![]() He had about a thousand followers on Twitter, where he posted mostly about anti–free speech left-wing campus culture and the need to reform political Islam. He had gone back to school after spending several years languishing in the millennial male purgatory of underemployment and aimlessness. As I watched him stream a close-up of his bloody face to more than a million people, it seemed like a defining moment in a new kind of media career.Ī little more than two years ago, Andy Ngo was more or less a nobody: a 30-year-old multimedia editor for the student paper of Portland State University, where he was working toward a master’s degree in political science. Just days after his warning, Ngo sat a few feet away from me, cut up and dazed, after a beating at the hands of left-wing protesters. I was in talks to shadow him at the upcoming demonstration, which I thought might be a good way to illustrate how Ngo constructs an incendiary political narrative out of a narrow selection of facts. But Ngo has also been a familiar, and reviled, presence at Portland’s left-wing protests, where he shoots alarming videos of anti-fascists that often end up on the likes of Fox News and Sky News. ![]() He made his name in part through his activism calling attention to a supposed epidemic of staged hate crimes, à la Jussie Smollett. Random bystanders can get hurt.Īndy Ngo was hardly a random bystander: The 33-year-old is suddenly one of the most prominent young figures in all of right-wing media. Under the evergreens, weekend gladiators in bike helmets and gas masks beat the sap out of each other, scoring pinfalls to document and then distribute to sympathetic online mobs. Over the past three years, the streets of downtown Portland have played host to a serialized civil war in miniature between armored combatants from the far right and far left. “Antifa promises violence,” Ngo wrote in a tweet about the video. Set to Kelis’s “Milkshake,” the video implored local leftists to turn out on June 29 to demonstrate against a march planned by the Proud Boys, the infamous right-wing fraternity. It was his first media appearance since the attack.Late last month, the conservative media personality Andy Ngo sent me a video made by Popular Mobilization, a group of anti-fascists who organize protests in response to right-wing rallies in Portland, Oregon. Ngo tweeted his thread approximately 10 minutes before appearing on the Fox News talk show The Ingraham Angle. They didn’t interfere with the people pursuing Ngo as they yelled at hotel staff. Though Portland police did close the intersection of Southwest Morrison Street and 6th Avenue, their perimeter appeared to be related to the arrest they made. But a probable cause affidavit shows that person’s arrest was unrelated to the attack on Ngo: The 26-year-old protester was arrested on suspicion of breaking a Starbucks window with a rock one month prior. ![]() Police arrested one person shortly after arriving at The Nines. (Publishers often ask for follow-up chapters to bestsellers.) Ngo says he ventured back into the crowd while reporting a new chapter for his recent book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. This is the second time in three years that protesters have attacked Ngo, whom they consider a threat to their safety because he regularly posts their mug shots and personal information to social media following their arrests. They chased Ngo for blocks before tackling him and punching him several times after his head hit the brick sidewalk of Southwest Morrison Street. Though Ngo’s identity was unconfirmed, approximately 10 people split off from the larger protest to follow Ngo and question him about his identity. ![]() Ngo’s account lines up with much of what WW reported that night. “Had I not been able to shelter wounded and bleeding inside a hotel while they beat the doors and windows like animals, there is no doubt in my mind I would not be here today.” “I was chased, attacked and beaten by a masked mob, baying for my blood,” Ngo wrote. In a thread on Twitter and a statement released to WW, Ngo gave his account of the assault, which occurred when demonstrators recognized him in disguise at a rally on the one-year anniversary of this city’s George Floyd protest. (Justin Yau) By Suzette Smith Jat 9:55 pm PDTĪfter five days of total media silence, right-wing author Andy Ngo confirmed he was the man who some of Portland’s leftist marchers chased and beat until he took shelter in The Nines hotel May 28. Floyd firework Fireworks above the Multnomah County Justice Center on the one-year anniversary of George Floyd's murder.
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