Giving Antifa Its Due
Look up Andy Ngo’s recently published Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy in your local public library’s online catalog, and chances are better than not that, if they even bothered to acquire it, the book has been slapped with the informationally ghettoizing subject heading “conspiracy theories” – a condescending label never applied to books about “Russiagate” or “white privilege”, for two obvious examples. “Andy Ngo’s new book still pretends antifa’s the real enemy,” scoffs Globohomo mouthpiece Alexander Nazaryan in the Los Angeles Times . [1] Clearly, the respectable curators of the information landscape are interested in keeping this book marginalized or hidden – which, naturally, is the first indication that it is worth reading. Many reasonable criticisms can be leveled at Unmasked . Ngo is at best a meat-and-potatoes prose stylist, and Hachette, his publisher, even skimped on providing proper proofreading, an indication that the book was rushed in...