Doxxed by MAGA: ‘I’m not the leader of Antifa – I’m just a historian’
Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, published in 2017, was forced to flee the US after death-threats from far-right Trump supporters. He tells The News Agents why MAGA wants a fascist state, and why its attacks on Antifa are unjustified.
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In brief…
- Author, professor and activist Mark Bray tells The News Agents how attacks from the US far-right forced him to flee to Europe, and why he’s been falsely accused of being the leader of Antifa.
- Antifa, which is not an organisation, has been declared a terror group by Donald Trump, which Bray says sets a dangerous precedent for anyone who opposes the president's views or policy.
- He says Trump’s MAGA movement is determined to bring fascism to the US, and says its misguided criticism of Antifa is a stepping stone towards that ambition.
What’s the story?
Mark Bray won’t tell The News Agents where he’s calling from.
The closest he’ll say is Spain, having fled the US earlier this year due to doxxing and targeting from far-right activists in the US over the belief he is a leader of Antifa, which has been designated a terror group in an Executive Order from President Donald Trump.
There are two major issues here: Antifa is not an organisation (it’s a general reference for any protester or activist standing against fascism), and Bray is not a leader. He is an anti-fascism protester who wrote a book about it in 2017, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.
“I am not a part of an Antifa group. I am just a researcher and a historian,” he tells Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel.
“I received a lot of death threats. My home address was posted publicly on X, and after all this harassment, my wife and I and our two small children had to leave the country.”
Fleeing the country wasn't easy for Bray and his family either. Their first attempt was cancelled at the last minute, and during their second (successful) they were subject to an hour of interrogation and searches by federal agents.
“When we tried to get on the plane, there was some kind of an error,” he says.
“We were taken aside to speak with the United attendant. She made a number of phone calls, had conversations and hushed voices, and after about half an hour figured out that someone had canceled my family's reservation at the last moment – presumably between when we checked through security, and when we were going to get on the plane.
“This was the same day that the far-right influencers who were harassing me online were meeting with President Trump in the White House. So to me, it was clearly in some form or another, politically motivated.”
He does not believe it was a coincidence. Bray and his family were able to leave America the following day.
‘MAGA can’t understand people protesting together without being funded’
While Bray describes himself as a radical activist, having been involved in Occupy Wall Street, anti-war organising and union organising, says he has never been actively involved in anti-fascism.
His book was written, he says, as both a professor and an activist.
“I support anti-fascism, insofar as I hate fascism, but I am not the person they're claiming I am,” Bray says.
“It's just that when they decided to go after Antifa as the boogeyman term de jour, I'm the most famous person in the US explicitly associated with that term, so was just an easy target for them.”
In September this year, Trump declared Antifa a domestic terror group – but Bray says the president and his administration cannot understand the concept of people coming together and acting under shared beliefs.
"They can't really imagine and conceptualise just a lot of activists and leftists and protesters coming together without someone paying them and directing them," Bray says.
"For me what I think of when I think of terrorism is slaughtering people indiscriminately.
"Antifa groups in the US have had confrontations with the far-right, most famously in Charlottesville where punches were thrown, pepper spray was sprayed. If that level of conflict and violence is what we're calling terrorism, then it renders the term meaningless."
The Trump administration has also accused Tyler Robinson and Luigi Mangione, alleged killers of Charlie Kirk and Brian Thompson, of acting on behalf of Antifa.
"They're trying to really conflate a lot of different things and blur the distinctions," he adds.
"That is calling resistance to Trump and protest and general, terrorism, and that has dangerous implications."
‘MAGA is ultra nationalist, misogynistic and racist’
Bray says he hopes to return to America in the summer of 2026, if the political climate has not pushed even further to the right.
At this moment, he doesn't believe America is a fascist state – but claims the MAGA movement is, and says some of its prominent figures are already pushing the country in that direction.
"I say that MAGA is fascist because it is a populist movement that is ultra nationalist, misogynistic and racist," he says.
"Make America Great Again and fascism has a desire to return to an imagined past. It advocates for violence beyond the law insofar as it glorifies police who kill protesters, who beat up protesters in a way that's actually illegal. It has a cult of personality for the leader.
"I don't think that what we have in the US is fascism. We don't have a single party dictatorship. Protest is still legal. The Democratic Party is still operating."
The ultimate goal of MAGA Republicans, he adds, has "aspirations" of bringing fascism to America.
"Stephen Miller has called the Democratic Party a domestic extremist organisation," he says.
"They're trying to paint the No Kings protesters as 'Hamas supporters' as a way of delegitimising the pro-Palestine movement and calling them terrorists. They've called them Antifa terrorists.
"So there is a clear goal, but they haven't actually reached the goal yet."