I Just Saw Tim Snyder on The Beat, And Noticed Something Disturbing.
Tim Snyder, author of On Tyranny, and other books, is a frequent guest on MSNBC. Especially on the Rachel Maddow show. If you look at his CV, it's incredibly impressive. He's one of the great political science thinkers of the age.
His Chyron normally lists him as a professor at Yale, which makes sense, since he's been a professor at Yale since 2001. Tonight, it shows him as a professor at The University of Toronto. I looked it up, and sure enough, Snyder moved from Yale to Toronto in July.
Has the BRAIN DRAIN officially begun again?
There was a brain drain in the 1950s, during the McCarthy Era, when Canada, the UK, and Europe became the beneficiaries of thousands of academics, scientists, and other intellectual who were fleeing right wing populism. And as those brains were fleeing the country, millions of flat-headed oafs were cheering, and saying "good riddance, you leftist pinkos!" It took decades to repair the damage.
Here we go again. It looks like Canada, UK, and Europe is about to get another windfall of vaccine scientists, public health specialists, and various other intellectuals, thanks to THE SAME POLITICAL PARTY. They call themselves the Republican Party, but Republican is the LAST thing they are. They're the Nihilist Party, or the Know Nothing Party, or the John Birch Society. But they have nothing to do with republicanism.
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It's also true that a concerning March 2025 survey by the journal Nature found that 75% of U.S.-based scientists were considering moving abroad. This was particularly true for early-career scientists, with nearly 80% of postgraduates indicating they were weighing job options in Canada or Europe.
And yes, there is a brain drain. How much is hard to say.
And NO, there's no brain drain that's ever OFFICIALLY BEGUN. BE aware that many have not left. Snyder has relocated but has not abandoned the U.S. and the democratic project. And even those who leave will always collaborate with America's fellow experts and professionals.
There are thousands more skilled and experienced experts outside this government than in it. That doesn't mean they're leaving. We see them on TV and online every single day.
Might the trump machine target them? Hard to say, but I prefer to believe that those high level experts are biding their time and waiting to see positive turning points, and that we're not completely drained of expertise.
Like the rest of us, our professional experts also take heart in seeing millions upon millions of Americans protesting our current destructive situation. It's logical to err on the side of preferring not to fear for our future, and to prefer to think that these experts, like millions of the rest of us, won't give up or give in and abandon the democratic project. They have families and children, too.
Solidarity. 
