The Adam Mockler Show - JD Vance EMBARRASSES Himself Trying to DEFEND TRUMP

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

Adam Mockler with MeidasTouch Network breaks down Donald Trump's Vice President JD Vance trying to justify the admin's attacks on elite Universities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, check this out. We're about to do something a little bit fun today. And by a little bit fun, I mean, we are going to surgically debunk this clip of J.D. Vance that is going viral in right-wing circles, because in it, he uses a lot of authoritarian justifications for his own administration's recent attacks on elite universities, on the media, on law firms, but mainly Harvard. I mean, any institution that can act as a check on the executive branch or push-forward intellectual progress is now being torn down by the administration, and the worst part is

the arguments J.D. Vance is using. The arguments they're all using are so lazy and dumb and easily debunkable. And that's where we come in. I don't want to waste any more of your time. Let's react to it and debunk everything that he says. He talks about education. He talks about brain drain. He tries to say that we don't need the best and the brightest from other countries coming to America to help with our research and development and to help push forward. forward our medicine and technology. I mean, I'll debunk everything he says here. Let's jump in. So the war, I don't call it a war, but obviously President Trump, you have concerns about elite education in America, Harvard University. And I do too, and it's great, and college is too

expensive. But are we getting closer to the point where we might have something of a brain drain? I haven't heard that phrase in a while. But I'm hearing that, you know, people at Johns Hopkins are getting nervous and they, you know, they're going to Finland. They're leaving and concerned about the long term. They do kind of do some important work, these schools. They do kind of do some important work. Yeah, Johns Hopkins, which sort of leads the way and some cancer research, does kind of do some important work, sure. Look, they do important work, but I make a couple points about this. First of all, I've heard a lot of the criticisms, the fear that they were going to have a brain drain. If you go back to the 50s and 60s, the American space

program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens, some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who had built an incredible space program with American talent. This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, you have to import a foreign class of servants. What is he talking about here? The straw man's are insane. We're not saying you have to import a foreign class of servants. We're saying immigration has played a huge part in the success of America. I mean, if you want to talk about 1950s and 60s space program,

you're leaving out Operation Paperclip. Operation Paperclip intentionally brought over German scientists after World War II to help contribute. Many Jewish scientists that fled Nazi Europe helped build everything from the Manhattan Project, the foundations of the science that we know today. So the idea that in the 1950s, in the 1960s, simply invested in our own people rather than not only welcoming but like incentivizing foreign talent to come into our pool and work with us he's lying jd vance is lying he's lying there's more to the

clip when i saw this this morning i was like i need to debunk all of it if you appreciate the work we do make sure you drop a like and subscribe but let's continue and and uh professors to do these things i just reject that i actually think we invest in our own people we can do a lot of good you've heard that criticism in particular as the president has talked about cracking down on foreign student visas and their abuses. But I think that's actually an opportunity for American citizens to really flourish. And here's the second and maybe the most fundamental point, Greg. These institutions do an important job.

But if you back up and look at American higher education over the past 20 or 30 years, there are a few incontrovertible facts. Number one, the hard. This is a cultural grievance time, by the way. It's just going to be cultural grievances. Hard sciences, particular biology, we have a terrible what's called a reproducibility crisis. meaning most of the papers that are published in biology, they don't replicate. They're not good science.

So even our elite universities are not often doing good science. Second important point, these institutions, sometimes by their own admission, are engaging in explicit racial discrimination, often against whites and Asians, in explicit violation of the Civil Rights Act. If the people's government can't come in, given those problems, and say, look, we're going to have some accountability here. You can't violate the Civil Rights Act. we're going to make sure that if we're funding science with federal money, you're actually doing good science. That's called accountability. That's not going to war on these institutions. Okay, there's more to the clip, but that's not accountability. It is going to war. You are

literally going to war through the courts. And while you're doing so, some of our top scientists and researchers are moving to the UK, are moving to other countries. And let's go into the cultural grievances for one second. He had two points there that I want to debunk. One of them was just pure cultural grievance. One of them was anti-intellectualism wrapped up in something that sounds kind of right. So when he talks about the reproducibility crisis and biology, that is very true. There are issues in peer review and being able to replicate things, but that is the point of science. The very people working to solve this problem and recreate these studies are scientists that either study at elite universities, work at elite universities, teach at elite

universities, this is not a reason to defund universities. It's a reason to support them so we can replicate the studies that you're talking about. The reproducibility crisis is not really a crisis. It's more of the scientific method not being understood. So if you want to hold scientists to a higher standard, you don't defund them. One more time. If you want to hold our scientists to a higher standard and try to incentivize them, you don't just defund them, which is what J.D. Vans is arguing for. These two things are contradictory. Then he talks about racial discrimination. He says explicit racial discrimination. That's just a right-wing attack on affirmative action. I'm not sure. Here's the thing. When you explain what affirmative action is to any Republican,

just in different wording, they understand it. The same thing with like DEI. Once you explain it in different wording, most Republicans understand. Now, was every affirmative action program absolutely perfect? No, I'm sure there were some abuses, but broadly, there's no evidence that universities have been favoring non-white students. In fact, universities throughout their history have likely, definitely favored wealthy white applicants. If you think about the legacy admissions, if you think about just donor preferences, or having rich families, or, you know, the standard tests that are designed to benefit white people more so. If you want to talk about fairness, we can start there. Affirmative action makes the applicant pool more fair in 95% of cases.

So let's finish this. Let me just make one final point about this. One final point. A lot about this. I want these universities to reform and to accept that they are part of an American body politic, that if the American taxpayer is frustrated with these universities, they've got to reform. What they're doing instead, what too many of them are doing is saying, oh, the Trump administration, this is dictatorial, this is fascism, no, this is democratic accountability. And I think the universities ought to see it as an opportunity. If they do that, they're going to get better and the American people will be better off because of it. This is democratic accountability solely through the executive branch done via executive order attacking universities and trying

to get them to curtail their behavior. That's democratic accountability. What about the judges that are pausing these and putting temporary restraining orders? If you want to talk about democracy, talk about that. He's basically saying that if universities don't comply with the executive branch, with, let's just say Trump's sole agenda, that they're playing the victim to democratic accountability. You can't just threaten institutions for being intellectually independent and for doing free research and then say that that's accountability. It's authoritarianism.

In the first 10 seconds, 20 seconds of this video, I said that J.D. Vance is using authoritarian justifications. And I would like to loop back to that and double down and say that J.D. Vance wants to wage war on our universities while wrapping it in the guise of patriotism. And I will leave it at that. Make sure you drop a like. Make sure you subscribe. I appreciate all of you. And I'll see you in the next video. Peace out.