REVIEW: Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy by Andy Ngo
A superbly written, highly personal account of a metastasizing tumor in western politics.
[PUBLISHING NOTE: Aligned to increasing numbers of subscribers, more features will be added to this Substack, including the monthly book review below, and conversations through podcasts and videocasts. Details on where to purchase the book can be found at the bottom of the review]
A remarkable thing happened in Britain last week. Winston Marshall, lead guitarist of Mumford and Sons, the Grammy Award-winning folk band, read a book, then congratulated the writer on Twitter. Note: Read a book. Not - filmed a sex-tape with a former Baywatch actress then uploaded it onto xHamster. Not - slaughtered a lamb mid-concert and ate its tongue. He. Read. A. Book.
Barely a week later and Marshall again took to Twitter - this time with a statement apologising for any offence caused. In a case of part cancellation/part self-cancellation, Marshall promised to spend time examining his ‘blind spots’:
I too have read the book. ‘Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy’ is written by independent reporter Andy Ngo (pronounced ’N-O-H’) and details his experiences with ‘Antifa’, a group loosely established on the idea (and associated hysterias) of anti-fascism. Ngo is the child of Vietnamese immigrants to America (Oregon), which, on top of being gay, should theoretically enhance his status within America’s race-to-the-bottom identity classification. However, the subject of Antifa is embarrassingly misunderstood by liberals, who - despite incontestable evidence to the contrary - see it as a force for good. Coupling forensic research to his own often violent encounters with the group, Ngo explains how Antifa have used this misunderstanding to its benefit, the organisation’s links to academe, the similarities between Antifa and ISIS - and critically, legacy media’s destructive role in continually excusing Antifa’s violence, or seeking a false equivalence with the far-right.
It was Ngo’s violent beating at the hands of an Antifa militia in 2019 that prompted the book - and the incident is worth revisiting. During a Portland protest in June that year Ngo was repeatedly punched and kicked by masked Antifa members, resulting in a brain bleed. The events that unfolded betray the very crisis in contemporary media that suffocates its every pursuit of truth. In this case, the vast majority of Ngo’s peers were quickly and probably not for the first time revealed to be sympathetic to Antifa - from Vox to the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, The Huffington Post and even Facebook’s resident and deeply corrupted fact-checker Politifact.
Even before he’d arrived at the hospital these forces gathered to diminish the seriousness of the attack. Some even blamed him. For those of us watching from afar, our long-held but often jeered suspicion that these ‘journalists’ were just overeducated, ugly specimens of a leftish, campus brainwash creep was vindicated. Some saw the eruption of long-anticipated violence and that was true - but if you looked carefully enough, you could also see that the thing that claims to uphold or advance democracy siding with something which, as Ngo expresses, wishes to destroy it.
This conclusion is supported by reactions to the book itself. Ngo hosts an unflattering intro page on Wikipedia, where the cautions “frequently accused of exaggeration” and “credibility and objectivity as a journalist has been extensively criticised” appear. This shouldn’t surprise you: the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, allows a woman who calls herself Holly “8 Cats” Brockwell to do his social media. A known Trump-hater from the crappy Los Angeles Times accused Ngo of ‘propaganda’ but failed to include any evidence. So it came to pass that it was the prevailing sentiment that took a chunk out of Winston Marshall day he decided to do the least rock ’n roll thing ever - not, say, actual people who too had read the book, but disagreed.
What happened in Washington on Jan 6th 2021 was abhorrent, but when sanity returned to sensible commentary, you could argue that you’d find the same result if the supervisors of Valkenburg patients went for an il-advised smoke break whilst the group was on a day trip to the V & A Waterfront. On Capitol Hill that day, many of the rioters were damaged people who require therapy - but the vast majority of corporate media, particularly CNN and MSNBC have since argued that they deserve much worse. Antifa, however, is spared condemnation. Whereas Nancy Pelosi hypes what appears to be a non-existent threat with barricades across DC, the damage Antifa inflicted across Portland and Seattle is ignored, or excused with CNN fraud Chris Cuomo’s ‘righteous cause’.
Exposing Antifa’s extremes as the spawn of our present and our future political circumstance is Ngo’s chief accomplishment in ‘Unmasked’. That politicians, in particular Mayors across America’s major cities - supported by George Soros-funded district attorneys - have attempted to leverage the behaviour of people who clearly need counselling to their own objectives and ends is not only disgusting but far worse than anything Donald Trump is accused of doing during his term.
Such repulsive manipulation always breaks: people who incite violence, just like people who tinker with censorship, eventually lose the ability to discriminate, reducing both to games. The left has cheered tech censorship of the right - only to find itself in censorship’s crosshairs in Joe Biden’s America, confused and stranded. The same applies to Antifa - and two examples here illustrate the strength of Ngo’s argument. Firstly, Jenny Durkan, the Mayor of Seattle, described the violent occupation of a zone in Seattle ‘a summer of culinary diversity and love’ - until they came for her at home too. Secondly, and having applied the manipulation wherein he publicly condemned Donald Trump, Portland’s Mayor Ted Wheeler eventually called for federal assistance - but only after the convenient bogeyman had left office.
The misunderstanding of Antifa is spreading rapidly and its influence greasing up exactly the wrong kind of people. Last year the former leader of Plaid Cymru, Leanne Wood, praised the group the day Donald Trump classified it as a domestic terrorist group, as did Billy Bragg, the Corbynista “musician”. A revolting little shrew of a feminist historian, Dr. Louise Raw, lives for protest confrontation and frequently empathises with the group. But Antifa’s biggest victory or scalp was Black Lives Matter, whose failure to distance themselves from the anarchy means they will forever be associated (the latter would have angled for some kind of mutualism, and don’t appear too bothered by the company). In South Africa, the violent, opportunistic and possibly criminal EFF have already adopted a pretend-inclusion strategy aimed at appealing to the trans community - exactly the sort of facade Antifa deploy.
Order Unmasked in London, United Kingdom
Order Unmasked in Cape Town, South Africa