QUESTIONS ASKED: “When it is fine for an all-white gang to assault an Asian American in broad daylight? When he’s a conservative journalist. Where is it fine to do this? Portland, Ore. How do you do it? By all means necessary.”

‘Why did I, a Vietnamese-American gay journalist, receive this reaction from a self-described anti-racist social justice movement?’

The answer, [Quillette editor Andy Ngo] wrote, was that he has tried to report honestly on Antifa — which, as Ngo wrote last year, is a ‘far-left movement of communists, socialists, and anarchists who agitate for revolution’, and who revel in ritualized violence against their enemies. If Ngo is not with them, he must be against them. And if he is against them, then he is a ‘fascist’ and deserves what he gets.

This is the logic of ‘By all means necessary’, the moronic line coined by Malcolm X, and familiar from the Malcolm X t-shirts issued to liberal white Humanities’ students on their first day in graduate school. Typically, the t-shirt shows Malcolm X, carbine in hand, peering out of a window as he tries to protect his family. Not against white racists, but against his fellow radicals, the sectarians of the Nation of Islam who would eventually murder him.

The story behind that image, and the false impression given it is reproduced without context, tells us everything we already know, or should know by now, about the radical fetish for violence.

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