What Next - He Wrote About Anti-Fascism—Then Fled the Country
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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| 0:33.4 | For the last few weeks, Professor Mark Bray has had to brace himself when he opens up his email |
| 0:41.5 | because he's never quite sure what kind of messages he's going to find inside. |
| 0:46.1 | The first one simply said, I'll kill you in front of your students. That's simple. |
| 0:51.2 | Another one said, I'm going to burn down your house and kill you when you run out. |
| 0:56.1 | Mark teaches history at Rutgers University. A few years back, he wrote this book, Antifa, the |
| 1:03.2 | anti-fascist handbook. It's a cheeky title for what is essentially the history of a movement. |
| 1:10.5 | Last month, when President Trump declared Antifa was a domestic terrorist organization, |
| 1:15.6 | that is when his inbox started to fill up. |
| 1:19.6 | Not this most recent Saturday, but the previous Saturday I was watching, |
| 1:22.6 | Yankees, Blue Jays, Game 1, the playoffs, and the bottom of the first I got an email. |
| 1:31.4 | It said something like we're watching you and it had the address. |
| 1:33.6 | And I knew I had to leave my home. |
| 1:34.6 | Right away. |
| 1:37.1 | Well, yeah, pretty much. |
| 1:41.5 | Mark wants to make something very clear. |
| 1:46.7 | He's not a member of Antifa. After conducting extensive interviews, |
| 1:53.6 | he certainly understands Antifa's internal logic, but he's not their spokesperson. Not like that matters anymore. Where are you right now? I'm in Spain. I'm not advertising, you know, where in Spain. |
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