The assault on rightwing, Islamophobic ‘journalist’ Andy Ngo likely resulted from a previous feud between him and Portland Antifa, according to Zack Beauchamp of Vox.
The NY Post article you link to is more polemical than factual. Ngo’s claims about Antifa require examination such as him saying the group “brutalizes the residents”of Portland, while police and city leaders “lack the political will” needed for protecting residents from such a radical leftist scourge.
I myself disagree with using violence as an activism tool, if that is what Antifa has been doing. But I suggest it’s inaccurate to see equivalency between leftist extremist violence in the US and that of the far right.
What is the Antifa equivalent to the far right murder of Heather Heyer, or the Charleston church shooting, or the attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue or the El Paso mass shooting?
There are no known deaths from Antifa and there is little evidence of serious injuries. But there are many deaths from far right violence where mass shooters express racist, xenophobic ideology.
The political left doesn’t have a monopoly on non-violence. But much of what reactionary and conservative pundits have called the “left” over many decades has been people organizing so as to assert their basic human rights, be it the labor movement, the women’s movement, Black liberation, the migrant worker movement, and so on.
Those and other freedom struggles require people building strength-of-numbers thru mostly nonviolent organizing.
History shows those movements are often met with conservative, reactionary violence.
Violence tends to be more likely as a political tool against social movements rather than a preferred means of the social movements.
The “left”, that is, the actual “left” of people organizing for migrant worker justice, anti-racism, anti-classism, a habitable planet, womens and LGBTQ rights, and so on, (and not the “left” which the political right uses to describe corporatist Democrats), requires coalition building, which includes a sympathetic press. Intimidation and violence generally makes no sense to leftist political organizing.
For those invested psychologically or financially in preventing social progress, ignoring or smearing social movements is often the first choice. When that is not effective enough to those invested in the status quo, intimidation and violence is the next step as, for example, the history of conservative opposition to Black civil rights and workers rights shows. Once those in power and the nonelites who support them start the cycle of reactionary violence, it is then unreasonable and immoral to expect those under attack to entirely refrain from violence, especially when it’s in self-defense of one’s community.
So it’s inaccurate and irresponsible to try to say that there is equivalency between leftist violence and violence from the far right. I’m referring to the political situation in the US, not to situations around the world, such as China over a half century ago, where there were mass atrocities from leftist violence under Mao. One might even argue that Mao wasn’t ‘leftist’ in a true sense of believing in people’s inherent right to self-determination.
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