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Andy Ngo: I Was Nearly Killed by Antifa. This is What I Learned.

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Few people understand the far-left extremist group Antifa as well as investigative journalist Andy Ngo, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unmasked-Antifas-Radical-Destroy-Democracy/dp/154605958X" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">author</a> of “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.”

He has been beaten, attacked, and nearly killed by Antifa for his undercover reporting of the group’s operations.

In an executive order signed on Sept. 22, President Donald Trump designated the group a domestic terrorist organization. On Oct. 8, the president hosted a roundtable focused on Antifa and invited Ngo and other journalists to participate.

In this episode, Ngo recounts his harrowing personal experiences.

What will it take to actually dismantle Antifa? How is Antifa organized and funded? And what does Ngo make of the broader trends of political violence, from the assassination of Charlie Kirk to the murder of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson?

Ngo is <a href="https://thepostmillennial.com/author/andyngo" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">editor at large</a> at The Post Millennial and authors the <a href="https://www.ngocomment.com/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">Ngo Comment</a> substack.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Andy Ngo, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you.

You were just at the Antifa Roundtable at the White House, and Attorney General Pam Bondi talked about, you know, of course, it’s been designated a domestic terrorist organization. She talked about taking it apart brick by brick, top to bottom. Kash Patel mentioned, the FBI director, that it had been built over a long period of time. How does one actually accomplish this?

It’s going to be very, very difficult, not easy. I alluded to that in my comments to the president and members of his cabinet. What the DOJ can do is several things. First, if they take on cases of criminal suspects who are engaging in federal crimes relating to rioting and other attacks, that then takes it out of the hands of local prosecutors generally, because local prosecutors aren’t going to pursue charges against most of these riot cases. They give them sweetheart plea deals where there’s no really meaningful consequence, as we saw in 2020. I’m not even talking about conspiracy charges, just assault and arson charges that attack federal officers. There are federal crimes that can apply right now. You don’t have to be very creative.

But more meaningfully, taking it apart brick by brick, as you just quoted them saying, I think the DOJ should use conspiracy charges. They have not used that at any point ever for suspects who are accused of being

part of Antifa or committing organized crimes in furtherance of the Antifa ideology. But it hasn’t been done before at the state level. The state of California vs.12 suspects, that was the case. Prosecutors in Southern California included members in LA and Long Beach and San Diego, who had conspired together to carry out violence and rioting on Pacific Beach in January 2021.

On that day, groups of people came dressed in black with their faces covered, and they had melee weapons and projectile weapons, and they violently attacked people who were attending a pro-Trump rally. The violence was so unrestrained that the militants attacked members of the public on the beach, people who were walking their dogs, people who were walking nearby.

This was during the middle of the day when there were people going to the beach, and they were affected by the mace and pepper spray. A woman was beaten to the ground, a teenage boy who was underage was assaulted, and there were numerous victims. A journalist was bashed on the back with some type of pole or a stick, and police were injured.

In this case, the majority of them were convicted of felony conspiracy. All 12 were convicted of something, by the way. And because it went to trial, the evidence came out regarding what the prosecutors had. They likely had one person out of the 12 cooperating. That’s my belief.

They recovered Signal chats. Everyone had an alias. They coordinated who was coming together, who was leaving together, what to bring. It showed that there were even some Left-wing journalists who were in the Signal chat, who were there, by the way. None of that was particularly surprising to me. I knew all that.

I wrote a book on Antifa called, Unmasked. It was a New York Times bestseller and came out in 2021. However, it was surprising in the context that this came out on the record in a criminal trial, finally. Of course, that case got no national media attention at all. So I think the DOJ can really look to that and see, because there are federal charges of conspiracy that can apply.

Even more creatively, they could potentially even look at racketeering charges, because of how some of the Antifa networks themselves organize. They operate as a gang, essentially. They have members, they coordinate together, they typically use Signal, and they have a plan and are instructed on how to destroy evidence as well.

Now, where it gets more confusing or difficult, maybe from prosecutors’ perspective, from law enforcement perspective, is how do you identify those who are in a cell vs. somebody who shows up to riot and is not part of the network? There are certain ways to identify that, but the way that Antifa organizes, it’s meant to appear as if there is no organization, but they are organized.

I hope people don’t forget what happened in 2020 when for months cities like Portland and Seattle and other places were besieged by nightly violence by Antifa. Individuals who all donned the same black uniform showed up at the same time, dispersed together, and carried out mass violence and disappeared into the darkness of the night and did it night after night after night with local prosecutors essentially doing nothing.

Even when police didn’t make arrests in the case of Portland, the district attorney there, Mike Schmidt, chose not to prosecute over 90 percent of them. His office, as soon as he came into power in August 2020, just had a whole list of riot-related crimes that he announced his office would not pursue charges on those who were charged with these.

At those riots, what I saw, particularly when the federal courthouse downtown was besieged in an insurrection, night after night in July, thousands of people came. They were extremely coordinated. At the front were the so-called Wall of Moms. That was all for the cameras. These are Antifa members and their supporters, females, who would wear yellow shirts, hook arms, and have signs saying, we are mothers, we are moms.

It is for the cameras because, of course, the video cameras and pictures that come out of that and their stories in the legacy media from that time, peaceful protesters. These are just mothers who are protesting against white supremacy and racism and police brutality, pure propaganda. You know, who was behind them? And the Wall of Moms knew this. Behind them was the black bloc.

There was a brigade of them who were shining powerful green lasers. There were dozens of them who had these lasers. And it’s not like it was one laser for each officer, no. The whole group of 50 would concentrate on one person. Your eyes can get injured from one being directed at it when you have dozens of people shining lights. So dozens of officers did suffer pretty serious eye injuries at that time.

There were those in the back, in the black bloc, who hurled projectile weapons, things that looked peaceful on camera. Like holding a water bottle is not particularly threatening, but when it’s frozen and it’s used to hurl at somebody’s face, it can be deadly. And that’s what they were doing. They had rocks, they even brought cans of soup. So all these types of things that weren’t technically illegal to have. It’s not illegal to have a bag of rocks in your backpack or cans of soup or frozen water bottles. But those were the types of weapons they were using.

And then they had so-called medics. These are fake medics. These are people with homemade printed medic patches. And even their own so-called press. Even within the rioters, there were those who had homemade press badges that they printed out. The purpose of that was to make police apprehensive of making an arrest, you know, like an attack on a journalist or something like that.

And anything that could be used as a weapon was. Some of the weapons included a blade being attached so they could use that to jab at police. They brought ropes and electric grinding and cutting tools to cut apart the reinforced fencing that was put outside the federal courthouse. This fencing, by the way, was the same type of fencing that was used outside the Capitol building after the 6th of January.

So it’s very heavy duty. But we had thousands of rioters working in coordinated fashion, and they were able to snap that fence. Night after night, they were doing this. You don’t get that level of successful rioting without coordination, and they were clearly coordinated. They had flyers, where to come, where to go.

So I bring up this example from five years ago because I don’t want it to be memory-holed. The press would like to, but the Antifa then are building off what they learned at that time for today. Part of the lessons that they learned is how do we hide evidence that we are organized? They have so many tactics, right?

They will put their phones in Faraday bags to block signals so that towers can’t pick up geolocation on their devices, which could be used as evidence that they were charged with something. They operate in these ad hoc Signal groups. Some of this evidence came out in an ongoing criminal case out of the Northern District of Texas.

The public and the national press aren’t really covering this at all. But in July, over a dozen mass militants with tactical gear and firearms shot up the ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, a prairie land facility, and an officer was shot in the neck. He was very fortunate to survive that. Most of the ambush attackers were apprehended that night by local law enforcement.

The alleged ringleader, Benjamin Song, fled the area. Investigators believe that he hid in a forested area around the facility for over a day until it was safe for him to flee. Multiple firearms were recovered. They came with a cache of weapons. They had a getaway car. Tons of weapons were discovered in the car. The ringleader was on the run for two weeks, and he wasn’t captured until almost 14 days afterward.

He was found in an Antifa safe house among some of his comrades in Dallas. So he didn’t go very far. He just stayed in the city where his network was. And this was an individual whom I had been tracking in my reporting before because he was part of the John Brown Gun Club, which is a name that people should know. That’s a far-Left militia, an anarchist-communist militia that teaches its members to use firearms, not for self-defense, but in furtherance of violence against its perceived enemies and the state.

Back in 2019, a member of the John Brown Gun Club carried out another shooting attack on the Tacoma ICE facility in Washington state. This was somebody I had seen before in my reporting on Antifa. His name was Willem van Spronsen. He was a Belgian-American, naturalized American citizen who was extremely radical. He was older; I believe he was in his late 60s. So he was much older than the average Antifa member, but nevertheless, extremely ideological and radicalized.

Willem van Spronsen showed up with a ghost rifle, which is a homemade firearm. So it was unregistered and untraceable. He began shooting up the facility, and he had explosive devices with him that he used to set cars on fire outside the facility. He was aiming at a huge painting that was attached to the building, and he was shot dead before he was able to blow it up. Before he carried out the attack, this John Brown Gun Club member sent out a manifesto to his comrades.

None of them contacted law enforcement, of course. But the contents of that manifesto are posted online and shared by Antifa as a template for others to carry out similar direct action. In that manifesto, he describes himself as Antifa. He gives reverence to his trans comrades in particular. This was 2019, by the way, so this was slightly predating the rise of Transifa violence that we’re seeing now.

Pardon me, which comrades?

Trans comrades. Towards the end of this manifesto, he lists out all his grievances against the state and white supremacy, things that we’ve all heard before and can expect from a far-Left violent militant. But he also includes the lyrics of the Italian folk song, Bella Ciao.

You know, you live in London, England now. Tell me the circumstances under which you had to actually move there.

Sometimes people think I was being dramatic when I said I had to leave the U.S. for safety reasons. They might not be aware that I nearly died. It took a very long time to get some improvements through various forms of therapy at the hospital. Leading up to the 2019 beating, they punched me repeatedly in the head and face so hard that I was bleeding from this area under my eyes, bleeding from my ears, and then bleeding in my brain, which I didn’t know at the time.

They threw all those drinks on me, and you know, these are the pictures that people see when they first Google. It’s me covered in these drinks. That was 2019. In 2020, I was undercover and embedded in these riots, and that’s how I gathered the field research for most of the material for my book.

In 2021, I left the country for six months, and I thought, you know, maybe it’s time to go home. My parents were in Portland. Their health was not great. It was very difficult being away from them. So I went back to Portland, thinking maybe I could do more reporting. At that point, I had received a lot of death threats.

But for those who are in the public space and are effective at what they do, particularly when they are good at exposing Left-wing extremism, they do get a lot of threats. At a certain point, it’s easy to sort of just accept that as a new normal and not really register the severity of the threats. I think that’s what happened to me.

So in May 2021, I was undercover again in Portland, in downtown. This was a one-year riot that was organized as an anniversary event for what had happened the year prior. The group was smaller, and I made the mistake of sticking around. Even though there were probably around 100 people, that’s small enough that the organizers within the group could keep an eye on people who weren’t rioting with them.

You’re there in the black bloc, but you’re not doing anything. Why? There was an Antifa member who had attacked me before, who identified me verbally to others there. So they went up and questioned me.

At that point, I was just thinking, how do I get out of this? I was a block from the Central Police Station, but to walk in that direction, I would have had to walk through dozens of Antifa and Black Bloc, and a group of them had come up and asked me who I was. I started walking away. I heard one of them say, I think it’s him.

Those feelings that I was having, I had never experienced that type of dread before. I was just wishing and praying in my head that law enforcement were nearby or undercover or around the corner. I’d see a police car, something, please. I kept walking, and it was dark. This was 10 p.m. on a Friday night, so the shadows were cast long from the street lamps.

As I was walking away, trying to remain calm, I was still in the black bloc, covered up and masked. My eyes were covered, but I could see the shadows of the group behind me. They were pursuing me. Every business was basically closed. This was a year after the riots that ravaged downtown, which had finished off any businesses that weren’t already closed from COVID.

The hotel that was open that I went to had locked front doors. Vagrancy had become such a big problem at that point that the hotels downtown didn’t unlock their doors. The person at the front desk didn’t open it for me, and the group caught up. In one swoop, one of them grabbed my head and pulled off the sunglasses that I had, the ski goggles actually, and the balaclava, and I was completely exposed. I took off running.

In this video I have shared, it’s compiled from multiple surveillance cameras in the city. You can see me running for my life. I had never run that fast before. I didn’t know I could run that fast. I was running through downtown, sprinting, screaming for help, and nobody helped. There were people walking around.

This was a Friday night at 10 p.m. It’s not that late. Cars were in the middle of the road. I ran in the middle of the cars in the street at the red light, pounding on windows and cars asking for help. When the light turned green, they drove off. You can see in the video that the group caught up to me and tackled me to the ground. My weight, plus the weight of the person on top of me, just shredded the skin on my leg.

As I tried to get up, some other person ran up in the black bloc and kept punching me until I fell to the ground. That person held me in a chokehold really hard. It was seconds in the video, but it felt much longer in my mind—maybe from lack of oxygen, I’m not sure—but that was my one near-death experience. I was just thinking about my family and those I cared for and loved.

It was like flashing out, almost like how you would see it maybe in a film, one person after another, and I was like, I’m so sorry that I let you down, that I’d go out this way. I could hear the rest of the Antifa mob catch up. They were running because I had sprinted really fast, so they were catching up. I knew if I went unconscious and was lying on the ground there, that group would kill me. They had wanted my blood for months. From all the reporting I did in 2020, all the mugshots I released, all the names, all the charges, they wanted me dead.

Before I passed out from being choked, some journalists ran up. They caught up with the group, and the person who was holding me in that chokehold held me so tight, by the way, that the blood vessels in my eyes burst. I was able to get out of that chokehold, and I ran to the next thing I saw, which was the Nines Hotel. I saw the door was open, so I just ran in. I was like a madman, barely able to catch my breath.

I was just trying to say the words, call police, call police, call police. That’s all I could say. The staff inside the hotel tried to kick me out onto the street. When they said, you have to get up, I said, no. I sat on the ground. The only way they were going to get me out was to carry me out. I was not going to go back out there because the mob was now amassing outside this hotel, trying to get in.

The hotel staff refused to call the police. They said, you need to wear a mask. They actually pulled out a black COVID mask from their drawer and said I needed to put this on. So I’m bloody, I’m out of breath, I’m screaming, call the police.

I was so lucky. I looked at my body and saw that I still had my phone. I thought it had fallen out of my pocket when I was tackled on the ground, but I still had it. I used that to call 911. The mob gathered outside the hotel, pounding on the windows, trying to break in, yelling, Nazi scum. If I hadn’t escaped that area, and they got in, they would have finished what they were trying to do.

There was a hotel guest who was going up the elevator. He was like, I’m getting the hell out of here. There’s like this mob outside. And I ran in after him. I said, please, let me go up with you. It was one of those hotel lifts where it required a card to go up, so I couldn’t just push numbers. He said, OK. I went up, and I hid in the hotel.

Eventually, finally, a Portland police officer came up to me, escorted me out through this back entrance exit that staff used for the hotel, so the mob wasn’t there. There was an ambulance there and a police car by the ambulance. Then the police escort took me to the hospital, the same hospital where I was treated two years earlier. There, I saw online, in real time, all the Antifa accounts because they were live streaming outside the hotel.

One of the Antifa members, you can see in the video, saying, Andy’s in there, Andy’s in there at the Nine’s Hotel right now. She was threatening me, and they knew I’d left in an ambulance and were trying to find out which hospital. So I very narrowly escaped that.

I left Portland immediately the next day on a flight and went from safe house to safe house until I could arrange where I would go next, and the death threats continued. Nobody was ever arrested over the assault I just described, or the 2019 one, or any of the death threats. I couldn’t stay in the U.S. anymore. I was on borrowed time.

Even when I traveled to other places, I had been recognized before by hostile people. I couldn’t live in hiding anymore, and it pained me a lot to leave the country that my parents found refuge in. It was a very weird thought in my mind. So I’m speaking to you now as somebody who’s still essentially in exile for safety reasons.

I had this opportunity to speak at the White House at a roundtable about my own experiences and what I learned and some suggestions I had for the administration. I never thought I’d see that day. Because I remember for so long on this Antifa beat, other journalists told me, mentors whom I looked to, said I should pick a new beat. One, this is really violent. Two, Antifa, it’s just a riot. That happens; that shouldn’t be your beat, you know. You should focus on something else.

And now I’m speaking to you in 2025, many years out from these early days of reporting I did on Antifa, and you can see the glee that is shown whenever a target on the Right suffers violence or death. We’ve had two assassination attempts on then-candidate Donald Trump, and people kind of just gloss over that the first assassination attempt resulted in somebody being shot in the head and dying in front of his family at a political rally in the United States, and that two other people were critically injured.

People just brush over that. Oh, Trump survived it. Let’s move on. Somebody was murdered there. Two people are lucky to survive. 2025 has been particularly violent for the Left, and it was cheered on completely. Right now, people are focused on the attacks on ICE because that’s directly in front of us.

Just a few months ago, Tesla stores were being set on fire and shot up. People have forgotten that. Particularly in Portland, there was the Tesla store in Portland that had been shot up several times. To this day, I don’t believe the Portland police have arrested a suspect in the Portland incident. A Tesla store in Salem, Oregon, was fired upon and set on fire. The suspect was apprehended in that, and I was the first to report this because the legacy media would not. That suspect is transgender and was part of this radical trans-militia type of group.

The Left is becoming so radicalized, and they’re supported by such large mainstream institutions and cultures that people have really normalized that violence, and they’re okay with it. That was really the thesis of my book, Unmasked, that came out four years ago, that this violence on the Left is becoming mainstream, and it’s going to have deadly consequences.

So tell me about this, okay? How is it that it’s being normalized? You’re talking about the media being involved, the legacy media, but there’s more to it than that. What is it that people are trying to wash their hands of?

You can see some prominent examples of how it’s been normalized and mainstream for several years now, but I’ll name some clear examples. After the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO, that act of murder was widely celebrated by the Left,, and individuals online began dispersing wanted-style flyers of other CEOs.

When a suspect was apprehended, Luigi Mangione, he was made into a hero, a celebrity. At all his court hearings in New York City, people showed up to cheer him on outside the courthouse. When recently the terrorism charges were dismissed at the state level, people had a dance party outside.

That really reminded me of something I remember in 2020 in Portland. As the riots went on by the middle of August, a Trump supporter named Aaron Danielson was assassinated in downtown Portland by a man named Michael Reinoehl. The gunman had a manifesto that was posted on Instagram, and in it was a quote, I am 100 percent Antifa.

Michael acted as a volunteer armed security for the rioters in downtown. He fled out of state after murdering Aaron Danielson. Remember that night that Mr. Danielson was killed and his body lay in the street? A couple of streets away, in front of the Justice Center, which was really the gathering area for the rioters every night, it was announced on a bullhorn.

The victim was described as trash being taken out and a Nazi, and then they cheered and held a dance party. There was no condemnation of that at all by anybody in Portland of that cruel act of celebrating a really senseless murder in downtown. Aaron Danielson was just a private individual. He wasn’t a big-time activist or anything, so his death was really quite overlooked for all these years. But he is just one victim of many far-Left extremists.

In the aftermath of Mr. Kirk’s assassination, that same type of celebration broke out not just on the radical Left, which you expect of them. The far-Left, you expect they’re extreme, they’re radicalized. But on the mainstream Left, there are those who said that Mr. Kirk was a fascist, that he expressed hatred, and that it’s good he died and it’ll be good if others like him were no longer around.

There are a couple of things I want to pick up on. One is dehumanizing rhetoric. What I’m getting from you here is that people are involved in creating this, and there’s some complicity there, even if they’re not involved in the violence itself. That’s what people might be washing their hands of. Do I understand that right?

Yes. My point in bringing that up is I’m not calling for guilt by association criminally. I just mean that what do you think happens when day in and day out you participate in a culture where your political targets are labeled as genociders, as fascists, as Nazis, as racists, white supremacists that need to be killed? Do you think when you normalize those types of lies against your political target, you just say and it just disappears, it just goes away? People take that in. In a country where access to firearms and deadly weapons is so easy, it doesn’t take very much for an individual to take direct action.

There was a shooting at another ICE facility in the state of Texas, in Dallas. The gunman in that case wrote an anti-ICE message on a rifle cartridge and had a note allegedly illustrating his anti-ICE views from a Left-wing perspective, killing one person who was actually a detainee migrant, and injuring two others who were detained migrants. He was trying to kill ICE agents.

The second thing is, is it your contention that all of these attacks on ICE, the burning of the courthouse in Portland, the San Diego situation, are somehow connected, somehow coordinated even? Because some of the coordination, at least in each individual instance, seems to be quite advanced, I would say, right? But I think you’re suggesting there’s something bigger happening.

It’s more ideological cross-pollination, which is very important to the agendas and goals of the violent militant left. They all share a common enemy. It’s people like you and me, people who believe in the institutions of America, who believe in the idea of America and our Constitution.

They want to see it destroyed. They would like to see themselves put in power, and how they envision society next is different. But they’re not too concerned with getting to that point yet. It’s much easier to destroy and attack now. The far-Left and Antifa are unique in a way that Antifa encourages their supporters to get arrested, to be violent, to get arrested, and to get it captured on camera—one, for propaganda purposes, but two, to get individuals to become parties to lawsuits and lawfare against police departments and cities.

In liberal jurisdictions, the Democrat-run city council will vote to settle, settle, settle. One million, no problem. Ten million, no problem. Twenty million, no problem. Cities across America have settled. Those who were arrested for rioting get rewarded with money. The funding comes from all these places.

There’s also an international element as well, which I’ve been discussing a lot in the capital here. It’s the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund, which takes money from donors all over the world to provide cash support to Antifa militants internationally. So it’s not all clandestine. That’s my point. You can see the cash app accounts, the Venmo accounts. Obviously, you don’t see who’s donating. They’re all choosing to hide their donations.

But how it’s being done is in the open or through these nonprofits that get money. You can pull up their tax funds. You can see where they get the money. A lot of it’s from the state of Oregon and Washington. It’s run completely by Democrats. They can decide how to disperse grant money, and they give it to people on the radical Left quite often.

Tell me this, okay? How does it feel to be sitting at the roundtable in front of the President of the United States telling your story, having the Attorney General of the United States say they’re going to take apart this, I don’t know, organization, or decentralized grouping of cells, or however you would describe it.

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