A Rutgers University professor who teaches a course on anti-fascism has become one of the highest profile targets of President Donald Trump's war on antifa, The Guardian reports, and his family’s ordeal has become part of a wider strategy by the Trump administration to target the movement to advance its authoritarian goals.
Mark Bray, whose 2017 book "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook," made the professor a leading expert in the movement, says that his crusade took on new life after the murder of far right podcaster Charlie Kirk when President Donald Trump, "without any evidence to show a link between the suspected assassin and antifa," signed an executive order designating the movement as a “domestic terrorist organization.”
“I’m anti-fascist insofar as I don’t like fascism and I would really like us to organise against fascism,” Bray tells The Guardian. “But that’s the extent of it. I have never been part of a group.”
But far-right activists targeted Bray, calling him a "domestic terrorist professor" and calling for him to be fired. Then came the death threats.
As a father of two young children, Bray says he was finally rattled when he was doxxed and his address was made public.
“I kept battling this notion that you’re playing into their hands by getting scared of this,” Bray says. “But the difference between this time and last time, among other things, was having little children and if it was like a 0.001 percent chance that someone would drive by our house and spray that house with an automatic weapon, I can’t take that chance.”
That's when he and his professor wife packed up the kids and moved to Spain until the end of the academic year. When they attempted to board the plane, they were turned away.
“Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second,” Bray posted on Bluesky. “We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.'"
Hours before Bray’s flight was cancelled, "Trump and his top officials had held a meeting at the White House, vowing to use the full force of the government to crush antifa, which they likened to some of the world’s most violent gangs and drug cartels," The Guardian notes.
“On the day I was leaving the country, the far-right influencers who targeted me were at the White House meeting with Trump about antifa and they’re in touch with him directly,” Bray says.
Although the family got on a plane the following day, priorto boarding, however, "they were held for about an hour by customs and border patrol agents who peppered Bray and his wife with questions, asked to see his phone and peered into the family’s carry-on luggage," The Guardian says.
They grilled Bray on how he donated half of his proceeds from the 2017 book to the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund, which supports the legal and medical costs for people around the world charged with offenses related to anti-fascist actions.
“It’s not an antifa group,” Bray told them. The agents backed off when he said he would need his attorney present to answer such questions, The Guardian notes.
“The authoritarian fascist playbook is well documented and it thrives on crisis and emergency,” Bray tells The Guardian. “It’s well-documented that figures like this want to squelch opposition resistance and usually will try to come up with a catch-all bogeyman category to do so.”
And as much as antifa is a movement to fight fascism, Bray says, MAGA is the new face of fascism.
“I do think that Maga is a fascist movement, I do think that the intent of the administration is to destroy opposition and protest and is to create an authoritarian system,” Bray says.
Trump's targeting of anti-fascists may have temporarily upended Bray's life, but it sends a greater, dire message to more than just him and his family.
“It was really not about me, per se, so much as using a bogeyman to try and target anyone that the administration doesn’t like. That’s how I see it,” Bray says, "pointing to the far-right media ecosystem that had amplified these claims, leaving him fending off death threats."
“But it was aggravating that someone could just fire off an email and change my life," he adds.