Celebrities from Barbra Streisand to Lena Dunham to Snoop Dogg have at one time or another announced their intention to move to Canada if Trump won election.
At last check, they’re all still here.
But Sunday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend hosted a professor who actually made good on moving north of the border. Jason Stanley gave up a good gig — a Yale professorship — to move to Canada and teach at the University of Toronto’s Munk School. Stanley has written that his decision to leave was “entirely because of the political climate in the United States.”
Stanley appeared during a segment devoted to stoking fears of supposedly incipient–or even current–autocracy/fascism in Trump’s America.
Stanley is something of an expert in fanning fascism fears from a far-left perspective. Since Trump was first elected, he’s written books titled How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
He is also a confirmed member of the cohort of Jewish intellectuals who support pro-Hamas protests and denounce Israel’s right of self-defense. Stanley was one of “nearly 3,000 Jewish faculty across the U.S. to sign a letter denouncing the arrest of a Columbia student protester [Mahmoud Khalil].”
And in an appearance on hard-left Amy Goodman’s taxpayer-funded Democracy Now show, Stanley said that the thesis of his book, Erasing History “is that a certain kind of erasing history justifies actions by authoritarian leaders, such as cutting down voting for minority populations, such as justifying state violence — in the case of the United States, against immigrants; in the case of, say, India, against Muslims; and in Israel, against Palestinians.”
In his Weekend appearance, Stanley gave off an odd, paranoid vibe. When Jonathan Capehart asked if the US is “sliding into autocracy” or is already there, he answered:
“Absolutely, we’re already there. Now, the United States has always had autocratic or fascist elements to its criminal legal system directed at black Americans, poor Americans. But now, we’re seeing a classic, historical thing, where the lawless treatment of people is then really explicit. Now, the United States is going to have explicit political prisoners.”
You mean, like when Biden-era prosecutors around the country tried to convict and imprison Trump?
Despite Capehart and Stanley agreeing that we have already slid into a neo-fascist autocracy, no Trump storm troopers charged the set and bundled off the panelists, who remained at peaceful liberty to hurl their accusations at Fascist Man Orange.
Just wonderin’—If Dunham and Snoop had made it to Canada, might they have collaborated on “Canadian ‘Girls’ Gone Wild?”
Here’s the transcript.
MSNBC
The Weekend
7:02 am EDTJONATHAN CAPEHART: Joining us now, Catherine Christian, former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, and an MSNBC legal analyst, and Jason Stanley, professor in the Munk School at the University of Toronto and author of Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Catherine, Jason, thank you both very much for coming to The Weekend.
Jason, in conversations, I think, among people, and certainly in our conversations, it’s, you know, we are sliding into autocracy. But are we sliding, or are we already there? To me, it seems like we’re already there, just given what I just said in the intro.
JASON STANLEY: Absolutely, we’re already there. Now, the United States has long had autocratic or fascist elements to its criminal legal system directed at black Americans, poor Americans, but now we’re seeing a sort of classic historical thing where that sort of lawless treatment of people is then
really explicit. Now, the United States is going to have explicit political prisoners.. . .
CAPEHART: What we’re talking about is just one part of the autocratic slide. I’m going to put up other autocratic things that have been in the headlines. This is element seven.
NBC News reports Trump fires labor statistic boss after the release of weak jobs reports. Washington Post, IRS, White House clashed over immigrants’ data before a tax chief was ousted. Wall Street Journal, Trump administration threatens to take over Harvard’s patents. New York Times, Trump administration to require universities to submit data on applicants’ race.
Particularly the firing of the labor statistics, BLS person and the ousting of the IRS chief. Can you explain why this is also part of the autocratic playbook in terms of, I don’t know, shaping facts and consolidating power.
EUGENE DANIELS: Shaping a complete different reality than what we’re living in.
STANLEY: Yeah, democracy requires truth. Truth is the basis of democracy, because then you can speak truth to power.
In an autocracy, in a dictatorship, there is only one “truth”
[air quotes], and that’s what the leader says. So you need to, the leader’s authority is challenged by facts. Autocracies run into reality and then they ground, then they ground down, and they collapse.
So you got to get rid of reality. And then you just say, whatever is in the service of the leader. And it becomes ever more explicit. So, kind of, people know that.
