This will be the last of my regular Monday book posts for a while. In preparation for moving, I’ve put a lot of my books in boxes, and it’s getting harder to find the books that I want to reread and discuss. Naturally, this isn’t stopping me from acquiring even more books. This post is about an upcoming book by Andy Ngo, called Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Or rather, it’s about Antifa’s attempt to suppress the book. I have it on pre-order from Water Street Bookstore but haven’t read it yet.

There’s a lot of misinformation about Antifa. On the one hand, mainstream media articles keep claiming it’s an “anti-fascist” organization. It’s anti-fascist in the same sense that the Capitol riot was “patriotic”: not at all, but the people involved find it handy to appropriate a term which they don’t deserve. On the other hand, some people on the right have built it into a ten-foot-tall organization which is behind everything. It’s even supposed to have been the real people who invaded the Capitol. What it mostly does is disrupt speaking events it doesn’t like. It’s basically a gang of thugs who hate freedom and aren’t hugely important.

It’s not even a formal organization, though there are local Antifa organizations. This makes it hard to say whether “Antifa” did something. However, when large numbers of people under the Antifa banner harass and assault people and no Antifa leaders repudiate association with them, it’s fair to call it an Antifa attack. Here’s an account of how Ngo was harassed and assaulted and another person was severely injured (though it’s not clear if the latter assailants were Antifa-affiliated.)

I can’t comment on Ngo’s book, since I don’t have it yet. This post is about Antifa’s efforts to intimidate those who sell it. They’ve forced Powell’s Books, a well-known bookstore in Portland, Oregon, to cancel plans to sell it in the store. It will still be available online from Powell’s. The Seattle Times reported that a crowd “gathered outside the store’s flagship location downtown on Monday, plastering the windows with signs and prompting the store to close early as a safety precaution.”

Emily Powell, the store’s owner, wrote: “Demonstrations outside our Burnside store have forced us to close to ensure the safety of employees, protestors, and neighbors. If we need to remain closed, we will not hesitate to do so.”

The statement by Powell’s says that it will not carry the book on its shelves and it won’t promote it. It doesn’t say why it won’t, though fear is evidently a factor. It might just never have been in their plans. (Which would imply Antifa’s harassment was a pre-emptive attempt to make sure they didn’t even think about it.) The statement reminds the readers: “Decades ago we received credible bomb threats for selling the work of Salman Rushdie, and yet we carried on. We cannot behave any differently today when we feel differently about the book or writer in question.”

For those who have forgotten, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini put out a hit order on Rushdie for having written The Satanic Verses, extending to anyone selling the book, and some people were murdered as a result.

I wonder if Antifa has heard of the Streisand effect. Their successful attempt to intimidate Powell’s is great publicity for Ngo. Publishers’ Weekly reports: “Unmasked has been lifted to the top of the bestseller list of several categories on Amazon, including Censorship & Politics and Political Commentary & Opinion.” And it isn’t even out yet.