Firing academics who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death just like Nazi Germany, professor says

A former Yale University professor who fled to Canada because of what he said are his concerns about President Donald Trump is once again suggesting a parallel between current day politics and Nazi Germany.

Professor Jason Stanley now teaches at the University of Toronto. On Sunday, he appeared on MSNBC to say that what is going on in the country is actually “worse than the McCarthy Era.”

Some of the incidents that led him to this conclusion include the firing of professors who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

“I want to take a little issue with your comparison to the McCarthy era. Forty academics were dismissed over their posts about Charlie Kirk,” Stanley said. “I’m not aware of such a rapid mass firing of academics in…the McCarthy era.”

As reported by The College Fix, some professors and administrators have said they have “ZERO sympathy” for Kirk or said they were “CELEBRATING” the assassination of the founder and CEO of Turning Point USA.

“So, I think to some extent this is much worse than the McCarthy era,” Stanley said, as reported by Mediaite. “We’ve had…countless people fired across countless industries. We had The Washington Post fire Karen Attiah, their only Black columnist, opinion columnists, remaining, for utterly innocuous posts claiming it was over Charlie Kirk,” he told Ali Velshi.

“Basically, people are targeting anyone whose political opinions they don’t like…So, that’s what they’re trying to do,” he said. “They’re trying to take this as any excuse to target people whose political orientations, whose truth telling really does not fit their narrative.”

Mediaite flagged another exchange where Stanley drew parallels between Nazi Germany and Trump’s actions to deport illegal immigrants (70 percent of whom have a criminal conviction or charge).

Stanley said:

And I think that they’re throwing everything at this. This is more than McCarthy. What this is, it’s an attempt to invoke the Insurrection Act, as you said. So, what they’re trying to do, there’s two historical antecedents to pay attention to here…And the first is the Reichstag fire, when…allegedly a communist burned down the German Reichstag and Hitler…flooded the streets with…his sort of official thugs, which is sort of equivalent to, analogous to, what it looks like is happening with ICE.

And then extreme voter intimidation happened. And then after the election, [Hitler] passed the Enabling Act to take full power. So, that seems to be a very clear antecedent here. And the other, of course, is, is Kristallnacht, when a German diplomat was assassinated in Paris by a Polish Jew and they called for the targeting of Jewish shops and synagogues.

This is not the first time Stanley, who considers himself an expert on fascism, has compared Trump or Republicans to Hitler (or Stalin). In 2020, he compared Trump to Hitler for a variety of reasons, including his supposed ignoring of science, criticism of the media, and allegedly endorsing “right-wing militias.”

Trump’s criticism of mass migration also reminds Stanley of Hitler, according to comments he made in 2024.

“And it, of course, was the core of Nazi ideology, when Hitler had this crazed conspiracy theory that Jews lost World War I to — betrayed Germany in World War I in order to bring in Black Senegalese soldiers into the Rhineland to mate, have children, rape and seduce German women, to undermine the white race,” Stanley told Democracy Now!

“We have a classic fascist situation in this country right now,” Stanley said in Dec. 2023. “Trump is a fascist leader who intends to overthrow the country and democracy — and he’s very good at it.”

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