Following a Dec. 1, 2017 speech by Antifa spokesman Mark Bray at the Harvard Coop, Matthias Thorpe – an organizer of the Resist Marxism “Rally for the Republic” that took place just under two weeks earlier on the Boston Common – was savagely beaten by a group of about ten people right outside the Harvard Book Store.

Thorpe was hospitalized and suffered several bone fractures but is expected to make a full recovery.

This comes off the heels of threats of violence during the Rally for the Republic from groups protesting the rally, which was organized to “celebrate America, support the Constitution, and honor veterans.”

The North Shore Antifa chapter published a “Provisional Response” following the incident outside of the Coop. After an elaborate attempt to assert that Thorpe was inciting violence at the event, the group claimed responsibility for their “justified,” preemptive violence.

“Fighting fascism and white supremacy is not an act of violence unto itself,” the group wrote. “It is an act of individual and community self-defense and we will not apologize for that.”

When asked about the comments North Shore Antifa tried to use to justify their attack, he scoffed at the premise.

“I never said what was in the article,” Thorpe said in regards to the comment he made complimenting his friends boots. “I did not say bashing. I said commie ass whooping.”

Thorpe made these comments after his friend Chris Bartley noted that “we got some people all around us right now who are Anti-Fascist.”

“To me this just seems like trash talking, and I would understand if we did this in the lecture or to somebody specifically and was provoking these sort of things to a person, but to me this was just playing along with the stream, trying to have some fun, trying to blow off some steam,” Thorpe said about the “punch commies” comment referenced by Antifa's Provisional Response.

Watching the video it can be seen that Thorpe read aloud the “punch commies” comment made by a viewer and then said “f*** commies.”

It's also worth noting that not only can anyone comment on the public Periscope, as someone did when they said “Dump Trump,” but also that the “punch commies” comment was likely in jest to a slogan adopted by the Antifa movement and popularized by leftists upset with the results of the election to “punch some people in the face.”

Bray is the author of “Antifa: The Anti-fascist Handbook” and, as has been documented in a Nov. 13 CD report, Bray has advocated for “preemptive” violence as a form of “self defense” against some hypothesized future attack from people arbitrarily labeled “Nazis” or emissaries of the “law and order notion of Fascism.”

As has been seen over and over again over the past couple of years, Antifa has continually labeled conservatives and Trump supporters as Nazis while perpetrating acts of violence against them, citing the conservatives' 'Nazi' concerns about open borders and the spread of – wait for it – National Socialism.

For those who are unaware, National Socialism is what Nazi is short for and is fundamentally identical to communism.

It's also no less ironic that the fascist violence and intimidation from Communist groups were what the Nazis used as a pretext for fascist control measures of the population in Germany. Being a Dartmouth Professor of History, Bray must surely be aware of these facts, which makes one wonder what exactly Bray is hoping to accomplish by pushing tactics such as these based on erroneous charges of a suddenly fascist Presidency, who to date has not afforded himself one more executive power that hadn't been exercised by his predecessor.

After offering a kind of vague criteria for people to defer to when attempting to differentiate when to shut down other people's speech or not, based on whether or not they were individuals or organized, Bray argued that there shouldn't be any legislation restricting people's speech, but there should be people who show up to shut down their speech.

“Free speech, in a sort of liberal abstract sense, is neo-nazis, and clansman, and anti-racists all are considered equal in this imagined free market of ideas, which is of course born out of an enlightenment optimism that if you let these ideas engage with each other, then the good ideas will rise to the top. Now that was never true, but it was – in a European context – understood to be even less true after the horrors of the holocaust and so forth.”

It would be alarming if a Dartmouth Professor of History was not aware that every single Fascist Genocide was characterized by a restriction of free speech, which, again, makes you wonder. Bray would go on to cite capitalism as one of the premiere “infringements on free speech.”

“There is this assumption that parliamentary democracy is the antithesis of fascism, but if we look to the fact that Hitler and Mussolini were both appointed, they obtained power largely illegally, and that when Hitler took over he did it through the enabling act which was actually approved by the German Parliament, you can see that in liberal democracies there are often mechanisms for the centralization of power in times of perceived crisis,” Bray said at the start of his talk. “And of course if you're trying to build a revolutionary movement to create a post capitalist society, and if you're successful, there's going to be a crisis.”

Fellow Resist Marxism organizer Chris Bartley posted a periscope interview with Thorpe at the hospital following the assault, during which Thorpe gave his account of the events.

“We were about to head out and meet up with Chris and this group of people came out (of the Coop); this girl comes by and says this guy's a Nazi, and before I could even respond verbally, another girl from that group, some short girl, started throwing fists at me,” Thorpe said. “And so I kind of backed off, and I was sort of fighting off the smaller group and someone came up from behind me and grabbed me. It seemed like it was a bigger person. It seemed like there were some bigger people who started hitting me in the face.”

In an interview with Citizens' Dawn, Thorpe responded to the assertions made by the North Shore Antifa group.

“I highly doubt that they were watching that periscope at the time,” Thorpe said about Bartley's Periscope broadcast referenced by North Shore Antifa before later going on to say that he has still not heard from the Cambridge Police about the status of the investigation. “I called them on Saturday night to express that they need to call the Coop and that they need to get in touch with other people to get this video surveillance, because if this video surveillance gets destroyed. then, well, I'd say it's a lost cause, but then you also have the right to take legal action against these people; against the police force; against the people who deleted the video. The Coop brought in this guy to speak, a guy who openly condones violence.”

Thorpe said that he intends to pursue every legal avenue at his disposal, after highlighting the financial clout that Harvard has in Cambridge, which may translate into a miscarriage of justice by the Cambridge Police Department. According to Thorpe, not only was he assaulted outside the coop, but that there was an assault inside the Coop as well.

“I don't condone violence, but at the same time I also lose hope everyday, and I just wonder at some point whether or not we're going to have take an offensive position towards all of this because people keep getting hurt,” Thorpe said. “I think the thing is if somebody on our side gets killed because of this, there's going to be extreme outrage, and I know there's extreme outrage just from what happened to me. I mean people see my face, people see who I am, they listen to me talk, they realize that I'm just a normal person, and I'm a pretty passive person to be honest, and people are really pissed off and so it's just like, I would not like to see the country come to that, but some times I wonder is it going to have to come to that. Is it going to get so bad that there is going to be some sort of civil unrest?”