Andy Cuong Ngo ( ; born ) is an American right-wing social media influencer, who is known for covering and video-recording demonstrators. He is a journalist and editor-at-large for The Post Millennial, a Canadian conservative news website, and a regular guest on Fox News. Ngo has published columns in the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal and authored a best-selling book on antifa.
Ngo's coverage of antifa and Muslims has been controversial, and the accuracy and credibility of his reporting have been disputed by journalists. He has been accused of sharing misleading or selective material, and has been described as a provocateur.
Early life and education Ngo was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. His parents fled Vietnam in 1978 as Vietnamese boat people. His mother came from an educated middle-class family that ran a jewelry business. His father had been a police officer in a small coastal town in Vietnam. In one interview, he said his parents were forced into labor and re-education camps by the Communist government; in another he said his mother's family were thrown into a labour camp when his mother was 16, while his father's job in the police was "a good job during the war, but one that could easily get you shot afterward." His parents first met amid a six-month stay at a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees camp near Tanjungpinang, Indonesia, prior to their arrival in the United States in 1979.
Raised in a Buddhist family, Ngo converted to Christianity in high school. After a period of time as an evangelical Christian, he became disillusioned and took an interest in skepticism. He subsequently became an atheist, and was strongly against organized religion, which was reflected in his social media activity in the form of what Ngo later described as "inflammatory language", with Reddit comments such as "Islam needs to be neutered like Christianity". In 2019, Ngo said that his earlier social media activity "represented my simplistic views at the time" and that his comments no longer represented his beliefs.
According to one interviewer, Ngo speaks with trace of an English accent, "developed from living in the UK for several years as a teen". While attending the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Ngo volunteered with AmeriCorps. He graduated from UCLA in 2009 with a graphic design degree. After graduation, he experienced a period of unemployment and worked as a photographer at a used car dealership. In the mid-2010s, Ngo came out as gay while visiting relatives in rural Vietnam. He began volunteering as a photographer at the Center for Inquiry in Portland in 2013.
In 2015, Ngo enrolled in a master's program at Portland State University for political science, with a focus on international relations and comparative politics. While attending the school, he joined the Freethinkers of Portland State University, a student organization that worked closely with professor Peter Boghossian.
Career PSU Vanguard (2016–2017) While enrolled at Portland State University (PSU), Ngo worked as a multimedia editor at the Portland State Vanguard, a student newspaper. In 2016, he reported on a demonstration organized by Don't Shoot Portland in which a man pulled a gun on a crowd of protesters.
In 2017, Ngo drew national attention after he was fired from the Vanguard and accused the newspaper of firing him over his conservative political beliefs. He attended an April 26 interfaith panel at the university, then used his personal account to tweet a video clip of a Muslim student's remarks. In the clip, the student stated: "I can confidently tell you, when the Quran says an innocent life, it means an innocent life, regardless of the faith, the race, like, whatever you can think about as a characteristic. […] This that you're referring to, killing non-Muslims, that is only considered a crime when the country's law, the country is based on Quranic law—that means there is no other law than the Quran. In that case, you're given the liberty to leave the country, I'm not going to sugarcoat it." Alongside the video, Ngo wrote: "At @Portland_State interfaith panel today, the Muslim student speaker said that apostates will be killed or banished in an Islamic state."
Breitbart News picked up and circulated the video within 24 hours of Ngo's posting, which led to a "social media firestorm". Four days later, the Vanguard editor, Colleen Leary, fired Ngo and stated that he was dismissed because his summary of the Muslim student's remarks reflected a reckless oversimplification and violation of journalistic ethics, and was meant to incite a reaction. She said that the dismissal was "not partisan".
In May 2017, Ngo wrote an op-ed for the National Review on the subject titled "Fired for Reporting the Truth". He also took part in online discussions about the incident on the pro–Donald Trump subreddit r/The Donald, where he called the firing part of a "trend towards self-censorship in the name of political correctness". Leary reported that since the incident did not receive much attention on campus, it left her with questions about the relationship between Breitbart News and Ngo. Ngo has said that he did not contact Breitbart News about his tweet.
Campus event coverage (2017–2018) With his student group the Freethinkers of PSU, Ngo helped organize a January 2017 campus event with Dave Rubin, Peter Boghossian, and Christina Hoff Sommers. According to Ngo, Rose City Antifa used social media to launch a phone campaign aimed at administrators in an unsuccessful effort to shut down the event.
Ngo and the Freethinkers of PSU hosted several speakers at a campus event on February 17, 2018, that included the headliner James Damore, a former Google engineer and author of "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber", an internal memo on diversity and gender that the company fired him for after they determined it was discriminatory and had elements that constituted sexual harassment. The day before the event, Ngo wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which he stated that there had been threats of violence against the event on Facebook and Twitter, which had led campus police to deny organizers' request for a larger venue to accommodate the expected crowd. During the event, a portion of the audience walked out in protest, and one protester attempted to vandalize the audio system on her way out.
Jason Wilson of The Guardian stated that the Damore event was one of several that appeared to have been "calculated to provoke Portland's progressive activists" and that Ngo's widely circulated videos fit into a pattern of actions where Ngo had "shrewdly inserted" his coverage "into the workings of the rightwing outrage machine" several times within the preceding year. Afterwards, Ngo wrote an article about the incident for Quillette, and the story was covered by YouTuber and political commentator Tim Pool.
As a PSU graduate student, Ngo filmed a talk on March 5, 2018, at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland by Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute known for her criticism of the women's movement. The event was disrupted by student protesters engaging in no platforming tactics, who forced the talk to end early. Ngo posted photos and video clips of students gathering on the stage and drowning out Sommers' talk with chanting and music. Ngo, who had covered protests at several talks given by Sommers, expressed interest in what he called "illiberal reactions" which he said restrict freedom of thought or behavior.
Reporting in 2018 On August 29, 2018, Ngo wrote an op-ed titled "A Visit to Islamic England" for The Wall Street Journal. In the article, Ngo described his experiences in two neighborhoods in East London, including visits to a mosque and an Islamic center. From these experiences, he concluded that London was afflicted with "failed multiculturalism". He mistakenly connected alcohol-free zones in parts of London to the Muslim-majority populations, subsequently issuing a correction acknowledging that alcohol-free zones "appear in many English neighborhoods, irrespective of Muslim population."
Ngo's opinion piece was widely said to have been Islamophobic. Alex Lockie from Business Insider criticized Ngo's article for "fear monger[ing] around England's Muslim population" and cherry-picking evidence, and for mischaracterizing the neighborhood near the East London Mosque. Steve Hopkins from HuffPost stated that "some of his [Ngo's] assertions have already been disproved".
In October 2018, Ngo started a podcast entitled Things You Should Ngo. His interviewees included Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin and Carl Benjamin (who uses the pseudonym "Sargon of Akkad" online).
Livestreaming Patriot Prayer rallies (2017–2019) In 2017, Ngo began filming rallies held by Patriot Prayer, a Portland-area far-right group known for holding pro-gun, pro-Trump rallies that have devolved into violence and street fighting. The Patriot Prayer gatherings (whose early rallies were used by white nationalists as recruitment events) were met by Portland's anti-fascists and anarchists known to support direct action, including violence. November 2018, Ngo live-streamed video coverage of the Him Too rally organized by a Patriot Prayer member in downtown Portland, and was sprayed with silly string and harassed by antifa protesters. By 2019, Ngo routinely attended and live-streamed events at Portland protests.
May Day 2019 On May 1, 2019, Ngo attended demonstrations and counter-protests in Portland associated with International Workers' Day or May Day. He reported being punched and blasted with bear spray while filming two separate May Day events, including a brawl between left-wing activists and members of Patriot Prayer, outside the Cider Riot pub. Bellingcat stated that Ngo's tweets framed the brawl as an unprovoked assault by anti-fascists.
Prior to the fight, Ngo was filmed standing in the presence of members of Patriot Prayer as they planned an attack on antifascists following the protests. Ngo did not report on the actions of Patriot Prayer. Five members of Patriot Prayer were charged with felony riot incitement for their actions on May Day 2019, including the group's leader Joey Gibson.
Assault during coverage of the Proud Boys rally and counter-protest (2019) On June 29, 2019, Ngo covered protests at a rally organized by the far-right group Proud Boys in Portland. A group of counter-protesters also organized, some of whom physically attacked Ngo, who was present filming. Ngo was punched in the head, kicked and hit with at least one milkshake. He blamed his injuries on antifa counter-protesters. No individual attackers were identified. He walked away and reported what happened in a livestream, during which a medic arrived to check on him. The video of the June 29 incident where Ngo was assaulted by masked demonstrators went viral and led the Proud Boys, a group designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, to organize a follow-up event in Portland known as the End Domestic Terrorism rally for August 17, 2019.
As a result of the attack, medical examiners determined that Ngo suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage. He retained attorney Harmeet Dhillon to investigate the response of the Portland Police Bureau. Following Ngo's attack, Texas Senator Ted Cruz called on federal authorities to investigate Ted Wheeler, Portland's mayor and police commissioner. 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Andrew Yang wished Ngo a speedy recovery. Broader analysis of media coverage following Ngo's attack was polarized, with each side expressing criticism of the other, including essays in The Atlantic and Commentary.
On August 21, 2023, Multnomah County Circuit Judge Chanpone Sinlapasai awarded Ngo $300,000 in damages from three defendants who failed to appear in court to contest Ngo's claims.
Patriot Prayer video and departure from Quillette (2019)