A typical academic year for Mark Bray, an assistant teaching professor of history at Rutgers University, turned into a nightmare after President Trump signed an executive order to designate antifa as a terrorist group.

Soon after the order, conservative activists targeted Bray, who wrote "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook," and he began to receive death threats. Once his home address was posted online, he knew it was time to act.

With the support of Rutgers, Bray and his family fled to Spain, where he will remain at least through the end of the school year as he fights what he calls false allegations regarding his beliefs and work.

“I'm very clear that I identify as an anti-fascist. I am completely opposed to fascism. I've never hidden that, but I myself have never been part of an antifa group, neither back then, nor currently, nor do I intend to ever be,” Bray told The Hill in an interview this week.

“So, the effort to conflate me with my subject matter is ill-informed and disingenuous. I support anti-fascism, broadly speaking, but that's the extent of it,” he added.

Bray is not unfamiliar with pushback on his work, but the firestorm that erupted late last month was unexpected for the professor.

Trump's executive order, which comes amid his broader crackdown in multiple liberal-run cities, says that antifa uses “illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide." It gives the federal government a broad mandate to investigate anyone involved in antifa operations or anyone who “provided material........

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