The Michael Knowles Show - UNMASKING The True Threat of ANTIFA | Andy Ngo

Episode Date: March 13, 2021

Andy Ngo joins the show to talk about his new book Unmasked. In Unmasked, Andy Ngo tells the story of this violent extremist movement from the very beginning. He includes interviews with former followers of the group, people who've been attacked by them and incorporates stories from his own life. This book contains a trove of documents obtained by the author, published for the first time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody. Michael Knowles here. A couple weeks ago, I sat down and chatted with my friend Andy No. Andy famously has been attacked physically, obviously as a matter of his reputation, but also physically attacked by Antifa. He got a brain bleed because of it. And this is because Andy is one of the few, maybe the only journalist in America who is actually going out and covering Antifa. He's got a new book out chronicling all of what he's learned about this militant leftist group, all the misconceptions people have about it. Turns out it's definitely not just an idea, as some Democrat politicians have told us. So take a listen to my friend, Andy No.

You know that the state of politics is tense and degraded when a friend of mine has to flee the country for his life because of all the threats he's getting from leftist militants. I actually can't believe, no matter how crazy things have gotten, that I have to utter that statement in America in 2021. But I do. My friend Andy Noe is currently in the United Kingdom because he is target number one for some of the most prominent leftist terrorists in the country, most of whom work under the banner of Antifa. Andy has a new book out, which I think is sort of the book on the topic. The book is unmasked inside Antifa's radical plan to destroy democracy. Order the book now. Get it while you still can.

I'm sure it'll be de-platformed or at least suppressed by big tech and by the liberal establishment. Andy, I'm sorry that you're out of the country right now, but I am glad that you're safe. Thank you for having me on, Michael. My pleasure. I want to talk about some news that Antifa has broken. I mean, they didn't report the news. They actually broke things, and therefore that is the news. Antifa took over this hotel in Olympia, Washington over the past week.

they appear to have taken hostages, some staff fled, some guests sheltered in place. This is not just, you know, running around making a nuisance in the streets. This is the sort of thing you'd see in a third world dictatorship. Yes, this is what happens in Somalia and Yemen, for example, the terrorists will target hotels. So on Sunday, a group of Antifa took over the red line in downtown, Olympia, Washington State. the state capital. And according to the statement that was put out by the city staff were assaulted, that they witnessed these militants bringing in hatchets, knives, and batons. Within, so this was just over the weekend, police did eventually respond in large numbers to get these

militants out. But this really should have been international news. Just how, shocking that they, I mean, just what's, it's becoming routine for them now to just take over territory or buildings and claim it as theirs. And I believe this is the first time they've done it to a building where dozens of people were victimized. You know, you're, you've become, I guess, one of the last journalists in America. By that, I mean, you are going in, covering stories that other people don't want to cover. As you say, this should have been international news, it wasn't. The liberal establishment is basically covering for Antifa. Many people in the liberal establishment have said, Antifa is just an idea. Something tells me you're not fleeing the country

because of the threats you've gotten from just an idea. This is real people who are committing real violence. Yeah, I think the, see, so that ideology statement that came from President Biden And then during a presidential debate, it was first said by the head of the FBI, Christopher Ray. And that statement in itself is not incorrect, but it needed to be followed up. So in addition to being an ideology, it's also movement and networks of organizations. Now, that third part is particularly important because that's how they carry out acts of domestic terrorism. And it's not just theory. You know, it's one thing if they were only distributing their extremist literature,

but this literature then is also coupled with pamphlets and booklets, describing actually on how to claim and siege territory, how to make homemade bombs, how to make Molotel cocktails. And I think because the Antifa have had essentially cover by the mainstream and legacy press, people don't even realize how extreme they are. I mean, think about it.

So we just now had the weekend of them seizing a hotel where people were inside and bringing allegedly weapons, blunt force weapons and knives and hatchets. But that was just one day. We had throughout 2020 in my home city of Portland month after month of nightly ride.

So everything that happened on the 6th of January at the Capitol Hill siege, All that year more happened day after day after day in my city. And the establishment left and the media left gave them cover for that. At best, they were silent. At worst, some of them actually even encouraged people to donate to some of these crowd fonts that would give supplies to these rioters or contribute to their bail funds so that those who happen to get arrested are just back on the street, ASAP.

This is the aspect of it that still confusing. me a little bit, though I think it's becoming clearer and clearer and clearer and your book is helping to explain why that is. Antifa is this kind of group of anarchists and communists who want to tear down the system. They're burning down buildings. They've burned down government buildings. They've taken over hotels, as we've discussed. Why does the establishment left, which owns many of these buildings and which, you know, operates within this formal system, Why are they covering for the people who seem to want to tear the system down? You're right. We have establishment left giving, coddling this beast that I think is now too big to slay.

So on inauguration day, for example, in Portland, the Antifa destroyed the headquarters of the Democrat Party office in Portland. But I think the reason why this allyship had developed was particularly, so in response to the surprise win of Trump in 2016, those who either are to ignorance or zealotry actually did believe that this was a sign of ascendant fascism in the U.S. And so they excused and in some cases even encouraged the most extreme elements of the far left like Antifa to come right. right into the mainstream left. And that's exactly what happened. The political violence in Antifa was accepted and tolerated in many urban centers to the point of where, for example, in Portland and Seattle's political street violence is routine.

It's not, it doesn't even really make the news there when people are smashing up businesses, Australian fires. People are gotten used to it over the years. And this was allowed to happen ostensibly under the banner of Antisbury. anti-fascism, anti-racism, but all it is it's violent extremism masked under social justice. Well, this is a great point because very often the left projects and accuses its opponents of doing what it itself is doing. And so what we saw with the rise of Trump, during that time, you had the left begin to elide, say, mainstream conservatives and radical neo-Nazis, whatever.

And, you know, whenever the occasional skinhead crops up, mainstream conservatives say, oh, yeah, we're not that. We don't agree with that. But the left no longer makes that distinction. They don't even use the different words anymore. You'll notice they don't even use this term alt-right or whatever the term was that becomes completely drained of meaning. Now, what the left is saying is that effectively 75 million Americans who, some odd, 75 million who voted for Trump, are fascists, they're Nazis, they're no different than Hitler. So they're erasing that distinction when, in fact, there are many distinctions on the right. But for the left, the distinction between these radicals like Antifa who are going out and giving brain hemorrhages to people such as yourself, there really is much less of a distinction between them and the mainstream left who has been coddling them and encouraging them now for years. Yeah, so what's allowed Antifa to become so empowered from a fringe movement to now a phenomenon on that it's actually destabilizing force in some cities is because of this excuse that the less gives in that the threat from the right, it's not even just threat from the far right,

it's they're casting this wide net of fascism over Trump supporters, even people, for example, who went to the capital to listen to Trump speaker, had nothing to do with riots. these people are now also being called domestic terrorists. They're essentially, they've mainstreamed tenets of Antifa's ideology. And it comes down to, as you mentioned a moment ago, Antifa are anarchist communists. And from the original Antifa to today, and by the original Antifa, I'm referring to the paramilitary Antifa

of the German Communist Party in the into war years. That was the first one in the group, that contemporary Antifa take inspiration in a direct lineage from. It's under that ideology that gives them, in their minds, the justification for setting fires to buildings when people are inside it, bashing people in the head with crow bars and bricks. And in my case, in 2019, a person with a camera, they actually punched me repeatedly in the head into I had a brain humbered.

And they all actually think that they are doing something just and noble. And that's really what makes them really dangerous because they see, I mean, they say it themselves that they will do this all by any means necessary, opposing fascism. And that if necessary, they will kill. And they have killed. And they've gotten themselves killed in the process of carrying out attacks as well, which I document in the book. Right. You know, it's kind of ironic, I guess, or it's just an inversion of what we used to see, which is in the traditional culture you had, the West was a Christian culture, right? It was Christendom. And Christianity posits the incarnation of the perfect good in Christ. And we're all kind of evil, but, you know, you have this incarnation of the perfect good, which can lead us toward redemption. And in leftism, which kind of flips that on its head, you don't really have any good and you kind of get rid of all those. all those old notions. But you do have the incarnation of pure perfect evil. And that takes the

form of fascism or Nazism or Hitlerism or whatever. I mean, basically all the references come back to World War II and this incarnation of perfect evil in the form of fascism. And so if you can, if you can tie your opponent to fascism, if you know, you can make your opponent literally Hitler, then that justifies doing anything. So you get a mild-mannered journalist like you. One of the, you know, for people who don't know you personally, one of the sort of most mild-mannered, nice, polite people that I am friends with goes out in Antifa. And they say you, and you know, are literally Hitler and we're going to bash your head in. Luckily, you escaped with your life. But all the while, you have guys like Jake Tapper, for instance, at CNN, who when the white

identityarian guy, Richard Spencer, got punched in the face. He was participating in these kind of jokes saying, well, it's the American tradition to punch Nazis. Now, nobody's defending these guys like Richard Spencer, but surely I think we can all acknowledge that we shouldn't have vigilantism in the streets, guys going around sucker punching and committing political violence, right? But now you have the mainstream left defending that because of this kind of broad category of fascism. Yeah, that was my concern several years ago when people on the mainstream left were celebrating these memes about Richard Spencer being assaulted. Now, I took issue with it not because I like Richard Spencer or stand up for what he believes

in. It's nothing like that. It's about the principle or this norm that we do not solve political disagreements through violence. I mean, that's sort of the base human instinct in a lot of societies. around the world still solved their issues that way. And the fact that nonviolence between citizens is a norm and the U.S. is a huge accomplishment. And now we're undoing that.

That undoing was being celebrated because, you know, it's easy to dislike or hate somebody like Richard Spencer. But then, again, at that time, that label of who is the fascist is being applied so broadly that it included just anybody who is critical of communism, it's critical of Antifa, it's critical of social justice extremism. All of us are labeled fascists and therefore worthy of their acts of violence and assaults and intimidation. I mean, I've had people show up to my home multiple times. All of this has been reported to police.

They routinely write around the city of Portland where I lived, murder, Andy Nino, kill And you know. And all this is being reported to beliefs and they don't do anything. So, you know, the conditions that gave rise to Antifa really had very little to do with Trump. That was just pretext for them to mainstream, the extremism. And now with Trump out of the picture, you can really see that their actions are no different. They're rioting the same. They're victimizing the public in the same way. They're attacking Democrat institutions in the same way.

I do want to touch on the Portland of it all. As you mentioned, they seem to cluster around there. They go after you personally there in your city. What is it about the Pacific Northwest? They took over this hotel in Washington State. I mean, I know that Antifa has spread out throughout the country. We've seen them in Washington, D.C. and all over the place. But why, what is it about Portland that seems to have attracted so many of these militants? So as I write in the book, the origin of American Antifa, and it's really organized form as we see today, did start in Portland through one of the cells called Roe City Antifa, which is the Antifa in Portland. I think the establishment of this cell is significant because then once they already had a blueprint to radicalize, recruit, and train members and prospective members, that could really be easily applied to new auxiliary groups that established in neighboring cities. So what you happen is it just becomes sort of once the apparatus is built, just it gets stronger and stronger. because then now riots that happen, for example, in Portland don't just involve the Antifa from Portland, the Antifa from Seattle, from Olympia, from Eugene, from Corvallis will come up and vice versa as well. So you have what is in absolute numbers of relatively small number of militants being much bigger than just a city problem. I think all of this underscores the point that Antifa is not just an idea. Sure, it's an idea, but it's not just an idea.

If it were just an idea, you'd see it maybe evenly spread out throughout the place. But no, it involves real people actually training, actually exercising violence in real places and where they cluster, more people are going to come as well. It's not just philosophy. There's a history to this also. You know, one thing that's kind of funny with the Antifa guys, if you want to use the word funny to describe these terrorists, is the way they talk and the way they write, they sound like the pink hat wearing campus radicals. You know, they talk about intersectionality and gender theory,

and you'd expect them to be kind of wimpy, you know, in the, in the ideologies they're espousing. But they're not, they're not little special snowflakes. They're armed with guns and machetes and bats. How do we reconcile this, this idea that all the, you know, people spouting these silly ideas are so wimpy? Well, they look pretty tough to me. Yes, I'm really glad you point that out because there is this misconception on the right that Antifa are just soy boys who are weak and wimpy. I mean, it doesn't really matter about their physical strength. These are people who bring gums, homemade explosives, incendiary devices, hatchets, hammers, two riots, and they use these weapons against people as well.

And they've killed. So it doesn't matter if they're weak. and, you know, it doesn't take much strength to fire a pistol or a rifle, for example, or to stab somebody with a knife, as they did in Portland this past summer. So we're underestimated, even the right is underestimating them. I think in addition to the organized violence, the philosophy and theory that is the basis for their movement and ideology is really crucial, because it calls for not just destruction and violence.

It actually, the main goal of it is to abolish the United States. So, like, in their worldview, they cannot establish their communist anarchist utopia made up of communes until the United States is destroyed. So you can see what happens when their political theory, if you will, is put into practice. Look at Chats, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. I write about my time undercover there in the book. It is an area once they claimed it as a sovereign territory separate from the U.S., immediately it devolves into murders, homicides, attempted rates, violence, night after night after night, infighting.

Even though they claim to be horizontally organized and not to have any leadership, there were figures immediately who rose up and were vying to be the warlords of this territory. That's what their ideology leads to. Well, of course, and when the Chaz zone and all these other pseudo-states that they're establishing, when they fail, of course, will be told that true Antifa has never been tried, and they'll try it again and again. You know, there does seem to be an anti-establishment movement on the left and the right. So on the left, it's Antifa and BLM. On the right, they generally are more peaceful, much more peaceful.

but there's still a real anti-establishment idea cropping up, that this establishment is corrupt. They're not particularly wise. They're serving themselves. They're not serving the American people. This seems to be getting worse and worse and worse. I was told if Joe Biden became president, it would be a return to normalcy. Just the first week, all of the executive actions, radical new policy coming out of him, even more social strife. That doesn't seem to be the case. You've mentioned the end game of Antifa here, which is the total upheaval of the system, the eradication of the United States. What do the next few years look like?

You're probably the nation's foremost leader on Antifa. Do you have a crystal ball? Do you have any prediction on where things go from here? I think it goes where they've been in the past year, which is that because of weak leadership in certain urban areas like Seattle and Portland and other cities, because of demoralized police departments and officers leaving in the droids and their budgets being slashed by the hundreds of millions,

you're going to continue to see an uptick and crime. And I think my fear is that this is leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy where Antifa seek to make the public not trust in the ability of the state to provide for the basic needs, you know, just like peace, protection of property rights and all that, which is why these attacks on capital property is, I mean, there's a lot of meaning behind it.

It's not just wanton violence. They actually want business owners to leave. They want the areas to become destitute so that they can go in and claim to be the replacement for the state And, you know, doing that at the federal level is, I don't think, going to happen. But you can really see the carnage that they can wreck in cities because of the leadership that turns of blind eye because they actually think that these people are anti-fascists. That's what I'm afraid of. Well, you've seen the rise of so-called no-go zones in areas in Europe where basically radical Islamists came in and just sort of displaced the state there.

And you see the rise of no-go zones in the United States, like the Chaz, or like many parts of Portland or parts of Washington. And, yeah, the fear is that things don't seem to be getting better, if anything, they seem to be trending in the wrong direction. One way to arm yourself with facts, with the knowledge of what this really is, and it's going to be very contrary to the propaganda you're hearing in the mainstream press, is to read Andy's book, Unmasked Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy. democracy. A really, really important book. I'm glad that you were able to put it out. I know Antifa's threatening you even threatening bookstores that are going to carry your book. So make sure you order it now before it's taken down. And Andy, when it's safe for you to return, I very much look forward to seeing you in person sometime. I know we haven't had a lot of travel now because of the Wuhan flu. Everyone's very afraid of that. I'm much more afraid of the armed leftist

terrorists who are threatening you, but I look forward to seeing you again in person. I'm sure that this book is going to climb the bestseller charts in the meantime. Thank you so much, Michael. Great to see, Andy. We'll see you soon.