See No Evil
How regime hacks keep their places on the dinner party circuit
The creepiest thing about October 2025 wasn’t the approach of Halloween. It was watching two men with huge platforms and profiles, one a late-night host, one a cable news anchor, insist in near-identical language that Antifa was a phantom we’d all cooked up in our noggins. There is extensive evidence that antifa is a decentralised network of far-left militants who’ve been attacking journalists, police officers, feminists, and political opponents in cities like Portland and Seattle for years. Trying to pass that off as some kind of audacious hoax is shenanigans.
On October 8, Mehdi Hasan tweeted that the right wing had “conjured up an Antifa boogeyman out of nothing.” Two days later, Jimmy Kimmel declared that Antifa is “an entirely imaginary organisation,” comparing arrests of its members to rounding up “Decepticons.” After six gruelling days off television, suspended over his comments about the assassination of an actual free speech hero, Kimmel had returned to resume his job of putting Americans to sleep. Antifa doesn’t exist, he sang softly. Antifa is, in fact, very real. It’s Charlie Kirk who no longer exists. If that connection occurred to any of his writers, he didn’t mention it.
Left-wing violence has a more peculiar existence than Schrödinger’s Cat. The messaging from journalists and broadcasters has varied over the years, but the goal has remained the same: confuse, mock, minimise and deflect from a very real threat. Back in 2017, David Brooks of the New York Times claimed “the left found ways to restrain its fanatics. The right never did.” CNN’s Erin Burnett said that Antifa-linked violence is “rare and limited compared to right-wing groups.” Now, in 2025, Kimmel and Hasan have moved to the final position: Antifa doesn’t exist at all.
It didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, they’re under control now. And actually, they don’t exist at all. This isn’t confusion. This is nearly a decade of coordinated effort to ensure you never even noticed the escalating left-wing terrorism problem, let alone worried about it. Charlie Kirk’s trusting openness was part of his appeal, but we all now wish he’d been cautious enough to put some plexiglass between him and the bullet.
On May 24, 2025, Antifa blinked into existence at Cal Anderson Park in Seattle. Ross Johnston saw them materialise. So did Jenny Donnelly. So did Russell Johnson and hundreds of Christian families who’d come for a prayer rally.
They saw counter-protesters throw urine-filled balloons at attendees. They saw a woman strip to a thong and twerk in front of children who’d come for free haircuts. They saw a counter-protester pull a knife and threaten a 17-year-old. They saw
officers punched in the face. Twenty-three arrests were made that day, and every single one was a counter-protester… not a single Christian. Mayor Bruce Harrell blamed the victims, saying the Christians had provoked it by holding a prayer rally in “the heart of Seattle’s most prominent LGBTQ+ neighbourhood.”
The FBI is investigating. Jimmy Kimmel and Mehdi Hasan are not.
This is what Andy Ngo has documented across dozens of protests. It’s a simple formation and it’s always the same. The colourful protesters, the face-painted activists, the signs with slogans written by Lewis Carroll, form the front line. Behind them, perpetually invisible to legacy media cameras, the Black Bloc waits for its moment. When the media arrive, they see only the spectacle. Violence emerges from behind, then retreats into the congregation of identical black balaclavas and sunglasses.
Andrew Boyd’s ‘Beautiful Trouble’ (2012) is a protest handbook teaching three key tactics: how to engineer confrontations, control media narratives, and present aggressors as the injured parties. As Ngo explained on Tim Pool’s podcast, the colourful demonstrators are strategic, designed to command attention and fill the frame. The cameras focus on the goofy frogs. Black Bloc, positioned behind, waits for a moment to strike.
This week, Antifa members (and useful idiots) in Portland dressed as frogs and other animals to ‘mock ICE deportations.’ Protesters and journalists on the scene noted that there were ‘frogs, unicorns, polar bears, raccoons, peacocks and sharks and approximately 100 conventionally dressed individuals,’ but also a significant contingent of Black Bloc activists was always present, just behind the main spectacle.
The tactics work because these journalists and chat show hosts are lazy, incurious and loyal to their tribe. They see what the dinner party circuit demands they see. They ignore what might cost them their seat at the table. They even instruct readers what to think about the issue! How else did the culture suddenly pivot from talking about the murder of Charlie Kirk to Jimmy Kimmel’s extended holiday?
Andy Ngo suddenly materialised into existence for regime journalists when he was assaulted in 2019. This photo shows him bleeding from his ear, his face battered, moments after Antifa protesters beat him so badly he suffered a brain haemorrhage. He’d been reporting on protests in Portland, documenting the tactics and violence of Antifa activists on the streets.
‘Charlotte’ Clymer of the Human Rights Campaign declared the assault “the greatest thing that could have happened to his career.” In a disgraceful piece, Rolling Stone smeared this gay, Asian-American as a ‘right-wing troll.’ Katie Shepherd of Willamette Week questioned whether he was even a journalist. Charlie Warzel of the New York Times suggested Ngo brought it on himself by “putting himself in volatile situations.”
This week, when Ngo and other journalists who’d covered Antifa violence visited the White House, Mehdi Hasan tweeted their photograph: “lol. None of these are journalists.”
Journalism cost Ngo a brain haemorrhage, hospital bills, and, for his safety, exile abroad. It costs Mehdi Hasan nothing, and it never will. That’s the luxury of keeping your seat on the dinner party circuit.
I’m an exiled Irish comedy writer working from my desk in Arizona. Mehdi Hasan and Jimmy Kimmel have research teams, studios… the full apparatus of legacy media. I know about Beautiful Trouble. I know about Black Bloc tactics. I know what happened in Seattle. Why don’t they?
They do. Their ignorance is deliberate, maintained like a monk’s vow. I’ve seen at close quarters this disease that ran through the media classes like cholera. I saw it when Jon Ronson dismissed my concerns about male athletes in women’s sport with “You were never interested in sport when I knew you, Graham,” as if caring about fairness required a subscription to ESPN. Just as Hasan ignores Black Bloc waiting behind the costumes, Ronson ignores the benefits of greater muscle mass, larger lung capacity, denser bones, and cardiovascular advantages.
He knows what these differences mean on a sports field. They all do. They’re not blind. Their careers, their social life, everything depends on them looking the other way. They hope that when the final confrontation comes, it’s me and Andy Ngo the mob will beat to death and not them.
There's a bit of a left vs. right war going on in the comments. So I just want to make one statement about it and I hope it doesn't alienate anybody. For me, the left's behaviour over the last ten years is a deal-breaker. It also makes me think differently about the history of the left, in the same way a terrible movie will make you wonder whether you ever really liked the director's earlier work. From now on, I aim to take people on a case-by-case basis, and I have yet to see anything that convincingly establishes Charlie Kirk's nefarious 'real' intentions.
Great piece, thanks Graham. I almost think that the allies, supporters and deniers are more to blame than the central figures. The central core would probably wither if the allies didn’t act like a protective shield stopping people from seeing what antifa really is; a violent, fascist organisation. What antifa needs is sunlight and the useful idiots of the left are keeping it in the shadows.