Publisher's Synopsis
The conservative media personality Andy Ngo sent me a video made by Popular Mobilization, a group of anti-fascists who sort out protests in response to traditional rallies in Portland, Oregon. Set to Kelis' "Milkshake," the video begged neighborhood radicals to turn out on June 29 to demonstrate against a walk arranged by the Proud Boys, the infamous traditional fraternity. "Antifa guarantees savagery," Ngo wrote in a tweet about the video. "Joe I'm concerned," he wrote me. "How might you protect yourself?" It was a reasonable concern. In the course of recent years, the streets of downtown Portland have played host to a serialized common battle in miniature between shielded combatants from the extreme right and extreme left. Under the evergreens, weekend gladiators in bicycle protective caps and gas masks beat the sap out of one another, scoring pinfalls to archive and afterward disseminate to sympathetic online crowds. Irregular bystanders can get harmed. Andy Ngo was hardly an arbitrary bystander: The 33-year-old is abruptly one of the most prominent youthful figures in all of traditional media. He made his name in part through his activism calling attention to a supposed plague of staged hate crimes, à la Jussie Smollett. Yet, Ngo has also been a natural, and chided, presence at Portland's left-wing protests, where he shoots alarming videos of anti-fascists that regularly end up on the likes of Fox News and Sky News. I was in talks to shadow him at the upcoming demonstration, which I thought might be a good way to illustrate how Ngo constructs an incendiary political narrative out of a tight selection of facts.
