She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavicist”, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. “It’s kind of baffling,” she says.

In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.

Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

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    22 hours ago

    Dude, you don’t understand truth number one about becoming a parent or you somehow got ppd and didn’t bond with your theoretical children that winked into existence when I called you out on not knowing about parenthood.

    I can’t tell if you’re mad about Trump or the gop because you spent days badmouthing someone who publicly criticised them on utterly spurious grounds and have come up with not one single substantive criticism of the current regime until I call you out on it, when it suddenly turns up but is really really vague compared with your irrational, specific and sustained ire against the effective and vocal critic of Trump’s authoritarianism. I can tell who you hate, and it’s this historian who spoke out against trump.

    Criticising people who leave their home country because they fear for their safety is, yes, just like the right wingers. They do that all the time. Like you, they take emigration to be a moral error.

    Trump would be delighted with your “she’s a coward” stance. It’s exactly the sort of purile hypocritical undermining and deflecting name-calling he would do himself.