'A stain on the degree of every Yale graduate': Dem rep shreds Vance in blistering speech
U.S. Vice President JD Vance walks, ahead of President Donald Trump delivering remarks on tariffs, in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 2, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis
NBC News reports the 2028 election is already underway with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) unleashing a blistering attack on Vice President JD Vance at the prestigious Connecticut university where he obtained his law degree.
“Let me say this as clearly as I can: JD Vance, your cold indifference to the lives of vulnerable immigrants betrays every principle that this law school was built to uphold,” Khanna said in a speech at Yale Law School. “Your affiliation with this law school is now a stain on the degree of every Yale graduate.”
“Vance has not only declared war on the courts, but on the universities. And it is no accident,” he continued. “As Stephen Kotkin observed in his study of Stalin, strongmen do not fear recessions or even failed wars as much as they fear the university.”
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His speech came a day after the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion in grants to Harvard University after it rejected Trump’s demands to address so-called campus “antisemitism,” which also happens to mandate the elimination of Harvard’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The demands also include banning masks at campus protests, merit-based hiring and admissions reforms and the targeting and disempowering of faculty and administrators the administration views as “more committed to activism than scholarship.”
Almost 900 Yale faculty members published a letter to their leadership this week expressing support for standing up to the Trump administration alongside Harvard.
“We stand together at a crossroads,” the letter read. “American universities are facing extraordinary attacks that threaten the bedrock principles of a democratic society, including rights of free expression, association, and academic freedom. We write as one faculty, to ask you to stand with us now.”
Khanna noted Vance’s response to the mistaken deportation and offsite incarceration of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. Vance falsely refers to Garcia as a “convicted MS-13 gang member,” despite Garcia having no record here or abroad. He also falsely calls him “an illegal immigrant with no right to be in our country,” despite a 2019 protection order against his removal from the U.S.
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“When Americans asked for due process, [Vance] answered not with reason, but with feigned rage — accusing us of sympathy for a gang member,” Khanna said.
Read the full NBC article at this link.
