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Andy Ngo Reportedly Assaulted by Portland Rioters

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  May 29, 2021 5:45 PM

Andy Ngo, a journalist and author who has covered Antifa extensively, was reportedly assaulted overnight in Portland, where rioting and unrest continues even a year after George Floyd's death. Fox News' Dom Calicchio, reported on the assault on Saturday, citing social media posts.

Predictably, but no less horrifying, many on Twitter found it worth joking about.

Ngo has not tweeted or spoken about the reported assault, though his tweets and retweets Friday afternoon and evening indicate he's in Portland.

A report from Suzette Smith for Williamette Week describes what went down, complete with a video:

People in a May 28 protest crowd in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center chased, tackled and punched someone they believed to be right-wing author Andy Ngo, pursuing him through the streets of Portland until he hid inside The Nines hotel.

The enraged group pulled on the hotel’s front doors and shouted “You wanna kill us? You wanna kill us, Andy?” at The Nines staff while the hotel staff frantically tried to hold the entrance closed.

The person hiding in The Nines appeared to be Ngo to this reporter—who saw him in the light of an elevator as he entered it and faced the front before the doors closed. But Ngo has not responded to WW’s inquiries about whether he was assaulted, and has released no public statements about the incident.

The person believed to be Ngo was not observed leaving the hotel, so the crowd of people waited in front of The Nines for at least an hour, telling people entering the hotel that it was “sheltering a Nazi.” 

...

Friday’s march concluded around 11:30 pm without much fanfare. Word began to spread that Ngo was in the crowd—disguised and wearing a Black Lives Matter flag around his shoulders.

A group of 5-10 people in identity-obscuring clothing called “black bloc” followed the person they suspected of being Ngo for blocks, inquiring who he was. At one point, the person they pursued said his name was Jake. In front of the AC Marriott, the group tried to unmask the unknown man. He ran for blocks until someone in the pursuing group tackled him—at Southwest 4th Avenue and Morrison Street—and punched him several times after his head hit the brick sidewalk.

A nearby man holding a skateboard admonished the group, saying that their quarry looked like he’d “had enough.” However, when someone nearby shouted that the person they were assaulting was Ngo, the skateboard-carrying man changed his attitude, swearing and joining the group.

When the fleeing man took shelter in The Nines, he appeared to be pleading with staff. “They’re going to kill me,” he said.


While Smith's reporting provided helpful context, she nevertheless went through great lengths to portray protesters as "peaceful," even as she herself acknowledges "the crowd threw raw eggs." 

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She also heavily scrutinized Ngo, who may have been an assault victim, for how his "willingness to post the mugshots and other personal information of protest arrestees has caused many of the people in Portland’s leftist movement to see him as something like an existential threat." 

Is that supposed to make the actions above acceptable then? It seems to at the very least for the "skateboard-carrying man."

Further, crowds have mistaken other Asian men for Ngo before. "There have been several incidents in which Asian men attending protests have been confused with Andy Ngo," as Zane Sparling wrote for Portland Tribune. If this were to be the case here, crowds would have assaulted a man for no reason other than mistaken identity.

Oregon Live reported that "Portland police declared a riot Tuesday night amid a destructive downtown demonstration. Some in the crowd lit fireworks and a dumpster fire, vandalized buildings with graffiti and broke windows at Portland City Hall," also noting that "Portland’s 2020 demonstrations spanned more than 100 consecutive nights — a lengthier stretch than anywhere else in the country."

In 2019, Ngo was attacked at a Portland protest by Antifa, including with a cement milkshake, which resulted in a brain bleed and a stay at the hospital. 

Sarling mentioned the incident in his reporting, tying the attack in with Ngo's resulting fame:

Ngo is one of the most prominent critics of the left-wing movement known as antifa. As recently as 2019, he was a little-known writer who frequently live-streamed Portland demonstrations. During an infamous rally in June of that year, crowds doused him in milkshakes and attacked him; the incident gave Ngo a massive social media following he parlayed into frequent television appearances and a book published earlier this year.  

Like Townhall's own Julio Rosas, Ngo was a target of a vicious smear campaign from The Intercept, though such a hit job did not reference Ngo being attacked in 2019.