One of the leading U.S. experts on fascism is so unsettled by the political climate under President Donald Trump that he’s packing up and leaving the country. Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale University and the author of books including How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy that will begin in the fall.

Stanley is not the only prominent Yale professor leaving the Ivy League university amid Trump 2.0. He’ll be joined at Munk by two colleagues, historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, in one of many signs that the United States is in the midst of a Trump-induced brain drain as the new administration threatens university funding, among many other unfriendly steps toward the world of academia.

In a wide-ranging interview with Foreign Policy, Stanley, who has raised alarm bells about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies for years and unequivocally calls the president a fascist, discussed his reasons for leaving the United States and Trump’s controversial Monday meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele—who styles himself the “world’s coolest dictator”—among other topics.

During the Bukele meeting, which Stanley described as a “horrifying moment,” Trump again floated sending U.S. citizens to be imprisoned in the Central American country—which legal experts warn would likely be unconstitutional. This came as the Trump administration continues to defy a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador.

Though Stanley has faced some criticism over his impending exodus from the United States, he’s making no apologies as he continues to warn people against assuming they’re not at risk of being targeted in Trump’s America.

“We need to call out the naivete of people who think that this will stop at noncitizens,” Stanley said.

“I am unwillingly going because I don’t want to leave the United States. It’s my home and always will be my home,” Stanley said.

Stanley said the well-being of his children is the primary reason for his decision. “I have two Black sons,” Stanley said. “I’m scared for the safety of my sons. And the explicit anti-Blackness of the moment is more frightening to me than it would be for someone without two Black sons.”

Trump has a long history of espousing white nationalist viewpoints and conspiracy theories, and his administration’s recent aggressive effort to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives from virtually every aspect of American life has been widely decried as racist.

Stanley, who is Jewish and the son of Holocaust survivors, said his family history also contributed to his choice to leave the United States. There are “obvious parallels” between the climate in 1930s Nazi Germany and what we’re seeing in the United States today, Stanley said.

“Plenty of intellectuals left Germany in ’32 to ’34, when it was unclear what was going to happen,” he said, adding, “The United States might be fine. But in the case where it’s not fine, you want to leave early for better positions.”

But the Trump administration’s assault on academia also played a big role in this. Stanley said he “impulsively” accepted the job at the University of Toronto after Columbia University caved to demands from the Trump administration in order to receive $400 million in federal funding. The university agreed to major changes, including overhauling its rules for protests and new supervision over the Middle Eastern studies department.

After Columbia capitulated, Stanley said he knew that the Trump administration’s demands for academic institutions would “get excessively more crazy” and that “it would have been foolish to decline the opportunity.” Stanley pointed to Trump’s recent demands of Harvard University, which include scrapping DEI programs and establishing “viewpoint diversity” in admissions and hiring. Harvard has rejected Trump’s demands, and the administration froze roughly $2.3 billion in federal funding in response.

“Imagine if newspapers were told: ‘We’re going to monitor your journalism to make sure that you hire Trump-friendly journalists and opinion writers.’ You would know you’re not living in a democracy anymore,” Stanley said. “It’s no different with universities.”

Stanley underscored that the Trump administration’s war on universities is straight out of an authoritarian playbook. Throughout history, the rise of authoritarian regimes has coincided with attacks on intellectuals—and efforts to discredit the institutions they’re associated with—in concert with the scapegoating of marginalized groups.

Authoritarians view universities—vital centers of critical thought and free expression—as an innate threat to their desire for complete subservience, Stanley explained. In 1931, for example, Italy’s Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, forced university professors to take loyalty oaths. In a more recent example, Central European University in 2018 was forced out of Budapest by the increasingly authoritarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, ultimately relocating to Vienna.

“Looking worldwide, authoritarians attacked the universities first,” said Stanley, who discusses this trend at length in his book Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Authoritarians look to erase “critical history” and “replace it with patriotic education,” Stanley said.

Stanley said authoritarian regimes often malign and deliberately misrepresent student protest movements while moving to delegitimize universities—and major media outlets have a habit of aiding in the process.

“India is a central case. In 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act passed, which made Muslims into second-class citizens. And there were protests at elite universities in India,” Stanley said. “The media misrepresented these protests as violent anti-national protests on behalf of Muslims. And they were crushed violently.”

Stanley said the U.S. media’s coverage of protests over the war in Gaza on college campuses last year followed a similar trajectory. “The media misrepresented the anti-war protests. It took the media months to acknowledge that there was substantial Jewish participation,” Stanley said.

“The media still doesn’t understand. They’re like: ‘Why is the Trump administration so focused on universities?’” Stanley said. “The universities, not because of ideological indoctrination but because they contain a lot of young smart people called students, have always been the source of resistance against authoritarianism and unjust war.”

Stanley also criticized Trump for invoking antisemitism amid his crackdown on academic institutions and effort to deport foreign-born students in relation to pro-Palestinian protests on campuses. He warned that by framing this around the issue of antisemitism, Trump is perpetuating a dangerous stereotype that Jews control powerful institutions.

The Trump administration has repeatedly portrayed campus protests over the war in Gaza as pro-Hamas and antisemitic and has moved to revoke student visas across the country while strong-arming universities into enacting reforms in exchange for continued funding. Stanley is concerned that by claiming to take these actions on behalf of the Jewish community, Trump will actually worsen antisemitism by fueling toxic tropes.

Referring to the Trump administration as “Christian nationalists,” Stanley said Jews and antisemitism are being exploited by the White House for the sake of controlling universities. He’s worried that Jews, in turn, will ultimately be blamed for Trump’s fascism.

Stanley added that any discussion on this “must start and end with the fact that it’s masking the suffering of Palestinians facing a genocide.”

“The true victims in all of this are the people of Gaza, whose extraordinary plight is being covered up by this fake pretense of protecting American Jews. And Jewish people stand against tyranny, that’s our historical role. We stand for liberalism. And they’re entirely trying to change what we stand for,” Stanley said.