Yahoo News Reporter Compares Citizen Journalist Andy Ngo to Nazis for Book Revealing Anarchist Mission of Antifa 

PORTLAND, OR - JUNE 29: Andy Ngo, a Portland-based journalist, is seen covered in unknown
Moriah Ratner/Getty
Penny Starr

The White House correspondent for Yahoo News wrote what seems at first to be a review of citizen journalist Andy Ngo’s new book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. But a closer read reveals the author’s disdain for conservatives and embrace of the violent left-wing group that has wreaked destruction in cities across America since last Spring.  

Alexander Nazaryan is the White House correspondent for Yahoo News and the author of his own book slamming former President Donald Trump and his followers, The Best People: Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington. His “review” of Ngo’s book was published in the Los Angeles Times.

Nazaryan tries to discredit Ngo, who spent many months on the ground in Portland, Oregon, and other U.S. cities documenting the violent riots that took place almost nightly, which included looting, attacking police, and repeated assaults on a federal courthouse that regularly involved members of Antifa.

As Breitbart News reported, Ngo meticulously reported on the riots he covered on social media, including Antifa’s recent plan to hold nationwide protests on the day Joe Biden was inaugurated as president.

But Nazaryan, while insulting Ngo, defends Antifa by citing a so-called Antifa scholar, Mark Bray, who wrote in the Washington Post that the movement is “not an organization. Rather, it is a politics of revolutionary opposition to the far right.”

Nazaryan connected Ngo’s reporting and book to the recent attack on the U.S. Capitol even if it was printed well before that event:

Ngo’s false-equivalence manifesto comes while fencing remains in place on Capitol Hill, all because the Proud Boys of the aforementioned November lovefest decided to return on January 6. Coming in the wake of that ugly insurrection, “Unmasked” has the ridiculous feel of a warning about the dangers of German communism issued in 1939. Incredibly, Ngo makes that very comparison himself, arguing that antifa’s predecessors in Weimar Germany deserve as much scrutiny as their Nazi counterparts.

“While the Brownshirts are well remembered in contemporary Western society, the history of far-left paramilitaries in the German interwar years has faded to memory,” Ngo writes, in the tendentious, pedantic tone of a Wikipedia enthusiast. I guess he didn’t get around to clicking on the entry for Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Nazaryan wrote that, in fact, Ngo’s work is in line with German extremists because “maligning the opposition was central to the Nazi strategy, and it is critical to today’s far-right extremists.”

The reporter claims that he doesn’t approve of Antifa after he witnessed thugs in the group destroy a Starbucks, but he puts up a defense for the violent and self-described anarchist movement nonetheless.

And this is not the first time Nazaryan has attacked conservatives. In 2016 Mediaite published a commentary of him attacking Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

The commentary said:

Is it ego or just plain stupidity? That’s the question for anyone and everyone in the media business right now.

…

Especially upon witnessing what feels like the 794th time a reporter, host, anchor, guest, writer, producer, PR exec feels the need to Tweet out a thought, an image (or both in this case) that he or she absolutely, positively KNOWS (and I never use CAPS to make a point) that it’s ill-advised, wrong and potentially career ending act.

At that time, Nazaryan wrote for Newsweek. He tweeted out an old image of people marching with Nazi flags and wearing swastikas to show what he called “Ted Cruz’s ground game.”

“In other words, if you support Cruz, you advocate the genocide of Jews with fascism being your particular political flavor,” Mediaite wrote.

Nazaryan also wrote a hit piece in Newsweek about Breitbart News that was published in 2017, referring to the news organization as “Donald Trump’s Pravda.”

Nazaryan concluded his pro-Antifa screed in the Times by asserting that right-wing Trump supporters and not left-wing rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6 even while hoping the left-wingers were to blame. (Media reports have shown at least one Antifa activist was inside the Capitol that day). 

“Followers of Trump fervently searched footage of the riot, desperately trying to find evidence of Antifa agitators,” he wrote. “But those rioters did not wear masks, so it was clear who they were — and were not.”

Follow Penny Starr on Twitter or send news tips to pstarr@breitbart.com.

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