He Studies Fascism. Is He Now Living Through It?

Mother Jones illustration; Ted Shaffrey/AP; Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty

On Saturday, October 4, Rutgers University professor Mark Bray was sitting in his living room watching the MLB playoffs when he received an email that would change his life.

Bray, a historian and author of the 2017 book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook^[2], had recently become the subject of an online campaign accusing him of “supporting terrorist behavior.” A petition created by the Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA^[3] had received fewer than 100 signatures. It was, nonetheless, amplified by Fox News. By the bottom of the first inning, Bray was not only receiving calls for his firing but death threats—including an email that contained his home address.

“That was when I knew everything had changed, and my family had to pick up and leave the house,” Bray said. “Initially, I thought about going somewhere else nearby. But the threats kept coming in.”

By Monday, Bray’s home address and information about his family had been leaked publicly on X. He decided to flee the country with his wife and children.

While their reservations for their first flight to Spain were canceled at the airport without explanation, Bray and his family successfully left the United States on October 9. He will teach his classes remotely for the next year.

Bray’s departure came after Trump signed^[4] an executive order designating “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization and issued a memorandum ordering the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force “to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle all stages of organized political violence,” including “antifa” groups.

Mother Jones spoke with Bray about his experience being targeted by the right, what his research on the history of antifascism can teach us about this political moment, and what “antifa” even is.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited. 

I’d like to start by walking our readers through what’s been going on in your life the past few weeks. When did the threats start? And what happened when you first tried to flee the country?

I was just living my life as a suburban dad and professor. Then there was the Charlie Kirk assassination. I think the Trump administration seized upon that as an opportunity to go after their political opponents, and I see Trump’s executive order declaring^[5] antifa a terrorist organization as part of that. It was a few days after that that I started getting threats.

The first time we tried to fly out of the country, we successfully got our boarding passes and made it through security. We were at the gate.

I think, for 99.9 percent of the time, that’s it, right? But they told us there was an error. They made a bunch of phone calls and basically said that, somehow, someone at the very last second had canceled our flight reservation—which I didn’t even know was possible.

I don’t know what happened. But it felt like more than a coincidence that—the one time this happened—my family was fleeing the country while some of the key far-right figures who had been harassing me were at the White House meeting with Donald Trump^[6].

The next day, we managed to leave—but not before being searched and interrogated by federal officers, despite facing no charges whatsoever.

I’m not suspected of any crimes. I’m just a professor.

Talk a little bit more about your areas of focus as a professor. What questions guide your academic research?

I’m a historian of modern Europe with a thematic focus on the history of the left, social movements, and protest. I’ve published four books about antifascism, anarchism, and other forms of radical political thought. Regionally, I’ve focused on Spain and Western Europe. I’m interested in how people have organized to make a new world in different times and places, particularly from the 19th century into the mid-20th century. I’m interested in how they’ve resisted authoritarianism and fascism. I’m interested in how different kinds of states—authoritarian or not—have sought to squelch or co-op protest.

I also have a history as an activist myself. I was one of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street in New York City in 2011. I’ve been involved in labor organizing and environmental organizing in a number of different places. The problem is that Turning Point USA and some of these far-right figures are arguing that I am the thing I’m researching. But I’ve never been part of an antifa group. I consider myself an antifascist insofar as I oppose fascism, but it’s disingenuous to simply collapse my research into who I am as a person.

What are the key takeaways in your book about organizing against fascism? What lessons did you learn from your conversations with antifascist organizers across North America and Europe?

Historians typically have focused on resistance to Hitler and Mussolini in World War II, but they have been reticent to talk about antifascism after World War II. I was one of the few at the time in 2017 to talk about the connections and the changes over time. It focuses on what I think you could refer to as “preventative antifascism”—which is the kind of antifascism that antifa groups have engaged in. This antifascism tries to make it so that small and medium-sized far-right groups are unsuccessful in their attempts to influence the halls of power and society.

I think in the US, we’re beyond that point; because those groups and those ideas^[7] have direct access to the White House these days. Take, for example, the great replacement theory^[8], which only existed on the farthest reaches of neo-Nazi publications and message boards decades ago. I think that we can see a lot of the Trump administration’s policies fitting into that kind of theory. So it’s too late for preventative antifascism. I think we’re in a new era.

The main takeaway I want people to get from the book is to think about different ways that antifascists have organized and resisted, their successes and failures. It is not a prescription for one kind of resistance. I’m not saying that I endorse everything that everyone has ever done in every time and place under the rubric of antifascism.

What does “preventative antifascism” entail?

After World War II, antifascists, particularly in Europe, faced the question of how to ensure “never again.” How do we make sure there isn’t a new Nazi party or fascist party? The dominant answer, particularly in continental Europe, and put forward by the leading socialist and communist parties, was that you use the state, and you make a law. In Germany and in Italy, it was illegal to make another one of those parties.

The problem is that, over time, particularly moving into the 1980s and 90s, you get a kind of far-right resurgence, particularly in response to the first real waves of non-European migration. It’s very xenophobic and racist—and what’s going on is fascist, but they don’t call it that. They change the names, they change the labels, they change the symbols. And so what develops is this more clearly articulated militant antifascist movement that argues that you resist in the streets, in your communities, from below, and without relying on the police or the courts or the discourse of civil society to stop the march to fascism. It’s a kind of strategy and politics that developed to stop small and medium-sized fascist groups from getting into parliament and influencing the halls of power.

But obviously, if you’re at a point where the president is echoing the great replacement theory and trying to banish books on African American history^[9] and create what a number of scholars have likened to concentration camps^[10] for undocumented people—you’re beyond that point. Which isn’t to say that there is no role for some form of street-level antifascism in counter-protesting far-right demonstrations. But I think that we’re at the point where we really need to call upon larger social movements to try and change the direction of society.

And what would that look like?

That’s the challenge. There are two main blueprints in antifascist history. There’s the preventative, post-war blueprint that I laid out. There’s also the kind of Spanish Civil War, World War II blueprint. We are not at that point, and I hope we never get there.

We’re somewhere in between, because we have what I would argue is a kind of fascistic administration—people like Stephen Miller^[11], who I think are really avowedly fascist, who really do want to destroy democracy and dissent, are promoting their politics. But we have not reached the point where they have achieved all their goals.

So, in that sense, if you look at the moments of historical fascism, we’re somewhere between January 1933, when Hitler took power, and the end of February, when he passed the Enabling Act^[12]. But that’s such a brief window of time that there’s not a direct parallel.

I think we need to come up with a new blueprint fit for the 21st century that is popular, that is pluralistic, that takes different forms of resistance, that encourages people to look beyond their political differences, that involves different kinds of civil disobedience and direct action. But I couldn’t possibly give a formula—because it will develop on its own, through a whole vast network of arteries that are beyond anyone’s individual control.

And that’s what is so misleading about how Trump and his allies depict resistance. There’s no one person telling anyone what to do. That kind of politics is really long gone. It’s going to come from different kinds of networks, and nodes, and groups across the country.

And I hope from afar to see this politics reclaim the country, so I can feel comfortable coming back home.

One of the things that the right-wing media has seized on is a part in your book where you say that you’re donating some of your proceeds to the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund. What is this fund, and why is the right so mad about it?

The International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund collects small donations from activists around the world to pay for the legal and sometimes medical costs of people facing charges for antifascist activism. Most of the cases that it sends money to are people who are resisting regimes in Eastern Europe, Belarus, Russia, and so forth. It is not itself an antifa group.

What even is an “antifa group,” since the term has been brandished so loosely?

The term antifa is originally German from the 1920s and 30s. It spread more broadly when it was revived in Germany with the autonomous antifascist groups of the 80s and onward. You don’t see it in the Anglophone world until the late 2000s. The first US group to call themselves antifa was Rose City Antifa, founded in 2007. It means there’s a group of activists, leftists of one sort or another, who decide to organize against fascism in a way that does not rely on the state. They’re not calling for bans on fascist groups. They’re not calling for censorship. They’re organizing in their everyday life. Beyond that, it takes a multiplicity of forms. Certainly, it’s much more well-known and understood in Europe, particularly continental Europe.

It’s more of something that a group of people do, or maybe something that they loosely identify with, rather than a fixed organization. Although: a lot of these groups are, internally—insofar as maybe they have a dozen members—rather well-organized, and take seriously questions around infiltration, and making sure that their identities are not found out by the far-right. But beyond that, it’s kind of open-ended how they operate.

Because, again, it is this kind of transnational movement that spans decades, and part of what I try to do with the book is trace some of that history so it’s better understood.

The other part of the book that’s received criticism is your language about the handbook being an “unabashedly partisan call to arms.” What do you mean by that?

What I mean by a call to arms is that I call upon people to organize against fascism. I’m not telling anyone any one way to do it or another. The book is not prescriptive in that sense. It’s only prescriptive in the sense that I want people to be informed when they decide what to do and to take action. I don’t know what the blueprint should be of resistance right now. I’m just encouraging people to resist. And so in that sense, you know, I come at this as a scholar, as a professor, as a researcher, as an activist. I’m not prescribing any particular form of resistance beyond people getting out there and organizing against what’s going on.

Three Yale professors who study fascism also left the country for Canada earlier this year, including Jason Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works. Do you get the sense that there are more academics who might be considering leaving, and, as a historian, does the exodus of intellectuals signal anything to you?

The future is unwritten, but it’s hard to imagine that it won’t get worse before it gets better. And that informs my decision to leave. Certainly, receiving death threats, having your address publicly exposed—this is all very concerning, particularly as a parent—and they’re grounds enough for me to want to seek safety. But my concerns about the pace at which this is going make me much more concerned. If things continue on the fascistic pace they’re on, without a change, we will get there.

So, it’s incumbent upon us to do something: to stop this, to get out, to mobilize. I think that we can stop this before it gets as bad as it could conceivably get. But it’s hard to see that happening before things start to get at least somewhat worse.