Rutgers Antifascism Expert Driven Out Of USA By Very Non-Fascist Death Threats
He wrote a book about 'antifa' years ago, so he must be the source of all America's trouble.
Donald Trump’s made-up war on “domestic terror” and declaration that “Antifa” is a “terrorist organization” (despite not actually being an organization at all) have already gotten big results, even beyond forcing bloggers to use lots of scare quotes to describe Trump’s “policies.” This week, Rutgers history professor Mark Bray, who has written extensively on antifascist movements, announced that he would be moving to Spain for the rest of the academic year after receiving multiple death threats against his family.
After all, Bray wrote a 2017 book titled Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and was interviewed on TV several times after Trump declared war on the nonexistent group. Eager to connect anyone they could to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, far-right influencers on social media responded to Trump’s executive order by insisting that Bray isn’t simply a scholar of antifascism, he’s actually one of the leaders and “financiers” of the very real group that in the last month suddenly became the greatest existential threat to America since transgender people and drag queens. (It’s true that Bray donated half the profits from his 2017 book to the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund, a group that supports antifascist activists. Good enough: He funds Antifa! But he doesn’t do book tours in drag. That we know of.)
All that online demagoguery from professional shitlords — including some who attended Donald Trump’s big Scare America About Antifa meeting at the White House Wednesday — was followed by death threats, as Wired reported yesterday (here’s an archive link too). One of the brave anonymous defenders of America sent an email saying, “I’ll kill you in front of your students.” Another, with the subject line “your violent rhetoric is under investigation,” listed Bray’s home address.
That was enough: Bray said he knows that most online threats amount to nothing, but decided that things have been insane enough in America lately that the safety of his family had to come first, so he let his current class at Rutgers know that the class would be shifting to remote teaching only and he made reservations to fly with his family to Spain.
But when Bray got to Newark’s Liberty International Airport Wednesday night, things went funny. He, his wife, and their kids were able to get their boarding passes, check their bags, and go through TSA security. But once they got to the gate, he wrote on Bluesky, “‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second. […] Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’”
It might have just been a terribly timed glitch; a few other people in the replies mentioned similar errors. But Bray told Wired, “There are various potential explanations, but I don't think it was a coincidence that it happened to us on that day.” After rebooking and trying again Thursday night, Bray posted that the plane to Spain took him sanely from Trump’s reign.
Bray is no stranger to online harassment; during Trump’s first term and the first rightwing freakout over “antifa,” he was targeted by “Professor Watchlist,” the doxx-a-professor website from Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. The site claimed that Bray “fully endorses ANTIFA’s embrace of violence as a tactic, and often describes it as ‘self-defense.’”
So when “antifa” returned to its status on Wingnuts’ Most Wanted list, the claims that he was teaching radicalism and violence came back with a (literal) vengeance, or at least threats of it.
In the wake of Trump’s executive order, far-right influencers once again jumped on Bray after he spoke to media outlets about Trump’s order. “I think I ought to visit,” wrote far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos on X, quoting a post about Bray’s work at Rutgers. Jack Posobiec, a far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist who was recently invited by the Republican National Committee to train some poll workers, called Bray a “domestic terrorist professor.”
“The day after the Posobiec tweet, I received a very direct death threat saying that someone was going to kill me in front of my students,” says Bray.
The threats accelerated last week. The treasurer of the TPUSA chapter at Rutgers, Megyn Doyle, started a Change.org petition aimed at getting Bray fired, with the very calm headline, “Remove Antifa financier & Professor, Mark Bray from Rutgers University.” Doyle wanted to know why the university would employ a prof who she claimed is “supporting terrorist behavior,” and suggested that Bray’s writing and comments in the media are “the kind of rhetoric that resulted in Charlie Kirk being assassinated last month.”
Then Fox News ran an online story about the petition, quoting Doyle saying that Bray’s academic writing “puts conservative students at risk” of being victims of violence from Antifa. Funny thing, though: While Bray’s work doesn’t appear to have inspired any attacks on the poor oppressed rightwing students at Rutgers, that Fox News story boosted the numbers of signatures on the Change.org petition from 100 to nearly 1000. What’s more, Bray told Wired, “when the Fox News story came out on Saturday, within a few hours I received another death threat and another threatening email that had my full address in it which very much disturbed me.”
In an interview with the Barcelona newspaper El Periódico Wednesday, shortly before his first, unsuccessful attempt to fly out of Newark, Bray said that the smear campaign against him falls into a very familiar pattern that he recognizes from his own work as a historian of totalitarianism. Asked if he considers himself a political refugee, he said (Google automated translation),
“I've spent years studying people who fled when the Gestapo came to their homes or in Pinochet's Chile, and I think what's happening to me is a lesser version, but, with all the caveats, I must say yes. The threats, harassment, and doxing are the result of Turning Point USA's actions, and while they come from a local group, there's a clear chain of command to a national organization directly linked to Trump's inner circle.
“I know from history that Trump is following the authoritarian and fascist playbook. We don't yet know how it will end because the future is unwritten, but we do know where it may lead. And what's the point of all the research I've been doing if I can't recognize it when I see it?”
He added that Trump’s campaign to label Americans on the left as “terrorists” is just another page out of the fascist playbook, and that, “The irony is that they say my research breeds violence, yet it's their petition that has directly caused the biggest scandal about threats and violence at Rutgers.”
And on Twitter, the wingnuts are all declaring victory because they were successful in scaring a professor out of the country, and a few also fantasized that Bray won’t even be safe in Spain, because terrorists and traitors shouldn’t ever be allowed a moment’s rest, the end.
[AP / Wired (archive link) / Guardian / El Periódico]
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TFW you're running away *from* America and *to* Spain to flee fascism
That they're proving every single point the professor made goes straight over their heads.