Parallel Worlds

In my opening post, I mentioned how it seems as though the political discourse we are reaching is becoming dangerous. We are all going into our own groups, while “othering” the opposite group. One thing that has become obvious during this is that each group has their own parallel world. This has never been more clear than during the attack on Andy Ngo by Antifa in Portland.

You might be wondering who Andy Ngo is. According to Quillette, he is a Sub-editor and Contributing Writer at Quillette, Andy claims that he focuses on free expression, the culture wars, and religion. The Editor-in-chief of Quillette claims that Quillette has basically a center left, moderate bias. Antifa seems to be a radical left wing group that uses violent extremism. Andy Ngo has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about what happened.

I wanted to get that bit out of background out of the way, from what it seems is that Andy Ngo is a journalist who was trying to cover an event that Antifa was covering because he believes it is important to cover their violent extremism. What I think is odd, is how each political group seems to be covering what should be a non-partisan incident.

As an example here is a couple different clips on how news publications that tend to be considered on the opposite side of the political aisle have been covering the same story. Here is a Fox News Interview with Andy Ngo after the incident and here is an interview with CNN about the same exact incident. There are different news publications that have far more polarizing views, but I figured CNN and Fox News are among the most well known news publications that seem to be on opposite sides of the political aisle. In the Fox News interview, they were very sympathetic and sensitive to the incident that happened, in the description beneath the video feed of the interview they labeled Andy Ngo a conservative and actually outright titled in the description that Antifa attacked him. In the CNN Interview, they were fair, but were a bit more straight in the interview with less sympathy than Fox News. I don’t think less sympathy is bad thing, they seemed respectful and gave him a straight interview. In the description beneath the feed of the video feed of the interview in the CNN Interview, they also labeled him a conservative, but they state that Andy Ngo said Antifa was behind the attack. They stay clear of proclaiming that Antifa actually did attack him, even though during the interview, they show footage of the attack happening by Antifa to him. Which is obviously much different from the interview I mentioned with Fox News where they downright stated that he was attacked by Antifa.

It seems clear that this was Antifa attacking him, but what isn’t clear is that Andy Ngo considers himself a conservative, which both CNN and Fox News seem to claim. I have been watching several podcasts/interviews that have had Andy Ngo on to talk about him getting attacked by Antifa, it wasn’t until I watched the Joe Rogan Podcast in which he finally mentioned him being on the center right. Every other podcast/interview that asked him that, he seemed to dodge that question until then. Until that point, I think everyone thought of him as center left, either way he definitely seems like a moderate. I feel this is important because he seems to be portrayed as something he is not by two different news publications that are on opposite sides of the political spectrum for what seems to be two separate reasons.

It seems that Fox News is trying to play the sympathy card in a time that they feel that conservative views are not acceptable and being censored by big tech. And it seems that CNN is trying to play a little bit more neutral as a couple of their news anchors have tried to defend Antifa or at least point out that Antifa isn’t that bad because they are supposedly anti-facists.

Sorry if this seemed a little too long, but I thought these things are important to point out. This should be a simple non-partisan issue. A politically moderate journalist who is trying to cover an extremist group and ends up getting beaten to the point of brain damage should be something we should all be coming together and saying this is wrong. Instead, we are still trying to score political points. Please let me know what you think and thanks for reading!