Andy Ngo - Antifa Unmasked: Inside America's Anarchy | Modern Wisdom Podcast 275

On many levels, I think there are a lot of Democrats whose hatred for Donald Trump and his administration and his supporters overshadowed their support and love for their country in standing up for the rule of law and standing up for America's institutions.

Was getting people to scream, "Stop selling Andy Ngo's book," in your hometown a part of your marketing strategy? Because it's pretty good free advertising.

Uh, it was not part of the strategy, but, uh, a lot of people did end up hearing about the book because of the six-day effort by Antifa to get it banned, which, uh, unfortunately was partially successful in that Portland's largest bookstore, uh, immediately came out and said they would not stock it on its shelves. Eh, and this is a bookstore, by the way, um, a very popular Portland institution that every year dedicates, um, a week to books that are censored and banned. So, um, there's sad irony there.

Too banned to be part of the unbanned book week?

Correct.

That's serious. But obviously, the elephant in the room is that almost everyone's gonna buy your book from Amazon or Barnes & Nobles or whatever.

Yeah. I hope so. And I, I mean, I'm just, you know, the goal is to get people informed about what's happening. And I think there's a lot of, um, misconceptions about Antifa, Antifa out there from both the left and the right. And, uh, this book tries to explain in, in one place where people can understand, um, the ideology, the history, and how they organize and what, what all that comes together actually looks like in practice. So I go into detail, particularly of what happened in the Pacific Northwest of the United States throughout 2020. Uh, my home city of Portland, which I've had to flee because of death threats against me, we had, um, more than 120 nightly days of violence. So, uh, in your country, Britain, you had sporadic violence that happened, uh, last year. Um, imagine if that was reoccurring day after day after day for months on end, and that's what happened in my city. And it's still ongoing.

(sighs) It's terrifying, man. So let's start. Who are Antifa?

The Antifa claim to be anti-fascists. Uh, they're actually anarchist communists who are really working to destabilize governments, particularly the jurisdictions in the United States, because they want to ultimately overthrow the US. So they take inspiration from historical anarchist communist communes, and they try to carry out these experiments wherever they can. And to do so in America was always a pipe dream for them, given how strong law enforcement institutions are, and the military, et cetera. But in 2020, things just completely was flipped upside down when after George Floyd died, then the, every excuse on the fringe extreme far left to carry out violence was excused in the mainstream left. And it was in that context that Antifa, BLM, for example, in Seattle, uh, the largest city in the Pacific Northwest, they actually claimed sovereign territory, or territory that they said was sovereign, from the United States for more than three weeks. And they actually had the blessing of the city council as well as the mayor. And immediately this, despite what the media was saying, describing it as a block party, summer of love, um, I spent time there a week undercover. I write about that in the book. Um, it devolved, um, within days into an area where there were shootings and people ended up getting killed and murdered there.