Yale Professor Flees "Fascist" America

As the US loses a second-rate mind to Canada, I'm here for the cupcakes and tearful farewells. Let's expose Jason Stanley's polemical silliness on his way out.

A Yale professor who studies fascism is leaving the US to work at a Canadian university because of the current US political climate, which he worries is putting the US at risk of becoming a “fascist dictatorship”.

Jason Stanley, who wrote the 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
—Rachel Leingang, The Guardian

To celebrate the departure of Yale’s least impressive academic, let’s go through Jason Stanley’s top ten signs of fascism afoot. I’ll respond between each *sign* with critical commentary.

1. The Mythic Past
Fascist movements evoke a glorified, often fictional past to stir nostalgia and justify nationalist policies.

Il Duce (Benito Mussolini) sought to conjure a connection to the splendor of ancient Rome when he set out fascist doctrine in the early twentieth century. Similarly, President Trump speaks of making America great again, which Stanley would like to connect to the OG fascist dictator—a slam dunk, right?

Alas, this *sign* fails on several counts.

First, evoking “a glorified, often fictional past” is familiar to many political movements. If an anti-authoritarian appeals to the Boston Tea Party or the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence, does that make her a fascist?

The Bolsheviks selectively glorified revolutionary figures and events, such as Spartacus and the French Revolution, to indicate history as an unfolding dialectic process leading to socialism. Hugo Chávez named his political movement after Simón Bolívar. Kim Jong Un has a positively mythic backstory. Are they fascists?

Appeals to nostalgia and past glories are common in most social movements, so this first approximation in raising the specter of fascism is weak.

2. Propaganda
Propagandists erode trust in facts, the press, and objective truth, which creates confusion and loyalty to the leader’s version of reality.

This one is trivially true, but somehow I doubt Stanley has been able to recognize the problem among his kind, for example, during the pandemic. Quite unironically, he writes: “In fascist politics, members of the hated outgroup are almost always depicted as bearers of disease.” Was Stanley uncomfortable with the reality that the pandemic originated in Wuhan, China, because racism? Was Stanley comfortable with the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” propaganda issuing from Biden’s White House, effectively shaming “bearers of disease”?

Never mind that the vaccines couldn’t stop the spread—and they knew it.

I’ve been looking for Stanley’s sorrowful admission that his favored regime eroded trust in *the science* and public health, as state actors censored dissenters who also happened to be correct. I have not found a peep about fascism.

I can’t find anything from Stanley about the fascist corporatism between Big Pharma (corporation) and Big Government (state) as authorities pushed COVID vaccines onto Americans. Was Stanley vocal about authorities mandating “safe and effective” vaccines, where an estimated 79,000 federal workers had to leave their careers to avoid vaccine injuries, as well as many more from other sectors?

Professor Stanley thinks everything he disagrees with is fascist propaganda, while everything he supports is for the greater good. Still, it’s true that using propaganda can indeed be a sign of fascism, even if your friends are the fascists.

3. Anti-Intellectualism
Experts, academics, and intellectuals are painted as elitist enemies of the common people, undermining critical thinking.

First, Mussolini’s fascism wasn't uniformly anti-intellectual but sought to create its own intellectual class loyal to the regime. (Sounds familiar.)

Anyway, this one fails as a fascism *sign* simply because it so often happens to be true—thanks to critical thinking. So many of today’s experts, academics, and intellectuals are frauds and thus enemies of the people, enchanted by “luxury beliefs,” and subsidized by taxes despite no real skin in the game. Charlatanry abounds, as evinced by those who regard Stanley as an expert on fascism.

Critical thinking has been replaced by critical theory among the experts.

Directionally, I’m a liberal anarchist, where liberal means concerned with the values of freedom and the rule of law—certainly no fascist. For the above to be a *sign,* anyone skeptical of experts or authorities would have to be a fascist—OR—our skepticism would have to be completely unfounded. For goodness’ sake, we just got finished reflecting on the failure of American experts, academics, and intellectuals throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite being censored, my assessments turned out to be far more correct than those of most “experts,” most of whom were in lockstep with Fauci, who should be in prison.

Beyond the pandemic, we could include any number of examples of expert failure—from numerous predictions of deadly sea-level rise over twenty-odd years due to the “climate emergency” to false forecasts of “transient” inflation that dogged the Biden Administration and its coterie of bad economists. And what about the state direction of industry as a core tenet of fascism? How did those manufacturer EV mandates turn out? A bitter irony here is that intellectuals are being something when they advocate fascist policies, even if those policies never quite work out as they planned. (Stanley remains clueless in this regard.)

4. Unreality
Fascists flood the zone with misinformation and conspiracy theories to disorient the public and delegitimize evidence-based discourse.

I’m having trouble not spitting out my coffee. Misinformation! Conspiracy theories! What shall we conclude about the Democratic Party today, with its hysterics about DOGE and Elon-as-Nazi, or past tales of Russia collusion and pee-pee tapes? Or Hunter’s laptop as having all the earmarks of Russian disinformation? Or is this just the tactic to Accuse your enemy of what you’re doing?

In 1925, the Italian fascist regime took control of the press office and censored newspapers. By 1926, editors could be removed for publishing content critical of the government. Less than a century later, I can think of little that is more fascistic than creating a Disinformation Governance Board (a Ministry of Truth) which had to be scuttled in the face of withering criticism—except for the fact that government agents had been working at Twitter HQ and/or meeting weekly with the social media companies to remove posts and get people deplatformed. Are these the acts that prompted Stanley to look for a job in Canada, where the government funds its own propaganda arm (CBC) and anti-government protests can get your bank account frozen? FFS.

5. Hierarchy
A strict social order is promoted, often rooted in race, religion, gender, or origin, asserting that some groups are superior to others.

Passing over the irony that academy hierarchs are obsessed with instituting sex- and race-based hiring and student recruitment, their labor cartel is itself arranged as a relatively rigid hierarchy.

Chancellor
Provost
Dean
Dept. Chair
Professor
Assistant Professor
Associate Professor
Lecturer
Adjunct

If Claudine Gay’s rise to President of Harvard doesn’t represent a strict social order rooted in race, I don’t know what does. She still makes $1 million a year despite a plagiarism scandal and a poor publication record. But is it fascism?

Then, of course, academics routinely tout the opinions of tenured experts over those who live and work in the real world (See 3., Anti-intellectualism). For better or worse, hierarchical status-signaling is an unavoidable human phenomenon, and let’s be honest: most academics think they are superior.

Does that indicate fascism?

I say this as one who is not a fan of formal hierarchy, though meritocratic hierarchy is a tolerable and necessary aspect of the social order. In other words, natural hierarchies are generated by differences in “virtues and talents,” a la Thomas Jefferson. For example, the NBA is generally more profitable and beloved than the WNBA because men are bigger, stronger, and faster players. The NBA is also a color-blind meritocracy. But are these signs of fascism?

Surely Jason Stanley doesn’t think that academics, especially tenured ones, are more intelligent and morally upright than we poor troglodytes. That might create a strict academic social order that he could not abide.

6. Victimhood
The dominant group is portrayed as under attack by minorities, immigrants, or outsiders to justify aggressive policies.

If expressing concerns about minorities, immigrants, or outsiders makes one a fascist, then it’s no wonder British people are being tossed into prison. If young indigenous British girls were being passed around and sexually abused as teens by minority migrant men, that fact should be covered up. Victims should be blamed.

Otherwise, you’re a fascist.

If those self-same Britons are worried about the number of Sharia law jurisdictions in their erstwhile liberal country, that too is a *sign* of fascism. If Swedish people are concerned about alarming rape statistics and street bombings due to particular groups, then fascism is the only reasonable explanation.

It couldn’t be that the majority culture is tolerant and liberal democratic while the minority cultures are intolerant and illiberal—or just plain violent. This puts the likes of Jason Stanley in the odd position of defending actual fascists, because they are minorities, against true liberals who want peace, freedom, and earned prosperity.

7. Law and Order
Fear of crime or instability is weaponized to justify authoritarian crackdowns and repression of dissent.

According to Jason Stanley, you might be a fascist if:

• You worry that any failure to prosecute people caught stealing items with a value of less than $1500 contributes to more theft and more crime.

• You think people who firebomb Teslas or loot businesses should be in jail.

• You’re okay with MS-13 members being sent back to El Salvador.

• You think Luigi Mangione is a murderous scumbag who, if found guilty, should rot in prison.

But you’re decidedly not a fascist if:

• You think three years in prison isn’t long enough for non-violent J6 protestors who walked on the Capitol grounds or were let in by Capitol Police.

• You think officials, in collusion with taxpayer-funded NGOs, should decide what is truth and what is disinformation, censoring anyone who disagrees.

• You think that Hamas militants and kidnappers are *freedom fighters,* and that their violence and twenty-year grip on the Gazan people is justified.

• You secretly thought that people who were afraid to get poorly tested vaccines deserved to die of COVID-19, or otherwise be denied alternative therapies, not be admitted to college, or be fired for non-compliance.

Crazy times. Up is down. Down is up. Liberal is illiberal.

8. Sexual Anxiety
Fascists exploit fears about gender roles, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights to reinforce patriarchal control and social conformity.

Gender roles. Children are more likely to grow up engaging in criminal behavior if they lack both a female role model and a male role model. Both the evolutionary and social dynamics of parenting are well-established phenomena. It’s also no mere social construction that men gravitate to provider-protector (hunter) roles and women to administration-caregiver (gatherer) roles. Are such facts fascist?

Feminism. Women who care about positions of power and authority betray the fact that feminism was never about equalitarian access to positions or offices occupied primarily by men. Otherwise, they would worry less about the composition of C-suites and legislatures and more about the composition of dangerous industries such as roofing, logging, and commercial fishing.

LGBTQ rights. Let’s be honest. America’s so-called fascists aren’t worried about lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. It’s the transgender social contagion that chafes. Indeed, it’s horrifying to think that it was once common practice to administer frontal lobotomies for psychiatric disorders. Sane people will come to find it unsettling that it was common practice to remove healthy teen organs or pump preteens full of sterilizing cross-sex hormones to transform them into a crude simulacrum of a sex they can never become. Whatever one’s feminist views, is it fascist to think it unfair for trans-women to compete against women in sports?

Patriarchal control. Almost no one could claim that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a lousy leader for Britain in the 1980s because she was a woman. Most think she was a strong liberal who turned the country around. In the twisted minds of those, like Stanley, who throw out the f-word willy-nilly, they will either argue that A) Thatcher had patriarchal false consciousness, or B) that she was herself a crypto-fascist. That someone supports a strong leader does not mean he or she is into patriarchy or fascism.

9. Sodom and Gomorrah
Urban centers are demonized as morally corrupt, alien places filled with decadence and enemies of traditional values.

Notice the sleights-of-hand here.

First, many rural people live in close, often religious communities, whose members depend on keeping good reputations. Skepticism about big-city life and its seedy underground doesn’t make one a fascist, though it might make one a conservative. Just because one might prefer a simpler life in a small town doesn’t make her Benita Mussolina.

Second, urban centers—especially Blue ones—tend to struggle with the necessary balance between freedom and order. That means along most dimensions, they are relatively more morally corrupt, and their denizens do tend to eschew traditional values. Urban centers are magnets for criminals, degenerates, and homeless addicts, and it’s just easier for creeps to lose themselves in anonymity than it is in a small town where folks are more likely to be up in your business.

Coming from the Old South, I can admit that Southern Gothic seediness is a thing, and parts of rural America are decadent and corrupt. But people are less safe in cities, which is a fact, not fascism. Urban areas have significantly higher rates of violent crime, according to research by AI, Perplexity. In 2021, the violent victimization rate in urban areas was 24.5 per 1,000 people, more than double the rural rate of 11.1 per 1,000 people. Similarly, property crime rates were much higher in urban areas at 157.5 per 1,000 people compared to 57.7 in rural areas.

10. Work Makes You Free
Personal worth is tied strictly to productivity, allowing the dehumanization of the poor, disabled, and unemployed.

The Nazi slogan Arbeit Macht Frei is the not-so-subtle association here, which is designed to conjure the specter of Hitler. (This goes to Stanley’s conflation of national socialism (Nazism) and fascism.) It also doubles as a swipe at market economies, or capitalism, which opens the door for anti-market types to claim more productive people are fascists. Or, if you criticize the welfare state, you dehumanize the recipients, which makes you a fascist. See what he did there?

Yet people who work hard for their meager incomes don’t like to see able-bodied workers smoke weed, play Xbox, and draw checks while they grind out a shift at the plant or construction site. This doesn’t make them fascist. It makes them fair.

Watch carefully: If you criticize policies that encourage healthy people to remain dependent and unemployed, this is a *sign* of fascist dehumanization. But if you cheer for a trust-fund kid who murdered a health insurance company’s CEO, then you are not dehumanizing anyone at all. (Dead men tell no tales.)

The Fascist Five

Jason Stanley is a near-perfect avatar for the partisans and useless eaters that find their way into the academy. Stanley will hop from the fifth-ranked university in the US to the first-ranked university in Canada. He claims the move is because he’s worried the US is becoming a “fascist dictatorship,” but I have my doubts. If Harvard had offered him a job, he’d almost certainly be packing for Cambridge. Then again, I wouldn’t have expected an institution with Yale’s reputation to tolerate the likes of Staley. How far the Iveys have fallen.

I’m also doubtful those attempting to unwind our venal technocracy are fascists.

The top ten *signs* above do not include enough of the following, which I would argue represent actual fascist principles.

1. Corporatist economic system. The economic model rejects both socialism and liberal capitalism. Fascism organizes society into corporate groups—workers, employers, professionals—all working together under state supervision for national goals rather than class interests or private profit.

Sounds an awful lot like FDR or Bernie Sanders or Xi Jinping. When the state directs the auto industry to make zero-emission cars, the health insurers to comply with Obamacare mandates, or Lockheed-Martin to make war machines, is that not state supervision for national goals?

2. Absolute nationalism. The state is supreme above all else. Fascism rejects individualism and glorifies the state as embodying our collective national will and destiny. The individual exists to serve the nation, not vice versa.

Somehow, those who decry Americans as fascists also argue that they are too individualistic and that these fascists want to destroy the benevolent government.

3. Totalitarian authority. Fascism demands complete loyalty to a strong, centralized government led by a powerful leader who embodies the will of the people and makes decisions without the inefficiency of democratic debate.

This seems vaguely Trumpy, but not so much in its totalitarianism as in the mistaken notion that America needs a CEO and a lot of tariffs, like Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, or Teddy Roosevelt.

I don’t care for tariffs and pushy presidents, but it’s a stretch to say that any support for such policies is fascist.

4. Military power and imperial expansion. A great nation must be a warrior nation. Fascism celebrates military values—discipline, strength, heroism, and sacrifice—and seeks to restore our imperial glory through territorial expansion, as is our historical right.

Fascists prefer action to talk. While Trump has made overtures about annexing Greenland—or making Canada the twenty-first state—his predecessors since WWII have built more bases abroad, invaded more countries, and launched more wars.

5. Cultural regeneration. Fascism represents a revolution against decadence. We shall forge a new people through struggle and conflict, eliminating weakness and purifying our national character to build a modern empire. Such requires censorship and suppression of those working toward the regime’s goals.

Mussolini, like the American progressives, was influenced by Social Darwinism. While few want to see America’s decline, most want to see Americans stronger, healthier, and less dependent on state largesse. The idea of forging a new people through struggle and conflict is indeed fascist. The idea of a new people forging themselves through entrepreneurial seeking and striving is distinctly American.

What if Americans could do great things without subsidies or a state monopsony? We can purify our national character by each of us improving our individual development and practice of the virtues. We can enjoy a renaissance that doesn’t require supervision by strongmen or culling the weak. In home-grown strength, we can care for each other in close communities and mutual aid. And we can build culture by tapping into our creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

In short, my five above are more accurate than Stanley’s ten.

Stanley Footnote

The trouble with polemics masquerading as scholarship is that it becomes an affront to historical understanding and the meaning of words. Students Stanley has taught and will teach barely understand what the word fascism means when they utter it. This is unlikely to change even after they read Stanley’s book on fascism. And for a disconcerting number of people, a fascist is still anyone with whom they disagree.

Most don’t realize that fascism is a specific doctrine, one that is not only distinct from Nazism, but that Mussolini had admirers in the progressive FDR who wrote that he was “much interested and deeply impressed by what [Mussolini] has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy.” It’s no wonder the two formed a mutual admiration society before the outbreak of war. Traditional progressivism, like fascist corporatism, is state-directed enterprise.