1,523 words
Andy Ngo
Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy
New York: Center Street, 2021
See also: Know Your Enemy: Antifa
If you follow Antifa as a subject on social media, you’ve probably seen the Right-wing meme that portrays them as weak and effeminate . . . This is wrong . . . It is a catastrophic mistake to assume the Antifa aren’t capable of mass carnage. This is not a movement that follows the rules of engagement. They go for the eyes, the genitals — whatever it takes to “bash the fash.” If that means mobbing an individual in a twenty-on-one scenario, they’ll do it. And if it involves killing for their cause, they’re willing to do it as well. (p. 163)
Andy Ngo’s book about Antifa’s violent rebellion during the Trump years is a page-turner. The narrative starts on June 29, 2019, when Ngo was beaten at an Antifa protest. Ngo ended up in the hospital with a brain injury. Video from the event went viral, and he became a nationally known journalist.
Although the nation is aware of Antifa violence through social media and alternative internet news sites, Democrats and the mainstream media claim that Antifa is only an “idea.” The Jewish Congressman Jerrold Nadler called Antifa “imaginary” during a debate. In heavily Antifa infected cities such as Portland or Seattle, one can go day to day without seeing an Antifa event. Antifa tends to only operate in a group at certain hours and in certain places, but their effect is enormous.
Indeed, Antifa was the movement of the year in 2020. And this movement is deadly serious. “Behind the violence,” writes Ngo, “is a plan to destroy the nation-state, America in particular, to bring about a revolution that leads to their vision of utopia. In 2020, the country experienced a taste of this when a relatively small group of committed radicals incited and carried out massive damage to life and property in the name of “anti-racism” (p. 6).
Ngo describes the main Antifa hotspots in the summer of 2020 quite well. In Portland, Antifa demonstrate night after night. When activists are arrested, they are immediately released. In Seattle, their occupation of Capitol Hill — CHAZ — wore the mask of a Leftist utopia, but at night it was a dangerous, warlord-controlled place and there were several murders.
Although CHAZ had an ideology of racial harmony, the area self-segregated. By the end, CHAZ was a parasitical anarchist zone — the City of Seattle supplied toilets and other necessities, and outsiders delivered pizzas and other types of food. Meanwhile, legitimate business ground to a halt. Even the plants in the public garden wilted. Leftist societies always require a subsidy.
Antifa’s Intellectual Urheimat
There is a heavy Jewish intellectual input to Antifa ideology. (Ngo doesn’t highlight this). For example, Herbert Marcuse (Jewish) is a major influencer. So is the racial Jew Karl Marx. But much of Antifa’s roots are non-Jewish. Antifa’s founders are the German Leftists of the Weimar Republic as well as the Leftists from the 1930s Spanish Republic.
Many Antifa ideas and tactics have come to America through British Antifa groups. The trick of mixing quick-drying concrete with a milkshake and throwing it at a person to blind and injure him while marking him as a target for a swarm attack emerged in England in 2019.
Antifa membership requires considerable reading in Leftist political thought. However, new applicants don’t need that much online Antifa-directed schooling in the first place. Marcuse’s ideas predominate in academia. His critical theory, in a simple and sweetened form, is even taught to children. Students today think nothing of attacking a speaker with whom they disagree. It is from these pupils that Antifa draws its recruits.
It is fair to say that Antifa is aligned with Black Lives Matter (BLM). The latter group has the same critical theory Marxist roots as Antifa and it traces its heritage to the sub-Saharan terrorist groups of the 1970s.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.
Why Portland?
According to Ngo, Portland, Oregon has emerged as a mecca for Antifa mainly due to the work of Caroline Victorin (née Gauld). She and her long-term mate, a Swedish national, worked to bring Antifa ideas from Europe to Portland. Much of the mainstreaming of Antifa ideas was through cultivating the fans of Portland’s professional soccer team. It is not unusual to see Antifa flags at such games. Politicization of soccer fans is very common across Europe.
There are also bookstores and other businesses that support Antifa in nearly every conceivable way. Portland is so wealthy, so white — indeed Yankee — that few people really get an education in racial reality. The local culture is tolerant of eccentricity, so the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker that are supporting Antifa activists probably have no idea that they are lighting the fuse for the political powder keg that is the rest of America.
As a reminder, there were fewer than 40 deaths during the worst year of the Bleeding Kansas crisis, but when that conflict reached the rest of the country, Americans couldn’t bury bodies fast enough.
Antifa & the Establishment
The “punch a Nazi” meme goes back to the 1940s. However, “punching a Nazi” might actually be a disastrous social policy. The issue has simply never come up since the end of World War II. However, the appearance of “Nazis” emerged in the minds of the establishment with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Suddenly, the Establishment — many of whom were ethnonationalist Jews — were terrified.
Thus the Left and the Democratic Party’s behavior during the Trump years was a surreal example of hysteria and insanity. The Democratic Party’s champion, Hillary Clinton, had no ideas during her campaign except aggression with Russia. After her loss, she fielded a dubious Russian hacking conspiracy theory which the mainstream media uncritically pushed. There was an obviously Jewish attempt to remove Trump from office. Many more examples of this mania exist.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party doubled down on stirring up black voter turnout in the midterms through BLM. Local political leadership, all Democrats, in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis support Antifa antics as part of the hysterical effort to damage the Trump administration and whites more generally. Ngo writes: “The local and national media are staunchly on the side of Antifa, regardless of their violence against police and property” (p. 61). These local governments have also reduced police funding. At the same time, many of the senior politicians in the Democratic Party often have children and relations involved in Antifa.
The US federal government was also hesitant to take on the role of defeating Antifa. One even might suspect that agencies like the FBI are sympathetic to Antifa goals and have members that are hostile to both Trump, and the historic American nation. When Trump sent in federal agents to arrest Antifa criminals, the news media claimed that Trump’s “stormtroopers” were arresting people without the normal protections. This was a lie.
Ngo writes:
The “parachute” journalists coming to Portland from Washington, DC, and New York didn’t have their finger on the pulse of the city or Antifa. To them, police and Trump were always to blame, never those who actually organized and initiated violence. Not only did the rioting continue after federal officers withdrew from the courthouse, it became even more violent and bled into other areas of the city. (p. 69)
What to do?
Ronald Reagan warned in his farewell address that “younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it.” Instead, we instituted critical theory, and now Antifa terrorists have appeared with critical theory talking points.
We’ve now seen how the anti-white establishment played its hand during the Trump years. So we need to get involved in the process of counting votes and influencing local governments. Critical theory needs to be examined and destroyed. The FBI, which has long been a semi-competent Pretorian Guard, should be abolished. Any worthy functions it might do need to be rolled into the Department of Homeland Security.
Things look bad right now. Indeed, America has become a revived, Antifa-led East Germany. We live under an oppressive regime that has built its throne upon bayonets. The bayonets of the National Guard at the empty inauguration, the bayonets of censorship and deplatforming, the bayonets of unequal application of laws, the bayonets of a senile president, and the bayonets of Antifa. The last of these blades are already soaked with blood. But as East Germany fell, so too will the current regime.
Andy Ngo has written the most important book of our time. Buy it, read it, and spread the word.
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18 Comments
Definitely going to check this out, I notice it’s available on audiobook too if anyone is interested. Ngo has certainly done yeoman’s work exposing the seething nest of self-hating mutants that is antifa.
Real journalists w/ something important to say:
Are always marked for death. No exception here.
Antifa are now as bold as NSDAP were in the late Weimar period, and they use similar tactics. They have friends in high places enjoining law enforcement and judiciary to look the other way. So their chaps are free to ‘bash the fash’ as a public and valourized way to destroy enemies of the upcoming ‘woke’ reorganisation of the West. The sneakier route: denunciation to the usual types and screeching on social media, is also acceptable for the ‘ladies’.
I would say that the only thing troubling the minds of Antifa in the US is the militia movement — assuming it cannot be defanged in time, Constitution or no. I am not a US citizen but I get the impression that it will take a further squeeze of the ‘equity’ agenda before militia patriots make common cause with the dissident right. Perhaps this will happen under Biden/Harris — or perhaps the administration is too cautious: we shall see!
I hope Antifa and the Marxists in America become so powerful that the liberal establishment will have no choice but to wage war on them. A guard dog that’s outgrown its muzzle stops being a pet, it becomes a threat. Blocking the far-left from power will trigger a wide-scale populist-left revolt, perhaps even secession, as exemplified by CHAZ. Imagine the entire West Coast walking away from the US! Either there will be civil war, or there won’t, both of which will bolster the populist right to an extreme degree. The liberal system refusing to take aggressive moves against the rebel territories would mean they’d rather break up the Union than go after Communists, and the good thing about a civil war between the liberal establishment and the far-left secessionists would be a blossoming of the militia movements. They and only they could set America right, through a combination of far-right populism, anti-systemic activism, paramilitary operations and anti-Communist patriotism.
Fantasies aside, I do believe that the US needs a real crisis before it can be improved (not another fake crisis like the capital protests, or a controlled crisis like the BLM mobs) – and the Antifa far left is the perfect candidate to deliver the sort of genuine crisis the Right can rally around.
Ngos and BEATTIES books must be mandatory reading…BEATTIES documents the GLOBALITS OCTUPUS LEVIATHAN MONSTER that dominates controls ALL levers of world power CULTURE ECONOMICS POLITICS LABOR ARTS EDUCATION MEDIA.ET….and I CONTEND that ANTIglobal MAGA forces will never achieve any form succes unless they start reading ANTONIO GRAMSCI and understand the deep/global/ universal concept idea of POWER…
Neither of these proposals has the least chance of being implemented under the current regime.
Try as I might I can’t take these birds seriously; all I can think of is Alcoff and Moldy Locks. One has the impression they would be annihilated if they went up against a real street gang like the 1950s NYC Baldies or the Pharaohs.
It is alleged the Antifa recruits from the ranks of sexual deviants, and persuades these young kinksters that their sexual perturbations are directly tied to class struggle, truth, justice, world revolution and liberation. I wonder if Ngo describes this aspect.
IIRC, Morris de Camp is, like myself, a native St. Louisan. So I’m sure, considering the subject matter, he’ll enjoy this observation back in 2019:
https://countenance.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/alphabets-and-arrows/
I fled Portland, in 2018…..im a retired Army veteran…i was receiving death threats, on-line daily….they left a bottle full of urine, at my front door….which means when we shoot you, you will soil yourself…I fled the same morning…..to remote Montana…an area with many Militias, & a conservative population….this book, is a must read….
I remember hearing of Antifa on a trip to Europe in the late 90s. I’ve lived in the PNW since that time, and didn’t really foresee them hijacking major US cities here two decades later. I’m thankful to not live in either Seattle or Portland. Anyone here heard of the American Redoubt?
I live on the edge of the American Redoubt. It is a real place as well as a real state of mind/spirit.
It is something to aspire to!
If you are defeated by an enemy that is weak what does that make you. People simply don’t think. That is the problem. We have people with lower and lower IQ and wisdom trying to run things.
We must join anti-fa and BLM and subvert their causes.
To operate successfully, Antifa requires at least tacit neutrality from the system. With funding from plutocratic oligarchs and court leniency, the organization functions essentially as one of the system’s proxies. With its axiological weaknesses, liberalism provides enough space for Antifa to act with impunity which, combined with institution infiltration, allows the ideology to be widely acknowledged as legitimate despite its apparent hostilty to the status quo. Thus, chasing Antifa is largely a fool’s errand since it doesn’t address the systemic conditions that allowit to function unobstructed in the first place. Never focus on the symptoms.
For example in Warsaw, it’s the liberal mayor’s clique policies that enable local Antifa charter to function unbothered and conduct training sessions within buldings belonging to the city. Overall, polish Antifa is one of the weaker nodes and relies heavily on support from german auxiliaries, as evidenced during the events of 2011 Independence March.
Trying not to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist here, but both Amazon and Barnes and Noble were “out of stock” on this book on the day it was published. Ironically, I ordered it from the woke Strand Bookstore. They claim it was shipped, but I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it actually shows up in my mailbox.
The title of the book in itself is garbage. Antifa doesn’t want to ‘destroy democracy’. Democracy is the very farce that allows antifa to exist in the first place.
There are a few older german books from the 90s and mid 2000’s like “Antifa means Violence” and “Fire and Flame for every State” about Antifa Rhetoric and Organization, their connection to leftwing parties, unions, financing and so.
Its one of these big ironies that americans, living in a country founded by violent revolution, understand very little about revolution besides muh guns and street activism, heavily involved in the early stages of the 1770’s conflict, overwells them. You look back at that time and you see incidements around police brutality, looting and John Adams was basically an activist lawyer.
Its going to be interesting to see which path the democrat party choses for the future and their connection to “Antifa”. If they keep that pet around they have to finance it, or if the business elite just throws them back in prison and just lets them out like a dog to cause havoc when convinient.
Anyway i think it was a big mistake by Trump not to bring out the black vans sooner and do a nation wide crackdown. Meanwhile “Bidens America” contrary to what the ads said is rather calm.
Trump lost the election (and I think he did lose it, though it was close, and there were enough irregularities that SCOTUS was under a moral as well as Constitutional duty to investigate) mainly because of how weak he looked in the face of BLM/antifa terrorism last summer. Even though so many people are now brainwashed liberals, people still irrationally respond to “winners”. They derive satisfaction in seeing themselves associated with them. BLM/antifa made Trump look like a loser, which he was at bottom. He was always more bark than bite, a classic overpromiser and underachiever. After a week or so of mass mob violence, why didn’t that weak man invoke the Insurrection Act, and really take charge of things? He had the power, but he flinched at using it. This has been the Right’s story for centuries now.
I believe that if Trump had been seen as the restorer of law and order, he would have won, even in wokeist 2020. Sounds paradoxical – wasn’t he obviously better than Biden and the Democrats on crime and disorder control? – but this is how the weakminded think and act.
I think Trump won the election, and I don’t agree RE BLM and antifa. I think it is more likely that Trump gained votes by letting the riots fester, and he probably would have lost white suburbanite votes if he had cracked down. He should have cracked down anyway, of course, because his first duty was to the country, not to getting reelected. But he could plausibly have argued that Biden in the White House would have been worse than the riots. So the greater good could have been served by letting the riots continue. Manny white Americans are so brainwashed, confused, and morally weak that they must be saved in spite of themselves.