Rutgers University professor Mark Bray said he’s moving to Europe after he received death threats following an online petition calling for him to be fired.
The threats ramped up last week when the school’s chapter of Turning Point USA started a petition to remove Bray, the author of bestseller “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” for what they claimed was endangering conservative students on campus.
The group, in its petition, accused Bray of “referr[ing] to mainstream conservative figures such as Bill O’Reilly as fascist while he calls for militant actions to be taken against these individuals.”
Megyn Doyle, the group’s treasurer and petition writer, told Fox News Digital 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.
Doyle’s petition, which described Bray as “a prominent leader of the Antifa movement on campus,” had over 900 signatures as of Tuesday evening.
Following the petition, Bray wrote in an email to his students that the subsequent fallout led to death threats, including at least one on his home address.
“This weekend, shortly after some negative media and social media attention (some of which, ironically enough, accused me of being a ‘terrorist’), I received another death threat,” the historian and assistant professor wrote, according to the email shared online by one of his students.
Bray told his students that he and his family no longer feel safe in their home, so they’d be “moving for the year to Europe.” He said he would continue to record lectures for students to watch online.
“The University is aware of the Change.org petition regarding Professor Mark Bray and Dr. Bray’s message to his students,” said Patti Zielinski, a spokesperson for Rutgers, in a statement. “We are gathering more information about this evolving situation.”
According to Bray, he first began receiving threats in late September after the Department of Homeland Security released a statement claiming to have arrested “dozens” of “Antifa-aligned left-wing violent extremists” who had “murdered innocent civilians throughout the United States,” which Bray said is false.
Days earlier, President Trump issued an executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.
“To me, this is kind of a local version of this larger effort by the far right to try and really push liberal ideas out of society,” Bray told NorthJersey.com.
In response to the situation, Rutgers students started their own petition to oust Turning Point USA from the New Brunswick campus.
“The Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) has been continuously promoting hate speech and inciting violence against our community,” reads the petition, created on Sunday. “Alarmingly, a respected professor felt compelled to leave the country, fearing for the safety of their family due to threats and harassment cultivated by this group.”
“The activities of the TPUSA chapter are contrary to the educational principles we aim to uphold,” the petition continues. “They spread messages that breed division and intolerance, and these actions speak louder than any supposed academic freedom they claim to exercise.”
That petition had garnered more than 1,300 signatures as of Tuesday.
Turning Point USA is a conservative student organization that claims to promote free speech on college campuses. The organization was founded by Charlie Kirk, a Trump ally and podcaster who was shot to death during a campus visit in Utah on Sept. 10.
Bray is on TPUSA’s “Professor Watchlist,” which targets faculty who “advance leftist propaganda.”
Bray graduated from Wesleyan University in 2005, and earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers in 2016, according to his online biographies. His book covers the history of resistance to fascist movements, like the Nazis, up to the violent, deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va.
