When I last wrote about milkshakes (urgh), Twitter torchbearers for the left remarked upon what they insisted was alarmism on my part.
When Burger King endorsed "milkshaking", I warned it wouldn't be long until hurling bricks soon followed. Little did I know AntiFa would turn the milkshakes themselves into bricks, as we saw this weekend in Portland, Oregon.
If Portland sounds a long way away from you, I assure you it is not.
What happened to my friend Andy Ngo in Portland is coming to a neighborhood near you, whether you're in Poznan or Portsmouth, Rome or Reykjavík, Kansas City or Kiev. The left knows its ideas are caustic at the ballot box, so they must resort to caustic measures of their own to literally beat the right.
In doing so, AntiFa has attracted apologia and support from across the left spectrum. Leading politicians, mainstream news anchors, comedians, musicians, and college professors have leapt to AntiFa's defense over the years.
Given what happened to Ngo, it is time they were all shamed.
PORTLAND
Andy Ngo is an old colleague, relatively speaking.
He first reached out to me in 2015 and we began exchanging messages in 2016. By the next year I had interviewed him on the Breitbart News Daily radio show. I noticed he was fearless in his reporting. Real reporting. The kind of which folks like Jim Acosta and April Ryan have never done in their lives.
AntiFa activists allegedly mixed caustic, quick drying cement into milkshakes.
By 2018 Andy had been published in the Wall Street Journal. This year, he was brutally attacked on the streets of Portland, Oregon, where he has made a name for himself as one of the few reporters willing to shed light on the savagery of AntiFa.
Images from Portland show many being attacked at AntiFa's hands this weekend. But it isn't anything new. It's just that Andy has brought the matter to national and international attention.
Images from this weekend's protest – where AntiFa activists allegedly mixed caustic, quick drying cement as well as bodily fluids into milkshakes – are now viral. There are even questions over whether their production line of weaponry was captured on camera.
DEMOCRATS AND ANTIFA
U.S. Democratic candidates, their fellow travelers in the media, and international politicians of the left have long attempted to defend AntiFa.
Former Vice President Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign by praising AntiFa as “a courageous group of Americans.”
The former Deputy Chairman of the Democratic Party of America and Attorney General in Minnesota Keith Ellison endorsed the AntiFa handbook which encourages "militant" behavior. Its author Mark Bray recently said: "Fascism cannot be defeated through speech".
CNN's Don Lemon has defended the group, while his colleague Chris Cuomo has come to their defense.
To the network's credit, at least one of its stars, Jake Tapper, has come out against AntiFa:
Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello took to Bill Maher's show to encourage violence against perceived "Nazis", and while Maher himself argued against doing it because it is unlawful, he repeated throughout the interview, "We all want them to be punched, we all want them to be punched".
WHITEWASHING
The bigwigs aren't the only ones riding to AntiFa's rescue.
Natasha Lennard did it in The Nation magazine in January 2017, lauding the group's "success rates".
Sarah Ganim and Chris Welch did it for CNN, even going so far as to edit the headline of a story at AntiFa's request.
Michael Harriot did it for the black, progressive magazine The Root, which is in turn owned by Gizmodo, now owned by Great Hill Partners whose Managing Partners such as Michael A. Kumin repeatedly max out in political donations to Democrat Party candidates.
Harriot wrote in his deeply racist, anti-white article entitled "Yes, Anti-Fascists Are Violent ... and Necessary":
"It is impossible to stop [racist] violence with signs, freedom songs and nonviolent resistance. Anti-fascists know that tactic has never worked in the history of the world."
Benjy Sarlin gave AntiFa violence credibility for NBC News with the headline, "Antifa Violence Is Ethical? This Author Explains Why".
Sarlin interviewed the author of the Ellison-endorsed AntiFa handbook Mark Bray. One part of the exchange went like this:
SARLIN: Do you consider Trump one of those emergency moments where potentially more violent tactics are necessary?
BRAY: The anti-fascist argument is that any amount of white supremacist or neo-Nazi organizing is worthy of emergency consideration — by no means can we allow this to take one step farther. Trump in office obviously from their perspective exacerbates this situation and empowers them and helps them to grow, but even if Hillary Clinton were in office, anti-fascists would still want to block the advance of… any of these kind of small little Nazi groups.
SARLIN: So basically, you don’t want to take a clear position on that specific distinction (between self defense and preemptive attack).
BRAY: In the abstract. I’m going to leave it at that if you don’t mind.
Bray is still a lecturer at Dartmouth College despite this.
The list goes on (there's more, here).
DOMESTIC TERRORISM
"These antifa guys were showing up with weapons, shields and bike helmets and just beating the shit out of people…" – Law Enforcement Officer
AntiFa is a domestic terror group.
The U.S. Department for Homeland Security has been warning of an emboldened hard-left since at least 2016.
Politico reported the words of senior law enforcement officials in the domestic extremism arena:
“It was in that [2016 election] period that we really became aware of them... These antifa guys were showing up with weapons, shields and bike helmets and just beating the shit out of people… They’re using Molotov cocktails, they’re starting fires, they’re throwing bombs and smashing windows.”
“Everybody is wondering, 'What are we gonna do? How are we gonna deal with this? Every time they have one of these protests where both sides are bringing guns, there are sphincters tightening in my world. Emotions get high, and fingers get twitchy on the trigger.”
In documents obtained by the San Diego Union Tribune in April, it was revealed AntiFa activists were attempting to purchase weapons from Mexican drug cartels.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said “anti-fascist activists... planned to disrupt U.S. law enforcement and military security operations at the US/Mexican border.”
The FBI’s report says a group of activists in Tijuana supporting the migrant caravan “were encouraged to bring personally owned weapons to the border and the group also intended to purchase weapons from a Mexico-based cartel associate known as Cobra Commander, AKA the Mexican Rambo, and smuggle the weapons into the United States.”
In another FBI report first published by former Newsweek and New York Times Magazine editor Edward Klein, the bureau claimed:
Task force covered G-20 meeting in Hamburg studied intel from local authorities, Interpol and other assets, determined that as assumed U.S. based anarchist/radical groups had traveled to Germany and took part in the violence. There is also evidence of meetings between these individuals and associates of ISIS. There is clearly overwhelming evidence that there are growing ties between U.S. radials and the Islamic State as well as several offshoots and splinter group affiliates.
There is an urgent need to closely surveil the identified individuals.
"One of the men from Oakland traveled to Syria to meet with ISIS, the purpose was for training in tactics..." – FBI Field Report
The document went on:
Ties between three key leaders of the Oakland group [names redacted] met in Hamburg with a leader of the AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] and the AQIM [Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb]. The leader from AQAP is an Egyptian born male [name redacted] who is known to be in charge of finances and recruiting for the group.
There is evidence from informants that he is helping the Oakland group acquire the weapons they are seeking, primarily bomb making equipment and toxic chemicals and gases.
One of the men from Oakland traveled to Syria to meet with ISIS, the purpose was for training in tactics, but was thought to be primarily a bonding visit to discuss possible massive disruptive attacks on the U.S.
While in Hamburg several of the Oakland based criminals were photographed throwing Molotov cocktails and wielding iron bars, which have been their weapons of choice, though they are almost certainly on the verge of upping the caliber of their weaponry for use in the U.S.
Despite having their faces covered by masks, they were positively identified.
WORSE BEFORE BETTER
I've never engaged in political violence, but the likelihood is the establishment media would rather keep taking the words of Mark Bray and AntiFa members than those of me and people such as Ed Klein.
This is why the situation will get worse before it gets better.
Most left-politicians and leftist-dominated media outlets have decided whose side they're on: AntiFa.
It would be a humiliating climb down for them to withdraw the tacit or active support they've expressed in recent years, as they used AntiFa as a cudgel against President Trump in Charlottesville, and watched as the group became emboldened.
No doubt what happened to Andy Ngo in Portland will create many headlines and television minutes on the political right.
But will people like Jim Acosta who claims in his new book that he is the reporter in danger, or April Ryan who attempts to burnish her victimhood credentials daily, say absolutely anything about Andy and what happened in Portland?
Unlikely.
Raheem Kassam is the Global Editor in Chief of HumanEvents.com
