Behind the Bastards - Andy Ngo: The Next Generation of News Grifter

Episode Date: September 5, 2019

Robert is joined again by Jack O'Brien to discuss news grifter,  Andy Ngo.Footnotes:1. What do the videos show of the brawl at Cider Riot? Take a look.2. Undercover in Patriot Prayer: Insights From a Vancouver Democrat Who's Been Working Against the Far-Right Group from the Inside3. Respectable Law Tweet 14. Respectable Law Tweet 25. New Evidence Shows Joey Gibson's Role in Planning May Day Attack at Cider Riot6. Andy Ngo Tweet7. I was the target of alt-right death threats across the internet – here's what happened next8. Andy Ngo on Tucker Carlson Tonight9. What happened when I wrote about Islam in Britain10. The assault on conservative journalist Andy Ngo, explained Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. What's partin' my twos? I'm Robert Evans, host behind the bastards. What is with the laughter, Sophie? That's partin' my twos. That's a solid introduction. I think you nailed it. Thank you, Jack. Sophie is being mean to me because she's the bastard of this episode. See how mean she is to me? Yeah. No, I'm still building to that one. This is the show about the worst people in all of history, obviously. In last episode, we talked about James O'Keefe, the patron saint of news grifters. In this episode, we're going to talk about, I don't know, he hasn't worked with O'Keefe, but you might call him his spiritual disciple, a fellow named Andy Noe. Now, James O'Keefe is higher

profile than Andy Noe. Have you heard anything about Andy Noe, Jack? Recently, I started seeing people tweet about him, and I saw the hammer thing that happened. That was him, right? Where he claimed that Antifa attacked somebody with a hammer, and it was actually them being attacked by him. Yeah, and Andy's a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson. He's very influential. He just hasn't been around as long as O'Keefe in the media sphere, so he's not quite as well known, although he's getting to be that way. So it's probably good for us to talk about him today. Andy Kwong Noe was born in Portland, Oregon at some point in 1986. I don't have an exact birth date for the guy. His parents had immigrated from Vietnam via boat

slightly less than a decade before. They'd been forced into reeducation camps by the country's government, which may explain some of the political attitudes that Noe inherited. As a young man, Noe intended UCLA and volunteered with AmeriCorps. He graduated in 2009 with a graphic design degree, like roughly 40% of the people I went to college with. And like all of my friends, he was unable to find any work because graphic design degrees were essentially a scam played upon members of my generation. He was forced to take work as a photographer for a used car lot, and he spent a lot of time unemployed. Noe would later tell Buzzfeed, quote, my brain wasn't a stupor. I couldn't spend the rest of my life going from minimum wage job to

minimum wage job. It's pretty sympathetic so far. A lot of us have been there. Like many millennials who realized they'd been grifted by the system into taking on buckets of student loan debt for a degree that wouldn't actually get them a job. Andy turned back towards the only thing that made sense to him, more school and more student loan debt. In 2015, he enrolled in a master's program in political science at Portland State University. So yeah, that's this guy's story so far. Now, Noe had been raised Buddhist and converted to Christianity in high school, but he became an atheist in the mid aughts. In 2012, he attended a Portland Convention of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. As he got drawn into internet atheist circles, he grew

increasingly concerned about Islam. This was heightened in 2014 and 15 as the Islamic State rose to prominence. Noe became fascinated with radicalism, and not just the Muslim kind. As social justice causes became more prominent across American campuses, Andy Noe grew concerned that a frenzy was overtaking American culture. According to a Buzzfeed profile, quote, he attended an event at PSU where he said white students weren't allowed to speak, and another where he said a black student said she feared that she would be killed on campus by a white supremacist. I'm from the city, no remembered thinking, and they believe Portland State is a place where there are white racists all over who can come out at any time and kill you.

It didn't seem to fit with reality. More than that, Noe thought he saw parallels with the Marxist Revolution his parents had lived through in Vietnam. I was deeply curious on how those beliefs could take root in my family's adopted hometown. So a couple of things to note, one of which is that Oregon was literally founded as a white supremacist state, and there have been several very well documented murders of black people by white supremacists in Portland itself within the last couple of decades. So it's not a silly, right? Well, it was attempted. A guy named Jeremy Christian carried out an attack on a Portland Max train where he was threatening violence on two young Muslim women, one of whom was black and two other passengers intervened

and were stabbed to death protecting them. That was 2017. So yeah, there's reason to be scared of white supremacists if you live in the city of Portland. Yeah, what a silly claim that woman was making. Yes, yes, stupid of her to be worried about white supremacists who have only killed a couple of people in Oregon recently, as opposed to worried about Muslims who have killed zero Oregonians. But by being attacked and thus drawing that person to defend her, wasn't that woman sort of responsible for that attack? She was, she was. So if she had just not been on the bus, there would have been no attack. Right. Yeah, I mean, there's two sides here. There's two sides here. You got to both sides of this one, Robert. Yeah, that does remind me of how it was explained

to me, traffic rules work for foreigners in Japan, that if you're a foreigner and you're involved in a traffic altercation, it's generally viewed as your fault because if you hadn't moved to Japan, the crash wouldn't have happened. Yeah. Yeah. Now, no claims, all of this stuff, pushed him into becoming a free speech activist and a journalist. He joined the Portland State Vanguard, a school paper as its multimedia editor. In 2017, he showed up at an interfaith talk at the university called Unpacking Misconceptions. During the talk, a Muslim student was asked for their interpretation of Quranic law and how it would apply to non-Muslims living in an Islamic state if that country applied the strictest interpretations of Quranic law. The student

responded that based on her understanding, non-Muslims would be asked to leave the country. The implication is that they would be killed if they did not. Another Muslim immediately argued against this interpretation of the law, which is, by the way, absolutely not what the Quran says. It's actually the opposite of a bunch of shit Muhammad said. If you're a Muslim and running a society according to the rules Muhammad set out, you're actually required to treat people of the book in certain ways and protect them. But no ignored that other student's response and ignored the fact that the first response had been to a theoretical question, not the student being asked what they wanted. He tweeted a video clip of just the response with the words,

at Portland State Interfaith Panel today, the Muslim student speaker said that apostates will be killed or banished in an Islamic state. Yeah. It sounds like something that somebody would say at an all faiths college. Yeah, and we see kind of the same O'Keeffe tactic where you pick out just the answer to a question that if you strip it of all context sounds bad, but if included with context is just people having a discussion. But you don't include the discussion because the news story is just that clip. Yeah, it was a moment perfectly crafted for the right wing rage machine. Breitbart quickly farted out a new story titled Muslim student claims that non-believers will

be killed in Islamic countries. So the fallout to all this was significant. Andy was fired from the newspaper, which led to more rage from the right as they rallied around their victimized truth teller. Andy was allowed to write an op-ed for the national review where he basically claimed that he'd been let go for exposing the moral bankruptcy at the heart of multiculturalism. The Vanguard's editor said that Andy had been fired instead for oversimplifying the student's answer to the point of rank and accuracy. The editor also noted that Andy seemed bafflingly and dangerously focused on Islam despite the fact that very few Muslim people live anywhere in Oregon and there have been no Islamic terrorist attacks in the state of note. Now that any hope of yeah,

so at this point any hope of Andy's career as a legitimate journalist had been shot and Andy No moved on to the refuge of all shameless partisan hacks. Are they suggesting that 9-11 was not a attack on all of America? Because that's bullshit. We were all attacked that day, all right? We were all attacked that day. Sorry, I stepped on your- I mean I guess fair. I stepped on your joke too. I'm sure an Oregonian or two died in that attack, but yeah. I don't know. It's telling that his focus is entirely on Islam when if you look at the problem of political and religious violence in Oregon, that's not really a big issue there. Yeah. So Andy moves on to podcasting after he gets kicked out of the newspaper. And I hate to admit it, Jack, but he kind of picked a perfect title

for his new show. You want to guess what Andy No calls his podcast? Something with his last name. Yeah, it is something. Yeah, he called it Things You Should Know. Did he really? Wow. I mean- Yes. And he already has a job so I can't go out and hire him on the spot. No, no, you can't. I mean, I was ripping him off when I pitched the title for this podcast initially as Things You Should Robert Evans. We didn't go with that for some reason, but- I mean, maybe we could sue him for copyright infringement for Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, Stuff You Should Know. So Andy's guests were men like Jordan Peterson, YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, Dave Rubin, and other alt-right and intellectual dark web figures. But podcasting

is hard and only super profitable if you have the voice of a Greek god like us or you happen to be Joe Rogan, like Joe Rogan. So Andy Know looked towards the brilliant and highly lucrative example set by- What? I liked that. Yeah, that part was fun to write. Thank you. Yeah. So Andy looked towards the highly lucrative example set by James O'Keefe. Andy had already succeeded in making one story go viral on the right wing, and unfortunately he hadn't moved quick enough to properly capitalize on the opportunity. So he set to work crafting another viral piece of fake news in the hope that it too would set the right-wing rage machine alight and direct donations to his Patreon. On August 29th, 2018, Andy Know published an article titled, A Visit to Islamic England

on The Wall Street Journal. I'm just going to read how this article opened. A visit to Islamic England. The subheading is, Muslims headed to Friday prayer while non-Muslims went the other way. No one made eye contact. Here's how it opens. London. Other tourists may remember London for its spectacular sights and history, but I remember it for Islam. When I was visiting the UK as a teenager in 2006, I got lost in an East London market. There I saw a group of women wearing head-to-toe black cloaks. I froze, confused and intimidated by the faceless figures. It was my first encounter with a niqab, which covers everything but a woman's eyes. Now, yeah, I didn't actually include this in the script, but there's literally a quote from Adolf Hitler,

where he's talking about how he first realized the Jews were dangerous, where he talks about seeing a fundamentalist Jewish man wearing like the hair locks and the yamaka in public in Vienna. And he said, I found myself asking, first, is this a Jew? And then, is this a German? That's literally something Adolf Hitler wrote about. That's how Andy opens this fucking article. This was published in what publication? The Wall Street Motherfucking Journal. What? Which you might remember Google considers to be the most credible source. Yeah, I mean, because they cover both sides. The person who is terrified of people from other cultures and the other side. Yeah, it's pretty wild. Now, the article was torn apart by

people who actually live in England, which in case you were not aware, Jack, is not an Islamic state. Muslims make up roughly 5% of the English population. No, he just saw one of them and it scared him. It scared him. People weren't making eye contact, Jack. Right. Yeah. And also, this is a story of a time he got scared in 2006. Yeah, I think so. I think he went more recently for the article. Like he opens it with a story of himself there in 2006. He's a bit of an anglophile, but he went back for the article. So I should note that in fairness. In more fairness, I should note that exaggerations and outright bullshit were very common in the article. At one point, Andy Knoe complained about seeing a sign that called a neighborhood an alcohol restricted

zone. Without doing any further research, like a journalist, Andy just assumed that since alcohol is haram for Muslims, they were behind this nefarious sign. The reality is that this neighborhood was an alcohol free zone due to a public safety ordinance created to stem a massive public drunkenness problem. Alcohol itself was not banned, just street drinking. But of course, Andy did no digging and blamed Muslims for banning alcohol in this neighborhood. I also blame Muslims for the fact that you're not allowed to drink on the street in America, too. Yeah, it's fucking wild, man. What do we live in the Islamic State? I mean, Jesus. Yeah, I do shout that regularly at police when they arrest me for public drunkenness. What is this, ISIS? Yeah, I should note that I've

spent time. Obviously, there are Muslim countries where alcohol is forbidden or very difficult to acquire. But I have gotten so drunk in so many Muslim majority nations and never had a problem with it and met so many Muslims who were like, oh, yeah, we drink too. It's fine. You meet a lot of Jewish people who eat shellfish, but for whatever reason, because conservatives are scared of Muslims, they assume that it's some hardcore dictate that every one of them follows, which if you've ever, I don't know, I've gotten drunk with a lot of young women in headscarfs. It's far from universally applied. They didn't make eye contact with you. How did you manage to unfreeze yourself while you were around those women, don't they? I mean, I will say they were

not wearing niqabs. I have never gotten drunk with somebody wearing the full niqab. Those people tend to be much more serious about the letter of Islamic Jewish prudence or whatever you call it. Now, in response to complaints about his shitty article, Andy wrote a follow-up in The American Spectator, another right wing news site. Here's how he tried to defend himself. These vitriolic attacks all seized on my mistake over the sign as evidence of my prejudice against Muslims. In fact, I was just trying and perhaps sometimes failing to describe what I saw. I admit to having been surprised by quite how segregated some parts of Britain have become. I try not to make judgments about that, but what I believe to be true is that

Britain's multicultural policies have produced what Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen calls plural monoculturism. That is, different communities are monocultures existing side by side with literally to no interaction with one another, which I don't know, if you've ever seen what drunken British people eat when they're out on the street, which tends to be Donor kebabs, like there's plenty of interchange. Yeah. And so he's saying that he was actually talking about how the cultures don't interact enough. It was his issue. But he's the one who, in the story that opens the piece, freezes in terror when he sees a Muslim woman. Yeah, I think as is generally true with bigots, his writing reveals his own prejudices more than

it does any actual problems at the core of British culture or multiculturalism as a whole. So, uh, sadly this article did not succeed in making Andy know a household name or earning him a spot with an outfit like Project Baratos. So he kept going. In the wake of the Jesse Small at Case, he started keeping a running tally of fake hate crimes, which he would collect and cover in articles with titles like Inventing Victimhood and Hate Crime Hoaxes Reflect America's Sickness. Andy also took to the streets, live streaming and writing about the escalating series of violent political rallies that have rocked Portland since the 2016 election. In October of 2018, he showed up at a peaceful rally by the activist group Don't Shoot Portland,

a march raising awareness for the police killing of Patrick Kimmons, a 27-year-old black man. This was a fairly tame and orderly march. The only really negative moment came when a driver made an illegal right-hand turn and hit some protesters who were legally crossing a crosswalk. This led several protesters to hit the driver's vehicle. One protestor shoved the driver. No one was seriously hurt, and the driver was allowed to pull away. A reasonable person might conclude that the protesters' rage at the driver was understandable, given that he'd driven a car into them and given the car-based terrorist attack on protesters in Charlottesville a year before. But a right-wing radio station WCBM retweeted footage of one angle of the altercation, edited

to remove all context of the event. They tweeted out with this, Antifa Anarchists Threaten Elderly Driver in Portland. The story spread across white right-wing media. One of the people who helped to spread it was Andy Noe. Noe's tweets eventually reached Tucker Carlson, and Mr. Carlson had Andy Noe on as a guest to discuss the attack. So that's what we're going to listen to next. But first, Sophie is informing me via vociferously-waved fingers that it is time for an ad break. So yep. What's an ad break? Well, Jack, I don't know if you realize this, but the money in podcasting comes from a collection of advertisers who support RR content with their products and services and the advertising petrodollars that they generate. Petrodollars. Yeah, I tried to use that term

once a day. I usually just shouted at people on the street as I drive past, but today it's going to be in a podcast. Products! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like

a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put

forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man,

Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So we're talking about, you know, this car hits protesters, some of them hit the car back because they're angry getting hit by a car. And the story spreads in right wing media as anarchists threatening an elderly driver. Tucker Carlson has Andy Noe on to discuss the event,

the attack, the onscreen chiron below their discussion is Antifa violence out of control. So I'm going to play a clip from that. Here's Andy Noe talking to Tucker Carlson. Some of the footage you showed was recorded over the weekend on Saturday by Brandon Farley. And that was a protest organized by Don't Shoot Portland, which is a Black Lives Matter type of group. They were protesting the police involved shooting of a man who is suspected of shooting two people. The police here take a pretty hands-off approach much of the time with protesters. And what you saw on Saturday in the video is demonstrators were allowed to take over a street in downtown Portland and direct traffic and threaten drivers stop traffic

while the police looked on from a block away because they were afraid of inflaming the situation. So there's a couple of things you might have noticed from that video. One of them is Andy's accent. Okay, I was going to ask. Yeah, that's his fake British accent, which he has affected since he became a media personality. I want to reiterate that he was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I was so confused by that. Yeah. Yeah, he pretends to be British. He sounds like, what's his name, Sebastian Gorka? Yeah, he's not good at having a fake British accent, but I think he's a real Anglo file. Yeah, he sounds a little bit like Frazier Crane. Yeah. Now, the other thing you may have noticed is that in this interview, he basically describes

the police as ignoring anti-fascists. At one point, he says that the response to Antifa has been hands-off in the city of Portland. I should note that he described this response as hands-off five months after Portland police opened fire with grenades upon a crowd of anti-fascist activists. One man was shot in the back of the head, the less than lethal ammunition cracked his skull, and would have killed him had he not been wearing a helmet. But did they touch them with their hands? I mean, with truncheons. Yeah. But hands-off, technically. So the faux outrage over this non-incident helped inspire a patriot prayer rally organized by the groups leader Joey Gibson, which he called Flash March for Law and Order in Portland.

The march provided onlookers with a great example of what happens when these far-right rallies are not met by an organized anti-fascist presence. Right-wing brawlers assaulted numerous people on the street, as scattered anti-fascists struggled to respond. You can find video of right-wing gang members stomping on people and punching them unprovoked. This happened a matter of days after a group of proud boys ran roughshot over a neighborhood in New York City, assaulting outnumbered counter protesters. Now, Andy Knoe hadn't filmed the video of the car assault that Tucker Carlson publicized, but he had helped spread it. And by showing up on Carlson's show, pretending to be a non-biased journalist and making anti-fascists look dangerous,

he'd found a lucrative niche for himself, the one that he'd been looking for all his career. So, a little bit after that video went viral. Another video went viral on Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller, as a result of a tweet that Andy Knoe had sent out. On the surface, this video showed a left-wing activist yelling at a woman who claimed to be a 9-11 widow. Tucker Carlson credited Knoe with bringing the video to his site's attention, although Knoe had not actually filmed it. The video ignited the right-wing rage machine and sent hundreds of extremely online conservatives into a doxing frenzy. Unfortunately, they were bad at it, and rather than doxing the actual activists, they doxxed a professional skateboarder that they misidentified as the

culprit. When the actual dude was finally identified, he received mass death threats, as did the social service agency who employed him. According to Arun Gupta, who interviewed a source at the agency, it was, quote, flooded with hundreds of harassing calls and Facebook messages that were explicitly racist and threatening to harm and kill staff. So, this is going on for months on end. Andy Knoe publicizing and often editing misleading videos to sick angry conservatives on local Portland activists. Many of them have received death threats as a result of this. In an article for the left-wing website, Jacobin Gupta notes, quote, Jacobin has talked to six people in Portland, including journalists, political officials, and activists who described harassing messages and

threats of violence resulting from Knoe's work or political involvement in Portland. Friends of two other activists claimed they went into hiding after Knoe spread their names and they became targets of harassment. Some individuals who's tangled publicly with Knoe are reluctant to go on the record. They say they want to avoid the trauma of being subjected to a new round of death threats. In fact, Andy Knoe seems to rely on people not speaking up about his effect on them. He often writes of how activists won't talk to him or how they take down social media profiles after he focuses on them, seeming to imply they have something to hide. Madison, a Portland activist who tracks Knoe, says, Knoe signals that this is a person that should be targeted,

should be harassed, and should be threatened. Andy puts a target on them and that results in the person being doxxed. Andy is giving people explicit permission to unleash hatred and violence on people. He absolutely knows what he's doing. Knoe knows what he's doing. Uh, you did it. Yeah, I can do the thing that he does. Yep, yep. It is okay for us to do because he did it. Now, we're actually going to run into another case like that a little later. Knoe's role in stoking harassment against individuals he disagrees with goes even deeper than that. See, Andy is now an editor at the far right website Quillette, which among other things runs articles that advocate for a cleaned up modern version of phrenology. Earlier this year,

Quillette ran an article by a researcher named Joine, uh, Linehan. On its surface, the article purported to be a groundbreaking study laying out a network of journalists who were secretly connected to Antifa. Now, the reality is that Joine is no more a researcher than IMA tennis pro. His idea of being connected to Antifa was no deeper than tracking journalists who followed at least 16 verified Antifa accounts and wrote articles he considered sympathetic to antifascists. There are a number of reasons this is absurd. For example, I follow at least 16 antifascist accounts. I also follow Augustus Invictus, a literal neo-nazi running for president. I followed members of numerous right-wing extremist and terrorist groups on Twitter because as a journalist,

that's kind of what you do. Now, the independent in coverage of this even noted that Quillette's founding editor, Claire Lehman, follows more than 16 white nationalist accounts on Twitter. But the fact that Linehan was a complete fraud with no academic credentials and the fact that his study was nonsense had no impact on Quillette. The study spread like wildfire through the fever swamps of the right and eventually made its way into the phones and computers of actual Nazi terrorists. One white nationalist tied to the Adam Waffen division posted a YouTube video that showed pictures of several of the journalists named in the Quillette article. The video is titled Sunset the Media, and it not so subtly suggested that these people should be murdered. The video

ended with a quote from James Mason, a neo-nazi terrorist and author of the book Siege, which is a guide for how to commit terrorism. The quote was about so-called lone wolf attacks. Mason said, quote, I do not urge anyone to do anything like that, but when it gets done, I won't disown them. Jesus. Now, this all kind of pisses me off because a lot of the people named in the article and in that video are colleagues and friends of mine. The Quillette article made it on to Stormfront, a neo-nazi message board the FBI has tied to more than 100 murders, and it's led to a lot of death threats from different groups towards journalists who are really good reporters. By publishing this shoddy piece of crap journalism, the editors at

Quillette endangered the lives of innocent people. One of those people was reporter Shane Burley. He noted in an article for The Independent, quote, In a tweet, Quillette contributor Andy Knoe attempted to identify us and others as covert Antifa ideologues posing as experts for willing journalists, all of whom apparently have joined together in a plot to create some kind of media Antifa industrial complex. So you can see why a lot of people in Portland are not exactly big fans of Mr. Andy Knoe. Their distaste for him would intensify after May 1st, 2019. Now, Portland is obviously a very left-wing city, and May Day marches are common there. Due to the sheer number of leftist activists in the streets, right-wing protesters like Joey

Gibson, Patriot Prayer and Century Proud Boys avoided hosting a single event where they would be swamped and swarmed and instead traveled around in a small group, demasking people and generally trolling. At the end of the day, they headed to a popular anti-fascist hangout in the city named Cider Riot. Now, Cider Riot is a bar, although they get angry if you call them a bar and prefer the term cidery, I'm going to be referring to them as a bar, because they're a bar. I'm sorry Cider Riot. Joey Gibson and a group of his goons showed up there with Andy Knoe in tow and assaulted several people there. Ian Kramer, a member of Patriot Prayer, whipped out a telescoping baton and shattered a young woman's vertebrae with it. The attack is on video and

it is entirely unprovoked. There was no fight, just a violent assault that you could very fairly call attempted murder. Hey everybody, one quick bit of clarification. When I say there was no fight, like there was a big brawl going on at Cider Riot that was started initially when some guys from Patriot Prayer began masing the people at Cider Riot and they sprayed Mace back and it eventually evolved into throwing stuff and then a fist fight. When I say there was no fight, I mean that the young woman whose vertebrae was broken was not fighting. She in fact had her back turned to Ian Kramer at the time when he swung at her, so I just wanted to clarify on that point. Now, in recent days, there have been a number of arrests, I think six so far,

due to the May Day attack, but we're going to get to that later. In the immediate wake of the attack, as Portland locals shared video of the brutal assault, Andy publicly doubted on Twitter whether the woman had suffered any kind of serious injury. He also doxxed her in a tweet in which he claimed without proof that she had committed crimes at a previous event. His tweet read, the Antifa woman who got knocked out cold at May Day is, and he gave her name, she is the person who tried to shut down the James DeMore Portland State panel last year by sabotaging and damaging sound equipment. Now, as you might imagine, this pissed off more people. Several folks who were at Cider Riot claimed no had basically lured them out of the bar and was

thus a willing participant in the attack. I haven't seen any evidence that this is true, but I say this in order to give you an idea of the sort of attitude that developed around no in the wake of that attack. People were pissed at him. This all came to a head in July during yet another set of dueling anti-fascist rallies in Portland. Andy no showed up live streaming to the anti-fascist side of things, where he was promptly doused with multiple milkshakes. I was actually there for that part. Not long after that, he wound up surrounded by a group of masked anti-fascists. Several of these people assaulted him, punching him a number of times. The video of the assault is very clear and quite ugly. No immediately filmed himself bruised and bloodied

in the wake of the attack. Now, the assault went very viral and prompted calls from the president and Republican lawmakers to declare Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Even centrist journalists like Jake Tapper picked up on the story, reporting it as another case of antifa violence against journalists. Jake Tapper is the fucking worst. I hate Jake Tapper. He's a garbage reporter. Now, the real story is a lot more complicated than that. Andy no is not a journalist. He is a right-wing activist. That does not justify his assault, which was absolutely not okay, but he was not a bystander just recording the event. Andy no was a participant in a running series of street battles which have torn Portland apart for

the last three years. He got assaulted during one of these street battles. And again, that's not okay, but his assault is no different from any of the hundreds of other assaults, most of which were against left-wing demonstrators that have taken place during the last three years. And this fact is made very clear in a video that was released just a couple of weeks ago, or just actually less than a week ago when we record this, which we'll talk about once we come back from an ad break. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to

grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season, we'll take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good badass way. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic

science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow

to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So as things currently stand, Andy knows been assaulted in July during a protest.

The video goes viral. He shows up all over the media and within a matter of literally like hours raises close to a quarter of a million dollars for his medical bills. So that's what people knew in July. Now, roughly a month later, a full video from the May Day attack was released. And this video had been filmed by someone who had been walking and marching with Joey Gibson, Andy Know, and other right-wing activists on their way to Cider Riot that May Day. The full video paints a very different picture of what happened than one I think No would have liked to have been known. I'm going to quote the Portland Mercury's coverage of the video. Quote, the most incendiary of the clips show a small group of Patriot prayer members milling

about a few blocks from the Cider Bar, waiting for instructions from Gibson. Who's texting Joey? Someone asks while the group seems to be without a game plan. Another man says, Tell Joey about and them to hurry the fuck up. I hope they got like 10 big dudes with them. As the group waits, they discuss their weaponry. A few men consider which way the wind's blowing to avoid getting spray in their eyes. Another man holds a thick wooden dowel and practices swinging it like a baseball bat. Somewhere goggles, helmets, and tactical gloves, one woman is holding a brick. Who's the guy with the weapons here? A man holding a police baton says, appearing to become agitated that the group has to wait for Gibson. Me! A little

while later, someone in the group tells a person on speakerphone, there's going to be a huge fight and gives them directions to Cider Riot. Now, that all is pretty damning evidence of conspiracy to riot, which is what six of the people present there have been arrested for, and Andy Know was present and filming for all of this. But not once in the wake of the attacks did he share any of his videos, any of his audio, or report this clear evidence of people planning to commit mass assault to the police or to the media. You can even in the video see him smile at one point as his comrades discussed their plans to attack the Cider Bar. This video makes it very clear that Andy Know is not a journalist. He is a participant in this attack. Of course, none of this evidence was

out in July when Know was assaulted and he was able to raise a huge amount of money. He claimed in the immediate wake of the attack that he had suffered a brain bleed. He has presented zero evidence of this. He flew across the country less than a week later and was checked out of the hospital the next day. I feel it's fair to question Know's honesty about the extent of his injuries, since that's exactly what he did to the young woman who had her spine broken outside of Cider Riot. Now, the good news seems to be that many journalists on the center have at least finally started waking up to Andy Know's grift. During the August 17th protests, which I also attended, Know retweeted several edited chunks of other people's videos to try and push claims that

Antifa has committed numerous assaults on decent, harmless right-wing activists. To give you a brief summary of his lies, he claimed that a bicyclist swerved to avoid an Antifa person on a scooter, causing a serious accident. There was in fact a scooter-bicycle accident during the time of the rally, but it had nothing to do with the protest or Antifa, and Portland Police repeatedly pointed this out. When challenged on this fact, Andy Know posted, Portland Police Bureau have released a press statement saying the two had actually collided when the woman on the scooter was going in the wrong direction. A source tells me she was part of the Antifa group. She and friends had been passing around the scooter and taking turns trying it out. Yeah, at another point in the day,

an armored school bus filled with members of American Guard, a fascist extremist group linked to nine murders and mosque burnings, attempted to cross into downtown Portland to do God knows what. They were caught by antifascists while stopped in traffic. The antifascists chucked water bottles and what appears to be sheetrock at the bus, which again was armored and had screens on most of the windows. Several of them kicked at the door of the bus. The fascists then opened the door of the bus and one of them began swinging a hammer at people's faces. One antifascist managed to take the hammer from him and swing it back. Andy Know tweeted edited video that just showed the antifascist with the hammer and claimed that this had been an unprovoked attack by Antifa,

something actual video evidence clearly contradicts. Again, this is the guy's fucking strategy. At several points he posted video or pictures of injured older men claiming they had been assaulted by Antifa. In every case, full videos show that these men were taking place in street brawls and in some cases instigating them. One video is a picture of a clearly inebriated man who taped his fists up specifically to punch people and repeatedly shouted that pass her by were faggots. He would eventually succeeded in starting a fight. When he was beat up, antifascist street medics provided first aid care to him. This is all documented. But here's how Andy Know characterized things, posting just a picture of the man on the ground. Middle-aged man was

maced and beaten by an Antifa mob. He was knocked unconscious to the ground. His partner or spouse was trying to protect him as the mob still surrounded them. No police. When the man regained consciousness, he began like instigating fights immediately again. Like he was with the people who were taking care of him. In the wake of the footage of the media attack and the sheer shocking number of lies Noah's caught telling about the August 17th rally, many local and national reporters have begun to dissociate themselves from the hymn. So it is possible that his grift has peaked and we're all about to watch him take a downhill slide. But if the lesson of James O'Keefe teaches us anything, it's that repeated and flagrant lies are no barrier

to a lucrative career in right wing journalism. And based on that, I suspect that Andy Know is going to have a long and very profitable career. Has he been on Tucker Carlson's show recently? I don't think he's been since August 17th, actually, but I'm not 100% certain about that. Tucker Carlson also took a planned vacation recently. So maybe. Yeah. Well, after claiming that white supremacy was not a problem in the US after a white supremacist terror attack. He always seems to have these vacations planned for right after he says some just blatantly racist shit. It's weird. I mean, you know, that's how I plan all of my vacations too. So I'm not going to hit him too much on that. You know, I don't know. And you know, it makes me very angry.

I think he's a dangerous person. And I don't like him. That's the that's that's what I got. Yeah, that seems to be, you know, the actual Nazis during, you know, the early 20th century didn't make a bunch of very convincing documentaries, but they made a bunch of, you know, famous works of propaganda. And yeah, because you have to edit the truth out of movies to get for the reality you're presenting to go here to your version of things. And it seems like that. Yeah, these people are just propagandists who managed to hijack a very willing right wing media. And a bad centrist media, you know, Andy Knoe was responsible like during the rally in July for sharing this picture of what if you look at the picture, it's an older man in his

60s with white hair and just blood pouring down his face and the top of his shirt, which, you know, obviously was claimed to have been an old man assaulted by Antifa for no good reason. And it made it into like local reporting, like centrist and sort of mainstream local news organizations, like one of the titles right above this picture was two more Oregon men are left bloody after violent Antifa attack at Portland protest. There's other pictures of the same guy before he's bloody with a telescoping baton and a fedora smiling and rushing towards a crowd. And there's video of him sparking attacks and swinging a stick at people. The guy got hit in the head after swinging a baton at people and instigating attacks. Like, yeah, the violence

definitely occurred on both sides. But this guy was an instigator and not an innocent old man. He was a dude swinging a fucking baton at people. Like, that's part of the problem is that like what's been happening in Portland is a complicated and conflicting series of street battles. And there's absolutely been bad actors on both sides. But the right wing media is trying to portray Antifa is this like violent organization, whereas the reality is most of them are more apt to do things like show up in banana costumes as a marching band or like like help hold prayer vigils and stuff. And there are a smaller number of guys who are there because they want to have a fight. Whereas on the right, you have also a shitload of people who show up because they

want to have a fight. And sometimes members of both groups get their wish. But like the idea that this is terrorism or anything but two groups who hate each other fighting in the street is pretty ridiculous. And the number of assaults that occur when the right wing demonstrators aren't checked by large scale groups of anti fascists, like those are the least violent rallies when a shitload of anti fascists show up and just sort of drown them out. Like that's why on August 17th there was no serious violence. But so I mean, in comparison, how do the number of people murdered by right wing extremists compared to the number of people murdered by Antifa? Well, so far there's been zero people murdered by Antifa. The closest thing you come to an

attack carried out by someone who marched with any of those groups was Willem Sprocken, the guy who attacked those ice buses. Hey, everybody, I screwed up again. His name was Willem van Spronzen, not Sprocken. Sorry, I'm dumb and a hack and a fraud. And he didn't kill anybody. He attempted to destroy buses that were empty to stop ice from being able to deport people. He was a guy who right? Yeah, they shot. He did have a gun with him. Yeah. That's the closest you get to an Antifa attack with a body count of zero, whereas we're up to well over 100 right wing deaths in the last year in change, like deaths as a result of right wing terrorists in the last year in change, and the police have arrested 27 people since El Paso for planning terrorist attacks, the vast

majority of whom had clear right wing and white supremacist ties. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird. I wonder how the right would react if Antifa killed a single person. Well, and this is what's really worrying to me is that I suspect there absolutely will be probably inspired by like environmental activism, a deadly terrorist attack in the near future, you know, maybe on oil and gas employees or something like that. And when that happens, it's going to be used as the justification for a vast crackdown on left wing activists, whereas, you know, there's been essentially was nothing done up until El Paso, you know, after it took it took dozens of right wing attacks for any kind of crackdown to occur. And even then, it's been fairly mild. Right. It's frustrating. It is. I would agree

with that. Yeah. Hmm. So everybody, look forward to the eco terrorist attacks in our future. And keep an eye out for people like Andy know, because they're full of shit. Yeah, all the pictures you when you just do a Google image search of him, it's all him with like a black eye appearing on various news things and just looking very, you know, beat down and victim me. It's just yeah, he's he talks about the victim culture, the people claiming to be victims. And that seems to be his whole MO. Yeah, that's he he really like it getting assaulted worked out very well for his career. I can say that, you know, he made a quarter of a million dollars in a matter of hours. And, you know, he's he's he's, I don't know, I'd be interested to

see his medical reports. Yeah, I also suspect I'd be interested to see if he gets charged as a result of any of the videos that came out on Cider Riot, or about Cider Riot, he doesn't doesn't say really anything during those videos. But he's present the entire time. And I know it's it's very like, I can say this as a guy who frequently is on and filming on the anti fascist side of things. If I was embedded with a group of these people, and I heard them planning to attack a bunch of people sitting and chilling at a bar, and then one of the anti fascist side was with unprovoked broke a woman's spine, I would report that shit, because that would be a serious crime and not okay. That's what you do as a journalist, regardless of where your sympathies

lie. And I think Andy's performance during the May Day attack is is all the evidence you need that he's not a journalist. Right. Yeah, I think that's pretty fair. Yeah. Hey, everybody, just one quick update. Andy know no longer works at Quillette. Some people say he's been fired. His name has certainly been removed from the masthead. I think some of his articles have been purged. You know, his editor at his former editor at Quillette says that he wasn't laid off that this was a planned departure. The timing certainly seems a little bit suspicious for that to have been the case. But either way, he seems to be currently unemployed. So we will see whether or not his career recovers from all this. Anyway, Jack, you want to plug your plugables?

I do. I desperately want to plug my plugables. Excellent. I can I host a week daily podcast called the Daily Zeitgeist. It is a comedic look at the events of the day, the Zeitgeist, the news ghost of the day, what what is happening in the world of pop culture, just the America's national shared consciousness. I do that with Miles Gray. You can find me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien. And you can find Daily Zeitgeist on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. So check out the ghost of all of that news. And check out us on BehindTheBastards.com, where you can find all the sources for this episode. Check us out on Twitter and Instagram at at Bastards pod. And you can buy t shirts from T public behind the bastards. Whoa. And

you found out about those. I did. I did. Sophie tried to keep it a secret from me for some reason, but I got to the bottom of it. I picture you best with your hands tied behind your back, tied to a chair and Sophie like throwing water in your face to wake you up. I'm telling you about that. That is t shirt store. That is how we start every episode of behind the bastards. Yeah, our recording studio looks exactly like the safe house from reservoir dogs. Yep. Just one swing light bulb. Yeah. All right. Okay, guys, that's the fucking episode. Go fucking, I don't know. Yeah, do do something useful or something useless, but relaxing. One of the two sounds like a plan. All right, bye.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sorted tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm

hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price to death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.