Rutgers Lecturer Condemns Trump’s Labeling of Antifa as Terrorist Organization

Antifa in Portland
Scott Olson/Getty
Tom Ciccotta

Rutgers lecturer Mark Bray argued this week that it is inappropriate for President Trump to label Antifa as a terrorist group. Bray may be best known for his sympathies for the Antifa movement, which he memorialized in a book that was published in 2017. Bray even donated the proceeds from his book to Antifa movements.

Breitbart News reported in 2017 that Mark Bray, then a lecturer at Dartmouth College, had published a book on Antifa. Bray even donated the proceeds from his book, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, to Antifa movements around the nation.

Now, Bray is pushing back against President Trump’s recent criticisms of far-left radical movements. On May 31, Trump claimed that the United States will designate Antifa as a terrorist organization.

Bray published a column in the Washington Post in response to Trump’s recent push to designate the Antifa movement as a terrorist organization. “Trump’s reckless accusations lack evidence, like many of his claims. But they also intentionally misrepresent the anti-fascist movement in the interest of delegitimizing militant protest and deflecting attention away from the white supremacy and police brutality that the protests oppose,” Bray wrote

Bray went on to argue that conservatives have inappropriately blamed the George Floyd protests on the Antifa movement.

But in the case of the George Floyd protests, right-wing attempts to blame everything on antifa — perceived by many to be predominantly white — evince a kind of racism that assumes that black people couldn’t organize on this deep and wide of a scale. Trump and his allies also have a more specific motive: If the flames and broken glass were simply blamed on “antifa” or “outsiders” — as if anyone had to travel very far to protest — then the urgency would shift from addressing the root causes of Floyd’s death to figuring out how to stop the shadowy boogeyman Trump rails against. Even if you disagree with property destruction, it’s easy to see the chain of events between Floyd’s death and burning police cars. Trump’s misinformation aims to mislead us all.

On Monday, Bray encouraged those that “won’t be in the streets” to tune into his appearance on CNN.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more campus updates.

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