A key figure linked to Antifa has fled the United States following President Donald Trump’s designation of the group as a domestic terrorist organization.
Antifa originated in Germany as Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifascist Action), a united front program of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Russia in the early 1920s. It functioned as the violent wing of the Communist Party of Germany and branded all its political rivals as “fascists.”
Johan Victorin, founder of the “Rose City Antifa,” a group based in Portland, Oregon, that has had frequent Antifa activity during protests, was captured on camera on Oct. 6 in the city of Vaberg, Sweden, where he now resides. He was born in Sweden and is a dual citizen of that country 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.
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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.”
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 Defense 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.
“As a precaution, we have shut down the donation infrastructure for The International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund to protect our donors and recipients,” the organization wrote on its website.
The fund, also known as “Antifa International,” supports Antifa-aligned groups in several countries.
