ANTIFA: The Rise of the Violent Left | Andy Ngo | EP 239

So what is it that they're celebrating? As far as you can tell, they think that a fascist or a racist got the violence against him that he deserved. Yeah, but I don't believe that. You know, I don't believe that's what they're celebrating because I don't think they're that good. I think they're celebrating watching some poor son of a bitch get hurt and that satisfies something unbelievably dark in their souls. Like the desire to burn, the desire to burn down buildings, the desire to melt cars, the desire for the whole goddamn thing to go up in flames because they're resentful and bitter. We can't take these things at face value, right? It's like, no, no, you don't understand. You're smiling and laughing while someone just got his teeth kicked in. No trial, no jury, no defense. He's on the ground, he's mobbed by overwhelming force, and you're celebrating that, and you're telling me that's because of your virtues? It's like, I don't think so.

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Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to have with me someone I've wanted to talk to for a long time, Mr. Andy No. Andy is a journalist best known for reporting on American Antifa. He's an editor at large at the Post Millennial, which has recently been under attack by left-wing radicals, who have sought to have the advertisers drop the Post Millennial and depriving them of their source of revenue. As a consequence, he's written reports for the New York Post, Newsweek, and other major media outlets. He drew national attention when he was beaten and hurt very badly by Antifa thugs on the streets of Portland in the summer of 2019. His February 2021 book, "Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy," was a New York Times bestseller and quite a gripping read, I might add. Andy had to leave the U.S. because of concerns for his safety and is currently residing in the UK.

Hey Andy, so nice to see you! We haven't met before, I don't think. My memory's a bit spotty, but I don't think we've ever met. Is that true?

Correct! Actually, no. No, no, Professor, we have. When you were on your tour and you were in Portland on the tour, that was where there were some of the largest demonstrations against you. And backstage, I interviewed you for my podcast very, very briefly.

Ah, sorry, I'm sorry, that hasn't managed to lodge itself in my memory, unfortunately. Although I do remember that there were protests in Portland; that was pretty much it for protests, you know, on that whole tour. So, but of course, you know, they would be in Portland and they weren't against me either. They were against who people wished I was so that they could protest me.

Really? So, all right. So I've been going through.

Distinction, yes! It is an important distinction because, you know, a lot of our ire is reserved for our imaginary enemies. And so that's certainly something that we could delve into a little bit with regards to Antifa. So let's go there right away.

So I was talking to a number of influential Democrats this week about Antifa and about January 6th. Okay? So, imagine that an outside observer, like a Canadian, might look at the United States and think, well, you know, the radical left has Portland and Minneapolis and that's pretty damn ugly, and then the radical right has January 6th, and that's pretty ugly. And, you know, maybe you could draw some kind of equivalency between the two, and maybe not. But I think you could at least make a reasonable initial case for something like that. January 6th had a lot of symbolic weight, if nothing else, and certainly did frighten people very badly. But when I was talking to these Democrats about Antifa and the riots, you know, their attitude is sort of well, there's always been riots and race riots in the United States throughout its entire history. So, in some sense, it's really nothing out of the ordinary. And besides, Antifa doesn't really exist.

And so I'd like you to address, if you would, both of those points. And I should point out too, these are reasonable people making these points. These aren't radical leftists. These are people who are trying hard to pull the Democratic Party towards a moderate center and who are very suspicious of the radical leftists, especially the grip they have on the education system. So they're good-faith players.

And still... and oh, the other thing they said to me was that they believed it was intellectually dishonest to draw a parallel between Portland and Minneapolis and January 6th, making the case that what happened on January 6th was much, much worse. Like in a category of its own. And they justified that by referring to the fact that it was a direct assault on the Capitol building, you know, and that there was presidential ambivalence about bringing that to a halt.

So that’s a rat’s nest. So, you know, you want to wade in?

Yes, Professor. So I think, let's say for good faith engagement from the left, I completely understand why there would be this perception that Antifa is a myth or doesn't really exist, because that's the propaganda that the public has received from the legacy media and broadcast and in print day in and day out, certainly since Trump was elected.

It's an entirely different story, though, when you are on the ground, as I have been for years, and you see that militancy face to face. And when you see it, the organization or aspect of it is undeniable. That's what initially sparked my curiosity, because in Portland, where I'm from, when the election results in 2016 November were announced, tens of thousands of people took to the streets. And within that, there was an organized element of people dressed in the same uniforms. At that time, it was unusual to cover your face, and they had weapons in a very strategic way. Smash and move on, smash and move on—cars, businesses, buildings, start fires, run.

So it was from there that sparked my interest in wanting to learn more about what looks like an organized militia or paramilitary. So with that out of the way, though, I think the press, because of its compromised nature and generally being biased a lot, they have turned a blind eye to the evidence that shows that there is, depending on where you are, an organizational structure to Antifa.

And the statement that Biden said, infamously, at one of the debates last year: "Antifa is an idea." That statement in itself is true. But it's not the complete statement. You have, I think one way to explain it that people can understand perhaps more easily is that it's analogous to the worldwide jihadist phenomenon, in that you can have people who are actual members of organizations like Boko Haram or ISIS or Al-Qaeda or any of these other jihadist groups, but you have people as well who are sympathetic to the ideology and act on it.

And in that regard, I think you can think of the contemporary manifestations of Antifa in the United States, Canada, and Western countries along the same lines. You can have people who self-identify in and simply all they do is go to these protests or riots based on flyers you see online. Then you have actual cells that operate, such as Rose City Antifa, which is an organized group. You can go on their website and look at the Q&A, and they actually have one of the questions: "How do I join?" And they say that currently membership is closed. So there's that.

And in my book, I publish some of the primary documents of the curriculum from Rose City Antifa, which is actually one of the cells that's part of a network called the Torch Antifa network. And they have cells in other cities. So from, you know, it's kind of all of the above—it’s ideology, it’s horizontally organized, it’s disorganized, it’s also highly organized in some cases.

So it’s because of that lack of centralized hierarchical authority that makes it easy for those who want to obfuscate and confuse the public about it, because they can point and say, "Well, you know, there's no single leader who's the leadership. Show me the leadership." Because there is no single person who's heading everything, then the response is, "Well, that's evidence that they don't exist."

You know, yeah, okay, so this is a real problem conceptually, right? I mean, and let's think about it. To begin with, as a problem that we all face instead of a political problem emanating either from the left or the right.

Okay, because I think there's a deeper problem here that isn't exactly partisan. And we'll get into the partisan element of it later. So imagine, first of all—okay. So I assume that the description you gave would be the one that you gave. Is that okay?

So what we have here is we have some actual organizations. Let's focus on Rose City Antifa. But it's a radically distributed organization. And we don't even know how radically distributed, and it's almost impossible to identify its core members or even to define what core membership might be. Now, you did point to Rose City Antifa, but if I said, for example, how many other Antifa groups are there that have an identifiable organizational strategy that's akin to Rose City Antifa?

How many? Do you have any sense of that?

Just like a few dozen. There aren't very many, but the thing is many—they close and then they spring up as new ad hoc groups under different names, but that's really the same.

Okay, a few dozen. So that's real interesting. So that's like, let's say, 24. Just let's make this concrete because I think it'll be interesting to do so.

So in that 24, how many people do you think are core involved in each group? Do you think it's like five? Is it three? Is it ten? Like real hardcore people who are devoting their time to this?

You know, like maybe they're unemployed; that would be a real shock, and it's their full-time job, something like that. How many people across the entirety of the United States?

If most of them—let's say we're averaging around the same size as Rose City Antifa—then I would say in total we're looking at below a thousand people in across the entire United States.

So hundreds, which is, you know, in the scheme of things and for the scale that’s a very small number.

Yeah, well, it’s look, it’s so small that you could say that it’s—and I’m not saying this—but it’s so small that you could say that it’s non-existent, right? Because it’s one in three hundred thousand. It’s such a tiny minority of people that they barely exist.

But what that points to is something actually that minimizing it in that manner actually points to something far more sinister, because what it means is that under a thousand committed people can radically destabilize whole cities and pose a threat to the integrity of entire culture. Not least by fostering polarization and the degeneration of the political scheme that comes along with that. And so that’s a real danger for all of us, particularly if it’s the case that groups like that can multiply their power by pulling other, you know, semi-attached and maybe not so violent or even extremist people in on the basis of their empathy.

Exactly. Concentric circles probably is a good way to explain it. What you asked me—the concrete number of how many people are actually core in terms of involved in the organizing, the planning, attending meetings or trainings, like as you said, almost non-existent given the population side of the U.S. However, the larger concentric circle is of their sympathizers. And I think the role of the press since particularly I would say since the election of Trump helped really to mainstream the so-called Antifa ideology. It put day in and day out for the entire world that this belief that America had elected a fascist president under Trump, that we were experiencing a regime change, that there would be people, there would be genocide.

And on the face, I mean, these ideas are—these accusations are so outrageous and I would say laughable, but people genuinely believe that. You know, go back five years, remember?

Yeah, I know they believe that.

Yeah, well, they're feeling the same way about Trump running again. You know that fear is definitely there, and I think it's probably even higher than it was—at least, it's higher than it was in some ways among the same people.

And so because they think, well, he didn't manage to establish an authoritarian state this time. But, you know, just wait! We'll see what happens if he gets power a second time. It might be the last election the United States ever has.

But think about what this means. So because I also talk to people on the left a lot—most of them are moderate. The extreme left types generally won't talk to me. But although I would talk to them if I had found someone who was credible and interesting to talk to and who was willing to.

What that means is think about the conceptual problem that we're faced with now. So the people on the left can point to the right and say, "Well, what about your extremists?" And the people on the right can say, "Well, there's hardly any of them. There's like—they basically don't exist." And in some sense that's genuinely true. And on the left, it's the same thing. It's like it's hardly anybody at all. It's under a thousand people committed to this, but they can cause a tremendous amount of trouble.

And so then the left can point to the people on the right who are extreme and say, "Well, look at your extremists and what they do." And then the right can point to the people on the left and say, "Look at your extremists and what they do." And we don't know how dangerous they are, and what happens if they get out of control and get the upper hand, and how much protection do we have to, you know, wall ourselves in with in order to make sure that doesn't happen?

And then the fact of those extremists mean that each side can demonize the other by pointing to the worst, and then everybody gets out of control. And so, and it's not obvious at all how to deal with that. Lying certainly complicates the situation tremendously, right? If there's any deceit in the press coverage and so forth.

And so, but okay, so that's a problem, a conceptual problem. And then why do you think that legacy media, so to speak, is so light-handed in its treatment of Antifa, given the tremendous damage and loss of life and violence for that matter that the riots that Antifa in some sense are central to have caused?

Like if you had to play devil's advocate, what's motivating them to minimize this?

Establishment journalists were entirely uniform and committed to their goal in opposing Trump. And many of them felt that it was their duty and obligation to violate some ethical standards, because we were living in such unprecedented times with Trump in the executive office, that he needed to be resisted by any means necessary.

Isn't that always the justification for ethical violations? Isn’t that always the rationalization? It's like, well, this isn't—I wouldn't normally do this, but this is an exceptional case. And so not only is it justified for me to violate my ethical standards, it's actually demanded of me.

And so that seems to me to be an argument I can understand, the argument, you know, because, well, hey, maybe we're faced with an emergency. We're going to see a hell of a lot of that, by the way, with climate change, like a lot. So it's coming in a big way.

And so, well, if the emergency is large enough, don't we get to violate our own principles? And, well, you're a journalist. Let me ask you a question. Can you recall a time—and this is a real serious question, man—can you recall a time where you thought the stakes were high enough so that you violated your journalistic integrity?

That's—I appreciate the question. So I've covered dozens of violent protests and riots where I witnessed people being assaulted. I've always—I don't intervene in those instances; I try to record or photograph. But when you see, for example, a mob of people beating somebody—and it doesn't matter for me the political creation of who that mob is—I feel sort of as a human, as a citizen, I should at least just intervene in some way.

That's something that I've struggled with a lot.

Okay, so you said you don't intervene. Now, in your book, there’s the account of your severe beating. I looked up some press coverage of that, and I believe this was in your book as well, that while you were being assaulted so badly, there were press there, and they did nothing to intervene. They were just recording and taking snapshots and video and so forth, and, you know, in the book, that sounds like they're derelict in their duties.

And maybe in particular because you're also a journalist. And maybe that, you know, maybe there's a special category there. But, and then also as a journalist, if you are recording, it's like you're putting the whole above the part in some sense, right? Because you think you’re journalistic—it’s demanded of you because of your journalistic integrity to record and not to intervene. But you said you feel the pull on your conscience about that.

So how do you—how is it that you've learned to live without it? What makes you think that you made the right decision doing what you've done?

And maybe you don't know. Maybe you know.

I'm not entirely sure if I made the right decision. Unfortunately, I haven't been like right next to somebody who was nearly getting killed. I think for that type of instance it’s very clear that that there's a demand for an obligation for an intimate intervention so that somebody's not murdered.

For me, I mean, you're also not a police officer, and you're not armed, and I don't imagine you're trained in street fighting or that sort of thing. So in some sense, you know, fools jump in where angels fear to tread. And two people getting beat to death isn't really an improvement over one.

And so I'm not saying that, like Leonard Cohen, that Canadian songwriter said, "There's no decent place to stand in a massacre." You know, sometimes you're in a situation where anything you do is bad because the situation is so terrible.

So, okay, so you've had moral qualms about how apart from the action you should be under those situations. What about, like, you're obviously not very happy with what's happening about Antifa, and you're on the ground, also, as opposed, I would say, to these journalists who are minimizing what Antifa is doing. They're much more up in the air in some sense, right? So you're down in the trenches to the point where you're getting beat up for it.

And then I would say the people who aren't doing that and reporting on it, they've got one form of blinders on because they're not seeing what's actually happening. But in some sense, the risk for you and your integrity is that you have the opposite problem: you're so damn involved; you're watching buildings burn; you're watching cars melt; you're watching people be assaulted and being assaulted yourself. That how do you protect yourself against the possibility that you're exaggerating the threat because you, you know, your sample is biased? You're in the middle of the damn riots all the time.

Yeah, I think that's a fair question, and it's a criticism. I—though the instances of ultra-violence that I've seen and I've written about and recorded video for, those are anecdotes that are important. But they're not the full story. And in my—the purpose of writing Unmasked—my book was to shed light really on the ideology that I think is ultimately much, much more dangerous than these instances of violence that lead to people getting seriously injured or killed.

In that, I think it's a theme and a subject that you've discussed before in your speeches and your writings, Professor. It's about this belief that for pursuing this justice, racial justice, anti-racism—whatever name they want to give—they believe that no act that they can make can never go too far.

And that’s sort of the—oh, isn’t that a lovely thing? Wouldn't that be a lovely thing to have on your side? So imagine that you're so virtuous in your pursuits that you are now entitled to do absolutely anything to anyone whenever you want.

I mean, if you have that kind of cognitive structure—I mean, first of all, you're not very self-reflective. It's like, do I really think that I’m so ethical that I can give myself a free hand to do anything?

And so I’m increasingly skeptical about large-scale ethical claims of that sort, you know? Well, this is so important that—well, that what exactly? Well, it depends on how important it is.

And well, we could—climate change is a good example of that. Well, if it’s the ultimate environmental catastrophe everywhere and it's going to happen within 20 years, then, well, we should do everything. Well, okay, let's get detailed about this. Does that mean we get to beat up Andy No if he's not that happy about climate change? Well, he's just one guy! You know, and it's a planet we're talking about here.

You know, that's independent, in some sense, of whether there are warranted concerns on the environmental front. I know there are. Like, the oceans are overfished, for example. That's not a good thing.

It's stupid! We should stop doing it! But it's this moral license that goes along with this claim to virtue that really scares the hell out of me. And it's also the fact that you can instantly demonize your enemies, because if you're so virtuous that everything is justified, then anyone who opposes you is virtually Satan themselves.

Yes, I've seen this with my own eyes—this demonization, dehumanization. One of the really shocking things I witnessed last year at the beginning of the riots: I was undercover, so again, I couldn't intervene, because if I did, it would potentially blow my cover and I could get seriously injured or killed.

But this wasn’t anime days after George Floyd had died. The rioting had not at that point spread outside of Minneapolis. There was a man who was targeted by the mob. He was accused of being right-wing. I don’t know whether that accusation is true or false, but he was beaten up. They got him on the ground, and then one of them, with glee, rushed at his head and kicked his teeth in. And you could actually see the teeth on the ground.

And what do you mean by "with glee"? Why that phrase?

The crowd around him celebrated that act, was calling this person a fascist, and was happy that he was crying.

And how could you tell they were happy? What exactly were they doing?

They had smiles on their faces as they were looking at this bleeding person on the ground.

Yeah, well, it's hard to see. It's hard to see exactly what moral claim would justify that smile. So what do you think's really going on there, just out of curiosity? You watched it right up close. So what are those people celebrating? Like, what is it in them that's responding to that?

Well, you said “with glee.” You know, that’s a very specific word.

So what is it that they're celebrating, as far as you can tell?

They think that a fascist or a racist got the violence against him that he deserved.

Yeah, but I don't believe that. You know, I don't believe that's what they're celebrating because I don't think they’re that good. I think they're celebrating watching some poor son of a bitch get hurt, and that satisfies something unbelievably dark in their souls.

Like the desire to burn, the desire to burn down buildings, the desire to melt cars, the desire for the whole goddamn thing to go up in flames because they're resentful and bitter.

Because we can't take these things at face value, right? It's like, no, no, you don't understand. You're smiling and laughing while someone just got his teeth kicked in. No trial, no jury, no defense.

He's on the ground, he's mobbed by overwhelming force, and you're celebrating that. And you're telling me that's because of your virtues? It's like, I don't think so!

And this is the danger we're facing, right, with all these activist groups. I've had people like that at my come and protest against me. I can kind of spot them because I have some clinical training. I can tell the guys, it's almost always men, and they're almost always there to prey on unsuspecting women by being their ideological affiliates.

And those damn guys, man! The worse it goes, the happier they are.

I wanted to ask you, based on your knowledge, your background, your clinical experience, what is the psychology of this mob violence? When I see it, it like—I don’t even recognize some of these—it seems animalistic is what I mean.

No, they’re worse than animals. They're worse than animals because animals—they just kill to eat. You know, human beings have a twist in them that makes them far worse than animals when they really get going.

Well, I think you really want to know what I think? I think it's revenge against God for the crime of being.

That's really what I think. It’s Cain and Abel. It's like, oh, Abel’s your guy, God? How about if I take him out in the field and beat him to death? How do you feel about that?

All my sacrifices went unrewarded.

Yeah, that’s what it is at the bottom of the hell of things. And so, you know, these people—they can light the whole world on fire. And that’s partly what you're so—

So I didn't get your answer to one question—sorry—about the potential warping of your viewpoint because you're so much in the action. Like, how do you—you know what I mean? If you're in that all the time, that becomes your world in some sense. And how do you know that you're not exaggerating the threat because you're in it all the time?

Because I describe step by step what is happening in, let's say, this particular antidote of Portland in the summer of 2020. But then I also followed that up with certain doubters—the consequences, the political consequences, say, in Portland last year.

The city council did vote to defund law enforcement based on the demands of the radical left activists—those who carried out violence. They defunded police; they also abolished the gun violence reduction team. A part of my reporting is crime. It's the crime reporting, particularly in the cities and areas I know what that's like in the northwestern United States.

And we've seen that—we have the actual data. The number of violent crimes has shot up ever since the death of George Floyd last year in Portland and other major American cities. Portland this year, 2021, has now surpassed its record all-time record for homicides, and this is a direct consequence of the political decisions that were made by local politicians in response to their constituents as well as outsiders going in carrying out acts of political violence and having certain demands over it.

Okay, so that's what you point to concretely. So, okay, so let's take that apart a little bit. So you have an ideology at the core of this. I want to go through this really programmatically.

One of the things that—so I'm going to kind of mangle a bunch of questions here together. So these core people—it's not so obvious to me that they're simply left-wing, you know? Because, well, some of them are anarchists.

Okay, like, what the hell's an anarchist exactly? Is he left-wing or right-wing? It's like, in some sense, it doesn't matter. I know ideas matter; that is what I'm saying. But in some sense, it doesn't matter because that person who's decided to be violent is working to burn the whole damn thing down for whatever reason, you know?

And they also describe them as paramilitary and organized militia, and there's kind of a—there's a right-wing flavor to that, right? The uniforms—because uniform is more an element of the right than the left, all things considered.

And I know that things get hard conceptually when the opposites touch, right? And people debate about whether the National Socialists were left-wing or right-wing, and the answer was, well, they were a mixed complex mixture of both and the worst of both in some sense—although, you know, maybe not worse than Stalin or Mao.

But so—and so that also means that people on the left can point to Antifa, even the violent types, and say, "Well, you know, what makes you so sure they're left-wing, and why should we bear the mark of their disquiet, you know, as a stain on our political beliefs?"

So then, okay, now there’s ambiguity about the real radicals and it’s certainly to the degree that they’re radical, the degree to which they can sow confusion about their political ideologies—all to their benefit, right?

So if both the right-wing moderates and the left-wing moderates point to them and say, "Well, your left-wing or your right-wing depending on what they're trying to justify," and that screws the system up. If they're hardcore anarchists, great, you know, that's all the better; they just play into their hands.

Okay, and then you laid out a pathway from that violent interchange to policy decisions like defund the police, for example, and the pulling back of law enforcement. And then you said, "Well, that's destabilizing cities."

That's actually what's happening— that's data. And so it's not that easy to trace. It's not so easy to trace that back to the radicals themselves except insofar as they want to destabilize, right?

The ideological trail isn't so clear. So now, is there a question in there?

Well, I guess one of the questions is, is it reasonable to characterize the radical extremists as either left or right? Do you think that's actually helpful?

I characterize them as far-left. And I can understand that there may be confusion about the ideology. Certainly, I've very frequently come across people on the right who would describe Antifa as radical Democrats or radical liberals, and that's incorrect.

I think what makes me give a partisan label to the Antifa ideologists is that by their own admissions and their attacks and the philosophers that they look to, it's this fusion of both anarchism as well as communism. So they—what makes them different from the traditional revolutionary communists of previous decades is that they're not looking for creating a tyrannical top-to-bottom state communist regime. In fact, they feel that communism failed in part because it was implemented in that way in China or the Soviet Union. They believe in the abolishment of the state, and this is where the anarchist side of the ideology comes out, so that society could be organized into communist communes.

And so they've tried some of these experiments many times. Last year, in the middle of the height of the riots that happened in Seattle, there was the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, otherwise known as CHAZ. When I went up there, that was this experiment that these anarchist communists, Antifa, actually put into practice.

They were able to force police to evacuate from a police department and then promptly took over six blocks of a neighborhood not that far from downtown, and they established a hard border. And in it, they actually took attempts at state building in terms of, "This is where you go to get your food. This is where you go to get your water. We don't—you don't have to pay for it. This is mutual aid. We're gonna do our gardening in the park."

They actually tried to grow fruits and vegetables.

That’s actually pretty funny—that's actually quite funny, the garden in the park thing, you know? Because, really, that's your solution, you dimwits? That's really what you're doing now?

Okay, so let me hammer you on that a bit.

So let’s say, because when I was reading your book, I thought, okay, well, one of the solutions is arrest people who break windows. Enough of this! Like, when they break the law, arrest them. It doesn’t matter what their political background is. And then you think, well, you know, remember in Toronto when the G7 came to downtown Toronto? They basically turned the whole damn city into an armed camp.

And I walked down there by the barbed wire and the cement borders, and I thought, "God damn it, you're turning the city into a prison!" And if you don't think you're going to have prison riots because you did that, you’re a fool.

And so I’m not a big fan of authoritarian states. So then I might say, well, is it okay in the U.S. if the state is loose enough, in some sense, to allow these foolish experiments to take place? Because maybe by doing so, by being that loose—I mean, I know you have the riots; that's not good. But by being that loose, it gives us a chance for these ideas to manifest themselves at a small scale, prove their total lack of validity and their incoherence, and then just sort of disappear.

Now, the alternative would be to crack down in some sense—more police to stop the violence in the riots and to arrest people who are clearly breaking the law. And we can talk about why that isn't happening, too.

But so what do you think about that? Is it a sign of a functioning democracy that it’s loose enough to allow such things to happen?

I think allowing the stuff to go on under normal circumstances—if the protesters, or the people who were somehow discontent, had the self-awareness to recognize when to give it up.

But the thing with these extremists is that they never admit when they’re wrong. They can only interpret history and contemporary actions as—when it fails, it’s because we didn’t try hard enough.

So, last year, the Democrat mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkin, she took a hands-off approach to the autonomous zone, and she thought, okay, it would look optically really bad to send in the National Guard to get all the law enforcement across Seattle County.

Bad, yeah, yeah, I know.

Shut it down! Let's give them that space. And she went on CNN in this infamous clip, and she was asked about it. She said, "Hey, it could be a summer of love."

And in some ways, on the outside, we know what happened.

Hey, we know bloody well what happened after the summer of love—that was the Rolling Stones concert and the Hells Angels and so forth. It's like, the summer of love deteriorated into anarchy hell pretty much instantly.

So that’s a fairly foolish metaphor, let’s say.

Okay, so she let it go; it’s fine. During the day, it did look like a street party, and that was when the journalists were there. That's when you would see the videos and the photos—people giving out free food, people supporting one another, providing everything that you would need with creative costs, and families could go in and out freely.

But at night is where the true side of that autonomism came out, which is that when you have no rule of law, true anarchy, then how do you bring order to a place when there are people who are violent, extreme, and willing to kill or rape?

And the course of what happened over the three weeks is that in these tents, where some of these women were, one woman was nearly raped. People started fires in the streets, and this was a really densely packed neighborhood—high-rise buildings, so people lived there.

The buildings were set on fire, and there were six shootings almost every night.

And there was a 16-year-old murdered.

So why do you think—okay, that's really—okay, so that's real. Let's take that apart too.

Okay, so look, we understand pretty well, as actual social scientists, what happens when it's a summer of love.

Okay? So imagine you put a group together of people who are only agreeable, so they're just compassionate, and so temperamentally so, and maybe let's say, let's make them like ethically so as well. So all they do is cooperate like mad.

Well, you let one psychopath in there, and all hell breaks loose because there's no defenses against the psychopaths. And that’s the free-rider problem.

Now I talked to Robert Trivers, who's one of the world's great evolutionary biologists, about a week and a half ago, about the free-rider problem—the cheating detection problem.

So—and that's the problem I just outlined. It's like, if everyone's cooperating, and then there's no enforcement, the stage is set for the absolute exploitation of that cooperating group by anyone who doesn't share that ethic.

And so here’s—imagine this. So women are more agreeable than men. So more empathic. And so that's kind of rough on women because the men are less empathic. They're harsher and rougher and tougher and meaner and more blunt.

And so women put up with a lot because of that, because a really disagreeable man can be quite brutal.

Now, that can be hemmed in by other traits like conscientiousness, et cetera, but we’ll just keep it simple for now.

So then why do women want less agreeable men? That’s Beauty and the Beast, by the way. That’s the conundrum there, right?

Well, because you need someone who's not that agreeable to keep you safe from someone who's really not that agreeable! And so men exist—and this is part of sexual selection.

Men exist on this weird line, eh? Where they have to be disagreeable enough to keep the real criminal psychopaths at bay. Those are the guys who come out at night, right?

And then, but they have to be agreeable enough to be empathic enough to be generous and share. That’s a really tight line, and it’s one that women are negotiating all the time.

And Trevor said that—no, it was—I talked to David Buss too. Buss said that young women are really attracted to dark triad guys. They're Machiavellian and manipulative, but they’re confident, and so they kind of look successful.

And they’re the risk-takers; they kind of have the persona of daring success, but they’re dark. They border on psychopathic. But as the women get more mature, they’re less likely to be taken in by that.

So anyway, anyways. So this summer of love—the summer of love problem is, well, what happens at night?

Okay, so why do you think it happens at night and not during the day? Just out of curiosity.

You've been there. Like what are you watching? Who’s coming out at night, exactly?

There were gang members who were there, and they were armed. I think they took advantage of the little literal anarchy and that they could go to a place where there was no police, because there was a hard—there were hard borders that were surrounding this zone. So law enforcement kept away.

And so that was just a perfect opportunity for criminals to go into.

And what did they want to do? What is it that it gave them free reign to do?

Shootings.

Okay, so that’s kind of odd. So who are they shooting? I mean, look, if it’s gang warfare, you know why they’re shooting each other. It’s usually guys who are looking for status—who’ve been challenged in some way—who are out to prove themselves.

Like there’s a good sociology of that kind of shooting. It’s like, well, why are these guys going into this free zone, summer love thing, and shooting?

Who are they shooting and why?

I don’t know the name, but they were untrained, and they ended up murdering a 16-year-old. As far as I know, no suspect has ever been identified in that case.

And how was that handled by the mainstream media, that particular event? Because that’s quite the event.

Yeah, that was then the second murder that happened at the top of the zone. So then, by then, the press started to be a bit more critical because that was nearing three weeks at that point. A lot of the residents were feeling a bit more emboldened to speak out anonymously to the—not anonymously, but unnamed to the press about what they’re witnessing, what they’re hearing at night.

I was there one of the nights that I was there—a burglar broke into a car repair business and allegedly tried to start a fire inside. But the owner was there, and he had security, so he detained this individual.

The news went out, and they had a speaker system set up in autonomous with a microphone. Somebody went up to the stage and said that a black person was being held by some racist whites.

An entire mob sprinted to this business, broke down the barrier at the business, got in, and got the guy out.

The business owner said he told the press later on that he had called police about a dozen times, and they just wouldn't respond.

What’d they do with him?

Uh, the person that got away.

Oh, he got away, I see. I see.

Yeah, it’s amazing they didn’t lynch him!

Oh, so yeah. You’re talking about the business owner, you’re right.

Yeah, yeah. It could have become deadly at that point.

Again, this is one of those things. Like, I’m watching, and I feel so helpless in a way that I'm observing. If they start to kill this business owner, that there was nothing I could do.

Police weren’t responding. They had already received many, many phone calls about that incident and they didn’t respond.

But I bring up the case of the child—it’s just sort of like just one example of what, like, a real-life manifestation of this Antifa ideology is.

There are certain parts that you could argue are nice, like this aspect of community building that I witnessed during the day. It seemed like a religious community in that they recognized—

Okay, but let’s take that apart a bit here too.

Okay. So first of all, let’s not forget that this daytime utopia existed in the middle of the richest country in the world that’s ever produced. It’s like, so we’re giving things away for free?

They have no cost. It’s like, no, no, someone else bore the cost! That food didn’t magically appear out of nowhere. Nothing that satiates hunger comes without a cost. Nothing that provides shelter comes without a cost!

And so this is an artificial utopia set up by clueless juveniles who have no sense whatsoever of how privileged they are.

They’re so privileged they think food is free. And, you know, the reason they’re that privileged is because food is damn near free.

And the reason for that is that we live in a miraculous society that’s made food free. And it isn’t because it has no cost, man. You think of all the blood that’s been spilled over the centuries to pay for the terrible struggle that it took us all to figure out how to do that.

That’s not free! You know, and it’s an appalling indictment of our education system that anybody can come out of it thinking that way!

So even during the day, so you have—and it’s the same with the San Francisco summer of love, in some sense. You know, that could have never come about at all, even to the degree that it did, without there being this unbelievable largesse and plenitude that characterizes modern Western societies.

So I mean, when we see people on the street—even—and I'm not saying that being on the street is not a terrible thing—but it’s a complicated thing. We don't see people who are skeletal. We see people who have enough to eat.

And so it’s just rubbish, right from top to bottom.

And to think of—to have a politician say, "Well, you know, maybe it could be a summer of love," it’s like, what the hell does that mean exactly? Our system is so broke that violent clueless radical juveniles can arbitrarily occupy a part of a city and in two weeks make something better? Really? Like, what the hell? I don’t get it.

Now, you talked about optics. So I've been talking to these Democrats, for example, about how to conduct yourself ethically in the political domain, and I've been talking to Republicans as well.

And one of the things we sort of zeroed in on is this idea of instrumentality. You know, if you’re doing something for a particular goal, maybe almost regardless of what that goal is, then you tend to use people for your end.

And you might say, "Well, we have to stop Trump, so it’s okay to use this person for that end." But I don’t buy that at all. I think there’s something deeply wrong about it.

You know, and so when I do these podcasts, for example, what I’m really trying to do is just to find out some things I don’t know. I don’t really have a plan. Like my—did I have a plan to talk to you? I’ll tell you what my plan was: it was like, well, I’m going to read as much of Andy’s book as I can manage in the time I have to do it, I’m going to do my background research to the degree that I can, and then I’m going to ask him a bunch of questions about things I don’t understand.

That’s the whole damn plan! And this instrumentality we’ve got to get rid of this idea that we can use people for an end.

I don’t care what the damn end is!

And you know, if you and I are doing this right, we’re having an honest conversation. That’s all we’re doing. And that's a hard thing to do!

So, okay, back to—your answer to whether or not you’re exaggerating this was to point to the consequences, like the defund the police, that sort of consequence, and the destabilization of cities like Minneapolis and Portland.

And how destabilized do you think they have become because of this?

Well, they’re—in the sense that the people who are dying are mostly black and brown people. So the elite liberal class of the cities don’t really—they don’t experience that loss of life if you know what I mean.

They may hear the gunshots more frequently in the streets; they may see businesses shuttered or damaged because of bullet wounds. But it’s not—it’s not people in their families and their friend circles who are dying! So in some ways, they’re kind of always protected from the consequences of their political decision-making or political demands.

I think one other thing about—

Yeah, so if you look at hierarchies, if you look at the way hierarchies work in the animal kingdom, for example, so even let’s say birds that really don’t live in flocks, they still have a hierarchy.

And the hierarchy is some birds have better nesting sites and so they’re closer to food. They don’t get exposed to wind and rain so much, and they’re birds that are generally in better physical health.

They’re like sort of—they’re birds that are in better physical health, let's leave it at that. They sing louder songs—the males—they attract higher quality, healthier female mates. They have the good nests.

Okay, now, a flu comes through that area, an avian flu. The birds die from the bottom of the hierarchy up.

And so that’s very much in keeping with what you’re describing, right? Is that as we move up our hierarchies, whether they’re based on competence or power, we shield ourselves from stress. That’s partly why we actually want to move up the damn hierarchies.

And so then, when things get destabilized, people die from the bottom up. That’s what’s the old saying, "When the upper class catches a cold, the lower class dies of pneumonia."

And so that’s the luxury belief problem too, isn’t it? Is we can have these adult-painted utopian schemes that we use to pat ourselves on the back for our ethical superiority.

We can fund their implementation, because you talk about that interestingly in your book, right? These left-wing organizations funneling money into these more violent extremist groups.

We can pat ourselves on the back for standing up for the oppressed, and when things go sideways, well, it’s just the oppressed that die. So I can’t figure out why the left stands for this. You know, that’s the thing I can’t get is that I thought you guys were for the working class.

I think how this was demonstrated in one way very clearly was last year in Minneapolis when some of the worst rioting broke out. There was the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which was set up to provide jail support and legal support for those who were arrested and charged with crimes related to the riots.

The public raised $35 million U.S. dollars for that bail fund, so everybody was bailed out, and there was millions more to spare.

Kamala, here, you called them far-left. You specifically called Minnesota the Minnesota Freedom Fund.

I went and looked up the board members there to see who they were, and you know they’re professional types—most of them community activists, some of them lawyers, etc. I mean, it looks like a perfectly legitimate site.

So why did you call them far-left, and why do you think they’re not legitimate? Because that's a pretty deadly epithet coming from your tongue given what you've seen and heard.

So is that—was that justifiable, that epithet, and if so, why?

I think so, because the belief system that’s undergirding that whole project of the freedom fund is that the criminal justice system should be abolished.

That is—I see that’s a strong claim. You’re—okay, so I want to push you on that because I like to talk about specifics. And I noticed that you called them far-left, and now I just called you far-right, so who the hell can trust you?

So like how do we wade through this?

So I’ve been—one of the ways that Antifa and their sympathizers and some publications in the press have tried to de-legitimize my work and my voice is to pause it or put out this idea that, um, because I’m against Antifa, by default then that must mean that I’m pro-fascism.

So they try now for years to throw any type of accusation at me and hoping—knowing that it’s false—but hoping that even if it doesn’t stick completely that I’m never left in the same state as before, but it’s always that I’m always dirtied in a way.

And the benefit—

Yeah, that works! I mean I was nervous about talking to you! It works, man! It works!

And believe me, I’ve experienced the same thing, and it doesn’t take much to stain someone's reputation, right? Especially because, look, there are seven billion people in the world; there’s no way I’m going to talk to all of them.

And so you’ll kind of need hardly any excuse at all not to talk to someone. So, you know, a little stain will do the trick.

And so this—this James O'Keefe thing: you’re described by your critics as a disciple of James O’Keefe—

Okay, the founder of Project Veritas—a right-wing activist group. Okay, so what’s the story with that exactly?

Well, a disciple would—that was tend to imply that, like, I’ve been mentored or for a long time by Project Veritas or James O’Keefe, which I haven’t. But for the record, I am very supportive of the work that they do.

I think they do great investigative—they invest the resources, money, and time getting people to be undercover journalists to record things that otherwise you would never get on record.

I understand there’s a lot of criticisms against—but are they reasonably conceptualized as a right-wing activist group? What exactly does that phrase mean in this context, do you think?

Uh, well, that’s meant to be disparaging, I think. It’s probably fair to describe them as conservative. Um, in the journalists there are conservative, but what they do is important.

For example, they—I thank them in my book because they provided to me some of the primary documents of when one of their journalists found undercover in Toronto City. And that’s something that today nobody else in the United States has been able to do—to actually get somebody who is completely unknown, located in Portland, build a whole new identity/persona, and get this person to infiltrate the group in terms of the membership process as much as possible.

That type of work deserves praise, not condemnation.

And I guess the fact that I’ve been, you know, on record supportive of Project Veritas, people are trying to use that just to smear me.

I think the more serious accusations I’ve been leveled against me, spurious ones, are accusing me of being like in bed with violent extremists, militant right-wing and far-right groups in Portland.

Okay, so now what’s the story there? Why?

And you know, because Carl Jung said every projection has to have a hook. You know, like there’s going to be ways you’re going to be smeared that will work, and there are going to be ways that you’re going to be smeared that won’t work.

And the ones that work, there’s a hook, right? There’s something about you that makes that stick a little better, right? And so we all have to examine our consciences when we get smeared because you think, well, you know, do I have a weak spot that I’m unaware of that makes me much more susceptible to that particular accusation?

And so, you know, you said, well, you’re a critic of Antifa, and that’s enough for you to be labeled as right-wing, and fair enough. But, like, anything else lurking around there that makes you an easy target of that sort of accusation?

I’m glad you asked. So this really started—so after I was beaten by Antifa in the summer of 2019, that was when my profile rose a lot. Before that, I was just a regional small figure. I was occasionally interviewed on Fox News, but otherwise really unknown.

I think what I noticed after that was, um, so what happened was a few months after that, a local left-wing alternative publication in Portland called the Portland Mercury did what they said was this explosive story to expose me.

They had to interview a person, given this individual a pseudonym. Today, I still don't know who this individual is, like the real identity, but they accused, with no evidence, they thought that I was in the presence of when a right-wing riot was being planned against Antifa.

And I had an agreement against the right-wing brawlers for mutual protection; that was a word this individual—the pseudonymous person said.

I was never reached for comment for the story and then it was printed on a local blog and then picked up by journalists on the left who sought to discredit me. Such I think there was Daily Beast, Slate, the same places that have gone after you, professor, and so they repeated this claim.

And I had my legal counsel send a cease and desist letter to the publication, and then they just ignored it. And the thing in the U.S. is to actually win defamation when you’re a public figure, particularly against the newspapers, it’s—it’s near impossible.

So I felt really helpless. And to this day, I’m still really furious about it—that this person just levied a serious accusation against me. I have no idea who it is, and I have no way to encounter—to confront my way.

Well, you do have one way. The one way is to just tell the truth. Yes, right? I mean, that does counter your accuser.

And every time that something like that’s happened to me, at least so far, ultimately it backfired. Now, I mean, I’m knocking on wood, you know, and I know that, you know, maybe my days are numbered in all sorts of different ways.

But so far it hasn't worked. Sometimes it’s taken a long time for the tide to turn, but it's always turned.

And so I would say if you’re still feeling rage about that, like one thing you can take solace in is that to the degree that you’re capable of representing the truth, that is the best protection you have against anything.

And I don’t think there is any better protection against anything than that. There are like the courts, anything like that. It’s like no—when you’re playing a deep game, the only real defense you have is truth.

And truth is reality itself, man! You have that on your side. It’s walking softly, walking carefully, speaking softly, sorry, and carrying a big stick.

So, you know, and that’s interesting too that you're still angry about that, because that's a hell of a thing to carry along with you, you know? It corrodes you over time, that kind of anger.

And you’re doing pretty good given all the things that have been stacked up against you.

So I feel angry because I’ve always—I’ve gone through my life like I have no—I don’t have—it. I don’t have a criminal record, and I’ve been arrested. I always—I do things right, you know?

I follow the rules. I don’t support any political violence, and then this persona identity that others have made—this made-up person of who Andy No is has gotten many to believe it, you know?

They presented this person who’s somebody who, you know, it’s a made-up person too, eh? Because they're pseudonymous. You know, that’s so interesting!

They had to fabricate a person to fabricate you!

Yeah. So it’s just, you know, it feels—I’ve been wronged in that regard.

And the evidence I was put out to try to support it, they said there was undercover video; the video they provided was me documenting the violent brawl that happened in everything before.

And they said that because I was in the presence and in proximity to people on the right, that I was with them or part of them, which is completely untrue.

And that type of standard would never be applied to other journalists.

It’s a backhanded compliment, you know?

Is that how—well, obviously, they think you’re a threat, right?

Right.

Well, that’s worth thinking about, right? I mean, that’s worth thinking about because it means you’re successful enough so that people are willing to generate lies to take you out.

And so I know that’s small solace.

Yeah.

Yeah, we were talking at the beginning—how many times have you been beat up doing what you’re doing? And why the hell do you keep doing it?

I’ve been assaulted or attacked in total four times, two of which were really serious. So the June 2019, most people have seen those pictures where I’m covered in all the milkshakes.

But I had a brain hemorrhage from that beating.

So how that attack’s thought is they punched me really hard in the back of the head from behind.

Okay, so that’s worth thinking about.

Okay, let’s just think about that for a minute.

Okay, so now you also said these guys were wearing fiberglass reinforced gloves.

Okay, so here’s the kind of courageous person who went after you as they wrap their fists into solid material. And instead of confronting you face to face, like someone who's, you know, vaguely civilized might in a brawl situation, let’s say, they punched you in the back of the head.

Yeah. Well, that’s the kind of person we’re talking about right now.

And then we’re talking about someone else. It’s even more than that. Is that they’ve managed to concoct for themselves a story about their moral virtue that’s so blinding that they think that doing that was justified.

They’ve told themselves a story to justify that particular action.

It’s like anyone who thinks someone like that is their friend better start thinking about what they mean by friend.

So, and so what’s the consequence for you? Like, you’re still doing this. How come?

Uh, after that assault, I was rushed to the hospital by ambulance, and I had a well swelling immediately that happened on my face in my eyes.

I was bleeding all over, bleeding from the ear. A CT scan was done on me, and the doctor let me know hours later that I had a subarachnoid brain hemorrhage, which is bleeding in the brain—very serious.

And I had about a year of cognitive speech therapy, physical therapy to address some of the deficiencies I had immediately after the assault.

It’s been two and a half years now, and I’m still dealing with the cognitive issues.

This is what makes me so angry, because nobody’s ever been arrested for it, and they—these anonymous assailants, some of them took something away from me forever.

They—you know, I have memory issues, and my mind is not the same as before; that’s what I deal with.

But I—what was it like for you going back to your next riot after you recovered from this or partially recovered from it?

I mean, what was that day like? You decided you’d go cover something else violent. Tell me what that was like.

I wasn’t able to do it for many, many months afterward. And when I did, I had PTSD—like this overwhelming fear, which wasn’t irrational. It made sense, as if these people knew who they were; they would beat me again and possibly kill me.

I mean, they have been threatening to kill me dozens and dozens of times on social media or through emails or phone calls, or they would actually graffiti it across the city: "Kill Andy No! Murder!"

Yeah, I’ve seen those pictures, man. So this incitement of violence was real. And I went back out, and you know, I’ve gotten a lot of criticisms over it.

But, you know, because I put myself at risk, and earlier this year in May, I was beaten again when I was exposed.

What sort of criticisms?

That you're being too courageous? Is that the problem?

Andy No is being too courageous, man!

No, no, it’s the right way to interpret it, you know, and I’m asking about foolhardiness, right? Because, like, you got hurt bad!

And so I’m asking, you know, how do you know it’s not time to hang up the shingle and do something that won’t get you killed? And I’m not saying you should; that is not what I’m saying.

But it is worth asking yourself that question! And so you did go back into the fray, and you got criticized for it, of course, by people who wouldn’t do that—that’s for sure! And they're sensible, you know, whatever that means.

But so why’d you do it, and how did you overcome that fear, man?

Because, of course, you had something approximating PTSD, and this isn’t some abstract fear—like you could be killed! You were damn near killed!

So there’s a—you can do a hell of a lot of journalism from the comfort of the computer anywhere in the world.

However, the further that you are physically removed from whatever subject you’re reporting on, you introduce—it's much, much easier to introduce more errors.

For example, the journalists who are at bureau deaths and bureaus in D.C. or New York who are reporting about Antifa on the West Coast from the comfort of their desks in their offices introduced a lot of error.

Here is, for example, like describing it as simply a movement against fascism!

And I needed to be on the ground.

Yeah, as if that’s simple! It’s like, oh, they’re fighting fascism, are they? Exactly how are they doing that?

And who are these people that think that they’re fighting fascism?

And why do they think they’re right? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So yeah, simply, it’s that low-resolution thinking that really is—it’s part of a—it’s part of a self-congratulatory privileged blindness, that’s for sure!

Okay, so you need to be in the fray as far as you're concerned to get the facts right, and we already kind of walked through why you think that you're not exaggerating the threat, right?

You look at what's happened in these cities, in the broader political landscape. If you don't mind, let's go back to that Minnesota Freedom Fund again, because that was really a crucial issue as far as I was concerned, because it has to do with these concentric circle—this concentric circle issue.

Okay, so they’re helping people get out on bail as rapidly as possible! Who are the people that they’re getting out on bail, and why do they think that’s a good idea?

They were completely indiscriminate. So the bail bailed out people who were accused of things such as attempted murder and rape.

One, at least one individual who was bailed out based on these funds went on to allegedly murder another individual.

Okay, so that adds credence to your claim that the ideology driving this is a low-resolution critique of the entire justice system, right? Because you wouldn't be indiscriminate in your deliverance of bail if you didn't believe the whole damn system was so corrupt that everyone arrested by it is just—they were just arrested for arbitrary and unreasonable reasons.

So exactly.

In Portland last year, we have, um, sorry—a person last year who’s accused by the state as well as the federal government of using firebombs to attack police during a riot in Portland.

An individual who, referring to suspect Muhammad Malik, he went from a different state to Portland, allegedly had training in St. Louis, was recorded, allegedly on CCTV, buying things such as bats and components to make the fire bombs.

He was held on a 2.2 million state bail in the state of Oregon when he was arrested after the investigation that involved the FBI and the ATF.

That individual was—that’s the highest. They all set out of the thousand people who were arrested in the riots in Portland, Oregon last year.

The bail fund in Portland raised the money to cover 10% of today’s bail, which is $220,000 cash.

They put to get this individual out. And again, it’s from this belief that these—either that there’s no absolutely no legitimacy to the American criminal justice system, so any act of sabotage such as getting out violent—allegedly violent people, people who are accused of attempted murder, people even accused of stabbing people and trying to kill others—all of that, they support and help because they just view it as one more way of disrupting the system in a way to cause it to break apart.

Okay, and so that’s what justifies your accusations, let’s say, of far-left sympathies on the part of this particular fund.

And it’s the indiscriminate use of the money!

Okay, so let’s go into the bail issue bit.

So we could make a counter-argument. We could say, well—look! These people are innocent before they’re tried, right? We presume innocence, and that’s why bail exists, at least to some degree, because people can get on with their lives when they’re getting mangled up by us, a justice system that certainly can be arbitrary and harsh and rather infrequently can deliver, you know, true justice because that’s a heavenly ideal, isn’t it?

And so they could just say, well, look, bail was set. What the hell’s so wrong with us putting bail up? And we’re just helping people who don’t have the means of fighting for themselves.

And yeah, maybe they got carried away at a demonstration, but people get to demonstrate and that doesn't mean we shouldn't help them out with bail.

And now you made a specific point about this particular guy—2.2 million bail, right? So, if there is any legitimacy in the justice system, that would be an indication that maybe he went beyond the pale by any reasonable standards.

Okay? And so how would you respond to—because I can imagine someone from that fund sitting here listening to you thinking, "No, we’re doing this for good reasons."

And so what do you think about that kind of argument?

I would be willing to concede that to them if they weren’t willing to bail out people who have been arrested, let's say, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times within the course of two weeks when you see that it’s used essentially to get people out and then they’re allegedly going to riot within the same 24-hour period.

So they’re arrested again—then that’s more like—it’s the indiscriminate aspect there.

Yeah, okay, okay, okay, fine. That’s good.

I want to read something from your book.

Okay. I’d like to talk to you for about, like, a day, but we’re not going to be able to do it.

Okay, so let me make sure I’ve got the whole story here.

Yeah, this is from a section in your book where you’re talking about, but really about what led to the ideas of defunding the police and so forth and about the fact that if there’s any interference in a criminal matter between the police and someone who’s black in this particular case, that the police are likely to be in terrible trouble for it.

And you talk a little bit about the difficulties that presents for law enforcement officers who are at least sometimes trying to protect black people as well from violent subgroups.

So here’s some—you’re talking about this guy: he was arrested and shot by police after fighting with cops in a residential area.

He had shrugged off being hit with a taser round and reached inside his vehicle where there was a knife. This was all caught on camera.

Blake, who is black, had a warrant issued for his arrest by the Wisconsin circuit court for a felony sex crime and other charges related to domestic abuse.

The criminal complaint for that May 2020 incident accuses Blake of raping a woman with his hand in front of her child.

According to a police scanner audio on August 23rd, officers responded to the same woman’s residence after she called 911 and said Blake was at her home again.

His criminal history included assaulting police, resisting arrest, carrying a firearm while intoxicated, and use of a dangerous weapon.

Even though he survived the shooting, the response was, again, mass carnage and looting in the streets of Kenosha.

Now this is the interesting part—not that all that wasn't interesting. Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris later visited Blake and said she was proud of him.

Okay, so I’m going to hammer you about that first because I want to get to the bottom of this. Did you take her words out of context? Proud of him?

Do you think, like, are you—because this is a pretty serious accusation, right? This guy does not sound good! In fact, he sounds pretty much like the antithesis of good.

And if a vice presidential candidate then visited him and said she was proud of him, well then, what the hell?

Which is really the point you’re making there.

So did—are you being fair to Kamala Harris?

I think so. So I think at that time, she and much of the public just weren’t aware that this was—was the crimes that he’s been accused of or was convicted of. That’s his history.

But it’s that what we see over and over is the context of who these individuals are who are involved with sometimes deadly encounters with police.

It’s almost like their whole history is irrelevant, and the only thing that matters is that they're black, essentially.

I think that Kamala and other Democrat politicians viewed him as a George Floyd 2.0 type of figure and saw only what was on the outside, which is the black man who had been shot by police.

Just either discarded evidence, early evidence that was known about some of his criminal history—some of it emerged, more of it emerged later.

That type of stuff was irrelevant, the narrative at hand because the Kenosha riots were part of riots that occurred in many other cities within this whole movement for racial justice and police reform, which the Democrats, in my view, very cynically used as a campaigning point and as a way to batter the Trump-Pence campaign.

Why cynically, you say?

Because, you know, part of what I’ve kind of come to understand is that some of the stuff is worse because it’s not cynical. You know what I mean?

There’s a cynical element, and because people act instrumentally—they want to win an election, for example. And they think that they need to win at all costs because, you know, look what we’re preventing.

And I get the malevolence and the cynicism. But it’s more scary when you see that it’s actually good people or people as good as you are, as good as I am, that are caught up in this sort of mess, you know?

Because it points to how complex and sticky and horrible it really is.

So I mean, you know, we talked about the incarceration rates and the disproportionality of incarcerated people in the black community, and that really is a problem, you know?

And it might be a severe enough problem to bring the whole mess down, right? We don’t know—it’s a real problem!

And it isn’t going away easily, and we can’t even talk about it—not deeply!

And so then we fall into these low-resolution categories, the kind that you just said. It’s like, well, the justice system is biased against black people and so whenever a black person is treated badly by law enforcement, there’s this reflexive move just to note the systemic inequality and to be on the side of the person who is a member of a group that is incarcerated at a much higher rate than other groups.

And so it points to some—to a real problem!

Now, God only knows what the problem is! It isn’t a problem, right?

First of all, it’s like 10,000 problems, and each of those problems is really hard, and you have to get a high-resolution map of them.

But—and, you know, we—it—I know why you went after Kamala Harris. It’s because, well, this isn’t a guy to be proud of!

Could she have known, or did she just not know?

And then, you know, that’s an important—it’s a crucial question because lots of times, you could know something if you want to, but you decide not to.

I don’t think she had to know because, I mean, she’s a former prosecutor herself. She has the resources to be able to pull up some of these criminal records.

Like I'm not just talking about things that, okay, so that’s a good point.

So she—don’t think she did her homework, and she could have done it! Because I would say, okay, look, she’s busy. Like such people are busy, right? They’re scheduled—they're scheduled to the second, like 20—like 18 hours a day, so they’re busy and things can get by them.

So you say, well, yeah, but she was a prosecutor, and so she knows this sort of thing. She could have done her homework, right?

Then and—and to go into that situation and say specifically that she was proud of this guy, it was like, no, that’s not excusable, because you had the expertise to know, and you could have taken the time to investigate who you were going to congratulate.

And did you let the camera opportunity get in the way, so to speak? That’s the question you’re raising.

Okay, okay, okay, well this is—I’m gonna talk about that particular story with these Democrats that I’m talking to because, you know, one of the things I like about your book—I’m afraid we’re gonna have to close on this—there's a whole bunch of other things.

We should talk again, I guess—that’s really the issue.

You know, the devil’s in the details, and your idea that you have to be there to know what’s going on—well, there’s real truth in that.

And, you know, there is the danger that because you’re there you’re going to exaggerate the threat. That’s the danger of being on the ground.

And, you know