A Yale University professor leaving the U.S. for Canada revealed Monday why President Donald Trump is launching a “brutal attack on America’s freedoms” and its democratic institutions.
“The message is that they’re going to do a kind of stochastic terrorism against our country. They’re going to target people one by one so that those who are in fear will shut up, essentially,” said Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor and an expert in fascism, told MSNBC’s Ana Cabrera.
“And universities are filled with fear already. They’re ceasing to make public statements. They’re not banding together. Right now they’re targeting non-citizens for, you know, writing in student newspapers.”
He went on, “I’m sure, or I suspect, they’ll start pulling people’s passports, targeting U.S. citizens for various reasons, and exploiting Americans’ ignorance.”
Stanley told MSNBC that he’s taking a roughly 25% salary cut to leave the Ivy League university’s faculty for the University of Toronto in the fall.
He added that the move is mostly about the safety of his two children, who are Black and Jewish, along with his desire to send a “warning” to Americans that’s “consonant” with his work.
Stanley told Vanity Fair that he had received the offer from Toronto before Columbia University bended the knee to Trump’s funding threats ― fueled by accusations that the school was failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitism amid peaceful pro-Palestinian protests last year.
The school’s president caved to the administration with a sea of policy changes, a move that Stanley likened to a hostage — with their kidnappers behind them— “declaring that they’ve seen the light.”
“This crackdown, Columbia’s capitulation to this, is a grave sign about the future of academic freedom,” Stanley told MSNBC.
Aside from schools caving to Trump, he turned to the cases of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national working on her Ph.D. at Tufts University. Both have shown support for Palestine before being detained and sent to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.
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Stanley — who recently told The Guardian that his grandmother and father fled Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany, in 1939 — slammed the Trump administration for using his religion to go after academic freedom and “crushing” universities in the name of “protecting” his people.
“I love America because it doesn’t have kings, I don’t love America because we can punch other people in the nose,” he told MSNBC.