Rutgers professor Mark Bray, an expert on Antifa, became a high-profile target of the Trump administration's efforts to label the decentralized movement as a terrorist organization. Facing death threats, online doxing, and a cancelled flight, Bray and his family were forced to relocate to Spain, viewing his ordeal as part of a wider authoritarian strategy to silence opposition.
Baggage dropped and boarding passes in hand, Mark Bray and his family cleared security at Newark airport in early October. Their flight to Spain was meant to ferry the family of four to safety after days of mounting threats; instead, as they waited at the gate to board, they were told that someone had cancelled their reservation. “It felt like I was being watched and laughed at,” said Bray, a professor at Rutgers university who teaches a course on the history of antifascism and in 2017 wrote a book on Antifa. “I knew it was politically motivated one way or the other.” The incident catapulted Bray into the headlines as one of the highest-profile people caught up in Donald Trump’s efforts to target Antifa. For years, Trump had taken aim at Antifa, seeking to turn it into a formal enemy despite the fact that the decentralised movement – which opposes the far right, fascists and racists – has no structure, hierarchy or leader. His crusade took on new life after the killing of far-right activist Charlie Kirk. Days after the killing, without any evidence to show a link between the suspected assassin and Antifa, the president signed an executive order designating the movement as a “domestic terrorist organisation.” In recent days, the administration has gone further, accusing four European entities of being “violent Antifa groups” and announcing plans to designate them as foreign terrorist organisations. AfD hails US ban on European leftwing groups as historians fear anti-fascist crackdown Read more The efforts to forge a link between Kirk’s killing and Antifa, however tenuous, jolted Bray’s life. Since the publication of his 2017 book, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, the professor had widely been considered an expert on the movement. The distinction was always clear. “I’m anti-fascist insofar as I don’t like fascism and I would really like us to organise against fascism,” he said. “But that’s the extent of it. I have never been part of a group.” In late September, as tensions continued to swirl over Kirk’s killing, far-right influencers and rightwing media ramped up their efforts to blur this distinction. One prominent rightwing influencer described him as a “domestic terrorist professor,” an allegation swiftly taken up by others, while a student group affiliated with the organisation founded by Kirk accused him of being a “prominent leader of the Antifa movement on campus”, and called for him to be fired. A handful of death threats soon followed. When his book on Antifa was published in 2017, Bray had brushed off the threats that had rolled in. But now, as a father of two young children, it was hard to ignore the email threatening to kill him in front of his students or the fact that someone had posted his home address on social media. “I kept battling this notion that you’re playing into their hands by getting scared of this,” he said. “But the difference between this time and last time, among other things, was having little children and if it was like a 0.001% chance that someone would drive by our house and spray that house with an automatic weapon, I can’t take that chance.” With the support of Rutgers, he and his wife, who is also a professor, decided to move to Spain, at least until the end of the academic year, and teach remotely, amid hope that the situation would eventually calm down. With the threats looming over them, they packed up what they needed in days, leaving the curtains drawn and their children in the dark about why they were making the sudden move. When their first attempt to board the flight failed, it laid bare how the context had shifted. Years earlier, when Bray had become known for his research on Antifa, he had felt as though the anger against him had bubbled up from a few aggrieved people who had then sought to rally others to target him. “This time, though, it wasn’t a bubble up. It was top down,” he said. “The way I see it is that the White House decided that Antifa is in the crosshairs.” 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. “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,” said Bray. The following day, as media, lawyers and a Democratic senator tracked the family’s progress, they made it on to the flight to Spain. Prior to 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. Their questions to Bray soon became more pointed, hinting at how Bray had 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 offences related to anti-fascist actions. “It’s not an Antifa group,” said Bray, noting that the agents backed off when he said he would need his attorney present to answer such questions. Several weeks later, over coffee at a well-known Spanish chain, Bray spoke to the Guardian. From a vantage point of more than 3,500 miles away, he described his family’s ordeal as part of a wider strategy by the Trump administration to use Antifa – a movement that remains poorly understood by many – to advance its own goals. “The authoritarian fascist playbook is well documented and it thrives on crisis and emergency,” he said. “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.” Antifa was being used in this way, despite the fact that its lack of structure made it more akin to socialism than any formal organisation. “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,” he said. As the Trump administration had launched into this process, the life that he and his wife had built in the US had – at least temporarily – become collateral damage. “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,” he said, 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.” Quick Guide Contact us about this story Show
