you're in a liberal bubble in New York City or Washington DC, | ||
| I mean, you can be really, you can be made persona non grata if you | ||
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| are too much of a dissident as a journalist, and you'll be kicked out and will never be welcomed back, or worse, you're smeared and somehow made to be not legitimate. | ||
| In my early student journalism career, You know, I had intentions and plans to go into legacy media. | ||
| I just thought, you know, I mean, at that time, I had personal private views that were conservative, but I kept it to myself. | ||
| I didn't think it was relevant to bring that out into the open. | ||
| I was interested in reporting on things as accurately as I could. | ||
| But then I was fired in very publicly from the student paper, a liberal student paper, here at Portland State, that I was working for because of a video I recorded of An event on campus that didn't present Islam in a very nice light. | ||
| Was that before or after that event that I did with Boghossian and Christina? | ||
| So you were a student journalist at that time? | ||
| I was. | ||
| I think when you came to Portland State, I think it was 2016, it was 2017 that I was fired. | ||
| But what the paper did was, I mean, this was, you know, this was me in my beginning of my career. | ||
| I was very naive. | ||
| I was quite shocked that they, They wanted to destroy any journalism prospect that I could have. | ||
| For example, they announced my firing in a piece in the newspaper with my picture and everything, which was a very nasty thing to do to one of your former colleagues. | ||
| These are people I worked very closely with, and some of them I, at that time, considered my friend. | ||
| And it was for violating the DEI training that we had been instructed about media and how we're supposed to cover Islam and to not spread Islamophobia, etc, etc. | ||
| So very early on I was sort of already tarnished with this label of being Islamophobic. | ||
| So, you know, I contributed to conservative places and I'm very, very thankful that early on there were a number of Conservative publications that took my submissions when I didn't have a following to my name or anything. | ||
| And so, yeah, a lot of other journalists, they don't have that type of experience where they're sort of really shaken and forced out of the bubble. | ||
| And so they just continue in it. | ||
| I think some of them don't recognize that they have a particular liberal bias. | ||
| And that's sort of the best case scenario. | ||
| I think in the worst case scenario, you can look at some of what legacy media journalists write on their social media. | ||
| And they're openly partisan, they're openly biased, explicitly biased, they lie often, they spread misinformation, they spread disinformation, they're unapologetic about it, and I mean for those I have a lot of contempt because You know, journalism is a profession or an area of industry that people should have a lot of respect for. | ||
| You want to have people in an industry who are out to find out the truth and to report it for the public. | ||
| And when people violate that trust systematically through bias, through lies or misinformation, it breaks that down, which is why Conservatives, broadly, don't trust the media, unfortunately. | ||
| And you and I and everyone watching has seen how, since Kamala was endorsed by all these Democrats, that all these lies are coming out about her now. | ||
| That, oh, she didn't support riot suspects in 2020. | ||
| She wasn't appointed the role of leading the border crisis. | ||
| These blatant lies. | ||
| And it's like, I mean, guys, really? | ||
| It's incredible the level of lying and that they feel they can get away with it still. | ||
| And I suppose to some extent they still can. | ||
| But, you know, again, we're airing this on a bit of a delay. | ||
| But, you know, I saw this two day period where suddenly everyone was saying, no, no, Joe Biden never named Kamala borders are. | ||
| Well, then we just went on the Congress website. | ||
| Where they have the actual document, where they call her, the borders are, the vice president Kamala Harris is now the borders are as per edict of Joe Biden, but they lie and lie and lie. | ||
| And they just keep lying. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| I don't know how they live with themselves, honestly. | ||
| I mean, we can expect, you know, if Kamala was to become the next president, the media coverage will be similar to like how it was under Biden in that we, for example, under Biden, we had a president who appears to have had a significant health decline in public over the years. | ||
| And yet the press wasn't willing to report it out until his numbers in terms of the election polling were bad. | ||
| That's really disgusting. | ||
| It's a disservice to the American public. | ||
| But you think it's mostly social pressures that lead to the conformity rather than a conspiracy, like a top-down conspiracy, right? | ||
| So meaning like, you might wonder why, you know, the day he got elected I said the guy's got dementia, he's not going to make it four years. | ||
| It's all been obvious, and I'm not from the future, it was just obvious, right? | ||
| So You think that basically all of these people, it's not that they're getting an email like, okay, don't report on this or lie about this. | ||
| It's that within their own circles, it's such an insular bubble that nobody is ever willing to do the right thing because you want to basically go to the same parties. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Uh, I don't think it's a conspiracy. | ||
| I don't think they would be willing to actually have it institutionalized as a policy. | ||
| That's, that, that would open them. | ||
| It would be too obvious. | ||
| Too obvious, open up to attack. | ||
| What happens is you, within each media institution, there's a, um, there's a, there's a political culture, right? | ||
| And it can be enforced in a soft way. | ||
| For example, through who's being hired, you're hiring people who are, let's say, student interns and Interns who are recent student graduates of the Communications and Journalism programs at liberal universities. | ||
| So they're already coming in with a particular baseline. | ||
| And then you have editors who are in positions where, let's say, pieces are tweaked to go with a certain narrative or a certain agenda. | ||
| As well, I mean, I can speak to one small example out of a small publication when I was working at the student paper. | ||
| This was pretty early on when I was an editor there. | ||
| So after Trump had won and he was announcing his cabinet, I remember they were having a story about Betsy DeVos. | ||
| I think she was the first my cabinet position that was or one of the high positions in the administration that was announced. | ||
| And my colleagues were trying to find a photo of Betsy DeVos to go with the story, and they found one. | ||
| And I remember one commented, we probably shouldn't use that. | ||
| She looks too nice. | ||
| Because it's just a picture of her smiling. | ||
| She looks unpleasant. | ||
| And so they actually then what they did was they ran a story out with an art piece where she was intentionally made to be ugly in a collage. | ||
| And it's like, it's the in that moment, nobody actually said, yeah, we have to make Trump look bad or make her look bad. | ||
| It was more of like, it was subtle. | ||
| It was like, it's she Yeah, it was too nice of a picture. | ||
| Let's go with an art piece of her instead. | ||
| So that's just like one small example of how these things are can be enforced in a soft, indirect way in a newsroom. | ||
| Do you remember, I think you were part of this article if I'm not mistaken, do you remember about six or seven years ago Der Spiegel did a cover piece about the rise of the alt-right, you know, journalists in America and the guy spent, I didn't know that that's what the article was going to be about, He came to my house for like 48 hours, watched a whole bunch of shows and some public events that I did, and then wrote the most godawful, dishonest piece ever. | ||
| And it was my picture on the cover of Der Spiegel, which is, you know, the number one magazine in Germany. | ||
| And the picture that he used, I'm sitting on my couch with a huge American flag behind me and I'm smiling and I've got my arms kind of out like this. | ||
| And when I emailed the guy and I said, man, what a, what a dirtbag you are. | ||
| What a hit piece this is. | ||
| This was so dishonest. | ||
| All the quotes are out of context, blah, blah. | ||
| He said, Dave, if it was a real hit piece, we would have used a picture where you didn't look good. | ||
| And I thought, man, you got like the level of BS with you people is just extraordinary. | ||
| I'm pretty sure you were in that one. | ||
| You may not even remember it. | ||
| I didn't read that piece, but Der Spiegel is a very big liberal magazine in Germany, and I'm sorry that you were a target of the piece by then. | ||
| I mean, I know what it's like to be targeted by liberal media, left-wing media, activist media. | ||
| That's happened to me actually a lot. | ||
| In some ways, it's... | ||
| It's actually been actually a bit traumatizing and I know when I say that it sounds like It might sound like hyperbole, but it's not. | ||
| I don't Google myself anymore, but I remember when I did or when I looked at what people were writing in my Wikipedia and what would show up when somebody would search my name. | ||
| I was really distraught by it because it's not who I am. | ||
| And I wrote about this a bit in my book about the idea of laundering and how Wikipedia and Google can be manipulated in a way. | ||
| Through like activist writers, they'll write some piece that's essentially an opinion piece. | ||
| It's a blog piece. | ||
| I mean, anybody can have an opinion, but then because it's published on some left-wing website like Daily Beast or Vox or Slate or something, then now there's a citation that you can put in your Wikipedia. | ||
| So, for example, there was a commentary, right? | ||
| A person reviewed my book for the LA Times. | ||
| I think LA Times was the only legacy media that published a review of my book. | ||
| It was a very nasty review. | ||
| I could tell that the person didn't actually read my book. | ||
| He probably skimmed through a couple of chapters. | ||
| And he put in there that there are allegations that Andy Ngo is associated with the violent far-right. | ||
| That might not be verbatim, but it's close to that. | ||
| It says something like that. | ||
| And then now that's like cited in my Wikipedia that the LA Times said Andy Ngo has associations. | ||
| And you see how it's like not true. | ||
| It's like somebody's A review is an opinion piece, first of all. | ||
| A review of a book is an opinion. | ||
| Two, to say that somebody else makes that claim without substantiating any of it, providing, you know, independently reviewing those claims, for example, but just saying that the accusation is out there. | ||
| And then now using that as a citation in these other follow-up pieces that other people write or in your Wikipedia. | ||
| It's how you can have your reputation be fully smeared. | ||
| And so that's been That has been difficult for me through all these years because I'm actually, you know, in a very mild manner. | ||
| I take my professionalism and my work very, very seriously and accuracy is paramount to me. | ||
| And, you know, the few times that I've gotten things wrong over the years, it's extremely disappointing and I have to come out and own it and make corrections and all that. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| Well, Andy, I would largely say you're hated by the right people and liked by the right people. | ||
| So that's probably the highest compliment that I can offer. | ||
| You mentioned that the first piece that got you in trouble years ago, around 2016, was you were criticizing sort of, I guess it was Islam's connection with The notion of Islamophobia and sort of what was happening on the left. | ||
| We really are seeing this red-green alliance right now, and it's really burst forth in Europe more than it's burst forth here, although we're obviously seeing some of the seeds of it there. | ||
| You spend a lot of time in Europe. | ||
| What are you seeing? | ||
| Because I sense particularly in the UK right now, and Ireland too, I should mention, there is a real pushback against this. | ||
| The Red-Green Alliance is a phenomenon that first happened a number of years ago in Europe and also in the UK where leftist politicians found that they could potentially gain power by trying to court the Muslim vote as the Muslim population has grown a lot in a number of European countries like France or the Netherlands or the UK and so on and so forth. | ||
| A lot of these politicians nowadays are with parties such as the Green Party or they might be independent and this is a particularly, it's a dangerous development because The particular Muslim vote that they're courting is not like integrated, moderate type of Muslims. | ||
| They're partnering with so-called community leaders who are Islamists, who are radical, who are into political Islam. | ||
| And they're trying to use those type of influencers to get votes within these communities that are self-segregating. | ||
| And of course, those communities may vote them in and they have particular demands, right? | ||
| You're going to They have demands about whether it be, most recently, they want their views of the hatred of Israel being represented in Parliament, for example. | ||
| They want a lot of institutional funding and support for anti-Islamophobia type causes. | ||
| A lot of the anti-Islamophobia campaigns is blasphemy, in other words, essentially anti-blasphemy, in that they don't want people to be able to criticize aspects of their religion, or to try to put a stop, for example, to mass migration. | ||
| All these type of things are being championed by left-wing politicians. | ||
| This is like in France, it's particularly acute. | ||
| France has the largest Muslim population in Europe, and now the left-wing coalitions, whether they be the far left to the France Unbowed Party, that's under Jean-Luc Mélenchon. | ||
| Many of his party members were elected as MPs most recently, and these are Like far left, to the point where some of the legacy media is describing them as far left or hard left. | ||
| Right, which for them to get there, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they've had, and part of this party are people who are actually part of, there's one particular person who's actually a member of Antifa. | ||
| They are holding up all these Antifa banners at their political rallies. | ||
| They go to particular migrant areas to campaign, and they campaign successfully and get the votes. | ||
| And so, you know, Muslim politics in Europe is going to be destabilizing. | ||
| It's destabilizing now, it will be in the future. | ||
| I mean, in the UK, like, Several Labour politicians, for example, felt like their lives were in danger because the party leadership wasn't willing to take an anti-Israel stance. | ||
| Because some of these Labour MPs represent areas of very high Muslim populations in the middle of England or in the north, and they face a lot of death threats since October as well. | ||
| What do you think that portends for Europe? | ||
| I mean, I know all the countries have their own issues here. | ||
| They have different leadership. | ||
| It sounds like Geert Wilders is going to be a little more proactive about this, maybe, in the Netherlands than what's going on, say, in the UK right now. | ||
| But what do you think it looks like in 10 years? | ||
| I think it's the continuance of the path that Europe has been on, and as its Muslim population and citizenry continues to grow, their demands are going to be louder and no longer something you can really ignore. | ||
| And a lot of their demands clash with the liberal democratic values of those particular countries. | ||
| One's going to give way to another. | ||
| We'll see which one wins in the end. | ||
| In the UK, for example, there was a teacher who's been in hiding now for a couple years because he showed There was a lesson about Mohammed and he showed some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, I believe it was, and he received threats and the British state wasn't able to protect him other than, I guess, the system and being in hiding. | ||
| And so it's sort of seeding the ground in that If you dare to somehow potentially, not even criticize Islam, just show something that's like a reality of it, for example, like that for many radical Muslims, they don't respect freedom of expression, particularly in art. | ||
| Your life can be at risk and you might be killed and the state won't be able to help you. | ||
| They won't be able to prosecute those protesters who are threatening outside of the school, outside of people's homes. | ||
| And of course, and another thing I should bring up is that what it portends really for the present and the future is that people will, the norms of society will change and people will self-censor. | ||
| The legislation doesn't even have to change. | ||
| For example, you're not going to see any media run cartoons of the Charlie Hebdo from 2015, the ones that caused that newsroom to be, that magazine room to be slaughtered. | ||
| They don't publish that. | ||
| And that's part of the story. | ||
| And people can't even see how innocuous these cartoons were. | ||
| They don't run that. | ||
| So that's self-censorship. | ||
| People are not going to be willing to teach some of that material in the state education anymore, seeing what's happened, for example, in France with the teacher being beheaded. | ||
| In England, with the teacher having to go into hiding for years. | ||
|
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So people just self-censor themselves. | |
| Let me ask you one other thing. | ||
| So as you know, I'm off the grid now, as I said, we're airing this on August 19th. | ||
| I've been off the grid for 19 days. | ||
| Um, what do you think I'm coming back to in a couple of weeks? | ||
| Do you think the world is wildly different than when I left on July 31st? | ||
| Do you think it's going to be roughly the same? | ||
| Do you think that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will still be the candidates by the time I get back? | ||
| I guess at this point, she's still the presumptive candidate. | ||
| What do you think I'm in for? | ||
| You know, at first I was going to say you're probably going to come back to something similar or the same, but just look at how in the two weeks before, how quickly the news cycle has moved. | ||
| Biden is no longer the presidential candidate for the Democrats. | ||
| There was a deadly mass shooting and attempted assassination attempt of Donald Trump. | ||
| There's a new likely candidate for the Democrats and this is all in a span of a week and a half. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I mean it's a bit that type of like rapid change is actually a little bit scary. | ||
| It feels really unstable and like everything seems to be on the table. | ||
| I can say that I hope that in the few weeks like when you come back what happens is that the whole The memes and the viral campaigns in support of Kamala that will die off a bit. | ||
| It does, it feels inauthentic to me. | ||
| It feels deeply inauthentic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like there's no, you know, I keep saying, I've been tweeting out all week, please find me one Kamala Harris supporter to have on the show who supported her in the primary, who thinks she's been a good VP, who supports her now. | ||
| I literally cannot find anyone. | ||
| I will gladly have somebody on. | ||
| I can't find anybody. | ||
| But that goes to the inauthenticity of what, of this thing that we're all seeing right now. | ||
| Indeed, let's not forget that the DNC, after Kamala was coronated, raised tens and tens of millions of dollars in an all-time record. | ||
| They have the money and resources to hire all these consultants who know how to manipulate the public. | ||
| You know, these are people who are professional and sort of Propaganda and messaging and media and all that, and they're going to continue to push that message. | ||
| Let's hope that there will be enough people who will push back with the truth. | ||
| We shall see, my friend. | ||
| Andy, it is a joy calling you a friend and also one of the same people over the years. | ||
| We've been doing this a long time together. | ||
| I suspect we'll keep doing it for as long as we can. | ||
| So it was good to see you. | ||
| Enjoy the rest of your summer. | ||
| And thanks for joining me while I'm not even here. | ||
| Thank you for having me on. | ||
| If you're looking for more uncensored opinions from today's thought leaders, check out our media playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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