This concept in particular needs more visibility in the broader culture. It's not only Stanley who doesn't make a distinction between fascism and right-wing authoritarianism, but almost the entire progressive left.
"fascism was a weird melding of left-wing and right-wing ideas, combining nationalism, racism, and socialism in a way that won more adherents than it ever should have — especially among intellectuals and, distressingly, on German campuses. Meanwhile, right-wing authoritarianism is basically the story of the human race prior to the 20th century, when left-wing authoritarianism started to become more prominent."
Totally on point, Greg. Regarding the Wolfson interview, that phenomenon has been absolutely driving me crazy: the denial that there's any sort of leftist indoctrination on college campuses, followed by words and actions that completely contradict that denial. The lack of self awareness is off the charts, and I've been meaning to write an article on it. It reminds of the quote (can't remember who it was) that says something like ideology is like breath, we don't notice our own.
It goes way back. There has been video floating around of an old Firing Line where William Buckley spoke with David Susskind about bias in media and academia, and Susskind basically said that it’s not bias, it’s just that when you are in a profession that makes you think carefully, you naturally end up a progressive. This was in 1966!
No doubt, and he says some ridiculous things later on in the interview, including attempting to minimize Jackie Robinson's experience of racism as the first Black MLB player.
Hate of the middle classes goes back at least to medieval times. The intellectual and artistic elites preferred the "earthy spiritual purity" (conformism) of starving, poverty stricken, diseased and illiterate peasants to the "crass commercialism" of the expanding urban commoner classes such as court scribes, river and sea traders, printing press owners, trade and crafts persons, and so forth.
The "left" recycled the medieval intellectuals' hate of the middle classes.
Various "anti-woke" scholars, conservative, centrist and liberals (Joel Kotkin, Musa al-Gharbi, John McWhorter) have compared woke-leftism to a dogmatic, quasi-religious cult.
The woke-left, postmodernists, neo-marxists and neo-communists have largely abandoned modern rationalism, and shifted to quasi-religious, emotive-subjective narratives. The problem with that is their positions are incoherent and self-referential.
Koestler's Ghost in the Machine explicitly describes how sense making, and systems in general, dis-integrate and regress to more primitive states under conditions of techno-economic and/or social disruption.
Leftism/wokeism is now in full, clear regression to ideological tribalism and social-justice-fundamentalism, as supported by billionaire globalist oligarchs and the professional-managerial class (PMC).
The corrupt elite-left has no choice but to continue its downward spiral as it wages an INVERTED CLASS WAR against the working and middle classes, especially people with traditional, non-leftist/non-woke values.
From the opening paragraph, it's clear that the NYT still doesn't understand the idea of acting from principle. It's all too common these days for partisans to assume that all process arguments are insincere and that everyone acts from partisan motivation.
Exactly - when has Jason Stanley ever made a good-faith critique of anything? He's pretty much a Chris Rufo of the left - his bottom line is the full dominance of his side of the political spectrum, and he'll invoke civil liberties criticisms selectively as a cudgel against his enemies, but not in a principled way.
Greg. well done again (all these thoughts). You are doing extremely important work. More power to you and thank God for FIRE. Free speech is a simple but radical concept and so many people are losing clarity over it. It is a bedrock of freedom and human progress.
I appreciated this piece because it highlights how academia often damages its own reputation — not just from outside political attacks, but through its own inconsistencies and blind spots.
My recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education looked at a different but related problem: when academics rushed to “fact-check” claims about transgender mouse research without checking the facts themselves. What started as a political talking point turned into a viral meme because experts, eager to mock politicians on the Right, got the basic science wrong themselves.
The result? Public trust erodes from both directions. Whether it’s inconsistent defenses of free speech (as FIRE points out) or sloppy, partisan-sounding fact-checking (as I describe), the public sees the same thing: institutions that claim rigor and neutrality but sometimes act with neither. Mocking people, while getting the "facts" wrong themselves, just further fuels the idea that academics are elitist and their science can't be trusted.
If academics wants to rebuild credibility, they needs to be consistent — in defending speech, in checking facts, and in admitting when it gets things wrong.
Just in terms of the Online Harms Act and fascism in Canada there is currently no version of the Bill tabled pending the new government taking a “fresh look” at the legislation. I suspect that we will not see the life imprisonment for hate speech component resurrected…
For all the talk of whether DEI can be reformed and saved , the bigger concern is whether universities can be reformed and saved. DEI is just a symptom of a far bigger problem. Those of us who graduated from allegedly elite institutions many decades ago ( in my case five) would not recognize at all what is going on now , and I think that's part of the problem. We still think of them as what they were, not what they have become.
It’s a fine article. As a point of interest, to me, my support for FIRE ended with FIRE’s support for pro-Palestinian demonstrators on campus. The demonstrators do not share FIRE’s distinction between protected speech and action. Incitation is not merely speech, but exhortation to unlawful action. As such, it is not protected. Jewish students have been attacked or physically impeded from attending classes by protestors FIRE seeks to enable.
[Falsely implying that the recent EO is unconstitutional because of the preamble to it, when the substantive part of the EO clearly takes pains NOT to be unconstitutional; it’s a prosecutorial discretion order about actions that are illegal on their own.
The guts of the piece from last year are great, in fact. It’s the Editor’s Note and the failure to mention that the EO as written are not unconstitutional that are partisan spin.]
[A cheap, dishonest piece trying to claim that censorship on campus on the right is roughly equal with that on the left, and not just in 2025, but in 2023 and 2024 as well!
Factually almost exactly opposite of what you note here and have done for a few years now.
Given the dishonest counting methodology used to make its points, the title of this piece really should have been:
“The ‘vibe’ shift in FIRE reporting methodology and spin about campus censorship.”]
If FIRE’s reputation for not taking partisan sides is important to you, then perhaps you shouldn’t publish pieces that are clearly about taking partisan sides…
You are supposedly a trained academic historian, a job that involves a lot of sifting through arguments, yet you respond to critical articles like a snotty teenager.
You're a celebrated expert on fascism, who apparently cannot distinguish between fascism and the various much older forms of right-wing politics that governed most of the world for hundreds and even thousands of years (as mentioned in the article).
In fact, it's worse than that: as all you have is the proverbial progressive hammer ('everything about history and politics must be viewed through the lens of 1930s/40s Europe'), all you can do is go around hammering 'fascist' nails. You and your ilk have gone about wacking people with said hammer for expressing mainstream beliefs like "I think law and order is necessary to an extent" and "sometimes, biological sex does matter", and then to cap it off, you then immediately deny having done it!! And now all those previously reasonable people, who at the time just wanted a better police presence in their neighbourhoods, or less regulation for businesses, or slightly reduced low-skill immigration, after being branded as beyond the pale of rational society by professional tastemakers like yourself, some have decided, not wrongly, that you and the institutions you're part of despise them. So they'll take their chances with the guy who also hates your guts and who at least seems in favour of *some* law and order, deregulation, reduced immigration, etc.
Instead we got the Salvadoran gulags and chatGPT-generated tariffs and Musk and Andreessen hacking up the fed with a chainsaw and selling its organs online. And this is your fault. Musk, the scale of the deportations, the tariffs... these aren't popular, even among a lot of Trump voters. Many may have 2nd thoughts about voting for him. But he claimed to have solutions to the problems you not only refuse to address, but demonise people for talking about. All because pointing out problems with modern liberal governance is 1 step away from the Reichstag Fire.
You thought your grandstanding, hectoring, bloviating and arrogant, snarky dismissal of critics would strangle the fascist baby in the crib. Instead, you somehow created many more fascists and many more potential enablers.
You are like one of those medieval to early-modern doctors who thought bleeding people would let the illness out of the body, often killing the patient in the process. (I guess you're unfamiliar as it's a bit of history from before 1933.)
Historians like you genuinely put me off wanting to be a historian, an academic, an intellectual type. I got my PhD and haven't looked back. Good riddance to the lot of you.
I'm sure you won't read this, and if you see it you'll just give some snarky twitter/blue-sky response like "don't let the door hit you on the way out" (there, you can have that for free).
But seriously, it is a tragedy that you and your compatriots are too high on your own farts to ever, *ever* have even a inkling of how much you've fucked things up for all of us.
All of us that us, except the people you claim to be fighting! They're doing great!
You did this, Jason. Not you alone. But you did it.
The social democrat, anti-communist, philosopher Sidney Hook argued that professors who were members of the CPUSA could be reasonably fired because they were required to follow the communist line regarding their teaching. Any thoughts on that dilemma?
There’s no way to know for sure, but I seriously doubt this is true: “As I told the Times, if higher-ed had listened to us 15 years ago about the ideological takeover of college campuses, the Trump administration’s actions against them right now wouldn’t be happening.”
I can’t think of an institution upon which the administration *isn’t* trying to enforce its viewpoint. I mean the BLS was never part of cancel culture, but it still got branded leftist propaganda.
(Not saying universities shouldn’t have listened for other more fundamental reasons.)
How long until progressives claim that you're running a "hit list" that encourages violence against the schools that FIRE ranks poorly on free speech? That would be the logical next step from calling TPUSA's "professor watchlist" a hit list.
Not Trump nor Congress can force Harvard to be politically diverse? Maybe. The law allowing the Harvard Corporation to have tax exempt status includes the requirement that they be non-partisan.
They say they are—they lie. They are an anti-Republican monoculture, much like the Nazis were anti-Jewish. Congress should pass a law/amendment to clarify that all non-partisan orgs include at least 30% Dems & 30% Reps. As professors, admin staff, Trustees.
Otherwise they fail to qualify for tax exempt status, and start paying their fair, partisan share, like other corporations that are not forced to be diverse.
Technically not forcing, but in this money-based society, such huge pressure that the influence seems like force. Hillsdale no govt cash is an option for all the Ivy+ elite schools, but they won’t like it.
I very much enjoy reading about FIRE's work and appreciate your principles - especially as I frequently back-slide in person, by cheering the "it's just consequences not cancellation" when someone I consider unprincipled and vicious gets the same treatment they were keen to see their opponents getting. I need those reminders that there's a UNIVERSAL principle to be defended here. I will still back-slide, only human.
This concept in particular needs more visibility in the broader culture. It's not only Stanley who doesn't make a distinction between fascism and right-wing authoritarianism, but almost the entire progressive left.
"fascism was a weird melding of left-wing and right-wing ideas, combining nationalism, racism, and socialism in a way that won more adherents than it ever should have — especially among intellectuals and, distressingly, on German campuses. Meanwhile, right-wing authoritarianism is basically the story of the human race prior to the 20th century, when left-wing authoritarianism started to become more prominent."
Totally on point, Greg. Regarding the Wolfson interview, that phenomenon has been absolutely driving me crazy: the denial that there's any sort of leftist indoctrination on college campuses, followed by words and actions that completely contradict that denial. The lack of self awareness is off the charts, and I've been meaning to write an article on it. It reminds of the quote (can't remember who it was) that says something like ideology is like breath, we don't notice our own.
It goes way back. There has been video floating around of an old Firing Line where William Buckley spoke with David Susskind about bias in media and academia, and Susskind basically said that it’s not bias, it’s just that when you are in a profession that makes you think carefully, you naturally end up a progressive. This was in 1966!
Wow! I just looked up the interview. Liberal condescension indeed goes back further than I thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UeSeZlXxqc
To be fair, Buckley was always pretty smug himself! :-) Long may he wave.
No doubt, and he says some ridiculous things later on in the interview, including attempting to minimize Jackie Robinson's experience of racism as the first Black MLB player.
Hate of the middle classes goes back at least to medieval times. The intellectual and artistic elites preferred the "earthy spiritual purity" (conformism) of starving, poverty stricken, diseased and illiterate peasants to the "crass commercialism" of the expanding urban commoner classes such as court scribes, river and sea traders, printing press owners, trade and crafts persons, and so forth.
The "left" recycled the medieval intellectuals' hate of the middle classes.
Various "anti-woke" scholars, conservative, centrist and liberals (Joel Kotkin, Musa al-Gharbi, John McWhorter) have compared woke-leftism to a dogmatic, quasi-religious cult.
The woke-left, postmodernists, neo-marxists and neo-communists have largely abandoned modern rationalism, and shifted to quasi-religious, emotive-subjective narratives. The problem with that is their positions are incoherent and self-referential.
Koestler's Ghost in the Machine explicitly describes how sense making, and systems in general, dis-integrate and regress to more primitive states under conditions of techno-economic and/or social disruption.
Leftism/wokeism is now in full, clear regression to ideological tribalism and social-justice-fundamentalism, as supported by billionaire globalist oligarchs and the professional-managerial class (PMC).
The corrupt elite-left has no choice but to continue its downward spiral as it wages an INVERTED CLASS WAR against the working and middle classes, especially people with traditional, non-leftist/non-woke values.
From the opening paragraph, it's clear that the NYT still doesn't understand the idea of acting from principle. It's all too common these days for partisans to assume that all process arguments are insincere and that everyone acts from partisan motivation.
What kind of moron would go to Jason Stanley for a quote about anything more serious than a head cold?
Only Jason Stanley himself.
Exactly - when has Jason Stanley ever made a good-faith critique of anything? He's pretty much a Chris Rufo of the left - his bottom line is the full dominance of his side of the political spectrum, and he'll invoke civil liberties criticisms selectively as a cudgel against his enemies, but not in a principled way.
Greg. well done again (all these thoughts). You are doing extremely important work. More power to you and thank God for FIRE. Free speech is a simple but radical concept and so many people are losing clarity over it. It is a bedrock of freedom and human progress.
I appreciated this piece because it highlights how academia often damages its own reputation — not just from outside political attacks, but through its own inconsistencies and blind spots.
My recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education looked at a different but related problem: when academics rushed to “fact-check” claims about transgender mouse research without checking the facts themselves. What started as a political talking point turned into a viral meme because experts, eager to mock politicians on the Right, got the basic science wrong themselves.
Here it is, for those interested:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-great-transgender-mouse-debate
The result? Public trust erodes from both directions. Whether it’s inconsistent defenses of free speech (as FIRE points out) or sloppy, partisan-sounding fact-checking (as I describe), the public sees the same thing: institutions that claim rigor and neutrality but sometimes act with neither. Mocking people, while getting the "facts" wrong themselves, just further fuels the idea that academics are elitist and their science can't be trusted.
If academics wants to rebuild credibility, they needs to be consistent — in defending speech, in checking facts, and in admitting when it gets things wrong.
Just in terms of the Online Harms Act and fascism in Canada there is currently no version of the Bill tabled pending the new government taking a “fresh look” at the legislation. I suspect that we will not see the life imprisonment for hate speech component resurrected…
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberals-taking-fresh-look-at-online-harms-bill-says-justice-minister-sean-fraser-1.7573791
For all the talk of whether DEI can be reformed and saved , the bigger concern is whether universities can be reformed and saved. DEI is just a symptom of a far bigger problem. Those of us who graduated from allegedly elite institutions many decades ago ( in my case five) would not recognize at all what is going on now , and I think that's part of the problem. We still think of them as what they were, not what they have become.
It’s a fine article. As a point of interest, to me, my support for FIRE ended with FIRE’s support for pro-Palestinian demonstrators on campus. The demonstrators do not share FIRE’s distinction between protected speech and action. Incitation is not merely speech, but exhortation to unlawful action. As such, it is not protected. Jewish students have been attacked or physically impeded from attending classes by protestors FIRE seeks to enable.
Excellent piece.
I admire the determination to not take sides that you reinforce in this piece.
Sadly, however, two recent FIRE pieces do not adhere to this standard at all, but are blatant spin designed to make the right look bad:
https://expression.fire.org/p/your-burning-questions-on-flag-burning
[Falsely implying that the recent EO is unconstitutional because of the preamble to it, when the substantive part of the EO clearly takes pains NOT to be unconstitutional; it’s a prosecutorial discretion order about actions that are illegal on their own.
The guts of the piece from last year are great, in fact. It’s the Editor’s Note and the failure to mention that the EO as written are not unconstitutional that are partisan spin.]
Even worse was this:
https://expression.fire.org/p/the-vibe-shift-in-campus-censorship
[A cheap, dishonest piece trying to claim that censorship on campus on the right is roughly equal with that on the left, and not just in 2025, but in 2023 and 2024 as well!
Factually almost exactly opposite of what you note here and have done for a few years now.
Given the dishonest counting methodology used to make its points, the title of this piece really should have been:
“The ‘vibe’ shift in FIRE reporting methodology and spin about campus censorship.”]
If FIRE’s reputation for not taking partisan sides is important to you, then perhaps you shouldn’t publish pieces that are clearly about taking partisan sides…
Bothsiding fascism
How can you be this dense?
You are supposedly a trained academic historian, a job that involves a lot of sifting through arguments, yet you respond to critical articles like a snotty teenager.
You're a celebrated expert on fascism, who apparently cannot distinguish between fascism and the various much older forms of right-wing politics that governed most of the world for hundreds and even thousands of years (as mentioned in the article).
In fact, it's worse than that: as all you have is the proverbial progressive hammer ('everything about history and politics must be viewed through the lens of 1930s/40s Europe'), all you can do is go around hammering 'fascist' nails. You and your ilk have gone about wacking people with said hammer for expressing mainstream beliefs like "I think law and order is necessary to an extent" and "sometimes, biological sex does matter", and then to cap it off, you then immediately deny having done it!! And now all those previously reasonable people, who at the time just wanted a better police presence in their neighbourhoods, or less regulation for businesses, or slightly reduced low-skill immigration, after being branded as beyond the pale of rational society by professional tastemakers like yourself, some have decided, not wrongly, that you and the institutions you're part of despise them. So they'll take their chances with the guy who also hates your guts and who at least seems in favour of *some* law and order, deregulation, reduced immigration, etc.
Instead we got the Salvadoran gulags and chatGPT-generated tariffs and Musk and Andreessen hacking up the fed with a chainsaw and selling its organs online. And this is your fault. Musk, the scale of the deportations, the tariffs... these aren't popular, even among a lot of Trump voters. Many may have 2nd thoughts about voting for him. But he claimed to have solutions to the problems you not only refuse to address, but demonise people for talking about. All because pointing out problems with modern liberal governance is 1 step away from the Reichstag Fire.
You thought your grandstanding, hectoring, bloviating and arrogant, snarky dismissal of critics would strangle the fascist baby in the crib. Instead, you somehow created many more fascists and many more potential enablers.
You are like one of those medieval to early-modern doctors who thought bleeding people would let the illness out of the body, often killing the patient in the process. (I guess you're unfamiliar as it's a bit of history from before 1933.)
Historians like you genuinely put me off wanting to be a historian, an academic, an intellectual type. I got my PhD and haven't looked back. Good riddance to the lot of you.
I'm sure you won't read this, and if you see it you'll just give some snarky twitter/blue-sky response like "don't let the door hit you on the way out" (there, you can have that for free).
But seriously, it is a tragedy that you and your compatriots are too high on your own farts to ever, *ever* have even a inkling of how much you've fucked things up for all of us.
All of us that us, except the people you claim to be fighting! They're doing great!
You did this, Jason. Not you alone. But you did it.
The social democrat, anti-communist, philosopher Sidney Hook argued that professors who were members of the CPUSA could be reasonably fired because they were required to follow the communist line regarding their teaching. Any thoughts on that dilemma?
There’s no way to know for sure, but I seriously doubt this is true: “As I told the Times, if higher-ed had listened to us 15 years ago about the ideological takeover of college campuses, the Trump administration’s actions against them right now wouldn’t be happening.”
I can’t think of an institution upon which the administration *isn’t* trying to enforce its viewpoint. I mean the BLS was never part of cancel culture, but it still got branded leftist propaganda.
(Not saying universities shouldn’t have listened for other more fundamental reasons.)
How long until progressives claim that you're running a "hit list" that encourages violence against the schools that FIRE ranks poorly on free speech? That would be the logical next step from calling TPUSA's "professor watchlist" a hit list.
Not Trump nor Congress can force Harvard to be politically diverse? Maybe. The law allowing the Harvard Corporation to have tax exempt status includes the requirement that they be non-partisan.
They say they are—they lie. They are an anti-Republican monoculture, much like the Nazis were anti-Jewish. Congress should pass a law/amendment to clarify that all non-partisan orgs include at least 30% Dems & 30% Reps. As professors, admin staff, Trustees.
Otherwise they fail to qualify for tax exempt status, and start paying their fair, partisan share, like other corporations that are not forced to be diverse.
Technically not forcing, but in this money-based society, such huge pressure that the influence seems like force. Hillsdale no govt cash is an option for all the Ivy+ elite schools, but they won’t like it.
I very much enjoy reading about FIRE's work and appreciate your principles - especially as I frequently back-slide in person, by cheering the "it's just consequences not cancellation" when someone I consider unprincipled and vicious gets the same treatment they were keen to see their opponents getting. I need those reminders that there's a UNIVERSAL principle to be defended here. I will still back-slide, only human.