What Next - He Wrote About Anti-Fascism—Then Fled the Country | 2025 in Review
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Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
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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 | The holidays are all about being together with friends, family, but for some folks, that's harder this year. |
| 0:08.0 | There are people who've been deported, of course, to their home countries, but also to third countries altogether. |
| 0:16.0 | There are people who've been arrested and detained, and then there are people who just left for their own safety, for their family. |
| 0:26.5 | Earlier this year, we spoke with Mark Bray. |
| 0:29.3 | He's a Rutgers professor, still teaching there. |
| 0:32.2 | But to conservative media, he's the Antifa professor. |
| 0:37.0 | And in October, he fled the U.S. for Spain after receiving death threats and getting doxed. |
| 0:43.8 | Despite all of the bluster, it's still not illegal to be part of a political group in the U.S. |
| 0:49.2 | that calls itself Antifa. |
| 0:51.1 | We caught back up with Mark, who is still in Spain. |
| 0:54.1 | But he's watching the news, and he's getting ready to return. |
| 0:58.0 | In a sense, a lot's happened in a sense, not much has happened. |
| 1:01.0 | It's just, you know, the kind of the headwinds of political discourse have blown around a bunch. |
| 1:05.0 | And while things, I wouldn't say things have gotten better per se, they have also not gotten |
| 1:12.9 | drastically worse. |
| 1:14.9 | So I'm just trying to keep an eye on that. |
| 1:18.4 | And hopefully if things kind of plateau, I'd feel comfortable next summer getting a new place, taking certain measures to make it much harder |
| 1:29.7 | to find my address, taking other security precautions on campus and in my personal life |
| 1:34.6 | to set up a more sustainable foundation to start over in the fall. |
| 1:37.8 | When you're dealing with a scary administration, but also a famously blustering one, |
| 1:43.9 | how do you know when to fold and when to call the bluff? |
| 1:50.3 | What was supposedly this existential threat to the safety and security of the United States, |
... |
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