Not mentioned in this video is that Stanley in 2020 was careful to say Trumpism was fascist while specifying the U.S. didn’t have a genocidal regime. That changed in 2025, as he described America as an authoritarian state worth fleeing, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazis. He fled, which is why he’s now introduced from Toronto.

That’s a top subject-matter expert updating his assessment based on evidence.

The use of Shelley’s poem in the video is about the gap between the self-inscription and the sand.

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Stanley’s argument in the video is that Trump knows about the sand and is trying to prevent it by making his regime permanent. The poem becomes not just irony but prophecy contested. Trump drew the opposite lesson from the poem: don’t let your signs get taken down.