Journalist Andy Ngo, who has become an expert on the violent anarchist group antifa, today dismissed claims by President Trump’s supporters that the group was behind the pro-Trump riots on Capitol Hill.
“The people occupying the Capitol building do not look like antifa people dressed in Trump gear or Trump costumes,” he said in an interview from England.
“I have seen no evidence that they are able to coordinate a mass infiltration on this scale before, so I’m really skeptical that they would have been able to do it here without any of that information leaking out,” he said.
Ngo has infiltrated antifa and Black Lives Matter camps in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, and covered their violent actions in those cities last year. He has been brutally attacked by antifa and had his life threatened several times for reporting on the group, often vividly on Twitter.
BLM-antifa tried to break into a federal building in Portland for months in 2020 using explosives, power tools, rope, etc. The tanks never came in and the national response was that it was wrong for federal officers to even protect the building. https://t.co/P4SHQJtxVQ
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) January 6, 2021
At many times, he was the only journalist casting a critical eye, and camera lens, on the group as it occupied parts of cities for weeks, often burning federal buildings and attacking police.
He is set to release a new book, titled Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, that dishes insider stories about the group.
I didn’t see any BLM or antifa all day and I’ve walked through the crowd a few times.
Whatever bad elements there are, they’re vastly outnumbered by everyday folks.
I walked through with no problems.
Many were talking about the women who was shot …
— Will Ricciardella (@WillRicci) January 6, 2021
Online and even on C-SPAN today, several people claimed that the violence in Washington and other cities today was the work of antifa operatives dressed as Trump supporters.
But Ngo said he saw little evidence to support those claims. Some reporters who covered the Capitol riots agreed. The Washington Examiner’s Will Ricciardella, for example, tweeted, “I didn’t see any BLM or antifa all day and I’ve walked through the crowd a few times.”
The disparate responses to those currently breaking inside the Capitol building versus those who tried to burn down the federal courthouse in Portland for months tells you what you need to know.
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) January 6, 2021
Ngo noted that the condemnation of today’s riots stood in contrast to the lack of outrage or even police action to antifa’s attacks in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis.
“The disparate response to what’s happening now and what happened six months ago should tell you what you need to know about the state of things,” he said.
