Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ Andy Ngo on the pro-Hamas movement, Antifa's latest mobilization against democracy

00:00:00.000 You don't want to miss this. Andy Ngo is our guest today. You know who he is, right?

00:00:04.140 He's the leading reporter who digs into Antifa. He'll give us a status update. I want you to see

00:00:10.860 the video version of this show. So go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe, and you'll

00:00:17.400 get five shows a week from me and one show a week from my colleague Sheila Gunn-Reed.

00:00:22.380 You'll see the video side of the story, which is important to tell when we're talking about

00:00:27.060 Antifa. And not only do you get a lot of content for your eight bucks a month, you can support

00:00:32.440 Rebel News too, because we don't take a dime from Trudeau, and it shows. All right, here's today's

00:00:38.420 podcast. Tonight, an in-depth interview with

00:00:56.920 Andy Ngo, the investigative reporter who tracks Antifa. It's May 17th, and this is the Ezra

00:01:03.420 LeVant Show.

00:01:07.080 Shame on you, you censorious bug.

00:01:18.860 Well, the Rebel News team has covered these university encampments across Canada and even

00:01:25.220 in the United States. And we've seen a coalition. It's a mix of people from different backgrounds.

00:01:30.840 We saw it in the United Kingdom too. They're not all new Canadians or immigrants to America

00:01:37.940 or the UK. Now, that is a large part of it in London. But in other cities, like New York,

00:01:44.860 it's mainly woke white liberal college kids. And in other parts, including in Montreal,

00:01:51.380 it is absolutely the backbone of these protests is Antifa, the folks who in years past were

00:01:59.880 protesting everything from Occupy Wall Street to climate action. And I thought we would delve a

00:02:07.520 little bit more into that because just today, our reporters in Montreal, Guillaume Roy and Alexa

00:02:15.900 Lavoie were attacked, not violently, but they were spray painted and their gear was destroyed by

00:02:24.100 masked Antifa thugs. Not Palestinians, not Muslims or Arabs, just local communist activists who

00:02:34.500 understand that the front line of the battle in 2024 happens to be the Hamas issue. As our friend,

00:02:42.380 James Lindsay says, the issue is never the issue. The revolution is the issue. And I think there's

00:02:49.800 one man in the world, at least in North America, who knows more about Antifa than anyone else. Not only

00:02:58.700 has he been covering them up close for years, but unfortunately, he has been a victim of them as

00:03:06.340 well. You might recall a few months ago, I went to Portland to attend briefly the trial of Andy

00:03:14.260 Ngo versus a gang of Antifa thugs who chased him down on the street and physically attacked him.

00:03:23.220 Andy Ngo is the senior editor at Post Millennial, and he's the author of the bestselling book called

00:03:29.600 Unmasked. And isn't that the truth? That's the chief tactic of Antifa is to hide themselves. Andy Ngo joins us

00:03:36.320 now via Skype. Andy, great to see you again. And I want to thank you for putting yourself on the line.

00:03:42.040 Most journalists operate from a desk or from a room far away from the front lines. You literally are

00:03:48.220 on the front lines of covering Antifa, aren't you? First of all, thank you so much for that kind

00:03:55.900 introduction and highlighting this very important subject to your viewers. Unfortunately, Antifa have

00:04:05.060 mobilized again. I had said in the past that there would be another George Floyd type moment. I didn't

00:04:13.780 anticipate that a geopolitical issue in the Middle East would be the George Floyd moment for this year. But

00:04:21.700 unfortunately, that's what it is currently. We have a coalition around the world of revolutionaries who for

00:04:32.020 different political agendas would like to see America and its friends destroyed. The hatred that they are

00:04:39.220 expressing towards Israel, genocidal hatred, I might add, is the same hatred that they feel for the

00:04:48.100 United States, for Canada, the whole liberal world order they would like to see destroyed. And in this

00:04:54.740 coalition, we have different new groups of people coming together or strengthening some of their bonds,

00:05:02.260 I should say. They've worked together in the past. Unsurprisingly, there are the anarchists and

00:05:07.620 communists of Antifa. These are the people who often use the tactic of wearing all black, covering their

00:05:13.860 faces and bringing weapons and coordinating violence against targets in media. You also have within this

00:05:22.100 coalition militant, ultra-nationalist Palestinians who espouse an ideology that is actually really the same

00:05:33.940 as the Charlottesville alt-right, this blood and soil type of worldview that the Palestinian land is only 0.98

00:05:43.700 for Arabs and belongs only to Arabs and everybody else needs to get out or be killed. You also have Muslim 1.00

00:05:51.460 extremists part of this coalition, and they are organized in various nonprofit groups, some of whom have

00:05:58.180 been accused by federal prosecutors in the past of financing jihadist projects in the Palestinian

00:06:07.460 territories. And for these Muslim extremists, they view the war that Israel has against Gaza not just as a

00:06:16.340 regional conflict, but rather a religious one. So they have a different agenda. So all these groups,

00:06:23.300 they have different goals ultimately, but the big goal is to see a destabilizing of the United States,

00:06:32.980 a radicalization of new people so that they can have another generation of foot soldiers, shock troops,

00:06:40.740 I would call them, to engage in acts of violence and intimidation against the public, against politicians,

00:06:48.180 against various leaders. We have extremists now showing up at the homes, the family homes, for

00:06:53.860 example, of those who serve on the board of various universities. So this is the type of escalation

00:07:00.340 in their tactics, in addition, obviously, to the encampments, violent occupations. And if you go to any

00:07:06.260 of these encampments, you see the type of messages they are leaving around in their graffiti and vandalism. 0.97

00:07:11.620 They're calling for people to be killed, to be murdered. The University of Washington in Seattle, 0.67

00:07:17.060 which has an ongoing three-week encampment right now, one of the messages is, 0.99

00:07:21.380 kill your colonizer. And it uses the red upside-down triangle symbol that Hamas used for the various 0.87

00:07:31.860 targets that they used to kill communities on the 7th of October. So this is a very violent extremist

00:07:39.780 movement. And the legacy media, establishment media, is using euphemisms to describe it,

00:07:45.460 as they did in 2020. Currently now we're seeing the protests being described as pro-Palestine protests,

00:07:52.340 pro-human rights protests, or anti-war protests. In 2020, they were describing the riots as mostly

00:07:59.460 peaceful or racial justice protests. You know, I've been to a few of these, and I've tried to ask

00:08:05.220 questions of people I encounter. And I find that most of the ordinary folks I talk to

00:08:12.020 are pretty poorly informed. I mean, I don't want to laugh about it, but when I was in New York

00:08:16.500 at the Fashion Institute of Technology, that was a downtown sort of fashion university,

00:08:22.660 there were kids or students waving a flag that was not the Palestinian flag. I said,

00:08:28.180 what flag is that? They said it was the Palestinian flag. It was not. They don't know what the river to the

00:08:33.540 sea means. They don't know any of the history. And so part of me thinks, oh, this is a pretty shallow

00:08:39.140 movement. It's just a club or a clique or a cult. But then there are some deadly serious

00:08:45.060 organizers, I think. Let me ask you this. How much of this is organic? And how much of this is

00:08:51.540 professional activists, including funded by, well, I'm going to mention the name George Soros,

00:08:58.020 because I know he funded some of the Black Lives Matter movement in the past. We've seen recent

00:09:02.660 allegations that Iran and even China have funded some of this. Help me sort the truth from the

00:09:08.500 allegation. Is this organic or is this bought and paid for? And if so, who's doing the buying and the

00:09:16.180 paying? The encampments, as you've noticed, are large and take a lot of resources to organize,

00:09:24.020 to maintain and also to continue to supply with food and tents and various types of resources.

00:09:32.180 All that takes a lot of money. And how it's being done is through various streams of funding.

00:09:36.980 So one way, one thing that I've researched a lot, particularly in my reporting in the 2020 riots,

00:09:43.220 is the role of GoFundMe, CashUp and Venmo in these ad hoc groups that spring up on social media for

00:09:52.740 the cause, the cause of the month, the cause of the week, cause of the day. And people can give

00:09:59.860 anonymous small donation amounts or even large. Sometimes you can see how much they're giving,

00:10:05.780 even if you don't see the name of who the individuals are. This is particularly dangerous

00:10:10.740 because this type of anonymous giving can involve state actors. We just don't know who they are.

00:10:19.300 Some of the bigger sources of funding that have come in, as you have mentioned, have involved

00:10:24.820 billionaire far-left philanthropists like George Soros and others through the various

00:10:32.180 charity foundations that they funnel money into various non-profit groups that run various projects.

00:10:40.260 Some of the groups that are receiving big money is the Students for Justice in Palestine,

00:10:45.380 for example. In Jewish Voice for Peace, JVP is one of the groups involved in many of the university

00:10:53.460 encampment protests. And these are people who are not students, but professional agitators.

00:10:59.220 The professional outside agitators is a huge component of the encampments. It doesn't absolve the

00:11:05.300 students of their role in their extremist organizing. But how it works is that you have students

00:11:11.860 working explicitly with outside seasoned professional agitators. And the role of Antifa in particular

00:11:20.260 is to provide a lot of the propaganda that's coming out in these encampments. They have tables set up

00:11:26.020 where they provide these, they call them zines, short for magazines. These are printed pamphlets and

00:11:33.460 booklets. Some of it is actually literal Hamas media office propaganda. That was at the University of

00:11:44.020 Irvine, University of California in Irvine, which had an encampment this week that was violent. There

00:11:51.140 was local journalists who went in and took photographs of some of the text propaganda before

00:11:56.100 they were discarded by police. And so there's so much ideology behind the encampments. There's

00:12:06.660 organization, obviously, there's big money, there's small money. I think the public really kind of

00:12:13.460 underestimates the danger of what these encampments do, because they're not just isolated incidents.

00:12:23.540 Each of these uprising movements build on top of one another. They involve

00:12:29.940 the same networks or similar networks or allied networks. And what they write after action reports

00:12:37.380 that go out on their far left blogs, instructions for how to besiege a building, how to break into

00:12:44.740 buildings, how to de-arrest your comrade, which is a way of organizing attempts to actually

00:12:51.940 physically remove a comrade who's been arrested from the custody of police. And so

00:13:01.380 the United States, Canada, many Western countries around the world have a far left extremist problem

00:13:07.380 that is being underreported, being denied, unfortunately, by not just media, but also

00:13:14.500 the so-called hate watch groups and the so-called hate watch groups and the counter extremist groups and

00:13:17.860 academe groups, nonprofits, organizations, disciplines and universities that are tasked with actually

00:13:25.780 researching extremism and informing the public. They've intentionally ignored one huge part of the

00:13:33.220 problem to the point now where Americans are so poorly informed and misinformed about far left extremism that

00:13:45.540 they don't even know or remember that in the 60s and 70s, the United States experienced a lot of domestic

00:13:53.220 terrorist attacks by communist revolutionary groups. And many of them were among the FBI's most wanted.

00:14:00.740 Some of them were convicted and spent years in prison. Some of them fled abroad to enemy states like Cuba.

00:14:08.420 And many of them who, once they were released out of prison, then entered academe and have continued to play

00:14:17.860 an outsized role in radicalizing students and espousing the ideology that they did before for violent revolution.

00:14:25.940 It's like Barack Obama's mentor, Bill Ayers, who went on to become a media darling and a professor.

00:14:33.060 You know, you've said so many interesting things there. I was following along your coverage of the siege,

00:14:44.020 the encampment at, I think it was the University of Portland, where they, correct me if I've got my

00:14:48.420 university wrong, where they took over a multi-story library. Is that the one?

00:14:54.260 Yes, that was at Portland State University. So that happened earlier this month, beginning in May,

00:15:00.660 for four and a half days. First, they created encampment outside, which was allowed and supported by the

00:15:08.260 university president. Unsurprisingly, many of these universities are filled with

00:15:14.260 weak leaders, left-wing leadership, who are sympathetic to the cause and think that by allowing

00:15:22.420 these encampments to happen, that they're doing something good. Well, unsurprisingly, after just a

00:15:28.900 few days of camping outside the library, they, as the numbers grew, then they had enough people to

00:15:35.780 actually besieged the building itself. The library was destroyed over four days. The estimates right

00:15:42.900 now from Portland State University is that it can cost upward to a million dollars because of the

00:15:49.860 extensive damages, the stolen books, the damaged books, the fire extinguisher system was destroyed,

00:15:56.660 the cameras that were destroyed. There's some videos and photos released by the Portland police,

00:16:00.900 so the extensive damage inside by far less extremists. And the library, unfortunately,

00:16:06.580 won't open until the autumn term at the earliest. So that means the students right now at Portland

00:16:14.260 State, for their midterms, for their finals, won't be able to study in the main library at the biggest

00:16:19.700 research university in Portland, Oregon.

00:16:24.020 That's astonishing, and that's heartbreaking, and that's infuriating. One of the things I remember

00:16:28.580 you saying at the time was that Portland had defunded its police to the extent that you weren't sure

00:16:34.820 if they had the resources, the manpower, the skills, the physical equipment to retake the library,

00:16:44.180 and that Portland, which in the past had relied on other near my police forces, didn't have those

00:16:51.220 assets. And correct me if I've got my facts wrong, I'm just trying to remember what you said some weeks

00:16:55.940 ago. And that's terrifying to me that you have effectively an on-the-ground militia that can

00:17:03.380 go toe to toe with the cops. Did I get you right on that? I mean, we saw the New York

00:17:08.900 Police Department go into Columbia. The New York police is like an army. It's bigger than many

00:17:14.260 countries' armies. They have sophisticated squads, sophisticated equipment. They weren't going to be

00:17:20.420 stopped by a few hundred students at Columbia, but maybe in Portland State they would. What's your

00:17:26.580 view on the weak resources of police, and even more importantly, the decision by mayors and police

00:17:34.660 commissioners and police chiefs not to deploy their forces? What's your view? What are the facts about that?

00:17:40.660 So, in cities like Portland and Seattle, the consequences from 2020 are devastating and

00:17:48.340 can still be felt in public safety. In addition to defunding the police at that time, the politicians

00:17:57.860 and the residents, unfortunately, created an environment of such anti-police sentiment that it

00:18:06.340 was really demoralizing for law enforcement to stay. So, officers quit. They resigned. They

00:18:14.020 transferred to different police departments. And for some cities, like Portland, the numbers of

00:18:20.660 officers remain catastrophically low still. And the response times for 9-1-1 life or death situations is

00:18:28.340 very long. And there just are not enough police officers. So, when I wrote a tweet a few weeks ago,

00:18:36.020 that I predicted that Portland police would struggle. I mean, Portland State University has its own

00:18:43.700 public police department on campus. And they also had faced defunding. And so, they only had a few

00:18:52.340 officers on hand. They had to rely on the Portland Police Bureau for help. And there's this video

00:19:00.180 during the time when police finally responded after four and a half days of the siege.

00:19:04.900 You can see that there weren't enough police officers there. So, most of those who had been

00:19:10.660 destroying the library simply fled through the front door, literally the library. They just fled

00:19:15.860 with their weapons and shields and masks on into downtown. And afterwards, police released these blurry

00:19:22.660 video screenshots asking if people can help identify any of them. So, the people who have done this type of

00:19:30.340 extensive damage at Portland State will likely not face consequence. On top of that, we currently have a

00:19:37.060 prosecutor, a district attorney named Mike Schmidt, who came into office in 2020, who, before office and during

00:19:45.300 office, has been very open about his sympathies for leftist politics and Black Lives Matter and the rioters in

00:19:52.900 downtown in 2020. So, we have this whole system where the whole rule of law in some places in America is

00:19:59.140 essentially broken. And also, the normalization of political violence has created an environment

00:20:06.020 where people who engage in First Amendment protected activities, such as having a conservative rally or a

00:20:13.220 Christian rally or rally against Hamas. And these are real-life examples in Portland. People who organize

00:20:19.780 those events, who show up to those events, are subjected to violence by Antifa with impunity.

00:20:26.180 That's incredible. And it's terrifying. And, you know, I didn't understand at first the phrase

00:20:31.780 black block. I thought it referred to a team. I thought it was a name. But it's actually a tactic, 0.65

00:20:38.660 isn't it? To dress head to toe in black, no distinguishing characteristics, no watches or

00:20:47.220 shoes or hats that could be identified. The idea is to make it very hard to prosecute. And when you

00:20:55.780 sneak out the front door, you won't be caught. Am I correct to say black block is a tactic as opposed 0.99

00:21:02.580 to an identity or a name of a group? Correct. It's a tactic that could be used by any group,

00:21:09.780 but it's mostly associated with violent, radical anarchists like Antifa and their allied groups.

00:21:17.300 And the whole intention behind it is to evade accountability for organized criminal activities.

00:21:24.580 Various cities in America, such as New York City, used to have actually anti-masking

00:21:29.780 statutes. In the past, it was used against the KKK so that people who are engaging in

00:21:39.540 harassing type of behavior at their extremist rallies could actually be identified by law

00:21:44.820 enforcement and prosecuted. Unfortunately, with the pandemic and the normalization of masking,

00:21:51.540 these anti-masking statutes have been rolled back everywhere in America. And now people just accept

00:21:57.940 that people show up to these demonstrations with their identities hidden to intimidate people and

00:22:04.420 to commit crimes. Yeah. You know, in Canada, a lot of the masks are keffiyeh masks in the style of Hamas. 0.83

00:22:12.420 I find it a deeply, I feel like it's an unraveling. I mean, when you look someone in the eye,

00:22:19.860 when you look at someone, there is a kind of social connection. And I think when your face is hidden,

00:22:27.300 you become emboldened to be anti-social. It's easier to be rude to someone when they don't

00:22:33.460 know who you are, when you're anonymous. That's why people are so brave with online comments,

00:22:38.020 because you might, you get the feeling you're anonymous. When you're out in society, you're not

00:22:42.580 anonymous. But when you can wear that black block mask or the keffiyeh, you can be someone you're not

00:22:49.700 really. You can be bold or brave would be a positive way to say it. But you can be violent,

00:22:55.780 thuggish, anti-social, threatening. You can do things thinking you can get away with it. And

00:23:01.300 unfortunately, it looks like you can. That's why your book is called Unmasked,

00:23:05.780 Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Well, Andy, let me ask you this.

00:23:10.740 How is it all going to end? Because literally every day, it looks like another campus has one of these

00:23:19.060 Hamas encampments erupting. Is this going to be another summer of hate,

00:23:23.460 like we saw in 2020? Is this going to continue? Like, what would be the natural stopping point?

00:23:28.420 Because the bad guys don't want to stop. They're doing great.

00:23:32.260 With any type of protest movement, at some point, it will ebb and flow. The encampments will end at

00:23:46.740 some point. The situation on the ground involving Israel and Gaza will end at some point. That war 0.95

00:23:55.140 will come to end at some point. However, the groundwork has been laid for a very long time to

00:24:01.460 radicalize people into supporting revolutionary violent extremist causes to the point where they

00:24:10.180 can just easily activate for some other cause. The next time there's conflict involving Israel

00:24:17.140 and Hamas, for example. The next time there's some type of viral police interaction that's caught on video.

00:24:25.140 And all these, I describe them as similar to ants slowly eating away at the body. You don't realize it because

00:24:38.820 the attacks are small and they're happening at different places and you don't realize the damage that it can do

00:24:45.940 over time. We're already seeing now how the politics in America and Canada have already changed to the

00:24:53.300 point where people in the mainstream feel comfortable expressing support for terrorist groups, for acts of

00:25:02.420 terrorism against civilians. Before they would use dog whistles and such. Now they're quite open with it.

00:25:07.700 At some of these encampments and these rallies against Israel since the 7th of October, we've seen

00:25:14.660 flags for Hamas. We've seen flags for Hezbollah. We've seen those who praise various figures in Hamas.

00:25:23.060 So they're not even hiding it anymore and it's moving to the mainstream.

00:25:26.580 And that's my, I think that's the most disturbing aspect of this is the effects long-term and

00:25:38.420 that our politicians are unfortunately unwilling and or unable to confront the reality of far-left

00:25:47.780 extremism, Islamic extremism. 0.60

00:25:50.020 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

00:25:55.460 true. Andy, we're very grateful to you for spending so much time with us. Stay safe. I know that Antifa

00:26:00.980 regards you as a priority target. They physically attacked you before. You've attacked back peacefully

00:26:08.420 in the court of law. So they regard you as enemy number one, which is why one of the reasons why your

00:26:14.340 journalism is so valuable is that you have the courage behind it. So thank you, my friend,

00:26:18.580 and keep in touch. Thank you. All right, there you have it. Andy Ngo, the senior editor at Post

00:26:24.020 Millennial and New York Times bestselling author of his book on this subject called

00:26:28.980 Unmasked. We'll put the link to the Amazon page under this video.

Rebel News Podcast - May 18, 2024

EZRA LEVANT ｜ Andy Ngo on the pro-Hamas movement, Antifa's latest mobilization against democracy

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