Whatever this is, it’s peak Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s also laughably performative. Not even noted lefty commentators like Nate Silver, another media figure who has managed to anger both liberals and conservatives, could stomach this elitist bravado: Yale professors are fleeing the United States because they think fascism is right around the corner. Oh, but trust them—they study this stuff really, really hard:
In the Opinion video…Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.
Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.
Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.
[…]
Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.
If this is what academia has become, they can stay gone forever. Second, everything they’re leaving the U.S. for is what Joe Biden did regularly as president when he remembered. Third, if there’s one thing we know as a fact, it’s that liberals have zero grasp of history and are laughably historically illiterate, so this is a tantrum. It’s not serious.
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This is so performative. If you think the threat is serious when by any definition you're an exceptionally privileged person (they're all Yale profs) then the honorable thing to do is stay here and fight and/or make lots of money by writing about it on your substack. pic.twitter.com/UMD400Ibw8
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 14, 2025
Silver mocked them:
This is so performative. If you think the threat is serious when by any definition you're an exceptionally privileged person (they're all Yale profs) then the honorable thing to do is stay here and fight and/or make lots of money by writing about it on your substack.
I’m not going to watch the video. It’s not polite to make fun of the mentally challenged.
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