Jump to content
Male HQ

Elon Musk and Twitter


sgmaven

Recommended Posts

6 hours ago, 7heaven said:

After Musk suspended Twitter accounts belonging to US extremist Antifa, Antifa is seeking revenge on Musk by threatening to damage his Tesla properties. Andy Ngo simply highlight the plight of Musk having done the right thing to suspend such Antifa extremists twitter accounts. 
 

We wonder why Twitter under the previous CEO did not suspend such violent accounts. It goes to show twitter was actually not a safe place under the previous CEO. 
 

 

There is no evidence that the claim by Andy Ngo is true.

 

Andy NGo has been caught so many times for posting untruths into twitter.

 

The joke on the Post Millennial reports is that it just contains Andy NGO's own tweets where he claims things about alleged Antifa hate posts.

 

What objectivity does this represent?

 

https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-andy-ngo-speaks-out-after-being-brutally-assaulted-by-antifa-in-portland-streets

 

This is not journalism or anything it is that what I call sensalisationising.

 

Any Ngo is one of the biggest culprits in that area.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think we all need to put things into perspective. Twitter, while being "famous", does not actually have as many users as the top social media platforms. If you look at data published by the website Business of Apps, then you will realise that with about 230k users, twitter actually pales in comparison to the likes of Facebook (2.9 million), YouTube (2.6 million), WhatsApp (2.4 million) and Instagram (2.3 million). Even the relatively new upstart Tiktok has 1.5 million users, which is more than 6 times twitter's user base.

Слава Україні!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, 7heaven said:

This is not about Andy Ngo. It is about Twitter and Musk

 

Sure this is about twitter, because hate instigators like Andy Ngo abuse the platform for their own agenda.

 

 

Portland’s Andy Ngo Is the Most Dangerous Grifter in America

Far-right forces will converge on Portland tomorrow, incited by the right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo. Though he poses as a journalist, the purpose of his platform is to sow harassment and violence against his targets on the Left

 

 

he media don’t know what to make of Andy Ngo. The New York Times calls Ngo an “independent journalist.” CNN describes him as a “conservative journalist.” Other outlets term Ngo a “conservative writer” to distinguish him from actual reporters.

 

But none of these labels get at who Ngo is. More importantly, they fail to define his role in far-right politics, media, and violence. An incident from October 2018 in Portland, Oregon, illustrates his role well.

 

It begins with Portland police killing Patrick Kimmons, a 27-year-old African-American male, in disputed circumstances. The Black Lives Matter–style activist group, Don’t Shoot Portland, called for a protest on October 6. Kimmons’s family members joined in what local media described as a “peaceful” and uneventful event.

 

There was one dicey moment during the march. A driver made an illegal right turn into protesters who were in a crosswalk and had the walk sign. A local TV station that recorded the incident wrote: “driver plows through protesters.” Video shows a man stopping in front of a silver Lexus that then strikes him and pushes him for more than thirty feet. Down the block, a brief confrontation ensues with a protester shoving the driver once and others hitting his vehicle. The driver left in his car without any more incident as protesters yelled, “Get out of here.”

 

It was unremarkable. But another video of the incident began circulating where it is difficult to see the protester being struck, enabling false claims such as, “#ANTIFA Anarchists Threaten Elderly Driver in Portland!” The story jumped to Fox News with Tucker Carlson replaying the obscured video, blaming everyone from Antifa and Occupy ICE to the Washington Post, Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, and protesters yelling at Trump officials in restaurants. Carlson’s guest was Andy Ngo playing an expert on lax law enforcement in Portland in an affected British accent. The Wall Street Journal gave Ngo a platform where he omitted crucial evidence that the driver deliberately struck a protester, while hyping outrage of a “mob” of “angry, agitated ingrates and criminals” marching for a dead black criminal, attacking a lone elderly white victim.

 

It’s farcical. The only significant lawbreaking was by the driver, who could have been charged with vehicular assault. But in a city that’s become an epicenter of far-right violence, the white nationalist friendly Patriot Prayer leaped on the faux outrage for a “Flash march for law and order in PDX” a week later. The march degenerated into street battles between right-wing fighters and masked antifascists as downtown bargoers looked on confused. At least one right-wing brawler was caught on video stomping a person on the ground, but no arrests were ever made. One reporter said they were maced by Antifa for no reason.

 

But it didn’t end there. The flash march created new viral moments. A video of a left-wing activist harassing a woman claiming to be a 9/11 widow was posted days later to The Daily Caller, which was cofounded by Tucker Carlson. (The woman appears to have lied about being a 9/11 widow.) Efforts to doxx the man hurling invective resulted in a professional skateboarder from Portland being falsely identified and inundated with death threats. Eventually the man in the video was identified, which started a new round of harassment. One source says the social service agency that fired him over the video “was flooded with hundreds of harassing calls and Facebook messages that were explicitly racist and threatening to harm and kill staff.”

 

Carlson credited Ngo with publicizing the videos. Ngo was a bit player, but the incident bolstered him. The incident was an example of a disturbing media model for the Trump era: opportunists using biased reporting, social media, and wild accusations inflame vigilante and digital mobs to target “enemies” such as the media, Democrats, and left-wing activists. Figures like Carlson and Ngo reap followers, prominence, and income from the outrage and threats of violence. But to keep the ratings and the money flowing, the outrage machine must be cranked ever louder, risking greater violence.

 

One political organizer in Portland who has received death threats stemming from Ngo’s work says, “It’s an arms race for money, and the narrative isn’t the point — the grift is. The larger, more offensive thing you can do, the system rewards it.”

 

This appears to be Ngo’s model. He uses social media to push biased opinions in conjunction with selectively edited videos that play to the bigotry of his audience. His followers get worked up, and this is often followed by a deluge of threats against his subject.

 

Jacobin has talked to six people in Portland, including journalists, political officials, and activists, who described harassing messages and threats of violence resulting from Ngo’s work or political involvement in Portland. Friends of two other activists claim they went into hiding after Ngo spread their names and they became targets of harassment. Some individuals who’ve tangled publicly with Ngo are reluctant to go on the record. They say they want to avoid the “trauma” of being subjected to a new round of death threats.

In fact, Ngo appears to rely on people not speaking up about his effect on them. He often writes of how activists won’t talk to him or they take down social media profiles after he focuses on them, seeming to imply they have something to hide. What he doesn’t mention is many say they are doing so to avoid harassment and threats of violence.

 

Madison, a Portland activist who tracks Ngo, says, “Ngo signals this is a person that should be targeted, should be harassed, and should be threatened. Andy puts a target on them and that results in the person being doxxed. Andy is giving people explicit permission to unleash hatred and violence on people. He absolutely knows what he is doing.”

 

Ngo is so intertwined with the specter of violence I encountered it after just a Facebook post. I wrote a post with the headline, “Andy Ngo is no journalist.” The post was shared by notorious right-wing figure, Carl Benjamin, aka, “Sargon of Akkad,” who has been featured on Ngo’s podcast and was banned from YouTube for repeatedly “joking” about raping a British Labour MP. In the comments on Benjamin’s post were calls for violence against myself, Antifa, and others. Within hours I started receiving threats directly, such as “You’re a bunch of retards and it will be a glorious day when you all are dealt with,” and “You are a disgraceful liar. If you or anyone of your ilk throws even a fucking tissue at me or my family watch what the fuck happens to your family lol.”

 

Now this model threatens to turn deadly. On June 29, Andy Ngo was attacked in Portland while videoing a Patriot Prayer rally heavily outnumbered by Antifa. A video shows him being punched, kicked, and hit with coconut milkshakes and silly string by masked individuals. Within minutes, videos of the attack and of a beaten Ngo narrating the incident were picked up by right-wing media such as Breitbart that have a dodgy relationship to facts. Headlines screaming brutal assault, vicious assault, and vicious attack by Antifa on Ngo were pumped out.

 

The sensationalism breached the mainstream with CNN’s Jake Tapper sending out an ill-informed tweet above a video of Ngo being attacked, writing, “Antifa regularly attacks journalists; it’s reprehensible.”

 
 

In a bizarre twist, the Portland police threw fuel on the fire by tweeting that some milkshakes thrown on June 29 “contained quick-drying cement.” The police never provided evidence and observers, including journalists, noted that many counterprotesters drank the milkshakes, making it extremely unlikely anyone could have laced them with concrete. But amplified by conspiracy theorists like Jack Prosobiec, the tweet went viral, whereupon right-wing media turned the disinformation into fact and the mainstream press treated it as a credible assertion. The police tweet incited the Right further and the group that made the milkshakes was deluged with death threats. It culminated in the city being flooded with death threats. Days after Ngo was attacked, City Hall was evacuated after a bomb threat. One source inside City Hall says the mayor’s office received “insane vitriol” and every office was receiving threats, including almost 100 harassing calls that tied up emergency service dispatchers.

 

Far-right figures responded to the June 29 attack on Ngo with graphic threats, and plan to hold an “End Domestic Terrorism” and “End Antifa” rally in Portland on August 17. Such is the level of far-right anger that many in the city fear the rally could become another Charlottesville, or worse — given the anti-Latino murder spree in El Paso and other foiled white nationalist plots since then.

 

To be clear, the attack on Ngo should be condemned. It serves no political purpose, and the Left should not be attacking media makers, even if they use dicey methods. Some Antifa activists in Portland also admit the attack played into right-wing hands by elevating him.

 

That is exactly what’s happened. Trump has beatified Ngo as one of his sinless followers — “A single man standing there with a camera who never got hit and never hit back before in his life” — under assault from the “evil” Antifa full of “sick, bad people.”

 

But it would also be a mistake to see Ngo as an innocent or as a journalist, considering that whoever he turns his camera, social media, or pen on is at significant risk of being inundated with violent threats from the far right.

 

Shane Burley is author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It, and a Portland-based journalist who covered the June 29 rally. He says, “I would never condone what happened to Andy Ngo, but I think there is a reason why he got in a conflict with protesters and dozens of other reporters present seemed to be left alone.”

 

Burley says, “One way to think of Andy Ngo is he is part of a far-right mediasphere that creates victimization narratives of conservatism and profit from it. It’s all about the embattled American man who is under siege at every turn, whether its trans children, immigrant criminals, anchor babies, or dangerous college campuses. ‘They are all out to destroy us and our values.’ It’s an entire infrastructure that’s moved from commentary like National Review to populist media hucksters drumming up a controversy. Ngo doesn’t seem to have many real journalistic credentials, and any he does is from creating controversy. He gets in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post from being a conservative celebrity. His actual reporting is very infrequent and sparse.”

Ngo adds a new element in facilitating violence, intentionally or not. Burley says, “He appears to target ideological opponents, which can make them fair game for harassment and violent confrontation.” The scale of the threats keep escalating. Now Portland is bracing for the August 17 rally.

 

Killing in the Name of Free Speech?

For the last few years, the far right has used fascistic language about “cleansing” Portland, while its brawlers wore T-shirts proclaiming themselves kindred to South American death squads that killed thousands of leftists in the 1970s. But in advance of August 17, the language and memes from the far right have become more extreme. They’ve posted dozens of threats on social media pledging to kill Antifa and naming left-wing activists in Portland who should be shot during the End Antifa rally.

 

Individuals affiliated with Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys talk of wanting to “slaughter” Antifa. Others have posted hair-raising images of a Portland activist and his partner with crosshairs over their faces and the words, “End Domestic Terrorist’s [sic].” Another image is of a knife cutting the throat of an antifascist with blood spraying out. This is especially ominous. In April 2017 white supremacist Jeremy Christian attended a Patriot Prayer in Portland and threw Nazi salutes while yelling “Die Muslims!” Weeks later Christian allegedly slashed the throats of three men, killing two, after they came to the defense of two black teenage girls, one wearing a hijab, whom Christian threatened by saying, “Go home. We need America here!

 

One organizer of the End Antifa rally is Joe Biggs, a former staffer at Alex Jones’s Infowars website who has “encouraged date rape and punching transgender people.” He shared an illustration for the rally of a Proud Boy punching an antifascist, warning, “Free speech was fought for and paid for with blood. It will not be lost for anything less!” Biggs, whose Twitter account was suspended recently, used the platform to advise his followers to bring guns and declared “DEATH TO ANTIFA!!!!!!”

 

After the FBI visited him, Biggs now says “he wants a peaceful demonstration and has told his followers to keep their weapons at home.”

 

But that may be too little, too late as the far right is encouraging potential mass shooters to come to the rally. Recently, Haley Adams, a provocateur in Portland who told a reporter last year, “Damn straight I support white pride,” said on Facebook she “couldn’t wait” to meet Thomas Bartram on August 17. Bartram is an Infowars fan who showed up in El Paso days after the anti-Hispanic massacre and was briefly detained after allegedly brandishing a gun and trying to enter a migrant solidarity center. The center claimed police did not search Bartram’s truck that was decked out with violent pro-Trump images, saying “he has rights.” After being released, Bartram told media he was headed to the End Antifa rally.

 

What connects these dots is Andy Ngo. He even did his bit to stoke right-wing paranoia in El Paso. In a July 29 tweet Ngo included an image of a flyer about an immigrant rights “border resistance tour.” Ngo claimed stick figures on the flyer represent “border enforcement officers being killed & government property fired bombed” as part of a plot by Antifa to “converge on a 10-day siege in El Paso, TX.” It’s been retweeted more than 11,000 times and hundreds of comments endorse violence against Antifa. Four days later Patrick Crusius allegedly killed twenty-two people in an El Paso Walmart in “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Gateway Bigotry

Ngo’s ascendancy began as an editor at the Portland State University newspaper, The Vanguard. At a university interfaith panel convened in April 2017, Ngo tweeted a brief video claiming, “the Muslim student speaker said that apostates will be killed or banished in an Islamic state.” The entire clip shows the student gave a long answer in response to a hypothetical question about Quranic law. The panelists stressed they weren’t experts, and the Muslim student later said “he may have misspoke.”

 

Ngo’s tweet was picked up by Breitbart. The Vanguard fired him days later for a “dangerous oversimplification that violated very clear ethics outlined by the Society of Professional Journalists.” The Vanguard said Ngo’s actions “placed a PSU student in significant danger.” Ngo twisted his termination into an article for The National Review, “Fired for Reporting the Truth,” which the student paper said was a “misrepresentation” that resulted in “unjust threats” against them.

 

Critics see this episode as establishing a pattern in Ngo’s work: using charged language and selective facts on social media that stoke bigotry, putting his subject at risk of harassment while boosting his own reach and status. It worked because in 2018 Ngo graduated to writing a “racist” and “massively Islamophobic” travelogue to two Islamic communities in England for the Wall Street Journal.

 

But it’s in the city of Portland and state of Oregon that Ngo calls home where the most damage has been wrought. Zakir Khan is board chair of the Oregon chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy and civil rights organization. Khan says of Ngo, “That guy is obsessed with us.”

Ngo has tweeted dozens of times about CAIR, saying it “has done PR for terrorists & their families.” He characterized CAIR’s representation of the surviving child of the Muslim couple who committed the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino as advocating for “the terrorists’ orphaned baby.”

 

Recently, in a sprawling New York Post opinion Ngo claimed a “suspicious rise” in gay hate crimes in Portland fits a pattern of hoaxes. (Ngo found space in his 2,100-word article to quote a member of the Proud Boys, which experts call a “gangnotorious for violence, as “the most welcoming organization that I have ever been a part of.”)

 

Khan says, “We are seen as experts on hate crimes reform, so I questioned Ngo’s groundless claims of ‘hate-crime hoaxes.’ He is not an expert in the field.” Ngo responded by accusing CAIR of “terrorism” and “terror.”

After the exchange with Ngo, Khan says, “We received dozens of threatening and harassing messages. We weren’t able to log them all.” One post that tagged Ngo, as well as Michelle Malkin (who signal boosts Ngo and started a “Protect Andy Ngo” fundraiser after the June 29 attack that netted him nearly $200,000), read, “CAIR IS HAMAS! If you stand with your Muslem neighbors; prepare to die with your Muslem neighbors. We will take our country back![sic]” Ngo frequently claims that Hamas, the governing authority in Gaza, is connected to CAIR.

 

The irony of all this is that after CAIR challenges Ngo’s claim of hate crime hoaxes, he responds with what could be considered hate speech, accusing them of terrorism. This appears to have incited his followers to threaten and harass CAIR, actions which might qualify as hate crimes.

 

For his next act, Ngo joined Quillette where he is a “sub-editor.” Described as the voice of the intellectual dark web, Quillette published a report on May 29 claiming fifteen reporters who cover the far right were really “Antifa journalists.” According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the article by “estabished right-wing troll,” Eoin Lenihan, was picked up by the neo-Nazi Stormfront website within a day, and a day after that a video was uploaded to YouTube containing “imagery of mass shooters intercut with images of the [Antifa] reporters.” The names of the journalists were put on a list called “Sunset the Media,” while the video ends with a notorious neo-Nazi saying he won’t “disown” anyone who kills the reporters.

 

Two journalists, including Shane Burley, wrote of the unnerving effect of being put on a Neo-Nazi death list. Another targeted journalist wrote that Quillette had crossed the line from being merely reactionary to “reckless endangerment” and bluntly stated that its list “could’ve gotten me killed.”

 

The article was so shoddy, Lenihan was suspended from Twitter. But Ngo promoted the article and more significantly continues to promote it — just as eight months after the fact, Ngo continued to claim that striking the protester from the Patrick Kimmons march is really evidence of Antifa taking their anger out on an elderly man.

 

In at least one instance it appears Ngo has doxxed activists himself. During May Day 2019, Ngo published a YouTube video that included him talking to members of the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America who were tabling for “Hands Off Venezuela.” The entire time Ngo points his camera at a sign-in sheet, not the person he is interviewing. In the video the sheet is digitally blurred. However, Connor Smith, a Portland DSA member, provided a still from what he claims is an earlier version of the video. The still includes a watermark of Ngo’s twitter handle, “@MrAndyNgo,” exactly the same as in the YouTube video. Eleven names can be seen on the sign-in sheet, including Smith’s, all of which have visible email addresses and six of which include phone numbers. Smith says at least one person on the list received threatening messages such as “Die commie.”

 

Smith claims it is a common right-wing tactic to doxx people on social media like YouTube and Twitter and then delete the offending material before it is removed for violating the platform’s rules. He says this cat-and-mouse game achieves the results the far right is looking for. “I’m sure some fascist has put all our names and phone numbers in a list.”

 

Ngo is more of a symptom, however.

 

Ngo couldn’t exist without social media companies which turn a blind eye to right-wing violence because having to monitor their platforms for hate speech would cut into their profits. Ngo also needs Murdoch-owned media such as the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and Fox News that allow him to masquerade his bigotry as journalism. These outlets, in turn, are amplified by the larger landscape of mainstream media, which often fail to distinguish between fact-based journalism and pro-Trump, white nationalistic propaganda. Add in police who collaborate with the far right and weak political leaders, as in Portland, and you have all the conditions needed for opportunists like Andy Ngo to grab the spotlight.

 

Ngo is just the latest inflammatory right-wing agent in Portland who’s tried to vault to the big leagues. Before him was Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson, who has seen his ranks of violent white nationalists dwindle due to infighting and long-overdue arrests.

 

Way back in 2016, before Gibson, was another media provocateur, Michael Strickland. Strickland shot his YouTube career — which mainly featured him doxxing and harassing local activists — in the foot after he pulled a gun on a Black Lives Matter protest while being armed with enough ammunition for a massacre.

That’s not to say the Left should ignore the likes of Andy Ngo or even Tucker Carlson. They are both the cause and effect of white nationalism and the violence that comes with it. Their synergy is also a reflection of the complex digital landscape. Legacy media like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and even Fox News need Andy Ngo just as much as he needs them. They gave him a platform not for his shoddy reporting and tired bigotry, but for the audience he’s amassed, even if it’s a digital lynch mob.

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

When even Jewish newspapers start to report about this Andy Ngo and come to report on his aggressive stance and misleading anti- muslim, anti liberals agenda.

 

That should ring the warning signs on this Andy Ngo.

 

Jewish Currents

 

 

The Making of Andy Ngo

The right-wing provocateur’s grift exposing “the tyranny of the left” worked—until it didn’t.

 

Andy Ngo appears on Fox News in advance of dueling antifa and right-wing demonstrations in Portland, August 16th, 2019. Image: YouTube
 

ON AUGUST 26TH, the day after a damning Portland Mercury investigation pulled back the curtain on Andy Ngo’s chummy relationship with the Portland-based far-right group Patriot Prayer, Fox News’s favorite Antifa victim found himself out of a job. In one of the least convincing PR ploys ever, Claire Lehmann—the editor of the far-right, skull-shape-obsessed website Quillette—took to Twitter to announce that Ngo, who, until that point, had been on her site’s masthead, was “moving onto bigger & better projects.” 

 

The 33-year-old provocateur, despite his pretenses to the contrary, wasn’t a reporter. His portfolio consisted of a few ham-fisted op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and other conservative publications, and a much more substantive collection of selectively edited video clips meant to embarrass the left. As BuzzFeed observed recently, much of his work, including his widely mocked “journey” into the “no-go zones” of London—an idea invented by the far right to depict majority-Muslim communities in major urban areas as intolerant and dangerous—exemplified what Max Read has called “busybody journalism.” There was no clarity in Ngo’s work; as Read noted, Ngo provided less the kind of “edification you associate with good journalism than the heightened anxiety and fear you associate with a good crime drama.” 

Even so, Ngo’s limited body of work brought him a surge of notoriety this year. Ngo had long trailed Portland’s warring political factions, on the hunt for sensational footage that could depict the left as dangerous and unhinged. But it wasn’t until this summer that he managed to thrust himself into the center of the story. In June, after Antifa activists punched and “milkshaked” him—which is exactly what it sounds like—at a protest in Portland, Ngo claimed to have suffered a traumatic brain injury and quickly crowdfunded nearly $200,000, aided by conservative politicians and media outlets who turned Ngo into a cause célèbre. Senator Ted Cruz called for a federal criminal investigation of Portland’s mayor on Ngo’s behalf. Fox News ratcheted up their alarmist coverage of Antifa. With Ngo’s help, they painted American antifascists as a “criminal cartel.” On the network, Ngo voiced his support of Donald Trump’s call to designate Antifa an “organization of terror.”

 

Rather than give up his spot in the limelight following the Patriot Prayer revelations, Ngo wrote a rambling op-ed in Spectator USA, outlining how the mainstream media sought to crush him through a coordinated disinformation campaign. “I am despised by left-wing journalists, so my reputation must be damaged,” Ngo wrote. Later in the same piece, he compared himself to the Covington schoolboys—a reference to a group of MAGA-hat-wearing teenagers who went viral for jeering at Native American activists in Washington, DC, earlier this year—arguing that “[w]hen people who are perceived to be right-wing smile, it’s often taken as sinister evidence.”

 

Ngo continues to double down on his claims of innocence. In response to my request for comment, Ngo rejects the Mercury’s claims, even though the video footage makes clear that Ngo was in the presence of Patriot Prayer members as they discussed the attack. 

 

“I did not witness or hear the people on the public street plan an attack,” he writes. “Neither did the antifa informant at the time, who was there speaking with people, according to his interview on the Portland Mercury blog. There were three other journalists there with cameras and they did not report seeing or hearing the planning of a criminal act.” Instead, Ngo says that he was the “victim of multiple unprovoked assaults that day by masked people associated with antifa.” (A reference to being sprayed with bear repellant.) Meanwhile, the footage has been deemed reliable enough to use against Patriot Prayer in court, as some members of the group are facing felony riot charges after an attack on Antifa activists at Cider Riot, a bar in Portland, on May Day this year. 

 

It appeared that Ngo had found the secret to success in today’s conservative media world. What the right-wing outrage machine demanded was an endless stream of content portraying leftists as the real totalitarians. The revelation of Ngo’s links to the far right may have cost him his relationship with Quillette—although both he and Lehmann insist his departure happened a week prior to the slew of bad press—but it’s not clear his career in media is over, and his rise leaves a template for other right-wing provocateurs to follow. 

 

Antifa activists and journalists in Portland, as well as a number of others who brushed shoulders with Ngo back in his early days as a graduate student at Portland State University (PSU), have been monitoring Ngo’s activities both in person and on social media for years now.  Through consultations with a number of individuals who either knew Ngo in his PSU years or have been tracking his movements during protests in Portland, a detailed timeline of Ngo’s career emerges, demonstrating how his life in Portland has in many ways laid the foundation for his grift as a right-wing anti-antifascist propagandist. Ngo seized upon trends in conservative media for his own gain—first latching on to its “clash of civilizations” approach to Islam in the Western world, then to the American right’s unhealthy obsession with “free speech” on campus, and, finally, to its fear-mongering about the left. A close examination of Ngo’s work during these years also sheds light on how the far right has become more sophisticated at feeding its noxious talking points into mainstream conservatism.

Screen-Shot-2019-09-11-at-10.23.04-AM.pn Andy Ngo immediately after being “milkshaked” in Portland at an antifa demonstration, June 29th, 2019. Image: YouTube

 

NGO LACKS a traditional reporting background, but in many ways he is ideally suited for the demands of today’s media. “Even as it shrinks,” wrote BuzzFeed’s Joe Bernstein in a July profile of Ngo, “the national media is reorganizing around a social media-to-cable news pipeline of daily outrage.” Ngo, with his made-for-Fox-News portfolio of video clips, is both the beneficiary and an exemplary product of this pipeline.

Ngo’s status as the child of Vietnamese immigrants, his identity as a gay man, and his roots in the New Atheist community all contribute to his appeal to today’s new right. The very fact that this seems like an unlikely background for a right-wing activist helps legitimize the push for a reactionary and Western chauvinist agenda by giving the right’s platform a veneer of openness to critical thinking, and of plausible deniability with respect to allegations of bigotry. This has been demonstrated, too, in the recent prominence of figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, who leveraged his identity as a gay man to amplify virulently Islamophobic talking points, as well as lesser-known individuals, such as the far-right blog Gateway Pundit’s first White House correspondent, Lucian Wintrich, who is also gay. (Wintrich, who was behind the infamous “Twinks for Trump” photography exhibit in New York City in October 2016, was allegedly fired from the Gateway Pundit for appearing on a white nationalist’s podcast. As with Ngo, the publication claimed Wintrich was already on his way out, and that news of his departure was pure coincidence.)

 

Ngo began building his career trolling the libs while affiliated with the Center for Inquiry (CFI), an international nonprofit organization “dedicated to defending science and critical thinking in examining religion.” Posts by Ngo on Reddit and Facebook indicate that he first started volunteering for CFI in 2013, when he offered to take photos at the CFI Portland branch’s events. 

 

 

Although CFI, which is headquartered in Amherst, New York, has a number of distinct branches and has served as a home for a diverse array of atheists and secular humanists, some of its individual outposts take on their own distinct political flavor. During Ngo’s time at CFI Portland, many of its main members, including Ngo, began to take an approach to secularism that emphasized the supposed incompatability of Islam with Western liberal modernity. 

 

Even prior to his affiliation with CFI, posts from Ngo prior to 2016 on both Twitter and Reddit capture a young man who was active in subreddits like /r/atheism and who expressed extreme anger at organized religion. “Islam needs to be neutered like Christianity,” replied Ngo on a post from 2013 about a Daily Mail article about a man chopping off his wife’s finger in order to stop her from studying for her degree. “Bible belt trash,” read another comment, responding to an Imgur post that detailed how to build a swimming pool out of hay. In 2015, Ngo accused Hend Amry, a prominent Muslim Twitter personality, of being an “Islamosupremacist fascist” in a series of tweets. In response to my request for comment, Ngo acknowledges that these now-deleted tweets contained “inflammatory language.” He claims that he attempted to apologize to Amry, but that she blocked him.

 

 

Three years later, Ngo would describe his earlier views on religion as harsh. In an interview with the Skeptical Inquirer, Ngo noted that his earlier life as a skeptic was one in which he was “quite dogmatic about his anti-religion ideas.” He confirms this now. “There was a period in my life in which I was involved in the secular community and was critical of all religions,” he writes. “The social media posts you found from years ago represented my simplistic views at the time but no longer represent my current beliefs.” Still, these simplistic anti-religious viewpoints would make it into his more mainstream work.

 

Ngo’s views on religion may have evolved by the time he started at PSU as a graduate student in 2015, but he would soon demonstrate that he was not one to shy away from controversy. Ngo’s work needling campus leftists would eventually take two forms: he would continue to nurture his connection to Portland CFI by joining the campus’s “humanist” CFI-affiliated advocacy group, known as Freethinkers of PSU; and he would become involved with the main student newspaper, The Vanguard, where he worked as a multimedia editor. 

Though some of Ngo’s pieces at The Vanguard consisted of actual reporting, others were clearly designed to troll. In one 2016 piece, Ngo wrote about his experience donning a hijab (complete with a low-resolution selfie) for a few minutes, and the sense of oppression that supposedly came with it. Another article from spring 2017, a few weeks prior to Ngo’s departure from the paper, provided a platform for a local white nationalist and white supremacist, known only as “Herrenvolk” (German for “master race”), to advocate for racial separatism.

 

But perhaps the most public platform for Ngo and his fellow travelers on campus was Freethinkers, a student organization devoted to “free speech” that worked closely with the controversial PSU professor Peter Boghossian. (Most recently, Boghossian has made a name for himself by submitting fake journal articles—one of which consisted of text pulled from Mein Kampf—in order to embarrass peer-reviewed gender and sexuality journals.) During Ngo’s first few years at PSU, the Freethinkers started to shift rightward. In January 2017, the group brought Christina Hoff Sommers, a prominent Gamergate apologist, and David Rubin, a far-right YouTuber, to the university to discuss “campus thought police.” Ngo introduced the panel. 

Beginning in spring 2017, Ngo’s efforts to frame himself as a dissident right-wing journalist took off—thanks, in no small part, to Breitbart. That April, Ngo tweeted a short video from an interfaith discussion panel at PSU. In the video viewers see one student on the panel responding to a question about what Quranic law says about non-believers in Muslim nations. The student’s response seem to imply non-believers would face violence, or even death, in countries overseen by Quranic law. According to the student, the presence of non-believers would only be “considered a crime” in a country where Quranic law was in effect, in which case these individuals would be “given the liberty to leave the country.” “I am not going to sugarcoat it,” the student adds. While salacious, Ngo’s video conveniently ignored later efforts to counter the student’s statement—including one from a fellow panelist. 

 

One day after Ngo—at this point still an obscure college journalist—tweeted the video, Breitbart pushed out its own screed. “WATCH: MUSLIM STUDENT CLAIMS THAT NON-BELIEVERS WILL BE KILLED IN ISLAMIC COUNTRIES,” screamed the headline. The video, as Portland-based journalist Jason Wilson would explain later in the Guardian, was almost tailor-made for Breitbart, which thrived off of “on-campus exposés of PC or identity politics, served up to inflame its rightwing populist and ‘alt-right’ readers.”

 

Ngo leaned into the controversy. Not long after Breitbart’s coverage thrust the story into the heart of the right-wing outrage machine, The Vanguard sacked Ngo, citing “ongoing breaches in trust and actions that were counterintuitive to the [paper’s] mission and editorial expectations.” Ngo, for his part, took to the pages of the National Review to deride the paper in an op-ed entitled “Fired for Reporting the Truth,” in which he described his forced departure as baffling and distressing. “I was disinclined to sugarcoat the truth,” he noted, regarding his decision to publish the video. “I just couldn’t have imagined it would cost me so dearly.”

The decision to fire Ngo wasn’t made overnight. Mike Bivins, a Portland-based reporter who was working at one of PSU’s other student publications, says his sense was that “they had wanted him gone long before that.” Regardless of the exact motivation for his firing, PSU quickly became a punching bag for the far-right media. A Breitbart article detailing Ngo’s departure framed him as a dissident who was only booted from the paper because his tweet captured the far-right website’s attention. The lesson for Ngo was clear: getting the right-wing outrage machine’s attention could be a game-changer for his career. He even expressed a desire to go on Tucker Carlson to sing his song of oppression during a Reddit AMA on the alt-right subreddit /r/TheDonald, which has since been quarantined for numerous threats of violence against public figures. 

Shortly thereafter, Ngo began an outreach internship at CFI, which offered a modest stipend. Ngo’s pseudo-liberal Islamophobia mirrored that of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and other New Atheist bigwigs, who had long portrayed Islam as a threat to Western civilization. But he opposed the broader trend in some more left-leaning humanistic circles, including at CFI, which emphasized intersectionality and diversity as tenets that ought to be central to any secular humanist worldview.

 

Ngo used CFI as a way not only to frame himself as a dissident against left-wing tyranny, but also to build connections throughout the secularist world. He traveled frequently: During a 2017 event at Stanford, Ngo connected with anti-Islamic activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali; former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani; and Faisal Saeed al Mutar and Melissa Chen, the founders of Ideas Without Borders—a secularist nonprofit advocacy group supported by Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, among others. Ngo’s later work on “no-go zones” may have been influenced by this crowd. 

 

A few months later, Ngo began writing for a number of right-wing publications, including the American Spectator, Quillette, and the Wall Street Journal opinion page, as well as attending popular New Atheist events like Mythcon—an annual conference that has included speakers with ties to the alt-right, such as YouTuber Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad). In early 2018, he captured the attention of the right-wing outrage machine once again when he claimed that the Freethinkers of PSU’s event with James Damore—the former Google engineer fired for circulating a sexist, anti-diversity screed in the workplace—was being threatened by violent, far-left forces lurking throughout Portland. Fox News got in on the fun, claiming—as the Portland-based alt-weekly Willamette Week noted in their coverage of the event—that “Antifa would ‘target’ the event.” At the time, Rose City Antifa told the Guardian that “no antifascist counterprotest was ever planned.” But Ngo didn’t let the truth get in the way of branding. At The College Fix, a conservative website that serves as a platform for student reporters, Ngo described the fact that the event took place without major demonstrations as a major win for “free speech.”

 

Despite the lack of violence, the event provided Ngo with a Wall Street Journal byline decrying the tyranny of campus leftists. Once again, reasonable pushback against an offensive campus speaker had been spun into a national news story meant to sound the alarm a manufactured free speech crisis. 

 

800px-Andy_Ngo_48514128576.jpg

Andy Ngo speaking at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Washington, DC, July 24th, 2019. Photo: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Creative Commons

 

ALTHOUGH NGO started tracking clashes between far-right and far-left protesters regularly after his departure from The Vanguard in the spring of 2017, Portland-based multimedia journalist Cory Elia notes that his videography work ramped up following the Occupy ICE protests, which kicked off in Portland on June 17th, 2018. It was, as BuzzFeed observed, “Ngo’s videos of angry leftists, along with his status as a local” that “got him back on Fox News” in the fall of 2018. In October, during his segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Ngo laid into Antifa for the grave sin of blocking traffic. Over the course of the next year, for nearly every one of Ngo’s confrontations with antifascist activists, there was a corresponding Fox News segment on the imminent danger posed by far-left activists. 

 

By the time May Day protests rocked Portland on May 1st, 2019, Ngo had cemented his status as either a tireless chronicler of leftist tyranny or as the preferred videographer of Portland’s neo-fascist contingent, depending on your point of view. Two days after being allegedly punched in the stomach and sprayed with bear mace at the same event, Ngo appeared on Carlson’s show to call May Day a “celebration of Marxism, Communism, and political violence.” By refocusing the media narrative on the supposedly existential threat posed by antifascist activists, Ngo provided ample support for the right-wing media’s tongue-lashings against the left. Fox and others used his content to warn about the dangers of leftist tyranny—all while charging that white supremacy is “actually not a real problem in America,” as Carlson said last month.  

But then, recent footage taken and made available by “Ben,” a pseudonymous Navy veteran who has been documenting Patriot Prayer activities from the inside, laid bare Ngo’s relationship with Portland’s far-right agitators. It also demonstrated how far-right videographers manipulate reality for their own ends. According to “Ben’s” footage, which was made available on YouTube in July, Ngo began his day amid a crowd of Patriot Prayer protesters. The footage makes clear that Patriot Prayer and the other far-right cronies affiliated with them were bent on a violent confrontation from the get-go—and that Ngo, who was supposedly tailing them in his capacity as a reporter, did nothing to shed light on their actions. In one video, taken a few blocks away from the well-known Antifa hangout Cider Riot, Ngo stands by calmly as Patriot Prayer members discuss plans for violence. Ngo’s camera only starts rolling when Patriot Prayer reaches Cider Riot, zeroing in on antifascists. 

 

As the Mercury’s investigation and conversations with journalists in Portland demonstrate, Ngo’s selective reporting on Cider Riot is not an anomaly. Ngo’s videos often depict Patriot Prayer as victims rather than instigators. (Ngo denies this framing to me, however, noting that his “video recordings don’t depict any particular side as victims. I record interesting events happening in front of me on my mobile phone.”) He’s even defended them against accusations that they’re a white nationalist group, posting on Twitter in October 2018, for instance, that this supposed misrepresentation was a result of local journalists lacking “experience interfacing with conservatives so they only know caricatures.”

 

“The entire time Occupy ICE happened [in Portland] he only showed up when Patriot Prayer or those groups showed up,” notes Elia, the Portland-based multimedia journalist. During another march, Elia says he witnessed a conversation between Patriot Prayer organizer Haley Adams and Ngo, where the latter implied Ngo was leaving the rally with the fascist group.

 

“He is THE videographer for [Patriot Prayer],” Elia says. “There are a few others, but he has the crowd.”

Even prior to his recent bout of Fox News-instigated fame, Ngo’s reporting has overlooked the far-right tendencies of various subjects in favor of a straightforward victimization narrative. A video created by Ngo for The Vanguard, entitled “Traitors: The Minorities Who Support Donald Trump,” tells the story of supposedly oppressed Trump supporters on campus who were either non-white or LGBTQ. One of the video’s subjects, Tylor Phelps—who introduces himself as a “gay conservative”—was and continues to be, according to his social media presence, an outright white nationalist. Although Ngo would later tell BuzzFeed that “[h]e was unaware of . . . Phelps’s views at the time he featured them in his reporting,” Phelps had for years been sharing links to articles about the trials facing white men published on sites such as VDare, a white nationalist and virulently anti-immigrant website, and the far-right website Taki’s Magazine. (The latter has featured the infamous white nationalist Richard Spencer, who worked there as an editor prior to starting his own white nationalist website, Alternative Right, in 2010.) Furthermore, in 2017, Phelps posted a photo on Facebook of himself standing next to Jared Taylor, the head of the white supremacist think tank and publication American Renaissance. Ngo would have been privy to all of this information: according to Facebook screenshots provided by a source who knew of Ngo from before his PSU days, Phelps has also been a member of Freethinkers of PSU’s Facebook page since early 2017, and Ngo confirms that he added Phelps himself, though he clarifies to me that “he added every one who requested access to the page.” 

In a Facebook post from July 2017, Phelps shared a story written by Ngo (who he described as a  “friend”) which focused on yet another far-right extremist who Ngo covered as if she were a run-of-the-mill conservative. The subject of the article, Edie Dixon, is a trans woman and a member of Patriot Prayer.

 

Although Dixon’s far-right beliefs were already clear, her various social media accounts demonstrate that she has become increasingly open about her specific affinity for neo-Nazism over the past year. At one point she even bragged on Facebook about trying to join the white nationalist organization Identity Evropa. (The organization has since rebranded itself as the American Identity Movement, likely in an effort to distance itself from its role in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” riot in Charlottesville, Virginia.)

 

For Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media that has fed off of Ngo’s antagonistic content, these connections to violent extremists are incidental. What matters to them is nurturing fear—fear of the other, fear of the left, fear of the unknown. As Rick Perlstein wrote in The Baffler in 2012, these terrors do not need to be tethered to anything real:  

The distance from observable reality is rhetorically required; indeed, that you haven’t quite seen anything resembling any of this in your everyday life is a kind of evidence all by itself. It just goes to show how diabolical the enemy has become. He is unseen; but the redeemer, the hero who tells you the tale, can see the innermost details of the most baleful conspiracies. Trust him. Send him your money. Surrender your will—and the monster shall be banished for good. 

 

In other words, this is all a cynical and dangerous grift. In the service of this grift, brushing shoulders with the far right—or even embracing them—is fine, so long as plausible deniability is retained. And in the event that it becomes impossible to deny, well, what’s one name scratched off Quillette’s masthead?

 

In many respects, Ngo is undergoing the same trials as many right-wing agitators before him. Perhaps the most prominent example is Yiannopoulos, whose career began to collapse after BuzzFeed reported on footage of him singing “America the Beautiful” amidst an enamored crowd of white nationalists cheering him on with Sieg Heils. (Even this brazen act of racist provocation wasn’t enough to sink him on the right—it was his endorsement of pedophilia that ultimately did him in.) This week, Vice News reported that Yiannopoulos is completely broke and cut off from his audience, thanks to an effective campaign to get social media platforms to ban him. Whether Ngo will suffer a similar fate remains unclear. But what his story so far repeatedly demonstrates is his dependence on institutions eager to offer him a platform—and once they’re finished churning through him, they’ll find another grifter to nurture.

 

 

Twitter is very well about Andy Ngo, because it demonstrates how these instigators abuse the platform and incite hatred against certain people.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If Musk is suspending left wing extremist accounts, then it is just fair and equal to suspend right wing extremist accounts also.

 

Andy Ngo is one of the right wing extremists.

 

He isn't even a real journalist, but just self-proclaimed.

 

The 33-year-old provocateur, despite his pretenses to the contrary, wasn’t a reporter. His portfolio consisted of a few ham-fisted op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and other conservative publications, and a much more substantive collection of selectively edited video clips meant to embarrass the left. As BuzzFeed observed recently, much of his work, including his widely mocked “journey” into the “no-go zones” of London—an idea invented by the far right to depict majority-Muslim communities in major urban areas as intolerant and dangerous—exemplified what Max Read has called “busybody journalism.”

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

59 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

I won't get into that whether any judge is appointed by that or this President.

We don't know whether the judge is a member of any party.

It is common knowledge that Biden also appointed judges who are members of the Republican party.

 

The case here is nothing about Democrat or Republican.

 

Once again you are simply distorting the truth and nit picking on some words from the article.

 

If Andy Ngo had not lied then, Hacker had not been let off that easily.

 

Hacker actually acted in self defence as Andy Ngo filmed him without the relevant permission.

 

Stop distorting the truth.

 

Andy Ngo was exposed as a blatant liar and exaggerator by the court case, which he himself initiated and was dismissed. The court case being dismissed evidences that Ngo lied about the incident.

 

 


You won’t get into it because the judge who did not find John Hacker guilty was appointed by a Democrat governor. Andy Ngo arguably is not a Democrat supporter. Let readers infer what they want. 
 

The judge did however did not condone what Hacker did. If Andy NGO had lied, why did the judge say he did not condone what Hacker did? 
 

There is no distortion. John Hacker have no reason to grab bottle of water and poured the contents over Ngo’s head. Do ordinary people pour water over other people head? 
 

 

7 hours ago, 7heaven said:

In his ruling, Judge Eric L. Dahlin said he was “struck” by the similar ways the men behave on social media, where they share photos, videos and identifying information of people they consider dangerous. He said he didn’t condone what Hacker did but that he couldn’t find him guilty because Hacker’s behavior didn’t show criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

59 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

There is no evidence that the claim by Andy Ngo is true.

 

Andy NGo has been caught so many times for posting untruths into twitter.

 

The joke on the Post Millennial reports is that it just contains Andy NGO's own tweets where he claims things about alleged Antifa hate posts.

 

What objectivity does this represent?

 

https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-andy-ngo-speaks-out-after-being-brutally-assaulted-by-antifa-in-portland-streets

 

This is not journalism or anything it is that what I call sensalisationising.

 

Any Ngo is one of the biggest culprits in that area.

 

 


Lol. We have not heard from any media organisations highlighting andy ngo calling out the dangers of Antifa calling for damage to be done on Musk’s Tesla’s properties. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

55 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

Sure this is about twitter, because hate instigators like Andy Ngo abuse the platform for their own agenda.

 

 

Portland’s Andy Ngo Is the Most Dangerous Grifter in America

Far-right forces will converge on Portland tomorrow, incited by the right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo. Though he poses as a journalist, the purpose of his platform is to sow harassment and violence against his targets on the Left

 

 

he media don’t know what to make of Andy Ngo. The New York Times calls Ngo an “independent journalist.” CNN describes him as a “conservative journalist.” Other outlets term Ngo a “conservative writer” to distinguish him from actual reporters.

 

But none of these labels get at who Ngo is. More importantly, they fail to define his role in far-right politics, media, and violence. An incident from October 2018 in Portland, Oregon, illustrates his role well.

 

It begins with Portland police killing Patrick Kimmons, a 27-year-old African-American male, in disputed circumstances. The Black Lives Matter–style activist group, Don’t Shoot Portland, called for a protest on October 6. Kimmons’s family members joined in what local media described as a “peaceful” and uneventful event.

 

There was one dicey moment during the march. A driver made an illegal right turn into protesters who were in a crosswalk and had the walk sign. A local TV station that recorded the incident wrote: “driver plows through protesters.” Video shows a man stopping in front of a silver Lexus that then strikes him and pushes him for more than thirty feet. Down the block, a brief confrontation ensues with a protester shoving the driver once and others hitting his vehicle. The driver left in his car without any more incident as protesters yelled, “Get out of here.”

 

It was unremarkable. But another video of the incident began circulating where it is difficult to see the protester being struck, enabling false claims such as, “#ANTIFA Anarchists Threaten Elderly Driver in Portland!” The story jumped to Fox News with Tucker Carlson replaying the obscured video, blaming everyone from Antifa and Occupy ICE to the Washington Post, Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, and protesters yelling at Trump officials in restaurants. Carlson’s guest was Andy Ngo playing an expert on lax law enforcement in Portland in an affected British accent. The Wall Street Journal gave Ngo a platform where he omitted crucial evidence that the driver deliberately struck a protester, while hyping outrage of a “mob” of “angry, agitated ingrates and criminals” marching for a dead black criminal, attacking a lone elderly white victim.

 

It’s farcical. The only significant lawbreaking was by the driver, who could have been charged with vehicular assault. But in a city that’s become an epicenter of far-right violence, the white nationalist friendly Patriot Prayer leaped on the faux outrage for a “Flash march for law and order in PDX” a week later. The march degenerated into street battles between right-wing fighters and masked antifascists as downtown bargoers looked on confused. At least one right-wing brawler was caught on video stomping a person on the ground, but no arrests were ever made. One reporter said they were maced by Antifa for no reason.

 

But it didn’t end there. The flash march created new viral moments. A video of a left-wing activist harassing a woman claiming to be a 9/11 widow was posted days later to The Daily Caller, which was cofounded by Tucker Carlson. (The woman appears to have lied about being a 9/11 widow.) Efforts to doxx the man hurling invective resulted in a professional skateboarder from Portland being falsely identified and inundated with death threats. Eventually the man in the video was identified, which started a new round of harassment. One source says the social service agency that fired him over the video “was flooded with hundreds of harassing calls and Facebook messages that were explicitly racist and threatening to harm and kill staff.”

 

Carlson credited Ngo with publicizing the videos. Ngo was a bit player, but the incident bolstered him. The incident was an example of a disturbing media model for the Trump era: opportunists using biased reporting, social media, and wild accusations inflame vigilante and digital mobs to target “enemies” such as the media, Democrats, and left-wing activists. Figures like Carlson and Ngo reap followers, prominence, and income from the outrage and threats of violence. But to keep the ratings and the money flowing, the outrage machine must be cranked ever louder, risking greater violence.

 

One political organizer in Portland who has received death threats stemming from Ngo’s work says, “It’s an arms race for money, and the narrative isn’t the point — the grift is. The larger, more offensive thing you can do, the system rewards it.”

 

This appears to be Ngo’s model. He uses social media to push biased opinions in conjunction with selectively edited videos that play to the bigotry of his audience. His followers get worked up, and this is often followed by a deluge of threats against his subject.

 

Jacobin has talked to six people in Portland, including journalists, political officials, and activists, who described harassing messages and threats of violence resulting from Ngo’s work or political involvement in Portland. Friends of two other activists claim they went into hiding after Ngo spread their names and they became targets of harassment. Some individuals who’ve tangled publicly with Ngo are reluctant to go on the record. They say they want to avoid the “trauma” of being subjected to a new round of death threats.

In fact, Ngo appears to rely on people not speaking up about his effect on them. He often writes of how activists won’t talk to him or they take down social media profiles after he focuses on them, seeming to imply they have something to hide. What he doesn’t mention is many say they are doing so to avoid harassment and threats of violence.

 

Madison, a Portland activist who tracks Ngo, says, “Ngo signals this is a person that should be targeted, should be harassed, and should be threatened. Andy puts a target on them and that results in the person being doxxed. Andy is giving people explicit permission to unleash hatred and violence on people. He absolutely knows what he is doing.”

 

Ngo is so intertwined with the specter of violence I encountered it after just a Facebook post. I wrote a post with the headline, “Andy Ngo is no journalist.” The post was shared by notorious right-wing figure, Carl Benjamin, aka, “Sargon of Akkad,” who has been featured on Ngo’s podcast and was banned from YouTube for repeatedly “joking” about raping a British Labour MP. In the comments on Benjamin’s post were calls for violence against myself, Antifa, and others. Within hours I started receiving threats directly, such as “You’re a bunch of retards and it will be a glorious day when you all are dealt with,” and “You are a disgraceful liar. If you or anyone of your ilk throws even a fucking tissue at me or my family watch what the fuck happens to your family lol.”

 

Now this model threatens to turn deadly. On June 29, Andy Ngo was attacked in Portland while videoing a Patriot Prayer rally heavily outnumbered by Antifa. A video shows him being punched, kicked, and hit with coconut milkshakes and silly string by masked individuals. Within minutes, videos of the attack and of a beaten Ngo narrating the incident were picked up by right-wing media such as Breitbart that have a dodgy relationship to facts. Headlines screaming brutal assault, vicious assault, and vicious attack by Antifa on Ngo were pumped out.

 

The sensationalism breached the mainstream with CNN’s Jake Tapper sending out an ill-informed tweet above a video of Ngo being attacked, writing, “Antifa regularly attacks journalists; it’s reprehensible.”

 
 

In a bizarre twist, the Portland police threw fuel on the fire by tweeting that some milkshakes thrown on June 29 “contained quick-drying cement.” The police never provided evidence and observers, including journalists, noted that many counterprotesters drank the milkshakes, making it extremely unlikely anyone could have laced them with concrete. But amplified by conspiracy theorists like Jack Prosobiec, the tweet went viral, whereupon right-wing media turned the disinformation into fact and the mainstream press treated it as a credible assertion. The police tweet incited the Right further and the group that made the milkshakes was deluged with death threats. It culminated in the city being flooded with death threats. Days after Ngo was attacked, City Hall was evacuated after a bomb threat. One source inside City Hall says the mayor’s office received “insane vitriol” and every office was receiving threats, including almost 100 harassing calls that tied up emergency service dispatchers.

 

Far-right figures responded to the June 29 attack on Ngo with graphic threats, and plan to hold an “End Domestic Terrorism” and “End Antifa” rally in Portland on August 17. Such is the level of far-right anger that many in the city fear the rally could become another Charlottesville, or worse — given the anti-Latino murder spree in El Paso and other foiled white nationalist plots since then.

 

To be clear, the attack on Ngo should be condemned. It serves no political purpose, and the Left should not be attacking media makers, even if they use dicey methods. Some Antifa activists in Portland also admit the attack played into right-wing hands by elevating him.

 

That is exactly what’s happened. Trump has beatified Ngo as one of his sinless followers — “A single man standing there with a camera who never got hit and never hit back before in his life” — under assault from the “evil” Antifa full of “sick, bad people.”

 

But it would also be a mistake to see Ngo as an innocent or as a journalist, considering that whoever he turns his camera, social media, or pen on is at significant risk of being inundated with violent threats from the far right.

 

Shane Burley is author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It, and a Portland-based journalist who covered the June 29 rally. He says, “I would never condone what happened to Andy Ngo, but I think there is a reason why he got in a conflict with protesters and dozens of other reporters present seemed to be left alone.”

 

Burley says, “One way to think of Andy Ngo is he is part of a far-right mediasphere that creates victimization narratives of conservatism and profit from it. It’s all about the embattled American man who is under siege at every turn, whether its trans children, immigrant criminals, anchor babies, or dangerous college campuses. ‘They are all out to destroy us and our values.’ It’s an entire infrastructure that’s moved from commentary like National Review to populist media hucksters drumming up a controversy. Ngo doesn’t seem to have many real journalistic credentials, and any he does is from creating controversy. He gets in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post from being a conservative celebrity. His actual reporting is very infrequent and sparse.”

Ngo adds a new element in facilitating violence, intentionally or not. Burley says, “He appears to target ideological opponents, which can make them fair game for harassment and violent confrontation.” The scale of the threats keep escalating. Now Portland is bracing for the August 17 rally.

 

Killing in the Name of Free Speech?

For the last few years, the far right has used fascistic language about “cleansing” Portland, while its brawlers wore T-shirts proclaiming themselves kindred to South American death squads that killed thousands of leftists in the 1970s. But in advance of August 17, the language and memes from the far right have become more extreme. They’ve posted dozens of threats on social media pledging to kill Antifa and naming left-wing activists in Portland who should be shot during the End Antifa rally.

 

Individuals affiliated with Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys talk of wanting to “slaughter” Antifa. Others have posted hair-raising images of a Portland activist and his partner with crosshairs over their faces and the words, “End Domestic Terrorist’s [sic].” Another image is of a knife cutting the throat of an antifascist with blood spraying out. This is especially ominous. In April 2017 white supremacist Jeremy Christian attended a Patriot Prayer in Portland and threw Nazi salutes while yelling “Die Muslims!” Weeks later Christian allegedly slashed the throats of three men, killing two, after they came to the defense of two black teenage girls, one wearing a hijab, whom Christian threatened by saying, “Go home. We need America here!

 

One organizer of the End Antifa rally is Joe Biggs, a former staffer at Alex Jones’s Infowars website who has “encouraged date rape and punching transgender people.” He shared an illustration for the rally of a Proud Boy punching an antifascist, warning, “Free speech was fought for and paid for with blood. It will not be lost for anything less!” Biggs, whose Twitter account was suspended recently, used the platform to advise his followers to bring guns and declared “DEATH TO ANTIFA!!!!!!”

 

After the FBI visited him, Biggs now says “he wants a peaceful demonstration and has told his followers to keep their weapons at home.”

 

But that may be too little, too late as the far right is encouraging potential mass shooters to come to the rally. Recently, Haley Adams, a provocateur in Portland who told a reporter last year, “Damn straight I support white pride,” said on Facebook she “couldn’t wait” to meet Thomas Bartram on August 17. Bartram is an Infowars fan who showed up in El Paso days after the anti-Hispanic massacre and was briefly detained after allegedly brandishing a gun and trying to enter a migrant solidarity center. The center claimed police did not search Bartram’s truck that was decked out with violent pro-Trump images, saying “he has rights.” After being released, Bartram told media he was headed to the End Antifa rally.

 

What connects these dots is Andy Ngo. He even did his bit to stoke right-wing paranoia in El Paso. In a July 29 tweet Ngo included an image of a flyer about an immigrant rights “border resistance tour.” Ngo claimed stick figures on the flyer represent “border enforcement officers being killed & government property fired bombed” as part of a plot by Antifa to “converge on a 10-day siege in El Paso, TX.” It’s been retweeted more than 11,000 times and hundreds of comments endorse violence against Antifa. Four days later Patrick Crusius allegedly killed twenty-two people in an El Paso Walmart in “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Gateway Bigotry

Ngo’s ascendancy began as an editor at the Portland State University newspaper, The Vanguard. At a university interfaith panel convened in April 2017, Ngo tweeted a brief video claiming, “the Muslim student speaker said that apostates will be killed or banished in an Islamic state.” The entire clip shows the student gave a long answer in response to a hypothetical question about Quranic law. The panelists stressed they weren’t experts, and the Muslim student later said “he may have misspoke.”

 

Ngo’s tweet was picked up by Breitbart. The Vanguard fired him days later for a “dangerous oversimplification that violated very clear ethics outlined by the Society of Professional Journalists.” The Vanguard said Ngo’s actions “placed a PSU student in significant danger.” Ngo twisted his termination into an article for The National Review, “Fired for Reporting the Truth,” which the student paper said was a “misrepresentation” that resulted in “unjust threats” against them.

 

Critics see this episode as establishing a pattern in Ngo’s work: using charged language and selective facts on social media that stoke bigotry, putting his subject at risk of harassment while boosting his own reach and status. It worked because in 2018 Ngo graduated to writing a “racist” and “massively Islamophobic” travelogue to two Islamic communities in England for the Wall Street Journal.

 

But it’s in the city of Portland and state of Oregon that Ngo calls home where the most damage has been wrought. Zakir Khan is board chair of the Oregon chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy and civil rights organization. Khan says of Ngo, “That guy is obsessed with us.”

Ngo has tweeted dozens of times about CAIR, saying it “has done PR for terrorists & their families.” He characterized CAIR’s representation of the surviving child of the Muslim couple who committed the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino as advocating for “the terrorists’ orphaned baby.”

 

Recently, in a sprawling New York Post opinion Ngo claimed a “suspicious rise” in gay hate crimes in Portland fits a pattern of hoaxes. (Ngo found space in his 2,100-word article to quote a member of the Proud Boys, which experts call a “gangnotorious for violence, as “the most welcoming organization that I have ever been a part of.”)

 

Khan says, “We are seen as experts on hate crimes reform, so I questioned Ngo’s groundless claims of ‘hate-crime hoaxes.’ He is not an expert in the field.” Ngo responded by accusing CAIR of “terrorism” and “terror.”

After the exchange with Ngo, Khan says, “We received dozens of threatening and harassing messages. We weren’t able to log them all.” One post that tagged Ngo, as well as Michelle Malkin (who signal boosts Ngo and started a “Protect Andy Ngo” fundraiser after the June 29 attack that netted him nearly $200,000), read, “CAIR IS HAMAS! If you stand with your Muslem neighbors; prepare to die with your Muslem neighbors. We will take our country back![sic]” Ngo frequently claims that Hamas, the governing authority in Gaza, is connected to CAIR.

 

The irony of all this is that after CAIR challenges Ngo’s claim of hate crime hoaxes, he responds with what could be considered hate speech, accusing them of terrorism. This appears to have incited his followers to threaten and harass CAIR, actions which might qualify as hate crimes.

 

For his next act, Ngo joined Quillette where he is a “sub-editor.” Described as the voice of the intellectual dark web, Quillette published a report on May 29 claiming fifteen reporters who cover the far right were really “Antifa journalists.” According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the article by “estabished right-wing troll,” Eoin Lenihan, was picked up by the neo-Nazi Stormfront website within a day, and a day after that a video was uploaded to YouTube containing “imagery of mass shooters intercut with images of the [Antifa] reporters.” The names of the journalists were put on a list called “Sunset the Media,” while the video ends with a notorious neo-Nazi saying he won’t “disown” anyone who kills the reporters.

 

Two journalists, including Shane Burley, wrote of the unnerving effect of being put on a Neo-Nazi death list. Another targeted journalist wrote that Quillette had crossed the line from being merely reactionary to “reckless endangerment” and bluntly stated that its list “could’ve gotten me killed.”

 

The article was so shoddy, Lenihan was suspended from Twitter. But Ngo promoted the article and more significantly continues to promote it — just as eight months after the fact, Ngo continued to claim that striking the protester from the Patrick Kimmons march is really evidence of Antifa taking their anger out on an elderly man.

 

In at least one instance it appears Ngo has doxxed activists himself. During May Day 2019, Ngo published a YouTube video that included him talking to members of the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America who were tabling for “Hands Off Venezuela.” The entire time Ngo points his camera at a sign-in sheet, not the person he is interviewing. In the video the sheet is digitally blurred. However, Connor Smith, a Portland DSA member, provided a still from what he claims is an earlier version of the video. The still includes a watermark of Ngo’s twitter handle, “@MrAndyNgo,” exactly the same as in the YouTube video. Eleven names can be seen on the sign-in sheet, including Smith’s, all of which have visible email addresses and six of which include phone numbers. Smith says at least one person on the list received threatening messages such as “Die commie.”

 

Smith claims it is a common right-wing tactic to doxx people on social media like YouTube and Twitter and then delete the offending material before it is removed for violating the platform’s rules. He says this cat-and-mouse game achieves the results the far right is looking for. “I’m sure some fascist has put all our names and phone numbers in a list.”

 

Ngo is more of a symptom, however.

 

Ngo couldn’t exist without social media companies which turn a blind eye to right-wing violence because having to monitor their platforms for hate speech would cut into their profits. Ngo also needs Murdoch-owned media such as the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and Fox News that allow him to masquerade his bigotry as journalism. These outlets, in turn, are amplified by the larger landscape of mainstream media, which often fail to distinguish between fact-based journalism and pro-Trump, white nationalistic propaganda. Add in police who collaborate with the far right and weak political leaders, as in Portland, and you have all the conditions needed for opportunists like Andy Ngo to grab the spotlight.

 

Ngo is just the latest inflammatory right-wing agent in Portland who’s tried to vault to the big leagues. Before him was Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson, who has seen his ranks of violent white nationalists dwindle due to infighting and long-overdue arrests.

 

Way back in 2016, before Gibson, was another media provocateur, Michael Strickland. Strickland shot his YouTube career — which mainly featured him doxxing and harassing local activists — in the foot after he pulled a gun on a Black Lives Matter protest while being armed with enough ammunition for a massacre.

That’s not to say the Left should ignore the likes of Andy Ngo or even Tucker Carlson. They are both the cause and effect of white nationalism and the violence that comes with it. Their synergy is also a reflection of the complex digital landscape. Legacy media like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and even Fox News need Andy Ngo just as much as he needs them. They gave him a platform not for his shoddy reporting and tired bigotry, but for the audience he’s amassed, even if it’s a digital lynch mob.

 

 

 

 


This piece of article is from Jacobin magazine which is a left wing media organisation. This lengthy piece here is nothing more than the opinion of a left wing media organisation employee. 
 

Jacobin has been criticised for being more concerned about “projecting the Spector of American empire onto the non-western world to self-flagellate about themselves rather than finding pragmatic solutions to avoid conflict.”

 

————————

AMERICAN LEFTIST magazine Jacobin continues to plumb the depths of bad writing on Taiwan that does not bother to consult Taiwanese voices about their own future, with a recent article by Chicago-based writer Branko Marcetic. Instead of anything like, say, speaking to Taiwanese to see what they think of the odds of conflict with China are, what one instead sees is the usual insularity of western leftists who are more concerned with projecting the specter of American empire onto the non-western world to self-flagellate about themselves rather than finding pragmatic solutions to avoid conflict. 


https://newbloommag.net/2022/08/16/jacobin-taiwan-critique/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

56 minutes ago, singalion said:

When even Jewish newspapers start to report about this Andy Ngo and come to report on his aggressive stance and misleading anti- muslim, anti liberals agenda.

 

That should ring the warning signs on this Andy Ngo.

 

Jewish Currents

 

 

The Making of Andy Ngo

The right-wing provocateur’s grift exposing “the tyranny of the left” worked—until it didn’t.

 

Andy Ngo appears on Fox News in advance of dueling antifa and right-wing demonstrations in Portland, August 16th, 2019. Image: YouTube
 

ON AUGUST 26TH, the day after a damning Portland Mercury investigation pulled back the curtain on Andy Ngo’s chummy relationship with the Portland-based far-right group Patriot Prayer, Fox News’s favorite Antifa victim found himself out of a job. In one of the least convincing PR ploys ever, Claire Lehmann—the editor of the far-right, skull-shape-obsessed website Quillette—took to Twitter to announce that Ngo, who, until that point, had been on her site’s masthead, was “moving onto bigger & better projects.” 

 

The 33-year-old provocateur, despite his pretenses to the contrary, wasn’t a reporter. His portfolio consisted of a few ham-fisted op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and other conservative publications, and a much more substantive collection of selectively edited video clips meant to embarrass the left. As BuzzFeed observed recently, much of his work, including his widely mocked “journey” into the “no-go zones” of London—an idea invented by the far right to depict majority-Muslim communities in major urban areas as intolerant and dangerous—exemplified what Max Read has called “busybody journalism.” There was no clarity in Ngo’s work; as Read noted, Ngo provided less the kind of “edification you associate with good journalism than the heightened anxiety and fear you associate with a good crime drama.” 

Even so, Ngo’s limited body of work brought him a surge of notoriety this year. Ngo had long trailed Portland’s warring political factions, on the hunt for sensational footage that could depict the left as dangerous and unhinged. But it wasn’t until this summer that he managed to thrust himself into the center of the story. In June, after Antifa activists punched and “milkshaked” him—which is exactly what it sounds like—at a protest in Portland, Ngo claimed to have suffered a traumatic brain injury and quickly crowdfunded nearly $200,000, aided by conservative politicians and media outlets who turned Ngo into a cause célèbre. Senator Ted Cruz called for a federal criminal investigation of Portland’s mayor on Ngo’s behalf. Fox News ratcheted up their alarmist coverage of Antifa. With Ngo’s help, they painted American antifascists as a “criminal cartel.” On the network, Ngo voiced his support of Donald Trump’s call to designate Antifa an “organization of terror.”

 

Rather than give up his spot in the limelight following the Patriot Prayer revelations, Ngo wrote a rambling op-ed in Spectator USA, outlining how the mainstream media sought to crush him through a coordinated disinformation campaign. “I am despised by left-wing journalists, so my reputation must be damaged,” Ngo wrote. Later in the same piece, he compared himself to the Covington schoolboys—a reference to a group of MAGA-hat-wearing teenagers who went viral for jeering at Native American activists in Washington, DC, earlier this year—arguing that “[w]hen people who are perceived to be right-wing smile, it’s often taken as sinister evidence.”

 

Ngo continues to double down on his claims of innocence. In response to my request for comment, Ngo rejects the Mercury’s claims, even though the video footage makes clear that Ngo was in the presence of Patriot Prayer members as they discussed the attack. 

 

“I did not witness or hear the people on the public street plan an attack,” he writes. “Neither did the antifa informant at the time, who was there speaking with people, according to his interview on the Portland Mercury blog. There were three other journalists there with cameras and they did not report seeing or hearing the planning of a criminal act.” Instead, Ngo says that he was the “victim of multiple unprovoked assaults that day by masked people associated with antifa.” (A reference to being sprayed with bear repellant.) Meanwhile, the footage has been deemed reliable enough to use against Patriot Prayer in court, as some members of the group are facing felony riot charges after an attack on Antifa activists at Cider Riot, a bar in Portland, on May Day this year. 

 

It appeared that Ngo had found the secret to success in today’s conservative media world. What the right-wing outrage machine demanded was an endless stream of content portraying leftists as the real totalitarians. The revelation of Ngo’s links to the far right may have cost him his relationship with Quillette—although both he and Lehmann insist his departure happened a week prior to the slew of bad press—but it’s not clear his career in media is over, and his rise leaves a template for other right-wing provocateurs to follow. 

 

Antifa activists and journalists in Portland, as well as a number of others who brushed shoulders with Ngo back in his early days as a graduate student at Portland State University (PSU), have been monitoring Ngo’s activities both in person and on social media for years now.  Through consultations with a number of individuals who either knew Ngo in his PSU years or have been tracking his movements during protests in Portland, a detailed timeline of Ngo’s career emerges, demonstrating how his life in Portland has in many ways laid the foundation for his grift as a right-wing anti-antifascist propagandist. Ngo seized upon trends in conservative media for his own gain—first latching on to its “clash of civilizations” approach to Islam in the Western world, then to the American right’s unhealthy obsession with “free speech” on campus, and, finally, to its fear-mongering about the left. A close examination of Ngo’s work during these years also sheds light on how the far right has become more sophisticated at feeding its noxious talking points into mainstream conservatism.

Screen-Shot-2019-09-11-at-10.23.04-AM.pn Andy Ngo immediately after being “milkshaked” in Portland at an antifa demonstration, June 29th, 2019. Image: YouTube

 

NGO LACKS a traditional reporting background, but in many ways he is ideally suited for the demands of today’s media. “Even as it shrinks,” wrote BuzzFeed’s Joe Bernstein in a July profile of Ngo, “the national media is reorganizing around a social media-to-cable news pipeline of daily outrage.” Ngo, with his made-for-Fox-News portfolio of video clips, is both the beneficiary and an exemplary product of this pipeline.

Ngo’s status as the child of Vietnamese immigrants, his identity as a gay man, and his roots in the New Atheist community all contribute to his appeal to today’s new right. The very fact that this seems like an unlikely background for a right-wing activist helps legitimize the push for a reactionary and Western chauvinist agenda by giving the right’s platform a veneer of openness to critical thinking, and of plausible deniability with respect to allegations of bigotry. This has been demonstrated, too, in the recent prominence of figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, who leveraged his identity as a gay man to amplify virulently Islamophobic talking points, as well as lesser-known individuals, such as the far-right blog Gateway Pundit’s first White House correspondent, Lucian Wintrich, who is also gay. (Wintrich, who was behind the infamous “Twinks for Trump” photography exhibit in New York City in October 2016, was allegedly fired from the Gateway Pundit for appearing on a white nationalist’s podcast. As with Ngo, the publication claimed Wintrich was already on his way out, and that news of his departure was pure coincidence.)

 

Ngo began building his career trolling the libs while affiliated with the Center for Inquiry (CFI), an international nonprofit organization “dedicated to defending science and critical thinking in examining religion.” Posts by Ngo on Reddit and Facebook indicate that he first started volunteering for CFI in 2013, when he offered to take photos at the CFI Portland branch’s events. 

 

 

Although CFI, which is headquartered in Amherst, New York, has a number of distinct branches and has served as a home for a diverse array of atheists and secular humanists, some of its individual outposts take on their own distinct political flavor. During Ngo’s time at CFI Portland, many of its main members, including Ngo, began to take an approach to secularism that emphasized the supposed incompatability of Islam with Western liberal modernity. 

 

Even prior to his affiliation with CFI, posts from Ngo prior to 2016 on both Twitter and Reddit capture a young man who was active in subreddits like /r/atheism and who expressed extreme anger at organized religion. “Islam needs to be neutered like Christianity,” replied Ngo on a post from 2013 about a Daily Mail article about a man chopping off his wife’s finger in order to stop her from studying for her degree. “Bible belt trash,” read another comment, responding to an Imgur post that detailed how to build a swimming pool out of hay. In 2015, Ngo accused Hend Amry, a prominent Muslim Twitter personality, of being an “Islamosupremacist fascist” in a series of tweets. In response to my request for comment, Ngo acknowledges that these now-deleted tweets contained “inflammatory language.” He claims that he attempted to apologize to Amry, but that she blocked him.

 

 

Three years later, Ngo would describe his earlier views on religion as harsh. In an interview with the Skeptical Inquirer, Ngo noted that his earlier life as a skeptic was one in which he was “quite dogmatic about his anti-religion ideas.” He confirms this now. “There was a period in my life in which I was involved in the secular community and was critical of all religions,” he writes. “The social media posts you found from years ago represented my simplistic views at the time but no longer represent my current beliefs.” Still, these simplistic anti-religious viewpoints would make it into his more mainstream work.

 

Ngo’s views on religion may have evolved by the time he started at PSU as a graduate student in 2015, but he would soon demonstrate that he was not one to shy away from controversy. Ngo’s work needling campus leftists would eventually take two forms: he would continue to nurture his connection to Portland CFI by joining the campus’s “humanist” CFI-affiliated advocacy group, known as Freethinkers of PSU; and he would become involved with the main student newspaper, The Vanguard, where he worked as a multimedia editor. 

Though some of Ngo’s pieces at The Vanguard consisted of actual reporting, others were clearly designed to troll. In one 2016 piece, Ngo wrote about his experience donning a hijab (complete with a low-resolution selfie) for a few minutes, and the sense of oppression that supposedly came with it. Another article from spring 2017, a few weeks prior to Ngo’s departure from the paper, provided a platform for a local white nationalist and white supremacist, known only as “Herrenvolk” (German for “master race”), to advocate for racial separatism.

 

But perhaps the most public platform for Ngo and his fellow travelers on campus was Freethinkers, a student organization devoted to “free speech” that worked closely with the controversial PSU professor Peter Boghossian. (Most recently, Boghossian has made a name for himself by submitting fake journal articles—one of which consisted of text pulled from Mein Kampf—in order to embarrass peer-reviewed gender and sexuality journals.) During Ngo’s first few years at PSU, the Freethinkers started to shift rightward. In January 2017, the group brought Christina Hoff Sommers, a prominent Gamergate apologist, and David Rubin, a far-right YouTuber, to the university to discuss “campus thought police.” Ngo introduced the panel. 

Beginning in spring 2017, Ngo’s efforts to frame himself as a dissident right-wing journalist took off—thanks, in no small part, to Breitbart. That April, Ngo tweeted a short video from an interfaith discussion panel at PSU. In the video viewers see one student on the panel responding to a question about what Quranic law says about non-believers in Muslim nations. The student’s response seem to imply non-believers would face violence, or even death, in countries overseen by Quranic law. According to the student, the presence of non-believers would only be “considered a crime” in a country where Quranic law was in effect, in which case these individuals would be “given the liberty to leave the country.” “I am not going to sugarcoat it,” the student adds. While salacious, Ngo’s video conveniently ignored later efforts to counter the student’s statement—including one from a fellow panelist. 

 

One day after Ngo—at this point still an obscure college journalist—tweeted the video, Breitbart pushed out its own screed. “WATCH: MUSLIM STUDENT CLAIMS THAT NON-BELIEVERS WILL BE KILLED IN ISLAMIC COUNTRIES,” screamed the headline. The video, as Portland-based journalist Jason Wilson would explain later in the Guardian, was almost tailor-made for Breitbart, which thrived off of “on-campus exposés of PC or identity politics, served up to inflame its rightwing populist and ‘alt-right’ readers.”

 

Ngo leaned into the controversy. Not long after Breitbart’s coverage thrust the story into the heart of the right-wing outrage machine, The Vanguard sacked Ngo, citing “ongoing breaches in trust and actions that were counterintuitive to the [paper’s] mission and editorial expectations.” Ngo, for his part, took to the pages of the National Review to deride the paper in an op-ed entitled “Fired for Reporting the Truth,” in which he described his forced departure as baffling and distressing. “I was disinclined to sugarcoat the truth,” he noted, regarding his decision to publish the video. “I just couldn’t have imagined it would cost me so dearly.”

The decision to fire Ngo wasn’t made overnight. Mike Bivins, a Portland-based reporter who was working at one of PSU’s other student publications, says his sense was that “they had wanted him gone long before that.” Regardless of the exact motivation for his firing, PSU quickly became a punching bag for the far-right media. A Breitbart article detailing Ngo’s departure framed him as a dissident who was only booted from the paper because his tweet captured the far-right website’s attention. The lesson for Ngo was clear: getting the right-wing outrage machine’s attention could be a game-changer for his career. He even expressed a desire to go on Tucker Carlson to sing his song of oppression during a Reddit AMA on the alt-right subreddit /r/TheDonald, which has since been quarantined for numerous threats of violence against public figures. 

Shortly thereafter, Ngo began an outreach internship at CFI, which offered a modest stipend. Ngo’s pseudo-liberal Islamophobia mirrored that of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and other New Atheist bigwigs, who had long portrayed Islam as a threat to Western civilization. But he opposed the broader trend in some more left-leaning humanistic circles, including at CFI, which emphasized intersectionality and diversity as tenets that ought to be central to any secular humanist worldview.

 

Ngo used CFI as a way not only to frame himself as a dissident against left-wing tyranny, but also to build connections throughout the secularist world. He traveled frequently: During a 2017 event at Stanford, Ngo connected with anti-Islamic activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali; former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani; and Faisal Saeed al Mutar and Melissa Chen, the founders of Ideas Without Borders—a secularist nonprofit advocacy group supported by Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, among others. Ngo’s later work on “no-go zones” may have been influenced by this crowd. 

 

A few months later, Ngo began writing for a number of right-wing publications, including the American Spectator, Quillette, and the Wall Street Journal opinion page, as well as attending popular New Atheist events like Mythcon—an annual conference that has included speakers with ties to the alt-right, such as YouTuber Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad). In early 2018, he captured the attention of the right-wing outrage machine once again when he claimed that the Freethinkers of PSU’s event with James Damore—the former Google engineer fired for circulating a sexist, anti-diversity screed in the workplace—was being threatened by violent, far-left forces lurking throughout Portland. Fox News got in on the fun, claiming—as the Portland-based alt-weekly Willamette Week noted in their coverage of the event—that “Antifa would ‘target’ the event.” At the time, Rose City Antifa told the Guardian that “no antifascist counterprotest was ever planned.” But Ngo didn’t let the truth get in the way of branding. At The College Fix, a conservative website that serves as a platform for student reporters, Ngo described the fact that the event took place without major demonstrations as a major win for “free speech.”

 

Despite the lack of violence, the event provided Ngo with a Wall Street Journal byline decrying the tyranny of campus leftists. Once again, reasonable pushback against an offensive campus speaker had been spun into a national news story meant to sound the alarm a manufactured free speech crisis. 

 

800px-Andy_Ngo_48514128576.jpg

Andy Ngo speaking at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Washington, DC, July 24th, 2019. Photo: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Creative Commons

 

ALTHOUGH NGO started tracking clashes between far-right and far-left protesters regularly after his departure from The Vanguard in the spring of 2017, Portland-based multimedia journalist Cory Elia notes that his videography work ramped up following the Occupy ICE protests, which kicked off in Portland on June 17th, 2018. It was, as BuzzFeed observed, “Ngo’s videos of angry leftists, along with his status as a local” that “got him back on Fox News” in the fall of 2018. In October, during his segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Ngo laid into Antifa for the grave sin of blocking traffic. Over the course of the next year, for nearly every one of Ngo’s confrontations with antifascist activists, there was a corresponding Fox News segment on the imminent danger posed by far-left activists. 

 

By the time May Day protests rocked Portland on May 1st, 2019, Ngo had cemented his status as either a tireless chronicler of leftist tyranny or as the preferred videographer of Portland’s neo-fascist contingent, depending on your point of view. Two days after being allegedly punched in the stomach and sprayed with bear mace at the same event, Ngo appeared on Carlson’s show to call May Day a “celebration of Marxism, Communism, and political violence.” By refocusing the media narrative on the supposedly existential threat posed by antifascist activists, Ngo provided ample support for the right-wing media’s tongue-lashings against the left. Fox and others used his content to warn about the dangers of leftist tyranny—all while charging that white supremacy is “actually not a real problem in America,” as Carlson said last month.  

But then, recent footage taken and made available by “Ben,” a pseudonymous Navy veteran who has been documenting Patriot Prayer activities from the inside, laid bare Ngo’s relationship with Portland’s far-right agitators. It also demonstrated how far-right videographers manipulate reality for their own ends. According to “Ben’s” footage, which was made available on YouTube in July, Ngo began his day amid a crowd of Patriot Prayer protesters. The footage makes clear that Patriot Prayer and the other far-right cronies affiliated with them were bent on a violent confrontation from the get-go—and that Ngo, who was supposedly tailing them in his capacity as a reporter, did nothing to shed light on their actions. In one video, taken a few blocks away from the well-known Antifa hangout Cider Riot, Ngo stands by calmly as Patriot Prayer members discuss plans for violence. Ngo’s camera only starts rolling when Patriot Prayer reaches Cider Riot, zeroing in on antifascists. 

 

As the Mercury’s investigation and conversations with journalists in Portland demonstrate, Ngo’s selective reporting on Cider Riot is not an anomaly. Ngo’s videos often depict Patriot Prayer as victims rather than instigators. (Ngo denies this framing to me, however, noting that his “video recordings don’t depict any particular side as victims. I record interesting events happening in front of me on my mobile phone.”) He’s even defended them against accusations that they’re a white nationalist group, posting on Twitter in October 2018, for instance, that this supposed misrepresentation was a result of local journalists lacking “experience interfacing with conservatives so they only know caricatures.”

 

“The entire time Occupy ICE happened [in Portland] he only showed up when Patriot Prayer or those groups showed up,” notes Elia, the Portland-based multimedia journalist. During another march, Elia says he witnessed a conversation between Patriot Prayer organizer Haley Adams and Ngo, where the latter implied Ngo was leaving the rally with the fascist group.

 

“He is THE videographer for [Patriot Prayer],” Elia says. “There are a few others, but he has the crowd.”

Even prior to his recent bout of Fox News-instigated fame, Ngo’s reporting has overlooked the far-right tendencies of various subjects in favor of a straightforward victimization narrative. A video created by Ngo for The Vanguard, entitled “Traitors: The Minorities Who Support Donald Trump,” tells the story of supposedly oppressed Trump supporters on campus who were either non-white or LGBTQ. One of the video’s subjects, Tylor Phelps—who introduces himself as a “gay conservative”—was and continues to be, according to his social media presence, an outright white nationalist. Although Ngo would later tell BuzzFeed that “[h]e was unaware of . . . Phelps’s views at the time he featured them in his reporting,” Phelps had for years been sharing links to articles about the trials facing white men published on sites such as VDare, a white nationalist and virulently anti-immigrant website, and the far-right website Taki’s Magazine. (The latter has featured the infamous white nationalist Richard Spencer, who worked there as an editor prior to starting his own white nationalist website, Alternative Right, in 2010.) Furthermore, in 2017, Phelps posted a photo on Facebook of himself standing next to Jared Taylor, the head of the white supremacist think tank and publication American Renaissance. Ngo would have been privy to all of this information: according to Facebook screenshots provided by a source who knew of Ngo from before his PSU days, Phelps has also been a member of Freethinkers of PSU’s Facebook page since early 2017, and Ngo confirms that he added Phelps himself, though he clarifies to me that “he added every one who requested access to the page.” 

In a Facebook post from July 2017, Phelps shared a story written by Ngo (who he described as a  “friend”) which focused on yet another far-right extremist who Ngo covered as if she were a run-of-the-mill conservative. The subject of the article, Edie Dixon, is a trans woman and a member of Patriot Prayer.

 

Although Dixon’s far-right beliefs were already clear, her various social media accounts demonstrate that she has become increasingly open about her specific affinity for neo-Nazism over the past year. At one point she even bragged on Facebook about trying to join the white nationalist organization Identity Evropa. (The organization has since rebranded itself as the American Identity Movement, likely in an effort to distance itself from its role in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” riot in Charlottesville, Virginia.)

 

For Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media that has fed off of Ngo’s antagonistic content, these connections to violent extremists are incidental. What matters to them is nurturing fear—fear of the other, fear of the left, fear of the unknown. As Rick Perlstein wrote in The Baffler in 2012, these terrors do not need to be tethered to anything real:  

The distance from observable reality is rhetorically required; indeed, that you haven’t quite seen anything resembling any of this in your everyday life is a kind of evidence all by itself. It just goes to show how diabolical the enemy has become. He is unseen; but the redeemer, the hero who tells you the tale, can see the innermost details of the most baleful conspiracies. Trust him. Send him your money. Surrender your will—and the monster shall be banished for good. 

 

In other words, this is all a cynical and dangerous grift. In the service of this grift, brushing shoulders with the far right—or even embracing them—is fine, so long as plausible deniability is retained. And in the event that it becomes impossible to deny, well, what’s one name scratched off Quillette’s masthead?

 

In many respects, Ngo is undergoing the same trials as many right-wing agitators before him. Perhaps the most prominent example is Yiannopoulos, whose career began to collapse after BuzzFeed reported on footage of him singing “America the Beautiful” amidst an enamored crowd of white nationalists cheering him on with Sieg Heils. (Even this brazen act of racist provocation wasn’t enough to sink him on the right—it was his endorsement of pedophilia that ultimately did him in.) This week, Vice News reported that Yiannopoulos is completely broke and cut off from his audience, thanks to an effective campaign to get social media platforms to ban him. Whether Ngo will suffer a similar fate remains unclear. But what his story so far repeatedly demonstrates is his dependence on institutions eager to offer him a platform—and once they’re finished churning through him, they’ll find another grifter to nurture.

 

 

Twitter is very well about Andy Ngo, because it demonstrates how these instigators abuse the platform and incite hatred against certain people.

 

 


Jewish currents is yet another left wing media organisation. They have the right to express their opinion but should everyone just blindly accepts wholesome what they write? 
 

The article again is nothing more than the opinions of a media organisation. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, singalion said:

If Musk is suspending left wing extremist accounts, then it is just fair and equal to suspend right wing extremist accounts also.

 

Andy Ngo is one of the right wing extremists.

 

He isn't even a real journalist, but just self-proclaimed.

 

The 33-year-old provocateur, despite his pretenses to the contrary, wasn’t a reporter. His portfolio consisted of a few ham-fisted op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and other conservative publications, and a much more substantive collection of selectively edited video clips meant to embarrass the left. As BuzzFeed observed recently, much of his work, including his widely mocked “journey” into the “no-go zones” of London—an idea invented by the far right to depict majority-Muslim communities in major urban areas as intolerant and dangerous—exemplified what Max Read has called “busybody journalism.”

 

 


Quoting “The 33-year-old provocateur, despite his pretenses to the contrary, wasn’t a reporter…” from Jewish Currents does nothing except to reproduce the opinion of employee or associates of Jewish Currents. 
 

Is Jewish currents the elected authority to determine who should be suspended in a privately owned social media company? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, 7heaven said:


This piece of article is from Jacobin magazine which is a left wing media organisation. This lengthy piece here is nothing more than the opinion of a left wing media organisation employee. 
 

Jacobin has been criticised for being more concerned about “projecting the Spector of American empire onto the non-western world to self-flagellate about themselves rather than finding pragmatic solutions to avoid conflict.”

 

————————

AMERICAN LEFTIST magazine Jacobin continues to plumb the depths of bad writing on Taiwan that does not bother to consult Taiwanese voices about their own future, with a recent article by Chicago-based writer Branko Marcetic. Instead of anything like, say, speaking to Taiwanese to see what they think of the odds of conflict with China are, what one instead sees is the usual insularity of western leftists who are more concerned with projecting the specter of American empire onto the non-western world to self-flagellate about themselves rather than finding pragmatic solutions to avoid conflict. 


https://newbloommag.net/2022/08/16/jacobin-taiwan-critique/

 

You always follow the same trait and strategy...

 

Anything that doesn't suit you, you always try to discredit by any means. 

 

If you had some intellectual knowledge you wouldn'r have embarrassed yourself because anyone with some knowledge knows who the "Jacobins" were...

 

Thanks for proving again how limited your knowledge is...

😂

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, 7heaven said:


Jewish currents is yet another left wing media organisation. They have the right to express their opinion but should everyone just blindly accepts wholesome what they write? 
 

The article again is nothing more than the opinions of a media organisation. 

 

4 minutes ago, 7heaven said:


Quoting “The 33-year-old provocateur, despite his pretenses to the contrary, wasn’t a reporter…” from Jewish Currents does nothing except to reproduce the opinion of employee or associates of Jewish Currents. 
 

Is Jewish currents the elected authority to determine who should be suspended in a privately owned social media company? 

 

Same goes here... 

 

Your responses always follow the same scheme... 

 

Compared to Andy Ngo, the Jewish Currents probably stand for authenticity...

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, sgmaven said:

I think we all need to put things into perspective. Twitter, while being "famous", does not actually have as many users as the top social media platforms. If you look at data published by the website Business of Apps, then you will realise that with about 230k users, twitter actually pales in comparison to the likes of Facebook (2.9 million), YouTube (2.6 million), WhatsApp (2.4 million) and Instagram (2.3 million). Even the relatively new upstart Tiktok has 1.5 million users, which is more than 6 times twitter's user base.


Your units seem to be wrong. Musk alone already has more than 110million followers. How can Twitter have 230k users only then?

 

And what’s your point besides reporting some statistics of selected social media companies?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 minutes ago, 7heaven said:


This piece of article is from Jacobin magazine which is a left wing media organisation. This lengthy piece here is nothing more than the opinion of a left wing media organisation employee. 
 

Jacobin has been criticised for being more concerned about “projecting the Spector of American empire onto the non-western world to self-flagellate about themselves rather than finding pragmatic solutions to avoid conflict.”

 

————————

AMERICAN LEFTIST magazine Jacobin continues to plumb the depths of bad writing on Taiwan that does not bother to consult Taiwanese voices about their own future, with a recent article by Chicago-based writer Branko Marcetic. Instead of anything like, say, speaking to Taiwanese to see what they think of the odds of conflict with China are, what one instead sees is the usual insularity of western leftists who are more concerned with projecting the specter of American empire onto the non-western world to self-flagellate about themselves rather than finding pragmatic solutions to avoid conflict. 


https://newbloommag.net/2022/08/16/jacobin-taiwan-critique/

 

You come here to quote from a Taiwanese magazine to judge about US media ?

 

New Bloom, 台北市. New Bloom is an online magazine covering youth culture and politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific.

 

 

How ridiculous can that be!

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

28 minutes ago, 7heaven said:


Lol. We have not heard from any media organisations highlighting andy ngo calling out the dangers of Antifa calling for damage to be done on Musk’s Tesla’s properties. 

 

As usual : substantiation 7heaven. 

 

We want substantiation instead of your phrases and bla bla on BW. 

 

If you can't deliver any evidence that the claims made by Andy Ngo are correct, then they might be just one of his fabrications. 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

You always follow the same trait and strategy...

 

Anything that doesn't suit you, you always try to discredit by any means. 

 

If you had some intellectual knowledge you wouldn'r have embarrassed yourself because anyone with some knowledge knows who the "Jacobins" were...

 

Thanks for proving again how limited your knowledge is...

😂

 


And you always use the same strategy of looking for opinions of media organisations that suit your imagined narrative. 
 

Jacobin magazine is free to call itself whatever as long as they don’t infringe on any trademark or copyrights laws. 
 

Thanks for proving that you are unable to distinguish between opinions and facts. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

 

Same goes here... 

 

Your responses always follow the same scheme... 

 

Compared to Andy Ngo, the Jewish Currents probably stand for authenticity...

 

 

 


Compared to Jewish Currents, Andy Ngo is highlighting the dangers of Antifa extremists who are threatening Tesla properties just because Musk suspended their twitter accounts. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, sgmaven said:

I think we all need to put things into perspective. Twitter, while being "famous", does not actually have as many users as the top social media platforms. If you look at data published by the website Business of Apps, then you will realise that with about 230k users, twitter actually pales in comparison to the likes of Facebook (2.9 million), YouTube (2.6 million), WhatsApp (2.4 million) and Instagram (2.3 million). Even the relatively new upstart Tiktok has 1.5 million users, which is more than 6 times twitter's user base.

 

The numbers are correct, the k stands for millions, while facebook etc represent billions in units. 

 

In the last reported quarter, the number of global monetizable daily active users (mDAU) on Twitter amounted to 237.8 million users

 

 

The potential reach of Facebook is 2.11 billion users

 

=> Twitter is a dwarf compared to Facebook et al.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

You come here to quote from a Taiwanese magazine to judge about US media ?

 

New Bloom, 台北市. New Bloom is an online magazine covering youth culture and politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific.

 

 

How ridiculous can that be!

 

 


Is there a global or international rule or UN chapter that dictates Taiwanese magazine is inferior or is not able to write about a US media organisation Jacobin magazine? 
 

How ridiculous can your thinking be?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, 7heaven said:


And you always use the same strategy of looking for opinions of media organisations that suit your imagined narrative. 
 

Jacobin magazine is free to call itself whatever as long as they don’t infringe on any trademark or copyrights laws. 
 

Thanks for proving that you are unable to distinguish between opinions and facts. 

 

Sure, but no member ever called me deluded, while there are 10 members who called you 7heaven totally deluded. 

 

Wonder who lives in his own reality and in a state no longer able to identify the facts... 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, 7heaven said:


Is there a global or international rule or UN chapter that dictates Taiwanese magazine is inferior or is not able to write about a US media organisation Jacobin magazine? 
 

How ridiculous can your thinking be?

 

What has the UN to do with this?

 

What sane person would refer to a Taiwanese media to say something about any US media? 

 

That you have to take a Taiwanese forum to make a point about US media shows how desperate you are 7heaven...

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

The numbers are correct, the k stands for millions, while facebook etc represent billions in units. 

 

In the last reported quarter, the number of global monetizable daily active users (mDAU) on Twitter amounted to 237.8 million users

 

 

The potential reach of Facebook is 2.11 billion users

 

=> Twitter is a dwarf compared to Facebook et al.

 


You have embarrassed yourself again. Which imagined world are you from? Lol
 

“k” means thousands and not millions. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, 7heaven said:


You have embarrassed yourself again. Which imagined world are you from? Lol
 

“k” means thousands and not millions. 

 

But sgmaven in his post used k to represent millions...

 

Another good example of your 7heaven's comprehension flaws...

 

Here:

 

1 hour ago, sgmaven said:

I think we all need to put things into perspective. Twitter, while being "famous", does not actually have as many users as the top social media platforms. If you look at data published by the website Business of Apps, then you will realise that with about 230k users, twitter actually pales in comparison to the likes of Facebook (2.9 million), YouTube (2.6 million), WhatsApp (2.4 million) and Instagram (2.3 million). Even the relatively new upstart Tiktok has 1.5 million users, which is more than 6 times twitter's user base.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

Sure, but no member ever called me deluded, while there are 10 members who called you 7heaven totally deluded. 

 

Wonder who lives in his own reality and in a state no longer able to identify the facts... 

 

 


You have used the opinions of Jacobin magazine to show that Andy Ngo is somehow untrustworthy. Such opinions have no authority whatsoever but you considered them important. This shows that you are unable to distinguish between opinions and facts which are more important than opinions. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

What has the UN to do with this?

 

What sane person would refer to a Taiwanese media to say something about any US media? 

 

That you have to take a Taiwanese forum to make a point about US media shows how desperate you are 7heaven...

 


People trust UN. 
 

However, you just belittled a Taiwanese media simply because it criticised Jacobin magazine. 
 

Explain again why anyone cannot use the criticism of a Taiwanese media on a US media? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

But sgmaven in his post used k to represent millions...

 

Another good example of your 7heaven's comprehension flaws...

 

Here:

 

 


You are desperately trying to save your face after embarrassing yourself to misunderstand K refers to millions when it actually means thousands. 
 

If he had intended for K to represent million, why did he spell millions out later out for Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and Instagram? And in any case, Facebook, WhatsApp do not only have millions of users. Therefore, my post about his numbers seem wrong.
 

And in which world uses K to represent millions in the first place? 😂 perhaps only in your own imagined world. 
 


 

2 hours ago, sgmaven said:

 

I think we all need to put things into perspective. Twitter, while being "famous", does not actually have as many users as the top social media platforms. If you look at data published by the website Business of Apps, then you will realise that with about 230k users, twitter actually pales in comparison to the likes of Facebook (2.9 million), YouTube (2.6 million), WhatsApp (2.4 million) and Instagram (2.3 million). Even the relatively new upstart Tiktok has 1.5 million users, which is more than 6 times twitter's user base.

 

 

Edited by 7heaven
Face saving
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 11/21/2022 at 1:17 PM, 7heaven said:


Fortunately Musk has restored Trump’s Twitter account and we can see for ourselves that Trump had twitted about No Violence and to remind people are respecting the law. 
 

How is respecting law and asking for no violence considered incitation? Ironically it is a Big Lie falsely accusing Trump of inciting the crowd to storm the Capitol. 
 

Which parallel universe are you from?
 

 

 

What manipulative attempt to fool us!

 

7heaven is trying to manipulate us with his truth distortions.

 

The twitter post from Trump was only 4 hours after the attack on the Congress on 6 Jan 2021. This is obvious from the timing of the tweet! 

 

 

Trump only asked his Proud Boys and insurrects to move away after his son, Republican politicians and son-in-law Kushner begged him to do. 

 

Trumps tweet was posted only on 6 January at 4:13pm when the mob had already entered the Congress on 6 Jan. Later Trump published a video with same content. 

 

  • As an insurrection continues on Capitol Hill led by supporters of Donald Trump, the outgoing Republican president tweeted while political leaders begged him to intervene in the violent riots on Wednesday.

 

Further, at 2.41pm Trump instigated the mob with his tweet on Pence! Quote: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!" Trump said.

 

 

 

Don't let 7heaven fool you with his truth distortions. 

 

 

Edited by singalion
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, 7heaven said:


You have embarrassed yourself again. Which imagined world are you from? Lol
 

“k” means thousands and not millions. 

@7heavenmy honest mistake with units does not detract from the fact that twitter has a much smaller reach than Facebook (which the younger generation consider passé) or Instagram. Even the business/employment oriented LinkedIn has greater reach than twitter.

Слава Україні!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, 7heaven said:


You are desperately trying to save your face after embarrassing yourself to misunderstand K refers to millions when it actually means thousands. 
 

If he had intended for K to represent million, why did he spell millions out later out for Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and Instagram? And in any case, Facebook, WhatsApp do not only have millions of users. Therefore, my post about his numbers seem wrong.
 

And in which world uses K to represent millions in the first place? 😂 perhaps only in your own imagined world. 
 


 

 

 

Why do I embarrass myself if I clarify the numbers. 

 

It is clear that Sgmaven meant 230 million. 

 

It also has nothing to do with face saving as I didn't write the post. 

 

This mistake by sgmaven is still very harmless against your blatant error 7heaven, when you didn't know that Washington D.C. is not a city in the US state Washington in the West of US but situated between Virginia and Maryland in the east of the US. 

 

 

Edited by singalion
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, sgmaven said:

@7heavenmy honest mistake with units does not detract from the fact that twitter has a much smaller reach than Facebook (which the younger generation consider passé) or Instagram. Even the business/employment oriented LinkedIn has greater reach than twitter.

 

Exactly, twitter is a dwarf compared to facebook, instagram etc... 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, singalion said:

 

The numbers are correct, the k stands for millions, while facebook etc represent billions in units. 

 

In the last reported quarter, the number of global monetizable daily active users (mDAU) on Twitter amounted to 237.8 million users

 

 

The potential reach of Facebook is 2.11 billion users

 

=> Twitter is a dwarf compared to Facebook et al.

 

 

I stand amazed by the numbers.  Hundreds of millions of Twitter users,  and several BILLION Facebook users !!!!

 

And I am using neither of these two websites.  This keeps me practically SEGREGATED from the millions and billions of these interesting individuals.  This draws me even deeper in my misery,  realizing how INSIGNIFICANT I am!  I cannot contain my tears of shame,  hopefully I don't get too dehydrated. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, singalion said:

 

What manipulative attempt to fool us!

 

7heaven is trying to manipulate us with his truth distortions.

 

The twitter post from Trump was only 4 hours after the attack on the Congress on 6 Jan 2021. This is obvious from the timing of the tweet! 

 

 

Trump only asked his Proud Boys and insurrects to move away after his son, Republican politicians and son-in-law Kushner begged him to do. 

 

Trumps tweet was posted only on 6 January at 4:13pm when the mob had already entered the Congress on 6 Jan. Later Trump published a video with same content. 

 

  • As an insurrection continues on Capitol Hill led by supporters of Donald Trump, the outgoing Republican president tweeted while political leaders begged him to intervene in the violent riots on Wednesday.

 

Further, at 2.41pm Trump instigated the mob with his tweet on Pence! Quote: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!" Trump said.

 

 

 

Don't let 7heaven fool you with his truth distortions. 

 

 


The fact is Trump had actually called for peace and no violence, and to respect the law. This shows that he did not instigate and on the contrary asked for peace. 

 

Let us take a look at what Trump twit asking for peace and no violence: 


 

Next, do show us evidence of what you said about the 2.41pm twit “Further, at 2.41pm Trump instigated the mob with his tweet on Pence! Quote: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!" Trump said.

 

Assuming what you said about the 2.41pm twit exist, it did not call for anyone to attack the Capitol. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, sgmaven said:

@7heavenmy honest mistake with units does not detract from the fact that twitter has a much smaller reach than Facebook (which the younger generation consider passé) or Instagram. Even the business/employment oriented LinkedIn has greater reach than twitter.


Yeah, the number of Twitter users are smaller compared with other huge social media giants. The 230million users of Twitter from Business app was registered under the previous CEOs. Perhaps they were unable to come up with good strategies to increase the user numbers. 
 

With new boss Musk heading Twitter now, he will definitely do a better job with fewer staff. The number of Twitter new sign-ups have already increased since Musk took over which is impressive as he only took over for less than 1 month!
 

Musk did it while having to deal with the activists and media organisations proactively instigating businesses to suspend ads on twitter and mis-characterising his efforts to remove hate speeches, suspend extremists Antifa accounts (which is puzzling why they were allowed under previous Twitter CEO). 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, singalion said:

 

Why do I embarrass myself if I clarify the numbers. 

 

It is clear that Sgmaven meant 230 million. 

 

It also has nothing to do with face saving as I didn't write the post. 

 

This mistake by sgmaven is still very harmless against your blatant error 7heaven, when you didn't know that Washington D.C. is not a city in the US state Washington in the West of US but situated between Virginia and Maryland in the east of the US. 

 

 


You just embarrassed yourself by claiming Sgmaven use of 230k users with K being millions. He already admitted himself that he made an honest mistake with the units. 
 

Let us take a look at Sgmaven said: 

 

10 hours ago, sgmaven said:

I think we all need to put things into perspective. Twitter, while being "famous", does not actually have as many users as the top social media platforms. If you look at data published by the website Business of Apps, then you will realise that with about 230k users, twitter actually pales in comparison to the likes of Facebook (2.9 million), YouTube (2.6 million), WhatsApp (2.4 million) and Instagram (2.3 million). Even the relatively new upstart Tiktok has 1.5 million users, which is more than 6 times twitter's user base.


 

 

6 hours ago, sgmaven said:

@7heavenmy honest mistake with units does not detract from the fact that twitter has a much smaller reach than Facebook (which the younger generation consider passé) or Instagram. Even the business/employment oriented LinkedIn has greater reach than twitter.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, 7heaven said:


The fact is Trump had actually called for peace and no violence, and to respect the law. This shows that he did not instigate and on the contrary asked for peace. 

 

Let us take a look at what Trump twit asking for peace and no violence: 


 

Next, do show us evidence of what you said about the 2.41pm twit “Further, at 2.41pm Trump instigated the mob with his tweet on Pence! Quote: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!" Trump said.

 

Assuming what you said about the 2.41pm twit exist, it did not call for anyone to attack the Capitol. 

 

What time did the Capitol Police declare that the Capitol building to be secure? 8pm on 6 January. When did Trump tweet? 4:13am the next day...  More than 8 hours after the Capitol building was declared secure by the Capitol Police. Must be so difficult to tweet less than 40 words, because it takes more than 8 hours to do so...

Слава Україні!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, sgmaven said:

What time did the Capitol Police declare that the Capitol building to be secure? 8pm on 6 January. When did Trump tweet? 4:13am the next day...  More than 8 hours after the Capitol building was declared secure by the Capitol Police. Must be so difficult to tweet less than 40 words, because it takes more than 8 hours to do so...


Must be so difficult to please those people who are nip-picking and witch-hunting at everything and anything Trump says or does. 

By the way, did the current President Joe Biden or Kamala Harris twit about asking people not to participate in physical protests during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic was ravaging? If they did not, should we also pin the blame on Biden and Harris for fueling the pandemic and unrests from these protests? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Since u r here said:

it is not ended ?

 

glad that u can still support him!!!

those haters shd get on twitter and tweet instead!!! aplenty there


The ulterior motive behind the media organisations and activists disparaging Musk takeover of Twitter is clear as daylight.


For too long under the previous CEO, they can have Twitter censor or block twits that contradict their narratives or expose truths inconvenient to their preferred political masters. Now, under Musk, they can no longer do that and they are suffering from unprecedented meltdown. The meltdown became full-blown hysteria when Musk decided to restore Trump’s twitter account. Lol. 
 

And they are pulling all stops to make Twitter under Musk a failure by using the narrative of “threat to democracy” and “threat to free speech”. Such tactics are very common and a running playbook of these people. Unfortunately many unsuspecting ordinary people fall prey to them and get brainwashed. 
 

First, they write hit publications saying how firing half the Twitter staff will cause Twitter to be unstable and filled with hate speeches. This is in hope that none-the-wiser ordinary users stop using Twitter. 
 

Second, they also write hit publications saying how the firing of Twitter staff was abrupt and cruel to the staff. This is in hope to show Musk as a cunning or unsympathetic employer. However, they kept really quiet when shortly after Facebook and Amazon decided to fire 11,000 and 10,000 staff. This 11,000 and 10,000 staff are significantly more than the entire staff number of Twitter 7,400 or 7,500. 


Then they pressured businesses to withhold or stop advertising on Twitter. This is in hope to kill off the revenue stream of Twitter. 
 

Also, they decry Musk for charging $8 per month for the blue tick. However, they also decry Musk for firing half the staff. They seem to lack the intelligence to understand Twitter need income to pay the salaries of staff. 

Now, there are activists who are pressuring Google and Apple to remove Twitter from their platforms because Twitter is surviving very well and gaining even more users despite half the staff strength. And Musk has responded that he hopes not but if they do, he will create a new smartphone company. I hope he does actually so that Musk is not dependent and beholden to anyone. 
 

If that happens, it can be expected that these activists will ask their preferred politicians in power to investigate Musk businesses and personal lives for any violations of laws.
 

This is so predictable of these people. Their motives are clear; they want to destroy Musk because Musk is unwilling to do their bidding. 

Edited by 7heaven
meltdown
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, 7heaven said:

Also, they decry Musk for charging $8 per month for the blue tick. However, they also decry Musk for firing half the staff. They seem to lack the intelligence to understand Twitter need income to pay the salaries of staff.

 

I think the opposition to the USD 8 per month for the blue tick, lies in the fact that you don't really need to prove that you are, who you say you are, but just pay the USD 8 to get a blue tick by your account handle. This loophole caused some bad actors to pretend to represent some legitimate businesses, and caused mayhem.

 

So, from what was previously a free service to verify the identity of the account handle, to paying money just to get a blue tick and not go through verification. Don't you think something is seriously wrong?

 

Someone malicious could set up an account and pretend to be the CPF Board of Singapore, and tweet that "all the CPF monies have been frozen, and cannot be withdrawn until further notice". All false, if you bother to check, but it would cause panic amongst those who do not check, and may lead to a round of rash decisions amongst these individuals.

Слава Україні!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, sgmaven said:

 

I think the opposition to the USD 8 per month for the blue tick, lies in the fact that you don't really need to prove that you are, who you say you are, but just pay the USD 8 to get a blue tick by your account handle. This loophole caused some bad actors to pretend to represent some legitimate businesses, and caused mayhem.

 

So, from what was previously a free service to verify the identity of the account handle, to paying money just to get a blue tick and not go through verification. Don't you think something is seriously wrong?

 

Someone malicious could set up an account and pretend to be the CPF Board of Singapore, and tweet that "all the CPF monies have been frozen, and cannot be withdrawn until further notice". All false, if you bother to check, but it would cause panic amongst those who do not check, and may lead to a round of rash decisions amongst these individuals.


There are still verification checks.

 

You can try paying $8 and use “POTUS”. Let us know what happens. Lol. 
 

The confusion that there are no verification checks are propagated and sowed by the bad actors. They assumed because Musk fired some staff, there are no staff left to do verifications.
 

And it seems nobody questioned how rigourous and thoroughly the verifications were before Musk bought Twitter when it was free of charge. 

Edited by 7heaven
k
Link to comment
Share on other sites

52 minutes ago, 7heaven said:

There are still verification checks.

 

You can try paying $8 and use “POTUS”. Let us know what happens. Lol. 
 

The confusion that there are no verification checks are propagated and sowed by the bad actors. They assumed because Musk fired some staff, there are no staff left to do verifications.
 

And it seems nobody questioned how rigourous and thoroughly the verifications were before Musk bought Twitter when it was free of charge. 

The verification only started to happen after the bad actors had struck. In fact, there was one case involving the drug company Eli Lily, and insulin, that caused the stock of the company to tank.

 

Also, quite a few celebrities then started impersonating Elon Musk on Twitter, and got banned subsequently...

Слава Україні!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, 7heaven said:


The fact is Trump had actually called for peace and no violence, and to respect the law. This shows that he did not instigate and on the contrary asked for peace. 

 

Let us take a look at what Trump twit asking for peace and no violence: 


 

Next, do show us evidence of what you said about the 2.41pm twit “Further, at 2.41pm Trump instigated the mob with his tweet on Pence! Quote: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!" Trump said.

 

Assuming what you said about the 2.41pm twit exist, it did not call for anyone to attack the Capitol. 

 

 

Yes but this was 4 hours or more past the break in into the Congress and stopping the vote count.

 

You can look up the details yourself. It is all on the internet.

 

I m not your butler.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, 7heaven said:

The fact is Trump had actually called for peace and no violence, and to respect the law. This shows that he did not instigate

 

Why is there then a 6 January insurrection hearing at the Senate?

 

Because Trump was so peaceful not to send his mob to storm the congress?

 

How more deluded can you get, 7heaven?

 

What to know about the public January 6 committee hearings

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is scheduled on Thursday to hold the first of six public hearings where it will unveil new evidence collected against Donald Trump and a range of other operatives over the course of its 10-month inquiry.

The congressional investigation into the events of January 6, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, has said it has evidence to suggest Trump violated the law to overturn the 2020 election results.

 

What is the point of the hearings and what evidence do they have?

The select committee’s ambitions for the hearings are twofold: presenting the basis for alleging Trump broke the law, and placing the Capitol attack in a broader context of efforts to overturn the election, with the ex-president’s involvement as the central thread.

Among some of the evidence that has already become public include admissions from Trump’s top former legal adviser John Eastman, who admitted in emails obtained by the panel that his plan to obstruct Biden’s certification was unlawful – but pressed ahead anyway.

The select committee has also obtained White House records that Trump attempted to hide from the inquiry, before he was overruled by the supreme court, that indicated he lied to his supporters that he would march with them to the Capitol to send them to the building.

House investigators have also obtained testimony and photo and video from inside the White House as the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, including about how he appeared to obstruct the certification through inaction by refusing to tell the rioters to leave Capitol Hill.

The panel also expects to chart the re-emergence of the “Stop the Steal” movement by the Trump activist Ali Alexander and others, and how leaders of militia groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and the First Amendment Praetorian coalesced before January 6.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, sgmaven said:

The verification only started to happen after the bad actors had struck. In fact, there was one case involving the drug company Eli Lily, and insulin, that caused the stock of the company to tank.

 

Also, quite a few celebrities then started impersonating Elon Musk on Twitter, and got banned subsequently...


The verification has always been there even with the $8 charge. 
 

Yes, so the few celebrities impersonating are one of the bad actors.  Right now, Twitter if fast gaining even more users, and cleaning up the mess which the previous CEO left behind such as banning extremist Antifa members’ account. It defies logic why the previous CEO allow these extremists account to exist. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

Yes but this was 4 hours or more past the break in into the Congress and stopping the vote count.

 

You can look up the details yourself. It is all on the internet.

 

I m not your butler.

 

 


Yes, Twitter is the default and official mode of communication for the White House. Lol. 
 

Without Twitter, all modes of communication from the White House ceases to function. Lol. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

Why is there then a 6 January insurrection hearing at the Senate?

 

Because Trump was so peaceful not to send his mob to storm the congress?

 

How more deluded can you get, 7heaven?

 

What to know about the public January 6 committee hearings

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is scheduled on Thursday to hold the first of six public hearings where it will unveil new evidence collected against Donald Trump and a range of other operatives over the course of its 10-month inquiry.

The congressional investigation into the events of January 6, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, has said it has evidence to suggest Trump violated the law to overturn the 2020 election results.

 

What is the point of the hearings and what evidence do they have?

The select committee’s ambitions for the hearings are twofold: presenting the basis for alleging Trump broke the law, and placing the Capitol attack in a broader context of efforts to overturn the election, with the ex-president’s involvement as the central thread.

Among some of the evidence that has already become public include admissions from Trump’s top former legal adviser John Eastman, who admitted in emails obtained by the panel that his plan to obstruct Biden’s certification was unlawful – but pressed ahead anyway.

The select committee has also obtained White House records that Trump attempted to hide from the inquiry, before he was overruled by the supreme court, that indicated he lied to his supporters that he would march with them to the Capitol to send them to the building.

House investigators have also obtained testimony and photo and video from inside the White House as the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, including about how he appeared to obstruct the certification through inaction by refusing to tell the rioters to leave Capitol Hill.

The panel also expects to chart the re-emergence of the “Stop the Steal” movement by the Trump activist Ali Alexander and others, and how leaders of militia groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and the First Amendment Praetorian coalesced before January 6.

 


Lol. We all know why there was such a hearing and there are no hearings for to investigate how the sitting president Joe Biden is implicated in Hunter Biden shady deals with foreign countries. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, 7heaven said:


Must be so difficult to please those people who are nip-picking and witch-hunting at everything and anything Trump says or does. 

By the way, did the current President Joe Biden or Kamala Harris twit about asking people not to participate in physical protests during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic was ravaging? If they did not, should we also pin the blame on Biden and Harris for fueling the pandemic and unrests from these protests? 

 

Distraction, deflection distraction spotted...

 

What does Black Lives Matter now have to do with the 6 Jan events???

 

Biden and Harris weren't running the Federal Administration when the Black Live matter started, Biden was not US President at that time.

 

However, Trump the instigator of the mob run on the Congress was the US president on 6 Jan 2021 and did not concede his loss in the Nov 2020 election.

 

That is the big difference.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just now, 7heaven said:


Lol. We all know why there was such a hearing and there are no hearings for to investigate how the sitting president Joe Biden is implicated in Hunter Biden shady deals with foreign countries. 

 

Hunter Biden did not violate the US constitution.

 

Another lame attempt to distract, deflect spotted.

 

Please keep the proper discussion in the relevant threads.

 

Hunter Biden has nothing to do in this thread here.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, 7heaven said:


Yes, Twitter is the default and official mode of communication for the White House. Lol. 
 

Without Twitter, all modes of communication from the White House ceases to function. Lol. 

 

Sorry, it was a weird US president who used twitter as his means of communication and not the White House press.

 

Trump even terminated Secretaries and other staff through twitter.

 

It was Trump's choice of mode of communication to use twitter.

 

Instead of posting a video on the proper White House channels on 6 Jan, Trump published the video on his personal twitter account.

 

Please get the things straight.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, singalion said:

 

Distraction, deflection distraction spotted...

 

What does Black Lives Matter now have to do with the 6 Jan events???

 

Biden and Harris weren't running the Federal Administration when the Black Live matter started, Biden was not US President at that time.

 

However, Trump the instigator of the mob run on the Congress was the US president on 6 Jan 2021 and did not concede his loss in the Nov 2020 election.

 

That is the big difference.

 

 


Biden and Harris were the candidates who put themselves up for Presidential election. They kept mum when the protesters were gathered physically with no social distancing whatsoever in the middle of a pandemic. Did they use twitter to discourage people not to go out to protest and not turn violent? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...