‘This is an authoritarian country, now’: Professor blasts U.S. as he moves to Canada

Yale University professor Jason Stanley explains why he is leaving the U.S. to teach at the University of Toronto.

An Ivy-League professor who is moving to Canada says that the United States has reached a “midpoint” between liberal democracy and fascist dictatorship.

“We’re beyond the point of a backsliding democracy,” said Yale University’s Jason Stanley, author of the 2018 book How Fascism Works, in a Thursday interview with CTV Your Morning.

Stanley is one of three U.S. academics who have recently announced plans to move to Canada amid rapidly shifting political circumstances south of the border.

He cites a series of moves by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration as indicators of authoritarian power structures, including attacks on education, the legal community, the media and public employees, as well as a crackdown on free speech, what Stanley calls a “pervasive culture of fear.”

“The president of the United States is targeting law firms he doesn’t like, he’s targeting professors he doesn’t like, he’s targeting his political opponents, he’s using the apparatus of the state,” Stanley said. “This is an authoritarian country, now.”

Trump, for his part, has lodged similar accusations toward those he views as opponents, calling some members of the media "A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY," with his White House describing a February executive order reining in the power of independent U.S. agencies as “RESTORING DEMOCRACY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN GOVERNMENT.”

In a social media post days before his inauguration, Trump cast himself as the figure to restore democratic order to the country.

“The USA is breaking down - A violent erosion of Safety, National Security, and Democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it. See you on January 20th. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Campus crackdown

Stanley says his decision to relocate from Yale came after recent developments at another elite American school: New York City’s Columbia University.

Last month, international students and others linked to protests against the war in Gaza became the target of detainments and visa terminations, forcing them to leave the country. Among them was Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student, permanent resident and notable figure among the antiwar protests at the school last summer, who was detained in March.

Trump has framed the crackdown as a move to support “national and foreign policy interests,” and called Khalil’s apprehension in particular “the first arrest of many to come.”

“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” the U.S. president wrote in a social media post in March. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”

Columbia protest leaders have denied allegations of antisemitism, describing themselves as antiwar and noting that demonstrations included Jewish students and groups.

In a statement dictated over the phone and published in March by the American Civil Liberties Union, Khalil said his arrest showed “anti-Palestinian racism,” and was a consequence of his advocacy for an end to the violence in Gaza. Khalil described himself as a “political prisoner.”

Faculty from Columbia’s school of journalism described in a separate statement an “alarming chill” that had descended on campus amid the crackdown.

“Many of our international students have felt afraid to come to classes and to events on campus. They are right to be worried," reads the faculty statement.

“There are more than one million international students in the United States. They, too, may worry that they are no longer free to speak their mind. Punishing even one person for their speech is meant to intimidate others into self-censorship.”

Stanley echoed the sentiment in the Thursday morning interview.

“If you’re not a citizen of the United States, you cannot speak out on social media,” he told CTV. “The federal government is saying that if you’re a non-citizen student or professor at … Yale University, and you tweet on social media some criticism of the government or the state ideology, you’re at risk of losing your visa.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters late last week that the government was “obviously not going to yank a visa” over trivial criticisms of the United States, but that international students are “here to go to class. They’re not here to lead activist movements that are disruptive and undermine the – our universities.”

“A visa is a gift. It’s a voluntary thing,” Rubio said. “We deny visas all over the world every day for a variety of reasons, and that means we can also revoke those visas. No one is entitled to a visa.”

Invoking the Martin Niemöller poem First They Came, Stanley said the crackdown is not likely to stop at foreign nationals.

“If they can do this to non-citizens, the next step is citizens,” he said.

After more than a decade at Yale, Stanley will join the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy later this year.

“There’s an incredible opportunity for Canadian universities essentially to replace the greatness of American universities,” he said. “I’m hoping Canada sees that opportunity.”

You can watch the full interview with Jason Stanley in the player at the top of this article.

With files from The Associated Press