Ivy League fascism scholar issues chilling warning before fleeing US for Canada

A Yale University professor who studies fascism has revealed he decided to leave the United States for Canada because America was moving closer towards becoming a "dictatorship."

Professor Jason Stanley said he accepted a job offer at a Canadian college because he wanted to be able “to raise [his] kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship," Daily Nous reported.

He added that “the decision was entirely because of the political climate in the United States.”

Stanley is author of "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them." He will join other prominent colleagues including historians Timothy Snyder and Marchi Shore who have left Yale for the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

The professor said that his final straw was watching Columbia University kowtow to President Donald Trump's threats to strip it of $400 million in federal funding.

The New York university is cracking down on protests and conducting "internal reviews" of academic programs, particularly its Middle Eastern studies department.

Stanley said that he was disappointed in academia's response to the free speech crackdown on campus, warning that won't stop at Columbia.

“When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted – that whole way of thinking pre-supposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy,” he said.

“You’ve got to just band together and say an attack on one university is an attack on all universities," he said. "And maybe you lose that fight, but you’re certainly going to lose this one if you give up before you fight.

“Columbia was just such a warning. I just became very worried because I didn’t see a strong enough reaction in other universities to side with Columbia. I see Yale trying not to be a target. And as I said, that’s a losing strategy.”

Notably, Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested earlier this month at his campus apartment for his involvement in the pro-Palestine movement.

Now, several international students across the country have been arrested for similar activism on campus as the Trump administration threatens to revoke their visas and green cards.

In a recent op-ed for The Guardian, Stanley warned that the U.S. was “on a path to educational authoritarianism" after the Trump administration issued a new directive about teaching racism.

Stanley's announcement stoked fears online about the intellectual class fleeing the country being a definitive warning sign of authoritarianism, though Stanley rejected that assertion, saying: "“I don’t see it as fleeing at all. I see it as joining Canada, which is a target of Trump, just like Yale is a target of Trump.”

However, he does feel that his move is eerily reminiscent of his family fleeing Germany in the early 1930s as Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party rose to power.

“Part of it is you’re leaving because ultimately, it is like leaving Germany in 1932, 33, 34. There’s resonance: my grandmother left Berlin with my father in 1939. So it’s a family tradition," he said.