Yale Professor Flees US for Canada, Citing Trump

Jason Stanley describes the United States as a ‘fascist regime’ under president

Yale University professor Jason Stanley said in an interview that he is fleeing the United States, describing the country as a “fascist regime” under President Donald Trump. He will take a job just north of the border, in Toronto.

“Things are very bad in this country. It’s an authoritarian regime. People are not responding well,” Stanley said in an interview with Vanity Fair, which described him as a “fascism expert.” Stanley will begin a new role this fall as the Bissell-Heyd chair in American Studies at the University of Toronto.

“The federal government is a fascist regime,” Stanley continued. “But fascism has to permeate the whole society. They’re trying to replace everyone with loyalists. And that’s a process. They’re pretty far along.”

Stanley, who described himself as “a very distinguished academic, honestly speaking,” bemoaned that he is making a “tremendous, tremendous sacrifice” by leaving Yale, including taking a “substantial pay cut.”

The interview comes as the Trump administration works to secure the southern border and pull federal funding from universities that fail to rein in campus anti-Semitism.

Trump’s decision to cut more than $430 million in federal grants to Columbia University over its repeated failure to curb anti-Semitic incidents on campus, Stanley said, represents “the most antisemitic moment of my life as an American.”

“This is an antisemitic attack on antisemitism,” Stanley said.

Stanley is not the only Yale professor to flee the United States for Canada. Historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore are also taking jobs at the University of Toronto, though Stanley said in the interview that Snyder does not actually want to leave.

“He wants to get arrested and shit,” said Stanley, who claimed to want “to get arrested for political stuff too.”

X users widely mocked the interview, with one calling Stanley “a preening idiot, as the many, many people who have interacted with him” have “learned for themselves.”

“Vanity affair indeed,” wrote someone else.