Mark Bray is in his early thirties and the recipient of a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers in 2016. He is also rapidly becoming antifa’s chief ideologue. Among his works describing or advocating for the often violent demonstrators are Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street.
Bray has yet to find a major commercial press for his tracts and, so far as I can tell, remains a lowly lecturer at Dartmouth College. But he has presented his case for antifa’s protest activities and the disruptive forms they have taken in, among other venues, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and Boston Review. Bray was also invited to voice his views at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., an honor usually reserved for intellectual and political celebrities. It was after watching Bray’s Politics and Prose address and the remarks it elicited from the mostly “antifascist” audience that my editor at Northern Illinois University Press arrived at the idea that I should write a book on antifa’s worldview.
Encounters: My Life wi…
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After listening to the YouTube talk and then ordering Bray’s Handbook, it occurred to me that there was nothing particularly interesting about what I was encountering. Despite its obvious incompatibility with the dominant political culture, the alt-right seems to have rallied philosophically deeper thinkers than the slogan-chanting adolescents who swarm around Bray. Alt-right publications regularly mention European rightist intellectuals like Alexander Dugin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Julius Evola, and however tendentiously those sources are used, their…