He Wrote About Anti-Fascism—Then Fled the Country | 2025 in Review
What Next
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
All this week, What Next and What Next: TBD are re-airing some of our favorite conversations from throughout the year and checking back with the people in those conversations to see how things have – or haven’t – changed. This episode is from October.
In an executive order, Donald Trump declared “Antifa” a terrorist organization. As it isn’t an organization, there aren’t leaders to target, so zealous conservatives took aim at Mark Bray, a Rutgers professor who wrote a book about fighting fascism eight years ago. The clumsy attempts to get him fired didn’t bother him—but the doxxing and death threats were enough to convince him he needed to leave America.
Guest: Mark Bray, assistant teaching professor at Rutgers, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Vanta. |
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| 0:30.3 | The holidays are all about being together with friends, family, but for some folks, that's harder this year. |
| 0:39.3 | There are people who've been deported, of course, to their home countries, but also to third countries altogether. |
| 0:46.8 | There are people who've been arrested and detained. And then there are people who just left, for their own safety, for their family. |
| 0:56.5 | Earlier this year, we spoke with Mark Bray. |
| 0:59.4 | He's a Rutgers professor, still teaching there. |
| 1:02.3 | But to conservative media, he's the Antifa professor. |
| 1:07.0 | And in October, he fled the U.S. for Spain after receiving death threats and getting doxed. |
| 1:13.8 | Despite all of the bluster, it's still not illegal to be part of a political group in the U.S. that calls itself Antifa. |
| 1:21.1 | We caught back up with Mark, who is still in Spain. |
| 1:24.1 | But he's watching the news, and he's getting ready to return. |
| 1:28.4 | In a sense, a lot's happened in a sense, not much has happened. It's just, you know, |
| 1:31.8 | the kind of the headwinds of political discourse have blown around a bunch. |
... |
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