Front Burner - Yale fascism expert on fleeing to Canada

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Last week one of the U.S.’s leading scholars and thinkers on fascism announced his intention to leave his country, which he said was “tilting toward authoritarian dictatorship.” Joseph Stanley will be leaving Yale and taking up a post at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. Stanley has been warning about the threat and rise of fascism in the United States since Donald Trump’s first term – his work notes the throughline between American Jim Crow and the Third Reich, fascism’s reliance on the identification of internal enemies, and why fascism rests upon the promise of restoring a mythic past. Stanley is a longtime professor and his latest book is titled ‘Erasing History, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future.’ He joins the show to discuss his decision to come to Canada as an academic refugee, and situate fascism in the broader continuum of American history. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

How do you know when an idea is worth your time? I'm Nala Ayed, host of Ideas. Join me as we deep dive into the stories and ideas that shape us. No topic is off limits, from the allure of authoritarianism to what we can learn from the average cat. Find and follow Ideas wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi everyone, I'm Jamie Prosson.

Last week, one of America's leading scholars and thinkers on fascism announced his intention to leave his country, which he said was, quote, tilting toward authoritarian dictatorship. His name is Jason Stanley and he's currently at Yale University, but he'll soon be at the University of Toronto alongside his like-minded colleagues, Timothy Snyder and Marcy Shore. We've had Timothy on the show a couple of times now. Back in 2016, when some started describing Donald Trump as a demagogue, an authoritarian, and an existential threat to American democracy, Stanley started to really focus on these questions and was one of the first to

issue warnings about the incoming threat of fascism to the United States. His decision to leave comes at a time when the US government is deporting people to foreign prisons, arresting campus dissidents, defying the orders of federal judges, declaring war on its institutions of higher learning, and enshrining its wealthiest citizens with de facto cabinet appointments. Jason Stanley, whose recent book is titled Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past and Control the Future future is my guest today. Professor Stanley, thank you so much for coming on to Frontburner. Thank you for the discussion.

Before we get into the thrust of this conversation, as I mentioned, you've been writing and thinking in public about the question of fascism in America for many years now. You've issued warning after warning. I mean, in many ways, this has kind of been your life's work. But now that this threat feels more present than ever in the lives of many, you're leaving. And I'm wondering why. Well, first of all, I'm leaving because University of Toronto is a fantastic university that is poised to benefit from the brutal crackdown on America's leading universities. And Canada, I believe, is at the forefront

of the struggle for democracy. I am also a professor at the Keefe School of Economics, where I teach around twice a year, an appointment I took up when the full-scale invasion started. And I believe that Canada and Ukraine, bordered by autocratic dictatorships, are at the forefront of the struggle for freedom. The Monk school at the University of Toronto has dedicated itself really to a future of protecting democracy in a country that is threatened by its authoritarian neighbor. So this is the positive side of

why I'm leaving. Would you like me to go into the negative side? Yeah, I would. I would. I have two children who are black and Jewish, and I want them to be raised under conditions of freedom. And their dual identities, black American and Jewish American, are under severe attack. The Trump regime is attacking black Americans in positions of power as DEI hires. The attack on diversity, equity and inclusion is nothing other than an attack on black people.

DEI would have ruined our country and now it's dead. I think DEI is dead. So they want to scrub. The new executive order on U.S. history directs our national museums to scrub black perspectives from these museums. Called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, President Trump takes aim at the highly respected Smithsonian Institution, seeking to purge its 21 museums, libraries, research centers, and the National Zoo of, quote, divisive narratives and, quote, improper

ideology. And will return us to a time when Confederate monuments dotted our landscape and were something for Americans to be proud of. This is nothing more than an insult to my children. And I hope that as the chair of American Studies at the Munk School, that we will be able to be a place where you can do black American history, because you won't be, increasingly won't be able to do it in the United States.

And black American history is a history of struggle against authoritarianism. And secondly, the Trump regime is using, is using Jewish Americans as the sledgehammer for fascism. They just told Harvard they're going to strip $9 billion in contracts, or they're threatening to strip $9 billion in contracts from Harvard University because of supposedly threats to Jewish students on campus. Education Secretary Linda McMahon says that the university has failed to protect students

from anti-Semitism and is promoting divisive ideologies. She added that if Harvard makes changes to its policies, its funding would not be impacted. This use of anti-Semitism to attack intellectuals. I mean, never before in history have intellectuals been attacked and universities in the name of protecting Jewish people. I know that you have referred to Trump's war on higher education as itself anti-Semitic. You are a Jewish man. You have parents that survived the Holocaust, I believe. I know that these are questions that you take very seriously. Could you just walk me through that?

Yeah. So there are various anti-Semitic stereotypes. And one of the most toxic is that we control the institutions. The Trump regime's attack on democratic institutions in the name of protecting Jewish faculty like myself and Jewish students like many of my students is reinforcing the anti-semitic stereotype that Jews control the institutions. It's doing more than reinforcing it. The idea that you would strip federal funding for anti-war protests is novel here in United States history. So it really sets us up.

It leans into the stereotype that we American Jews control institutions, and it makes it very hard to deny for many non-Jewish Americans that are presented with this anti-Semitic stereotype in stark apparent realization. So I think one worry here is it's setting us up for popular rage against us. And certainly in the history books, when they talk about this time in U.S. history and talk about how our the greatest education system in the world was dismantled, supposedly to protect Jewish students and Jewish faculty, that will forever be a stain on Jewish Americans, so unless we stand up loudly and protest. The second way it's anti-Semitic is it draws a distinction between

good Jews and bad Jews as the Nazis did. The idea that, you know, ich bestimme wer Jude is, I decide who's a Jew. In our anti-war demonstrations against last year at Yale, there was no larger identity group than our progressive Jewish students. So in these encampments, our progressive Jewish students were a very large presence. And that was true of all these universities, including Columbia. But those Jewish students were a very large presence, and that was true of all these universities,

including Columbia. But those Jewish students were erased from the media coverage, and they're erased in this anti-Semitic attack. The idea is the only good Jews, the only real Jews are the ones who unquestioningly support Israel. And those of us who believe that everyone is human,

that even that Palestinians are human too, we're supposedly bad Jews. We're not really Jews. And so this is an attack on us. It's an attack on our many progressive Jewish students. It's excluding them from Judaism and with the complicity and indeed active participation of other American Jews. You know, you are a philosopher by trade. You have taught the subject at Yale for years now. And I'm just curious, what were the earliest indications for you that your country was on a trajectory towards fascism?

Yeah, so you said that my life's work has been devoted to this, but that's not quite true. I've been a professor for 29 or 30 years. I have a hard time counting now at four different universities, the last 12 years at Yale. And I started working on this topic. I published many books just on philosophy of language and epistemology that don't have any politics in them. But I started writing for the New York Times in 2011 or 2012, and my first piece for the New York Times was on Donald Trump's birtherism theory,

a conspiracy theory, that Obama was really a Muslim socialist agent somehow, really not born in the United States, and there was some kind of traitorous thing going on. Why doesn't he show his birth certificate? I think he probably... Why does he have to? Because I have to and everybody else has to.

I'm sure it's like you can't be coming to the show. Excuse me, no, excuse me. I really believe there's a birth certificate. Why, look, she's smiling. Why doesn't he show his birth certificate? And you know what? That conspiracy theory and its popularity that Trump was mainly responsible for popularizing

made me very, so that was the kind of conspiracy theories that when they float around in politics augur an anti-democratic public sphere. So, you know, the conspiracy theory, for instance, that Jews lost World War I, betrayed Germany and were, and hence lost World War I for the Germans, of course, was a virus that undermined Weimar democracy in Germany in the 1920s. So when you have a public sphere dominated by conspiracy theories, you know, you start to have

an anti-democratic public sphere. And the reaction to Obama's presidency was very concerning to me. Obama was basically a centrist politician, but the very fact that he was black raised all kinds of really insanity in response. I mean, Barack Obama is the least Marxist politician the Democratic Party has ever preferred. So that got me concerned, this reaction to race. And then when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, I knew a white backlash was coming

because that's the story of our country. The historian Elizabeth Hinton has this concept she calls the cycle, and she shows that occurs even in small cities in American life. There's police brutality against black citizens, there's a kind of uprising, everybody agrees to reform the system, police brutality against black citizens. There's a kind of uprising. Everybody agrees to reform the system.

And then there's a harsh white backlash. And we've just, we're seeing, Donald Trump rode back to office on an incredibly harsh and extreme white backlash of the sort that almost defines our nation's politics. Given that, are you surprised by any of what we're seeing today? I mean, we are 70 days into Trump's second term. We've already come to a place where campus dissidents are being arrested by federal agents in plain clothes.

This is the moment Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested and taken into federal custody. Doorbell camera footage obtained by NBC News shows two plain clothes officers approaching the 30 year old in Somerville outside of Boston. Canadians flying into the US are being harangued at US airports for tens of hours. Some have been sent to detention centers for weeks. Jasmine Mooney is a Canadian citizen who had a work visa, no criminal record, and had been traveling back and forth between Canada and California without any complications until she says she was suddenly detained without explanation. Without any warning about what was about to transpire, I was literally just taken.

I feel like I've been kidnapped. I was literally just taken. I feel like I've been kidnapped. I was taken. They appear to be indiscriminately arresting Latino men and sending them to what your friend and colleague, Timothy Snyder, the historian, has referred to as foreign gulags. An administrative error. That's how ICE is explaining why a Maryland man

with protected legal status was sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Kilmar Abrego, Garcia's attorneys, are now asking the government of El Salvador to return him to the US to his wife and son. Vice President J.D. Vance... And the US president is openly flirting with the notion of an unconstitutional third term in office.

The president telling NBC's Kristen Welker, quote, there are methods which you could do it, when asked to clarify, saying, I'm not joking not joking later adding it's far too early to think about it. Did you ever imagine that this would actually come to pass? Yeah. And, and I don't, you know, I don't like to talk about terms. We all know Trump will die in office unless a miracle occurs whenever that is in his quote unquote third term or quote unquote fourth term. And then the question is, who will be this anointed successor? Will it be his son?

Will it be JD Vance? But that's the future, and that's the future that Canada must reckon with, just as Ukraine must reckon with Putin at their border. How do you know when an idea is worth your time? I'm Nala Ayed, host of Ideas. Join me as we deep dive into the stories and ideas that shape us. No topic is off limits, from the allure of authoritarianism

to what we can learn from the average cat. Find and follow ideas wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of the reporting and discussion of our moment today positions Trump's incursions into democracy as like novel and unprecedented, that fascism is a uniquely European idea, that this is generally alien to the United States. But the story is much deeper than that, right?

Like how would you describe the tradition of American fascism or the presence of fascism in the United States of America? Do you consider Trump the first of his kind or the most recent in a much longer, even homegrown tradition. The Black American intellectual tradition has always called the authoritarian racist states fascist. It's always called Jim Crow fascist. They attack you, bust you all upside your mouth, and then take you to court and charge

you with assault. What kind of democracy is that? The black press said World War II was a double victory campaign against fascism abroad and racism at home. Langston Hughes in 1937 said, you don't need to tell the black American what fascism is. We experience it every day. Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois and Black Reconstruction

labeled the Jim Crow regime fascist. That was in 1935. The black press were really the first to blow the whistle on European fascism when Italy invaded Ethiopia. There was a very long American tradition of understanding American white supremacy as fascism. The distinction between that and Europe

is European fascism coalesces around a cult of the leader in Germany and Italy, not in Romania. I mean, there's fascist structures in Europe that don't necessarily have the kind of Mussolini or Hitler-led structure. But here we have a figure who is something like Charles Lindbergh was in the America First Movement of the 30s and 40s.

And we know from, say, Bradley Hart's work that the Nazis viewed Charles Lindbergh as a possible American Hitler. If we desire to keep America out of war, we must take the lead in offering a plan for peace. That plan should be based upon the welfare of America, but it should not involve the internal affairs of Europe. They never were and never will be carried on according to our desires. The very expression America First comes from a movement that contained as a central part

the American fascist party, an American fascist movement. And just as then they viewed themselves as allied with the Nazis, as Lindbergh did, now they view themselves as allied with Vladimir Putin. American conservatives have long rejected any framing that links Trump to European fascists, like Hitler and Mussolini. Their argument is that Hitler in particular is guilty of crime so severe, there is no

ground on which he and Trump could be compared. But beyond Trump, you have written at length about the links between American Jim Crow and the Third Reich, the fact Hitler closely read the works of American race scientists while in prison, or the fact that he lauded the U.S. with praise in Mein Kampf, the fact that Nuremberg laws were heavily influenced by American anti-American laws that prohibited people of different races to marry, right? How closely linked in tradition is America to Nazi Germany? In Mein Kampf, Hitler says the country that he most wants to fashion the Third Reich after

is the United States, which he says is a country built on race. So, you know, we had immigration laws that banned Asians, for instance, from coming into the country. We had the Asian Exclusion Act in the early 20s. We had another huge immigration act banning Asians. It wasn't ended until 1965.

Anti-miscegenation laws, to which you refer refer were not fully struck down in the United States until 1967. So my children would have been illegal in many southern states until two years before I was born. So we had one party authoritarian white supremacist states until the late 60s. And we're a very young democracy as a result. I mean, we weren't a true democracy until the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s. So, Hitler's American Model is a book by my colleague Jim Whitman that covers the way in which the Nazis, the Nuremberg laws passed in 1935 that stripped my father of his German citizenship at the

age of three. These laws were based on the Jim Crow laws, and I expect similar kinds of laws in the United States where they'll turn to stripping American citizens of citizenship for political dissidents as the Nuremberg laws stripped suspected communists of citizenship for political dissidents as the Nuremberg laws stripped of suspected communists of citizenship. You're talking about dissidents being arrested while the Tufts student was arrested and sent to a brutal Louisiana prison

where Mohammed Khalil from the Student at Columbia is incarcerated as well. She, let's remember, wrote a co-authored opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper. And for that, she's in a sweltering, brutal American prison. Another takeaway I've had from your work is the fact that fascism often emerges out of quasi or even fully democratic systems that Hitler, for example, ran in an election and won. And there are many more like him.

What would you say to an American who uses the fact that there is a working Congress, a judiciary and Supreme Court, and the fact that America has just had a peaceful transfer of power as evidence of the country's functioning democracy? I would say that I don't think the Congress or the courts is functioning. We have one party that votes 100% of the time for the president and in support of the president. No one goes out of line. That's like communist China or something.

It's a completely 100% loyalist party that has dedicated 100% to Donald Trump. They're not heeding the courts, and they're even saying they might disband the federal courts. They're just, JD Vance, our vice president, said we don't have to listen to the federal courts. It's not clear what power the federal courts. They're just, JD Vance, our vice president, said we don't have to listen to the federal courts. It's not clear what power the courts have.

I think we might see a system where they keep some formal semblance of democracy, but it's not clear what Congress can do. I mean, Trump himself has tweeted and represented himself as a king. So, what is great about the United States is for hundreds of years, we have said we have no kings, but that era is over. LESLIE KENDRICK You've written about fascism traditionally being formulated along certain

lines around the story of a mythic past and a bid to restore that past to redeem a nation or a people's humiliation. This effort, you've said, is usually built around certain targets. Among them are outsiders like immigrants, Jews, black people, gay people, communists. Palestinians, I would add to that. Well, this is my question. Who is that target today? Well, it's always – there are always standard targets of fascism.

Many countries have national minorities in the United States. There are minorities around whom the elections turn. And so black Americans are our national minority in that sense. They're a target, xenophobia. Trans people are always a target. They were the target of the Nazis. The first book burning in May 1933

included Magnus Hirschfeld's, the collection of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexuelle Wissenschaft that contains the largest collection of photographic evidence of gender variability. Rigid gender roles are central to national socialism. They're also central to non-Nazi ideologies like social religious conservatives. So, it's not the case that if you believe in rigid gender roles, you're a fascist. But fascists

believe in rigid gender roles not for religious reasons, but because they want the dominant race to multiply. A patriarchy is very central to what we're seeing here. So women's rights are targeted, women's equality is targeted. So women's rights, trans people, national minorities, intellectuals, political opponents who are invariably tarred as Marxists. So the Nazis imprisoned the social Democrats,

calling them Marxists. So we're seeing that list of targets and immigrants because xenophobia, non-white immigrants, immigrants not in the dominant group. So then you create other targets, like in this case, people who are pro-Palestinian, they're suddenly traitors. So you need a lot of internal enemies to get this apparatus working,

and you need to get people worked up about these supposed internal enemies so you can pick their pockets and hand their money to oligarchical supporters. And also I should add to that federal workers because I was teaching this semester Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism published in the 1930s and he talks about the Nazi attack on federal workers saying they're lazy, they live off the state, they're parasites.

So they get replaced by regime loyalists. All of that we're seeing today. This government campaign against higher education may now center on the question of the Palestinians, but in many ways it started with a focus on Black history and studies. It started with widespread book bannings in states like Florida, banning the works of great American authors like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. This turned into a campaign against DEI and critical race theory. Now both Black Studies and Middle East Studies programs are under siege and are to be replaced

in many ways, I think, by what Linda McMahon, head of the now soon to be defunct US Department of Education, has referred to as patriotic education. Why do you think this all started with Black Studies and history and what do you make of this characterization of a so-called patriotic history? So Black Studies is a place of critical analysis of America's myths. So Linda McMahon says that there's a toxic ideology that is going to be targeted in the future, that America was built on racism, and America was very clearly built on indigenous genocide and slavery.

So they're going to ban their targeting actual history, indigenous history and black history. And in the Black intellectual tradition, what you find is a very different perspective on the United States. And you find intellectual resources and tools that allow you to see through the crevices of essentially patriotic education, of a sort of self, of an infl inflated egotistical telling of America's

past. So it's dangerous and that's why we at the Munk School at the University of Toronto are going to lean into Black history, Black American history, because it provides concepts and resources that enable us to see what's going on, see how authoritarianism works, see how methods of sort of erasing people's history undermine critical inquiry. And patriotic education will just imagine some kind of cartoonish version in your head of an authoritarian society. There's no education, there's patriotism. You learn to salute the flag, the greatness of the nation.

The Nazis told Germans they should love their country because their country was powerful and more powerful than other countries and could punch them in the nose. The United States is not about that. The United States is not about that. The United States is ultimately about overcoming our past and creating a multiracial democracy around the ideals of freedom and equality.

But this regime wants us to love the United States because it's more powerful than other countries, we have more weapons, we can punch people in the nose, and we've dominated. And that's why I'm coming to Canada, because Canada is right now a freedom-loving country that believes in the democratic values of freedom and equality,

and doesn't just throw at it as its citizens tax cuts for the wealthy and scapegoating of minority groups. Now that we've established some of your thoughts on fascism and its arrival to the United States, what do you think it demands of the citizen on an individual level? And I recognize the irony in asking you this as you prepare to leave the country, but I still think it is a question worth asking. Yeah, I'm not like a moralizing person.

I don't like get out, I'm an intellectual who analyzes reality and predicts what will happen given the analysis I have of reality. I don't tell people what to do. I can talk about strategies for fighting fascism But you know, I'm not gonna sit here and lecture others and that's never been a part of my work But collective action is necessary the democratic institutions must work together and there's this fear of You know losing of being crushed, you know when you're in a war you might lose

But if you don't even recognize that you're in a war, you might lose. But if you don't even recognize that you're in a war, you will lose. Jason Stanley, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, that's all for today. I'm JB Poisson. Thanks so much for listening.

Talk to you tomorrow. Talk to you tomorrow. Talk to you tomorrow. Talk toisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.