Charlie Kirk's group chases anti-fascism professor out of the country

A history professor is abruptly leaving the U.S. after a conservative group founded by the late Charlie Kirk singled him out for persecution.

Mark Bray, who has taught about antifascist movements at Rutgers University since 2019, notified students Sunday that his courses would immediately move online as he and his family prepared to flee the country for their safety, reported the Washington Post.

“Since my family and I do not feel safe in our home at the moment, we are moving for the year to Europe,” Bray told students by email. “Truly I am so bummed about not being able to spend time with you all in the classroom.”

Far-right social media accounts called attention to Bray in late September, after news outlets quoted his remarks about President Donald Trump’s executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization," and the Washington Post confirmed three death threats sent to the professor since Sept. 26.

One online activist called him a “domestic terrorist professor," while another shared his home address in New Jersey, and the Rutgers chapter of the conservative student group Turning Point USA, which was founded by the late Kirk, launched a petition Thursday demanding Bray's firing, referring to Trump's executive order and smearing the educator as a threat to their safety.

Bray decided to move his family to Spain for the rest of the year, and he's optimistic they'll be able to return one day.

“I’m hopeful about returning, and I’m hopeful — and I say this as a history professor — that someday we will look back on this as a cautionary tale about authoritarianism,” Bray said.

The university told the Post that administrators were aware of the Turning Point USA petition and Bray's message to students.

“We are gathering more information about this evolving situation,” the university said in a statement.

Bray, the author of four books on anarchism and antifa, also faced widespread criticism when he told NBC News’s “Meet the Press” in 2017, while a lecturer at Dartmouth University, that violence was sometimes justified, after the deadly “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

Dartmouth's president at the time condemned Bray in a statement and accused him “supporting violent protest," but more than 100 of the university's faculty members rallied around him.

Turning Point USA did not respond to requests for comment on the report, but the Trump administration justified the threats he received by blaming Kirk's assassination, which remains under investigation, on "Democrat violence," but Bray characterized the threats chasing him to Europe as part of the president's crackdown on academic freedom.

“There’s been a concerted attack on universities, and I feel like this is a facet of that," Bray said, "to make it so that professors who conduct research on protest movements don’t feel safe sharing their research or teaching about topics that the administration doesn’t like.”