Beaten up by Antifa, Andy Ngo gets a vindication

By Eli Mendez –

By 2019, journalist Andy Ngo had already spent four years documenting the violence of Antifa in its juggernaut city Portland.

Then he became the story. 

At an Antifa march on June 29, 2019, black-clad left-wing extremists descended on him, mobbed him and beat him until his eyes swelled and his brain bled.

“I felt something hit me really hard in the back of the head,” Ngo says. “People dressed in black surrounded me. I felt punches to the head and face in every direction. I tried really hard to hold on to my GoPro equipment. Unfortunately in the beating, somebody wrangled it out of my hands and took off.”

And that’s how the child of Vietnamese asylum seekers catapulted from drifting reporter to national icon of the dangers of leftist anarchy assaulting America’s streets.

Andy Ngo was born in Portland, graduated from UCLA right in the 2009 recession and took part-time minimum wage jobs, wondering what to do with his life. After abandoning the Christianity of his youth, had become an atheist and a homosexual. He also became concerned about Islamist extremism.

Wanting to study political science focused on North Africa (where Islamism rages), he enrolled in Portland State University’s graduate program. That’s where he got involved in the campus newspaper, assigned to covering Antifa protests just off campus.

His first exposure to the activists under the banner of being “antifacists” was on election night of 2016. To the surprise of everybody, Donald Trump won. Many in Portland, which was known for its very leftist political leanings, reacted with outrage.

“People  took to the streets in masses to reject that outcome, and in Portland, many people chose to manifest their frustration through violence and destruction,” he says. Carrying bats, crowbars and hammers, they “destroyed the hell out of the place.”

The fact that they all dressed in uniform in head-to-toe black gave the sensation that they were coordinated, that they were an organization. It was the beginning of what would become a regular feature in the political landscape across America, mostly in the large cities. 

It was the emergence of Antifa.

For the Portland State University student newspaper, Ngo filmed and reported on Antifa, which seemed to consider Portland as a base of power. As a student journalist, he was a junior member of the press corps, yet he was disconcerted that the senior corpsmen seemed to be misrepresenting the realities he witnessed on the street.

“The coverage from the local press was not the honest picture about who these masked militants actually were,” he said. “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.”

Eventually he left college and continued reporting as an independent journalist with a Twitter channel. His videos got used by conservative outlets like Fox. He branched out to Seattle Antifa and exposed fake hate crimes like Jussie Smollett. People were shaming America; but his parents were grateful to come to America, and he was grateful.

As he exposed Antifa’s ample use of violence and the organizational coordination that would eventually lead Trump to declare Antifa a terrorist organization, he was gaining the ire of the people he covered.

That ire didn’t stay limited to hot heads and sharp anger.

In June 2019, the ire manifested itself in blows. After being doused with milkshakes, Andy was mobbed and beaten. In a city where the mayor blames Christians for the violence done against them, no one (surprise, surprise) was ever arrested, much less tried in court.

Joseph Bernstein, a reporter with Buzzfeed, was at the event. He was not covering the march. He was covering Ngo, pursuing the angle propagated among leftists that Ngo was provoking and antagonizing, thus drawing naturally a pushback.

Bernstein certifies that Ngo did nothing to trigger violence. He simply recorded events. Bernstein was with Ngo from before the event and after, into the hospital where he was treated.”The attack was not provoked,” he wrote.

“I was very lucky to survive that,” Ngo says. “I went through many many months of pretty intensive forms of therapies: physical, occupational, speech. One of the lingering effects of the  subarachnoid brain hemorrhage is I have memory issue, which is pretty devastating to suffer as a journalist.

“I’m lucky that I was able to regain my balance and some of my speech and cognitive issues have minimized.”

Through tireless investigative journalism, he – not the police – identified his attackers. He sued. Since they didn’t even show up to court, he won the case and an award of $300,000. It was a symbolic victory only, since the defendants don’t have any money to collect, Ngo says.

In October 2021, a Multnomah County grand jury indicted John Colin Hacker (aka John Hacker) on a felony robbery charge for allegedly stealing Ngo’s cell phone during a May 2019 attack. An arrest warrant was issued, but he has not turned himself in.

In February 2021, he published the New York Times best seller Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.

Ngo’s not the only one to suffer violence at the hands of Antifa. On Aug. 29, 2020, Aaron Joseph “Jay” Danielson, a supporter of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, was shot and killed in Portland, after a pro-Trump rally. Michael Forest Reinoehl, an Antifa militant, was accused of being the shooter, but when U.S. Marshals attempted to arrest him, he drew a gun and was shot and killed.

On Sept. 22, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa a “domestic terror group.” But it is not clear what crackdown this will bring as it enters a gray area in the law. Still, it was a vindication for a man who suffered at the hands of Antifa just for covering what Antifa does.

Ngo is still working to expose Antifa. His latest work exposes the John Brown Gun Club is training leftist in the use of guns. He tracked down, for example, the shooter of ICE in Texas.

Related content: Is trans violence an erupting volcano?, progressive Shaun King goes from woke to Muslim, 3,200 respond to Christ in Portland. Sources: PragerU, Buzzfeed, others.