Antifa professor charged with assaulting journalist deemed not a threat by UNC

Interview w/ Patrick Howley, who Prof. Dwayne Dixon was charged with assaulting at a left-wing riot in 2018

Long before being highlighted in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination as an antifa associate and advocate teaching at a public university, UNC professor Dwayne Dixon was charged with assault for attacking a right-wing journalist the night Silent Sam was torn down in 2018.

The charge against Dixon was ultimately dropped, not due to his innocence, but due to a clerical error in the charging documents naming Dixon as the victim of the assault, which lead the judge to dismiss the case at the end of Dixon’s trial.

The Triangle Trumpet had the opportunity to interview Patrick Howley, the actual victim of Dixon’s assault, about the incident.

“He is guilty, he did it,” said Howley. “A lot of these antifa guys get off on technicalities. So weird and mysterious.”

Howley began reporting on Dixon after it was reported that he had bragged about wielding a firearm against the man who would later be convicted of intentionally driving his vehicle into the left-wing counter-protesters at the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, writing on Facebook that he had “used [his] rifle to chase off James Fields from our block...before he attacked marchers to the south.”

retrieved from the Gateway Pundit

When Howley began investigating at UNC-Chapel Hill, whose “Silent Sam” Confederate statue made it a focal point for left-wing/antifa, he found that the reality of the situation didn’t match how it was being portrayed.

“This riot culture there in Chapel Hill, it was not coming from students,” Howley explained. “They were hiding behind this idea that somehow it was students, but it really wasn’t, it was a complex Antifa network.”

After researching “a little sect of them” who had been active in Virginia and North Carolina, Howley described going undercover at the August 20, 2018 riot where “protesters” pulled down the Silent Sam statue.

However, when Howley confronted Dixon at that same event about the comments he had made regarding his interaction with Fields, Dixon chased him down and assaulted him, according to Howley and the video he captured:

Dixon was charged with simple assault, with the criminal summons alleging that he “willfully did assault and strike DWAYNE DIXON by GRABBING HIS LEFT HAND AND ARM, THEN STRIKING HIM ONE TIME ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE FACE AND ONE TIME ON THE RIGHT UPPER CHEST WITH AN OPEN HAND.”

The case went to a bench trial three months later on November 15, 2020 before Judge Samantha Hyatt Cabe; after testimony from both sides, Howley believed the trial was going his way until the defense pulled out their trump card, the fact that Dixon was named as the victim in the charging document instead of Howley.

Assistant District Attorney Jeff Nieman, who has since been elected Orange County District Attorney, accepted the office’s responsibility for the mistake: “while it does happen, it’s an error that we take responsibility for, and I can assure everyone that it’s something we take seriously and will be very careful to avoid in the future.”

Howley says that there was no communication to him by the DA’s office on their decision not to refile the charge, a decision which Nieman confirmed to WRAL on the same day as the ruling.

(Coincidentally, Cabe was also the judge who dismissed the first case brought to trial from the pro-Palestine encampments arrests, leading Nieman’s office to drop the outstanding charges for the remaining defendants.)

Although Dixon had previously been open in defending his “antifascist” justification for left-wing violence in 2018, such as in an Australian TV documentary (“The Hard Left Antifa And Their Call To Arms”) or on a Harvard panel (“You Don’t Stand Around and Let People Get Hurt: Antifascism After Charlottesville”), he appears to have kept a lower profile in the years since.

Dixon was only catapulted back into the public eye in 2025 due to an ancillary connection to recruitment flyers put up by John Brown Gun Club in celebration of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. (Dixon was an open member of Redneck Revolt, an militia-style antifa organization listed as an “offshoot” of the JBGC by the Counter Extremism Project.)

The flyers, which were found at Georgetown University, read “Hey Fascist! Catch!” (a reference to one of the engravings on a bullet casing allegedly left by Kirk’s killer) with a QR code to “Join the John Brown Club,” which the flyer described as “the only political group that celebrates when Nazis die,” echoing the extremist rhetoric used by antifa like Dixon to justify even lethal violence against anyone on the right deemed to be “fascist.”

image of flyer shared by Andrew Kolvet on Twitter/X

Although Redneck Revolt claims to have been disbanded in 2019, Dixon’s previous membership in the group attracted scrutiny to his antifa history and association with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is listed as a Teaching Associate Professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

It was announced Monday that Dixon was being placed on administrative leave “following recent reports and expressions of concern regarding alleged advocacy of politically motivated violence.” However, after an antifa-organized protest, a legal threat by the ACLU, and a “thorough threat assessment,” the university concluded that they “found no basis to conclude that he poses a threat to University students, staff and faculty, or has engaged in conduct that violates University policy.”

Full Interview & Transcript