Later in the same piece, he compared himself to the Covington schoolboys-a reference to a group of MAGA-hat-wearing teenagers who went viral for jeering at Native American activists in Washington, DC, earlier this year-arguing that “hen people who are perceived to be right-wing smile, it’s often taken as sinister evidence.” “I am despised by left-wing journalists, so my reputation must be damaged,” Ngo wrote. Rather than give up his spot in the limelight following the Patriot Prayer revelations, Ngo wrote a rambling op-ed in Spectator USA, outlining how the mainstream media sought to crush him through a coordinated disinformation campaign. With Ngo’s help, they painted American antifascists as a “ criminal cartel.” On the network, Ngo voiced his support of Donald Trump’s call to designate Antifa an “organization of terror.” Fox News ratcheted up their alarmist coverage of Antifa. Senator Ted Cruz called for a federal criminal investigation of Portland’s mayor on Ngo’s behalf. In June, after Antifa activists punched and “milkshaked” him- which is exactly what it sounds like-at a protest in Portland, Ngo claimed to have suffered a traumatic brain injury and quickly crowdfunded nearly $200,000, aided by conservative politicians and media outlets who turned Ngo into a cause célèbre.
But it wasn’t until this summer that he managed to thrust himself into the center of the story. Ngo had long trailed Portland’s warring political factions, on the hunt for sensational footage that could depict the left as dangerous and unhinged. As BuzzFeed observed recently, much of his work, including his widely mocked “journey” into the “no-go zones” of London-an idea invented by the far right to depict majority-Muslim communities in major urban areas as intolerant and dangerous-exemplified what Max Read has called “busybody journalism.” There was no clarity in Ngo’s work as Read noted, Ngo provided less the kind of “edification you associate with good journalism than the heightened anxiety and fear you associate with a good crime drama.”Įven so, Ngo’s limited body of work brought him a surge of notoriety this year. His portfolio consisted of a few ham-fisted op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and other conservative publications, and a much more substantive collection of selectively edited video clips meant to embarrass the left. The 33-year-old provocateur, despite his pretenses to the contrary, wasn’t a reporter. In one of the least convincing PR ploys ever, Claire Lehmann-the editor of the far-right, skull- shape- obsessed website Quillette-took to Twitter to announce that Ngo, who, until that point, had been on her site’s masthead, was “moving onto bigger & better projects.” ON AUGUST 26TH, the day after a damning Portland Mercury investigation pulled back the curtain on Andy Ngo’s chummy relationship with the Portland-based far-right group Patriot Prayer, Fox News’s favorite Antifa victim found himself out of a job.
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