EZRA LEVANT ｜ Andy Ngo on the pro-Hamas movement, Antifa's latest mobilization against democracy
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Summary
Andy Ngo is the senior editor at Post Millennial and the author of the bestselling book, Unmasked. He has been covering Antifa for years, and has been a victim of them as well. In this episode, Ngo gives us an in-depth look at what it means to be an Antifa infiltrator, and the tactics they use.
Transcript
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You don't want to miss this. Andy Ngo is our guest today. You know who he is, right?
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He's the leading reporter who digs into Antifa. He'll give us a status update. I want you to see
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the video version of this show. So go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe, and you'll
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get five shows a week from me and one show a week from my colleague Sheila Gunn-Reed.
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You'll see the video side of the story, which is important to tell when we're talking about
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Antifa. And not only do you get a lot of content for your eight bucks a month, you can support
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Rebel News too, because we don't take a dime from Trudeau, and it shows. All right, here's today's
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Andy Ngo, the investigative reporter who tracks Antifa. It's May 17th, and this is the Ezra
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Well, the Rebel News team has covered these university encampments across Canada and even
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in the United States. And we've seen a coalition. It's a mix of people from different backgrounds.
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We saw it in the United Kingdom too. They're not all new Canadians or immigrants to America
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or the UK. Now, that is a large part of it in London. But in other cities, like New York,
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it's mainly woke white liberal college kids. And in other parts, including in Montreal,
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it is absolutely the backbone of these protests is Antifa, the folks who in years past were
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protesting everything from Occupy Wall Street to climate action. And I thought we would delve a
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little bit more into that because just today, our reporters in Montreal, Guillaume Roy and Alexa
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Lavoie were attacked, not violently, but they were spray painted and their gear was destroyed by
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masked Antifa thugs. Not Palestinians, not Muslims or Arabs, just local communist activists who
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understand that the front line of the battle in 2024 happens to be the Hamas issue. As our friend,
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James Lindsay says, the issue is never the issue. The revolution is the issue. And I think there's
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one man in the world, at least in North America, who knows more about Antifa than anyone else. Not only
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has he been covering them up close for years, but unfortunately, he has been a victim of them as
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well. You might recall a few months ago, I went to Portland to attend briefly the trial of Andy
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Ngo versus a gang of Antifa thugs who chased him down on the street and physically attacked him.
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Andy Ngo is the senior editor at Post Millennial, and he's the author of the bestselling book called
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Unmasked. And isn't that the truth? That's the chief tactic of Antifa is to hide themselves. Andy Ngo joins us
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now via Skype. Andy, great to see you again. And I want to thank you for putting yourself on the line.
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Most journalists operate from a desk or from a room far away from the front lines. You literally are
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on the front lines of covering Antifa, aren't you? First of all, thank you so much for that kind
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introduction and highlighting this very important subject to your viewers. Unfortunately, Antifa have
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mobilized again. I had said in the past that there would be another George Floyd type moment. I didn't
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anticipate that a geopolitical issue in the Middle East would be the George Floyd moment for this year. But
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unfortunately, that's what it is currently. We have a coalition around the world of revolutionaries who for
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different political agendas would like to see America and its friends destroyed. The hatred that they are
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expressing towards Israel, genocidal hatred, I might add, is the same hatred that they feel for the
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United States, for Canada, the whole liberal world order they would like to see destroyed. And in this
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coalition, we have different new groups of people coming together or strengthening some of their bonds,
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I should say. They've worked together in the past. Unsurprisingly, there are the anarchists and
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communists of Antifa. These are the people who often use the tactic of wearing all black, covering their
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faces and bringing weapons and coordinating violence against targets in media. You also have within this
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coalition militant, ultra-nationalist Palestinians who espouse an ideology that is actually really the same
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as the Charlottesville alt-right, this blood and soil type of worldview that the Palestinian land is only
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for Arabs and belongs only to Arabs and everybody else needs to get out or be killed. You also have Muslim
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extremists part of this coalition, and they are organized in various nonprofit groups, some of whom have
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been accused by federal prosecutors in the past of financing jihadist projects in the Palestinian
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territories. And for these Muslim extremists, they view the war that Israel has against Gaza not just as a
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regional conflict, but rather a religious one. So they have a different agenda. So all these groups,
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they have different goals ultimately, but the big goal is to see a destabilizing of the United States,
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a radicalization of new people so that they can have another generation of foot soldiers, shock troops,
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I would call them, to engage in acts of violence and intimidation against the public, against politicians,
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against various leaders. We have extremists now showing up at the homes, the family homes, for
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example, of those who serve on the board of various universities. So this is the type of escalation
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in their tactics, in addition, obviously, to the encampments, violent occupations. And if you go to any
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of these encampments, you see the type of messages they are leaving around in their graffiti and vandalism.
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They're calling for people to be killed, to be murdered. The University of Washington in Seattle,
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which has an ongoing three-week encampment right now, one of the messages is,
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kill your colonizer. And it uses the red upside-down triangle symbol that Hamas used for the various
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targets that they used to kill communities on the 7th of October. So this is a very violent extremist
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movement. And the legacy media, establishment media, is using euphemisms to describe it,
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as they did in 2020. Currently now we're seeing the protests being described as pro-Palestine protests,
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pro-human rights protests, or anti-war protests. In 2020, they were describing the riots as mostly
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peaceful or racial justice protests. You know, I've been to a few of these, and I've tried to ask
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questions of people I encounter. And I find that most of the ordinary folks I talk to
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are pretty poorly informed. I mean, I don't want to laugh about it, but when I was in New York
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at the Fashion Institute of Technology, that was a downtown sort of fashion university,
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there were kids or students waving a flag that was not the Palestinian flag. I said,
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what flag is that? They said it was the Palestinian flag. It was not. They don't know what the river to the
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sea means. They don't know any of the history. And so part of me thinks, oh, this is a pretty shallow
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movement. It's just a club or a clique or a cult. But then there are some deadly serious
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organizers, I think. Let me ask you this. How much of this is organic? And how much of this is
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professional activists, including funded by, well, I'm going to mention the name George Soros,
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because I know he funded some of the Black Lives Matter movement in the past. We've seen recent
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allegations that Iran and even China have funded some of this. Help me sort the truth from the
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allegation. Is this organic or is this bought and paid for? And if so, who's doing the buying and the
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paying? The encampments, as you've noticed, are large and take a lot of resources to organize,
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to maintain and also to continue to supply with food and tents and various types of resources.
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All that takes a lot of money. And how it's being done is through various streams of funding.
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So one way, one thing that I've researched a lot, particularly in my reporting in the 2020 riots,
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is the role of GoFundMe, CashUp and Venmo in these ad hoc groups that spring up on social media for
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the cause, the cause of the month, the cause of the week, cause of the day. And people can give
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anonymous small donation amounts or even large. Sometimes you can see how much they're giving,
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even if you don't see the name of who the individuals are. This is particularly dangerous
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because this type of anonymous giving can involve state actors. We just don't know who they are.
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Some of the bigger sources of funding that have come in, as you have mentioned, have involved
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billionaire far-left philanthropists like George Soros and others through the various
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charity foundations that they funnel money into various non-profit groups that run various projects.
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Some of the groups that are receiving big money is the Students for Justice in Palestine,
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for example. In Jewish Voice for Peace, JVP is one of the groups involved in many of the university
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encampment protests. And these are people who are not students, but professional agitators.
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The professional outside agitators is a huge component of the encampments. It doesn't absolve the
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students of their role in their extremist organizing. But how it works is that you have students
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working explicitly with outside seasoned professional agitators. And the role of Antifa in particular
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is to provide a lot of the propaganda that's coming out in these encampments. They have tables set up
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where they provide these, they call them zines, short for magazines. These are printed pamphlets and
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booklets. Some of it is actually literal Hamas media office propaganda. That was at the University of
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Irvine, University of California in Irvine, which had an encampment this week that was violent. There
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was local journalists who went in and took photographs of some of the text propaganda before
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they were discarded by police. And so there's so much ideology behind the encampments. There's
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organization, obviously, there's big money, there's small money. I think the public really kind of
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underestimates the danger of what these encampments do, because they're not just isolated incidents.
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Each of these uprising movements build on top of one another. They involve
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the same networks or similar networks or allied networks. And what they write after action reports
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that go out on their far left blogs, instructions for how to besiege a building, how to break into
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buildings, how to de-arrest your comrade, which is a way of organizing attempts to actually
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physically remove a comrade who's been arrested from the custody of police. And so
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the United States, Canada, many Western countries around the world have a far left extremist problem
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that is being underreported, being denied, unfortunately, by not just media, but also
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the so-called hate watch groups and the so-called hate watch groups and the counter extremist groups and
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academe groups, nonprofits, organizations, disciplines and universities that are tasked with actually
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researching extremism and informing the public. They've intentionally ignored one huge part of the
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problem to the point now where Americans are so poorly informed and misinformed about far left extremism that
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they don't even know or remember that in the 60s and 70s, the United States experienced a lot of domestic
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terrorist attacks by communist revolutionary groups. And many of them were among the FBI's most wanted.
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Some of them were convicted and spent years in prison. Some of them fled abroad to enemy states like Cuba.
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And many of them who, once they were released out of prison, then entered academe and have continued to play
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an outsized role in radicalizing students and espousing the ideology that they did before for violent revolution.
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It's like Barack Obama's mentor, Bill Ayers, who went on to become a media darling and a professor.
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You know, you've said so many interesting things there. I was following along your coverage of the siege,
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the encampment at, I think it was the University of Portland, where they, correct me if I've got my
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university wrong, where they took over a multi-story library. Is that the one?
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Yes, that was at Portland State University. So that happened earlier this month, beginning in May,
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for four and a half days. First, they created encampment outside, which was allowed and supported by the
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university president. Unsurprisingly, many of these universities are filled with
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weak leaders, left-wing leadership, who are sympathetic to the cause and think that by allowing
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these encampments to happen, that they're doing something good. Well, unsurprisingly, after just a
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few days of camping outside the library, they, as the numbers grew, then they had enough people to
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actually besieged the building itself. The library was destroyed over four days. The estimates right
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now from Portland State University is that it can cost upward to a million dollars because of the
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extensive damages, the stolen books, the damaged books, the fire extinguisher system was destroyed,
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the cameras that were destroyed. There's some videos and photos released by the Portland police,
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so the extensive damage inside by far less extremists. And the library, unfortunately,
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won't open until the autumn term at the earliest. So that means the students right now at Portland
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State, for their midterms, for their finals, won't be able to study in the main library at the biggest
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That's astonishing, and that's heartbreaking, and that's infuriating. One of the things I remember
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you saying at the time was that Portland had defunded its police to the extent that you weren't sure
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if they had the resources, the manpower, the skills, the physical equipment to retake the library,
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and that Portland, which in the past had relied on other near my police forces, didn't have those
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assets. And correct me if I've got my facts wrong, I'm just trying to remember what you said some weeks
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ago. And that's terrifying to me that you have effectively an on-the-ground militia that can
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go toe to toe with the cops. Did I get you right on that? I mean, we saw the New York
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Police Department go into Columbia. The New York police is like an army. It's bigger than many
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countries' armies. They have sophisticated squads, sophisticated equipment. They weren't going to be
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stopped by a few hundred students at Columbia, but maybe in Portland State they would. What's your
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view on the weak resources of police, and even more importantly, the decision by mayors and police
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commissioners and police chiefs not to deploy their forces? What's your view? What are the facts about that?
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So, in cities like Portland and Seattle, the consequences from 2020 are devastating and
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can still be felt in public safety. In addition to defunding the police at that time, the politicians
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and the residents, unfortunately, created an environment of such anti-police sentiment that it
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was really demoralizing for law enforcement to stay. So, officers quit. They resigned. They
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transferred to different police departments. And for some cities, like Portland, the numbers of
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officers remain catastrophically low still. And the response times for 9-1-1 life or death situations is
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very long. And there just are not enough police officers. So, when I wrote a tweet a few weeks ago,
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that I predicted that Portland police would struggle. I mean, Portland State University has its own
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public police department on campus. And they also had faced defunding. And so, they only had a few
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officers on hand. They had to rely on the Portland Police Bureau for help. And there's this video
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during the time when police finally responded after four and a half days of the siege.
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You can see that there weren't enough police officers there. So, most of those who had been
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destroying the library simply fled through the front door, literally the library. They just fled
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with their weapons and shields and masks on into downtown. And afterwards, police released these blurry
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video screenshots asking if people can help identify any of them. So, the people who have done this type of
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extensive damage at Portland State will likely not face consequence. On top of that, we currently have a
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prosecutor, a district attorney named Mike Schmidt, who came into office in 2020, who, before office and during
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office, has been very open about his sympathies for leftist politics and Black Lives Matter and the rioters in
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downtown in 2020. So, we have this whole system where the whole rule of law in some places in America is
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essentially broken. And also, the normalization of political violence has created an environment
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where people who engage in First Amendment protected activities, such as having a conservative rally or a
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Christian rally or rally against Hamas. And these are real-life examples in Portland. People who organize
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those events, who show up to those events, are subjected to violence by Antifa with impunity.
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That's incredible. And it's terrifying. And, you know, I didn't understand at first the phrase
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black block. I thought it referred to a team. I thought it was a name. But it's actually a tactic,
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isn't it? To dress head to toe in black, no distinguishing characteristics, no watches or
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shoes or hats that could be identified. The idea is to make it very hard to prosecute. And when you
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sneak out the front door, you won't be caught. Am I correct to say black block is a tactic as opposed
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to an identity or a name of a group? Correct. It's a tactic that could be used by any group,
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but it's mostly associated with violent, radical anarchists like Antifa and their allied groups.
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And the whole intention behind it is to evade accountability for organized criminal activities.
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Various cities in America, such as New York City, used to have actually anti-masking
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statutes. In the past, it was used against the KKK so that people who are engaging in
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harassing type of behavior at their extremist rallies could actually be identified by law
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enforcement and prosecuted. Unfortunately, with the pandemic and the normalization of masking,
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these anti-masking statutes have been rolled back everywhere in America. And now people just accept
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that people show up to these demonstrations with their identities hidden to intimidate people and
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to commit crimes. Yeah. You know, in Canada, a lot of the masks are keffiyeh masks in the style of Hamas.
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I find it a deeply, I feel like it's an unraveling. I mean, when you look someone in the eye,
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when you look at someone, there is a kind of social connection. And I think when your face is hidden,
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you become emboldened to be anti-social. It's easier to be rude to someone when they don't
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know who you are, when you're anonymous. That's why people are so brave with online comments,
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because you might, you get the feeling you're anonymous. When you're out in society, you're not
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anonymous. But when you can wear that black block mask or the keffiyeh, you can be someone you're not
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really. You can be bold or brave would be a positive way to say it. But you can be violent,
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thuggish, anti-social, threatening. You can do things thinking you can get away with it. And
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unfortunately, it looks like you can. That's why your book is called Unmasked,
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Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Well, Andy, let me ask you this.
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How is it all going to end? Because literally every day, it looks like another campus has one of these
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Hamas encampments erupting. Is this going to be another summer of hate,
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like we saw in 2020? Is this going to continue? Like, what would be the natural stopping point?
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Because the bad guys don't want to stop. They're doing great.
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With any type of protest movement, at some point, it will ebb and flow. The encampments will end at
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some point. The situation on the ground involving Israel and Gaza will end at some point. That war
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will come to end at some point. However, the groundwork has been laid for a very long time to
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radicalize people into supporting revolutionary violent extremist causes to the point where they
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can just easily activate for some other cause. The next time there's conflict involving Israel
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and Hamas, for example. The next time there's some type of viral police interaction that's caught on video.
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And all these, I describe them as similar to ants slowly eating away at the body. You don't realize it because
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the attacks are small and they're happening at different places and you don't realize the damage that it can do
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over time. We're already seeing now how the politics in America and Canada have already changed to the
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point where people in the mainstream feel comfortable expressing support for terrorist groups, for acts of
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terrorism against civilians. Before they would use dog whistles and such. Now they're quite open with it.
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At some of these encampments and these rallies against Israel since the 7th of October, we've seen
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flags for Hamas. We've seen flags for Hezbollah. We've seen those who praise various figures in Hamas.
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So they're not even hiding it anymore and it's moving to the mainstream.
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And that's my, I think that's the most disturbing aspect of this is the effects long-term and
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that our politicians are unfortunately unwilling and or unable to confront the reality of far-left
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I think you're right. I think what you're saying is scary and I wish it weren't true, but I think it is
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true. Andy, we're very grateful to you for spending so much time with us. Stay safe. I know that Antifa
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regards you as a priority target. They physically attacked you before. You've attacked back peacefully
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in the court of law. So they regard you as enemy number one, which is why one of the reasons why your
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journalism is so valuable is that you have the courage behind it. So thank you, my friend,
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and keep in touch. Thank you. All right, there you have it. Andy Ngo, the senior editor at Post
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Millennial and New York Times bestselling author of his book on this subject called
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Unmasked. We'll put the link to the Amazon page under this video.