Michael Yon, a war correspondent who has covered hundreds of protests, said the people who stormed the Capitol during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 were apparently led by Antifa and his agitators, who mingled with the crowd and led Trump supporters into Congress. This is the same pattern as the so-called “protesters” who stormed the Legislative Council during the 2019 “anti-China” movement in Hong Kong.
Michael Young said in an exclusive interview that he was there on Jan. 6, but did not enter the Capitol, “I was outside the building, observing the activity outside.
Young described the Antifa members he saw at the Capitol as “agent provocateurs” who were used only to carry out special operations. He explained that unlike the Antifa groups seen in the Portland riots or in the Occupy Zone, “they are well-trained, well-organized, they are professionals, they show up with the equipment they need.
Yang also noted that a typical tactic of Antifa’s “spies” is that they would blend into the protests wearing so-called “enemy” clothes, waving “enemy” flags, and usually assuming the same protest posture as the “enemy.
Young said that on Jan. 6, it took 30-45 minutes for President Trump’s supporters to march to the Capitol after his speech on the Oval Lawn south of the White House. That’s when he saw some people guiding the crowd, mouthing things like “go forward, keep going, go over the wall.
“Whoever has the microphone has the power,” Young said. Once people get riled up, they’ll do it,” Young said. Because we’re human, we’ll go with the flow.”
Young added that when Antifa began attacking police, he saw Trump supporters at the rally shouting, “That’s not us, that’s Antifa,” and “They’re attacking and making us look bad, be careful.”
“These are obvious covert operations.” “It’s an old trope that goes back centuries,” Young said.
He also observed at the time that as agitators led protesters into Congress, many Trump supporters were saying, “Don’t break anything, don’t steal anything.”
These scenarios are very reminiscent of the “anti-China” movement that took place in Hong Kong in the summer of 2019. On June 12 of that year, a large number of protesters in Hong Kong staged a sit-in protest outside the Legislative Council, but suddenly people stormed the Council and clashed with police. At the time, Yang was inside the Legislative Council building. The incident was eventually qualified as a “riot” by the Hong Kong government, which used it as a pretext to crack down on the protesters.
Yang told that Antifa learned a lot of “tactics” from the whole Hong Kong protest process and brought them to the United States.
“Of course, the two movements are completely different, they’re completely unrelated.” He explained that the Hong Kong protesters had the moral high ground in their protests, and that they were not stealing or vandalizing people’s stores, “whereas Antifa, on the other hand, were clearly criminals.”
He added that Antifa is an extreme anarchist group, a communist organization, while the Hong Kong people are protesting to defend their freedom and stop the Chinese Communist regime from destroying Hong Kong’s autonomy.
Michael Young, born in 1964, is an American writer and photographer. After serving in the U.S. Special Forces in the early 1980s, he became a writer in the mid-1990s and focused on military writing. He served several tours into Iraq with U.S. and British forces, a deployment that ended in September 2005. Young also won the 2005, 2007 and 2008 Weblog Awards. During the 2019 Hong Kong anti-Send-China movement, Young spent about seven months in Hong Kong and participated in more than 100 protests.
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