Victim Blaming Andy Ngo
The breaking news on the Andy Ngo front is some video footage purporting to show him actively coordinating violence with right-wing elements, specifically Patriot Prayer / Proud Boys (groups often labeled far-right). This Twitter thread highlights apparently ‘damning’ footage of Ngo caught in the act. This took place right before Patriot Prayer and Antifa duked it out in a brawl at a Portland cider bar (confusingly named Cider Riot).
Something about the inexhaustible efforts to "discredit" Andy Ngo really bother me and it didn't click for me until recently. Curiously, a Motte thread about pop stars and interracial dating ( u/ThirteenValleys 's post specifically) is what helped me think this through. It seems like not many people want to outright say "Andy Ngo deserved to be assaulted" so they couch their sympathy through various layers of obfuscation. There is the language analogous to "I don't support assaulting journalists but..." where you perhaps list your lack of surprise when he does get assaulted.
The Twitter thread above goes one step further. What exactly is the point of the tweets? If you read enough of them, you just get a general sense that Andy Ngo is Bad and sloppy and misleading and dishonest, but nothing completely coherent. There are very clear avenues for criticizing journalists that are both devastating and much more worrisome. Making up quotes (e.g. Juan Thompson @ Intercept or Stephen Glass @ New Republic) is one, doctoring video by splicing events out of order (e.g. James O'Keefe @ Project Veritas, or even Katie Couric's gun documentary), not doing your due diligence in fact-checking your sources (e.g. the Rolling Stone 'A Rape on Campus' is the most notorious), or any number of other journalistic malfeasance. Sometimes people make mistakes, sometimes they are deliberately misleading, but in neither case would a normal person argue that the proper response in any of the cases above should be physical assault.
Why do I keep mentioning physical assault? It seems to me that the people currently involved would not expend so much energy cataloging all the supposed Bad things Andy Ngo has done if it wasn't for the fact that he was a victim of an assault. This seems to me an obvious example of confirmation bias in action. But most crucially, it's too difficult to directly support the physical assault, so the alternative strategy is to build up enough opprobrium around his character that intuitively and on an emotional level, people will be less likely to condemn his physical assault, even if logically the two are not related.
Assuming everything in the Twitter thread is true, Andy Ngo is guilty of standing around other Bad people and also using editing to highlight what he thinks is important. None of that comes across as anywhere near serious journalistic malpractice to compare to any of the above examples, and none of it definitely comes close to justifying a physical assault on him. Further, Antifa people fucking hate Andy, so if he's going to stand anywhere, it makes sense to do it near people that don't want to give him a brain hemorrhage.
So I'm just left wondering, if I assume the most charitable interpretation, what the fuck is their point?
I watched the supposed "damning" video posted in the thread above and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to look for. If the video is supposed to prove that the Proud Boys are a violent group that enjoys getting into street scuffles, well there's nothing for me to disagree with. Nothing new or surprising about that assertion. If you start the video to when Ngo arrives within earshot, nothing really stands out about the conversation they're having. It basically boils down to a discussion about how it's a bad idea to go near Cider Riot but if they have to here's how they will defend themselves. I shrugged. Similarly, I see the woman holding a brick but it's not clear that Ngo does as he is walking behind her. It's possible he struck an off-the-record agreement with everyone involved. This on its own would not necessarily be unusual, and this is based off my experience with being involved with left-wing militant groups. Whether it's a good idea is a separate topic.
My first impression of Ngo’s video from Cider Riot hasn’t changed. It showed Joey Gibson and his comrades clearly posturing and antagonizing the folks congregating at Cider Riot. I never got the impression from Ngo's footage that they were hapless victims. They were shown repeatedly charging forward and egging people on.
I still don't deny that Ngo has an agenda to push, and he sometimes bends over backwards to make some really stretching connections. When Joseph Alcoff was charged with assaulting two Marines in Philadelphia for thinking they were proud boys, Ngo posted a picture of Alcoff with Maxine Waters as a way to hint hint at a Democratic establishment link. Similarly, after Willem Von Spronsen died after trying to set the Tacoma detention center on fire, Ngo posted a tweet from the gun club Willem was part of where they posted a day before the attack "These camps must be shut down" as some sort of damning revelation. I rolled my eyes hard at both of these and told Ngo as much.
I've been close to this situation for a bit and I saw a plethora of excuses trotted out after he got assaulted. There were the outright fake headlines that claimed the assault was a hoax orchestrated by the Proud Boys. Folks oscillated between a bunch of random accusations, everything from the gloves he was wearing that day, to a video from months ago where he inadvertently (his claim) moved his camera down to a sign-up sheet. This exercise genuinely reminds me of how police departments selectively release information after a fatality. It happened with Michael Brown when they released toxicology reports that he had marijuana in his system. They did the same with Botham Jean when they executed a search warrant and publicized that they found marijuana in his apartment. To me it's obvious what they're trying to do but they refuse to outright say it because they know that it's weak when explicitly stated.
Full disclosure (and I spoke about this two months ago on the first episode of The Bailey podcast) I am in touch with Andy Ngo somewhat regularly. He asks me questions about certain leftwing dynamics and I get frustrated with him because he often comes off as deliberately misunderstanding something in the worst possible light. That said, I’ve never heard him claim to be unbiased. He acknowledges that he focuses on leftwing violence instead of ALL extremist political violence because he believes (correctly or not) that the phenomenon does not get enough media attention.