‘Sane Asylum’: My Latest Hot Type Column in Byline
In my Saturday Hot Type column for Byline Supplement, I document the European and Canadian universities offering a safe harbor for US academics and scientists, echoing a dark past
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In my Saturday Hot Type column for Byline Supplement, I report with some relief that Europe and Canada are acutely aware of the dangerous climate in America and have been ramping up programs to quickly relocate scientists and academics so they can continue their important work.
Thank you as always to everyone who supports my work here and at Byline. I believe the work of independent investigative reporters exposing the transnational crime wave has revealed the failing of corporate media in stark contrast.
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Below is an excerpt:
Sane Asylum
Scientists and academics are being offered safe harbour from an increasingly authoritarian US in an echo of a dark past that could become an equally dark future, reports Heidi Siegmund Cuda
“Accept the truth from whoever utters it.”—Maimonides
On November 5, 2025, the day I became a woman without a country, my friend shared with me a quote he’d learned in his childhood.
“During the rise of Nazi Germany, the pessimists went to New York. The optimists went to Auschwitz.”
Family members of his had perished in the Holocaust, and I found the cold truth from that quote oddly reassuring.
I have spent much of the past decade investigating the parallels between the rise of fascism in Germany and the rise of fascism in America, while documenting the network ties to the terrorist state of Russia.
And still, as intellectual historian Marci Shore told me, too often people don’t seem to be aware of the danger they’re in until they’re actually inside the concentration camps.
And now, as tens of thousands of people in America are being arrested and deported — US citizens among those deported — I asked in last week’s column, how many is enough? On Friday, a Wisconsin judge was arrested for allegedly trying to help an undocumented defendant avoid arrest.
As America’s top scholar of Italian fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in her Lucid Substack last week, America is now in ‘authoritarian territory’ and yet, too many Americans remain oblivious to their proximity to danger.
What is important, however, is that democratic countries throughout the world are witnessing the authoritarian tactics being deployed in America and are stepping up to offer safe harbor for US intellectuals, whose work makes them a target of the Trump regime.
As scientists and academics leave America, Marci Shore told Byline Supplement: “Intellectual emigration is not just about intellectuals finding safe spaces, but also about encountering other people and other minds.
“Émigrés and emigration have played an enormous role in intellectual history, most famously the Russian-speaking emigration in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Central European Jewish emigration in the wake of Nazism.
“If Roman Jakobson hadn't left Moscow for Prague in 1920, a whole history of linguistic structuralism and avant-garde aesthetics in Central Europe might not have taken place. Likewise had Alexandre Koyré not introduced Roman Jakobson to Claude Levi-Strauss in New York during the Second World War, a whole history of structural anthropology would not have happened. Jakobson fled first the Bolsheviks, then the Nazis, as did Koyré and Lévi-Strauss. Think about Vladimir Nabokov and Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein and Nikolai Berdyaev and Thomas Mann and Herbert Marcuse, and perhaps my very favorite philosopher, Lev Shestov.”
Shore and her husband, historian and author Timothy Snyder, left their posts at Yale University for opportunity in Canada. Both now work at the University of Toronto, as does their Yale colleague Jason Stanley, who wrote the book How Fascism Works. Three of America’s leading academics now boost Canada’s intellectual wealth…
A Profound Impact
For Shore’s brother, opera composer Dan Shore, who is an assistant professor at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and an accompanist with the Boston Ballet School, much of American music is defined by those who escaped Nazi Germany.
“The biggest story here for me is the profound impact that the Nazis, or more specifically Jews fleeing from the Nazis, had on American music,” he told Byline Supplement. “Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most significant composers and teachers of the twentieth century, fled to the United States and wrote his most significant textbooks for his students here. Kurt Weill, who wrote The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny with Bertold Brecht, fled to the United States and became one of our most accomplished Broadway songwriters. Franz Waxman and Erich Korngold fled to the United States and helped establish the classic Hollywood film score sound we still hear in the movie theaters today.
“And how many great conductors fled the Nazis to lead orchestras in the United States? George Szell, Bruno Walter, Erich Leinsdorf...and I can't even begin to list all of the pianists, violinists, and other instrumentalists who came here and helped establish studios, run schools, and create training programs here.”
He said Germany and Austria, the countries who gave the world Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner, had been the center of the classical music world for hundreds of years before Hitler came to power.
He asked: “How much great music has come out of Germany and Austria since the death of card-carrying Nazi Richard Strauss in 1949? None.”
‘Scientific Asylum’
Sometimes I feel like I’m writing in the Twilight Zone, an upside down world where the good guys became the bad guys, and exile is happening in reverse. As a daughter of parents who came to America from post-World War Two Germany, seeing Europe and Canada now offer ports in the storm for US citizens under threat is surreal.
I often wish I could wake up from this nightmare to a world where America is still aligned with its post-World War II allies and not a global threat to democratic nations and aligned with Russia, but we must face the cold reality.
European countries have lived experience and seem to best understand our peril, as indicated by how quickly many universities are mobilizing to offer asylum for Americans.
Notably, France and other EU countries are offering ‘scientific asylum’ to US researchers. As Trump wages war on higher learning, instigating a multimillion dollar freeze on research, thousands of scholars became unfunded and unemployed overnight.
In response, European universities are swiftly recruiting them, with French universities leading the way. France’s Aix-Marseille University created the new program, Safe Place for Science, making funds available to over two dozen overseas researchers for three years…
I was just in Marseille shortly before the program was announced, and the industrial seaside town felt so much like San Francisco in the nineties, cool, lovely, gritty, and filled with possibility. All of that was stripped away as Silicon Valley became home to ‘brozillas’ — democracy-wrecking monsters who sucked the life out of my beautiful home, which became too expensive for mere mortals.
Marseille is not alone in opening its doors. The Pasteur Institute in Paris also announced they are actively recruiting American experts in infectious diseases, and France’s Minister of Higher Education and Research is urging the nation’s more scientific institutions to expedite ways to encourage immigration…
Like Aix-Marseille, the Belgian university opened new post-doctoral positions for international scholars, with an emphasis on those who are US-based.
Universities in the Netherlands are also moving rapidly to open up avenues to offer scientific asylum for US researchers…
The speed with which the global science community is moving to offer safe harbor for US expats is an indication of how desperate these hours are.
“One never knows where all this fleeing and intermingling and encountering will lead,” said Marci Shore.
If history is any indication, Europe and Canada will make great gains, while America, with its government institutions now led by quacks, charlatans, and traitors, will continue to suffer from a collective lack of imagination as to how it happened here.
The above report in an excerpt of my Hot Type column originally published Saturday in Byline Supplement, April 26, 2025.
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Excellent essay, as usual. Thank you.
One week from today I'll be heading to San Jose for a major synthetic biology conference. I'm to be on a panel on how arts & culture influence the direction of science and technology, and I had already planned to discuss the dismantling of the scientific infrastructure in the USA and the ongoing brain drain from, instead of to, the US. I will be sure to cite this 'Sane Asylum' essay when I do. I also plan to talk about Silicon Valley TESCREAL-bros, another subject you've written about.
Here's a link to an essay about how I'm preparing for that conference. I would love to hear from you if you can find the time to read it — if not the whole thing, then maybe the précis? I hope it's not rude to include it here, but if it is, please delete this comment.
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnsundman/p/synbiobeta-dreaming-2025?r=38b5x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false