A typical academic year for Mark Bray, an assistant teaching professor of history at Rutgers University, turned into a nightmare after President Trump signed an executive order to designate antifa as a terrorist group.
Soon after the order, conservative activists targeted Bray, who wrote “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” and he began to receive death threats. Once his home address was posted online, he knew it was time to act.
With the support of Rutgers, Bray and his family fled to Spain, where he will remain at least through the end of the school year as he fights what he calls false allegations regarding his beliefs and work.
“I’m very clear that I identify as an anti-fascist. I am completely opposed to fascism. I’ve never hidden that, but I myself have never been part of an antifa group, neither back then, nor currently, nor do I intend to ever be,” Bray told The Hill in an interview this week.
“So, the effort to conflate me with my subject matter is ill-informed and disingenuous. I support anti-fascism, broadly speaking, but that’s the extent of it,” he added.
Bray is not unfamiliar with pushback on his work, but the firestorm that erupted late last month was unexpected for the professor.
Trump’s executive order, which comes amid his broader crackdown in multiple liberal-run cities, says that antifa uses “illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide.” It gives the federal government a broad mandate to investigate anyone involved in antifa operations or anyone who “provided material support” to the group.
“It should be clear to all Americans that we have a very serious left-wing terror threat in our country. Radicals associated with the domestic terror group antifa that you’ve heard a lot about lately, and I’ve heard a lot about them for 10 years,” the president said at a roundtable regarding his order.
Shortly after Trump signed it, Bray said a prominent conservative activist on X posted that he was a “domestic terrorist professor.”
“The first death threat came the next day, an email saying that this person was going to kill me in front of my students. That’s when I decided to move my classes online,” he said.
A week after the X post, Fox News contacted him for comment about a petition started by the school’s Turning Point USA chapter seeking to get him fired.
“Within a few hours, I received more death threats in an email with my home address, which is when I started to get very concerned. The coming Monday after that, my home address was posted on X, along with information about my family. The death threats continued,” Bray said.
Reached for a response, the White House said, “These comments are a pathetic attempt to distract from the surge of radical left-wing violence and mainstream Democrat support for it.”
“Not only is the President a survivor of two assassination attempts, but recent examples of Democrat violence are plentiful: Charlie Kirk was tragically assassinated by a left-wing radical; a Democrat politician talked about shooting his political opponent in the head and fantasized about his children dying; ICE agents were targeted by a radical leftist following Democrat smears against ICE; the list goes on. The Trump Administration is focused on stopping this violence — Democrats are fueling it,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson.
Conservative students told Fox they felt Bray was a danger to their campus, though some condemned the threats and doxxing efforts.
“You have a teacher that so often promotes political violence, especially in his book ‘Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,’ which talks about militant fascism, which is on term with political violence,” student Megyn Doyle told Fox News.
The students accused Bray of donating to antifa, which he denies, noting antifa does not have a central organization or head like other organized groups.
“It’s true that I donated 50 percent of authors proceeds to the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund. That is a fund that raises money from small donations from activists around the world to pay for the legal and sometimes medical costs of activists charged with offenses pertaining to anti fascism,” Bray said. “Most of the people that it supports are in countries like Belarus and Russia, but some of them have been in the U.S., and that itself is not an antifa group.”
Bray previously worked at Dartmouth College before joining Rutgers in 2019. Although his expertise is in anti-fascist movements and the history of the left, he says he is currently writing a book on a “completely different topic.”
Bray said Rutgers was very supportive after he decided to move his family to Spain for the rest of the academic year due to the threats and the Trump administration’s policies.
In a statement, the university said it “does not comment on specific personnel or student conduct matters.”
“Rutgers University is committed to providing a secure environment — to learn, teach, work, and research, where all members of our community can share their opinions without fear of intimidation or harassment. Rutgers is committed to upholding the rights of students and faculty to free speech and academic freedom as fundamental to our community,” the statement reads.
“We’ve lived here in the past. I’m a historian of modern Europe with a focus on Spain,” Bray said. “So, from 2023 to 2024, my family and I lived here for about a year. So we’re all familiar with it. We know the country, and it felt far away, and it made it easier to explain to our kids that were going on a research trip than we’re going like the town over, which would have been to them, actually, probably weirder.”
But the first time they tried to take off from Newark Liberty International Airport, Bray said he was blocked from the plane and the reservation was mysteriously canceled.
“It did not seem like a coincidence, and it felt ominous. You know, my kids were sobbing, and we couldn’t get on the plane. And it was a really upsetting experience,” he said.
The next day, his family was able to get on a new flight to Spain, where they now contemplate when to return to the U.S.
“The plan is to be here for the academic year through the end of the spring, and then ideally come back. We’ll keep an eye on the news, what’s going on, monitor any potential further threats, or anything like that, and take it from there,” Bray said.
“For now, we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to come back after the spring semester.”
