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[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to so what you're saying is i'm peter whittle now before i introduce our guest this week just want to say again please do remember to subscribe when you it's very easy you simply go to the button that says subscribe and click on that and then next door there's one saying notifications if you press on that that means you get notified of all our programs as they're coming up so thank you very much now my guest today i'm delighted to say is one of the best-known journalists now in america andy noe became famous for chronicling the progress and the rise of antifa which is a movement we hear an awful lot about but actually know very little about andy has written for the wall street journal for the spectator and the new york post and he is currently editor at large of the post millennial he's got a new book out which is in fact coming out next week which is called unmasked inside antifa's radical plan to destroy democracy um thank you very much for joining us it's a pleasure thank you um before we sort of talk more thoroughly about antifa uh they've actually tried to have your book banned haven't they all they've really caused some problems yeah in in portland where i'm based out of uh the largest bookstore they're pals uh it's such it's so big that it's a tourist attraction on its own and last week there were days and days of protests it calls to a bookstore to shut down onto those days in addition to the people who surrounded the business there was the online component of it and immediately the bookstore caved and said that the unmasked would not be sold on its shelves but it could still be available it's still available online and that wasn't good enough to the protesters um but it's sort of i mean you've become it's right to say that for auntie for you are probably number one hate figure are you not yes no and that is an extraordinary thing to live with isn't it yeah i think if they um well i used to think that they were just ragtag group of people street hooligans and i was naive in 2019 in my coverage of them in the summer i was beaten by them and given a brain hemorrhage they could have killed me that day and ever since then they've been really trying to finish the job that they started before just relentless intimidation criminal harassment showing up at my home releasing where i can be found in real time um and that's part of the reason that um i've left portland it's just all these instances are reported to the local authorities and nothing's done even when names of suspects are provided nothing's done and this is just the breakdown of the rule of law that's been happening in many major american cities it's not just portland i think portland's an example i understand best just because we've had so many right arrests throughout 2020 and over 90 percent of them get their charges dropped and they get released immediately from jail they don't have to pay bail if they do have to pay bail there are these sources of funding that will pay for them and will provide legal aid as well so um unfortunately our elected officials have failed in not viewing and not recognizing this violent extremist movement as the threat that they are and now they've been able to build up a system and apparatus networks to sustain and maintain and embed the political violence yes i should explain that you grew up in portland didn't you this is your hometown yes right we've seen images obviously over the past year of what's been going on there and indeed you know obviously after the uh george george george floyd uh death uh obviously it's spread all over america but in in portland in particular um can you just paint a picture of how the city has changed from the one that you grew up in sure so well let me just start with something that happened recently so on the 6th of january the international community recoiled in horror at the riot that happened in capitol hill when rioters had sieged a capital building for a couple hours all that was done that day and worst was done every night in portland in the targeting of local businesses citizens um county and city property as well as as federal property so um the people now who are calling what happened on the 6th of january the darkest day in america i just i wonder why they were silent when my city was under siege last year when blm and antifa actually sieged territory in seattle washington for more than three weeks and that zone that they claimed zone of terror led to several homicides and shootings the change in portland i would say is just that poland has always for decades now has been a left-wing political monoculture and it's um people they're really proud of that tradition of being hard left and very progressive and weird for the sake of being weird and different i think since 2016 what's changed though is that the fringe far left in portland which has existed for decades was able to go into the mainstream and operate violently in the open with the tacit support of those on city council as well as the mayor and the local media and the pre-tax that they use for their violent extremism at that time was because of the election of donald trump but we have a new administration now for fast forward four years and they're still writing yes because i've seen images you know the past over the past week of them smashing up places in fact interestingly smashing up democrat local headquarters correct that was in portland on inauguration day so the irony is that thousands and thousands of national guard troops poured into the nation's capital because there was this fear that trump supporters would try to interrupt the transfer peaceful transfer of power that violence didn't materialize there but the violence that did happen which was pre-announced and shared publicly on twitter for weeks now happen in seattle in portland and denver and in portland the about 150 masked black bloc militants march unimpeded to the headquarters of the democrat party of oregon and destroyed it one by one just smashing every window law enforcement arrested only eight people in that rampage and the weapons that they confiscated were knives hammers crowbars homemade fire bombs etc but as shocking as that may sound that is normal for portland now we had that go on for more than 120 days in 2020 and it's going to continue because it was never really about trump it was about opposition to violent opposition to america itself and what it stands for well that's just a that's that's the the number of it really isn't it what you know because people say we hear it now as i said in the beginning antifa we know this name how would you characterize what do they want what are they trying to do what it you know what is the basis of their movement so i'm glad use the word movement rather than organization because when organization is used in singular it makes it sound like it's a single entity when it's not so it is an ideology also movement and organizations um that are connected to one another networks and so broadly it's a coalition of anarchists and communists who are revolutionary and believe in the overthrow of not just the u.s governments but all governments through the use of violence and they believe that they can or they can create a new world a new utopia and actually at the inauguration day portland riot one of the banners that they held would say um something like create a new world from the ashes so they really believe that nothing can be reformed about america or any liberal democracy in particular and that society should be organized by into communist communes free of government and that sounds may sound just entirely theoretical but they actually have put that belief into practice when they have claimed territories that they claim were sovereign from american jurisdiction such as in seattle and the capitol hill autonomous zone otherwise known as charts in portland in december they claimed territory for nearly a week in a residential area and both times what happens as whenever you have violent far-left coups essentially is it devolves into violence terrorism um the either so in charge for example they actually had and i write about this in the book because i spent a week there undercover so even though they said they didn't have that they were didn't have a government naturally they did have leaders rise up and fulfill sort of government rules and they were totalitarian they had in the mexican restaurant that was um in the center of the chas they set up this operations base that was a tent there was also an interrogation area so there's an independent journalist i knew who was also undercover and he got busted when he was trying to record some of them secretly and they tried dragging him into this tent to interrogate him and to look at his video footage so you can just imagine if they were given if they have more opportunity for power what they do um but you don't have to just imagine you can just look historically wherever communist regimes come into power they put they kill the opposition and the ones who aren't killed are put into prison camps so to see this movement of people not just in america but also in western europe and britain just excuse the accesses of the far left historically but to actually really rebel in that violence i i'm shocked that more people aren't disturbed and recognizing them for the threat that they are i think don't they sort of have a kind of cover i think you you you mention this in the book that they have fair weather for not fair weather friends actually fellow travelers in various branches of what we might call our professional establishment i mean whether it's the media or maybe the law people who sympathize with them or feel that they should sympathize with them yeah so i think um what makes them particularly powerful is that people don't really recognize them as the anarchist communists that they actually are they think that antifa are merely anti-fascists who are opposing white supremacy neo-nazis in the far right they think that people who are part of black lives matter are just fighting for racial justice rather than actually agitating for revolutionary marxist politics which by the statements of those who founded blm is what they want so there's just this this basic ignorance of these really powerful political movements that have been able to gain so many liberal followers in respectable institutions and fields such as academia and entertainment and media and journalism because they they're cloaking themselves with this banner of fighting for social justice yeah and what sort of started you on this on this particular trail with antifa i mean you you have you know become a very very well-known name i know it's got a big downside for you obviously as you told us at the beginning but essentially it is you know you've been going to these demonstrations you have been going to these very stre you know street protests and obviously being in huge physical danger yourself and indeed what as you said wasn't attacked but how did you get there and why did you decide to do that sort of reporting what what motivated you so back in 2016 i was just a student journalist when i was doing my graduate studies at portland state university and one of my instincts at that time as a nascent student journalist is that i should be pursuing stories that people aren't being told and one of them was that there was far left extremism in portland that was being presented in the media by my colleagues by my peers as merely people fighting for justice and so what was particularly eye-opening in november 2016 was seeing the reaction in my city and across america to the electoral win of donald trump and the response from the public at that time in portland was to write and that was the first time while on assignment that i saw organized marauding groups of people in black uniforms and mass carrying weapons and destroying property businesses and starting fires in the streets and that happened for three days um that was a very shocking 72 hours of course looking back on that now we had that times much much more in 2020 but the response the collective response from the public at the time was that that anger was righteous because this was people fighting against the um the electoral win of an incoming fascist regime and um i knew and talked to a lot of trump supporters and just this cartoony caricature that was being presented in progressive cities in progressive media of trump's base was not the reality that i was seeing so unfortunately what continued happened then was just the political violence in the streets of portland and other cities northern california berkeley san francisco seattle new york philadelphia pittsburgh minneapolis um it just started to become routine and every time it was just driven by this rage from the far left and that most of these protests turn right so this antifa organized antifa element and i just wanted to find out more about who are the people behind the maps because for um unsurprisingly the journalists who are normally so curious about these things weren't really interested in finding out who these people were and what are their political views and the more i dived into it the more i was really shaken to the core that there could be such a extremist fringe movement operating openly in the mainstream with no opposition no opposition from big tech in that they could actually create crowdfunds on gofundme venmo cash app they have accounts on twitter on facebook so a lot of their organizing wasn't even clandestine it was out in the open but also i wanted to dig deep into the ideology because in talking to some of them before i became a target for violence it was clear that they had a certain coherent ideology that wasn't just anti-fascist opposing the far right they were talking about burning down system creating a new world cap linking capitalism property rights with white supremacy fascism racism talking about how america can not be reformed in any way that it must be destroyed and so that's what caused me to dig deeper and deeper and unfortunately i've been i've been warning about antifa for several years now to local officials in portland and my warnings weren't heated and um portlanders suffer and continue to suffer because of the inaction of those who are meant to protect the public in portland and seattle and other cities you've obviously now written their book and i i imagine that basically the pressure from them will probably just get worse won't it but um i wonder could you paint a sort of picture of the kind of people i mean there are a couple of description one in your book something you say in your book and also something else i've come across i i just wanted to read these if i can it's i'm just trying to get a picture of the kind of people i think we know who they are but i mean just for the audience you know antivirus have been called the revolt of the over-privileged right i mean i think that's fantastic but you've also said in in your book that in fact basically the hatred that antifa feel towards their society and fellow citizens comes from pain and resentment of their own lives which i think is a very interesting observation can you expand on those two statements um there are broadly i would say two types of people that get drawn into militant antifa activism one is as i quote about these people who represent who are from an educated middle class background many of them are white collar jobs and actually when i chronicle the arrests in portland because there's been so many i look into what kind of work are these people doing and shockingly many of them are work as professors as teachers people who work in the medical field people who are training to be doctors and they're attorneys they're lawyers and so many of them come from you know having master's degrees having phds and having a unit the privilege of the university back education background these are the people who have been who are heavily influenced by the ideology and theories that are quite intellectual by antifa actually and um you know they they cite in inspired by a lot of uh radical left-wing um communist and anarchist thinkers of the 20th and 19th centuries um but then there's another type of antifa and in the quote you mentioned from the book you know it's i didn't want to create the same fallacy uh or mistake rather of creating a caricature of these people that i have been vocal and opposing um and being on the ground and covering that near being very close to them now for many years and many times undercover you see a human side of them and many of the antifa who are carrying out some of these street criminal activities that activities that will lead most likely to to them being arrested and charged these are often people who are many of them are vagrants they're dealing with mental health issues and that recently have just transitioned from one gender to another and to another one unemployed so i have like this is a certain like i guess sympathy and pity for them that people who are vulnerable and need protection have instead been pulled until this extremist cult who has really no issue with using them as sort of their henchmen in carrying out these criminal activities and on the off chance that they get convicted and sentenced to jail it's just a drop in the bucket because there's so many of them quite often you you see these uh pictures the mug shots of people who've been charged uh they appear you know on on social media and they look like you know very disturbed people actually or or you know something usually looks like drugs i mean nine times out of ten you know but i mean people who are if you like not at peace with themselves yes so um yeah this is an aspect of my reporting that i don't get to talk about very much it's just like who who are these people really and i think they've been they've been radicalized through the literature that they're exposed to by antifa whenever you go to their rights any of their events their mutual aid events in addition to them doing quote-unquote charity work such as giving out free food and other supplies they always have a table where the literature is available and these tables are usually very popular so all these grand theories uh against capitalism against america are compressed into these pamphlets that are much more easy for the average reader to just read in a setting and get through and they introduce really radical extreme ideas uh one of them is called for example why we break windows and that gives the intellectual argument for the meaning and purposes behind shattering the windows on businesses and properties but it's these literatures that incrementally introduce them to these more and more extremist ideas and there's a whole library of them and they're available as pdfs online that can be printed out at home and easily disseminated and this was in the book some of the shocking new information that's published for the first time is the curriculum of one of the uh formal antifa groups called rose city antifa which is the antifa group in portland and they're the largest and oldest and i had documents leaked to me by somebody who tried to apply for membership in there and it is as far more of an organization as as it can get despite them claiming to not really exist as an organization so it's a vetting process um a training process a curriculum uh literature that they have to read discussion groups and they do this all secretly of course um and so you know it there are a lot of steps in between um a hot somebody who's on the hard left she's somebody who dawns the uniform and costume and takes knives and guns and explosives to rides i mean is it sort of right to to make a link between what you might call the woke and antifa i mean because there is a kind of natural progression there isn't there but but being woke is an entirely establishment thing particularly now in america it's sort of almost like the establishment uh ideology but there is a link isn't there was there's a link and that link was made more explicit in 2020 with a lot of cross-pollination between antifun blm in that blm excuse me antifa as an ideology is going back decades the original antifa group was the paramilitary of the german communist party and in two years of germany at that time they didn't have these these theories about intersectionality and um and trends and being people of color being above these other categories that are ranked in in a totem pole whereas the american manifestation of the anti-fun recent years has really incorporated a lot of these vogue theory vogue theories coming from critical race theory and and because of that it's made them more broadly appealing and allowed them to build many allies um blm is an explicit ally of the antifa to the point of where i really considered them kind of the same entity in the u.s really yeah in that anti-fur militants will provide violent act as volunteer armed security at blm events um antifa node to go to blm protests and can at a moment transform them into riots as i happen in minneapolis and other cities they know they chant the same thing so they have differences in their ultimate agendas i mean the alumni is much more of a classic revolutionary marxist whereas um antifa reject the idea of gov governments however they share enough in the mutual hatred of the us and its ideas um that for now their allies and partners i mean we have that here in in britain and europe in the sense that it runs through the culture a form of self-loathing right um this has been the terribly upsetting thing someone like me who's loved america and lived there is that america seemed to not have that so much this is something we accept about europe now it's so ingrained that it's almost like we think it's the natural order of things america didn't have it but there is this kind of red in tooth and claw self-hatred isn't there or hatred for the country that has come far more to the fore in america isn't it yeah and that hatred manifests itself in not just virtual but violence i think the intentional targeting for example of the federal courthouse in portland last year for weeks on end where writers were returning every night with power tools to try to cut into the building they brought explosives with them they had they divided into essentially into different units like an army in one unit was tasked with bringing these lasers that would blind and injure the eyes of the federal officers protecting the courthouse they also then after that went on to try to burn down police stations attack other courthouses like all this is meant to i mean it's a literal attack on institutions that represent buildings that represent the rule of law which is what they reject and so when they are calling for things like abolishing police abolishing the criminal justice system they really mean that they don't their entire they advocate for justice but their understanding of justice is entirely different and this has been this is i guess what makes them so brilliant is that they remake not just like change the meaning of words but really remake them from the ground up and introduce really radical ideologies into the mainstream so for example this how they define violence they don't actually consider what they're doing violence they consider it self-defense and how they consider and understand self-defense is not a risk a response to somebody actually actively assaulting you for example it's that somebody or the state has the wrong opinion and that opinion is an attack on you therefore you can you're defending yourself by attacking them um they mainstream the idea that uh people over property which sounds like a benign noble thing to say but what it means is then it provides the uh legitimate legitimization of things like looting and destroying businesses um that this is all a form of reparations so yeah there's been a sort of you know as i think you alluded to earlier a kind of denial i mean not just help from people but when it comes to politics i think famously one congressman said there's no such thing uh antifa is just an idea isn't it this is kind of soft soaping of the whole thing i just wonder andy where do you see it going because people say people looking now from a position of not really knowing that much about them say oh we've got president biden now and such and such these people presumably operate entirely in a different kind of plane um and biden is just as much an enemy surely as trump would be because they're right they want to pull the whole thing down correct um one of the banners that was held the very large banner at the portland riot on inauguration day said um f biden right it's excuse sorry it said um we don't want biden we want revenge in a large banner and there was a drawing of a clash and a cut of rifle on it so i mean they're broadcasting very clearly the violent extremism but the coverage from the media the headlines would be protesters stage uh nc biden pro protests yeah yeah and i was reading the responses from people who were just reading the headlines and they just automatically assumed that these were trump supporters who were trying to riot against biden so antifa been so powerful because they have so many not just allies and sympathizers in the in in journalism and that's at best and that worse they actually will have antiphon members who are who work in mainstream journalism and i write about that in the book and i name names as well you do yeah there's quite a lot of new material isn't there in your book yes about it which is fascinating do you think as well only the the haters they have for you isn't just because you try to you know investigate them and expose them but also because you are the son of immigrants to america you're a gay man doesn't that mean therefore that somehow rather you should be automatically in their universe on their side i know they are very frustrated that they haven't been able to take me down in the same ways that they have done to other people for example spurious accusations of being a white racist or white supremacist don't really stick on me but they i mean they still try they would throw anything and everything and hoping that something sticks and because they have lots of allies in journalism i've come to realize actually there's this this system that gets established where extremely biased journalists will write hit pieces some of them are masters reports and some of them are just pure opinion columns that get published and then these are then cited to represent my character in the wikipedia and then when you google me what you see is the wikipedia and these hit pieces so fortunately i've been able to rise all that i still work and write and contribute to mainstream publications but there's been so many people that i've seen cancelled and how their lives destroyed based on on these how these lies get repeated so i'm motivated to do what i do in part because i feel like i'm providing some voice for other people who don't have the privilege of a large platform and um i yeah i was very touched by something that you actually wrote in your book actually which i think says a lot about you and your voice i want to read it out again it says as much as this book is about antifa it's also a letter of gratitude to the nation that welcome my parents penniless refugees from the socialist republic of vietnam to become equal citizens um that shows to me you know the kind of man that you are i mean that is you know basically you love the country that your parents essentially adopted you know and came to um and yet the people who are fighting against you or fighting against us i would say um are people who just hate it almost out of a kind of resentment and a kind of possible as you say over privilege or overindulgence whatever it might be um and i think you know i wonder when you look at a statement like that i should think well how do you feel about the future going forward do you do you fear for america going forward do you fear for the america that your parents presumably are very proud of i do fear for it um i have always been a very strong defender of law enforcement and but like seeing how over and over when i'm reporting death threats to police in even the sbi and nothing getting done it's really on a personal level kind of rattled this um confidence that i had in that but still um i think the rule of law in america um still it's still there it's heavily being challenged right now um i think because ideas that undergird it are being fundamentally um damaged um uh with that quote thank you for reading that from the book yes i the the thing the trait or quality that i see missing from all these antifa extremists is that they don't have gratitude it's always they are driven by grievance that manifests into violent hatred um and you know if my fate could have been if the u.s didn't take in my parents as uh political refugees after they taught their time in um prison camps after the the fall of vietnam south vietnam um you know i could have been brought up in a society where i didn't have the rights that i currently have now by merely by luck of where i was happening to be born in the passport that i hold so it's with all these attacks on the us that have come and have been intensified in attacks not just like on the us but like very fundamental um ideas to liberal democracy yes i it's it's like a personal attack to me like this is the this is the society that took in not just my family but hundreds of thousands of millions of refugees who have fled um communist revolutions and have prospered and found not just acts not have access to new new um rights where they settled but their ability for them and their children to pass prosper and to get an education and go to university and so um i'm warning about the threat of antifa because america as an idea as a nation state should be defended and should be preserved and the vision the so-called utopia that antifa are fighting for i've seen with my own eyes leads to death destruction and violence indeed but very profound observation uh there andy i mean i think um it's extraordinary what you do is extraordinarily brave actually i just wonder it was one thing uh when you were physically attached in 2019 and you were actually covering another street protest if if i'm right and anti-five people attacked you um you know they it was a serious attack wasn't it you were hospitalized you had a brain hemorrhage yes did you at one moment think this is crazy that's it for me i'm not doing this anymore yes and actually many mentors in journalist mentors who uh i highly respect and speak to just told me like andy you've been covering them for a while what's the point of going forward you're putting yourself at risk you're putting people around you at risk it's politicians officials in your city aren't listening to you so there's so many other things that you can write about um but then i just and so that was the thought i entertained but then i just thought about like all the other people who before me in that day who were beating during that riot and attacked and had no voice or platform to voice what happened to them and that many people since who have been attacked assaulted i just like it you know i had to remove myself from this and that it's not just me that i'm fighting for i'm fighting for all these other people who have not had justice um i'm fighting for the american public for them to have access to facts about what is actually happening in major american cities so that's why i keep going well and also dousing as well because people say oh you can write about other things you think well you've got to write about the most important thing haven't you yes you know well look i'm glad you have and the book is out actually on which you can see the cover again here the book is out uh this tuesday february the 2nd now we will put a link actually on under the video andy but presumably it's obviously on amazon um you know as he used to say as well awkward bookshops but bookshops are closed um but uh so they can order it from that um i really hope it does well deserves to uh and thank you very much for you know sharing your time with us today and um we'll stay safe all right thank you for having me on it's a pleasure uh that's it for so what you're saying is this week we shall see you next time and as i say please don't uh don't forget to subscribe will you thank you bye [Music] you