Andy Ngo, Journalist Who Covers Antifa, Reveals Why He Left the United States

Andy Ngo, a Portland-based journalist, is seen covered in unknown substance after unidentified Rose City Antifa members attacked him in Portland, Oregon on June 29, 2019. Moriah Ratner/Getty Images

Journalist Andy Ngo, who for years has been documenting the anarcho-communist group Antifa, revealed why he left the United States earlier this year.

Ngo, who is the editor for The Post Millennial, told Fox News that he left the country amid threats of violence against not only him but his family members.

“It was just not safe anymore for me. I had already been on borrowed time,” he said, adding that there was an “escalation of safety concerns.”

Ngo said that when he was covering the far-left group after the 2016 election, “the response to that Democratic outcome was for people to take to the streets in masses to reject that outcome, and in Portland, many people chose to manifest their frustration through violence and destruction.”

“There was just this overall, not just a shift in the attitudes in the public toward left-wing political violence, but also the hollowing out and weakening of law enforcement institutions,” he said, adding that mainstream news outlets allowed such rhetoric to flourish.

“These extremist, radical, unfounded ideas were given space to propagate in our papers of legacy, in our homes and ... through broadcast and radio, and of course to online news sites. That helped to really radicalize the left, in my opinion.

“After every riot that was occurring in Portland and Seattle, the coverage from the local press was not the honest picture about who these masked militants actually were.

“The way they were described, they were lionized and described essentially as heroes who are protecting their communities because police don’t protect people, because police are racist and transphobic and homophobic.”

However, over time, Ngo became known to Antifa followers and had to stop going to riots and demonstrations. In 2019, Ngo was attacked by a mob of Antifa adherents and was hospitalized, although some members of the media accused him of faking his injuries even while he was hospitalized.

“I was challenging the narrative that they had, the dominant narrative that they had within both the local press and therefore in the national press, as well,” he said.

Earlier this year, Ngo told The Epoch Times that Antifa isn’t merely an ideology, as some U.S. intelligence officials have said in recent years and months. FBI Director Chris Wray told a panel in 2020 that it was more of an ideological movement than an organization.

Antifa is “more than an idea,” Ngo said. “It’s also a movement.” It has groups that are organized into formal groups, he said, and that includes Rose City Antifa, “the oldest Antifa organization in the U.S.,” which is based in Portland, Oregon, the epicenter of the movement’s violent activity.