A view from the north
I'm both American and Canadian. I immigrated to Canada in summer of 2016, a few months before Trump won the 2016 election (and have since become a Canadian citizen). It was a weird time to have immigrated. On the one hand, the weekend of the election, my husband and I attended a protest that passed in front of the US consulate in Toronto. We attended the Unitarian congregation in our neighbourhood for the first time, kicking off four years of intense involvement in that community. The (also American+Canadian) pastor's sermon that Sunday was a barn-burner, a salve for our shocked and broken hearts. The 2016 Trump election was an event here, too.
On the other hand, it felt like we were removed from the major political activities of the first Trump administration: we didn't go to airports to protest the Muslim ban, we weren't in the streets of US cities for the 2020 uprisings. (And, given the immune situation in our household, we didn't go to the #blm protests in Toronto, either). We didn't have a sense of first-person exposure to the whims and depredations of the first Trump administration, as we surely would have, had my career not brought us to Toronto from Detroit.
I had planned a course for winter term 2017, "Media, Technology, Control," that was to have been a devastating critique of Hillary Clinton neoliberalism, grounded in the late work of Michel Foucault; I very nearly tore that course up and reworked it around the Frankfurt School thinker Theodor Adorno. I didn't, because I remembered that we in Canada were still living with Justin Trudeau neoliberalism. (And Mark Carney's corporatist neoliberalism is the best we can hope for right now, sadly.)
Last time around, despite a frankly-surprisingly-shitty conservative premier in Ontario, I felt reasonably comfortable personally, knowing that things were mostly secure and stable in this country dedicated to "peace, order, and good government." And knowing that the University of Toronto, my new employer, was a fairly rock-solid institution.
This time, I feel like I'm on very unstable ground indeed.
First of all, the vibe in Canada is not one of removed security from a terrible but mostly incompetent and largely parochial US administration. We're now in an escalating trade war, with threats of annexation. (A Canschluss, if you will. Nyuk.) Canadians seem to be coming together, but Canadian nationalism is a weird, unstable thing (and that's generally a Good Thing for Canada, in my humble opinion). Meanwhile, a police officer with an AR-15 strapped to his chest showed up to talk to me about my reading material when I was reading Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline in Logan Airport in August. (Picking that particular reading material for an airport lounge is on me, but it feels very rattling indeed for an assault rifle to show up to book club.)
I'm at-least-for-now certain that neither my university nor my federal granting agency will be required to ensure I don't use bad words in my work. But I'm giving work at Berkeley and Stanford this week, some of which is about Frankfurt School critical theory, and some of which commits acts of queer theory. These are anathema to the fascist anti-DEI witch hunt. I am, for the second time in my professional life, nervous about giving a talk. (The first time, I declined to have a talk I gave about #blm streamed and recorded, since I didn't want to broadcast my potential getting-it-wrong over the whole internet for posterity to find problematic.) This nervousness is rather exacerbated by crossing a now-weirdly-charged international border to give this work, even though I'm a citizen on both sides of that border.
It's also, I think, rather more deeply pitched because of how universities, despite their dedication to seemingly-neutral "Chicago principles," really screwed the proverbial pooch last year with the anti-genocide encampments. U of T, where I work, was home to the longest-running encampment in North America, and did something like an admirable job of managing never to take a position. Lots of universities cracked down extremely hard on/encouraged state violence to be visited upon student protesters. These protesters were, as it always goes, annoying and imprecise in the way student protesters always are. But they were also indubitably on the right side of history. There's still a genocide on in Gaza. (I cannot but note the steeply asymmetrical rhyme between the Israeli government cutting off electricity to Gaza and Doug Ford's export tax on Ontarian electricity going to the US, given Trump's frankly unhinged response to Ford's move.)
As always, the politics of this fact are subtly but importantly different in Canada than they are in the US, and here and now isn't the time to fully unfold that (and I'm not sure I really understand it fully). What I do know is that the University of Toronto is not likely to have a much stronger spine than its cognates in the US. Having seen how the specific people in charge at this institution responded to the encampments and student demands in 2024, I can only hope it learns how to grow both a spine and a set of principles when push comes to shove, as it surely must.
The degenerate spectacle of Columbia University's so-called leaders cravenly caving to right-wing and even fascist demands of avowed Zionists and far right MAGA demands was bad enough. Here's what it got them: $400M withheld (almost certainly illegally) by the Trump administration. The small-c-conservative impulse to "protect the institution" by trying to comply, both in time and in advance, can only destroy faith in your institution from the bottom--and it gets you literally nothing in return from the fascists. This impulse to comply--and to encourage or extort or coerce or demand compliance from those below you--is, in fact, one of the things university """leadership""" is selected for.
I was surprised that the U of T encampment ended without state violence, actually. I worried that the donor class whose favour the University continually courts would demand such violence for U of T to remain fundable. The president of a university has a mandate to keep the donor class happy. The stronger desire still to keep any and all possibly bad news out of the newspapers prevailed, thankfully, in this particular case. But when push comes to shove--and again, it surely must--I have no faith that any Canadian university's leadership will protect students and faculty against bureaucratic and other malfeasance from a rogue provincial or federal government. And there's still very much a chance that we'll get a PC government at the federal level that will reprise the Harper-era war on science (let alone humanities).
All I can hope is that both the curdling of anti-MAGA, and frankly anti-American sentiment in Canada, as well as watching what is happening in the US academy, will encourage both a repudiation of right wing politics and "policies," and the formulation of a set of principles and some fucking courage on the part of our dear colleagues who, up to now, have managed to be both craven, when facing right, and patronizing, when facing left. Being a leftist, I saw somebody once quip on Bluesky, or Twitter, means always being correct--but always too soon.
All I can offer, for now, is that I want to know what it might be that I can do to help my colleagues in the US, as a Canadian academic with a modestly-funded humanities, arts, and critical-social-sciences research Centre dedicated to media and tech. Beyond, I suppose, being as plainspoken as I can be, when I can muster the time & gumption to speak--nervousness aside. I do have a grant in the works from SSHRC to fund queer and trans histories of computing, which is my own little way of helping to make queer-and-trans-life more survivable in the US. I'm sure there's more, but I also don't know what the vibe really is at US universities and in the US generally (despite my US-heavy media diet, a common Canadian affliction). Please, if there's something I can do, reach out at hi@scottrichmond.me or @scottrichmond.77 on Signal.
We don't know, yet, what the particular contours of this dystopia will be. (Like, I just had my mother send me my childhood vaccination records to ensure that I had two doses of the MMR vaccine. That was not on my 2025 bingo card, although it probably should have been.) A lot of the fear lies in the uncertainty, and of course, that is the point. Certainty won't actually arrive at all, beyond the certainty that (a) shit is awful and will keep getting awfuller for a good long while, and (b) because uncertainty is the norm, and it's now impossible to tell the difference between catastrophe and catastrophizing, courage will look like doing something in the absence of what feels like sufficient information about how it will go.
I've spent a lot of time trying to tease out that difference, between actual catastrophe and anxious catastrophizing in therapy. But it's not a therapeutic problem, it's a structural one. It's even a particularly Canadian problem at the moment, since it's basically impossible to tell just how seriously to take my dark fantasy, upon seeing the skyline while flying into Toronto in late February, of a Battle of Toronto as Canadians resist American military occupation.
One thing I know we need (even as it's not everything we need) is as much plainspoken, clear-sighted description of the catastrophe as we can muster. The catastrophe has long been here, just unevenly distributed, but it will come for us all. How we stay on the inside of conviviality and solidarity and support with one another while it arrives--inside and outside the academy, and across international borders--is one of the questions of the moment. It will continue to be for quite some time, since the nature of catastrophe is that it will keep changing. And so the obligation of speaking the truth of catastrophe will keep falling upon us, for as long as we can see into the future.