Dispatch #4: Ivy League Delusions and Psychological Warfare

May 17, 2025

Greetings from the Swamp.

Recently, The New York Times released a short documentary about three Yale professors, who are experts in authoritarianism, fleeing the United States to take up positions within University of Toronto. The video holds a melodramatic tone with heavy ominous strings punctuating the stark analysis each professor offers of the current moment in the United States. One of them suggests, “The lesson of 1933 [Germany with the rise of Hitler] is you get out sooner rather than later.” A rapid volley of cuts of black-and-white Nazi archival footage follows: someone giving a Nazi salute, a burning building, and Hitler. Low strings flutter underneath.

On one level, the overwrought form of the documentary well matches the general feeling of anxiety of living through a bad movie that the Trump regime exerts on many of us within the United States. We have a second-rate reality t.v. show president who wants to continue driving the ratings up no matter what he has to do whether it be threatening to make Canada a fifty-first state, stealing Greenland, abducting foreign students who are critical of Israel, or attempting to intimidate universities by eliminating federal funding.

Many of these actions come straight out of the authoritarian playbook that countries like Hungary, Turkey, and Brazil have recently pursued. But they are also being dictated by a narcissist where the shock of the new and outrageous remains a goal unto itself in driving attention to him. The Trump regime is an uneasy mixture of Project 2025 plans with Borscht Belt antics to hold our attention hostage. How much of this translates into a fundamental transformation of the executive branch into an authoritarian stronghold or instead into an ever-grinding reality television show or, more likely, a mixture of both remains to be seen.

I don’t blame anyone who wants to escape the United States right now. Academics across the country are under increasing pressure to mute critical analysis of systemic oppression, climate change, and U.S. history. I also don’t have issues with those who see emerging elements of fascism taking shape within our culture and politics. I do, however, have issues with reducing such fascism to that found in Italy and Germany during the interwar period as the documentary does.

As scholars like Alberto Toscano and Jack Bratich point out, fascism exceeds any limited organizational form and constitutes wider desires and cultural trends than often acknowledged. For example, as many U.S. Black intellectuals and activists during the 1930s pointed out, vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion, and the Silver Shirts constituted a domestic fascism against people of color and immigrants long before the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. We need to better understand the ways in which fascist desires and practices have circulated around us, both in the past and the present, along with recognizing the dangers of them constituting new social movements and political regimes.

One of the Yale academics notes in the documentary, “We’re like people on the Titanic,” who believe that our ship cannot sink. But this antiquated and overused analogy speaks to the conceptual limits of the video and the ways in which these academics are positioned. Another academic quotes the author Toni Morrison who suggests that the pathway to the “final solution” happens step-by-step, not with a leap. As we hear Morrison talk about each step leading “to another and another,” we see viral footage of Elon Musk giving what appears to be a Nazi salute. The editing of the video implies that there is a direct pathway leading from Hitler’s Germany to the Trump regime. Although there might be resonances between these moments, there are also important differences and variations.

Florida offers an illustrative example of the ways in which authoritarian politicians have attempted to corral and intimidate public higher education into submission. I recently had the pleasure of being on Toby Miller’s Cultural Studies podcast with a group of academics who have been involved in the resistance against the attacks against public higher education in Florida.

Dr. Nicole Morse, who was once a colleague of mine at Swamp U., offered a particularly revealing insight that we should not conflate the hype coming from would-be authoritarians like Donald Trump or Governor Ron DeSantis with the on-the-ground reality of how their policies actually impact people. Morse notes that despite the claims to ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and attacking “wokeness,” “they’re not effectively ending people’s interest in diversity, in people’s commitment to studying race, gender, and sexuality. So I think it’s really important to balance our rightful concern about the real material impacts of these authoritarian attacks with a recognition that they will do as much as they can purely though rhetorical tricks.”

Such rhetorical tricks are used as a form of psychological warfare that wants to encourage faculty to self-censor themselves out of fear and despair. As Dr. Morse observes, such politicians “are relying on us to do the rest of the work, to say, ‘Oh, well, now I’m going to change my research agenda. Now, I’m going to not propose that class I wanted to propose.’” But, as anyone who teaches in Florida can tell you, many students’ interests in these very topics that the state government has attempted to marginalize has grown rather than receded.

Whether or not faculty feel secure enough to discuss such topics in their classroom remains a different story, partially based on job security and status within the university, but not solely upon them alone. Dr. Katie Rainwater, a teaching instructor at Florida International University, illustrates how many nontenured faculty have been taking the lead against the attacks on public higher education. As she notes during the podcast about her current situation:

I don’t have job security, and I know my job is going to come to an end, which, is devastating to me because I love my job. I love my students. I love doing research. But I have dignity, and I want to stand up for principles, and I don’t think staying silent is going to save me.

Within Florida, graduate students and non-tenure track faculty occupy some of the most vulnerable positions regarding the attacks on the classroom, in part because of a significant earlier defeat of reactionary legislation. As Dr. Rainwater notes in an unpublished piece, the state legislature signed HB-7, known colloquially as “The STOP WOKE ACT,” into law in 2023, which attempted to restrict the teaching of certain subjects throughout public higher education curriculums. But a judge ruled that such legislation violated the First Amendment and called it “positively dystopian” where “professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the state approves.” This was a small but significant victory that has been largely overlooked by the press that tends to frame public education in Florida as completely under the boot of reactionary politicians.

As a result of this defeat, the state changed tactics by creating SB 266 that regulates the material that can be taught in introductory courses called “general education.” Such courses are predominantly taught by instructors, adjuncts, and graduate students. Such courses are more likely to have students not interested in the major or the course material. Therefore, they would be more likely in reporting finding problems with it. Such courses are also most likely to have political plants within them trying to entrap their professors in a violation, as one faculty member from University of Florida recounts in a recent New York Times op-ed.

But with this said, many faculty continue to teach material in introductory courses that the state wants to censor since they feel obligated both to address the interests of students and to best reflect their academic discipline with the most current research. The course description and title might have changed. But the essence of free and critical inquiry remains.

This is why I find the New York Times documentary so troubling: it reinforces the psychological warfare that would-be authoritarians want us to internalize. It suggests that we are inevitably headed towards a fascist moment. It models the very type of behavior that it wants all faculty to embody through its three faculty profiles: fear and flee. The very fact that they are all Yale professors, who occupy the upper echelons of academia and hold prestige and resources that most academics will never encounter, stresses the point that those of us at no name state schools have no hope in hell in resisting.

At the video’s most deluded moment, the professors rationalize their move by suggesting, “One thing you can definitely learn from Russia is that its essential to set up centers of resistance in places of relative safety.” They are indirectly referencing the Bolshevik strategy during the Russian Revolution. To suggest that three Yale professors hightailing it to University of Toronto constitutes “a center of resistance,” reveals a fundamental limitation that they all hold in understanding what constitutes resistance and exposes their inflated sense of being a part of it.

Take it from someone in Florida: faculty have been resisting such actions for three years here in our state, not always successfully and not without some serious limitations. But the fight is here at home where unions and progressive social movements occupy central positions. Our recent podcast well reflects this reality from people who have been on the front lines of such resistance.

Although fleeing elsewhere is a very understandable impulse, it plays into the dynamics of psychological warfare that the Times documentary perpetuates. It overlooks past and current resistances occurring against attacks on public higher education. It ignores how this fight against authoritarianism originated at state schools and universities where the least privileged student bodies were being used as testing grounds for such anti-democratic and anti-intellectual practices. It centers on three faculty members rather than acknowledges how the struggle is collective by building strength across university and college communities as well as with our surrounding communities, who might have nothing to do with education but everything to do with maintaining freedom, resilience, and resistance.

All academics should have the right to move where they feel they can best do their best work and be content. Although only relatively few have the prestige and opportunity in doing, no one  should question their ability in doing so. But to privilege the voices of three Yale academics in speaking for the present threats against higher education and democracy more broadly, the documentary ignores the innumerable struggles and resistances that have been going on across campuses for years, particularly in Red states. It also ignores how faculty across universities and colleges continue to collectively organize against the increasing onslaught against public education and for forms of resistance against authoritarianism and populist schmaltz. It is these other stories of resistance that need to be highlighted and shared so our movement can grow and strengthen.

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