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Andy Ngo slammed for claiming Antifa tried to kill him again: 'Vile, dishonest, gaslighting, liar'

Civil rights activist Bishop Talbert Swan tweeted: 'Andy Ngo is an anti-Black, white supremacy defending, bigot'

PORTLAND, OREGON: Conservative journalist and provocateur Andy Ngo said on Wednesday, June 2, that he was chased and assaulted in the last week of May during a downtown Portland protest. In a series of tweets, Ngo explained what happened on May 28. While Ngo’s account of events has received support from conservatives, there are many who either do not believe him, or feel that he deliberately put himself in harm’s way for publicity.

“No journalist in America should ever face violence for doing his or her job,” Ngo wrote on Twitter. “Yet on Friday, May 28, Antifa tried to kill me again while I was reporting on the ongoing protests and riots in Portland, Ore. for a new chapter of my book, ‘Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy’.” 

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He said that he was “chased, attacked and beaten by a masked mob, baying for my blood,” adding that had he 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.”

Ngo said that he ran into a hotel, The Nines, where he was eventually escorted to an ambulance. He posted photos showing his injuries, which included wounds to his left knee and right abdomen, and an injury that caused bleeding in his eye.

Ngo further said that “Antifa” — a left-wing, anti-fascist, and anti-racist political movement that is highly decentralized in nature and comprises a wide array of autonomous groups — wants him dead. “I document what they want to stay hidden,” he said. Ngo claimed that the attacks against him and threats on his life were retribution for his work as a journalist because he is “recording the tactics and true ideology of an extremist clandestine movement that relies on deception and regards the truth as the greatest threat of all.”

Ngo’s account of the incident has been met with much opposition and mockery online. “Press should be clearly marked as such, and should not be disguised in all black, doing god-knows-what kind of dishonest stuff. Once you insert yourself and become part of the story, you’re not a journalist. You’re an agent provocateur. I hope you’ve learned a valuable lesson,” said a Twitter user. 

Another Twitter user said, “Andy Ngo ingratiates himself with street brawlers and develops propaganda with the purpose of directing violence against political opponents, then makes spurious claims that he's ‘a journalist targeted by antifa’ to enlist the sympathy of credulous journalists,” adding, “This isn't even the first time he's played this game (see earlier baseless ‘concrete milkshake’ claims), and most credible and objective journalists/commentators are unlikely to fall for the same ruse once let alone twice, but there's always doe-eyed folks like you I guess.”

The incident being referred to here was from 2019 when the far-right Proud Boys group held a rally in Portland, Oregon and left-wing groups put together a counterprotest — whose attendees clashed with the Proud Boys. Ngo was reportedly attacked during the counterprotest and he was hospitalized. Demonstrators reportedly doused Ngo in milkshake, punched him, and yelled at him. 

Ngo, however, was not considered an innocent victim by many. A Vox piece from the time explained that he was seen as a far-right sympathizer who has doxxed antifa members in the past, potentially facilitating their harassment, and provoked them so that he can broadcast the result.

“Violence is completely wrong, and I find it sad and weak to allow a sniveling weasel like Andy Ngo to get under one’s skin like this. But I’m also not going to pretend that this wasn’t Ngo’s goal from the start,” said Charlotte Clymer, a press secretary at the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign at the time. 

Michael Hayden, a journalist, wrote on Twitter about Ngo’s latest claim and the fact that he had his face and eyes hidden while carrying a BLM flag during the incident: “Andy Ngo gave himself ‘a beat’. He is not a reporter. A Canadian junk news website loaned him a meaningless title after the split with Quillette. So, who is paying him to cosplay as antifa and churn out paranoid fantasies about a color revolution?”

Civil rights activist Bishop Talbert Swan said, “Andy Ngo is an anti-Black, white supremacy defending, bigot. He’s a vile, dishonest, gaslighting, liar, not a journalist.” One Twitter user said, “If Andy Ngo wants to be a self-styled ‘journalist’ and put himself in dangerous situations, he must accept the risks real journalists face reporting war. War that he helps fan the flames over.”

Reviewing ‘Unmasked’, Ngo’s book, Alexander Nazaryan wrote for the LA Times that the book 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’.”

Nazaryan noted that Ngo’s fundamentally flimsy arguments and reporting are unconvincing, and added in a cutting statement: “‘Unmasked’ will do no more to help Americans understand antifa than ‘Borat’ helped us understand Kazakhstan.”