Hot Type: 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

Thousands gathered to support the Sciences in America at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, 7 March 2025. Photo: Robyn Stevens Brody/Sipa USA/Alamy

“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.