Faizel Khan, the owner of Café Argento, told the New York Times: ‘They barricaded us all in here.’ He didn’t… — Andy Ngo
Faizel Khan, the owner of Café Argento, told the New York Times: ‘They barricaded us all in here.’ He didn’t dare speak out to media until weeks after CHAZ’s demise. ‘[T]hey were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.’ His testimony to the paper comports with what I witnessed myself. Though there thousands in CHAZ during the day, actual business was incredibly slow. Customer traffic was severely impacted from the street blockades. People could only travel in and out by foot.
p. 38Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Every use of force by officers, whether it be tear gas, smoke, pepper balls, or arrests, was heavily scrutinized. Out-of-context video snippets were released on social media and published by news outlets, generating mass rage and universally negative press for law enforcement and the Trump administration. The officers were called ‘Trump’s gestapo,’ ‘storm troopers,’ and ‘thugs’ by Democratic politicians and the media.
p. 63
Despite what was happening before our eyes, left-wing politicians and media denied antifa played a role. House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called the movement ‘imagery’ during a congressional debate. And even though the public could plainly see masked militants openly planning and carrying out riot operations, we were still told there is ‘no evidence’ of organized antifa. ‘Who caused the violence at protests? It wasn’t antifa,’ declared one gaslighting Washington Post ‘fact-checker’ analysis, for example.
p. 5
One glaring blind spot in the mainstream media coverage of CHAZ was how the space gave platform to violent extremist ideologies. Reports about CHAZ’s political agenda focused shallowly on ‘racial justice’ and ‘defunding the police’ rather than its explicit calls to kill cops and overthrow the government. Hundreds of graffiti messages and images lined the zone showing dead pigs wearing police hats.
p. 39
