Journalist Quits Job After Awkward Video of Him with Conservative Group Surfaces
By Carl Samson
Andy Ngo, the conservative journalist who was
His exit comes at an interesting time, however, as a video showing him tagging along with a group of far-right activists orchestrating an attack against anti-fascists surfaced earlier on Twitter.
The group, known as Patriot Prayer, is a small coalition of “Trump-supporting provocateurs” based in Vancouver, Washington, according to Portland Mercury.
Filmed by an undercover liberal activist in May, the footage shows Ngo witnessing the group as they plan a violent confrontation with leftists at a local bar, which he never mentioned in his coverage framed as an “Antifa brawl.”
In the video, Patriot Prayer members discussed their plan of attack, including assessing wind direction to avoid pepper-spraying themselves. One with a wooden dowel held it like a baseball bat.
“There’s a hundred of them there,” someone said. “I’ll take the first three.”
“Seemed bizarre to me that it didn’t look like Cider Riot was just place #antifa had amassed to have drinks,” Ngo wrote on Twitter the following day. “It looked like they were using business as base to prep attack.”
The bar, Cider Riot, eventually filed a lawsuit against members of the group, with some facing felony charges for inciting a riot. Others have multiple charges, including assault and illegal use of weapons.
Journalist Alex Zielinski, who wrote the Portland Mercury story about the video, claimed that Ngo was with the group “the entire time” they planned their attack.
“There’s no way he couldn’t know the group was planning on instigating violence against people at Cider Riot,” she wrote in a tweet.
Meanwhile, Twitter user @RespectableLaw accused Ngo of posting “misleading” footage about the attack, citing one clip in which the journalist “edited out some goons stomping a man’s head, and did it with a sloppy looking jump-cut in his own clip.”
“As more people send me clips, it becomes clear that Andy’s work is plagued by these dishonest edits,” @RespectableLaw wrote.
Hours after Portland Mercury published the story, Ngo removed his job title at Quillette from his Twitter profile. Shortly, his name disappeared from the masthead at Quillette’s website.
Quillette Editor-in-Chief Claire Lehmann, however, claimed that Ngo’s exit had nothing to do with the story or the undercover video. Instead, he left the site “a few weeks ago” after sustaining a “traumatic brain injury” from the alleged Antifa attack in June.
“Andy actually moved on from Quillette a few weeks ago because he is undertaking bigger and better projects, we just hadn’t updated the website and he hadn’t updated his Twitter bio until today,” Lehmann told the Daily Beast, claiming that she has not seen the video.
She added, “We are good friends still, he was a great worker, and I fully support him in his future endeavors.”
Ngo, who is Vietnamese American, has also written columns in the National Review, New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, among other outlets. It’s unclear what “bigger and better projects” he is moving on to.
Featured Images via Twitter / @MrAndyNgo (Left) and YouTube / RewoundNews (Right)
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