In the 1960s, college professors gleefully railed against Western civilization and viewed their positions in the ivory towers of academia as an opportunity to start a revolution of the American mind. For decades, they dominated colleges and universities, removing the Western canon from courses and programs and screaming from the rooftops, “Hey ho, hey ho, Western civ has got to go!”
For now, it seems they’ve won. You’d be hard pressed to find a college course in America where students feel free to openly share opposing viewpoints. And they’re certainly not reading any Western literature classics or learning anything positive about America’s founding.
Now, leftist professors who blew up the establishment have become the establishment. But rather than embrace a rising movement to restore academic freedom, they’re running away from it.
Recently, three Yale professors who study fascism (what a surprise!) recorded a video for The New York Times explaining why they’re leaving America. One of them, Marci Shore, says America is a sinking ship and a place where democracy is regressing.
As Jonathan Turley writes in response, “Shore insisted that the United States is now a fascist country replicating the Nazi takeover. Indeed, she mocks those of us who believe that our constitutional system has proven itself for centuries as a guarantor of civil liberties, including our system of checks and balances.”
Another, Jason Stanley, is protesting against Donald Trump and so-called attacks on civil liberties. The third, Timothy Snyder, wants to live in Toronto, where he can “host conversations about freedom.”
Those conversations would have been more relevant during Joe Biden’s presidency, when a discussion about fascism may have helped prevent it.
As David Strom writes at Hot Air, “These professors somehow missed the last four years in which the government imposed medical fascism on the populace, shoved propaganda down our throats, spent millions of dollars prosecuting a former and future president, censored millions of American citizens, and paid other countries to do so as well, sent the FBI after conservative Catholics, named white males potential terrorists, and gave free rein to radical groups to vandalize and intimidate dissenters. No, they didn’t miss it, actually. They applauded it, in the name of fighting fascism.”
They will feel right at home in Canada. Freedom is under direct assault in the land of maple leaves and ice hockey, and Canadians are increasingly afraid to express their viewpoints. According to one survey conducted by Research Co., “More than a third of Canadians report a decline in four situations over the past 10 years: the ability of people to disagree with each other on social media (45%), the ability of people to disagree with each other in conversation (40%), the ability of people to convince others about looking at an issue differently (36%) and the ability of people to question stories they learn about in the media (35%).”
In short, Canada is the last place to escape authoritarianism. North of the border, people are under increasing pressure to remain silent and to submit to leftist viewpoints.
Turley makes a remarkable point regarding who is actually “safe” in Canada. “What is truly striking,” he says, “is that even Yale (which has purged virtually all conservatives from its faculty ranks) is not sufficiently ‘safe’ for these three academic émigrés. They are going to the University of Toronto and Ontario to feel truly safe. Of course, Ontario is not viewed as a safe space for many conservatives or contrarians. It proved hardly protective for University of Toronto professor emeritus Jordon Peterson when he was ordered to take mandatory training classes to curb his controversial writings. That order was upheld by successive Canadian courts.”
Free speech had long been under attack during the regime of Justin Trudeau, whose government froze bank accounts of truckers protesting draconian COVID-19 orders and tried to implement new speech codes. More recently, newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney threatened to punish any company that did not submit to his radical climate change policies. Carney also wants to revive the Online Harms Act, which the National Post’s Amy Hamm says would grant “judges the ability to mete out life sentences for hate speech, and would have created a government ‘Digital Safety Commission’ to police Canadians’ speech, and impose life-destroying fines upon those whose speech was deemed hateful by our government censors.”
Shore, Snyder, and Stanley don’t seem to mind that Canadians with opposing viewpoints are afraid to speak their minds. Since these professors all specialize in studying fascism, Canada is the perfect laboratory to continue their work.
Meanwhile, our Constitution and Bill of Rights are alive and well here in America, protecting our First Amendment rights. Instead of bowing down and giving President Donald Trump what he wants, the courts are actually checking Trump’s power and have often ruled against some of his actions. That’s hardly a fascist dictatorship, even if anything he was doing resembled fascism.
Actually, this all makes perfect sense. These pretentious, Marxist professors just can’t tolerate being part of an academic community or a society where there’s actual debate instead of indoctrination. They claim they’re leaving the U.S. because they can’t tolerate fascism, but they’re really just looking for a safe space for fascists where freedom can’t touch them.
