Monday, January 11, 2021

New role for antifa: Biden’s 'shock troops'

The election of President-elect Joe Biden does not signal the end of violent anarchist group antifa, sometimes portrayed by sympathetic media as a national anti-Trump movement.

Unmasked cover image.jpg

Instead, according to a journalist who has tracked its every move, antifa is likely to feel emboldened to challenge pro-Trump critics of the new Democratic administration.

And following Wednesday’s violent protests in the halls of Congress by Trump supporters, said Andy Ngo, “They will feel, in their own right, legitimized” to retaliate.

Ngo is a self-made antifa expert and critic who has used his platform on Twitter, with 842,200 followers, and as editor-at-large at the Post Millennial to publicize the violence of the group, including his own beating and death threats from members.

Next month, he is publishing his first book about the group, Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, which includes excerpts from training books, identifies key leaders, and reveals a plan to recruit members through Major League Soccer fan clubs, including those for the Portland Timbers.

One thing is for sure, he wrote: Antifa is here to stay with a new role highlighted by the book’s publisher, Center Street. “Antifa,” it said in promoting Ngo’s book, “will become even more influential in the Biden era by serving as the far-left’s shock troops to intimidate political opponents, undermine elections, and push for radical, violent revolution.”

In an interview from England, forced there temporarily by repeated antifa death threats, Ngo said he wrote the book to keep the heat on antifa and media outlets that he said cover pro-Trump clashes more critically than the group’s firebombing of federal buildings and seizure of city streets in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington.

“People are responding like they're very, very shocked,” he said of Wednesday’s MAGA Capitol attack. “And I'm wondering where the hell were you all when we had thousands of people for months in Portland try also to break into a federal building and to burn it down, actually. They came with Molotov cocktails, and, actually, they used ropes at strategic points to break down this reinforced barrier, and they tried to storm the building multiple times. They attacked police and damaged their eyes with lasers. Where the hell were your condemnations during that time? Why was I one of the lone voices?”

Comparing antifa’s riots and assaults at an earlier pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., to the Capitol siege, he said, “They mirror each other, lots of far-Left and the far-Right, but one side is given a particular legitimacy, and that’s what makes them, in my view, more dangerous because nobody is viewing them as a threat."

By not grouping both together as groups to condemn, he said, antifa not only wins credibility but is given carte blanche to push its agenda.

“My concern, in why I paint a grimmer picture toward the end of my future prediction, is because the longer goal and longer game that they're playing has been really working to systematically mainstream fundamental tenets of their ideology,” he said.

That, Ngo added, includes “the mainstreaming of their argument that how you resolve your grievances is through violence, which is anathema to the enlightened principles that undergird a liberal democracy.”


 

 


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