He didn’t claim there was concrete, it was a police officer who tweeted that they had heard rumours ppl might be planning on using concrete. This was mentioned in the very vox article you posted.
I don’t think much of Ngo, his article on Islamic England was hilariously ignorant. Americans with ignorant views on Europe aren’t limited to conservatives though. Attempts to smear him as a far-right activist are bulshit, he’s a moderate conservative at worst, seems pretty liberal on many issues, there’s no excuse for what happened to him.
Antifa are scum, the fact that their current US incarnation is not as bad, for the moment at least, as the far right in America isn’t particularly reassuring. And if the history of the movement is anything to go by, things could get a lot worse (e.g. the antifa run by the German Communist party in 30s played a big role in helping the Nazis come to power, both by helping sway public opinion for the Nazis, and by directly opposing the SPD - radicals opposing centrists and liberals today is just as big a threat as it was back then), also see their links to criminal and terrorist activity in latter half of the 20th century across Europe.
Radical socialism and anarchism are just as intellectually and morally bankrupt as Nazism and fascism, with a far greater body count on the side of the socialists to boot (anarchists seem to be pretty useless at least, so I guess they’re less of a threat). They all need to be resisted equally.
