You know what’s fun? Put JD Vance in front of a friendly interviewer and let him talk. In this case, He sat down with a Breitbart drone and felt confident to just unfurl his freak flag and sing.
I actually think we have to destroy the universities in this country. They get too much money, they have too much power, I don’t think they do anything good.
He also claims that universities teach students to hate your country and hate your family
. I had to quickly review my syllabi to see if I included those points…oops, no, I guess I’m going to have to spend my weekend doing revisions.
There’s so much hatred of education and learning in that interview…I’d go on, but he’s such a prolific source of insanity that The Cut listed a guide to his most unhinged public statements. It doesn’t even include his DESTROY ALL UNIVERSITIES
talk.
And he’s just the vice president candidate. CNN compiled a list of 12 blatant lies Trump said in the last month.
And folks thought Trump loved the poorly educated..
I mean he does but Vance loves them so, soo much more! Becoz you would have to be even more willfully ignorant and deliberately close-minded and incurious to support Vance – which says a lot.
Every sentence is wrong and a lie.
.1. The universities don’t get enough money.
Back in the Dark Ages of the 1970s, the good public university I went to was heavily subsidized by the state. My tuition the first year was something like $600. Tuition this year is in-state $12,500. That state subsidy has all but disappeared.
.2. The universities don’t have too much power. They have in fact, very little power.
This is partly because their reason for existence isn’t to accumulate and exercise power.
Universities educate people and do research.
.3. Vance: I don’t think they do anything good.
JD Vance is dumb.
Thirty of the world’s top 40 research universities are in the USA. This explains a lot about why the US is the leading economy in the world and leads in scientific research and development.
Our military depends heavily on the universities for research and development and also for educating the soldiers.
And, an educated population is needed to run a Hi-Tech advanced society.
It used to be said that those (former) heavily subsidized college degrees paid for themselves. Educated people get better jobs and make more money, and so pay more taxes.
JD Vance is just outright dumb.
He is also seriously weird.
Is this really much different from Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge?
Who is this “we” here?
All of our powerful elected officials are also highly educated in mostly our elite universities.
Vance himself is a self described hillbilly from Appalachia who climbed out of poverty by going to Ohio State University and then getting a law degree from Yale.
The hypocrisy of this guy is immense.
I can’t think of too many societies that destroyed their universities.
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
Maybe China under Mao with his cultural revolution.
Both of these cases ended up being major failures.
Vance seems to think these are good paths to follow.
Right, what the USA needs is a Mao style Cultural Revolution where we shut down the universities and send all the professors to the countryside to do agricultural work.
I’m sure our society will benefit when people like Dr. PZ Myers are forced to weed corn crops with hoes and harvest the corn crop by hand.
Maybe just Yale?
This is particularly rich coming from the part of the Republican ticket that (a) got an undergraduate degree from the single Big Ten university most distorted by the dominance of its athletic department and (b) got a doctoral degree from Yale. Especially as to the latter, one wonders what his student-loan history looks like. (And anyone who says “GI Bill” has no idea whatsoever how the “modern” — that is, post-First Gulf War — system works… or what the actual “dealer-sticker-price” tuition at Yale Law School was when Vance attended.)
Keep people uneducated and they’ll believe anything you tell them.
These guys really belong to the same groupmind don’t they.
Extreme cons/fascists/authoritarians of all stripes share the same fear of higher learning, probably conscious of the fact that their bullshit is easily parsed (and ridiculed) by those ‘orrible professors.
And let’s ignore the fact that, while deriding “learned people” as unmanly and weak they appear to be mightily terrified by them, in fact one of the first things on any tyrant’s playbook is bringing the unis to heel.
In short, classic ur-fascist playbook, nothing new:
https://archive.org/details/umberto-eco-ur-fascism/umberto-eco-ur-fascism.lt/
EXCEPT it might happen for real, in some form, in a couple of months.
Why aren’t the Dems collecting these fascist quotes and soundbites from these right wing clowns and blaring them on every media outlet with color commentary?
He’s running for the second highest office in a party that receives most of its votes from those without a college education. From his perspective, getting rid of the universities and destroying the education system is investing in the future.
@ Akira MacKenzie : Hopefully they are..
Or will. Guess it takes time.
“I actually think we have to destroy the universities in this country. They get too much money, they have too much power, I don’t think they do anything good.”
Desantis has already done this in Florida. The far right’s attack on education at all levels needs to become toast.
@#10WalterSolomon
Yup, they want to create more Republican voters because they can’t do it through intelligent conversation. Or is it just easier for them?
Quit using The Cut because of that godawful cat article. It’s owned by Vox, which owns New York Magazine, which employs Olivia Nuzzi, who had an emotional affair with RFK Jr.
This supposed man of the people from somewhere in Appalachia (well, at least he spent a few weeks there when he was a kid) is really just an elite snob. He thinks Yale is your average US university. Of course, guess where he’ll send his kids in a few years?
raven @ # 2: Every sentence is wrong and a lie.
Unfortunately, I must disagree. When Vance says
he may well mean it. (Okay, with a possible exception for football programs. And Liberty U.)
@4 Raven
“All of our powerful elected officials are also highly educated in mostly our elite universities.”
Attended maybe, educated no. The goal of an undergraduate education is not to accumulate facts, It’s to learn how to think –problem solving in the very general sense of the term. How many of our “powerful elected officials” could think their way out of a wet paper bag?
@5 Nemo
I think the poison from the Harvard Business and Law Schools dwarfs the other Ivy League schools (poison ivy?).
I think JD Vance has a layer of synthetic tissue, like the terminator. Inside is some reptilian alien that wants to destroy the Earthlings from inside. His social ineptitude is a big giveaway.
I guess the vancehole is the founder of the National Anti-intellectuals for tRUMP coalition. I wish people would/could just see that his hateful, idiotic (often self-contradictory) spiel is just as insane as tRUMP’s. But they won’t. That would require analytical thinking that they know is against jebus’ teachings. They’ll just continue to chug down the mind numbing tRUMP koolaid and drool.
‘CNN compiled a list of 12 blatant lies Trump said in the last month.’ I guess they don’t research anything completely anymore. I can’t believe it was just 12! After all, he is ‘credited’ with over 30,000 lies in the 4 years he spent destroying things in the white house!
Calls David Icke: “Hey David, we’ve got another live one for ya!”
He graduated from Yale. Senator Cruz from TX graduated from Harvard. ???How did they do this???
…maybe he isn’t wrong.
Killing the intelligentsia is the traditional way to start a genocide. In addition to Pol Pot, there was the Red Terror in Russia, and the White Terror in Spain, plus at least 30 entries in the wiki page on eliticide. Nazis were all about burning books and eventually escalated to the authors and professors.
Shady does provide a good example of the abysmal education he received from his Ivy League Alma mater.
Advocating for a Red White and Blue terror is blatantly fascist, and possibly qualifies as sedition since he is an elected official.
I cannot wait to see Tim Walz debate this utter tool.
Coach vs couch?
I always find it funny when fascists do identify a real problem in our society but completely flub the solution. The problem with out colleges I’d that they are privatized factories for producing elites, professional technicians for industry, and class replication. They aren’t there to cultivate people and maximize their potential as human beings. The real solution is universal free higher education for all who want it run by the actual educators for the benefit of the people. And this doesn’t even get into how some schools are just football teams or hedgefunds with seminars attached.
Um – I don’t see how CNN could reduce the list of lies told by Trump in the last month down to only 12.
@crimsonsage #24: they didn’t “fail” to identify the real problem, that kind of implies they tried.
By and large, they don’t care about the real problem, they care about producing sound bites that will get them in power.
Do they believe what they say? Neither yes, neither no. They simply don’t consider whether what they believe is true or false, like you or I would do.
Fascists don’t have ideas. They have intentions. And the rest is just rationalizations for those intentions, and will change on a whim whenever convenient.
They play by different rules.
Sherman J @ #20,
I think the operative word there is ‘blatant’ – I am sure Trump told many more than twelve lies, but the twelve that CNN singled out are presumably so qualitatively awful that even a mainstream media source, inured in levelling ‘both sides’ out to mundanity even when one of those sides is grotesquely disconnected from reality, had to sit up and notice.
@22: That’s an issue only if you buy in to the mythology in The Paper Chase (which was already nearly obsolescent in the 70s). Flunking out almost requires effort… Yale Law School doesn’t have any grades at all — getting in appears to be good enough.
The only law schools that still have “look to your left; look to your right; one of the three of you won’t be here at the end of the year” are marginal law schools (which I won’t name here) that take a lot of marginal students — some of whom can become good lawyers, but their other circumstances kept them away from “higher prestige” institutions. (Family-and-financial being the primary of such circumstances.)
Tethys @ 23
Vance did work briefly in corporate law, whereas Walz is reportedly bad at interviews. However, Walz’s team can take some comfort in the fact (although hopefully not too much comfort) that Vance is so terrible at news interviews.
I think it’s important to remember that Vance is only one McHeartattack away from becoming president if Trump gets in, and that Trump could have won the 2020 presidency if the right 3,700 people in the US flipped their vote to Republican. So if any of you have a family member who seems like they might be flippable to vote Democrat, you might want to consider doing so. As a Canadian, all I can do is worry about how Americans will vote.
@HidariMak #29: Walz is demonstrably not bad at interviews; it’s how he got the veep gig.
At least, we could demand that those who run for office can come up with interesting yarns, like those old sailor tales.
Right now it is more like prime minister Botha, in the song “I’ve Never Met a Nice South African”.
J D Vance during his uninhibited moments would fit into those Monthy Python sketches about dim-witted upper-class twits. But he needs to work on his Brit accent.
Nemo @ 30
My brain misfired. I’d heard a few news reports saying that Vance was rumoured to be bad at debates, but was thinking of the part of the sentence regarding Vance’s lack of skill at news interviews.
It’s worse than that.
Trump is declining cognitively at a rapid pace.
He isn’t going to be much of a president even if he gets elected.
He will be a figurehead, a symbol, and meat puppet.
They will just prop him up in a chair with soft drinks, a TV, and something to connect to X formerly Twitter.
His staff and owners will be running the USA.
That would be the Heritage Foundation, the ultra-rich oligarchies, Elon Musk, Fox NoNews, and JD Vance.
…
It’s amazing how much a lack of sleep can screw up a functioning brain. The message I was trying for in posts 29 and 33 is that WALZ is rumoured to be bad at DEBATES. I’m guessing that the VP debate won’t have the same knockout punch as the presidential debate, but am still expecting Walz to win it.
Walz taught HS social studies before he got elected to office. I am confident he will drag that hillbilly across the debate stage with historical facts about various fascist regimes if/when he says asinine things such as
“We need to destroy Universities”.
I hope he hammers them on the immigrant pet eating propaganda and the resulting terrorism that is currently happening in Ohio due to knowingly spreading blood libel.
Perhaps we will get to savor the delicious tears of the fascists when #2 fails to carry his home state.
This weird show sums up JD Vance et al nicely.
‘Alien Super Show
Trump Gets Humiliated by his Own Major Missteps’
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=2-sLpkjTC28
raven@34:
You left out Vladimir Putin.
Mmmm. Putin is past it.
Question is when, not if. IMO.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/22/putin-regime-will-collapse-without-warning-says-freed-gulag-dissident