Was Andy Ngo asking for it?
Portland, OR, has become a summertime melting pot for Antifa activists and self-proclaimed Proud Boys–each year, it seems, both groups gather together in this town to clash like warriors on a field to show how they were ready to fight for their ideals, respectively a strong Old Glory maintaining freedom and traditional values, and a diverse society where everyone was free to live as he or she wished to do so. But this time, something was different--a journalist, the «Quilette» editor Andy Ngo, ended up in the Antifa's gauntlet, being thrown with milkshakes and punchhes. This day ended in the emergency room for him, sadly. Some people on the internet applauded unto this vicious action, called it rightful, regarding his employment with the Conservative outlet, others were shocked by the behaviour on Antifa's behalf, obviously threatening press freedom with physical violence. And there's good reason to be shocked, despite a left-winged majority contradicting this normally self-explaining point of view.
Going back to the numbers, at least hate crimes referring to the victim's gender identity barely decreased, from 124 to 119 crimes. This makes up a decrease of about 4.20 percent, comparable to the increase on crimes against one's sexual orientation. A slight balance, if you want so.
Crimes due to the victim's gender (assuming we're talking about crimes against women, as they might make up the majority of this field) have sharply increased, from 31 to 46, an increase of 48.39 percent. Whether this could become an ongoing trend to accumulate this way, we cannot tell yet, but one has to be on the watch when news of this kind should proliferate.
Coming back to the actual topic of this text, it's suspicious to read that Ms. Stanford so fiercely declined to comment on the incident she sought support for on the internet. Assuming she knew Ngo and his work, she might have expected him to having believed he looked for another example of how he would expose the left's hypocrisy, but through her reaction, she brought to him exactly what he wanted. No matter what might have been her intentions to not comment to him, she delivered him what he wanted to have. So did Bruso's likewise reaction when he deleted the story. He clearly showed that he was lying, therefore having floated the right's boat that too wanted to expose their hypocrisy, crowning them the stereotype of left-winged homosexuals and transsexuals. Bona note: Andy Ngo identifies as a gay man. Just in case anyone unaware of his sexuality might see a transphobic in him. To many, he relates to Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-winged troll/provocateur.
To shorten it up at this point, Ngo mentions a few other incidents that worked by the same schematic of raising angst about transphobic and homophobic hatred, but quickly withdraw once the public attention is there, because they know they would be prosecuted with defamation once the police investigated the case. That's why the police is usually unaware of any such crime when Ngo requested comments from them. He might not be lying, but he lacks the hard-boiled information that would be really interesting when reporting about such hoaxes (We'll come back to this terminology later). Normally, a journalist would refer to statistics by the police or the justice government in order to prove his or her case, but Ngo didn't; he, instead, chose to list numerous crimes that are supposed to prove his case. What the reader doesn't hear is how many actual crimes compare to these listed cases he collected. This way, the article becomes highly biased, obviously leading towards a certain mood the reader shall have when having finished the article. This piece is not about informing the reader, but about infuriating. It's about emotions, not about reason. This is not Conservative, but right-winged populist, on the way towards extremism.
We shall focus on one more article written by Ngo for a different news outlet before we'll move on to have a look at his authorship for his employer, the Quilette. It's important to know what he writes for other outlets in order to receive a full picture not only of his work but also of his way of thinking and his major concerns (beside his disliking for the Antifa). The third one he wrote was for the «Western Journal», and was subjected to so-called [hate crime] hoaxes. For those who may not know: Hoaxes are false-flag actions staged to either fuel a certain agenda or simply cause fury about a certain individual or group. We already had them in the previous examination on gay crimes in Portland, which almost exclusively consisted of hoaxes. None of these crimes included active commitment of physical violence, but only defamation.
Yet, hoaxes are a thing, and depending on which kind of news source you rely on, they either are more common than you think (Quilette), or they are rare but devastating (New York Times). The question is: How many of them are there anyway? Only these two examples are turning into different directions while actually writing about the same issue, namely real hate crimes and staged hate crimes. How can it be that such a disunity exists between the two aisles? The first instanced answer is easy: The bias. There's a disparity between the two sides when it comes to the right behaviour before minorities, the right tends to not grant them as much attention and support towards a synthetic equality (an enforced equality rather than equality through just competition à la pursuit of happiness), so they try to counter the left's overt attention towards minorities by painting a different picture of them, a picture of groups consisting mainly of criminals who would better be incarcerated rather than being granted unfair advantages. The left, on the other hand, has to be depicted as a pack of hypocrites in order to declass its arguments, or more technically speaking: To not feel urged to elaborate potential flaws in the left's arguments. It's up to one's personal views and experiences on prior debates with the right wing.
Now, back to the Western Journal article Ngo wrote. It literally is just a copy-paste work of what he once published via Twitter, an indefinite monography of hate crimes turned out to be hoaxes (for those who are interested to read it there can follow this ThreadReader site in which they were all compiled; the Twitter entry can be found here). The fact–which he also mentioned himself in his Twitter feed, but not in the Western Journal op-ed–that it only is an indefinite collection of random staged hate crimes. It hardly represents the greater mass of all the hate crimes, let alone those who could be proven wrong. Still, it invokes a populist picture of statistics inherently flawed and biased towards the liberal-leaning left. I don't intend to claim that Ngo spread lies straight away, because he doesn't–each incident he highlights is backed by local news media (oftentimes affiliated to what extreme right-wingers would call the mainstream media). One note has to be made for those who are going to read Ngo's entry: The first incident about the vandalised church doesn't highlight the fact that the organ player daubed the words Heil Trump on the church's wall. The right article would have been this one. Same source, but the more current, up-to-date article.
What Ngo particularly does is exploiting a gap not yet closed by responsible agencies: The gap of mentioning (hate) crimes that could be proven lies by the pretending victims. It's an open question not prosecuted by the agencies, so that the public is unaware of the victims-turned -offenders. This is not about defaming the actual victims but simply about transparency: The public has got a right to recognise how many people only pretended to have become victims to fuel an already dangerously polarised public debate, as if they managed to accelerate a decrease of right-winged punditry to accumulate hatred against minorities, or grow further solidarity with haunted minorities. To leave out such information only fuels the aforementioned debate, leaving space for conspiracy theorists and equal hatemongers. It also wouldn't create much more work, not require further bureaucratic measurements or employees to be paid, to refute incoming arguments from the Conservative wing. It just required incumbent employees to create one further chart regarding disproven hate crimes, and put in all the crimes that were wrapped up and fulfilled the presumption of a hoax. Every novice to the Microsoft Office package could fulfill such exercises with abandon. Why not long-term police department employees? It would bring a lot of benefits to the public debates via enforced clarity by little effort to be added.
On the other hand, I have to confess, journalists already put effort into scouring through the available data to unveil the data of disproven hate crimes. The aforementioned NYT article shows that
The Quilette's Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning didn't have much to hold against these bare numbers, but only–as Mr. Ngo already did on his own–mentioned a few cases that would back up their point, without providing a broader picture of the status quo. No-one intends to call the mentioned cases made-up but only to say that a fistful of incidents doesn't represent such a great picture; the US are more than approximately a dozen hate crime hoaxes over two decades. There are thousands of hate crimes who really happened. «Reason» quickly followed to include Ngo's thread of staged hate crimes and Quilette's work about the same topic nevertheless, but at least balanced the analysis of hate crimes in the era of Trump and recalled the incident between Native activist Nathan Philips and Covington Catholic high school student Nicholas Sandmann which sparked mutual outrage between the political right and left wings due to respectively different understandings of what has happened during their viral standoff. In the end, as it came out, Sandmann was in the right, forgiven the public defamation. In the end, it seems, you couldn't trust your eyes even before the invention of deep fakes. But this way, you should especially not trust every pundit on the internet with a blue check or TV just because he was employed by a major broadcaster such as Fox News or NBC. Sometimes, it's not someone's competence that got one employed, but charming and flowery phrases, promising the boss the pie in the sky.
We'll wrap his work for foreign news outlets up from here, but if you found him inspiring and want to read more by him, I would recommend to you this indefinite list on behalf of «Muck Rack», to find everything he has written so far, even on Twitter. As for his work for the Quilette, we're not going to examine this work, but only look what can be found, regarding the topics of his articles, and whether a certain kind of escapism can be found there, or if he tries to be more moderate, journalistic, informative instead of populist/emotional.
The incident
Andy Ngo is either a journalist or a blogger, this might be up to one's point of view. Stilll, he joined the event that annually takes place in Portland to cover it for Quilette, as a photojournalist. Quilette is known to be a more Conservative-leaning magazine that describes itself as a liberal-leaning magazine with a Centrist view. On the internet, he is an already well-known figure, expressing crucial views that are hardly bearable for many left-winged individuals in the US. But we'll come back to this later. As one can expect, in Portland, only radical left-wingers assembled to counter the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer march. Those who would counter the marches were expectedly knowing him, therefore they strictly knew they had to take revenge on him for what he said online, what he wrote for the Quilette, or whoever permitted him to contribute to them.
For those who might be aware of the brawls that take place in such clashes might argue that Ngo was lucky to only be hit by milkshakes and a hits that barely injured him (there's a theory stating that he was also hit by quickly drying cement blended into the milkshakes that were thrown at him, but this theory couldn't hold any verification). As the «Huffington Post» reported shortly after the incident, left-winged protesters experienced more severe injuries that were close to threatening their lives. Of course these injuries were not (usually) caused by clashes with right-winged protesters, but still, they experienced them during protests, they also didn't (reportedly) provoke these injuries. Still, it wasn't the severity of the actions that were committed at Ngo, but the fact that these actions were committed in the first place. Andy Ngo is acclaimed to be a journalist among his fellows in this métier. Therefore, support reached to him by journalists like Charlie Sykes (editor-in-chief of The Bulwark), David Reaboi (reporter with Security Studies Group, also contributor to The Federalist), Jake Tapper (CNN contributor) and even Eric Swalwell (Democratic presidential candidate from California), to name one famous individual outside of the journalistic profession. Especially journalists felt a certain heat when it was reported that Ngo was attacked, memories from the Sayoc incident in which faux bombs were delivered to public figures emerged, a further increase in escalating tensions towards press freedom were expected, now that even non-liberal journalists became targets towards violent attacks. In the most pessimistic, dystopian imaginations, the US became an authoritarian government in which insurgent militias persecuted journalists, chasing down to their own homes to murder them, in order to prevent them from reporting about the government, critically.
What was more frightening is that it was the Antifa that was evidently accused of having violated this journalist's integrity in execution of his duty. He was obstructed in his work by being assailed with milkshakes; of course this was a hardly aggressive attack during a clash between two such antagonised groups, it was almost as newsworthy as a fight between two football clubs' hooligans who met to battle one another. But in this case, we're talking about a journalist being attacked during such a protest, a neutral spectator whose only affiliation with the protest was to report about it after it had ended. To assail a man like him would be comparable to attacking the referee during a football match, stating that he ruled in favour of one team prior to the current match.
And this is where the breaking point was reached and at which critique emerged especially against those who sided with Andy Ngo after the milkshake incident–Ngo is known to have spread not only provoking statements, but he also endorsed equal content via Twitter, one of his preferred networks; he so far is followed by more than 213,000 individuals, and also left some actions there that shall be highlighted later on. What could also be found on his Twitter account a few days after the incident was a retweeted short video published by Jim Ryan, reporter of «The Oregonian», a local newspaper, at which Ryan covers Portland. Ngo was located amidst the protesters of both aisles, it's unknown why he was standing inside the mass rather than standing on the sideways to not become a target in the first place. Yet, only a few seconds on, he is thrown milkshakes from every side, while trying to get out. In a personal tweet, he will later announce that he was brought to the emergency room, that his camera was stolen, beside other personal goods. This, too, was a concern that should not take place if one was dedicated to a freer world with less hatred but more confidence, sociality, equality and respect. Even if you might not agree with what someone says or writes, one should be able to at least treat this very same person with a minimum amount of respect, protect this person from assails from any side, and support this person in times of need. As the old proverb goes: Treat anyone like you would prefer to be treated yourself. One might wonder how these people would answer a question related to this saying, regarding how they treated Andy Ngo when appeared among them.
If you want to know about how Ngo himself recounted the assail against his press authority, you can read the -- sometimes awkwardly biased -- interview on «Townhall.» Don't worry, it's just as you would expect it to be, but as with each incident that could end up before court, each side has to be heard, and since we're talking about sensitive issue, which the press certainly is,, we need to know what the victim has to say as well. Also, we try to be as balanced as can be in such times, when the frontiers are hardening more and more day by day. Audiatur et altera pars -- let's also hear the opposing party. To speak in a more Twitter-like manner: Listening doesn't equal endorsement.
What was more frightening is that it was the Antifa that was evidently accused of having violated this journalist's integrity in execution of his duty. He was obstructed in his work by being assailed with milkshakes; of course this was a hardly aggressive attack during a clash between two such antagonised groups, it was almost as newsworthy as a fight between two football clubs' hooligans who met to battle one another. But in this case, we're talking about a journalist being attacked during such a protest, a neutral spectator whose only affiliation with the protest was to report about it after it had ended. To assail a man like him would be comparable to attacking the referee during a football match, stating that he ruled in favour of one team prior to the current match.
And this is where the breaking point was reached and at which critique emerged especially against those who sided with Andy Ngo after the milkshake incident–Ngo is known to have spread not only provoking statements, but he also endorsed equal content via Twitter, one of his preferred networks; he so far is followed by more than 213,000 individuals, and also left some actions there that shall be highlighted later on. What could also be found on his Twitter account a few days after the incident was a retweeted short video published by Jim Ryan, reporter of «The Oregonian», a local newspaper, at which Ryan covers Portland. Ngo was located amidst the protesters of both aisles, it's unknown why he was standing inside the mass rather than standing on the sideways to not become a target in the first place. Yet, only a few seconds on, he is thrown milkshakes from every side, while trying to get out. In a personal tweet, he will later announce that he was brought to the emergency room, that his camera was stolen, beside other personal goods. This, too, was a concern that should not take place if one was dedicated to a freer world with less hatred but more confidence, sociality, equality and respect. Even if you might not agree with what someone says or writes, one should be able to at least treat this very same person with a minimum amount of respect, protect this person from assails from any side, and support this person in times of need. As the old proverb goes: Treat anyone like you would prefer to be treated yourself. One might wonder how these people would answer a question related to this saying, regarding how they treated Andy Ngo when appeared among them.
If you want to know about how Ngo himself recounted the assail against his press authority, you can read the -- sometimes awkwardly biased -- interview on «Townhall.» Don't worry, it's just as you would expect it to be, but as with each incident that could end up before court, each side has to be heard, and since we're talking about sensitive issue, which the press certainly is,, we need to know what the victim has to say as well. Also, we try to be as balanced as can be in such times, when the frontiers are hardening more and more day by day. Audiatur et altera pars -- let's also hear the opposing party. To speak in a more Twitter-like manner: Listening doesn't equal endorsement.
Andy Ngo's authorship, for Quilette and others
Andy Ngo declares himself to be a photojournalist, as it was mentioned before. But this doesn't mean he wouldn't also write texts, of course. In times of decreasing journalistic forces, one has to be a jack of all trades to survive. One must be as flexible as possible to not get under the wheels. Fortunately, there are outlets for every journalist of any couleur, even for those who might identify as part of the fringe right (although most of them are freelance journalists who share highly partisan, oftentimes doubtful or straight-out false information). This might also apply for Andy Ngo, although one might question whether he matches the standards of the Quilette, but this is up to the founder (he's the co-founder) and to anyone on one's own. As for now, it shall not bother us to question his affiliation with this magazine, but his writing. One of the topics that grind his gears to the fullest, it seems, is the proceeding Islamisation of the Western World, or what he views as such. Thus, one of his most critically received pieces is an opinion piece he penned for the left-leaning Wall Street Journal (heretofore referred to solely as WSJ). It is said to be a weak attempt to approach the more renown newspapers who enjoyed a universally positive reputation, since anyone with an email address was able to write an opinion piece for the WSJ without having any experience in the journalistic field, let alone work in this profession, either as a freelance journalist or as a full-time reporter for any newspaper or online outlet. Still, assuming that this was right, why would the Wall Street Journal hide this article behind a paywall, making it a subscriber-only piece, exclusive content for paying readers? Paying customers would at least expect an editorial board that lectured articles before they were published on their site. The news market has become a tough one due to the internet's competition on reporting the truth, much to the local journalism's disliking. Hence, we should assume that his piece, even in spite of many reader's and left-winger's disdain, was double-checked and thereby underwent a strict examination on the facts and the language. Now, I for myself am not a subscriber to the WSJ, and since they don't offer one a trial to read a certain amount of articles or as many articles as possible in a period of time, we all have to switch to a different source that is going to provide us with the text. What firstly sounds dubious and an easy bait for shady websites trying to lurk naïve browsers of the internet into a trap, it's foolproof for all of us: We can rely on an annotated edition of the comment on the website «Outline.» For those who still wish to read the piece at the original place, you can all follow this link here, and will be redirected to the WSJ piece Andy Ngo wrote.
What we all do have access to, though, is the response to this opinion piece, written by news editor Alex Lockie in the «Business Insider», at which he also writes about foreign policy. As we can read therein is that Andy Ngo stated in his piece that the famous London borough Whitechapel, known for the equally infamous serial killer Jack The Ripper who used to murder multiple women in this borough, was declared a no-go area due to its high crime rate, seemingly related to its equally high rate of foreigners living there (as an attached part of a map shows us too is that Europe's largest mosque was located in Whitechapel as well).
Without commenting on Lockie's piece correcting Ngo's claims about London's Whitechapel, what we can tell is that -- beside the fact that an alcohol-restricted zone next to a student building might not as effective as it doesn't seem at first glance -- Ngo was quick to judge during a short visit of the city which became the first European one to be ruled by a Muslim mayor (Sadiq Khan), he should've spent more time on getting to know the people, watching his surroundings to acknowledge the real London of the 21st century. What we have to highlight, even in spite of Ngo's weakly grounded arguments (most of his experiences can hardly be back-checked without visiting the respective borough oneself, beside the fact that police officers are carrying rifles due to recent murders on the streets, committed by terrorists on the one hand and gangs on the other hand), is that Lockie didn't manage to disprove many of his arguments; merely did he stick to a fistful of his arguments and stomped them aground. It didn't function to persuade at least me, which doesn't mean that this also applies to you, dear reader.
But all in all, the responsive opinion piece on Lockie's behalf was not as persuasive as it should've been in order to defend the English capital and its newly diverse society. Still, one could question one thing: Who drew the more apt picture of London's Whitechapel–Lockie, or Ngo? This is up to each on one's own. But without further ado, we should still throw a glance at his response to Lockie, or merely the overall reaction to his WSJ piece, including Lockie's response. Since he didn't want to leave this contradiction as it was by then, he too responded to Lockie's point of view, now on a website that is accessible to everyone–he published it in the «Spectator USA.» As I said before, he compiled some of the most noteworthy reactions to his piece (according to his point of view); as one will soon recognise, he chose the mentioned reactions selectively, highlighting responses from Islamist groups and figureheads to justify his piece in the very first place; it's likely there also have been multiple moderate Muslims who too were frustrated about Ngo's distorted image of London, but those may then not have been granted an appearance in his response, because this would have meant that his opinion could be named a balanced resumé of reactions on his piece, even a reflection on how to improve his later writings. But anything towards this direction would only consist of rumours on his intentions, rumours that cannot simply be verified except with assumptions that again had to be verified somehow. Consequently, any argument to usher Ngo into a right-winged conspiratorial perimeter would become a biased ridiculousness. Thus, we'll leave it be and move forward to examining further pieces. Before this, though, we will make some space for one honourable mention on Ngo's piece, a comment by a website that bears its author's name, or rather a moniker: The "White British Muslim," as he calls himself. He called the piece an example of brilliant journalism, but was disappointed about it anyway because Ngo is, according to him, a bigot. If you want to read his peace, follow this link.
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| The corpus delicti: A milkshake |
Going on for the next piece; about gay hate crimes it shall be, especially since it took place in Portland, the same place as Ngo met his milky fate. One might be unaware of the fact that there are actual hate crimes committed by homosexual individuals, since they don't seep to reach public attention, let alone the headlines. What is well-known and profusely reported about, on the other hand, are hate crimes against homosexuals, committed by heterosexual males, even Muslims. We all thereby remember clearly the shootout in the gay nightclub «Pulse» in Orlando, FL in 2016, in which 49 people were murdered (to recall: The New York Times coverage as it happened). But when it comes to hate crimes committed by outspoken homosexuals, one might be dumbfounded. There don't seem to be any, or the crooked mainstream media successfully managed to moot any public debate on them, and how to deal with them once they happen. Thus, Andy Ngo might have served us all well when raising our awareness on this long-forgotten spectre of violence that was haunting our peaceful society. And we grateful sheep simply didn't care. It's time for us to wake up and finally speak about it. Let's go!
To read the article, follow this link. What comes first to mind when reading past the screenshot Twitter post is that it might be true that social activists and probable victims of homophobic or transphobic crimes called upon society to support them in their case, but he didn't back it up with further cases beside the Sophia Stanford case, to show that a particular amount of those cases that went viral turned out to be lies to expose these phobias. It lies in abeyance, with little hope that it will be elaborated later on. Ngo introduced his thesis, but didn't argue it based on facts, but solely on the observation that several people called for support online. A weak foundation, but good enough for the New York Post, which leans right, as can doubtlessly be told with regards to the columnists that write for this newspaper.
Yet, at one point, Ngo seems to have made point, when he requested comments from staff at businesses along the busy intersection that were rumoured to have become showplace for a violent, probably transphobic encounter, seeking either for confirmation or negation of the story that went viral on the internet. As it seemed, the story was false, scripted to raise anger:
If we wanted to be mean, we could immediately ask: Oh well, when this happened at an intersection, but didn't lead passersby to help the intimidated couple that experienced this unwanted confrontation, the staff inside the businesses that -- no pun intended -- minded its own business would of course not recognise such an incident. But this would exactly be the reason why to believe Ngo: Maybe it really didn't take place; maybe the faux incident didn't happen and Bruso only looked for stories to justify his profession as a fat-queer activist. He would at least have made one fair point in his article on gay crimes, although we might wonder if this would already fulfill all requirements for defamation. As long as no particular person is being defamed publicly, this would apply only as a shameful attempt to severe a social problem we already experience fully even without any additional scripted encounters. One doesn't need to blow out a problem that is already problematic. The 2017 statistics on hate crimes, provided by the «Department of Justice» (DOJ) shows us an increase in crimes referring to one's sexual orientation from 1,076 to 1,130, an increase of 5.02 percent. Doesn't sound much, but regarding the fact that we're talking about a percental share of 15.9 percent of all crimes committed this year altogether, it is a lot. They're still 1,130 people who became victims to a crime only because they expressed themselves as who they are. An unbearable offense in a country that once was founded on the belief in freedom and self-determination, oppressed by a monarch of whom they got ride finally in 1776, 169 years after the first colony founded on American soil. Should this monumental spirit be forgotten, 243 years after? Leave behind the spirit of freedom to not protect those who need the unity's help? If yes, then this country can no longer be declared the country of infinite opportunities, but a regular country that doesn't serve its people.I spoke with staff at businesses along that intersection, but nobody I talked to had witnessed an attack. When Bruso’s post went viral on Facebook and commenters raised questions about the incident, she deleted the post.
Going back to the numbers, at least hate crimes referring to the victim's gender identity barely decreased, from 124 to 119 crimes. This makes up a decrease of about 4.20 percent, comparable to the increase on crimes against one's sexual orientation. A slight balance, if you want so.
Crimes due to the victim's gender (assuming we're talking about crimes against women, as they might make up the majority of this field) have sharply increased, from 31 to 46, an increase of 48.39 percent. Whether this could become an ongoing trend to accumulate this way, we cannot tell yet, but one has to be on the watch when news of this kind should proliferate.
Coming back to the actual topic of this text, it's suspicious to read that Ms. Stanford so fiercely declined to comment on the incident she sought support for on the internet. Assuming she knew Ngo and his work, she might have expected him to having believed he looked for another example of how he would expose the left's hypocrisy, but through her reaction, she brought to him exactly what he wanted. No matter what might have been her intentions to not comment to him, she delivered him what he wanted to have. So did Bruso's likewise reaction when he deleted the story. He clearly showed that he was lying, therefore having floated the right's boat that too wanted to expose their hypocrisy, crowning them the stereotype of left-winged homosexuals and transsexuals. Bona note: Andy Ngo identifies as a gay man. Just in case anyone unaware of his sexuality might see a transphobic in him. To many, he relates to Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-winged troll/provocateur.
To shorten it up at this point, Ngo mentions a few other incidents that worked by the same schematic of raising angst about transphobic and homophobic hatred, but quickly withdraw once the public attention is there, because they know they would be prosecuted with defamation once the police investigated the case. That's why the police is usually unaware of any such crime when Ngo requested comments from them. He might not be lying, but he lacks the hard-boiled information that would be really interesting when reporting about such hoaxes (We'll come back to this terminology later). Normally, a journalist would refer to statistics by the police or the justice government in order to prove his or her case, but Ngo didn't; he, instead, chose to list numerous crimes that are supposed to prove his case. What the reader doesn't hear is how many actual crimes compare to these listed cases he collected. This way, the article becomes highly biased, obviously leading towards a certain mood the reader shall have when having finished the article. This piece is not about informing the reader, but about infuriating. It's about emotions, not about reason. This is not Conservative, but right-winged populist, on the way towards extremism.
We shall focus on one more article written by Ngo for a different news outlet before we'll move on to have a look at his authorship for his employer, the Quilette. It's important to know what he writes for other outlets in order to receive a full picture not only of his work but also of his way of thinking and his major concerns (beside his disliking for the Antifa). The third one he wrote was for the «Western Journal», and was subjected to so-called [hate crime] hoaxes. For those who may not know: Hoaxes are false-flag actions staged to either fuel a certain agenda or simply cause fury about a certain individual or group. We already had them in the previous examination on gay crimes in Portland, which almost exclusively consisted of hoaxes. None of these crimes included active commitment of physical violence, but only defamation.
Yet, hoaxes are a thing, and depending on which kind of news source you rely on, they either are more common than you think (Quilette), or they are rare but devastating (New York Times). The question is: How many of them are there anyway? Only these two examples are turning into different directions while actually writing about the same issue, namely real hate crimes and staged hate crimes. How can it be that such a disunity exists between the two aisles? The first instanced answer is easy: The bias. There's a disparity between the two sides when it comes to the right behaviour before minorities, the right tends to not grant them as much attention and support towards a synthetic equality (an enforced equality rather than equality through just competition à la pursuit of happiness), so they try to counter the left's overt attention towards minorities by painting a different picture of them, a picture of groups consisting mainly of criminals who would better be incarcerated rather than being granted unfair advantages. The left, on the other hand, has to be depicted as a pack of hypocrites in order to declass its arguments, or more technically speaking: To not feel urged to elaborate potential flaws in the left's arguments. It's up to one's personal views and experiences on prior debates with the right wing.
Now, back to the Western Journal article Ngo wrote. It literally is just a copy-paste work of what he once published via Twitter, an indefinite monography of hate crimes turned out to be hoaxes (for those who are interested to read it there can follow this ThreadReader site in which they were all compiled; the Twitter entry can be found here). The fact–which he also mentioned himself in his Twitter feed, but not in the Western Journal op-ed–that it only is an indefinite collection of random staged hate crimes. It hardly represents the greater mass of all the hate crimes, let alone those who could be proven wrong. Still, it invokes a populist picture of statistics inherently flawed and biased towards the liberal-leaning left. I don't intend to claim that Ngo spread lies straight away, because he doesn't–each incident he highlights is backed by local news media (oftentimes affiliated to what extreme right-wingers would call the mainstream media). One note has to be made for those who are going to read Ngo's entry: The first incident about the vandalised church doesn't highlight the fact that the organ player daubed the words Heil Trump on the church's wall. The right article would have been this one. Same source, but the more current, up-to-date article.
What Ngo particularly does is exploiting a gap not yet closed by responsible agencies: The gap of mentioning (hate) crimes that could be proven lies by the pretending victims. It's an open question not prosecuted by the agencies, so that the public is unaware of the victims-turned -offenders. This is not about defaming the actual victims but simply about transparency: The public has got a right to recognise how many people only pretended to have become victims to fuel an already dangerously polarised public debate, as if they managed to accelerate a decrease of right-winged punditry to accumulate hatred against minorities, or grow further solidarity with haunted minorities. To leave out such information only fuels the aforementioned debate, leaving space for conspiracy theorists and equal hatemongers. It also wouldn't create much more work, not require further bureaucratic measurements or employees to be paid, to refute incoming arguments from the Conservative wing. It just required incumbent employees to create one further chart regarding disproven hate crimes, and put in all the crimes that were wrapped up and fulfilled the presumption of a hoax. Every novice to the Microsoft Office package could fulfill such exercises with abandon. Why not long-term police department employees? It would bring a lot of benefits to the public debates via enforced clarity by little effort to be added.
On the other hand, I have to confess, journalists already put effort into scouring through the available data to unveil the data of disproven hate crimes. The aforementioned NYT article shows that
[...] of an estimated 21,000 hate crime cases between 2016 and 2018, fewer than 50 reports were found to be false. The center believes that less than 1 percent of all reported hate crimes are false.Now these are numbers that would hardly tell us that hate crime hoaxes were so common we had to fear a future rise that would lead us to a dystopian reality of hoaxes leading us towards collective suspicion, where no-one could trusts one's next, believing he could call for a witch hunt on his or her neighbour because he or she didn't like him or her. Because this is what such some incidents cause when there is incomplete information available for the public access. It shouldn't be up to journalists to do the government departments' work, nor any NGO's or non-profit organisations'. The government has got its responsibilities and tasks. If it doesn't execute them properly, it has proven to be ineffective and has to either be removed or replaced. This should be up to the people to decide which choice to prefer.
The Quilette's Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning didn't have much to hold against these bare numbers, but only–as Mr. Ngo already did on his own–mentioned a few cases that would back up their point, without providing a broader picture of the status quo. No-one intends to call the mentioned cases made-up but only to say that a fistful of incidents doesn't represent such a great picture; the US are more than approximately a dozen hate crime hoaxes over two decades. There are thousands of hate crimes who really happened. «Reason» quickly followed to include Ngo's thread of staged hate crimes and Quilette's work about the same topic nevertheless, but at least balanced the analysis of hate crimes in the era of Trump and recalled the incident between Native activist Nathan Philips and Covington Catholic high school student Nicholas Sandmann which sparked mutual outrage between the political right and left wings due to respectively different understandings of what has happened during their viral standoff. In the end, as it came out, Sandmann was in the right, forgiven the public defamation. In the end, it seems, you couldn't trust your eyes even before the invention of deep fakes. But this way, you should especially not trust every pundit on the internet with a blue check or TV just because he was employed by a major broadcaster such as Fox News or NBC. Sometimes, it's not someone's competence that got one employed, but charming and flowery phrases, promising the boss the pie in the sky.
We'll wrap his work for foreign news outlets up from here, but if you found him inspiring and want to read more by him, I would recommend to you this indefinite list on behalf of «Muck Rack», to find everything he has written so far, even on Twitter. As for his work for the Quilette, we're not going to examine this work, but only look what can be found, regarding the topics of his articles, and whether a certain kind of escapism can be found there, or if he tries to be more moderate, journalistic, informative instead of populist/emotional.
His topics on the Quilette
His latest writing dates back to April 22, 2019, when he wrote about the Iranian columnist Jaleh Tavakoli, who lives in Denmark after having fled from her homestate to live as a free, independent woman. In Denmark, social services threatened to take away her child because her child could not grow up normally under constant police precaution and such a dangerous environment (Ngo writes she survived a jihadist attack in 2015). What needs to be minded about this topic is that as it seems, only right-winged outlets wrote about her case, seemingly to exploit it to expose liberal hypocrisy on the diverse society. Thus, we find articles on the topic by the «Gatestone Institute», «WND» or «Breitbart.» There's little sympathy for the mother's cause, but allotted hatred against liberal governments who overreact in regards to child safety. No surprise Ngo joined the bandwagon of indirect Islamophobia and Illiberalism.
The second article that appears on his authorship page on the Quilette again deals with Islam, although more in shape of a review on a book that was starred to become a critically received movie which many festival hosts seem to have avoided to present in spite of the mainly positive reviews; they surely were fearful of what could happen to the audience if they presented it, perhaps even terrorist attacks. It's understandable not everyone was joyful to add it to the line-up. Now, the third article finally is different, somehow, it deals with hyperventilating individuals we all might recall from our own experiences. It's likely a story similar to those we examined before, so it would be of no worth to again step into it. For those who dare to read it, it has been linked, but we can tell from this point on already is that the entire story was over-interpreted, since it's not usual that especially people of African-American heritage would holler at people for reporting them, although this already bears an underlining issue, namely everyday racism that not seldom ends lethal for the those who now insulted a woman for reporting them to block the driveway (an issue that would normally be solved by communicating with one another. It doesn't need any intervention by third parties. Yet, regarding former viral news on women reporting springtime events of families having a BBQ in the park, cashing paychecks, mowing their lawn, or even selling soda at the pavement. White people have been more offensive towards African-Americans than vice versa).
To shorten this overview, let's just take a quick grasp on what else he wrote, more superficially: Going through his contributions on this site (state: 05 July 2019), his major issues, about which he wrote 10 out of 13 articles, concern gender and academics, technically speaking the radical liberalism that maintains a hegemony at college campuses, which continuously develops an ideological monotony. One article he respectively dedicated to Islamophobia hoaxes and young English schoolgirls and graduates joining ISIL in its jihad. The rest of his authorship invariably dedicates to the culture war, “grievance studies,” Jordan Peterson and free speech on college campuses for Conservatives. Frankly, and without any concern about bias, one can tell that Ngo certainly follows an agenda, consisting of focusing on the left's hypocrisy (which is given, one must admit, even though it might not match for each self-proclaimed liberal), and Islam, which recovers its existence in the Western World, centuries after the fall of the caliphate al-Andalus at the Iberian peninsula. Of course no-one is free from following one's own agenda, or ideology, just as one might prefer to describe it. It only becomes a problem when it overtakes one's personal way of thinking in such a way that one becomes refractory to criticism from anyone not driving parallel to one's own ideology. In Ngo's case, a different phenomenon of the echo chamber issue emerges: That one cannot any longer dedicate one's time or efforts to any issue that would actively criticise the personal ideology. One's personal ideological ideal can only prosper healthfully when one also takes up and processes criticism from the opposing aisle, or otherwise, gaps and flaws that would not be detected by any like-minded individual would prevail. This issue in particular will only manifest more and more the longer one stays in one's echo chamber, growing more stubborn throughout time. Finally, the prevailing issues that could have been deleted by venturing to discuss different points of view are irrevocably installed as immaculate matters-of-fact. The most rational minds are those who are able to criticise and reflect their own perspectives. The most rational minds are those who never obey themselves to a certain direction, to common sense in total, to a group of people who act alike, running off the cliff like a blind flock of sheep. The problem nowadays, though, is that those who call themselves rational are those who staunchly follow the aforementioned requirements towards becoming blind followers, hypnotising themselves in utter numbness to the discovery of a mutual solution, to the issues surrounding the problem. They blind their eyes with flashing lights of biased, half-baked information verifying their views. They stack their echo chambers with parrot boxes, keeping out anything else, stigmatising disliked, yet provocative outlets either leftist or fascist, as it matches their enemy, thereby dragging moderate, useful outlets into one pit with those that are truly perilous in regards to the public discourse and public safety (If you doubt the latter issue, than imagine what kind of news sources future serial killers might read in order to inform themselves. Or think about Cesar Sayoc's truck and the sticker upon it, reading Dishonest CNN sucks).
Ngo way! Andy Ngo's extremism
Many Conservative writers and journalists, but also Jake Tapper, have defended Ngo and condemned the attacks against him, calling it an attack against the press freedom, but little did these people know about him. There's nothing to complain about this, there are many people calling themselves journalists since one doesn't need to reach a certain diploma to call oneself a journalist. One could just open a WordPress blog and start writing, then register on LinkedIn and declare oneself a journalist. If one is therefore accepted as a journalist, this depends on the public opinion. But as long as there are acclaimed journalists who would defend this man and decry Twitter hashtags like #AndysNoJournalist (also a poor choice; they surely missed the chance to name it #AndysNgoJournalist), there surely is a question on who to declare a journalist, and who to not keep this title.
Back to a question we have to ask ourselves when thinking about his more unusual or at least unexpected defenders: Why did they know little? Do they know little about him, or could they justifiably defend his case? Fortunately, we are all able to find out, we all do have an internet connection (if you don't, you'll have to prove you received this blog post in any other, extraordinarily inconvenient means of acquaintance, thus must be a true fan of my texts. Thoughts and prayers to you, old sport!), and so, we can make up our mind on him by reflecting his actions traceable on the internet. Thankfully, a person called «Antifada» compiled on some of his controversial, provocative and downright disgraceful actions that left their marks on his internet profile, also giving evidence on how his own way of thinking might be shaped. Let's have a look into some of them:
- Ngo was fired from Portland State University's Vanguard for consciously misquoting from video
Andy Ngo worked as a multimedia editor for the student-run Vanguard newspaper of his university, until he shared a video of a man intently claiming that apostates were being killed in an Islamic State, thereby falsely framing an idea under which Islam stood for the murder of heretics when it became the state's religion and executor of law and order. In reality, the man never said these words, and to put his entire speech during the videos Ngo shared required a certain bias that wanted him to say something like this in order to verify one's idea of what Islam meant. This violated the Vanguard's ethics, and so, they had to fire Ngo, who was previously published in this newspaper, since his pieces could be found as qualitatively appropriate. Their justification of his dismissal can be read here.
Such a mistake doesn't need to mean that he was a bad journalist per se, since he previously published a lot of worthwhile pieces that stood for what they are supposed to stand, namely qualitative journalism that informs the reader about the status quo. Thus, one should avoid to take this incident to ultimately explain that Ngo can by no means be declared a journalist. Let's read on instead, and see what else could be found.*** - Trump rants about journalists for working together with left-winged informants
It is not unusual that journalists work together with unsavoury individuals, and sometimes, people tend to denounce them for exactly this, claiming they proactively gathered false information to frame a certain narrative. Such a behaviour might apply to outsiders who are not aware of how to gather information to write an article on a topic that might require information by insiders. Also, they might not be aware of the fact that true journalists are able to separate worthwhile information from faux information that really was useless. In the outcome, all it takes to acquire information from inside is an advanced understanding of the human nature and, occasionally, a polygraph, just in case. But a journalist would be able to tell something like this single-handedly, maybe throwing in an anecdote or other kinds of experience from the working day and how he or she once looked for dropouts of a scene he or she intended to write an article about (or, being fully into Gonzo journalism, joining the scene and looking for someone to help introducing oneself to it). Thus, one might imagine that Ngo knew about this. But n(g)o, he doesn't seem to, as one Tweet of his tells. Verbatim quote who don't want to open the Twitter link themselves (additions in brackets by me for further understanding):
» Important to document Jason Wilson’s reliance on antifa ideologues in his writings. Just google Jason Wilson + Mark Bray (chair professor for comparative education at University of Hong Kong, author), Alexander Reid Ross (lecturer at Portland State University, author), Shane Burley (Journalist, author), Spencer Sunshine (Researcher, writer, activist) to see how he subtly mainstreams the extremist ideas of antifa ideologues in publications like Guardian. «
First of all, there's nothing bad about having a couple of informants to gather information, but to claim that those who might have knowledge on a topic to share are immediately linked to a scene, let alone active members of the same, is a shameful suggestion that first needs to add some arguments to not fall through as a prejudice that is not a manner to work by when being an editor for a news outlet, which Ngo knowingly is. Journalists don't throw each other under the bus but have one another's back. Also, Ngo didn't deliver any arguments in this thread. It might be that each of them (or only some of them) who were mentioned do have connections to active Antifa members. But this doesn't mean that they would fight with them in the summertime brawls–it could cost them their fellowship at the university they work with (applying to Bray, Ross). In conclusion, to shame a journalist to have connections with Antifa to be provided firsthand information is an obvious defamation to a journalist for simply doing what a journalist has to do. Ngo played himself with this tweet. Many Antifa activist are excellent researches documenting right-winged violence good enough to even support the police (which is the case for the Lübcke case in Germany, in which an Antifa researcher delivered precious information on the alleged murderer, Stephan E.).***
- Andy Ngo, and Quilette in general, worked together with far right organisation Atomwaffen Division compiling a hitlist of journalists
This is by far one of the most telling points to be made, and one can be glad to not only rely on tweets claiming this, but also having actually researched articles. Because such some claims, if wrong, can be one of the most threatening, declassing, and also one of the most shameful points to be made about someone. But if such a claim is right, it can function as a trump card against a so-called journalist, exposing someone to be nothing bu a stooge to outright terrorism. So much for Ngo's fear of Islam overtaking the Western World and replacing Western culture with... What? Oriental culture? Perhaps. But whatever, it doesn't matter, this bullet point is about the Quilette's support of the US far right organisation Atomwaffen Division. But first of all, what is the Atomwaffen Division? To put it bluntly, the Atomwaffen Division is a white supremacist terrorist organisation planning on committing attacks against journalists (since they are all intertwined with Antifa, therefore the enemy of the pople, which have to be eliminated) and to accelerate the culture war to fight it out at last (a scenario that, according to them, can be imagined as the Judgement Day as it is described in the Bible, in John's Revelations). To support this case, the Quilette firstly offered self-proclaimed researcher Eoin Lenihan a platform for his study about connections between researchers, journalists and the Antifa, having undertaken a study of more than 20,000 Twitter profiles that fulfilled the respective presumptions. So far, so poorly and vaguely created. If it wasn't for anything that followed after this, one could've laughed it away, even the fact that many right-winged outlets like Russia Today, the Red State, Breitbart and so on picked it up and republished it, therefore providing Lenihan a wide range of attention.
As it's said, Quilette offered him a platform to further elaborate his study and emphasise examples that underline his arguments. Still, nothing too unusual, in the tribal polarisation, it's common sense to support one another by expediting such some findings to again verify existing assumptions.
In the outcome, 15 journalists have been revealed by this study, fifteen of them who prior to this study enjoyed their anonymity on the internet (which to some of them is essential in order to continue their work; especially researchers are vulnerable since they dedicate their entire profession to a job that keeps them inside a snake pit, impossible to be bitten or asphyxiated until their identity becomes publicly exhibited). To use the jargon of the internet, they were doxxed. There's specific software that can be used to extract information such as one's home address, name, and so on. It's all derived from one's IP address. Of course this is illegal, but who thought that the use of such some sensitive information was anyhow legal? It would be naïve to highlight especially this fact, rather than the causation of vulnerability and threatening of life to all these men and women.
Although it might be true that no-one was murdered, neither the ones on the list, nor any other ones that were affiliated to the Quilette or the fringe right that promoted or committed domestic terrorism anyhow. Still, to support any kinds of terrorism, especially right-winged terrorism, which by far constitutes the major threat to public safety in the US (what we can tell by the hate crime offenders' ethnicity: In 2017, 50.7 percent of them were white, while only 21.3 percent of them were African-American. Either did the FBI, which provided these numbers, not mention oriental-looking offenders, or included them in the term of Asians), is a rigged affair that not only denounces one's journalist ideal, but also could be declared an offense by itself. For those to whom it would be too much work investigating these numbers, they all can read the «Intelligencer» article released this year (2019) and enjoy seeing the statistics for 2019 which were seemingly unavailable on the FBI's page. What has to be highlighted simply is that any kind of scaremongering about the Great Replacement or a culture war that, according to the fringe right, was at stakes, to fight a final battle to judge who was superior and therefore going to prevail in the future, whether it'd be the right or the left, accompanied by respective ideals, is not only false but also causing actual threats to those who watch over them and those they have declared their natural enemies. Those who fear the self-erected Potemkin villages of life-threatening minorities like Meso- and Latin-Americans, Muslims from afar, or left-leaning liberals are the hazards the US society experiences, even in spite of the GOP and its sympathisers maintaining unaware to it with a blind eye to the right-hand side.
In this inserted paragraph, it has already been highlighted that some journalists' lives have been threatened although the reconstruction of what the article–published by the «New Republic» (it will be cited again in a later part of this text)–didn't mention anything like this yet, but it will now be a concern. Why? Because Eoin Lenihan is not any ordinary right-winged pundit roaming the vasts of the internet. His study has inspired members of the fringe right organisation Atomwaffen Division to visualise the findings interwoven with his own personal views on their work, in the most brutal way he (or anybody) could think of. One could easily tell what this meant: To reveal the journalists' names because they exposed criminal attitudes inside the scene was already a crime that could be compared to negligent homicide. Now, the organisation that already planned terrorist attacks showed just how dangerous this exhibition could be.
This is how the story ended so far, fortunately. Of course these antifascist journalists never lived an easy life, and of course do they know this. They don't complain about it, unless their life and their families are being threatened. The only other exception is when their identities are going viral and/or the (federal) government either puts a blind eye on this major source of domestic terrorism or even is undermined by the same. At the moment, recalling Trump's comments on the Charlottesville incident at which that the neo-Nazis were some very fine people, and Trump's chronology of racism (indefinitely compiled by «The Atlantic»).
As I said before, some of you people might not be fine with the first mentioned source, namely «The New Republic». To some of you, this source might appear biased and therefore incredulous. Even though this view might already clarify that you perhaps were unresponsive to the bare cruelty of the whole jeopardy the fringe right poses in today's Western society, one could refer to you the blog entry that was published on the same topic by the «Columbus Journal Review». If this doesn't help, nothing can. As the mention in the bottom of the article and the parenthesis in the last paragraph of the article lined out, the woman who wrote the article too was part of the study as well as the video that appeared twice on the internet–once, initially, and a second time, in an adjusted version with more Atomwaffen Division insignia, after the video's first version was shut down due to several reports to YouTube. Even if the video might still be up and well, it is not going to be shared here, to not provide it with further traffic. Those who want to see it can look it up themselves. What shall be left of this bullet point is the danger Andy Ngo's Quilette causes when it treats its contributions so carelessly. Even if they meant no good with letting Eoin Lenihan publish his made-up study in their outlet to gain traffic, they behaved irresponsible on account of their fellow journalists. If anyone of them had died by an attack of the Atomwaffen Division, their blood stuck on Claire Lehmann's and Andy Ngo's hands.
Short notice: On the very same day as Lenihan's elaborated article on his study findings was published on the Quilette, Ngo shared, on his personal Twitter account, a quote by Lenihan, from his article. This should at least prove that he believes in what Lenihan writes, although it would be too far-fetched to accuse him of an individual complicity in the video. On the other hand, as a chief-editor for the outlet he co-founded, he should be responsible for what is being published there. Thus, we should be able to arguably assume he is responsible, an abettor for the consequences of the faux study and the article that followed up.
*** - Andy Ngo's affinity with hate crime hoaxes continued
We previously spoke about Andy's fondness for hate crime hoaxes, although he hardly ever refers to statistics that would prove is point, although their cold precision are integral to make a valid point, especially as a journalist. Normally, we could simply say that the topic was finished, he lost all integrity when talking about such controversial topics because he only relies on initial cases rather than statistics that provide a broader picture, presumably because they would prove him wrong, as reports that were mentioned earlier in this text were able to argue, relying to statistics provided by the FBI. Why bother to again look at such a text? Because he wrote about it in a different news source, one that even appears more serious than a biased news outlet without a history in print. But this is only the appearance at first glance. After doing some research, the picture clears, and gives a greater outlook about who we are talking about: The City Journal, which published Ngo's story, was founded in 2008 by the Manhattan Institute, a Conservative think tank with a focus on economics. Their City Journal, on the other hand, publishes incisive commentary on urban policy, politics, and culture, as they describe themselves on Twitter. Regarding the Manhattan Institute's personal leaning, it's no surprise that somebody like Andy Ngo would have an easy standing in the City Journal, even with his controversial topic–Conservatives not seldom bear a vivid disliking of liberals' social openness, about their hedonist lack of boundaries towards any direction. Hence, any criticism on them, no matter from whom, is wholeheartedly welcome. Then, the editors will even dare to bend the rules as long as the point matches the reader's probable interest. And, frankly, who will ever question the arguments mentioned in the article, let alone back-check them for their credibility? Each of them will believe in the journalists and editors behind the articles. On Twitter, blue checks assure the credibility, and sometimes, it's just the verification of one's presumptive beliefs that justifies sharing something that might as well be a made-up story, as Jussie Smolett's crime hoax.
In the end, to blindly trust an outlet on the internet just because it appears reputable in the cosmetics and because it was founded by trustworthy individuals who graduated in renown universities, even acquired academic titles (which applies for Claire Lehman, who studied forensic psychology, but dropped out of her studies before graduating, due to ideological and bureaucratic reasons, about which she wrote in a separate article herself). Quilette, so to say, provided right-winged pundits like Ngo a professional, intellectual platform. Not least because of this did the Quilette also reach the attention of «POLITICO Magazine» contributors who wrote about it, calling it the voice of the intellectual 'dark web.'
Still, this point refers to further articles of Ngo, dealing with so-called hate crime hoaxes, which he dedicates most of his work as well. A platform that offered him support was mentioned only a few lines before, the City Journal. Additionally to what I said about it before, one can highlight the fact that Twitter offered to them a blue check, thereby providing them with credibility in public attention, although one might wonder why they received it. Their self-description exclaims dedication to urban development, albeit a different aspect of their work might be recognised by some: Their articles are comparably short. Compared to different outlets who have a more cultural, more societal topics such as urban living. Even when topics such as the decrease of people living in more rural communities while big cities are growing further, disappointment arises when the article suddenly ends when there was potential to continue writing about it, including commentary by those who decided to live there when living conditions become harder. Their texts, without any biased point of view on them, could be longer, thus could be more informative. If this meant that fewer texts would be published per month, so what? Qualitative journalism should not be about producing as much input as possible, but about manufacturing worthwhile articles that inform readers about staggering issues, such as decaying rural areas that especially hurt the Old South, a mainly Republican part of the US.
Ngo, of course, didn't write about urban living, decaying communities, or astronomic costs of living in cities like New York City or San Francisco–he wrote about Inventing Victimhood. As one can imagine, it was about hate crime hoaxes exposed oftentimes by local newspapers. For those who want to read his short piece on his lifetime issue, here's the link. Needless to say, he follows the same procedure as usual: Mentioning a couple of cases he could find during extensive research, but still lacks absolute numbers, so that one can either be as upset as Ngo hopes the reader will be after having read the article, or one wonders whether these few cases even outline a broader, more frightening cause, such as an epidemic of hoaxes that pillory innocent victims. We don't know, because such statistics don't exist. It would be up to journalists to assemble in newsrooms and gather such data over a certain period of time, to afterwards present the results of their monumental project on hate crime hoaxes in the US. Unfortunately, Ngo never did this, and so, the interested reader will be left with his or her unawareness, forced by the author to outraged by selected cases of hate crime hoaxes. Again, this has got nothing to do with journalism, this is the work of a tabloid contributor who directs the reader into a certain direction, abandoning journalistic neutrality, changing it for the amplification of hatred against minorities as well as the left. Hence, Andy can hardly be called a journalist. His métier is the New York Post, not the New York Times; the Daily Mail, not the New York Daily News.
*** - The Quilette's affiliation with racist sociologist Noah Carl
On the first May of 2019, the English «Guardian» broke a story that one might not have imagined to appear in 2019, unless as a scam for April Fools day. Unfortunately, it was no April Fools joke, but reality. The headline read as following (for those who did not click on the link):«Cambridge college sacks researcher over links with far right»
Firstly, this doesn't sound too exciting, since it is common sense even among liberals that colleges and universities lean more towards the left, thus hold an inherent suspicion towards those students who lean towards the right, especially when their ideological leaning is being expressed openly and partially viciously. In this case, the problem, even though the first introductory phrase insists that it might just be another case of left-winged snowflakes combating free speech. This time, exceptionally, students and professors didn't undertake a hate crime hoax that would have float Ngo's boat. This time, it was about a racist sociologist who excavated an old myth that experienced a high time during the Third Reich's era and before, when biologists and anthropologists examined human beings from different cultural backgrounds to prove they were intellectually different from one another, especially depending on where they came from. Nowadays, these myths could be proven wrong and racist because they assumed that white people from Europe were intellectually superior to African people(s). Usually, so-called biologists and anthropologists proved their obscure theses with the shape of the peoples' head. As I said before, this myth about racial superiority was exposed as racist long before, so one might think that it was scrapped afterwards, so that no serious scientists would ever dig it up again.
Then, on the other hand, there are white supremacists who would like to view their beliefs as scientifically proven, no matter how ridiculously argued. One of these people was Noah Carl, who was to be awarded a fellowship at Cambridge University, much to the outrage of fellow students who wanted this fellowship not to be granted. The internet rumoured that the protests were either caused by his vaguely known right-winged leaning, which is merely despised in humanities and social sciences, although the «Guardian» article didn't mention any specific findings of Carl's. Thus, more information is required, not least because the Quilette, which offered Carl a platform, released its own commentary on Carl's sacking. What can be mentioned already, too, is that Carl also programs software for crowdfunding, next to greater platform such as Kickstarter, who are known to cease crowdfunding projects when their intent is likely to be misused for one's own benefit or for doubtworthy means that violate the platform's ethics.
To specify what Carl's study claims to have found, it's hard to find any further information in reports. «The Times» offers a report written continuously on May 1 and May 2, but both require registration to obtain a free trial lasting one month, so it's not free to be accessed by each one. What can be obtained for free online, on the other hand, is his infamous study, he himself released it on a website for open-access journals called «MDPI.» The abstract already tells us why he was accused of racism, he tries to exonerate the hereditarian hypothesis that claims that peoples from certain origins were inherently less intelligent than other peoples from different origins. It's exactly the way of thinking that brought up the belief in white superiority. Thankfully, Carl redefined it in his study's introduction:
Conversely, the hereditarian hypothesis states that group differences are explained partly or substantially by genetics, i.e., that certain groups achieve lower average scores on IQ tests due to a lower frequency of genetic variants that enhance cognitive ability and a higher frequency of genetic variants that reduce cognitive ability (e.g., [5,6,16]).
(The references can be found beginning at page 12 to the end (p. 17)). Now, how would one who had apparently studied at Cambridge University arguably justify such an archaic kind of racism in the 21st century, when racism has long been exposed as without substance? What Carl tried to underline is that the difference in IQ is not based on missing opportunities in impoverished nations of the world such as in Central Africa, but based on genetics. The IQ itself is a vague approach to detect one's mind's capabilities, without a definitive outcome to work with. To focus on it to display genetic differences in various cultures is obviously controversial and hard to defend when trying to do so unbiased. On a paratextual base, it's also telling that most of the referenced studies seem to have been published in equal open-access journals–it of course can be the controversial topic itself that scares away many renown journals and institutions, or it's the weak argumentation they don't want to support by offering it a platform to reach public attention. One wouldn't like to function as a wall of defense for probably racist researchers. On the other hand, there are popular scientists like Stephen Pinker who too made a contribution on the debate of human nature, although it's not safe to say that he supports the hereditarian hypothesis.
Coming back to the contextual matter and to not distort Carl's text, let's pick up one of the arguments he makes to assume there was something like a race among humans, as with other mammals, or beings in general:
Today, scientists often eschew the term ‘race’ due to its essentialist connotations, instead employing terms such as ‘ancestral population’ or ‘biogeographic ancestry group’ [78,79,83,84]. Note that in any case, nothing about the veracity of research into group differences hinges on whether ‘race’ is valid scientific label. If one objects to claims about ‘race differences’, then one could just as well talk about ‘differences between biogeographic ancestry groups’.
What he doesn't seem to think about is that to presume there were different races or species among human beings, there had to be differences among humans from different cultures in the first place. I may not be a sociologist or a biologist, let alone an anthropologist, but I may humbly assume that when we were talking of such differentiation beyond the cultural origin (Occidental, Oriental, African, Native American, etc.), we firstly needed to identify biological differences between people of different origins; differences beyond the colour of one's skin, which only appears due to details in one's pigments. Otherwise, what point would be there to be made? It's exactly the point Carl attempts to make–that there are genetic differences to be found.
It doesn't take much time, though, until Carl makes presumably verified claims about the existence of races in human nature, backed up by a study published in renown journal of biology, «Nature.» From a different study, he quoted the following words:
Patterns of human genetic variation are influenced by mating patterns, and the latter are in turn influenced by geographic and cultural factors (e.g., mountain ranges, language, religious practices). Consequently, it is not surprising that human genetic variation, while correlated with geographic location, is not perfectly clinal.
This of course is true, and undeniable furthermore. Genetics cannot be shared among humans when there are limitations to shattering, such as seas or mountains. It's a phenomenon that can be observed with remote peoples living in mountainous areas. Sometimes, it's even argued to be a cause of inbreeding, when the pool of genetics are infringed to a limited amount of people. Or at least it can be used as a textbook example of inbreeding. Still, how would one arguably claim that such a limitation of genes could cause a decrease of intelligence? What the avoidance of inbreeding argues doesn't work for the race hypothesis. One had to necessarily assail the fundamental hypothesis of the relation between genes and intelligence in order to expose this argument. Only biologists or anthropologists are capable of doing so, or those who have a privileged access to academic journals concerned with this subject. Thus, without getting further into this study (the endeavouring ones can read the study, it's, as I have said before, accessible for free to everyone, scholars as well as non-scholars), we shall look for counter-arguments to Carl's point.
One short argument can be found in the «Genetics Home Reference:» It states that many studies have tried to draw relations between a frequent appearance of certain genes and conclusively higher intelligence, leading to their result that
These studies have not conclusively identified any genes that have major roles in differences in intelligence. It is likely that a large number of genes are involved, each of which makes only a small contribution to a person’s intelligence.
Whether Carl's study ended up in the same dead end depends on the studies and books he cited, which I didn't do because in the end, this would be a more arduous work than the outcome would be worth, since I, as I mentioned before, am not of this discipline, therefore my opinion would not be worth as much as the one expressed by a PhD biologist or anthropologist. It only is likely that the race hypothesis trying to conclude that there are genetic differences in humans that refer to their higher or lower intelligence. In the end, it required a mass phenomenon of lower intelligence among peoples, visibly low intelligence. Without ever having travelled to African countries myself, nor to any other foreign countries, I do believe that there are no such differences. Whatever can be found of poor conditions in these countries are mainly results of postcolonial structures, an abandoning of colonialists who left the peoples they used to oppress and raid to their own fate, opening doors to autocrats who fed on their social instability. Tribes prevailed because of a proximity of people towards nature, to their mother earth, which went lost in higher-developed nations who embraced the miracles of science that led to exorbitant pollution which now caused climate change. Still, we go astray from the actual topic of this text, which is to discuss whether Andy Ngo is a journalist or a right-winged pundit like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson. Noah Carl is a scientist from Cambridge University and a close colleague to the Quilette, which will be shown later; his support of the hereditarian hypothesis drew outrage in the academic scene, because it was long believed to have died due to a lack of evidence that would argue its case.
To shed more light on this highly controversial topic, we shall add yet another source into it, a text by the «Scientific American,» apparently asking whether intelligence is hereditary. The outcome, although in Carl's favour, doesn't imply any racial background, but only the bare genetic dependence of intelligence, meaning that yes, intelligence is genetically dependent, but doesn't separate broadly in cultural borders. Albeit it might be ignorant to deny the genetic background of intelligence, to imply that something like race played a role in it is still racist, no matter how many studies are referred to. Studies like these, hence, have to be peer-reviewed, or otherwise, they can hardly be believed in. Whether Carl's study was peer-reviewed is not mentioned, there is a good probability that it never happened, because the outrage was too large. Furthermore, such a review took place in major journals, not in open-access journals. Moreover, the topic itself would be big enough to be granted a separate text, since it still is not this text's focus. Thus, we shall move on with Carl himself and the controversy surrounding him.
As I said before, the «Quilette» reported about Carl's case in its own way, to have his back, calling him a Conservative scholar, although there is no greater chance Conservatives would back racist biologists or sociologists. Anyway, their depiction of his case shall be granted a closer look nonetheless. What immediately jumps into one's eyes is one name of support to Carl: Peter Singer. Of course this might just be my personal narrow view on the names that were mentioned in the introductory paragraph, but Singer could be called one of the greater names among them: Singer works at the Princeton University, being known as an utilitarian. In 2015, he sparked a controversy when dealing with the issue of abortions, more technically speaking about abortions of fetuses that were detected to be born with disabilities. His point was to abort fetuses with disabilities before they will be born, for their own merit because they were, according to his opinion, incapable of ever reaching what can be called a worthwhile life. Not least because of this did he obtain negative press coverage besides the main disliking by Christians as well as old-fashioned liberals (one pre-millennium article can be read here). Regarding this, one might be suspicious about his support for Carl. Those who might side with him would accuse those who allege him of inhumane beliefs as the preferable option of abortion for disabled fetuses of accusing him of thought crimes. More easily expressed: Those who accuse Peter Singer of being a monster–Liberals and Christians–would be accused of accusing Singer of so-called thoughtcrimes–right-wingers would do so. Singer, according to Liberals and Christians, committed a thoughtcrime, an Orwellian terminology referring to his book «1984,» in which the planning of a crime could be detected in one's brain, so that the commitment would never take place because the criminal would be arrested beforehand. Singer was never arrested for his thoughts, as a philosopher, he's supposed to have controversial, yet well-argued, ideas and thoughts. Carl wasn't arrested hitherto either. Still, the Quilette accused the left-wingers who called him out of accusing him of having committed a thoughtcrime.
However it can be described, there is one thing to be highlighted for sure: Carl's study is (potentially) racist, since it builds upon exposed hypotheses used to depict non-Western cultures and people of such non-Western cultures as intellectually inferior, and his support derives from equally controversial individuals such as Peter Singer. Hence, to see Quilette contributors defending him and mutually accusing critics of alleging him of thoughtcrimes is nothing afar from telling, especially in regards to previous points made. The twist back to Ngo is his position as an editor-in-chief and co-founder. His silence can be equated to approval of it. All of the texts that are published in this outlet pass his way, he has to express his d'accord for what is being published since he will ultimately be responsible for the content. Thus, we can unanimously suppose that he too backs Carl's bizarre theses. One question remains, therefore: Would Ngo apply for a more or less intelligent heritage, regarding his origin of Vietnamese parents? Southern Vietnam used to be Communist, and Communists, according to Joe McCarthy, is the enemy to US-American freedom. Combining these factors, we should assume that Communists must be less intelligent than the freedom-loving, gun-wielding and soda-drinking American. Since Communism spread in Vietnam, thereby ending up in a proxy war against the US and being burnt down by Agent Orange, we logically had to assume that Communism was part of the Vietnamese people's genetic, just as intelligence is likewise.
Enough of this unscientific shenanigans, we shall move on to the next point to be made. I will just leave Carl's «Medium» blog post for those who would like to know how he personally defended his study before those who called for the rejection of his fellowship. Audiatur et altera pars–even those who bear the most disgraceful points of view. As long as there was nothing to fear, to hear the person's view won't cause any trouble. And since we didn't find any easily accessible reports that would have extracted the main points of his study, who, if not he, could show us better what he actually meant to represent through it?*** - Andy expressed support for conspiracy theories about Ilhan Omar and Mike Cernovich
This next point shall be kept short since there are no written pieces by him but only posts from his Twitter feed which were saved through screenshots by aforementioned anti-fascist and data researcher Antifada161. Once upon a time, in the widths of the internet, rumours were spread by right-winged pundits who clearly disliked two things about the small gang of four who were later become sensations under the self-proclaimed title, «The Squad.» The Squad consisted of four newly elected Congresswomen: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D - NYC); Ayanna Pressley (D - MA); Rashida Tlaib (D - MI); and Ilhan Omar (D - MN), who became a handpicked target by president Donald J. Trump, who called her that if she didn't love America, she should go back where she came from, to Somalia, which she left as a child, she later on was naturalised, thereby becoming a full US citizen.
What Ngo joined in before The Squad assembled is older, though–conspiracy theories about Omar arose that she once was married to her brother. Period. The idea itself was comparably racist since it dealt with clichés about Arabis in general, including people of countries outside of the Arab League, just because they looked similar and too were mainly Muslims. Theorists who spread the claim that Omar was married to her brother hardly were able to mention any (verifiable) evidence about her supposed marriage, including false documents that were evidently made-up. Any such marriage in her hometown was not registered, so that further falsifications were given. Still, only in 2019 did local newspapers, in collaboration with the fact-checking website «PolitiFact,» finally created a definitive investigation on this claim. As it could be expected, the theory was wrong, and only about spreading false rumours in order to assail her. Ngo, on the other hand, also built upon local newspapers who investigated claims that Omar married in order to skirt immigration laws, only contemplating the probability that she might have married her own brother, he didn't take it as a proven matter-of-fact (article by the «Minneapolis Star-Tribune» | Ngo's respective tweet featuring the article). What actual journalists wouldn't do, nevertheless, is to share suspicious marriage contracts shared by ominous, unverified accounts on Twitter. Such contracts should, before they were shared or endorsed anyhow, shown to responsible departments to verify their authenticity. Whether Ngo ever headed towards the respective department to have the contract's authenticity certified is doubtful, he at least didn't retweet the original poster to mention this undertaking, so we are moved to disbelieving this normally assumptive turn, something that would be obvious to journalists who build upon facticity rather than spreading false rumours build upon islamophobia and fringe-right populism. On the other hand, more and more evidence piles up to expose Ngo's anti-journalistic behaviour and work.
Andy Ngo liked a post featuring an unverifiedmarriage contract with her brother, thus endorsingan islamophobic conspiracy theory against the pro-gressive Minnesotan Congresswoman(Courtesy: @Antifada161)
Additionally, Ngo also endorses Mike Cernovich, who too has got a past written by conspiracy theories and affiliations with the Proud Boys. Before we get further into who Cernovich is, we can tell that only shortly after Ngo was attacked during the 2019 Portland summer clashes between left-winged and right-winged protesters, he condemned the attacks against Ngo and the violent Antifa who caused the encounter (via «Twitter»). Evidence that Ngo endorsed Cernovich can be found on a screenshot taken by Antifada161.
There are good reasons to better distance oneself from Cernovich, who describes himself as a writer, filmmaker and journalist. Little good on his behalf emerges, but merely further conspiracy theories who promoted his points of view but rarely match the truth. For example, he is the man who made up the infamous «Pizza Gate» which falsely claims that former Secretary of Defense and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton maintained a child trafficking ring in the backroom of a pizza bakery. The theory has since then received much traffic online and gained him a lot of fame that also urged him to also delete tweets and videos that would have otherwise let him look like the disgusting being he actually is, having advised man on how to choke women on dates, for example. Still, not everything he did was inherently bad. In 2016, he sent a tip to «BuzzFeed News» about sexual assault committed by Democratic Representative John Conyers from Michigan, although one might wonder whether it was really him who gave BuzzFeed News the tip, and not the victim herself. At least the article reads so, so there is a good reason to believe it. The respective paragraph reads as following:
Ngo added doubtful posts by conspiracy theorist andwhite supremascist internet personality Mike Cerno-vich to his timeline on Twitter, commenting on postby Iranian-American religious scholar and DailyBeast contributor Reza Aslan.(Courtesy: @Antifada161)Cernovich said he gave the documents to BuzzFeed News for vetting and further reporting, and because he said if he published them himself, Democrats and congressional leaders would “try to discredit the story by attacking the messenger.” He provided them without conditions. BuzzFeed News independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents with four people directly involved with the case, including the accuser.
Excluding the reason for having chosen this path rather than publishing it himself via his own website, to choose an independent third party to publish it should always be a favourable choice to underline neutrality and not appearing as if one would try to extract personal benefits from leaking such a story. Still, the real Democrats and left-wingers wouldn't attack the messenger, namely him, as long as the sources and evidences don't lack credibility. Only hypocrites would then attack him instead of the sexual predator who still denies ever having assaulted the woman who settled the case forcefully and against her own intentions, due to the grinding mechanism that backs Congressional predators. What he has to understand, though, is the more suspicious approach to him and the documents he lacked, he doesn't have any reason to condemn it since he was the man who came up with the Pizza Gate conspiracy against Hillary Clinton. Who would then believe him, afterwards, when he leaks documented allegations against the longest-serving Representative in the House? He knows better than anyone else why he normally wouldn't be trusted. Furthermore, who would become a Trump superfan but still introduce such documents to a liberal-leaning news outlet? An obscure behaviour indeed.
Cernovich, after all, appears like an honourable defender of journalistic integrity, although his affiliations towards the right aisle are clearly founded and usually shine through when he publicly denounces figureheads of left-leaning media outlets in television broadcasting and in print and online outlets. For example, he called out former MSNBC anchorman Sam Seder when he made a disappointing joke about his daughter being raped, whatever made him think that this was appropriate. Yet, even though one might not agree with fathers making jokes about their daughters being raped, not everyone on the left sides with Cernovich and his watchdog-like behaviour over the media on the left. «Vox» contributors, for example, called out Cernovich for having called out Seder. Whether Seder's tweet could be understood satirically or it just was blatant and inappropriate, one should decide upon oneself, I won't get further into opining on it, since the topic itself is merely subjective and partially emotional. I will instead just cite it verbatim so that one could make up one's mind oneself. The tweet read as following:
«Dont care re Polanski but i hope if my daughter is ever raped it is by an older truly talented man w/ a great sense of mise en scene» (sic!; guillemets added by me)
Without further ado, we shall move on to yet another public ethics work. The slight sarcasm in this sentence is on purpose because, as I mentioned before, Cernovich's call-outs only target merely left-winged editors and journalists, but no right-winged pundits. Now, one could add, with a low-brow approach, that all the right-winged journalists, editors and anchormen sported white vests, but we all know that this simply isn't true. Cernovich himself is a textbook example of right-wigned escapism and lying. Another textbook example would be Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who, especially during the Trump administration, went further towards the right, without ever having been called out by the Fox News team itself, despite his close embrace of white supremacism (a commentary piece and interview with media expert and Media Matters contributor about it can be found on left-winged outlet «Salon». Her own piece, which she wrote for Media Matters, can be found here, but is also linked in the Salon article).
However, we shall now focus on what has happened. So, what happened? The story is even more bizarre than the previous one. New York Times columnist Sopan Deb has retweeted a tweet by US-American rapper Bow Wow who said that he, Trump, should stop attacking Snoop Dogg before we pimp up your wife and make her work for us (as he was quoted by «The Daily Beast»). Nothing special, one might say, just a columnist sharing his private opinion about the president, without necessarily endorsing violence against the man who would later claim that there were fine people on both sides, subsequent to a demonstration between Proud Boys and left-winged counterprotesters, which went deadly and left peaceful Antifa activist Heather Heyer dead; the man who would tell progressive Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to go back to Somalia because she criticised him; the man who called the free press the enemy of the people. There might be a lack of balance between the two sides, although some of the mentioned events on Trump's behalf took place later on, but still–if a president can divide the nation ever further, a New York Times columnist should have the freedom to retweet rappers criticising the president as long as these tweets remain private and don't significantly influence his work. Cernovich's work, thus, might be beneficial to holding journalists to account, but his bias shows through these public accusations, thus displaying him and his efforts as a two-sided medal. He forces outlets to act exaggeratedly to remain morally accountable, while right-winged outlets pretend to be comparable while continuing to be as bad as a newsroom pigsty. It's the common problem of functioning as a beacon of hope in a sea full of vices and hatred; the beacon usually tumbles on its isle, eventually falling down. The only question to propose is: When will this day be?
Sometimes, Cernovich is also attacked personally, for example for physical disabilities such as his lisping. And all bias aside, to mock someone for disabilities or physical shape is wrong, disgusting and only shows one's true face. If one is a truly bad being, there'll be better points to target than inevitable attributes, points one actually can adjust. Lisping can be attempted to be cured, but there's no safety that it will ever be erased. Thus, one would better stay away from it if one was interested in remaining credible and reputable. Business Insider contributor Josh Barro put his foot in it when he apparently mocked Cernovich's lisping, but withdrew it when he was called out for it. There was a similar case in Germany (for those who speak German) when the satirical TV show «heute show» childishly mocked a right-winged AfD-politician for his stuttering. One week later, after his party complained about it, they apologised for the inappropriate joke (the weekly magazine «Stern» wrote about it).
As one can tell, there is much trouble around him, not only through his watchdog work on left-leaning journalists, or the controversy he sparked around James Gunn and his cooperation for the movie «Guardians of the Galaxy» (he was rehired for the sequel, though, as «The Verge» reported). One might wonder what exactly made him the target of so many controversies. Was it only because of his constant call-outs, o did more happen that would make him a disgraceful pundit on the right? To shorten it up a little bit, beside the Pizza Gate promotion, he also called for women to be raped, and he also relativised misogyny of gamers in online games, thereby causing the so-called «Gamer Gate.» Both of these cases boosted his status as an online personality, a free speech activist and defender of masculinity. One last addition to his career online shall be made: He involved in the primary campaign of Republican Senator Kelli Ward of Arizona. The latter link also assembles some of his most disturbing quotes again, thus showing that a man like him would better not appear in one's timeline, or at least one should distance oneself from him if one doesn't want to be associated with his deranged views. Neither did Ward during her campaign alongside him, nor did Andy Ngo when he endorsed his views on Twitter. True journalists know who they can side with without causing a public outrage, or falling from grace. Maybe Ngo agrees with Cernovich on date rape, or maybe he only agrees with him on this one topic he quoted him (or didn't, he didn't say anything, he only liked what he saw). No matter how his endorsement should be interpreted, the only thing one can tell regarding is that Ngo sides with Cernovich, thus leaving a mark of confusion and disgust.
Conclusion
This is it--everything one should know about Ngo's comprehension of credibility as a journalist, and his personal views. It's doubtful, some of the content is straight-away discrediting him as a so-called journalist. We can also mention, for goodness sake, what «Bulwark» founder Charlie Sykes wrote when he talked about the Left's Antifa problem, that the Left would rationalize violence, which one could of course view in such a way–violence is justified as long as it serves the good cause, it's a way of thinking that is usual in war. And normally, what else should one do to erase an issue that cannot be helped in any other way? To attack journalists doesn't serve any good cause, obviously, but on the other hand, we have seen extensively why Ngo can hardly be called a journalist. He works flawed, without using absolute numbers but trying to ignite hatred against the Left by highlighting single incidents of hate crime hoaxes, beside actual cases in which we have to admit that the discourse is leading downhill. But the problem is that his personal points of view stain his work. He provokes constantly, but victimises himself when he experiences the consequences. Journalists know that neutrality is key in their work, or that one should at least not leave controversial points of view for all to see without elaborating them understandably, so that misunderstandings and misinterpretations won't happen, thus creating a distorted picture of reality. One would not call a mob to lynch the king to then leave the subsequent instability to the masses without further monitoring of the aftermath. Because then, one could not say that he didn't see the autocrat usurping the vacuum of power coming. He would immediately be accused of having caused exactly that, intentionally. The same applies for Ngo's experience during the 2019's clashes between Antifa and Proud Boys. Throughout his pseudojournalistic work, he embraced fringe right political figures, embraced deranged views and conspiracy theories, and provoked hatred upon his person whenever he could. He only received that much support because many of those who sided with him appeared seemingly unaware of what had caused the outrage about him. Sykes wrote that the ideology shouldn't matter, and he was right about this, although one has to draw a line at which point the ideology should matter. This point is reached when one embraces fringe right figureheads ideologically and thereby distorts reality in such a way that it serves exactly this hateful ideology. Ngo, hence, serves a function as does the Trump troll Milo Yiannopoulos.
Rod Dreher asked in the «American Conservative» whether Andy Ngo was asking for this violence, and after having studied his case, I have to admit but one thing: Yes, Andy Ngo was asking for it. Of course no-one will take your right to free expression, no-one does this. Ngo was never banned from Twitter, and so weren't many other right-winged pundits. Even Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are still alive and well on Twitter. Rush Limbaugh is so, too. Just one thing has to be imperative when talking about freedom of speech: When you reap the seeds of hatred and escapism, you will inevitably sow harvest of your work. You cannot have free speech without the consequences. That's why cases as Ngo's are usually called victimisation–he doesn't want to reap what he obviously sowed.
Although Andy Ngo didn't write fake stories, but only suggestive and incomplete ones, he experienced outrageous violence and theft of his property. Was this necessary, let alone justified? There is a staunch response to it: No. Period. Now, one question arises on the left? Why wasn't it justified? Hear me out, then, if you don't understand. The fight against the fringe right is necessary and a good cause is normally ahead of this fight. But we have to ask ourselves how such a fight should be conducted, and how the good cause can be achieved as quickly and clean as possible. Such a tremendous cause is not easily accomplished, of course, it requires an extensive organisation of various forces inside the left wing. The enemy has to be highlighted for everyone to see, persuasion of the masses from the fringe left to the moderate centre and centre-right has to be executed and secured. The hydra which the enemy is has to be targeted and battled effectively, so that the warriors of the good cause won't exhaust eventually. Exhaustion would emerge when the struggle took longer than expected, let alone longer than required. Thus, only those should be fought who could be detected as key figures inside the oppressing system. The more systematic forces are used in this battle, the less likely they are to be exhausted on the way. Side shows should be ignored as long as the don't matter or become obnoxious trouble in the outline or during important battles. The main direction has to be maintained throughout the entire battle, or otherwise, an unexpected issue arises, as it does now, unfortunately.
What I mean is the lack of persuasion among the skeptics who are so essential to the Left's credibility and reputation. The Left wants to be morally superior to the right, and therefore needs the majority among the people. Violent demonstrators bear the ability to destroy exactly this reputation, to be the humane and rational side of the two. Of course the die-hard fringe left sycophants who would side with every direct action that would be denounced by the masses would simply say that the masses are leaning more towards the right and thus can't be right. Assuming that this would be true, we had to ask ourselves one question: Who are you fighting for, then? The sycophant would say that he fought for the victims, for the good cause. But does this sycophant then had to fight not only the enemy but also the majority of the people, to save the victims and introduce the utopia the world needs, according to him. Yet, direction is key again, because one needs to remind oneself what the utopia is supposed to look like. If your enemy ranges from the fringe right to the centre, the utopia might consist of mass destruction, because two third of the people one had to fight have turned out to be enemies of the good cause. Could this be reality, in the end? A hard question that required more than one point of view, more than just mine. I don't want to assume that two third of the people have already ended up in a purgatory of hatred and egoism, thus had to be thought. But I also cannot tell what is the outcome of this question. Thus, I will have to leave it open.
One last question before this text ends has to be answered, in regards to Ngo's foundation of the Quilette: Can anyone in this world still read the Quilette with a good consciousness, or do we all have to boycott it because of its co-founder, Andy Ngo? It's a hard question I had to contemplate for a long time, but in the end, I came to a certain solution: Yes, we all can continue to read it if we want so. Why? Because of two factors that surround this question: (1) He only writes a small amount of the articles that are published there, and (2) we should not abandon the impressions we can gain from the authors' points of view. The first point can be left behind, we don't need to write or think about it any further, we could as well just boycott all texts by Andy Ngo. But the second point could spark some criticism from certain readers of this text. Thus, again, hear me out, please. We are talking about points of view we pay attention. We don't immediately and blindly endorse them, let alone leave them as they were. But why would one ignore someone's point of view because he is a prick? This paradoxically would make no sense. Why? Because even pricks can make good points we might not agree with but nevertheless had to consider in our own thinking. I for myself have read several books I didn't agree with, many of them being written by Conservative authors. But I appreciated having put effort into comprehending their points of view. In the end, I was glad to be able to consider them. One's personal ideas cannot be safe to not include any gaps unless someone with a completely different view took a look on it. Those who think alike will only agree in anything, thus will never have a more suspicious gaze upon it. This is only natural, but therefore insecure finally. A worthwhile discourse usually consists of at least two mutually opposite ideologies. Hence, authoritarian regimes never turned out to develop prosperously, but collapsed eventually. Instead of hearing their opponents out, they declared them fiends of their peace and progress, ignoring them wholly and subsequently signing their own demise. Those who have more fiends than ideological challengers will always fail, without exception.
One might now inject that somebody like Ngo or those who would contribute to them could never have a rational point of view that should be considered rationally. I dare to contradict this thesis, because we are not talking about a scamming pulp outlet like Breitbart or the Drudger Report, or the Gateway Pundit. We are talking about an intellectual outlet with scholarly endeavour. Just because they appear provocative from time to time doesn't mean that they were only talking rubbish and giving fringe right loudmouths an intellectually appearing platform. This simply is not the case. Except for Ngo's toxic Twitter feed, most of the articles are interesting when they stick out of the mainly homogeneous mass of repetitive theses, topics and articles. But this is a different issue that has got nothing to do with its credibility. What we can doubtlessly tell is that the Quilette is useful in terms of acquiring a mindful expansion of one's thoughts. Unfortunately, I know that there'll be many people who still disagree with me. For those, I invented the term of Machiavellian Information and Viewpoints Acquaintance (MIVA), knowing that they would also disagree with much (if not anything) Niccolò Machiavelli elaborated in «Il Principe.» Machiavelli was often depicted as an egoist theoretician, someone who justified tyranny for one's own cause and intentions, his contemporary Bodin, for example, described it this way in the preface to his «Six Livres De La Republique.» I frankly don't agree with everything Machiavelli said, but when rationally utilised, his egoism can be useful to one's own intentions. A Kantian approach has to be acquired additionally, one's own intentions have to be good, benevolent too. If this appears hypocritical or confusing to some, I either demand to reread and converse about it with others. There's nothing more peaceful and rewarding than discussing controversial topics with others, especially with those who turn out to be one's most disagreeing figures. Ideological opponents are the most precious individuals who'll ever cross our lives, next to those who agree with us. On the other hand, those who corrupt our discourse, individuals like Ngo, are vermins that have to be removed from public discourse. Since this is hardly feasible and will cause immediate outrage in public, they are better ignored. The morale: Ignore Ngo when you can, and also ignore him when you can't. If a childish loudmouth demands attention, reject his demand. One day, he will stop, at best. Otherwise, we still can avoid him by ignorance. It's the only time ignorance will be beneficial rather than counterproductive.
~ END ~
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