Andy Ngo - Unmasked: Inside Antifas Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy

W HOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS ! the crowd of left-wing protesters chanted as they marched in the heart of downtown Portland, Oregon, in June 2019. Some of them wore red shirts and bandanas to broadcast their allegiance to Marxism. They paraded red flags printed with a rose logo, a symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America. They were joined by dozens of people dressed head to toe in black. These were the radical anarchist communists. Most of them wore maskslong before the COVID-19 outbreak made them a norm of public life. Many also wore helmets and carried melee weapons. Together, the crowd of around four hundred brought traffic to a standstillby now a regular occurrence in the City of Roses, as Portland is known by. As usual, the police stayed away. They knew whom the streets belonged to.

Working as a journalist with a phone and a new GoPro camera, I slowly made my way toward the front of the crowd. Some of the protesters recognized me. They glared and whispered in the ears of their comrades. Luis Enrique Marquez looked right at me. The 48-year-old Rose City Antifa member has been arrested so many times at violent protests in Portland over the past few years that he no longer bothers to wear a mask. Still, I ignored the stares and continued forward. By this point, the crowds chants had changed.

No hate! No fear! they began shouting.

Before I made it much farther, someoneor somethinghit me hard in the back of the head. I was nearly knocked to the ground from the impact. Never having been in a fight, I naively asked myself in the moment: Did someone just trip and fall into me? Before I could turn around to look, a sea of bodies dressed in black surrounded me. In the background, I could still hear the crowd chant, No hate!

Ironically, all I saw nextand feltwas the pure embodiment of hatred.

Staring at an amorphous mob of faceless shadows, I froze. Suddenly, clenched fists repeatedly struck my face and head from all directions. My right knee buckled from the impact. The masked attackers wore tactical glovesgloves hardened with fiberglass on the knuckles. Its likely some of them used brass knuckles as well. I put my arms up to surrender, but this only signaled to them to beat me more ferociously. Someone then snatched my cameramy evidence. I desperately tried but failed to hold on to it. The masked thief melted into the crowd, a function of the black bloc. Another person ran up and kicked me twice in the groin. Someone bashed me on the head from behind with a stiff placard or sign.

The attack left me dazed and bloodied. I was bleeding from my ear and had open gashes all over my face. My eyes were beginning to swell with blood. I thought the beating was over, but next came the hailstorm of milkshakes, eggs, and other hard objects at my face and head.

The mob roared in laughter as I stumbled away. A crowd of cameramen surrounded and followed me. I thought they were going to offer to help, but they just took photos and video.

Fking owned, bitch! shouted a local transsexual antifa militant and a member of the Satanic Portland Antifascists.away, half blinded, to the county courthouse across Lownsdale Square before losing my balance. Later, in the emergency room of the Oregon Health and Science University hospital, I found out my brain was hemorrhaging.

Outside of the Multnomah County Justice Center, the building that houses the Central Police Precinct, the Sheriffs Office, and courtrooms, I was nearly killed by a violent mob. At no point did police intervene to help. Mobile phone footage recorded by Jim Ryan, a news reporter with the OregonianPortlands newspaper of recordcaptured part of the beating.

While I was in the emergency room, the video was being watched hundreds of thousands of times on social media. My name began to trend on Twitter across the United States, even though most people had no idea who I was. Even liberal mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN could not ignore what happened. In contrast to the narrative Americans had been sold that antifa are merely anti-fascists, the video showed a mob of mask-clad extremists beating a journalist in the middle of a major American city with impunity. It confirmed what some had been warning for years: antifa is a violent extremist movement that attacks all kinds of targets under the guise of anti-fascism.

Though my assault that day received national and international attention, I was hardly the only one to be brutally attacked. Adam Kelly, 37, was hit from behind with an overhead swing by several masked militants as he attempted to help an older man being beaten on the ground next to the Pioneer Courthouse. One of Kellys attackers used a baton to strike him on the head. The impact could actually be heard on video. Kellys head injury required twenty-five staples to close. He and I were treated in the same emergency department, but we didnt know it at the time. He was lucky to survive.

Gage Halupowski, a 24-year-old Portland resident, was convicted and sentenced for the attack against Kelly. To date, he remains one of the very few antifa extremists in the United States sentenced to prison time. Tellingly, antifa groups refer to him as a political prisoner.

In total, eight were injured that day. Three, including myself, required hospitalization. Rose City Antifa, the Portland antifa group, claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The events of this weekend are what we mean by community defense, the organization said in a statement on its website. This is exactly what should happen when the far-right attempts to invade our town. This was a rare moment of honesty for an antifa organization that otherwise spreads disinformation and propaganda. If it isnt clear yet, violence is a feature, not a bug, of antifas ideology. In fact, they venerate violence. Since 2015, untold numbers of victims, including other journalists, have been doxed, beaten, robbed, or killed by antifa militants. Few of them receive media attentionor justice.

For whatever reason, the violence on June 29, 2019, in Portland became one of the watershed moments that brought national attention to antifa violence and the left-wing politicians who enabled it despite many people having been victimized before me. For example, two Marine reservists visiting Philadelphia in November 2018 were jumped after being mistaken for Proud Boys by antifa. Alejandro Godinez and Luis Torres, who are Latino, told investigators they were called racial slurs during the unprovoked attack and robbery. Tom Keenan, Thomas Massey, and Joseph Alcoff were later arrested after they were identified in a video recorded earlier in the day at a nearby antifa protest.