“President Trump’s coments that the quote-unquote ‘alt-left’ and ‘alt-right’ are equivalent moral forces is really historically misinformed and morally bankrupt. The anti-fascist movement has a global history that stretches back about a century. You can trace them to Italian opposition to Mussolini’s blackshirts, German opposition to Hitler’s brownshirts, anti-fascists from around the world who traveled to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War…. In the United States, we can look at Anti-Racist Action in the 1980s, 1990s, and the early 2000s, which took some of these methods of confronting neo-Nazis and fascists wherever they assemble, shutting down their organizing, and, as they said, going where they go.”

That’s Mark Bray, author of the forthcoming Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, speaking Wednesday morning with Democracy Now!’s Juan González. As we wrote yesterday, after this weekend’s devastating events in Charlottesville, we’ve made the decision to fast-track the book. We’re doing everything we can to get into bookstores as urgently as we can — it should be available everywhere next week.

In the meantime, Mark hasn’t been snoozing. He was a human media dynamo yesterday. First off, he took on some of the basic questions about antifa, breaking them down with clarity and eloquence in the Washington Post:

Antifascists argue that after the horrors of chattel slavery and the Holocaust, physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective. We should not, they argue, abstractly assess the ethical status of violence in the absence of the values and context behind it. Instead, they put forth an ethically consistent, historically informed argument for fighting Nazis before it’s too late. As Cornel West explained after surviving neo-Nazi attacks in Charlottesville, “If it hadn’t been for the antifascists protecting us from the neo-fascists, we would have been crushed like cockroaches.”

The entire article is extremely worth reading.

Then there was his Democracy Now! appearance, in which he took on tough questions and offered an overview of the tactics and history of anti-fascism:

Later in the day, Mark swung over to talk to Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press, along with Southern Poverty Law Center president Richard Cohen. “Most people think of Nazism as something that died with World War II — but it really rebranded itself…. The main perspective of antifa is essentially that, rather than simply waiting for the threat to materialize, you stop it form the beginning — you say: ‘No platform for fascism.’” A must-watch (if your browser isn’t showing the video below, you can watch it right here):

Mark also took the time to appear on the Thom Hartmann Program, where he spoke in detail about the history of global anti-fascism. “Today, since the Trump campaign, anti-fascism—antifa—has been a sort of a model that a lot of radical leftists have turned to, as a way to defend themselves and to fight back against the alt-right.” Watch the whole clip here:

And more’s coming — a lot more. In the meantime, you can pre-order Antifa right here, and we’ll ship it along to you very soon.