Rutgers professor moving to Europe after threats over antifa accusations

A Rutgers University professor is temporarily relocating to Europe as he grapples with threats that intensified after a student group affiliated with the organization founded by murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk accused him of being “a prominent leader of the antifa movement on campus”.

Rutgers’ Turning Point USA chapter also says the presence of Mark Bray – whose work has closely examined antifascist movements – threatens them and is calling for his firing from the New Jersey university, prompting the academic to say those demands are little more than “manufactured outrage”.

“I am not now, nor have I ever been, part of any kind of antifascist or anti-racist organization – I just haven’t. I’m a professor,” Bray said on Monday about the circumstances. Noting that antifa is a decentralized movement, he added: “I’m a professor of the history of the left.”

A Change.org petition calling for the termination of Bray’s employment at Rutgers came Thursday, several weeks after Kirk – the founder of Turning Point USA – was shot to death by a sniper on 10 September.

Turning Point USA has chapters at various college campuses. And the treasurer for the chapter at Rutgers, student Megyn Doyle, told Fox News Digital that the petition was made necessary by the fact that Bray “puts conservative students at risk for antifa to come in”.

“You have a teacher that so often promotes political violence, especially in his book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, which talks about militant fascism, which is on term with political violence,” Doyle said.

Bray countered that he is an antifascist “insofar as I don’t like fascism”. But he denied that he is a threat to conservative students.

The language Doyle used in the interview with the conservative-friendly Fox outlet came after Donald Trump issued an executive order designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. But despite the president’s order, there is no centralized entity named antifa.

Mark Bray says he’s been inaccurately portrayed as an ‘antifa financier’. Photograph: William B Plowman/NBC via Getty Images

Trump has long framed leftist activism as dangerous. And many Trump supporters claim that leftist rhetoric led to Kirk’s killing, with prosecutors alleging that he was shot to death by someone who viewed Kirk’s views on gay and trans rights specifically as hateful.

In any event, Bray said he has never advocated for terrorism and dismissed efforts to cast antifa as a terrorism organization. “It’s not an organization – it’s not terrorist either,” he said.

“I don’t know whether these people believe that this is true or not. But I’m not so sure that they care, because it serves a narrative they’re trying to promote.”

Nonetheless, the anti-Bray petition charges him with having “regularly referred to mainstream conservative figures such as Bill O’Reilly as fascist while he calls for militant actions to be taken against these individuals”.

“This is the kind of rhetoric that resulted in Charlie Kirk being assassinated,” the students seeking Bray’s ouster claimed in their Change.org petition.

Bray said: “I don’t think I’ve ever called Bill O’Reilly a fascist. I don’t remember ever doing that.

“Of course, if they were actually my students, I’d say, ‘include a citation.’”

Referred to by the petition as Dr Antifa, Bray has written several books, including Antifa: the Anti-Fascist Handbook. The book came out just as white supremacists and counter-protesters collided at the Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Heather Heyer, who protested the white supremacist rally, was killed when neo-Nazi James Fields rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters. Bray swiftly became an in-demand news commentator, according to the Washington Post.

The Change.org petition aiming to remove him from Rutgers mentioned how Bray’s handbook pledged at least 50% “of the author’s proceeds would go to the International Anti-Fascist Defense fund”.

Bray countered that the fund collects donations “to help with the legal or medical costs of people facing charges for organizing pertaining to anti-fascism or anti-racism”.

“It is itself not an ‘antifa’ group,” Bray said.

Nevertheless, Bray said, he’s been inaccurately portrayed as an “antifa financier”.

Bray received threats when his work first rose to national prominence – but those had subsided in recent years, he said.

Threats resumed after Trump’s antifa executive order, the Change.org petition and a 25 September X post from far-right commentator Jack Posobiec calling him a “domestic terrorist professor”, according to Bray.

He initially responded by moving his classes online, he said. Then, after the Fox News story on the petition, he received a threatening email containing his home address. That prompted him to plan to move abroad for a while as he continued teaching three Rutgers courses, including one on terrorism and another on antifascism.

Bray has received extensive support in a Rutgers subreddit.

One user commented: “I loved him as a professor. He was great at challenging us to argue more nuanced points. He made me such a better writer. I’m honestly in so much shock I was only in class with him like three years ago.”

Another said: “This is terrible, had him in spring 2023 for Human Rights, he was such a nice guy, you could tell he really cared about all his students.”

The group calling for Bray’s firing claims to believe in the constitutional right to free speech – but, invoking a common refrain in such discussions, it added: “This does not mean that one is free from the consequences of their actions.”

The Guardian reached out to Doyle through the petition’s portal but did not immediately hear back.

Bray said he met with Rutgers’ dean and received “full support … for my academic freedom and for my safety” after informing students of his intermediate plans in a message.

Asked for comment, Rutgers said: “The university is aware of the Change.org petition regarding professor Mark Bray and [his] message to his students. We are gathering more information about this evolving situation.”