Since Trump’s executive order, at least one Antifa-affiliated entity has shut down its operations in the United States.
Key figures linked to Antifa have fled the United States following President Donald Trump’s designation of the group as a domestic terrorist organization.
Johan Victorin, founder of “Rose City Antifa,” a group based in Portland, Oregon, a city that has had frequent Antifa activity during protests, was seen on Oct. 6 in the city of Vaberg, Sweden, according to an X post and video by Swedish investigative journalist Christian Peterson. According to Project Veritas, which did an undercover exposé of Rose City in 2020, Victorin is a dual citizen of Sweden and the United States.
Victorin has maintained a low profile since founding the Rose City Antifa. The group’s website professes a commitment to anonymity, which it claims helps it “stay safe from state repression and violence” and proves that individual participants “are uninterested in gaining social capital from our work as antifascists.”
Meanwhile, Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook” and a professor at the State University of New Jersey, recently announced to students that he was leaving the United States for Europe; however, he later announced that his flight was canceled.
“Since my family and I do not feel safe in our home at the moment, we are moving for the year to Europe,” Bray wrote in a message to students on the platform Canvas.
On Oct. 8, he wrote on Bluesky: “‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second. We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.”
A little over 24 hours later, Bray posted: “Our plane is in the air! Thank you so much to the countless people supporting us in every way.”
The introduction to Bray’s seminal Antifa handbook states that he will donate half of the proceeds from the sales of the book to “International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund, which is administered by more than three hundred antifa from eighteen countries.”
“Only mass antifascism, legal or not, can save us,” Bray wrote on the Bluesky social media platform on Oct. 4.
Since Trump’s executive order, at least one Antifa-affiliated entity has shut down its operations in the United States out of concern about engaging in prohibited activity.
By Arjun Singh
