This is a dangerous thing for me to think- surely someone somewhere is thinking something, and if I assume they’re not I could get complacent. And really, why bother? No one is reading this to learn anything, except maybe for me and some other antifascists trying to dope out what the other side is thinking. You could make something, not necessarily “good,” but at least interesting and provocative out of this.
You’d figure trying to appeal to an audience that had completed their formal education, not just begun it, would make Ngo and his editors more attentive to form, not less, but alas. This is basically “Spooky Stories To Tell In The Dark” but aimed towards Fox News grandpas instead of towards pre-teen children. You’d figure Regnery might have more pride of workmanship, if not respect for their readership.
The dispiriting conclusion I came to is that Hachette, a mainstream press (they also published antifascist Talia Lavin’s “Culture Warlords,” in the same catalog!), decided that their audience just didn’t give a damn. The chapter order seems like they put them through to make a table of contents, and within chapters, there’s often little rhyme or reason as to what paragraph goes where. The usual question in the culture at large and when dealing with the right in particular is “is this person lying, or stupid?” I asked myself that plenty of times reading “Unmasked,” but structurally, the more relevant question is often “Is Andy Ngo (and his editors) completely incompetent, or is he/are they trying to be fancy?” The ways in which this text arranges reportage, history, polemic, and Ngo’s personal story (it leans a lot on Ngo getting his ass kicked by antifa once, and his parents fleeing Vietnam after Uncle Ho stole his mom’s slaves or something) make zero sense, and there’s no introduction that tries to explain. Speaking as someone who has given some thought to the mixture of reporting, political polemic, and memoirs that Ngo is attempting here, “Unmasked” is mostly a good indicator of what not to do. “Unmasked” is a poorly organized, underedited mess. I thought it would be a smooth propaganda pill. In any event, I went in expecting slickness. Or maybe books are such loss leaders, something to give an uncle for Christmas, it just doesn’t matter? Remember when people talked about how slick right-wing media was, back when cable news and talk radio were still a-forming and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were taking the world by storm? Well, presumably now that they know that their base exists in the decaying minds of the old (and the pre-decayed minds of the willfully ignorant young), it seems they don’t really try that hard anymore.
#Andy ngo books professional#
I knew Andy Ngo, grifter and professional victim, wouldn’t be the guy to provide any of that stuff, when I picked up his big leap from Twitter to bound paper books. This constitutes a problem for me on a number of levels: one of my tasks is to read this shit, good or bad, and it would be nice if more were good historically, there have been plenty of good right-leaning writers and I suppose some part of me still wants to find worthy opponents. Name Asterisk on Review- Ma, “Harassment A…Īndy Ngo, “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Plan to Destroy Democracy” (2021) – I know I’ve lamented before the lack of interesting voices on the contemporary right. Review – Fountain, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”.
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