Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching our shores

Another related article, three Yale professors are leaving for Canada: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/28/us/yale-university-scholars-t...

Brain drain is happening in real time.

Related: "as part of the Brains for Brussels initiative, VUB aims to actively attract American professors looking to relocate"

https://www.brusselstimes.com/1490737/brussels-university-vu...

The three professors:

https://history.yale.edu/people/timothy-snyder

https://history.yale.edu/people/marci-shore

https://philosophy.yale.edu/profile/jason-stanley

Surely a brain drain of liberal arts professors is part of the plan though? Will be interesting to see engineers/pharma/mathematicians also leave. US doesn’t look like a nice place to be in the next few years so perhaps they will.

If Trump and his intellectual descendants stay in power, it is very likely they take Canada eventually, probably starting with Alberta.

Fun fact, the leader of Alberta is hanging around Trump and others in his orbit a ton and having a generally great time. That isn't a coincidence:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/danielle-smith-has-g...

Those are history professors though. I don't want to disparage other lib arts, but the historians are at least looking at what has happened when countries become fascist states. Could they have recognised all the warning signs?

Yep, it’s an interesting social experiment. USA is becoming like Russia, with fake democracy and robber baron oligarchy that does whatever it wants. Many people are going to be OK with it, as long as they think it benefits them personally. But I’m not sure many in academia will be among those.

I bet China, India and EU will soon overtake America in sciences. Made in America may yet become the new made in Bangladesh.

Next up: Trump signing an executive order forbidding top level academics to leave US soil ? Or maybe Russian style: we'll see an increase of mysterious accidents and suicides amongst high profile dissidents?

Snyder was regularly posted on HN on his subject matter. HN used to consider him someone worth reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210327 ("Understanding Hitler’s Anti-Semitism (theatlantic.com)" (2015), 59 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41583725 ("Timothy Snyder on How the Collapse of the Soviet Union Took America by Surprise (lithub.com)" (2024), 87 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33104723 ("How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end? (snyder.substack.com)" (2022), 88 comments)

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=timothy%20snyder

And a few more here (Algolia search censors things that were flagged),

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=snyder.substack.com

Are you following events and making highly speculative judgements or can you see evidence this is the direction Trump is headed?

Its just crazy. Are they seriously going to bully current allies and start wars with them?

Come to Europe and join your local army reserve! Hard for non citizens though.

> Are you following events and making highly speculative judgements or can you see evidence this is the direction Trump is headed?

Here is a recent New York Times major article titled: "How Trump’s ‘51st State’ Canada Talk Came to Be Seen as Deadly Serious"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/world/canada/trump-trudea...

Here is NBC News headline:

"Trump's quest to conquer Canada is confusing everyone: President Donald Trump increasingly links a trade war to his push to annex America's northern neighbor."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-quest-co...

The underlying issue is that it makes sense from a long-term economic standpoint if you ignore everything else. Canada has tons of resources and even more land which will get more valuable as the world warms. Argicultural regions may shift northward if there is significant warming and that could hurt the US and benefit Canada. So strategically there is logic.

The main complicating factor is that Trump can be quite erratic in his views, so it may just shift off of his plate and he focuses on something else if we are lucky.

I do not really understand this line of thought of USA invading Canada. What’s in it for them? Canada isn’t some helpless third world with oil that they can exploit, Canada can and will retaliate.

> Canada isn’t some helpless third world with oil that they can exploit, Canada can and will retaliate

Canada can retaliate in a trade war, but if it is real annexation/invasion, Canada cannot effectively fight back. It would be a walk in the park for the US. We do not have the military resources, our popular is 1/10 the US, and our weapons are mostly supplied by the US, so they may not even work in a real war. And unlike with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, no one is coming to our aid.

Also the US would likely do it incrementally and start with a friendly province like Alberta, where a significant minority may even welcome it.

Third world countries unironically have bigger militaries than Canada.

Certainly Iraq pre-invasion made them look like a pushover!

That's not to say that invading would be painless, but let's not pretend that Canada would have a chance.

I wouldn't worry about that. Alberta had a pretty close election, and if their current premier Danielle Smith even hinted at the proposition of joining the US she would never win another election again. Not to mention that the federal government of Canada would also have to be on board for a province to seperate.

And yet, Carrie Lam did sell out Hong Kong to Chinese annexation, and was silent as student protest leaders were black-bagged and dragged off to the mainland for torturing. Her approval rating at that point bottomed out in the single digits; but that is what she did.

Not every politician is motivated solely by winning one more election.

If US annexation of Canada started to look like a fait accompli, and Trump was threatening terrible retributions for anyone who resisted him—which politicians would resist, and which would become Carrie Lams, or Pétains?

> Not to mention that the federal government of Canada would also have to be on board for a province to seperate.

You may be right about the other aspects, but "annexation", which Trump has proposed, isn't a negotiated thing, it is something that is forced.

There's always the French foreign legion. Ukraine has one too.

Economic force wouldn't be enough, so I'm guessing you mean military.

The idea of the US going to war with Canada is seriously stupid. Canada has fought beside the US military. There are deep ties between the countries that go much deeper than trade, many close friendships, and family connections across the border.

The US will not start a war with Canada, despite what Trump may make you think.

I don't understand why we haven't yet created an alliance of civilized Western countries? Like NATO, just without the US?

Contiguity on the map. (Yes, really.) Empire-building.

US will withdraw from NATO, Trump has wanted this since '87