Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley, are — or rather, were — Yale professors who study fascism.
They published a guest opinion piece in The New York Times on May 14, a hybrid seven minute video and text piece, where the gist of the whole thing was in the headline: “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.”
You know why, of course: Donald J. Trump, 45th and now 47th president of the United States, is part of the reason why “America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding” and they’re going to the University of Toronto.
You know what people who study fascism who are afraid of fascism do not do if they are afraid of a fascist state? Make seven minute videos about why they’re so afraid of that fascist along with an article before they leave the authoritarianism they claim to be escaping, then submit them to the country’s paper of record.
“Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities,” the text portion of the article opened.
Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.
Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
Which is, I believe, what we heard the last time Donald Trump spent four years in the presidency. And even after protesting the election results the last time, he still left the Oval Office, did not engage in mass campaigns of illegal detention or lawfare against his enemies, or bend the Constitution to his whims.
In fact, that was mostly left to his successor and his party, which spent the better part of the next four years engaging in a campaign of lawfare against Trump and hiding the fact their president was in extremis, mentally and physically, for practically the entire thing.
Will these people stay out of the United States?
“I’m moving for the University of Toronto to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words,” said Stanley, a philosophy professor.
This is an ironic statement to utter from someone in academia, considering the fact that getting punished for wrongthink happens all the time on college campuses, particularly in the Ivy League. (Meanwhile, defend Hamas as part of a radical student organization that ran roughshod, criminally, over Columbia University’s campus, and watch people howl over your visa being revoked.)
“The lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later,” said Shore, a professor of history.
Of course, the lesson of 1933 is also that anti-Semitism and statist centralization are unique evils — which, when they collide, cause catastrophic damage to a society. In fact, that should be the major takeaway from that annus horribilis.
Which is why she’s leaving an American university campus because … oh wait, they’re all mostly fine with anti-Semitism, and any economic system that encourages moving away from statist centralization is generally frowned upon. But I guess Toronto is colder and has more statists?
And so on and so forth. The video is six minutes so stuffed with ominous music and rapid-fire clips with filters and zooms that you’d swear it was done by the same people responsible for election-season campaign ads — and, for all we know, it was.
Heaven knows the pivot shaft on the revolving door between Democratic Party politics and the New York Times newsroom needs quite frequent lubrication given all the use it sees, and the only difference here is that it’s seven minutes, and you’re paying to see it if you’re a subscriber, not 30 seconds a candidate or their PAC is paying you to look at. Suckers.
However, once you get beyond the appeal to emotion that the video and the words are meant to engender, what you have is three people who are so scared of the big bad fascist that they’re … posting a big fat exit notice before they get out in the one place where everyone in America can see it.
You know, just like those fleeing fascism always did as they were running out the door, leaving their loved ones and possessions behind as they tried to stay one step ahead of the secret police, lest they be sent to the prison camps. Right. Apparently, studying fascism and identifying it aren’t exactly correlated all that closely.
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