MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Following Charlie Kirk's assassination, President Trump signed an executive order. It designated antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, although it's not an actual organization.
MARK BRAY: When Charlie Kirk was killed, there was a concerted effort by Trump and his allies to take advantage of that for their own purposes.
MARTIN: Mark Bray is an historian who teaches at Rutgers University. Back in 2017, he published a book titled "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook." It's meant to educate people about anti-fascism movements, past and present.
BRAY: I come at this as a researcher but, of course, also as someone who opposes fascism. I consider myself an anti-fascist, but I have never been part of an antifa group. I am not now. I do not intend to be.
MARTIN: Over the last few weeks, Bray became a target of a stepped-up right-wing harassment campaign. Previously, Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Kirk, had added him to their professor watchlist, a project begun in 2016 to name and create dossiers on educators the group perceived as left wing.
BRAY: A number of far-right provocateurs started calling me a domestic terrorist professor online.
MARTIN: Bray began being bombarded with death threats. It got so bad he fled to Spain with his wife, who's also a professor, and young children. At MORNING EDITION, we're examining the state of the First Amendment - who feels more free to speak? Who feels silenced? And the way the First Amendment is shifting in America. Bray thinks the harassment has been directed by the Trump administration, so I asked him why.
BRAY: Journalists and scholars who've investigated this White House and its connection to these far-right figures have established that there is this far-right ecosystem that has included Charlie Kirk prior to his death and that has extended through the national Turning Point USA Network. And so the local groups of Turning Point USA are given talking points by national. The national Turning Point leadership is in touch with figures very close to the Trump White House. So I think that it's pretty well documented there's this ecosystem. That doesn't mean that Donald Trump said, oh, we're going to try to make Mark Bray's life difficult. But I think it is necessary to see it as a consequence of a media propaganda atmosphere created by the far right and the Trump White House.
MARTIN: This is not to in any way blame you or imply that you have some responsibility for provoking this conduct, but is it accurate that you donated half the proceeds from your book, "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook," to a legal defense fund for people arrested while demonstrating against fascism? I just wanted to ask - in hindsight, was that wise, or do you think that it put you more into that gray area of activist/scholar?
BRAY: Well, I mean, I am an activist scholar. I have been for a number of years. I participated in Occupy Wall Street. I have a very strong desire to see justice in my country and in the world. And so I'm not shy in the book. I encourage people to pick it up. See for yourself what I have to say. I oppose fascism. I broadly speaking, support anti-fascist organizing. But the problem here is that I've been described as, like, the mastermind of particular groups, which I am not part of. Yes, I donated half of the author's proceeds to a legal defense fund. That doesn't mean that I am endorsing or involved in all the different things that people are doing around the world.
MARTIN: Why don't we back up for a second and just ask you - what is antifa?
BRAY: Trump and his allies would like us to think that it is this singular organization with a hierarchy, a leader, a headquarters and a massive budget. And none of those things could be further from the truth. But, you know, antifa stands for anti-fascist in a number of different languages. It refers to a loose politics or a movement of radical left, opposition to the far right, taking different kinds of socialists and leftists and putting them together in small groups that really have, at most, a kind of loose network affiliation with each other in opposing far-right and fascist groups. But, you know, I don't think Trump really cares if that's true or not. It serves his purposes to create a kind of poorly understood bogeyman term to equate protests with terrorism.
MARTIN: To the degree you feel comfortable, I would like to know what this has been like for your family.
BRAY: Well, you know, we had to pack up our family in a few days. We didn't want to scare our kids, so we didn't tell them what was happening. We just said that, you know, Mommy and Daddy have a research trip. Before we left, some of the neighborhood kids came over and wanted to play with them and we had to tell our kids that we can't today, just because we didn't feel safe with them or us watching them outside of our home before we left.
We had the curtains drawn in our living room out of fear of what if someone's outside our house with a gun and trying to look in? It's been very disturbing and I think that we have to see that it is a foreseeable consequence of the kind of harassment that Turning Point USA has conducted against professors, journalists and people whose ideas they don't like. And I think that we need a societal reckoning about how we address these matters.
MARTIN: Professor Mark Bray, thanks so much for talking with us.
BRAY: Thank you.
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