Meanwhile, the daily violent antifa protests were becoming more organized and sophisticated. Media pundits inaccurately described what was happening … - Andy Ngo

In many ways, being at CHAZ was like being among jihadists. To each other, they showed a lot of care and camaraderie in the form of mutual aid, and compassion but opponents to their political agenda needed to be destroyed.

As much as CHAZ was an experiment in anarchy and chaos, it was also a successful experiment in propaganda making. What journalists were allowed to record was heavily controlled by the residents there. For example, in one instance a black man carried an American flag through the zone. He was immediately accosted the followed by a large mob, including masked black bloc antifa, who shouted racist invectives at him. ‘Race traitor! Race traitor’ one man yelled repeatedly on a bullhorn. ‘ Fox News will use this,’ another person yelled after rioters tried to steal his flag. This became a relatively common refrain in CHAZ anytime fights broke out. CHAZ supporters were not interested in reality. They wanted the media to broadcast to the world a fabricated utopia.

While CHAZ was ostensibly created to be an explicitly ‘anti-racist’ zone, it ended up segregating along racial lines. Most of CHAZ’s black residents and black visitors did not follow antifa’s anarchist-communist ideology. Some actively took issue with antifa’s destruction and vandalism of the space. The white anarchist, socialist, and communist radicals mostly stayed together in their spaces.