How Bad Is It?: Why an Antifascism Scholar Fled the Country
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2025
⏱️ 63 minutes
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Summary
The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt for the latest installment of “How Bad Is It?,” a regular checkup on the health of American democracy. Their guests are the Rutgers historians Mark Bray and Yesenia Barragan, a married couple who recently left the United States after Bray became the target of a right-wing doxing campaign. Bray and Barragan share the events leading up to their decision to leave the country with their family, including the death threats that followed Bray’s addition to a right-wing “professor watch list” and the portrayal of his work in conservative media as promoting political violence. Bray, who is the author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” also speaks with Tyler and Andrew about his research into militant antifascism and how those ideas resonate in Donald Trump’s second Presidential term. They discuss the debates his work has sparked over political violence, free speech, and how his arguments about antifascism challenge conventional ideas of liberalism and academic freedom.
This week’s reading:
- “When the Government Stops Defending Civil Rights,” by Eyal Press
- “What if the Big Law Firms Hadn’t Caved to Trump?,” by Fabio Bertoni
- “Trump and the Presidency That Wouldn’t Shut Up,” by Jill Lepore
- “Why Biden’s White House Press Secretary Is Leaving the Democratic Party,” by Isaac Chotiner
- “Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing,” by Adam Gopnik
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, Andrew. |
| 0:01.7 | Hey, Tyler. How's it going? |
| 0:03.0 | Pretty good. |
| 0:05.1 | Welcome back to the political scene from the New Yorker and to our special series, How Bad |
| 0:09.4 | Is It, where Andrew and I sit down for a monthly checkup on the health of our democracy. |
| 0:14.1 | So this week, we want to talk about Antifa, especially in the context of Trump's recent |
| 0:19.0 | executive order classifying the group as a domestic terrorist association. |
| 0:24.3 | It should be clear to all Americans |
| 0:26.4 | that we have a very serious left-wing terror threat in our country, |
| 0:30.4 | radicals associated with the domestic terror group, |
| 0:34.3 | Antifa, that you've heard a lot about lately, |
| 0:36.8 | and I've heard a lot about them for 10 years. |
| 0:40.2 | There's no legal process to designate a group, a domestic terrorist association. But it seems like |
| 0:45.6 | the intent of the administration here is pretty clear. Under the Trump administration, |
| 0:50.0 | we're going after Antifa criminals and all who fund and support their campaigns are in serious trouble. |
| 0:57.0 | And we have a lot of records already, a lot of surprises, a lot of bad surprises. |
| 1:02.2 | It's people that you would never think. |
| 1:04.6 | So we're talking this week with Mark Bray and Yessenia Baraghan, who are both professors from Rutgers, both historians who recently |
| 1:13.1 | fled the country to Spain after receiving death threats. |
| 1:17.3 | Mark is the author of the Anti-Fascist Handbook, a book from 2017, and he has taught courses |
| 1:23.5 | on anti-fascism and terrorism, most recently at Rutgers. Mark a while ago was placed on a |
| 1:29.6 | professor watch list by the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, and he has been accused of being a |
... |
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