The Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America; Vanity Fair, March 31, 2025

 KEZIAH WEIR, Vanity Fair; The Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America

"Jason Stanley has spent the last two decades writing about power, language, and the ways both are corruptible. He is an expert on authoritarian regimes and the author of seven books, including 2018’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and last year’s Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, and has been a member of the Yale University faculty since 2013.

Last week, in what he calls an “impulsive” decision prompted by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump administration demands, he decided to leave—not just Yale, but the country altogether. This fall he’ll decamp to the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, where he was offered the position of Bissell Hyatt Chair in American Studies.

“Educational authoritarianism is frequently accompanied by more general restrictions on knowledge,” he writes in Erasing History, “and by attempts to push mythic representations in place of that knowledge.” In the book he likens conservative activist groups seeking book bans to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels keeping lists of books to be censored, and outlines attacks on the rights of LGBTQ+ people by various fascist regimes throughout history (among which he counts the Trump administration). When I ask whether he sees warning signs in sectors outside of education, he responds, “Are you fucking with me?”"...

[Vanity Fair] I think an anxiety for many people is, will we only really realize how bad things are once it becomes too late to do anything about it? How would you counsel people who are wondering how you know that it’s time to try to get out?

[Jason Stanley] Not my business. My business is to describe what’s happening. And you can read what I write and decide for yourself, but I’m not going to make other people’s decisions for them. I’m not into moralizing or lecturing; that’s not my thing. I’m an intellectual. What I do is I describe reality as I see it. I would love to live in the United States, but I want to live in the United States because it’s a place that is free. A lot of Americans don’t care about freedom. If you look at the polls, they say that Americans don’t value democracy at all. I have a different set of values. Democracy comes before the price of eggs. But what I think is particularly foolish and naive and stupid is to give up democracy and raise the price of eggs."

The Rewriting of a Pioneering Female Astronomer’s Legacy Shows How Far Trump’s DEI Purge Will Go; ProPublica, January 30, 2025

Lisa Song, ProPublica ; The Rewriting of a Pioneering Female Astronomer’s Legacy Shows How Far Trump’s DEI Purge Will Go

[Kip Currier: Information professionals and centers can be leaders in preserving histories -- like that of influential astronomer Vera Rubin. Right now, too, libraries, archives, and museums can continue to collect books by and about these kinds of trailblazers. They can digitize and make available illuminating records and artifacts, like diaries and photos. They can create interactive exhibits and virtual reality experiences to raise our awareness of their struggles and triumphs. 

And when purges and sanitization actions occur, journalists can tell us about them, just as they did in this ProPublica story about Vera Rubin.

Once this phase of selective erasure and targeted minimization of historically marginalized persons and groups has inevitably passed, so too can information professionals, historians, reporters, authors, and myriad others work to restore these pioneering people to the historical record.

A larger question is why the current administration is laboring so hard to erase and undervalue the histories and achievements of individuals who have inarguably faced discrimination -- and in countless inspiring instances have surmounted formidable barriers -- as members of disenfranchised communities?

Why do they fear these histories and uplifting achievements?

They work to erase these histories so that others won't be empowered by these stories and lessons. Not knowing these stories enables the erasers to control the narratives and, more importantly, influence how people think. They don't want people to be aware of what boundary breakers have done to break through barriers to equal opportunities. Why?

They benefit from unequal power structures. They fear equality and change. They want to define "truth". So, they stoke fear, apathy, division, and distrust to fortify the inequitable power structures that advantage them and disadvantage everyone else.

The world has seen revisionist campaigns like this many times before, though, and I'm confident that truth and reason will eventually prevail again. But it's going to take hard work and strategy and creativity and resilience and teamwork to achieve.

Media outlets, like ProPublica and others committed to truth telling and accuracy of information, serve inestimable roles in uncovering deception, revealing truths, and reporting the facts. As the renowned lawyer John Adams (and future 2nd President of the United States from 1797-1801) pointed out to a Massachusetts court in 1770, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

Those of us in the information professions who care about truth and the historical record -- and the stories of everyone, not just the privileged few -- are going to have to do our parts to stand up to the self-appointed revisionists, censors, and erasers. Many information professionals are already stepping up in ways that make a positive difference every day. Like challenging those who want to remove books from our libraries.

Filmmakers, graphic novelists, photographers, screenwriters, faith leaders, investigative reporters, musicologists, grant funders, poets, independent bookstores, lawyers, actors, civil watchdog groups, data analysts, publishers, ethnographers, artisans, and countless others are also working to push back against erasure and disenfranchisement of diverse peoples.

I will share stories about ongoing efforts to counter the silencing of diverse voices in future blog posts throughout this year.]

[Excerpt]

"During his first presidential term, Donald Trump signed a congressional actnaming a federally funded observatory after the late astronomer Vera Rubin. The act celebrated her landmark research on dark matter — the invisible, mysterious substance that makes up much of the universe — and noted that she was an outspoken advocate for the equal treatment and representation of women in science.

“Vera herself offers an excellent example of what can happen when more minds participate in science,” the observatory’s website said of Rubin — up until recently.

By Monday morning, a section of her online biography titled, “She advocated for women in science,” was gone. It reappeared in a stripped-down form later that day amid a chaotic federal government response to Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

While there are far more seismic changes afoot in America than the revision of three paragraphs on a website, the page’s edit trail provides an opportunity to peer into how institutions and agencies are navigating the new administration’s intolerance of anything perceived as “woke” and illuminates a calculation officials must make in answering a wide-open question:

How far is too far when it comes to acknowledging inequality and advocating against it?"