Note: I posted this on a whim on reddit and decided to share here too:
I don’t even know how to begin to articulate the mind-boggling stupidity of what I just read…. I had to make sure it wasn’t a comedy piece.
So, I was watching Youtuber Sham Sharma explain his viewpoint on the Andy Ngo attack and then he listed all the US Left-leaning journalists who either gave passive comments or straight-up justified the physical assault on Andy Ngo as warranted because of his political views. I couldn’t believe US discourse has actually become this poisoned, so I decided to search online and clicked the first article which was from Vox. Vox is generally known to be Politically neutral on the Left, but this article clearly wasn’t at all.
It was like reading a sick joke. The author of the piece equivocates on the very idea that the attack on Andy Ngo has anything to do with rising violence against journalists, even though it was a blatant physical attack on a journalist who suffered a brain hemorrhage from the horrible encounter. That’s not a point of view or an argument, that’s the fact of what happened. The author of the piece then goes into more sickening territory by attempting to victim-blame Andy Ngo for the attack against him. The author has the gall to bring up Andy Ngo doing his job in exposing one of the Antifa thugs by arguing it is some sort of doxxing campaign, blaming more violence on the Political Right as a defense for the violent actions of Antifa against Andy Ngo, and then I read quite possibly one of the dumbest arguments in US journalism that I’ve ever encountered and that is sadly not an attempt at a hyperbole.
You know how the Modern Left loves Identity Politics as an excuse? This author, Zack Beauchamp, who is a Senior Correspondent at Vox and a White Male heavily implies that Andy Ngo, a gay Asian male, is a Far-right agitator and Nazi sympathizer. Beauchamp then follows-up by arguing that the Antifa attackers, who were mostly white men and one white woman, were defending Ethnic minorities when they attacked Andy Ngo by quoting Antifa’s stated goals. You read that correctly: A group of white men and one white women beating up a gay Asian man who suffered a brain hemorrhage from the attack is portrayed as misguidedly defending racial minorities.
We have actually come to a tragicomedic point where in defense of Identity Politics a White Male journalist defended several White men and one White woman attacking a homosexual Asian man as a defense of Ethnic minorities. Of course, rather predictably, the specific minorities this journalist highlights are Muslim immigrant activists and just as predictably, he seems to be entirely unaware of the dangers of the theology of Sharia in Islam.
Even with all these words, I don’t know how to fully convey my bewilderment at the complete and utter lack of self-awareness of the Modern Left right now. I mean… just how deeply do people in contemporary journalism lack so much self-awareness that they don’t see the clear and obvious contradictions in their actions and beliefs? We’ve actually gotten to the point where something this asinine has happened. Excuse me while I smash my head against a wall at how downright idiotic this has all become.
Let me just cut through your obvious bias here and take your article with a grain of salt. You’ve managed to not only to take an isolated incident with the attack on Andy Ngo and you’ve applied to all left leaning peoples and institutions while unironically complaining about identity politics which you yourself pile on to make the point that your caricature of the left is accurate.
One would hope you wouldn’t be so naive to believe that Andy Ngo, a known race-baiter and mouthpiece for the right is not complicit in some way to maybe not this incident but other incidents where he was backed organizations like the Proud Boys. To be honest, it really doesn’t matter since groups like the Proud Boys and Antifa are both leaderless organizations. It’s also clear that Ngo has in the past decided to help push a certain right wing narrative that will more than happily be run through Breitbart or Fox News if given a chance: https://psuvanguard.com/in-response-to-fired-for-reporting-the-truth/
Andy Ngo’s Islamic England article: “https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-visit-to-islamic-england-1535581583”
Responses to article: https://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-journals-andy-ngo-writes-cowardly-islamic-england-2018-8, https://londonist.com/london/opinion/the-wall-street-journal-spouts-nonsense-about-islamic-london-in-this-article
Andy Ngo clearly has a motive in these types of situations which is similar to how Alex Jones might approach the situation. Instigate and get it on recording. I’ve seen the videos of the attack on his person and there’s no evidence to suggest he did so in this case so I decided to withhold judgement and condemn these individuals attacks. But to create this straw-man of the left and simply call it a tragicomedy, you are engaging in the same rhetoric you would at the same time denounce. You slapping the fearmongering of Sharia Law in the United States does not go unnoticed, however you are conveniently ignorant of the very real and present erosion of the separation of church and state attacking our educational and governmental institutions by Christian dominionists, which for me indicates that you are either a bad faith actor responding to this to push a narrative or you are just ignorant of what’s actually going on in the body politic of America.
In conclusion, what was done to Ngo by these individuals was a heinous act and it is currently being investigated with 3 arrests already made. For you to apply it to the entirety of the left is asinine since I could easily do the same to the right with a certain incident in Charlottesville and a certain bloc of the public suddenly energized to reveal their ugly fascistic heads. Let’s be realistic here, this only ran the right wing media circuit because it helps to find someone “as bad” as Neo Nazis that conservatives can leverage into a threat.