They say that freedom is lost gradually, then all at once. We have reached ‘all at once’.
Last Tuesday, August 8, a court in Portland, Oregon, ruled in a civil liability case. The two defendants in the case were cleared of responsibility for a series of physical attacks carried out against a journalist, Andy Ngo, between 2019 and 2021. If you’re not familiar with Ngo’s work, or the civil case he was bringing against the defendants, John Hacker and Elizabeth Richter, the ruling likely passed you by. But it’s not hyperbole to state that this may have been the moment that America ceased to be, as the song goes, the “land of the free”.
First, a bit of background.
In 2020, Portland suffered what’s come to be ironically known as the “summer of love” — 100 straight nights of rioting by Antifa activists following the death of George Floyd. Fireworks and Molotov cocktails were thrown; the Federal Courthouse was torched with people inside; a Trump supporter was shot dead. “It was clear that the intent of the crowd was not peaceful protest,” the Portland Police Bureau said.
Ngo, a Portland native whose parents had been Vietnamese boat people, had been butting heads with Antifa since his tenure as an editor for the Portland State student newspaper in 2016/17; following his graduation he found work as a journalist and continued to report on their activities. In May 2019 he was assaulted at his gym by an antifa member who poured a liquid over him and tried to steal his phone. The following month he was attacked again, this time hospitalised with a potentially life-threatening head injury.
When Antifa began their rampage in 2020, Ngo was well-placed to document and expose their activities. He regularly outed individual Antifa members, further enraging the group, and making his a well-known face in Antifa circles. On May 28, 2021, left-wing protestors held a rally to mark the one year anniversary since the death of George Floyd. Ngo infiltrated the crowd wearing a mask, but was spotted and attacked by a group of activists. They punched him and smacked his head against a wall. He was able to flee to a hotel, where staff held back his assailants and the police were called.
In a statement handed to Willamette Week, Ngo wrote: “I was chased, attacked and beaten by a masked mob, baying for my blood. Had I not been able to shelter wounded and bleeding inside a hotel while they beat the doors and windows like animals, there is no doubt in my mind I would not be here today.”
Already in 2020, frustrated with the lack of criminal proceedings against his attackers, Ngo had filed a civil case against Rose Hill Antifa and six individual defendants, seeking nearly $900,000 for damages resulting from assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. One defendant settled out of court; three others have already been found in default (their damages are yet to be decided). That left Richter and Hacker as the two remaining defendants.
In court, Hacker admitted that he had been the man who assaulted Ngo in the gym in 2019. “I don't think it was appropriate. I wasn’t thinking. I was just like, ‘I hate this guy. Fuck this guy’,” he told the jury. He also apologised to Ngo, admitting the attack was “a ridiculous way to resolve grievances.”
Richter, for her part, was caught on camera outside the hotel screaming “That's Andy! Get him! Get him!” — footage that was shown to the jurors in court.
So why were the pair found not to bear any responsibility for what happened to Ngo?
Well, one reason can be found within the Portland Mercury, which, in covering the outcome of the case, told their readers that “Ngo is a prominent right-wing social media personality and editor at large for the Canadian-based Post Millennial website, which has often featured conspiracy-laced stories and been accused of spreading disinformation.”
They continue: “Ngo's antics have landed him on the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch lists, which describes him thusly: “What Ngo has portrayed as his journalistic work largely consists of publishing anti-antifa, Islamophobic and transphobic tweets and articles to his sizable Twitter following, along with disseminating the arrest records and personal details of left-wing demonstrators.””
You see? He’s a conspiracy theorist, a racist, an anti-anti-fascist, and what’s more, he isn’t even a real journalist.
But there’s more to it than that.
During closing statements, lawyer for the defense, Michelle Burrows, told jurors “I am Antifa,” warning them that she “will remember each one of their faces.”
The judge was forced to increase the safety measures afforded to the jurors, after they raised concerns about their identities being made public, while, journalists covering the trial were also threatened and had their property trashed.
In short, Antifa menaced the court into finding in favour of their members. So this is where we are now: journalists can be physically beaten by state-sanctioned groups, and can’t get justice in court. That’s firmly in banana republic territory.
That alone would be cause for major concern. Taken together with:
the state’s accelerated persecution of the Republican front-running candidate through the court system;
the failure to properly investigate credible allegations of election tampering during the 2020 Presidential election;
the judicial persecution of figures who made those allegations;
the Reichstag-fire false-flag event that is January 6;
the Biden corruption scandal;
the prosecution of a war against Russia through a proxy state for no reason other than the pursuit of power and wealth by the elites;
the state sanction of cartels in major industries including banking and pharmaceuticals;
and a whole host of other issues besides (feel free to add your favourites in the comments) …
what we have is a wholesale collapse of the institutions required to make a country free and democratic.
The American Republic, governed by ‘We, the People’ through their representatives in Congress, has effectively fallen. All that remains now is for that reality to assert itself in people’s day to day lives. And it will. In places like Portland it already has.
Each century has its story. The 18th Century was the Age of Enlightenment, marked by revolutions in America and France that saw monarchies overthrown in favour of rule by the people. The 19th Century was Age of the Nation States; no longer were the lives of the common people bound by local geography, with little meaningful difference between the Kentish, Flemish and Breton man. It was then that people started to draw meaning in national identities, Zionism being the most obvious example of this trend. The 20th Century was the Globalist Age, provoking a battle royale between Communism and Capitalism which gave rise to the ‘three worlds’ of the Cold War.
And now we’re nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st Century. What will our century’s story be?
In part, it will carry threads of from what came before. Enlightenment values still shape our understanding of who we are — our national identities — and what we want our countries to be. The fight between NATO and the Second World is not only unresolved, but has resurfaced. Economic questions also abound: the people want to continue reaping the rewards of a free market, while the elites prefer a managed economy.
But it also brings something new to the table: technologies which make inescapable techno-feudalism a very real possibility for the first time in human history. This could be the century in which globalism becomes consolidated, centralizing power in the hands of a very few. Or it could be the century in which decentralisation takes off, effectively completing the work started by the American revolutionaries all those years ago.
In March, President Trump effectively launched his re-election campaign at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), telling the crowd: “They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom. They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.”
Speaking in New Hampshire on the same day as the ruling was made in Ngo’s case, Trump continued on this theme: “They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom,” he told supporters. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.”
The 2024 election will be an election like no other. The candidates may make the usual pledges about jobs and taxes, but it won’t be their policies and campaign promises that make headlines.
When Trump and Biden take to the stage next year to duke it out, they will be no mere mortals vying for the world’s top job. They have become avatars. The ballot papers will say ‘Trump, Donald J’ and ‘Biden, Joseph R,’ but the choice before the voters will be existential: do you want freedom, or do you want feudalism?
The history of the 21st Century has not yet been written. What will our story be?
Do you actually believe that the people who staged three impeachments and a lockdown, and instituted a controlled press, will ever cede power?