Shouting, running around in black, sometimes smashing store windows and punching people, anti-fascists make for good television. The man’s literal brand is that anti-fascists are violent and loathe him.Īnd it’s a healthy brand in a robust market for footage of left-wing violence. Before I arrived in Portland, he suggested that it might be good for my story to go get a drink with him at Cider Riot, a far-left hangout. Scary-looking antifa marchers glare from his account’s banner image. “Hated by antifa,” Ngo’s Twitter biography read before and after the attack. Ngo has been building to a dramatic confrontation with the Portland far left for months, his star rising along with the severity of the encounters. The attack was not provoked.īut it would be a mistake to think this violence came out of some vacuum-sealed ideological intolerance toward conservatives. Nothing he did that day suggested that he planned or even secretly wanted to be assaulted, which has been a common enough refrain in the days since from some on the left. I was with Ngo, watching him, from an hour before he entered the demonstration until an hour after he arrived at a Portland hospital to be treated for his injuries. The former debate turns on the extent to which Ngo deliberately provokes angry and violent responses from anti-fascists. Smaller, semantic debates have spun off, mostly on Twitter, about the nature of the word “journalist” as it applies to Ngo and the nature of the word “violence” as it applies to nonphysical harm. In the past week, President Trump has publicly condemned the attack twice. The attack and its bloody aftermath, captured on video by witnesses and Ngo himself, launched a national media cycle predicated largely on the willingness of various liberal public figures to denounce the violence of the far left. He, of course, owes the most recent surge in his fame to the June 29 assault. He now has almost a quarter of a million followers on Twitter. Though his career output is limited to a few dozen op-eds and news stories, an active Twitter feed, some cable news appearances, and a handful of dramatic protest videos, his name is now regularly uttered by members of Congress - including some who have proposed federal investigations on his behalf - by cable news megastars, and by Joe Biden, the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Twenty-seven months later, Ngo is very much a somebody. He had about a thousand followers on Twitter, where he posted mostly about anti–free speech left-wing campus culture and the need to reform political Islam. He had gone back to school after spending several years languishing in the millennial male purgatory of underemployment and aimlessness. As I watched him stream a close-up of his bloody face to more than a million people, it seemed like a defining moment in a new kind of media career.Ī little more than two years ago, Andy Ngo was more or less a nobody: a 30-year-old multimedia editor for the student paper of Portland State University, where he was working toward a master’s degree in political science. Just days after his warning, Ngo sat a few feet away from me, cut up and dazed, after a beating at the hands of left-wing protesters. I was in talks to shadow him at the upcoming demonstration, which I thought might be a good way to illustrate how Ngo constructs an incendiary political narrative out of a narrow selection of facts. But Ngo has also been a familiar, and reviled, presence at Portland’s left-wing protests, where he shoots alarming videos of anti-fascists that often end up on the likes of Fox News and Sky News. He made his name in part through his activism calling attention to a supposed epidemic of staged hate crimes, à la Jussie Smollett. Random bystanders can get hurt.Īndy Ngo was hardly a random bystander: The 33-year-old is suddenly one of the most prominent young figures in all of right-wing media. Under the evergreens, weekend gladiators in bike helmets and gas masks beat the sap out of each other, scoring pinfalls to document and then distribute to sympathetic online mobs. Over the past three years, the streets of downtown Portland have played host to a serialized civil war in miniature between armored combatants from the far right and far left. “Antifa promises violence,” Ngo wrote in a tweet about the video. Set to Kelis’s “Milkshake,” the video implored local leftists to turn out on June 29 to demonstrate against a march planned by the Proud Boys, the infamous right-wing fraternity. Late last month, the conservative media personality Andy Ngo sent me a video made by Popular Mobilization, a group of anti-fascists who organize protests in response to right-wing rallies in Portland, Oregon.
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