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When experts on Fascism are compelled to flee America, maybe we should pay attention... [1]
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Date: 2025-04-01
For reasons that are not terribly important, I was listening to my local NPR station before 6am EST this morning. I caught an interview with Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley.
The interview is horrifying in its implications. While there is a transcript, I urge everyone to listen to the audio because you really need to hear the emotion in Stanley’s voice as he describes why he is leaving Yale to take a position at the University of Toronto, Canada. He fears for himself and his loved ones as he sees what the Trump administration is doing.
Stanley is a distinguished academic:
His recent book Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite History to Control the Future is playing out in real time in America. Universities are having Federal funding stripped from them, supposedly because they’ve been allowing anti-semitism on campus, and DEI. The Department of Education is being dismantled. Government websites are being scrubbed of any references to things the Trump regime wants censored out of existence. The military is being politicized. ICE is effectively a Gestapo operation these days that can pick up and detain anyone the Trump regime decides to target without any regard for the law.
Stanley is not confident that Yale will stand by him or adequately resist the demands being made.
MARTÍNEZ: If Yale, Professor, had told you, maybe, off the record that they were going to try and work behind the scenes, maybe to protect academic freedom, but that it would be much more difficult to do without the federal funds, how would you have responded to that? STANLEY: I would respond by saying that's the wrong tack. You need a very loud defense of democratic institutions. They don't - that response would not take seriously the point that this is a war. We cannot fight this unless we recognize that this administration wants to take down the universities because they want to target intellectuals. That's what fascists always do. And so if universities think they can work behind the scenes and make friends, they're simply confused about the nature of the conflict. Yale University, like other leading universities, needs to take the lead, take a leadership role and collectively work with other universities loudly to protect democracy.
emphasis added
Stanley’s family history includes family members fleeing the holocaust, experiencing first hand anti-semitism in action. This is something he takes seriously. When Martinez asks how universities can resist without funding, here’s his reply:
STANLEY: You might lose anyway. You might. But you can't win a war unless you recognize it's a war. This way, they're going to pick us off one by one. And history is watching here. Our institutions will be written about they're being attacked under this entirely fake reason, that's, furthermore, fomenting antisemitism in the United States. It's going to create mass popular anger against Jewish people. So if universities want to fight antisemitism, they need to stand up and say, no, we are not threats to American Jews. You are threatening American Jews.
emphasis added
Stanley is very explicit on the threat he’s facing, and why he’s moving to Canada:
STANLEY: I have Black Jewish children, and the attacks on DEI are an attacks - are attacks on Black people. They're attacking Black history. They're targeting Black people in positions of power, and they're creating mass popular anger against Jewish people by taking Jewish people, by setting us up and saying, you know, we're the excuse for taking down democracy. And, you know, personally, I'm not going to risk my kids' safety for a political point. And finally, by leaving, I'm making a political point. I'm making the political point that I'm repeating history of Jewish intellectuals leaving a country in the face of a fascist regime.
Stanley is not the only professor fleeing Yale for the University of Toronto. From Yale News:
Three prominent critics of President Donald Trump are leaving Yale’s faculty — and the United States — amid attacks on higher education to take up positions at the University of Toronto in fall 2025. Philosophy professor Jason Stanley announced this week that he will leave Yale, while history professors Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, who are married, decided to leave around the November elections. The three professors will work at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. ...Snyder and Shore both specialize in Eastern European history and each has drawn parallels between the fascist regimes they have studied and the current Trump administration. Stanley, a philosopher, has also published books on fascism and propaganda, including the popular book “How Fascism Works.” In 2021, Stanley and Snyder co-taught a course at Yale titled “Mass Incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States.” Earlier this week, Stanley and Shore joined nearly 3,000 Jewish faculty across the U.S. to sign a letter denouncing the arrest of a Columbia student protester and urging their respective institutions to resist the Trump administration’s policies targeting colleges. ...“The departure of Professors Shore and Snyder leaves behind a profound void,” Tytarenko wrote to the News. “The intellectual and moral leadership they offered in advancing public understanding of Ukrainian history, culture, and politics at Yale is, in many ways, irreplaceable.”
While Snyder is described as his move being more based on personal matters than the current political situation, he has been very vocal in documenting what is happening in this country. He’s active on Substack for those who want more of his work.
The larger picture isn’t just about these three individuals seeking sanctuary in another country. It’s a symptom of the brain drain that is going to deprive America of the best and the brightest who will leave this country, just as so many did from Germany in the 1930s. It’s all the people who will no longer come to America now either, depriving us of their talents.
Above and beyond that, the universities having their funding stripped away will be shutting down programs and firing thousands of people who would otherwise be developing their intellects, their talents, and their careers. Critical research will be abandoned. The Trump regime is effectively giving the nation a lobotomy of the next generation of leaders in so many fields.
The mainstream media still resists calling this what it is: a Fascist coup. (NPR pigeonholed this article under education — though give them credit for reporting it.) The failure of universities to push back hard against Trump’s threats will make them all fail. Preemptive concessions and compromise gain them nothing; the Trump regime will come back for more.
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