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."

Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada; The Guardian, March 26, 2025

Rachel Leingang , The Guardian; Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada

"A Yale professor who studies fascism is leaving the US to work at a Canadian university because of the current US political climate, which he worries is putting the US at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship”.

Jason Stanley, who wrote the 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Stanley told the Daily Nous, a philosophy profession website, that he made the decision “to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship”...

Social media posts spread on Wednesday, noting the alarm sounded by a scholar of fascism leaving the country over its political climate. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist and creator of the 1619 Project, wrote on the social media platform Bluesky: “When scholars of authoritarianism and fascism leave US universities because of the deteriorating political situation here, we should really worry.”"

We are witnessing the making of a fascist president in real time; The Guardian, October 28, 2024

Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian; We are witnessing the making of a fascist , president in real time

"In a case of exquisitely poor timing, two days before the latest revelations of Trump’s despotic intent and his own insistent bellicose demands for absolute power to use against his “enemies”, the Wall Street Journal editorial board assured its readers that Trump doesn’t mean it. There is no reason to take him seriously. In any case “the public isn’t buying this Democratic claim about Trump”. The “fascist meme” is just partisan propaganda. “The answer is that most Americans simply don’t believe the fascist meme, and for good reasons. The first is the evidence of Mr Trump’s first term. Whatever his intentions, the former President was hemmed in by American checks and balances.”

Not satisfied with absurdly dismissing Trump’s unapologetic statement, the Wall Street Journal felt compelled to airbrush the present and the past in the Orwellian tradition of “doublethink”. Within 48 hours, however, its dismissal of the supposedly “Democratic claim” about “the fascist meme” was swept away by Kelly. Having discarded Milley’s and Mattis’s earlier statements, the Journal must have figured it could deposit Kelly’s as well in the burn bag for facts in order to be able to embroider its sophistry. But, at least for the moment, creating doublethink is a demanding job.

An essential element in the normalization of Trump and his fascism is the erasure of his crimes and transgressions when he was president – his “first term”, as the Journal disingenuously describes it, as though he’s already elected to his second. Conjuring up an air of inevitability is another demoralizing Newspeak tactic. Trump’s threats, when they are not dismissed as mere rhetoric, are too generally reported as if they are something new, that they exist solely in the vacuum of this campaign, and that he has no past. Trump’s history is consigned to the memory hole."

Trump calls John Kelly a "lowlife" after Hitler praise revelations; Axios, October 24, 2024

 

• Ivana Saric, Axios; Trump calls John Kelly a "lowlife" after Hitler praise revelations

"Former President Trump on Wednesday night blasted his former White House chief of staff John Kelly as a "lowlife" and "total degenerate" after Kelly gave a series of critical interviews about his former boss.

Why it matters: Trump's Truth Social posts mark his first public remarks about Kelly since his ex-chief-of-staff divulged the GOP presidential nominee's alleged praise for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

State of play: "John Kelly is a LOWLIFE, and a bad General," Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday.

• "The story about the Soldiers was A LIE, as are numerous other stories he told," Trump added, though he did not specifically address his alleged praise of Hitler."

Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in.; Vox, October 23, 2024

 Dylan Matthews, Vox; Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in.

"Five years have now passed, and the fascism questions have only grown more frequent. Trump has had time to implement quite anti-immigrantand anti-Black policies, and refused to denounce his most extreme and violent supporters, from the neo-Nazis and white nationalists in Charlottesville to the Proud Boys group. And every week, I receive dozens of emails from readers wondering if I stand by my conclusion in 2015, that Trump is simply a bigot with an authoritarian streak, not a fascist.

So I reached out to the experts I talked to back then. Four of the five replied, and I also got in touch with a few more scholars who have researched fascism to get a broader view.

The responses were, again, unanimous, albeit tinged with much greater concern about Trump’s authoritarian and violent tendencies. No one thinks Trump is a fascist leader, full stop. Jason Stanley, a Yale philosopher and author of How Fascism Works, came closest to that conclusion, saying that “you could call legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement” and that Trump is “using fascist political tactics,” but that Trump isn’t necessarily leading a fascist government."

Mark Esper: Trump 'has those inclinations' toward fascism; Politico, October 23, 2024

GRETA REICH , Politico; Mark Esper: Trump 'has those inclinations' toward fascism

"Mark Esper, who served as secretary of Defense under Donald Trump, backed former colleague John Kelly’s recent remarks that he believes Trump meets the definition of a fascist.

Esper told CNN Wednesday that he has no reason to doubt Kelly’s “honesty or integrity” in relaying Trump’s previous comments. He encouraged the audience to look up the definition of fascism, as Kelly did, and ask whether Trump falls “into those categories.”

Real men reject fascism; The Ink, October 23, 2024

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, The Ink; Real men reject fascism

"Two things have grown increasingly clear: Donald Trump is a fascist, and he is winning the support of most American men. But it doesn’t have to be like this. There is a way out.

Yesterday, a breathtaking report arrived in The New York Times. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, warned in the starkest terms that Trump is a fascist with a real authoritarian vision and confirmed the murmurs about Trump being jealous not to have had the kind of generals Hitler did...

The distressing thing is that a majority of American men are looking at all of this and saying, “Yeah, let’s do that.” We are dude-bro-ing our way into democratic death...

So now here we are in a country that is changing a lot, has changed a lot — indeed, has, over the past few generations, done more to change the status and rights and dignity of women than hundreds of prior generations did. And we have done the right things while failing to manage social and psychological change — failing to manage the minds and hearts of those who experience these worthy changes as headwinds.

This seems to me central to the story of how a majority of men could do what populations bewildered by change and anxious about the future and their place in it have done: support fascism, support dictatorship, support tyranny to smash it all...

Yes, change is scary. Yes, it sometimes feels like you don’t know how to be these days. Don’t know what to say. Yes, it’s tempting to shake things up when you’re scared. When you feel attacked by the future itself.

But don’t. Because men worthy of the word don’t outsource the care and protection of their families to dictators. Men worthy of the word don’t depend for their self-esteem on the crushing and marginalizing of Others. Men worthy of the word don’t need women to be locked in the fourteenth century legally to feel whole. Men worthy of the word don’t hand over the keys to the future to billionaires who pull the strings.

However one might reject their premises, some fraction of the mass of American men who have succumbed to the lure of Trump’s fascism need to feel seen and heard and recognized in their stress and anxiety and sense of dislocation in the future that is coming. And they need to be invited into a contrary story of progress. Saving the country from tyranny needs to become aspirational for men. Not a lecture.

They need to remember, and become excited to say, that real men reject fascism."

Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini; The Atlantic, October 18, 2024

 Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic; Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini

"In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.

Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics."

A week before the election, Trump will hold his most unsettling spectacle yet; The Guardian, October 18, 2024

Sidney Blumenthal , The Guardian; A week before the election, Trump will hold his most unsettling spectacle yet

"In the last week, Trump has pledged to deploy the military against “the enemy within”, domestic opponents he claims are worse than foreign adversaries – those Hitler called “Feind des Volkes”, or “enemy of the people”. Trump has threatened to destroy CBS, ABC and the New York Times. About ABC, after it conducted the debate in which he performed disastrously, he called to “take away their license”. After Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview, having refused his own, he tweeted on 10 October: “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” About the Times, he said on 9 October: “Wait until you see what I’m going to do with them.” He has singled out by name journalists for the Times and the New Yorker as “FAKE OBAMA LOVING ‘JOURNALISTS”. At every rally he denounces the “fake news”, a drumbeat for years, echoing Hitler’s pejorative slur, “die Lügenpresse” – “the lying press”.

 

Trump traveled on 11 October to Aurora, Colorado, where he claimed a Venezuelan gang had seized control, “scum” and “animals” who have “invaded and conquered” and “infected” the town, a description dismissed as false by its Republican mayor. “We have to clean out our country,” said Trump. His language represented the Nazi idea of “Rassenhygiene” – “race cleansing” that required purification, not an academic interest in genetics but a program of eugenics for designating inferior races to be isolated or eliminated.

 

As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “A people that fails to preserve the purity of its racial blood thereby destroys the unity of the soul of the nation in all its manifestations. A disintegrated national character is the inevitable consequence of a process of disintegration in the blood.”

 

The former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, retired general Mark Milley, according to Bob Woodward in his new book War, told the veteran journalist: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump. Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” Trump had stated that for Milley’s communication with his counterparts in China on January 6 to reassure them that the US military was stable, he deserved “DEATH” – to be executed."

Use the f-word; The Ink, October 1, 2024

 The Ink; Use the f-word

"Philosopher Jason Stanley talks about why fascists have mounted an attack on education, why universities haven't fought back, and how to resist."

"Fight the Empire!" - Maarva Andor's Speech [Andor Episode 12]; November 23, 2022

 [Spoiler Alert]

"Fight the Empire!" - Maarva Andor's Speech [Andor Episode 12]

"We were sleeping.

I've been sleeping...

The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness.

It is never more alive than when we sleep."

'Andor' soared — it was about the force, not The Force, of the Star Wars universe; NPR, November 23, 2022

Glen Weldon, NPR; 'Andor' soared — it was about the force, not The Force, of the Star Wars universe

"Force with a lowercase "f"

Karn and his colleagues are dedicated to the cause of fascist oppression (which they're careful to refer to only as "order") with a zeal that isn't remotely macro. It isn't mythic, religious or even passionate. Instead, they're driven by institutional imperatives that scour their souls free of empathy, compassion and understanding, and reward them for ruthlessness, cruelty and — above all — efficiency. 

Who's the showrunner here, Hannah Arendt? Because as we watched season one of Andor play out in a series of mini-arcs across its 12 episodes, we saw the inner workings of the Empire. It's The Banality of Evil: The Series."

What the Banning of Maus and V for Vendetta Tell Us About Comic Book Censorship; CBR, February 1, 2022

Tommy Ebbs, CBR; What the Banning of Maus and V for Vendetta Tell Us About Comic Book Censorship

"What is of particular interest is the fact that both Maus and V for Vendetta are innately political texts. While Maus is a genre-bending memoir about the Holocaust and V for Vendetta is a fictional tale about an anarchist revolt, both books deal with themes relating to fascism and authoritarianism. In 2014, Russia banned Maus due to it featuring the swastika on its front cover during a crackdown on anything involving Nazi paraphernalia, even though the comic is one of the most anti-fascist works in all of fiction. In 2020, China also banned the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, and although no official reason was given, the Guy Fawkes mask from the comic and film was worn by many Hong Kong protesters during the 2019-2020 unrest.

While the rationale of removing the books from Tennessee schools is due to a belief that it will make students “uncomfortable”, many of the books are written by members of the LGBTQ+ community and address issues related to race and gender. When the CCA was first introduced, comics were still in their infancy and regarded as children's entertainment that did not address social and political issues. Since then, however, both Maus and V for Vendetta have been considered challenging literary works that deal with political topics in a mature fashion. This is an incredibly concerning development, considering how both books are anti-fascist and deliberately warn against the limitation of free speech and the curbing of artistic expression, as well as what can happen when these issues go unchallenged."

Am I Imagining This?; New York Times, February 10, 2017

Roger Cohen, New York Times; 

Am I Imagining This?

"Simon Schama, the British historian, recently tweeted: “Indifference about the distinction between truth and lies is the precondition of fascism. When truth perishes so does freedom.”...

Facts matter. The federal judiciary is pushing back. The administration is leaking. Journalism (no qualifier needed) has never been more important. Truth has not yet perished, but to deny that it is under siege would be to invite disaster."