ANDY NGO UNMASKS THE REAL THREAT TO AMERICAN FREEDOM:

Although Unmasked reached no. 1 status on Amazon in advance of its release, when Antifa members protested Powell’s plan to sell the book, the store’s managers immediately apologized, explaining that while a lot of the store’s inventory was hand-picked, that wasn’t true of Ngo’s book. They consequently pledged that the book “will not be placed on our shelves. We will not promote it.” They did add that Unmasked would “remain in our online catalog,” since “we carry a lot of books we find abhorrent, as well as those that we treasure.” One might think that they were speaking of Mein Kampf! But despite the pledge that Powell’s wouldn’t stock the book, a crowd of protestors gathered outside the store’s flagship, downtown location (as reported by ABC News) on the day of the announcement, plastering the windows with signs and prompting the store to close early as a safety precaution.

A conversation with a friend and former student of mine who owns another of America’s leading independent bookstores, situated in a fashionable downtown neighborhood far removed from Portland, assures me that Powell’s really had no choice in the matter. In fact, my friend, who is of a moderately conservative inclination, told me that he wouldn’t dare stock the book himself, as the result might be the burning down of his establishment. If he won’t, I doubt that many bookstores, outside of the most conservative areas of the country, would dare to.

It is a sign of our changing political times that Andy Ngo, who describes himself as gay, an unbeliever, and (at least in the past), a Democrat, should find his chief defenders among those who identify as conservatives. But as the son of Vietnamese boat people who risked death to escape Communist prison camps, he evidently appreciates the value of law-based freedom more deeply than many native-born Americans who take it for granted. And most American conservatives, one hopes, have come to recognize that what they share with fighters for freedom like Ngo matters far more than any disagreements about sexual orientation, religion, or party affiliation. But what would John Milton or John Peter Zenger, Thomas Jefferson or John Stuart Mill say of a situation in which a nation that historically prides itself on an unsurpassed freedom of speech and of the press allows anarchist groups to prevent books that express views contrary to their own from being sold? And why are the mainstream media, both print and electronic, making so little of it?

Because they’re “‘Democrat activists in the propaganda field,’ certainly not reporters, or journalists. They need to be treated as what they are.”