Unmasked — Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy — a review
Andy Ngo is an independent journalist based in Portland, Oregon. His new book is about the militants known as “Antifa” (anti-fascists). It starts by describing some of these criminals beating up the author during a riot in 2019. Then it goes on to examine the role of Antifa in the far bigger protests of 2020, which went on for over six months, almost every evening.
I read it sceptically, because I’m aware of Ngo writing questionable material. For example, a 2018 article for the Wall Street Journal, “A Visit to Islamic England,” gives the impression that Tower Hamlets, a London borough in which I have friends, and with whom I have visited their local streets, cafes and pubs for decades, is virtually an Islamic state.
I expected this book to consist of equally biased reporting of the situation in America, and at first, I was vindicated. Recounting the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th, which provoked the 2020 protests, Ngo uncritically accepts what the authorities said.
The Hennepin County medical examiner found that he died as a result of the “combined effects of… being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system.” There was no evidence found of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation in the county’s autopsy. It was later revealed that Floyd’s blood contained a fatal level of fentanyl” (page 20).
You only have to watch the video, to see that he died because a police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes: 8 Minutes and 46 Seconds: The Killing of George Floyd, Sky News, June 15th 2020.
Floyd politely said he couldn’t breathe, and onlookers asked officer Derek Chauvin to arrest him, rather than suffocate him. But the cop ignored these reasonable requests, and so did his three accomplices, and he continued until Floyd died. Chauvin is being tried for second-degree murder, and the others for aiding and abetting second-degree murder. If the jury convicts the Minneapolis four, perhaps it will be partly because they know what happened in Los Angeles in 1992, when four officers were acquitted of using excessive force when they repeatedly beat Rodney King with their batons, in spite of the overwhelming evidence of their guilt. See Video of Rodney King Beaten by Police Released — ABC News, March 7th 1991.
Ngo doesn’t credit ordinary Americans with the ability to oppose police excesses unprovoked. He claims that the riots in Minneapolis, which included burning down a police station, resulted from Antifa manipulation. Neither does he suggest what people should do when cops murder, but he implies they can trust the authorities. He doesn’t grasp why anyone might not like the police, especially not the feds.
Accordingly, he describes the response to Floyd’s death in entirely negative terms. But throughout the hot summer of 2020, I was able to walk from my apartment to the centre of the biggest protests in the USA, in downtown Portland. Antifa thugs were a small minority of the protestors. Most were ordinary Portlanders, opposing police brutality, and, later, protesting the troops sent in by president Trump to protect federal buildings. Ngo quotes all the elected politicians of city and state saying the Department of Homeland Security is an occupying force; he doesn’t ask how they got elected, but the title of the book implies Ngo is in favour of democracy. “By mid-July, the Portland City Council officially banned Portland Police from cooperating in any way with federal law enforcement” — page 71.
I saw the emergence of the “Portland Moms,” who tried to discourage federal troops from attacking peaceful protestors. From all directions, they walked into downtown around 8:30 each evening. In Ngo’s version, their action is labelled “Women were used as human shields.”
Ngo is right to point out that innocent people were killed, and buildings burned. But it is still possible to sympathise with some of the aims of a protest, without agreeing with every action committed by numerous uncoordinated participants. I was initially sympathetic, but I witnessed the movement’s degeneration into what is misleadingly labelled “antiracism.”
Signs saying “White Silence is Violence” imply that, if you are white, you are obliged to say you agree with something. When I visited the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle in June, I saw widespread acceptance of similar examples of classifying people by race. Ngo reports “There was even a separate garden for ‘black and Indigenous folks’ after concerns arose over there being too many whites in the area.” — page 39.
Maybe, as the book’s title says, Antifa wants to “destroy democracy,” but since its politics alienate most people, it cannot do so. The riots at their zenith only covered a tiny fraction of the urban United States. CHAZ was taken down in an hour after several murders occurred within it — incidentally, all those who died were black. Ngo worries about “civil war.” Antifa is just as hyperbolic. They talk as if the situation in Portland in 2020 was comparable to the siege of Barcelona in 1936. Overuse of the allegation “fascist” led to the murder of a Trump supporter in Portland on August 29th.
But surely the most glaring error in the political upheavals of 2020, is that race was assumed to be the most important issue. The fact that George Floyd was black, and that the man who killed him is white, is, for “antiracists,” evidence of “racism.” Black people are around thirteen percent of the population, but twenty-five percent of those killed by police.
However, as Wilfred Reilly points out in a January 2021 article for Minding The Campus, “The Cost of False Facts: A Critical Review of Incorrect Boogey-Men from Glassner’s 1990s to Today,” using the Washington Post’s Fatal Force database of police shootings, a basic adjustment for black/white differences in violent crime rate eliminates the disparity. If the members of an ethnic minority are 2.4 times as likely, on average, to commit violent crime, than the population in general, and are twice as likely to get shot by the cops, the problem isn’t racism.
Chapter 4, Rose City Antifa, is an account of the Portland group’s efforts at secret organisation, written in the “shock horror” tone of a conservative baffled by radical politics. But anyone, including conservatives, concerned about privacy, can learn from this chapter’s description of Antifa’s training sessions.
Chapter 5, on the origins of anti-fascism, surprised me with how well-researched it is. Few know about the German Communist Party allying with Nazis from time to time during the nineteen-twenties, and calling the Socialist Party “fascist.” Nor that the original Antifaschistische Aktion was a tool of the KPD, loyal to Stalin’s Kremlin. Modern anti-fascists are not Marxists, but their rabid response to political differences echoes their German forebears.
Antifa’s analysis has in common with traditional Marxist theory that they believe society is divided into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” But that’s where the similarity ends. There is a world of difference between claiming, on the one hand, as Marxists do, the one oppression essential to any capitalist society is the exploitation of the labour power of the proletariat, by the bourgeoisie, and believing, on the other hand, that the most important problem is “white supremacy.”
Marxists claim that the economic oppression they point to contains the seeds of its own abolition, because the working class is the majority, and if it took power, there would be no class it would have an interest in, or ability to, exploit. The idea defended by Antifa, by best-selling authors Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi, and by the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” that “anti-blackness” is the most important form of oppression, leads to no such result.
Ngo doesn’t explain the difference between Marxism and (post)modern leftism, but he does provide evidence for the above criticisms. On page 132, he points out that “Intersectionality flows through American antifa. The revolution they are fighting for will not be led by workers but rather trans, black, and indigenous ‘folx’ of color.”
Here are some representative comments from various “antiracists,” quoted by Ngo.
On page 131, he cites In Defense of Looting. It says looting strikes, not only at property and the police, but at “whiteness, black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination.”
Discussing the sixties black liberation movement, he recollects “Finney, Goodwin, and Hill were members of the Republic of New Africa, a militant Marxist group that sought to create a black ethno-state in the American South.” — page 138. Obviously, this is the opposite of Marx’s “workers of the world, unite.”
“White supremacy and capitalism are the underlying causes of state-sanctioned police orchestrated violence.” — page 140.
“We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on sort of ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk.” — page 141.
I persisted with the book, and it gradually became more convincing. The detailed uncovering of the strange deaths of various Antifa heroes in chapter 9 is particularly interesting and sad. Andy doesn’t reciprocate Antifa’s hatred. He expresses compassion for people led astray by this cult.
Most importantly, the book contains detailed, referenced accounts of numerous violent acts, including murder, by Antifa, the most violent expression of cancel culture. No wonder Antifa tried to stop the book being sold. I bought Unmasked for the same reason I bought The Satanic Verses — opposition to censorship driven by violence; I didn’t expect to believe most of it. But I’ve also encountered the influence of Rose City Antifa on Portland’s radical subculture, and can confirm Ngo’s view of it.
Though Antifa could never come close to power, some of the extremes of “antiracism” have entered the mainstream. A sensible Republican administration would have been able to take advantage of public aversion to the riots. But as it was, the Democrats won the 2020 election, and on taking office on January 20th 2021, immediately started issuing a series of executive orders about race and gender. On the 27th, president Joe Biden claimed “The fact is systemic racism touches every facet of American life.”
“Systemic racism” is not a fact. It is not even a hypothesis, since it is unfalsifiable. You cannot prove that an organisation is not “systemically racist.” In a UK report from 2000 for Civitas, “Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics: The Macpherson Report and the Police,” Norman Dennis, George Erdos and Ahmed Al-Shahi explain how London’s police were unable to defend themselves against this and similar nebulous allegations.
Ngo concludes with an Afterword about the experiences of his Vietnamese parents. Some leftists have expressed surprise that Andy, and most of those who have escaped from Vietnam, do not share their beliefs. They’ve seen pictures of schoolchildren being napalmed, in South Vietnam, by the South Vietnamese air force, with American napalm. Given this, and the rest of the war crimes committed by the USA and its ally, it implies the 1975 North Vietnamese victory must have been traumatic, to have driven millions to sympathise with the politics of the country which had bombed them. Ngo’s account of his parents’ experiences in concentration camps helps us understand. But I was wrong to think, as I did at the beginning, that he reacts blindly against mindless leftist extremism with its right-wing counterpart. This is what he believes, what Antifa calls “fascism”:
“…the political and moral philosophy of thinkers like John Milton, John Locke, and James Madison. Liberalism is the framework that allows for the protection of liberties, equality, property, free speech, and freedom of expression.”
