Author Series | Jason Stanley | Erasing History

Yale University Professor, Jason Stanley, discusses his latest book Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Combining historical research with modern geopolitical analysis, Stanley makes an urgent global call to action on behalf of democracy to save the world’s last century of progress on race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Authoritarian movements have found fertile ground and developed in the United States as well as around the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, it is imperative to go back to extract lessons learned from our past. In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations’ history and traditions are discouraged, if not an outright danger to those who do it. In Erasing History, Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. Stanley illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality, all while illustrating the ways we are ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway.

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of six books, including How Fascism Works and How Propaganda Works. Stanley is a member of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School and serves on the advisory board of the Prison Policy Initiative. He writes frequently about authoritarianism, democracy, propaganda, free speech, and mass incarceration for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, and many other publications.