Andy Ngo, American Patriot

Editor's Note

Andy Ngo’s beating by Antifa should have been a national scandal. Instead, it was dismissed, even mocked, by commentators intent on preserving ideological narratives rather than defending a journalist. That inversion — in which truth-tellers are branded as “reactionaries” and violent mobs are excused as “anti-fascists” — is a sign of our cold civil war.

Christopher Flannery, in this essay, refuses to see Ngo as simply a victim of political violence. Instead, Flannery argues, he’s a case study in the costs of dissent within a republic under strain. Ngo is a witness to Antifa’s rise and a reminder of the civic courage required to resist it. America is in his debt, for he has recorded a reality others denied for far too long.

President Trump just announced that he is designating Antifa a “major terrorist organization.” As Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has said, “If you want to know about Antifa, follow @MrAndyNgo.”

Who is Mr. Andy Ngo? He’s an American hero. We’ll need a lot more like him to make it through this storm. Here’s a bit of his American story.

After the American defeat in Vietnam in 1975, the victorious communists confiscated the homes, businesses, property, and savings of those South Vietnamese deemed “counterrevolutionaries.” These could be people working in government, law enforcement, the media, or the military, religious leaders, or just business owners—including their families.

Hundreds of thousands of these men, women, and children were forced into what were called “reeducation” camps, often to live in inhumane conditions, some for months, some for many years. They could be subjected to forced labor and aggressive interrogation and indoctrination. These measures aimed to break their will and compel them to confess their guilt and affirm the truth of the Communist Party line.

In increasing numbers throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Vietnamese fled communist tyranny and became “boat people,” risking their lives and everything they had in extremely dangerous escapes to freedom. According to the best estimates, 200,000 to 400,000 of these “boat people” perished at sea — drowning, starving, dying of thirst or disease, or being killed by pirates.

Of those who didn’t perish, about half a million made their way to America in the twenty years following the communist victory. Two of those were Binh and Mai Ngo, who met during their escape, made it to America’s West Coast in 1979, got married, moved to Portland, Oregon, worked hard, made a modest living, and, according to their son, achieved “the greatest dream they could hope for: freedom.” Mai would always say, “America is number one.” Andy would learn from experience to agree.

Andy Ngo grew up and went to school in Portland, became a journalist, and — against the advice of friends and mentors— took on what he calls the “dissident beat” because no one else would. This led him to report on a movement that had been around since the early 20th century but was little discussed in the early 21st century until it became almost a household word: “Antifa,” a revolutionary movement whose American operations have as their explicit aim destroying America.

Like many of us, Andy Ngo didn’t begin to take seriously his role as an American citizen until “well into adulthood.” He had taken his freedom more or less for granted and hadn’t really grasped his parents’ experience in communist Vietnam, where there was no free speech, freedom of assembly, free elections, property rights, or freedom of religion. Then, in his investigative reporting on Antifa, Ngo found in America “a virulent strain” of the same “revolutionary communism” his parents had fled forty years before in Vietnam.

In just the several years during which Ngo has been reporting, Antifa has made shocking progress in terror, destruction, and undermining the rule of law in America. The riots of the summer of 2020, the most destructive in American history, marked their most publicized victories.

The violence of these riots has now become a way of life in many cities, replacing the rule of law. Andy Ngo’s reporting showed how Antifa achieved these victories and how, in the face of assaults by Antifa and their allies, American governments chose not to defend the basic rights to life, liberty, and property of American citizens. He also showed how Antifa’s anti-American and anti-freedom ideology was brought into the mainstream with the aid of the Black Lives Matter movement, corporate media, and the Democratic Party.

Because of this reporting, Andy Ngo was attacked and brutally beaten as a “reactionary,” just as his parents had been imprisoned and persecuted as “counterrevolutionaries” in communist Vietnam. On June 29, 2019, in the midst of what the media reported as a “mostly peaceful” protest in Portland, Oregon, a swarm of attackers dressed in black and wearing masks and tactical gloves knocked him down, punched and kicked him, stole his camera, sprayed him, threw objects at him, cursed him, and laughed at him as he dragged himself away.

Video of the last part of the attack spread across the country and around the world. In an emergency room later, doctors found that his brain was hemorrhaging. He could have died.

Andy is a small man with a gentle demeanor. He had never been in a fight. But the terrible beating did not discourage him from continuing his work. In his words, “The beating that day cemented my resolve in investigating the origins, ideology, and organization of Antifa.” And he has continued doing this despite further beatings, threats to shoot him or set him on fire, terrorists stalking his family home and releasing his whereabouts on social media, and other threats and harassment.

Andy Ngo’s father suffered a stroke in 2018 and has not been himself since that time. But Andy says that his father’s “American dream lives on in me. It gives me the resolve to overcome the assaults, intimidation, and death threats to continue my work.”

Ngo gathered his reporting from the years 2019 to 2021 into a book titled Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. All Americans should know about the things he reports in that book and continues to report daily in his journalism. Much that he reports is ignored by the corporate media. It should not be ignored by any American patriot.

Andy’s book is also, as he says, “a letter of gratitude to the nation that welcomed” his parents “as equal citizens” years ago, though they were just “penniless refugees from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” It is a sign of our times — like the murder of Charlie Kirk and the demonic celebrations of that murder — that just as Andy Ngo’s parents had to escape Vietnam to seek freedom in America, Andy Ngo was forced, for the sake of his own freedom, to escape America.

But his reporting continues, despite the daily death threats. If America is finally going to do something about the terrorists in our midst, Andy Ngo is a big reason for that. We are in his debt.