“Unmasked”, by Andy Ngo, needs another look after Capitol incident, but “two wrongs don’t make a right”
BLM anti-police sign, Washington DC. B:M Plaza, June 2020
I’ll start this review by mentioning the Afterword of Andy Ngo’s new book, Unmasked. He presents his family background. His parents had been relatively well off, maybe, in Vietnam before the collapse of the country in 1975 (after Nixon negotiated the departure of American troops in 1973 – in my own young manhood, and, yes, this mattered in the days of the military draft, which Nixon “ended”). His parents’ wealth was expropriated and the family was treated to “reeducation” and typical far-Communist abuse. They became asylum seekers in the US in 1979. Back in 2016-17 I presented a lot of material on that issue now, as I was considering becoming more involved in some sort of housing than I finally did.
So a couple of big points to start. Ngo’s book was completed and nearing official publication and availability when the January 6 Capitol riots occurred. Appropriate criminal investigations are going on about that incident, but obviously the implications of where it might have led (however uncertain) are indeed very frightening.
However, “two wrongs don’t make a right”. The various riots and events he describes (especially in Portland and Seattle) were disruptive for many “bystanding” businesses and residents, who had nothing to do with causing the grievances expressed. So it is perfectly appropriate to castigate those responsible “on the far Left”. (There is no credible evidence that the far Left was involved undercover at the Capitol, however.)
Moreover, the world, as I experienced it socially., changed radically in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. Gay pride marches were canceled and bars closed, some for good (like Therapy in NYC, one of my favorites), and then others struggled to make outdoor and takeout models work later in the year. (Ironically, in some southern red states, they had more success remaining more or less open.) But, after the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis (and others, like Breonna Taylor in Kentucky), protests erupted, particularly (as well as in Minneapolis itself) in the Pacific Northwest where politicians and law enforcement did not want to challenge them. They were common in Washington DC and New York City, and some of them were destructive, and others were coercive, going into outdoor dining spaces and conscripting support. 16th St, at the intersection with Lafayette Park, became Black Lives Matter Plaza.
That sounds just, but some of BLM’s management, like co-founder Patrisse Cullors (her YouTube series “Resist” reviewed here Nov. 30, 2020), make no “apologies” for the group’s inception (back in 2013 after the Trayvon Martin case in Florida, maybe not the best possible example) connections to Marxism. But the idea of class struggle and wealth redistribution to workers became overshadowed by what PragerU appropriate calls “identarian socialism” and critical race theory, explored elsewhere (Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”, reviewed here July 21, 2020), with proposals for race-based reparative measures. Many well-educated “corporatized” white liberals (including many upper-income white gay men) bought on to using the BLM trademarks on their own social media pages, even assisting with measures like bail money, without awareness of the Marxist origins, as did whole cities, and then later found themselves somewhat embarrassed.
But before moving on I do have to mention again the significance of the January 6 event, and the almost indisputable role of President Donald Trump’s behavior in promoting it. This essay by Manny Otiko (let alone Umair Haque!) pretty well summarizes the belief that Trump seemed to be promoting the idea of a collective “white birthright” as a kind of alt-right tribalism, where individual weaknesses are covered by the supposed (if unjustifiable) superiority of their group. Obviously, this would become a tremendous threat to members of minority groups (normally “people of color”, but possibly others who set up groups, including LGBTQ, and disabled). The threat might be so great as to demand special deference from others (to join up in allyship when approached), beyond the more distant norms of personal interpersonal public conduct (“do no harm”) that we had become used to since perhaps the late 1980s. The existential nature of the threat, as perceived especially by (some) people of color, would abrogate the usual conditions for speech acceptability in the past, because almost any gratuitous speech could be seen as intended to endanger or provoke others, however remotely. As I type this, I feel somewhat startled by reports that some extremist Trump supporters actually wanted a Myanmar military coup here, just to shelter their own unearned cocoons from another “Gone with the Wind” reset.
Ngo’s full book title is “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy”, as published by Center Street (Hachette), in New York and Nashville. Yes, the title sounds deliberately ironic, given the politicization of wearing masks during a pandemic. Ngo starts out covering his own being “milkshaked” in Portland (and Carlos Maza, who used to produce great and funny videos for Vox, got into that fight with Stephen Crowder that started adpocalypse, would say, “milkshake them all”). It can lead to serious injury. Then the book becomes topical over twelve chapters. He covers the “autonomous republic of Chaz” in Seattle, an obvious reference to the former Soviet Union’s practice of calling some sub-republics “autonomous” oblasts. Chaz, in fact, broke into little separate sub-neighborhoods with their own tiny warlords. He returns to Portland and then covers radical ideas like eliminating the police.
In the early part of the book, you have the impression that the extreme left wing violence was catalyzed by the hardships of the pandemic. Pretty soon, however, Ngo is back describing the world pre-Charlottesville but after Trump came to power, with his discussion of the banning of Milo Yiannopoulos at lectures and then the entire history of Rose City Antifa, and the extreme loyalty to Marxism that it demanded. (Rose City is Portland.) This somewhat an “American Mutation” of ideology that goes back the ideology of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. Ngo covers some of the far Left movements in Europe (beyond communism) that arose before the World Wars. But these were based largely on class and the idea of unearned wealth. For example, in various stages of the Russian revolution, whole rich families on country estates were invaded and murdered. (I can remember back in 1970, on my first job with RCA in New Jersey as an adult, a co-worker one day mentioned Marcuse to me in a conversation in his office; it was on his mind. “Men shake hands”, he said. Ironic now.) Ngo goes on to show Antifa as more “organized” than it claims.
As extreme and shocking as some of the antics of last summer seemed to me, I had seen similar activism as a young man, especially before “my second coming” (as gay) in 1973. In December 1972 I “spied” on a meeting of the Peoples Party of New Jersey in a rowhouse in Newark, NJ. I would have been considered an oppressor because I was a salaried professional working for Univac and making all of $14000 a year. The platform of the party wanted to limit annual income for anyone to $50000 a year (was that for a family?) The residual threat to resort to violence and even call for a constitutional convention were in the platform. Leftist bookstores and campuses were places to recruit. There was a lettuce boycott at the time. But in the gay community in NYC (the GAA was on Wooster Street in the Village then) there was more of a cultural split, as many men were relatively closeted, but affluent and well presented, and tended to create friction with those who were less fortunate and more radical. Generally, low-income inner city neighborhoods were prone to lawless rule then, but it did not spread because there was no social media yet. Leafleting outdoors was the best that could be done. The South Bronx in NYC was the most lawless of all, but the suburbs were pretty “safe”. Companies tended to flee to the south, especially to Texas, where there was still more social segregation, especially in the school districts.
But what was new was that the lawlessness could invade downtown and sometimes upscale residential areas of some cities, especially in the north, and politicians would turn a blind eye, out of fear of the mobs. Especially noteworthy is the far Leftist claim of “people, not property” (when inflicting vandalism in urban businesses and sometimes residences), and that normal claims about property rights as made today by libertarians are abrogated by our history of slavery in the past. But of course many countries have that history (including communist ones). The Leftist claim in the riots, however, was especially concerned with the idea that an inherited “systemic racism” (more than just material wealth or income inequality, or even risk inequality as with the pandemic) sends a message to police and law enforcement that inappropriate or gratuitous profiling is “OK” and will inevitably happen (hence, “abolish the police”, or other demands for systemic remedy, however disruptive to bystanders).
Ngo covers the ways that far Left attacks become more personalized, with doxing, and cancel culture. That is somewhat different from the mechanics of terror from the right, which is more organized to use larger weapons. But there have been left wing gun attacks, such as at the Republican softball practice in 2017, and an attack in Dayton Ohio right after the El Paso attack in 2019. But sometimes Ngo is quick to call people by labels, such as David Hogg as a “left wing influencer”, which is a bit of an oversimplification. Hogg is now using capitalism, starting a socially responsible pillow company as a B-corp, while still at Harvard.
I do have journalists as friends who cover Portland and Seattle in person. When, last September, I asked one of them that “they” meet with Ngo, they asked me to delete the tweet because connecting them in public was too dangerous!
Andy Ngo himself is gay (Vox article, Zach Beauchamp). He had been known as a contributor to Quillette. His “conservatism” sounds so disloyal (or counter-revolutionary) to the Left, as far as its Overton window has shifted, but mostly he sounds very logical, reacting to Communism and its attack on the meaning of being an individual. Rolling Stone is less kind (EJ Dickson). I feel like having fun with pronouncing his last name because the first James Bond movie was “Dr. No” in 1961, a linguistic coincidence (remember the “three blind mice” as the movie starts). And, yes, the title of the book means something ironic during a pandemic, and it means something also in chess.
I would add that at a personal level, there is a split in our values, as to whether it is all right to admit to becoming a victim and asking (even begging for help), as evidence of some sort of personal failure. That idea remains counter to Left demands for “solidarity” and feeds into intersectionality. It also matters for the personal risk taking someone will share with others in a group. Far Left extremism (or for that matter on the far Right) demands that others join a mob (as in Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer“, 1951) and behave for the interests of “the group” and accept the authority of “the people”, and “get over themselves”, counter to norms of personal behavior that we had developed over the past decades.
All this said, it seems to me right now that the extreme Q-driven “right” has suddenly moved ahead in line as an existential threat to democracy now, given events in early January.
The book has many bw photos, usually on the left-facing page for a chapter.
Author: Andy Ngo
Title, Subtitle: “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy”
publication date: 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5460-5958-5 hardcover, also ebook
Publication: Center Street (Hachette), Introduction, Afterword, 12 chapters, endnotes, indexed
Link: Publisher link
(Posted: Tuesday, March 2, 2021 at 11:30 AM EST)