Dartmouth College lecturer Mark Bray has announced that half of the proceeds from his new book on Antifa will go directly to funding Antifa protests.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education paints a positive portrait of Bray. “Mr. Bray, a 35-year-old who looks even younger than that, is neither a fire-starter or a Nazi-puncher. He is a lecturer of history at Dartmouth College. His weapons of choice are logic and history, his crisp sentences delivered with the vaguest trace of a New Jersey accent.”
The article goes on to announce that Bray will be donating half of the proceeds from his new book, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, will go directly to financing the efforts of Antifa groups around the country.
“As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, Mr. Bray studied Spanish revolutionaries and began to think of himself as an anarchist,” the flattering Chronicle profile continues. “‘The struggles and sacrifices of workers and peasants to collectively shed generations of oppression and forge a truly equitable society were so beautiful,’ he wrote. ‘I knew I had to continue their struggle.'”
Earlier this year, Bray was condemned by Dartmouth College’s president over the endorsement of Antifa violence. Shortly after Bray’s endorsement of political violence, Dartmouth attempted to distance itself, writing in a statement saying “supporting violent protests do not represent the views of Dartmouth.”
In response to the college’s critique of Bray, a hoard of faculty members began to express their outrage. “Since the violent neo-Nazi attack in Charlottesville, we have watched with gratitude as our junior colleague Mark Bray, on the strength of his historical scholarship, has become the national expert on a subject that is suddenly, terribly urgent: the twentieth-century history of fascism and anti-fascism, in Europe and, more recently, the United States,” a letter from a faculty group read.
The faculty letter specifically condemned Breitbart News for inspiring Dartmouth College to condemn’s Bray’s endorsement of violence.
“The tone and content of Dartmouth’s statement takes at face value the distortions presented as truth by Farkas, Breitbart, and Daily Caller reporters, as though they were somehow more credible sources than Professor Bray himself—had anyone contacted him—or the transcripts and published pieces widely available for the College’s representatives to check for themselves,” the letter continues.
In his book, Bray writes that violence is a “vital” part of Antifa activity. “In truth, violence represents a small though vital sliver of anti-fascist activity,” Bray wrote. “Anti-fascists don’t wait for a fascist threat to become violent before acting to shut it down, physically if necessary.”