Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1323 - Andy Ngo
Uploaded: 2019-07-11T00:14:45.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1323 - Andy Ngo' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-07-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1323 - Andy Ngo' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-07-11. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1323 - Andy Ngo

okay hello andy hi mr rogan thanks for having me on my pleasure how you doing
man you're all healed
up the bruising and swelling has gone down as you can see but the more serious
injury was to
the brain you have a serious injury to your brain yeah brain hemorrhage what
happened from what the
mob beating so from getting hit in the head you got a brain hemorrhage multiple
times really
intusions yes they were bashing me on the back of my head and to my eyes but so
how do you know you
had brain hemorrhaging and how are you able to just walk around well i was
taken to i started losing my
balance after the beating there was no police i made it uh to the courthouse
sat down on the ground
ambulance was called i had to walk back to the ambulance because the streets
were walked back to
the police precinct in the direction of the mob the medics that were associated
with the portland
police let me know that they um that i needed to walk in that direction it was
quite shocking because
it was um i had just been a victim of this mob beating and then now they're
telling me to walk
back in direction of uh the center precinct where the beating had happened did
they not know that you
had been beaten up well let's let's let's let's set this up for people who are
new to this and don't
understand what happened um i've been aware of you because of you had written
for quillette right
and uh you had become one of these for whatever reason controversial online
journalists and uh you
covered antifa quite a bit and you covered a lot of uh the radical left you
were in portland
and uh what was the exact rally that was going on what was it called did it
have a name
uh it was something like protect portland so it was organized by rose city antifa
and its allies
and by its allies i'm referring to the local chapter of the democratic
socialist america came out to
support them in numbers and what are they protecting portland from they allege
uh fascists fascists but
just in general i mean is there like a particular thing they're worried about
there were two right
wing events happening that day that they were counter demonstrating against
there was a on one side
one part of downtown the proud boys were holding a flag waving event that was
completely uh peaceful
there was no actually flag waving american flag waving correct okay um and a
lot of portlanders found
that provocative and uh a manifestation of uh fascistic violence and in another
part of downtown there
was a men's rights activist who was holding um a rally uh it was titled for for
victims of domestic
terrorism it was an anti-antifa event so uh a men's rights activist yes that
was doing an anti-fascist
or anti-antifa correct well what boy seems like a whole lot of do about nothing
flag waving and anti-antifa
okay yeah can i set the context for please for the city of portland it's a mess
you have listeners and
viewers all over the world so portland oregon is a extremely progressive city
in the pacific northwest
and um i call it a political monoculture because really it's um uh not just you're
more likely to find
socialists open socialists there than you would find like a regular uh
republican or conservative
and within this sort of echo chamber of just leftist politics there's it's
become also a hotbed for
far left militancy so rose city antifa is you could call it like the local
chapter movement of antifa
it's one of the oldest in the country it's very large in portland and they hold
um what you could
call protests but they're they're protests that always devolve into riots where
they essentially take
over parts of downtown and attack people attack their ideological opponents and
do it frequently with
impunity i mean i wasn't the only one attack that day there were two other
people who were bashed on
the head very and have very severe lacerations to the face on head um you may
recall the footage uh from
october of last year when there was elderly driver who was attacked on the
streets yeah they were
directing traffic exactly and and somehow or another the mayor thought it was a
good idea to let this
take place is that the case and they told the police to stand down is that true
so um i mean the next
part of this journey for me will be the legal aspect of it and it seems like
something stinks in portland
the issue is really not with the rank and file officers they're following
orders to not intervene
so i i had been uh assaulted and criminally harassed earlier before the mob
beating people throwing
milkshakes at my face and head within eyesight of police who were watching in
downtown and both of
these were reported and the the answer that i heard that day as i've heard many
times before when i've
been assaulted by antifa is that we will not question approach or detain the
suspect because this could
incite the crowd okay so this is why this has exacerbated or this is why this
has become such a
big deal in portland because of this attitude because portland seems to be the
hotbed right now for this
kind of stuff is that is that fair to say i think it is so is this the mayor i
mean who is who's the one
who's giving the orders to the police to tell them to allow this stuff to take
place well um i'm crowd
funding for the legal fund right now and we are willing we are going to hold
accountable
whoever is responsible for dereliction of duty where the evidence leads us so
portland has an odd
governance system in that the mayor who is up for re-election by the way is
also the police
commissioner so oh wow yeah how does that work it it was an old system that it
inherited and it just
didn't never change from the wild west like that sounds ridiculous yeah it is
ridiculous you can see
all the political conf the conflicts and in conflicts of interest that that
yeah would arise right yeah
yeah shitload um how did you get involved in this like what why first of all
why were they angry at you
i uh i work as a journalist uh i'll name like places that i've been published
before i write and i do video
and i do podcasts so my written work has been published in the wall street
journal the national
review spectator new york post i'm also on the editorial team of quillette
magazine um and one of my beats
among several is about far less militancy particularly in portland and to me
what i was noticing was that the
national and local media coverage had a particular blind spot when it came to
their coverage on antifa there was all this sensitivity to the quote unquote
far right
and white nationalism or white identity extremism but they could not or would
not recognize the
militancy that was on the left in portland seemed to be one of the places for
ground zero particularly
after 2016 we had very violent rioting in downtown the um a segment of the
population could not accept the election results in november
and so uh they did a million dollars in damage
setting fires and uh destroying properties and businesses and at that time i
was a graduate student working at the student paper
and i did a story on that and i came out to witness and it it you know this was
a major american city but it felt
uh like i was in afghanistan or iraq just with all these fires and explosions
and people running around
with bats while masked up and that was first time i really became familiar with
antifa and i took an interest in it
and i saw over and over that the media coverage was basically really sort of
whitewashing
them kind of like referring to them as anti-fascists giving them that
propaganda victory and
antifa is a movement they're masters of doublespeak and disinformation so it
starts with the name antifa
is short for anti-fascists but i never refer to them as that because um that's
ceding the ground to uh
to them uh they when they say that they are defending a community self-defense
it actually
is referring to premeditated violence and offensive violence so i started going
to covering this more
and more you know after i i left the student paper i started writing for um
some national international
publications and there internationally there was a you know a set of readers
who were interested in
in what the hell is going on in portland why are there these continued scenes
of street brawls
and anarchy over and over what are the variables that are causing this and i
thought that i could try to
shine a light on it and by doing so antifa became enraged with my work and
particularly things they've
hated me since last year but they started really escalating um on on the first
of may mayday um so this year
was when i was physically assaulted by them for the first time they were very
upset that i wrote a story
for the new york post where there was a series of and this is one of the other
beats that i work on is
hate crime hoaxes and portland earlier this year had this huge panic over
serious allegations of
lgbt people claiming that they were marauding right-wing gangs driving around
trying to kill people with
bats with hammers trying to uh kidnap them and these were all rumors that were
reported on social media
it caused a huge frenzy even the mayor uh had to come out and you know issue
statement about how he was
concerned there was an emergency town hall with the the local queer center and
um so i started looking into all
these allegations there were 15 of them and i found that of the 15 only one was
reported to police and
what was reported to police and documented in the report was entirely different
from the gofundme
where over 10 000 was raised for this trans activist she had alleged that one
night walking home transphobic
people had beat her with the bat and knocked her unconscious police reports
said that she was
extremely intoxicated and likely fell and there was no evidence that anybody
had assaulted her so when i
this story came out because antifa was really antifa and the democratic
socialist america in portland
were really involved in peddling this hate crime fear in portland and i just
kind of you know threw water on this
this uh uh panic that they had been um flaming and so on the first of may um
there was a riot that i was
covering and one of the masked antifa people went up and sprayed me with i
think it was bear mace some
type of chemical that blinds you and burns you yeah i saw that video yeah so
there was no police that that was
there that i mean that antifa event was publicly advertised on facebook and all
that so over and
over like antifa is very transparent about their calls for people to come to
their stuff and to engage
in this physical confrontation that they call self-defense and the police
either stay away or on purpose
or are told to stay away so it's very confusing because when you watch the
videos they're just macing
people they're macing people who disagree with them like they're yelling at
each other and then someone
will come along and mace people and for the police to not step in and do
something it's i don't i don't
think there's another city in the country that would allow something like that
it just doesn't it doesn't
seem like it makes any sense at all because you're you're not talking about
people that are being
physically attacked and that are macing someone to protect themselves or even a
threat of being
physically attacked they're just disagreeing with each other and yelling at
each other and then
someone will come along and start macing people and i've seen it many times and
i think there's also
a real problem with people wearing masks you know whether their ideology makes
sense or not when you
put people in masks and then you have a bunch of people yelling and escalating
and then there's teams
there's team antifa versus team you know anybody opposing them they feel is a
white supremacist or a
nazi and this is just how they've chosen to frame it to dehumanize people and
then you see them attack
people i'm sure you're aware of the girl who got maced in the face because she
had a hat on that said
make bitcoin great again but it was the same color hat as the make