Antifa's PR Problem
I wanted to point out some interesting developments around the Antifa beat. First, a Portland man with antifa associations was just sentenced to 6 years in prison for hitting a guy in the head with a baton. The video clearly shows the victim, Adam Kelly, trying to stop a guy (John Blum) who found himself ganged up on by several antifa folks (to be fair, John Blum is accused by some of being the aggressor). Collapsible metal batons are very popular defense weapons for a variety of reasons and you can see how effective they can be, but jesus fucking christ anyone who is only mildly familiar with them will always tell you to never hit someone in the head unless you want to risk murdering them. John Kelly got hit three times in the head and needed multiple staples to close the skin. It's seriously amazing he's not dead.
The way the guy who got caught was kind of a fluke. A Portland police officer happened to witness the assault and focused on him for an arrest, even though multiple people hit Kelly with batons. When I was on Justin Murphy's podcast and discussed antifa's relationship with violence, one of the things I outlined was my own approach to when violence is appropriate. The thing that strikes me about antifa's violence is that it comes off as entirely performative, like what are you trying to accomplish? It seems so fucking pointless to spend the next several years of your life in prison because...you almost killed a guy trying to stop a fight? Cool, dude. I wonder how much that is going to change the minds of similarly situated people when they're risking such a consequence from their street skirmish.
In similar news, someone well-known within the antifa scene in both Seattle and Portland just got arrested for felony harassment. Jamal X is accused of following two visibly Orthodox jewish men and yelling “Jews, Jews, Jews...give me your money!” followed by a threat to shoot them with a gun. He followed them again to their homes a couple of days later and threw candy at them. Because of his felony record, he's on the hook for quite a long prison sentence, and I imagine there's a lot of political pressure for the prosecutor to not go easy on an explicitly anti-semetic crime. All this is just an allegation so far, but it seems more likely than not given the actors involved.
Wrapping up, Andy Ngo remains a bizarre fixation among the scene. On Halloween, six men wearing printed masks of his face showed up to his mom's house and rang the doorbell. Surveillance cameras caught the super creepy footage. As you may or may not know, Andy Ngo gained national prominence when they beat the shit out of him at a protest in Portland early this summer. There's no evidence that he ever engaged in violence, but a dizzying amount of energy has been spent on finding something to accuse him of. It's too much work to catalog all the efforts, but the most recent one has been blowing up a large message accusing him of "providing kill lists to Atomwaffen".
If you're puzzled by that accusation you're not alone. But basically the train of thought is that while he was an editor at Quillette, a researcher (not Andy Ngo) wrote an article with some dodgy methodology about network links from Twitter follows between antifa accounts and some journalists. This was a minor viral hit and a few weeks later, Neo-Nazi terrorist organization Atomwaffen Division released a video called "Sunset the Media" which is intercut with footage of mass shootings and included names of some of the journalists named in Lenihan's study. This all happened in early June, so the fact that it's being used as a talking point now comes across as flailing. All I can think about is the Sunny in Philadelphia conspiracy meme.
Andy Ngo is ultimately just a dude with a camera. My own (very uncharitable, but what can you do) interpretation is that his beating triggered a significant amount of backlash against antifa. Sympathetic members seem obsessed and are working extra hard to find something that will stick, in order to retroactively justify the beating. It's so goddamn weird to me.