The Daily Signal - Andy Ngo Details 'Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy'

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

In June of 2019, journalist Andy Ngo was attacked and beaten by Antifa. Ngo, the author of the new book "Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy," joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss the book, the agenda behind Antifa, the five months of Antifa riots in Portland during the summer of 2020, his on-the-ground investigations in which he actually goes inside the “black bloc” with Antifa members, and much more. We also cover these stories: Former President Donald Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial began Tuesday with a debate on the constitutionality of the trial itself. During her confirmation hearing Tuesday, Neera Tanden, President Joe Biden's choice to head up the Office of Management and Budget, apologized for attacks she has made on Twitter on Republicans. COVID-19 is likely to have originated in animals, according to a World Health Organization team tasked with finding the origin of the pandemic’s outbreak.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, February 10th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. What are the goals of Antifa? How do the organization come about? What was it like to go undercover to report on the organization? Andy No, the editor at large for the Canada-based post-millennial and who some of you might remember who was beaten by Antifa in June of 2019,

joins me on the podcast today to discuss his new book, Unmasked. inside Antifa's radical plan to destroy democracy. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. President Donald Trump's second Senate impeachment trial began on Tuesday afternoon with a four-hour debate over the constitutionality of the trial itself. House impeachment manager, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, kicked off the trial by playing footage from the Capitol riots. Raskin then argued the legitimacy of the trial per the Associated Press.

President Trump has sent his lawyers here today to try to stop the Senate from hearing the facts of this case. They want to call the trial over before any evidence is even introduced. Their argument is that if You commit an impeachable offense in your last few weeks in office, you do it with constitutional impunity. You get away with it. This would create a brand new January exception to the Constitution of the United States of America. A January exception. And everyone can see immediately why this is so dangerous.

It's an invitation to the president to take his best shot at anything he may want to do on his way out the door, including using violent means to lock that door, to hang on to the Oval Office at all costs, and to block the peaceful transfer of power. Representative Joe Nogh, Democrat of Colorado, spoke pointedly for the reason of Trump's impeachment per ABC News. Trump was not impeached for run-of-the-mill corruption, misconduct. He was impeached for inciting a violent insurrection, an insurrection where people died in this building, an insurrection that desecrated our seat of government.

And if Congress were just to stand completely aside in the face of such an extraordinary crime against the Republic. It would invite future presidents to use their power without any fear of accountability. CNN reported that most senators were either taking extensive notes or listening carefully during their remarks given by the House impeachment managers. The trial is scheduled to continue through the weekend under a resolution authored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and GOP leader Mitch McConnell. During her confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Nira Tandon, President Joe Biden's choice to head up the Office of Management and Budget apologized for a tax she made on Twitter with Republicans.

Here's her exchange with Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman via the recount. You wrote that Susan Collins is, quote, the worst. Tom Cotton is a fraud, that vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz. You called Leader McConnell Moscow Mitch and Voldemort. and on and on. I wonder specifically, how do you plan to amend fences and build relationships with members of Congress you have attacked through your public statements? Senator, I very much appreciate that question. I recognize the concern. I deeply regret and apologize for my language and some of my past language.

The coronavirus is likely to have originated in animals, according to a World Health organization team tasked with finding the origin of the pandemic's outbreak. The World Health Organization team says it is unlikely that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab and will not suggest further investigation of this theory. WHO food safety and animal disease expert Peter Ben and Berwick said Tuesday that our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research. The WHO team investigating the origin of the virus includes experts from 10 different countries.

They arrived in Wuhan, China, the city where the virus was first detected on January 14th to begin their work. According to an investigation by the Associated Press published at the end of December, the Chinese government is working hard to control all investigations into the origins of COVID-19 and prevents coronavirus specialists from speaking with members of the press. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Andy Noe on his new book on Antifa. Americans use firearms to defend themselves between 500,000 and 2 million times every year. But God forbid that my mother has ever faced with a scenario where she has to stop a threat to her life. But if she is, I hope politicians protected by professional armed security didn't strip her

of the right to use the firearms she can handle most competently. To watch the rest of Heritage expert Amy Swearer's testimony on assault weapons before the House Judiciary Committee head to the Heritage Foundation YouTube channel. There you'll find talks, events, and documentaries backed with the reputation of the nation's most broadly supported Public Policy Research Institute. Start watching now at heritage.org slash YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe and share. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal, podcast by Andy No. He's the editor at large for the post-millennial. And as some of you might remember, he also was being by Antifa in June of 2019 and has been on our podcast a whole bunch of different

time. So, Andy, it's great to have you back. Thank you for joining us on the Daily Signal podcast. Thanks for having me on again. Well, it's great to have you with us. So I want to dive right in. Congratulations. You just released a new book. It's called Unmasked Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. And so we're going to get into different parts. of the book, but can you just tell us a little bit about the book and why you wrote it? I wrote it so that the, just the average person, the average reader could pick up one source and have in their hand a book that would provide not just the history and origins of Antifa, but also lay out what their ideology is, what their strategies are, how they're organized,

so that people can better understand the threat that we're dealing with. there are a lot of misconceptions out there, both on the right and the left. And I think these misconceptions have allowed Antifa to grow as a phenomenon that now, I think, is in some areas of the country, a force that has been destabilizing, as we saw throughout 2020. My book writing process took on additional urgency when all the violence broke out last year in the name of Black Lives Matter, just because from city to city,

what I was observing in videos, and also when I was there and some places on the ground, was in addition to protesters who were saying they were with Black Lives Matter, there were elements within that of people dressed in the black uniforms and carrying melee weapons

and having backpacks that were filled with mottes cocktails or other riot supplies and they were very strategically and effectively turning these masks already highly emotionally charged protests into riots really at the snap of the finger. And I lay out in some of the chapters in my book on Mass how this process played out, not just in Minnesota but also in Oregon and Washington State and other places. And I think some of the probably most relevant information for readers is some of the primary documents that I released for the first time from somebody who was in the membership process for one of the largest answer for groups in the U.S. And you'll see in there that the curriculum includes a radicalization process that lasts for nearly half the year. So they really subject their recruits to really intense indoctrination and brainwashing.

And as part of the curriculum, they also train them on how to hurt and name and injure their opponents and also how to take up arms. Well, Andy, that was actually one of my follow-up questions is you didn't mention the curriculum used by Antifa. and you had said materials for the book that includes, it includes not only course schedules, but also there are different meeting locations and individuals involved in training, and it included academics and journalists. So what else can you tell us about this curriculum

and how it was used to do this training? So some of the research that is done at Heritage looks at the work of jihadists and Islamists networks. And I think it's analogous to compare what some anti-fog groups do to how Islamist groups organize in that they take people who are sympathetic to what they think is the anti-fascist cause and they befriend them and invite them to social events. And they eventually invite them to join formally and teach them gradually more and more radical and extreme ideas. The curriculum is structured in part, kind of like a university curriculum,

except that lasts for a month. It's on end. And they complete different units. So this curriculum is pretty significant because it's not just used for Rose City Antifa, which is the cell in Portland. But Rose City Antifa is part of this network called the Torch Network. And they're connected to other cells across the United States who are organized along similar lines. So it really lays to rest, I hope, in this claim that Antifa are not organized in any meaningful way, that it's just an ideology of being against fascism. They have been able to use that as a facade in a way to trick the public and sort of not viewing them as a threat and viewing them as a threat.

and viewing them as allies in the fight against the far right, whatever. In mapping out the growth of the American Antifa, it really exploded in 2016 and going onwards. They've existed on the fringes of the far left for several decades in the United States, but 2016 gave them this perfect opportunity to move into the mainstream left because now they had all these allies in journalism and culture and entertainment who were pumping day in and day out into the minds of the public that America was on the cusp of another Holocaust because of Trump's election win.

So Portland really kind of became the sort of testing ground for how far they could go. And the mayor, Ted Wheeler, turned a blind eye and allowed them to continue to organize. to develop the structures and apparatus. And so I wasn't particularly surprised that in 2020 when riots lasted for days and other places around the country in Portland, it lasted for months. Well, something that you bring off in the book and that some people I don't think are aware of

is that Antifa actually has some communist roots. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so part of the origin story of Antifa looks at who are the original Antifa, So the original and first Antifa were a paramilitary group of the German Communist Party in into four years of the Bimar Republic. And that's important because in that historical context, the Antifa today don't necessarily have a direct lineage to the original group.

They kind of just appropriated the name and the symbols and the messaging. But the original Antifa were communist. the people that they called fascists went just the actual fascist in terms of the national socialist. Their opposition was primarily to the Social Democrats, which was the party that was in the governing party of the Vimar Republic. And they saw it at every turn to delegitimize the state. Their members were connected to previous communist uprisings. Their goal from the beginning was always to delegitimize liberal democracy. And the answer for today still continue that. legacy and goal. If you step back even after World War II, so Eastern, what became East Germany,

the communist state of East Germany, they actually institutionalized the so-called anti-fascist ideology until like the state ideology. You can see what that actually produced. It was an extremely repressive society that had a mass spying apparatus that rooted out not just political dissent, but people who even had wrong things. They spied on, they had hundreds of thousands of informants who were spying on their own family members and all that. And all of this was done in the name of anti-fascism to oppose the West. The Berlin Wall, as we are familiar with what it's called to the East Germans.

They actually, the official title was the anti-fascist defense. barrier. So this whole label being against anti-fascism has always been like a trick. It's just like it sounds noble and great because, I mean, America was involved in a war of fighting actual fascists. And so people who are ignorant about Antifa maybe sympathize with the name. But they use that to pull liberals in the mainstream left into becoming allies or in my dear useful idiots. And as I write in the book, the ideology, it's not just communists. It's like even worse because it merges in really extreme elements of anarchism as well. So it's not, you know, they're not just trying to do the tried and true methods of like having a vanguard and doing a communist revolution.

They don't recognize any government authorities. So it's even, whereas like previous, like, The United States has the history of dealing with far-left Marxist revolutionary terrorist groups. So you can look at, like, for example, the Weather Underground or the Black Liberation Army. These were communist terrorist groups in the U.S. where you could actually dismantle it as the federal authorities did in the 60s and 70s by taking out leaders. Antifa, by the way the structure and this is where the anarchy comes in, and they're entirely autonomous. and they're independently organized, connected in networks, but they're phantom cells. So you cannot take it out in the same way that you could, some of these other terrorist-communist groups that the U.S. dealt with in the past.

Well, one of the things that the book covers that you mentioned is that there's this treasure trove of never before published communications that was sent to C. Rose Antifa members in Portland. Can you kind of clue us in on what some of that was? So the curriculum is part of that. but also like the correspondence between Rose City Antifa and their new member recruits. And they laid out very clearly as this is a commitment. You're expected to complete this curriculum. You're expected to go to the training.

And so it's like, and also the recruits are informed that if they don't complete the program to the satisfaction of the other members, they can get kicked. out actually. So the people who go to the recruitment process are not just indoctrinated, they are also expected eventually to participate in the criminal activities. So for my sourcing for these primary documents, he made it far into the organization that was ultimately voted out because his comrades are wondering if he's one of us, why is he not willing to vandalize with us. Why is you not willing to hit an assault other people with us? There's a lot of pressure to not just become like a sympathizer, but to be somebody who will

take up arms with their comrades and if needed kill and be martyred. Well, as you mentioned, Amy, a little bit ago, the book also talks about that five months of Antifa riots in Portland during the summer of 2020. can you talk us through what happened? You were behind the scenes undercover there. Can you tell us about what that was like and what you witnessed? So people have fresh on their minds the events of the 6th of January at the Capitol when there was a riot by Trump supporters.

And the condemnation of that was unequivocal and universal. And so all of those actions on that day, all that end, Worris was actually repeated for months on end every night in my home city of Portland against federal property and also city property. And people were at that time silent about that political violence at best, at worst, they were actually encouraging the rioters. And we're encouraging people to donate to some of these crowdfunding campaigns so that rioters could be supplied with travel,

accommodation, food, and even riot gear. It was really like a war zone. So every night the Antifa were, they were attacking different facilities, but it, I mean, they were cycling through the same ones. Most of the violence is directed at the U.S. courthouse in downtown. So it's a federal building. And they had tried to, or they did actually, set it on fire multiple times with people who were inside.

They tried to barricade the building and then to set out on fire at the same time. They were bringing explosives, guns and knives, Molotov cocktails. When the federal officers from DHS came to protect this courthouse, they set up a big, heavy barrier fence, similar to the fencing that's in D.C. now, they set that up around the courthouse,

and then sort of the rioters, the answer to what they were doing, so they started to bring in electric tools to cut into the fence. So it really looked like a war zone. It didn't look like America to me. It looked like something you would see in a failed state where you were having thousands of essentially armed militias trying to kill those who were affiliated with the state. And, um, This continued night after night after night, and the response from the local elected officials like Ted Wheeler and those on city council was to condemn law enforcement and to also pass new laws that prohibited local law enforcement from even having any communication of the federal law enforcement. And the press demonize the officers at the time and dozens and dozens of officers faced really serious injuries. So, you know, I was observing the violence, but what was fascinating to me was the level of sophistication that took place and I write about this in the book.

So they were really, it was like an organized army in that they were divided into different units. So the very front were human body shields. So they put like, sometimes they would put kids in the front or parents would bring their kids and they'd stand in the front. There were the wall of moms, which you heard a lot about in the media. They had veterans in the front and dads. And then just behind them would be the people who are throwing the projectiles and throwing the explosives. And then much further back would be this whole unit of people with the really powerful lasers.

And dozens of them would focus like on one officer. And that would cause eye damage with these lasers. And if Ken Cuccinelli of the DHS at the time, when he gave testimony to Congress, I would say, he showed like even just shining the light for a few seconds on your hand, it will start to hurt because the heat builds up. So imagine dozens and dozens of people directing that at the eyes of these officers. And then when the law enforcement were forced to respond with tear gas

or flashbangs, whatever, to disperse the rioters, because they were actually beginning to break into the area. Then all the video cameras by the so-called press would focus then on these civilians who looked like they were getting tear gas and then the narrative that was being told over and over that peaceful protesters were being victimized and brutalized by Trump's secret police, Gestapo, and all that is under rhetoric brought in people from other cities

who came, we had an issue in June where it was hundreds and hundreds of rioters, but by July, because of the false stories that were put out by journalists, that number swelled to the thousands. That is incredible. We're talking about for anyone who's missed the title of the book, the book that Andy has just published is unmasked inside Antifa's radical plan to destroy democracy. Something else that you point out in the book is that a lot of, A lot of people assume that with former President Donald Trump's exit from the Oval Office, the loss of their right-wing target will cause Antifa to just kind of fade into the background.

Is that the case? No, not at all. The opposition to Trump, or in the words of Antifa, the fascist Trump regime, that was always pretextual. And they played our colleagues in journalism like a fiddle. and they used this whole fear-mongering narrative that was pumped out day in and day out to legitimize their messaging. And it had really nothing to do with Trump. That was always an excuse.

Antifa's main enemy is the United States itself. You can look at their own literature. They view the United States as a fascistic imperialistic state who doesn't just need to be destroyed, but the American philosophy itself needs to be destroyed because America has influenced an exported liberal democracy to a lot of the world in the 20th century. So that is their principal enemy. So the actions that they were partaking in

during the Trump administration are the same in the Biden administration. So even in November when it was announced that Joe Biden had become president-elect. The response in the Antifa in Portland and Seattle, where their most active, were to take to the streets to riot. So on the 4th of November, the day after the election, the National Guard was actually activated for the first time by the Oregon governor because the Ancifer were smashing up businesses

one-by-one in downtown. They even destroyed a church, which I think that should have been are widely covered in the media because of destruction of the house worship is significant, I think. And they've continued that since. But the media had just moved on from Portland. You know, the headlines aren't so interesting when you can't blame Trump, when you can't blame secret police under Trump. So much of the country wasn't even aware that the riots were continuing. On inauguration day in Portland, the Antifa had announced way ahead of time that they were planning a direct action.

And of course, they gathered a group of several hundred, and they marched to the headquarters of the Democrat Party in Portland and destroyed it. And this is the second time that they had severely damaged building connected to the Democrat Party. So they literally have chased the mayor of Portland outside of his home. He fled his condo when they rioted out there multiple. times and try to set the building on fire. They've assaulted him when they've seen him in restaurants. So these factless, weak politicians who have coddled and allowed this extremism to grow under

their watch, now it's turned on them, which was a given anyways. Antifa don't recognize any political leader. But, I mean, for example, Jenny Durkan, the mayor of Seattle, she allowed the autonomous zone, the Chaz in Seattle. That happened for three weeks. I was there and that devolved into shootings and murders. She announced she's not running for office again. You know, these politicians can, once they're done being in office, they can retire and have a good life in a suburb.

They're not affected by the decisions that they made that have, are turning parts of their cities until First World slums. Well, something that we mentioned briefly was the situation at the Capitol, the riot on January 6th, and something that you've talked about is how that you don't think Antifa was involved in that at all. Can you tell us about that and your perspective there? So there were a lot of rumors spreading in real time on the 6th of January, and there was a lot of theories that this was a false flag operation by people on the far left, whether it be BLM or ANCFA.

I was very skeptical of that because the type of organization that it would take to embed yourself with, let's say, Trump supporters and to manipulate them in that way, I haven't seen ANTIFA been able to do that. They've been able to do that with people who share similar ideologies to them,

like BLM protesters and all that. But to carry out that type of complicated operation at a Trump rally, it was hard to swallow. the evidence didn't materialize either. I did, I was one of the early ones to point out that one of the people who was inside the Capitol Hill, his name is John Earl Sullivan, is somebody who was involved in BLM activism in Utah and had been arrested last year over a riot.

But that's just one person. You know, the investigations are still ongoing. And so if new evidence comes out that we find out at a late, point when all these trials play out that there were other political ideologies present, then we should discuss it then. As of now, there isn't evidence for that. So I think there needs to be sober analysis by people on what happened. And I'm really glad that the condemnation of those actions were universal.

I just wish that Democrats and the media were condemning of similar actions that had occurred for much longer last year. We've talked about the media a little bit, but I did want to ask you, what is your perspective of the media's coverage in total of Antifa? One reason why I sought to write this book was because the mainstream and legacy media have not done the public right in informing them on what Antisbury. actually are. And I think that is mostly due out of ignorance. And ifa as a movement and ideology is relatively difficult to understand if you don't focus on it as a beat. I mean, they do organize

as phantom cells. So it's easy to sort of, there's always plausible deniability in their presence in role in riots, for example. And they really exploit that in the press. And these are people who I call like the useful idiots, people who just take Antifa on the surface level that think they're anti-fascists. I think CNN's quits Cuomo and Don Lemon, probably some of the most egregious examples. But there are also journalists who are actual fellow travelers or members of Antifa groups as well. And I write about that in the book. One of the people who provided some of the radicalization training to Roe City Antifa is a man named Shane Burley. And he has written opinion pieces for NBC, the independent, and some other mainstream places.

And he's never been forthcoming about his involvement in training anti-fone extremist ideology. And so there's also academics who are involved. So, yeah, it's just the press has been abysmal in their coverage of this. which is why, for example, the problem is as bad as it is. Well, lastly, Andy, I did want to ask you, what do you think, is there anything Americans can do as well as other leaders and different lawmakers, state and locally, and even on the federal level, to respond to Antifa?

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I wanted unmasked to end in some type of positive note, but I do think the present and the near future is bleak. in that the conditions that gave rise to Antifa is still there and confronting these networks and now much more sophisticated apparatus that develop is much, much harder. Really, to break up some of these networks, because it involves interstate communications, interstate criminal activities in organizing, it does take a federal response, but I'm not optimistic that the current administration will have the political will to do that. Even the previous administration under Donald Trump,

who was calling anti-terrorist organization, all that, the DOJ was not able to, as far as I know, make any effort or inroads into actually breaking up some of these networks. Individuals have been, some individuals are in the process of being held accountable in that they have trials upcoming for their alleged involvement in far-left riots last year. But you can take out individuals many, many times. It won't affect the networks

because these riots, particularly why they were so effective, is that they involved a lot of people who weren't in Antifa, who were used as foot soldiers unwillingly. For example, I read about in the book, what I was seeing in some of these places is that they were, at some of these BLM riots, these people dressed in black block would,

seek out, for example, youths, young people who are just there sort of as kind of opportunists taking control or taking advantage of the chaos. And they would be given, they would give them fodder to stop fires or they'll give them hand them out actually some of their modified homemade explosives and tell them to throw to light in throw in this direction. So if anybody ever gets arrested, it's those people who are caught on camera or security footage throwing throwing the explosives or lighting the fires, you never find out who was the one who was actually handing it out because they were completely masked and they disappeared. But yeah, I mean, what really needs to happen is, I guess at local level, if you happen to live

in a left-wing monoculture like Portland or Seattle, I don't think there really is much that can be done. And part of what has kept made Antifa such a growing threat is that there is a critical mass of support in these areas for the violent actions of these far left militants. And that's a very difficult reality to recognize. But you can look, for example, in Portland in November, Teweilo was running for re-election. And he's the one who has been coddling Antifa, and he was considered a moderate choice. he was running against somebody who called herself an anti-firmary or a candidate who refused to condemn the violence and the rise.

And he only beat her by roughly five points and only because there was somebody further to her left who was running as a right-in candidate who got around 13% of the votes. So there is a certain number percentage wise of people who support. And I think I don't know what can be done if you happen to live in it because, these people then will elect district attorneys who are corrupt as has happened in Portland with district attorney Mike Schmidt, who has dropped to charges of more than 90% of the thousand plus cases of people who have been arrested at the months of riots. I guess, yeah, I'm sorry that I don't have like steps one, two, three of what you can do to improve things.

hopefully if you have the resources to be able to move to a place where people are more sensible and elect people who are actually willing to uphold the rule of law. For those who want to read the book, it's called Unmasked Inside Antip is a radical plan to destroy democracy. Andy, thank you again for coming on the podcast and speaking with us today. It's always great having you. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast.

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