He seeks to paint leftists as emotionally fraught, unstable, and pathological, their ideology simply a vessel for their resentments. To defame his targets, Ngo pulls together disconnected pieces of a person’s biography-youthful legal troubles, past associations, anything he can make hay out of. It may be more accurate to say that the book is the culmination of Ngo’s Twitter account: he stacks bizarre allegations and spurious rumors into a sprawling, incoherent metanarrative. The book itself is the “culmination of his reporting,” which we also have to put in quotes since, as I’ll discuss, Ngo cannot be said to do anything resembling real reporting on antifa. Ngo capitalized on all this for Unmasked, his first book, which hit #1 on Amazon. People ate up Ngo’s story because of its utility-the example of a gay man of color being attacked by intolerant leftists-and, during 2020’s protests, he became a favored figure and go-to commentator for right-wing pundits, including Tucker Carlson. (His book also uses British spellings.) To the right, he is the perfect victim of the “unchecked radical left” in modern America. He comes across as meek, decidedly unassuming, with a curious British accent for someone born and raised in Portland, Oregon. The “milkshake incident” in 2019 was videotaped it led his celebrity on the right to skyrocket (along with a brief stint of liberal sympathy), and delivered him huge sums of money through crowdfunding. Over the past few years, the term has become a mainstream right-wing bogeyman, and Ngo has been a prime cultivator of the trend. Bearing the humiliation was clearly too much, so he refocused his entire career on “antifa,” a word that, in this context, has to be put in quotations. You see, two years ago, after an already-prolific career of Islamophobic op-eds and antagonistic interactions with left-wing organizers, Ngo was roughed up and had a milkshake thrown at him at a Portland protest. Ngo’s new book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, published by Hachette, consists of this process extended to an agonizing length, all hamfistedly contorted into a mythology that Ngo has fashioned out of his own imaginative grievances. But this name-and-shame process is the foundation of Ngo’s celebrity: he has created a highly lucrative career off of pairing identification with accusation, using vague allegations of malfeasance that are taken by his followers as a signal to harass and threaten the person named. I should say very clearly he is not the one directly threatening me, nor does he explicitly instruct anyone to do so. He has branded me an “antifa ideologue,” sometimes tagging my Twitter account while accusing me of some nefariousness he’s sure I’m responsible for. I, like a lot of people, am often able to trace this experience back to one person: Andy Ngo. Often it goes darker, into homophobia, antisemitism, threats of violence. I didn’t recently publish anything noteworthy-so why the attention? When I check them, I’m in for a string of insults: my appearance, the unworthiness of my work, my intellectual inferiority, whatever the angle may be. It goes something like this: I suddenly notice that my Twitter notifications are blowing up. I have an experience in common with a number of other reporters on the left.
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