Coming in the wake of that ugly insurrection, “Unmasked” has the ridiculous feel of a warning about the dangers of German communism issued in 1939.īooks How do we get to a more stable democracy? 6 writers chart a courseĪnnette Gordon-Reed, Ayad Akhtar, Héctor Tobar, Martha Minow, David Kaye and Jonathan Rauch discuss the Jan. Ngo’s false-equivalence manifesto comes while fencing remains in place on Capitol Hill, all because the Proud Boys of the aforementioned November lovefest decided to return on January 6. Rather, it is a politics of revolutionary opposition to the far right.” The nation’s top mainstream antifa scholar, Mark Bray, wrote in The Washington Post that antifa is “not an organization. The truth about antifa has been chronicled elsewhere, and it is a lot more quotidian than Ngo and his abettors at Fox News would like you to believe. The counter-protesters, meanwhile, are a “marauding gang.” The same section of “Unmasked” that ends with Ngo’s paean to the United States portrays a mid-November “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington as a “peaceful and celebratory” affair, with no mention of the Proud Boys amassed there. As a journalist, however, I must point out that he is churning out the very kind propaganda that keeps authoritarians in power.ĭistortions and untruths hover like flies around every shred of confirmable fact. As an immigrant from a communist country, I understand the sentiment. He calls this book “a letter of gratitude to the nation that welcomed” them. “Unmasked” is a culmination of Ngo’s single-minded quest to depict an assortment of leftists as a unified vanguard whose mission is to “destroy the nation-state, America in particular.” Only in its final pages does he explain the roots of that fixation, his parents’ immigration from wartorn Vietnam. In “Unmasked,” he eagerly dons the martyr’s vestments, describing the attack with such self-serving detail, you’d think he’d been liberating Rome. What goes unmentioned is that Ngo had a history of “embedding” with right-wing groups - including, according to persuasive allegations he has denied, the white supremacist outfit Patriot Prayer - that provoke antifa into the very fights Ngo then films. Ngo was punched and kicked as well he claims to have suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Philippe Sands’ ‘The Ratline’ is a Nazi-hunter novel with a unique premise: Sands tries to prove to the Nazi’s son that his father wasn’t a ‘good Nazi.’ Ngo claimed the milkshake contained concrete far more likely, it was a vegan blend heavy on cashew butter.īooks Review: A (sadly timely) quest to hold a long-dead Nazi accountable Ngo’s fame, such as it is, stems from a June 2019 donnybrook in Portland, in the course of which antifa activists assailed him with a thrown milkshake. It is his black-clad white whale, his Marx-spouting Moby Dick. But whereas O’Keefe, whom Ngo thanks in his acknowledgments, goes after a diverse range of subjects, Ngo is singularly focused on inflating antifa’s importance. Not because it is a serious book - it is nothing of the sort - but because Ngo’s prominence is evidence that false flags will continue to be planted, sometimes on the very same soil where violent reactionaries have spilled American blood.Ī mainstay of conservative media, Ngo is a disciple of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, who rose to fame with videos in which members of liberal organizations were duped into making outrageous statements that were then deceptively edited. Capitol in search of elected officials to kidnap or kill, “ Unmasked” has to be taken seriously. If you find that universe, please send directions.Ĭoming as it does in this weary universe of ours, a month after pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the U.S. In that other world far, far away, Marjorie Taylor Greene remains a nutty CrossFit enthusiast from Georgia, not a member of Congress, and we know nothing of her musings on Jewish space lasers, the execution of Democrats or “ false flag” school shootings. There is an alternate universe out there in which we never have to ponder, let alone read, “Unmasked,” provocateur Andy Ngo’s supremely dishonest new book on the left-wing anti-fascist movement known as antifa. Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy
0 kommentar(er)
