Unmasked

Introduction

“WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!” the crowd of left-wing protesters chanted as they marched in the heart of downtown Portland, Oregon, in June 2019. Some of them wore red shirts and bandanas to broadcast their allegiance to Marxism. They paraded red flags printed with a rose logo, a symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America. They were joined by dozens of people dressed head to toe in black. These were the radical anarchist communists. Most of them wore masks—long before the COVID-19 outbreak made them a norm of public life. Many also wore helmets and carried melee weapons. Together, the crowd of around four hundred brought traffic to a standstill—by now a regular occurrence in the City of Roses, as Portland is known by. As usual, the police stayed away. They knew whom the streets belonged to.

Working as a journalist with a phone and a new GoPro camera, I slowly made my way toward the front of the crowd. Some of the protesters recognized me. They glared and whispered in the ears of their comrades. Luis Enrique Marquez looked right at me. The 48-year-old Rose City Antifa member has been arrested so many times at violent protests in Portland over the past few years that he no longer bothers to wear a mask. Still, I ignored the stares and continued forward. By this point, the crowd’s chants had changed.

“No hate! No fear!” they began shouting.

Before I made it much farther, someone—or something—hit me hard in the back of the head. I was nearly knocked to the ground from the impact. Never having been in a fight, I naively asked myself in the moment: “Did someone just trip and fall into me?” Before I could turn around to look, a sea of bodies dressed in black surrounded me. In the background, I could still hear the crowd chant, “No hate!”

Ironically, all I saw next—and felt—was the pure embodiment of hatred.

Staring at an amorphous mob of faceless shadows, I froze. Suddenly, clenched fists repeatedly struck my face and head from all directions. My right knee buckled from the impact. The masked attackers wore tactical gloves—gloves hardened with fiberglass on the knuckles. It’s likely some of them used brass knuckles as well. I put my arms up to surrender, but this only signaled to them to beat me more ferociously. Someone then snatched my camera—my evidence. I desperately tried but failed to hold on to it. The masked thief melted into the crowd, a function of the “black bloc.” Another person ran up and kicked me twice in the groin. Someone bashed me on the head from behind with a stiff placard or sign.

The attack left me dazed and bloodied. I was bleeding from my ear and had open gashes all over my face. My eyes were beginning to swell with blood. I thought the beating was over, but next came the hailstorm of “milkshakes,” eggs, and other hard objects at my face and head.

The mob roared in laughter as I stumbled away. A crowd of cameramen surrounded and followed me. I thought they were going to offer to help, but they just took photos and video.

“F—king owned, bitch!” shouted a local transsexual antifa militant and a member of the Satanic Portland Antifascists.¹ I walked away, half blinded, to the county courthouse across Lownsdale Square before losing my balance. Later, in the emergency room of the Oregon Health and Science University hospital, I found out my brain was hemorrhaging.

Outside of the Multnomah County Justice Center, the building that houses the Central Police Precinct, the Sheriff’s Office, and courtrooms, I was nearly killed by a violent mob. At no point did police intervene to help. Mobile phone footage recorded by Jim Ryan, a news reporter with the Oregonian—Portland’s newspaper of record—captured part of the beating.

While I was in the emergency room, the video was being watched hundreds of thousands of times on social media. My name began to trend on Twitter across the United States, even though most people had no idea who I was. Even liberal mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN could not ignore what happened. In contrast to the narrative Americans had been sold that antifa are merely “anti-fascists,” the video showed a mob of mask-clad extremists beating a journalist in the middle of a major American city with impunity. It confirmed what some had been warning for years: antifa is a violent extremist movement that attacks all kinds of targets under the guise of “anti-fascism.”

Though my assault that day received national and international attention, I was hardly the only one to be brutally attacked. Adam Kelly, 37, was hit from behind with an overhead swing by several masked militants as he attempted to help an older man being beaten on the ground next to the Pioneer Courthouse. One of Kelly’s attackers used a baton to strike him on the head. The impact could actually be heard on video. Kelly’s head injury required twenty-five staples to close. He and I were treated in the same emergency department, but we didn’t know it at the time. He was lucky to survive.

Gage Halupowski, a 24-year-old Portland resident, was convicted and sentenced for the attack against Kelly. To date, he remains one of the very few antifa extremists in the United States sentenced to prison time. Tellingly, antifa groups refer to him as a “political prisoner.”²

In total, eight were injured that day. Three, including myself, required hospitalization. Rose City Antifa, the Portland antifa group, claimed responsibility for the attacks.

“The events of this weekend are what we mean by community defense,” the organization said in a statement on its website.³ “This is exactly what should happen when the far-right attempts to invade our town.” This was a rare moment of honesty for an antifa organization that otherwise spreads disinformation and propaganda. If it isn’t clear yet, violence is a feature, not a bug, of antifa’s ideology. In fact, they venerate violence. Since 2015, untold numbers of victims, including other journalists, have been doxed, beaten, robbed, or killed by antifa militants. Few of them receive media attention—or justice.

For whatever reason, the violence on June 29, 2019, in Portland became one of the watershed moments that brought national attention to antifa violence and the left-wing politicians who enabled it despite many people having been victimized before me. For example, two Marine reservists visiting Philadelphia in November 2018 were jumped after being mistaken for Proud Boys by antifa. Alejandro Godinez and Luis Torres, who are Latino, told investigators they were called racial slurs during the unprovoked attack and robbery. Tom Keenan, Thomas Massey, and Joseph Alcoff were later arrested after they were identified in a video recorded earlier in the day at a nearby antifa protest.⁴ Alcoff is the son of a feminist professor and worked as a progressive Democratic lobbyist in Washington, DC.⁵

Those attacks flew under the radar at the federal level, but President Donald Trump finally weighed in soon after my attack. “Portland is being watched very closely,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!”⁶

Part of the city resembled a failing state that day, with masked thugs patrolling the streets openly and freely with weapons. The authorities were unable to secure order and protect citizens per commands that limit police engagement with left-wing protesters and rioters. This has been the norm in the City of Roses.

In fact, the normalization of antifa violence in Portland could be summed up in how a local left-wing journalist described the events of June 29. Even with all the violence, now—Washington Post writer Katie Shepherd called it “mostly unremarkable.”⁷ She was actually right, just not in the way she meant. Political violence involving antifa extremists had become so routine in the city that by 2019 the near-killing of three citizens was considered a banality. But what happened in Portland didn’t stay there. Nor did the violence end at severe head injuries. As antifa continue to be whitewashed and ignored and their existence denied, their appeal and membership grow. So does their adherents’ willingness for violence. After months of coronavirus lockdowns in early 2020, race riots erupted in May in response to the death of George Floyd during an arrest by Minneapolis police. In the name of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and with the help of antifa, rioters and looters torched buildings, raided stores, and attacked law enforcement in dozens of cities. This resulted in over two dozen deaths.

Despite what was happening before our eyes, left-wing politicians and media denied antifa played a role. House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called the movement “imaginary” during a congressional debate.⁸ And even though the public could plainly see masked militants openly planning and carrying out riot operations, we were still told there is “no evidence” of organized antifa.

“Who caused the violence at protests? It wasn’t antifa,” declared one gaslighting Washington Post “fact-checker” analysis, for example.⁹

In 2018, I was one of the few journalists writing about antifa and warning the public about what was happening in Portland. I had only been a journalist for a few years, and my older mentors in the field told me to pick a new beat. “Antifa is an old story. They’re irrelevant. Move on,” I was told by one trusted editor. Against their advice, I continued writing and speaking about the subject. Thanks to brave editors and producers at the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, respectively, my reporting was given a large national audience.

What my mentors failed to see at the time was antifa’s sophisticated strategy to destabilize society using propaganda, radicalization, violence, and even electoral politics. It was always wrong to reduce antifa to a ragtag group of street hooligans. Behind their violence is a plan to destroy the nation-state, America in particular, to bring about a revolution that leads to their vision of utopia. In 2020, the country experienced a taste of this when a relatively small group of committed radicals incited and carried out massive damage to life and property in the name of “anti-racism”.

ON AUGUST 4, 2020, I gave testimony to the U.S. Congress about the threat antifa poses to American life and liberty. I was invited to speak by Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution. I came with a nonpartisan message. Being a Portlander who has reported extensively on antifa for years and witnessing their daily violence firsthand, I knew that local and federal authorities weren’t taking the threat seriously. Not only had it led to preventable deaths, anitfa militants were now openly organizing uprisings from coast to coast.

I knew that the high-profile nature of giving testimony to the Senate meant that I would be subject to another round of death threats. But I couldn’t ignore the opportunity to speak with Democrats for once. The threat of antifa cannot be solved through just one party.

Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono, one of the highest-level Asian American politicians, cochairs the subcommittee with Senator Cruz. I wrote my remarks hoping she and her Democratic colleagues would understand, even just a little, that antifa are not simply “anti-fascist” as they claim. I cited evidence from court documents, government press releases, law enforcement, and my own research to show that antifa are violent and seeks to destabilize the United States through domestic terrorism. My comments were ignored by the Democrats. Not one asked me any questions or even acknowledged my presence there. Senator Hirono for her part repeated headlines from the Guardian and other leftist sources that erroneously say that antifa have “killed no one.”¹⁰ Before the three-hour hearing was over, she stormed out of the room. “I hope this is the end of this hearing, Mr. Chairman, and that we don’t have to listen to any more of your rhetorical speeches,” Hirono told Senator Cruz when he asked her if she would denounce antifa.¹¹ At that point, no other Democrats were in the hearing. They had either physically left or logged out if they were attending virtually. A few weeks later, antifa militant Michael Reinoehl went on to kill in Portland.

UNMASKED IS THE end result of years of reporting on antifa, even before I understood what they were. It has taken me on the streets of Portland, Seattle, New York, London, and more. As any good journalist should know, you don’t want to become part of the story. However, whether I wanted to or not, antifa decided to make me part of their story. After my 2019 beating, I became antifa’s public enemy number one. They’ve sent me death threats, stalked me, and even showed up at my family’s home on several occasions. They have threatened to shoot me and to set me on fire. They’ve released my exact whereabouts in real time on social media. They’ve threatened my friends. The criminal threats are reported to local police, but no one is ever held accountable.

By 2020, antifa grew to become a near-household name in the United States following months of street violence and property destruction. President Trump moved to have his administration treat them as a domestic terrorist organization after promising to do so for a year. Predictably, this prompted a new wave of countless reports, op-eds, and essays defending or whitewashing antifa.

Few of the people who write about them actually know what this movement is and what its goals are. In fact, misconceptions, misinformation, and disinformation abound about antifa in both left-wing and right-wing media. On the right, antifa are portrayed as street hooligans—violent but also weak, gender-confused “soy” boys and girls. On the left, they are characterized as brave heroes who defend their communities against white supremacists and fascists. Neither side captures what antifa fully are nor the true threat they pose to liberal democracy and the American republic.

So, what exactly are the “antifa,” and what do they want? Antifa—pronounced “an-tee-fa” and short for “anti-fascist”—is a relatively new American phenomenon, but their ideology and violent strategies have been honed and refined for decades in Europe. Simply put, antifa are an ideology and movement of radical pan-leftist politics whose adherents are mainly militant anarchist communists or collectivist anarchists. A smaller fraction of them are socialists who organize through political groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and others. Labels aside, their defining characteristics are a militant opposition to free markets and the desire to destroy the United States and its institutions, culture, and history. Contrary to what many on the right believe, they are not liberal, though that does not mean they haven’t made inroads in transforming and radicalizing the Democratic Party.

What unites this group of leftists is its opposition to so-called fascism, though importantly, what is defined as fascism is left wide open. This is intentional as it allows antifa to justify all manner of violence and extremism in the name of opposing “fascism.” However, not all of its followers participate in violence. In fact, most don’t and instead work on delegitimizing liberal democracy and the nation-state through “charity” and relentless propaganda. Since Trump’s election win, the manifestation of antifa in the United States and Canada (and to a lesser extent in other Western countries) has mutated into a unique contemporary breed of violent left-wing extremism. Influenced by BLM, intersectionality, and other vogue left-wing theories from academe, American antifa have become a more virulent strain that appeals to the mainstream left.

Antifa are no longer a fringe group of radicals wreaking havoc in a handful of cities in America. They’ve seen tremendous success through finding fellow travelers in education, journalism, the legal profession, and politics. The United States is being attacked in all directions by a movement few understand or recognize.

The political street violence involving antifa in the United States serves as a harbinger of American society—the canary in the coal mine of our coming disorder—even possible civil war—if we allow their actions and ideology to be further normalized. American media constantly warn us about the rise of right-wing violence and the lethal threat posed by white supremacy. No honest person denies there are indeed violent far-right militants in the United States, as documented by federal law enforcement, but their numbers and influence are grossly exaggerated by biased media. Antifa receive a tiny fraction of the news coverage of the far right, and yet I would argue their increasingly violent tactics and ideology pose just as much, if not more, of a threat to the future of American liberal democracy. In these pages, I will show why.

Through analysis of never-before-seen antifa documents, Unmasked reveals some of the key players behind this movement and the strategy they’ve developed to recruit, train, and radicalize followers and the public. Street violence is only one part of their planned revolution. We ignore or whitewash antifa at liberty’s peril.