Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (2014) s12e22 Episode Script

1
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight"!
I'm John Oliver, thank you so much
for joining us. We are back!
And a lot has happened
over the last few weeks.
The National Guard continued
to wander around D.C.
looking for something to do,
these two got engaged,
and on Wednesday, Xi Jinping
held a massive military parade,
featuring troops
running past missiles,
this shot of pure, uncut shaft,
and Xi himself somberly
sticking his head out of a sunroof
like your most uptight friend trying
to be fun at her bachelorette party.
He looks like a dog who just got
some concerning medical news.
Now, in what many took
to be a rebuke to Trump,
Xi's guests included Vladimir Putin,
who was caught on a hot mic
engaging in some fun small talk.
As biotechnology continues
to develop,
human organs
will continue to be transplanted,
and people will become younger
and perhaps even achieve immortality.
Okay, set aside the weirdness
of hearing such supervillain shit
over the visuals of two 72-year-olds
getting their steps in,
the last thing you want to hear
autocrats getting interested in
is young organs.
Because you know the answer
to "where would you get them?"
is not going to be
"an unusually strong pig."
But we're gonna start
here in the U.S.,
which has seen weeks of chaos
surrounding vaccines.
Last month, Trump and RFK fired
the head of the CDC.
On that same day, the FDA released
new Covid vaccine guidelines
that limited their use
for many Americans.
And then on Wednesday,
this happened.
With the CDC in turmoil,
there's new fallout this morning
after Florida's move
to end vaccine mandates,
including those
for schoolchildren.
The Florida Department of Health,
in partnership with the governor,
is going to be working to end
all vaccine mandates in Florida law.
All of them! All of them!
Yeah, all of them! Vaccines for polio!
Measles! Mumps! Diphtheria!
Whooping cough! All of them!
It is genuinely weird
to hear such terrifying news
announced so cheerfully,
the same way it'd be weird
to hear your pilot announcing,
"Great news: we've replaced
all the toilets"
"with holes that suck you into the sky.
All of them! Isn't that good?"
That guy is Florida's surgeon general,
he holds a ton of questionable views.
He's been a supporter
of hydroxychloroquine
as a treatment for Covid,
even though it's been repeatedly
shown not to work on it.
He called for a halt to adding fluoride
to Florida's water supply
and recently stated, "I support
the decision to consume raw milk",
amid an outbreak of E. coli linked
to it in his state.
And he took some pretty
wild swings in his speech
against vaccine mandates,
including this.
Every last one of them is wrong and
drips with disdain and slavery.
Who am I to tell you what your child
should put in your body?
I don't have that right!
Okay. Now,
much like a Florida textbook,
I'm gonna skip right past
the slavery part and point out:
you are the surgeon general!
It is actually your obligation
to advise people
on what vaccines should be
in their children's bodies.
And look, I am not a doctor, I just
think about one before I go to sleep.
But even I know there are certain
things you're allowed to tell people
to put in their kid's body.
Water, for instance. Nutrients.
One piece of dog food,
just to end the discussion.
And also,
life-saving vaccines.
But it's also wild to hear that whole
"parents, you do you" stance
from a man who's sought to
ban gender-affirming medical care
for minors
regardless of parental consent.
And it is worth noting, Florida,
like many states,
already allows parents to opt out
of vaccines for religious reasons.
But there is
a big difference between that
and the state's top health official
comparing vaccine mandates to slavery
with the voice of a used car salesman
and the body language of someone
nut-tapping two ghosts.
All these medical groups
have since come out
against what Florida is doing.
And even Fox News's in-house
medical expert
pointed out
why it is a terrible idea.
You could, at a state level, say,
"If you want to go to kindergarten,
you need this vaccine."
Why do we want you to have it,
if you don't have an exemption?
Because of something
called herd immunity.
Because measles, if you go
into a room where measles was
and you are not vaccinated,
within two hours,
there's a 90% chance
you are going to get it.
And so, for immunocompromised kids,
the only way to protect them
is to have 95% of the population
vaccinated.
You're joining a community
when you go to kindergarten.
You're not only
thinking about yourself,
you're thinking about others.
That's where the basis of it is.
Exactly.
And it is shocking to hear such good
health information on Fox Business,
in the same way that it'd be weird
if Dr. Fauci chose
to make an appearance on
Scheana Shay's "Shenangians" podcast.
It's just not where I'd expect to hear
a passionate defense of public health.
I'm glad I'm getting it. I'm just
a little surprised at the source.
But he is right there: you are joining a
community when you go to kindergarten.
You're also joining
a macaroni art gallery,
an unofficial Halloween
candy trading society,
and a recorder symphony-slash-terrorist
group of audio torture professionals.
But fundamentally,
you're joining a community.
Now, the good news here is that
some states are going the other way.
Just this week, California, Oregon
and Washington launched
a West Coast Health Alliance designed
to preserve vaccine access.
But Florida probably won't be
the last state to take this step,
which will inevitably result in kids,
and others, getting sick and dying.
And while it is not great
that certain leaders
seem to be getting obsessed with
achieving immortality through science,
I'd argue it is frankly humiliating
that ours currently seem intent
on doing the exact fucking opposite.
And now, this.
And Now: Checking In on the Dismal
Prop Comedy of the U.S. Congress.
You see, this is a simple meme
that you would find on the internet,
but this meme is very real.
Why don't we go ahead
and play a round?
Okay, that was my attempt
to roll the dice.
This is, of course, a picture
of former President Ronald Reagan,
naturally, firing a machine gun
while riding on the back of a dinosaur.
This is what
you could end up looking like
if you eat some
of the raw frozen shrimp
being sent to the United States
by other countries.
I believe this is actually the first
time in American history
that we have a taxidermied
swamp creature
on the actual floor
of the House of Representatives.
We need them to confirm, firm,
firm, firm, firm, firm.
A person who will work, work,
work, work, work, work.
To ensure that we can FERC,
FERC, FERC, FERC, FERC, FERC.
Before I start talking,
I just want to take a quick drink
of this super delicious milk.
Moving on. Our main story
tonight concerns universities.
They've brought us friendships,
staggering, unrelenting debt,
raunchy comedies
where the protagonists engage
in antics we now recognize
as sexual assault,
and amazing research studies
like this.
I see this childlike curiosity when
people see these rats driving.
I'm surprised at the extent,
but I know that we've been doing
this for a couple of years now,
and every person
who has seen it,
they're surprised, they seem
to be intrigued by this.
Yeah, of course they are,
it's a rat driving a car.
What is not to be intrigued by?
Unfortunately, though,
tonight's show is not gonna be
about rats driving cars.
It can be. You can just play the last
30 seconds over and over again.
I certainly would.
Instead, it's gonna be about Trump's
ongoing war with higher education.
In his last presidential campaign,
Trump promised to target universities,
especially those that he said were
engaging in "racial discrimination",
suggesting the universities had become
increasingly hostile to white students.
And as protests against the war in Gaza
broke out across campuses,
his campaign rhetoric escalated.
To every college president, and I say,
remove the encampments immediately,
vanquish the radicals, and take back our
campuses for all of the normal students
who want a safe place
from which to learn.
A pledge to "take back our campuses
for all the normal students"
might be one of the most
"lots to unpack there"
of all the theres
we've ever unpacked.
And with all due disrespect,
what the fuck does Donald Trump
know about being normal?
"Vanquish the radicals" is the
weirdest possible way to say anything.
It is a supervillain phrase,
right up there
with "guards, seize them"
or "let's round up all the…"
And for the record,
college isn't the place to be normal.
It's the place
to eat like a complete monster,
get weirdly into posters for the one
and only time in your life,
and audition different personalities.
It's for reinvention.
It's the first time you won't be around
the people who've known you forever,
so you can change your hair,
clothes, everything.
Were you stuffy Patrick
in high school?
Well, in college, you can be Pat,
or, if you can pull it off, Trick.
You're not Patrick, who's that?
He sounds like a kid who cried
on the bus in fourth grade
because it looked like he peed his
pants, even though it was just sweat,
but no one believed him
and they never let him forget about it,
even in high school.
Patrick sounds like a real square,
but that could never be you.
Because you're Trick now.
Trick.
Yeah, Trick's chill. Trick vapes.
Trick can take the train by himself.
I heard Trick's last name was
Nasty. Not figuratively, literally.
Trick Nasty.
Trick didn't bring a special note
to school excusing him
from changing in front
of the other boys in gym class,
that was Patrick, and he's dead now.
You're Trick.
And Trick's good
at taking his pants off.
Trick knows what he wants
at the restaurant,
and Trick's phone
is always charged.
When Trick tells people that
that wet spot on his cargos is sweat,
everyone believes him.
Nice sweat, Trick.
Trick's not sus. Trick lowkey rips.
Trick, and this is true, fucks.
Trick Nasty.
Anyway, the point is,
Trump's long held a grudge
against higher education.
And now that he's in power,
he is acting on it.
Among other things, he's targeting
the billions of dollars
that flow to universities for things
like scientific research
in order to bend them to his will.
He's done this to schools
all over the country,
including Harvard,
which he justified like this.
Harvard's got to behave themselves.
Harvard is treating
our country with great disrespect.
And all they're doing is getting in
deeper and deeper and deeper.
They've got to behave themselves.
I'm looking out
for the country and for Harvard.
I want Harvard to do well. I want
Harvard to be great again, probably.
I do love that he felt the need
to tack on a "probably" at the end.
Like his brain has a tiny,
overworked fact-checking department
that is so overwhelmed
it can only throw a qualifier
on one
out of every 700 obvious lies.
And things have only escalated
since then.
So given that, and with schools
starting their fall semester right now,
it felt like tonight
might be a good time
to take a look at Trump's war
on higher education,
the history of right-wing attacks
on what they research and teach,
and what this current fight
could cost us.
And let's start with the fact
that conservatives' distrust
of education is nothing new.
Nixon famously said,
"The professors are the enemy."
And historically, their attacks
have fallen into a few key categories.
One big one has been that universities
are wasting taxpayer money
on things like frivolous
scientific research.
Fox has been talking about one example
in particular for literally years now.
503.000 dollars
to watch shrimp on a treadmill.
There goes the little guy.
This thing costs,
over a number of years, 3 million,
they say, in taxpayer money.
Remember when the federal
government spent three billion
of your tax dollars over a decade
to study shrimp on a treadmill?
Remember when our government
spent thousands
to put a shrimp on a treadmill?
Remember that? Hard to forget.
Yeah, it is hard to forget.
Partly 'cause you won't shut
the fuck up about it,
and partly because
it's inherently great TV.
Honestly, the only way
that'd be made better
is if it had its own theme song.
You go, shrimp! You go!
Prove that you're not just some bum!
Prove that you got heart.
Specifically, one single-chambered
heart that you keep in your head
'cause you're a shrimp, goddamnit!
You go!
The point is,
that story won't go away.
Just this year, Joni Ernst complained,
"We've put shrimp on a treadmill
to see how fast they run",
a complaint Elon Musk
then tweeted out with the caption,
"Insane wasting of taxpayer money."
But there's a few things
you should know.
First, that video is from 2006,
meaning that shrimp's been
running since the Bush presidency.
Second, that research
was actually useful.
A marine biologist and his colleagues
studied how changes in the oceans
could potentially affect the ability of
marine organisms to fight infections,
which is relevant,
given that that impacts
how much bacteria could wind up
on a plate of seafood in front of you.
And for what it's worth,
the treadmill in that video
actually cost less than 50 dollars
and was paid for out of
the researcher's own pocket.
So, to recap: some guy used his own
money to build a shrimp gym
for the cost of seven Subway
cold cut combos,
all to try and keep shrimp enjoyers
from getting poisoned,
and somehow
that is academia run amok.
Now, the other common attack
on colleges
is that they are havens
of liberal indoctrination.
For years now, Fox has sought out
stories on so-called campus craziness,
where something as minor as "climate
activists delayed Harvard-Yale game"
gets a lengthy unpacking
on "The Five".
They live for this petty shit,
and you know who cracked
this code early on? Stephen Miller.
'Cause back in 2007, as a student,
he made it onto "Fox & Friends"
with a story about how several school
newspapers had refused to run this ad,
directing people to a website
that featured claims like,
"Muslims have problems living
peacefully with their neighbors."
And they lapped it up.
Right now, a lot of kids
on college campuses,
they're only getting
one half of the story.
And when we're in a situation
where you have nuclear threats
and radiological threats
and biological threats,
and we're at a really
dangerous time in history,
you want everyone in America
to have a keen understanding
of what it is that we're facing
and I'm frankly sad to say,
right now, that's not the case.
Are you a college kid?
Yeah, I'm a senior
at Duke University.
You're smart.
I watch "Fox & Friends" almost
every morning,
so that probably
has something to do with it.
I watch you every morning and
that's why I might be smart.
I gotta say, I'm guessing
"Are you a college kid?"
is a question Stephen Miller
got a lot back then,
though that was probably
less to do with his smarts
and more to do with the fact
people just assumed
he was a 45-year-old
undercover narc
trying to do an unsanctioned
"21 Jump Street" on them.
But it's worth noting, for all his talk
about censorship in college newspapers,
as a Duke undergraduate,
Miller had a newspaper column
where he routinely aired
conservative grievances,
like "Christmas is being banned",
which as you all remember, happened.
He also called affirmative action
"misguided" and "devastating"
and said Duke's women's studies
department was an effort
to indoctrinate students
in radical feminism, saying,
"A proper women's studies program"
"would study women
from all angles, not one."
A pretty weird choice of words
coming from this guy,
who I think most women
would prefer to be studied by
from exactly zero angles.
And the very fact that Miller
had a regular column
does suggest that,
as hard as it may be to believe,
there was representation at Duke
for Republican points of view.
The more you listen to Republicans
complain about what is on campuses,
the clearer it becomes,
they don't want diversity of thought,
they want
one specific type of thought.
JD Vance has repeatedly
made that clear over the years
with complaints like "we are giving
our children over to our enemies"
when we send them to college.
And in a podcast appearance,
he advocated for doing
"what Viktor Orban has done in
Hungary" to schools, which was,
for the record, to consolidate power
over what gets taught in universities.
And that wasn't all that Vance said.
We should seize the institutions of the
left and turn them against the left.
We need, like,
a de-Baathification program,
a de-wokeification program.
Basically, my strategy is, like,
deinstitutionalize the left,
re-institutionalize the right.
It is very hard.
It will require men and women
of incredible courage.
But I don't see another way out.
Okay, first, if you are not familiar,
de-Baathification was the process
of purging the Iraqi government
of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party,
something not universally considered
as something we should do
to our own citizens.
And second, you aren't having a stroke,
JD Vance is doing an interview
with someone who looks like
they went to the barber
and asked for the Airedale terrier.
The point is,
conservatives have long sought
to orient universities
sharply to the right.
And in recent years, they've seized
upon a new justification for doing this,
specifically,
to "combat antisemitism",
in the wake
of student protests over Gaza.
And look, we've talked about
those protests before,
and it'd take more time than
we have to fully litigate them now,
but very quickly:
multiple things can be true.
You can think some critics
of the protests
were conflating criticism
of Israel with antisemitism,
and that some were pointing out
actual instances of antisemitism.
You can also acknowledge
that some Jewish students
did feel unsafe because
of the actions of some protestors,
and that some protestors
were made unsafe
by universities
calling the police on them.
You can also argue that many
universities did themselves no favors
by failing to figure out
a coherent, consistent response.
None of that nuance has been present
in the White House's response,
which has been to suggest the
destruction of certain universities.
After taking office, Trump promised
a "task force to combat antisemitism",
backed by Stephen Miller.
Here is the head of it,
laying out their strategy.
We are suing every one of these
universities guilty of antisemitism.
Under Title VI,
we're taking away their money, Mark.
We're gonna bankrupt
these universities.
We're gonna take away
every single federal dollar.
He is coming in pretty hot there.
And for the record,
I actually agree with
that screaming madman,
in that it'd obviously be great
to get rid of antisemitism,
in college and everywhere else,
hold for applause.
And look, if colleges were spending
all their federal money
on inventing a big automatic
antisemitism generator,
then, yeah, it would make sense
to take their money away.
But the thing is,
they're not doing that,
partly because it seems
to be Elon Musk's project.
Instead, the money being taken away
is largely going to research studies.
And cutting those has nothing
to do with ending antisemitism,
as many university heads,
like the president of Wesleyan,
have pointed out.
When Jewish students are intimidated
or afraid to practice their religion
on campus or are yelled at,
it's just horrible.
At Wesleyan, and in many schools,
the percentage of Jews protesting
for Palestinians
was roughly the same as the percentage
of Jews on the campus generally.
The idea that you are attacking
antisemitism by attacking universities
I think is a complete charade.
It's just an excuse for getting
universities to conform.
Right, it's obviously bullshit.
The very idea that Trump's actions
are part of some great effort to defend
the Jewish people is, as charades go,
slightly less convincing
than a toddler playing hide and seek.
"Where's Brian? All I see is a chair
and then most of Brian!"
"What an illusion
has been cast here!"
And there are some telltale signs
that this isn't really
about antisemitism concerns.
With perhaps the biggest one being
that all this is coming
from a president who,
deep breath,
reportedly kept a book of Hitler's
speeches by his bed,
dined with a holocaust denier, brought
people into his administration
with records of advancing antisemitic
tropes and conspiracy theories,
including a spokeswoman
at the fucking Pentagon,
apparently said during his first term
that Hitler did a lot of good things,
and asked his generals
to be more loyal, saying,
"Why can't you be
more like Hitler's generals?",
posted an image using the shape
of a Star of David
to accuse Hillary Clinton
of being corrupted by money,
was endorsed in his first election
by both David Duke and the KKK,
and also, just two months ago,
told a rally crowd that thanks to him,
they wouldn't have to deal with bankers
who were, quote, "Shylocks".
Hearing that Trump is suddenly
waging war against antisemites
is like hearing Billy Joel is waging war
against dads from Long Island.
Are you really doing that? 'Cause
you always seemed so very close.
Yet, that is how Trump is justifying
his assault on higher education.
It is worth looking at exactly what
he's doing, because it's pretty grim.
And let's start with one
of his first major targets, Columbia.
It was a prominent scene
of protests over Gaza,
and at the beginning of March,
it was notified
by Trump's antisemitism task force,
you know, this guy's team,
that its grants were under review.
And while those sorts of Title VI
investigations typically take months
and sometimes years,
just four days later,
it announced its conclusions,
and the administration, citing
Columbia's "continued failure to end
the harassment of Jewish students"
canceled 400 million dollars
in contracts and grants.
Just a week later,
it sent Columbia a letter
giving them seven days to comply
with a new list of demands,
which were extensive,
including calling for the university
to deliver a plan
of "comprehensive admissions reform"
and install new oversight
of the university's Middle Eastern,
South Asian
and African studies department.
It was an extreme degree
of government intrusion,
which is what made it so dispiriting
when this happened.
Just in the last few minutes, we are
learning that Columbia University
will give in to demands from
the Trump administration
in order to restore hundreds of
millions of dollars in federal funding.
It appears that in some way,
shape, or form,
Columbia has agreed to pretty much
all of the president's demands.
Yeah, they caved
in about five seconds,
officially solidifying Columbia's
reputation as little bitch university,
rather than what it was known
for before:
being the place that Timotheé Chalamet
went for five minutes
before realizing he didn't need it.
But here is the thing: that capitulation
didn't put an end to it.
Because the administration
just kept escalating things further,
freezing all of Columbia's
remaining NIH funding,
amounting to
about 700 million in total.
And even threatening
Columbia's accreditation.
And there is no guarantee
the administration's gonna stop
making demands from Columbia,
and why would they
when they keep getting met?
It's a situation that, understandably,
has had a chilling effect on campus,
as this professor explains.
No one wants to express a controversial
opinion about anything anymore.
Michael Thaddeus
teaches at Columbia
and is a member of the American
Association of University Professors,
a national organization
now suing the Trump administration.
I'm a math professor and math
is a wonderfully apolitical topic.
Math, in fact, has flourished under
all kinds of authoritarian regimes.
But my colleagues who teach history,
political science, you know,
regional studies, they're terrified.
Okay, setting aside the breezy
"historically, we mathematicians
have done great under dictators",
it is not entirely fair
to call math "apolitical",
because if you know how to listen,
much of math has a lot to say
and some of it is very political.
For instance, if you add 100 senators
and 435 representatives
you get 535, and if you
multiply that by 538,
the number of Electoral College votes,
you get 287.830.
Now here
is where it gets interesting,
the ZIP Code for the White House
is 20500
and if you add those numbers
you get, that's right, 308.330.
Now, add to that the number 4.494
which is the corresponding number
for the ensuring faith in our elections
act, do we all see where this is going?
Do we see it, guys?
You get 312.824.
And that is already pretty exciting,
but if you multiply that by 17,
the age, of course, George Washington
was the very first time he held office
you arrive at 5.318.008.
And if you take that number
and turn it upside down.
Pretty cool, right?
Honk honk, right?
One of our writers spent an
entire afternoon writing that joke,
and I don't know
if I should fire them,
or let them
host this show from now on.
Columbia has since agreed
to pay a 200 million fine
to restore
its frozen research funding,
a move that its president has claimed
"safeguards our independence".
But that is a pretty bold take
from someone who was just
successfully shaken down, twice.
"Well, that was certainly unpleasant,"
"but at least the moody president
who hates honoring deals"
"and loves winning fights
will never try that again."
Now, some universities did take
a different tack from Columbia.
Because when the administration sent
a similar list of demands to Harvard,
even throwing in some new ones,
like demanding an audit
of the political ideology of
the student body and faculty
to determine "viewpoint diversity",
Harvard refused to back down.
Instead, it sued the government
in federal court.
And in retaliation, the administration
froze or terminated
more than 3 billion in research grants
and contracts with Harvard.
The administration's also,
among other things,
launched multiple investigations
into whether Harvard was discriminating
against white men.
One investigation, for instance,
noted an increase
among faculty of color, women
and those identifying as nonbinary,
as well as a decrease
in white men in tenure-track jobs.
Now, Harvard actually
secured a victory this week,
when a federal judge ruled
the Trump administration had
illegally cancelled its funding.
Which is what makes it so frustrating
that some think Harvard might
try and reach a settlement anyway,
as the government can still appeal
or mire the university
in costly and time-consuming
investigations.
And I will say,
the government going after big
universities first is a smart strategy.
For one, it is easy to hate Harvard
and people who went there,
and if you're not sure if you've met
someone who went to Harvard,
believe me you haven't
because they would've brought it up
within the first five fucking seconds
of meeting you.
But as this academic points out,
if Harvard ultimately caves,
that'll send a terrible signal.
Harvard has more wealth, more
power, and more institutional strength
than almost any other sort
of organization in America.
If they can break Harvard,
then they are sending a sign
that they can do it to anybody.
And that is the message
that this is trying to convey.
He's right. Fred Armisen
is just completely right.
Because this goes much further
than Harvard and Columbia.
The administration's frozen billions
of federal research funds
at all these other schools,
and slashed studies at public
institutions across the country.
Even universities who tried
pre-capitulating
have found themselves out of luck.
Northwestern tried to get ahead
of things by releasing a list of steps
it had taken to combat antisemitism
that closely tracked
with a list of demands the Trump
administration had given to Columbia.
But it was targeted anyway
several days later,
with more than 790 million
of their grants frozen.
Those funds have still
not been unfrozen, even though,
on Thursday,
the university's president resigned.
There's an irony in him being pushed
out to fight antisemitism on campus,
given he's a Jewish descendant
of Holocaust survivors.
And that is the thing here,
for all the talk about how
the government's current assault
is a direct response
to the Gaza protests,
here is JD Vance, back in 2021,
spelling out the whole playbook.
We go to the universities. We use
the hundreds of billions of dollars
that we send to them as leverage,
and we say,
unless you stop indoctrinating
our children,
unless you stop indoctrinating
our entire society,
you don't get another dime
of our money.
That will stop it very quickly.
But we've gotta have the willpower
to actually go and do it.
Right, and that is the exact
same plan as now,
just hastily remodeled to be
about "fighting antisemitism"
and expecting no one to notice.
It's basically
the rhetorical equivalent
of when a random business
clearly used to be a Pizza Hut.
Tax accounting my ass,
you're not fooling anyone,
the place still stinks
of stuffed crust.
And at this point, it's worth talking
about what we are losing here.
Because the administration's been
slashing grants all over the place.
Sometimes, as at Columbia
and Harvard, as a form of ransom.
But other times,
as with the cuts directed by DOGE,
to send a clear message about what
sort of work is no longer in favor.
Internal documents have revealed
many of the specific grants targeted
were singled out because they dealt
with things like gender identity,
DEI in the scientific workforce
and environmental justice.
And the end result of all this is,
as one researcher put it,
"The science in this country
is going to be destroyed."
Disruptions in NIH grants have
already affected research
on things like Alzheimer's,
cancer and substance use.
And the thing is,
even if Trump's cuts get reversed,
you can't always start and stop
studies whenever you like.
Some involve clinical trials
and human patients
who will now find themselves
suddenly without treatment,
as this cancer researcher explains.
We're very worried, because
what's happening is that, one day,
we hear our grants are cut,
and, the next day,
we have to say to a patient, sorry,
no more money's coming in,
so we can't treat you
on this trial anymore.
And could that patient die
as a result?
Absolutely,
these patients are on clinical trials
because they have no other options.
Look, I feel terrible
for patients in that situation,
but also for the doctors,
because that is a tough conversation
to try to navigate.
"Bad news: you can't have
medicine anymore."
"Okay. Why?" "'Cause the president
doesn't like antisemitism."
"Really?" "No, he just cares about
ideological diversity at colleges."
"Really?" "No, not really,
his brain is functionally pudding now,"
"but the people around him
told him to do it and he said fine."
"Okay, but what does any of that
have to do with me?"
"Absolutely nothing."
"Got it, thanks so much
for explaining things." Dies.
While the costs there are obvious,
even science with less immediate
practical impact
can wind up being incredibly useful.
Remember, that shrimp on a treadmill
was ultimately about keeping
bacteria out of seafood.
Drugs like Ozempic are based
on a hormone
identified in an NIH-funded
study of Gila monster venom.
A study of how bees optimize their
nectar foraging led to an algorithm
that now powers the 130 billion
web hosting industry.
Even that study of rats in a car
discovered that certain stress hormones
in the rats' poop
changed as they learned to drive,
a finding which may now inform
future behavioral treatments
for mental health.
The point is,
somewhere out there
is a weird little tree frog
that jizzes the cure for cancer,
and some scientist, probably
working at a university,
is going to discover that,
because she had a healthy
curiosity about frog cum.
And honestly, that theory
kind of makes sense.
I'm just saying,
this pig is over 50 years old.
Most pigs don't live that long.
What does she do that most pigs
don't? This guy right here.
All I'm saying is,
maybe there's a fountain of youth
and it's located between two green,
spindly legs.
Sometimes science involves
asking weird questions
and getting unexpected answers.
And the thing is, if we lose
this vital university research,
there's no real replacement for it.
Private industry isn't gonna pick up
the slack because these studies
don't often have a clear,
immediate return on investment.
As the head of Arizona State
points out,
when we invest in research, that
actually helps the private sector,
which is probably something we
should talk about a lot more often.
I left my iPhone out
because everybody thinks
that this iPhone 16 is the product
of the genius, and he was a genius,
of Steve Jobs. Hardly.
There were probably,
by my estimation,
5.000 academic research groups
through the decades
that had something to do with
the technology I'm holding in my hand.
Nobody even knows they exist.
Nobody knows the hundreds
of patents that are in here
and the thousands of articles that
back up the patents that are in here.
There's not one aspect
of this iPhone 16
which has not been deeply
empowered and enabled by,
at one point or another,
some academic research activity,
academic technological development.
And no one knows any of that.
Exactly. Every iPhone ever made
contained the work of thousands
of academic research papers,
which we never talk about.
They may have occasionally
also contained a meaningful
part of a child laborer's finger,
but we don't talk about that
for different reasons.
The point is,
publicly funded research is,
among other things,
good for the economy.
One report found that every dollar
of medical research funded by the NIH
delivers 2.56 in economic activity.
So, even if you are someone who hates
learning and loves money,
and, yes, I am talking to one guy
in particular here,
publicly funding research
is just a no-brainer.
But obviously, that is not
what this is really about.
This is about the right being
willing to sacrifice everything,
up to and including a generation's
worth of scientific progress,
to get what it wants. And it is not
hard to see what that is.
Because when the administration
is launching investigations like,
"Why aren't there more white
men teaching at Harvard?",
you know what they're up to.
Just like you know what the plan was
when they suddenly
canceled diversity grants,
awarded to PhD students members
of certain racial or ethnic groups,
disabled, or from
disadvantaged backgrounds.
And don't just take this from me.
In June, a federal judge,
appointed by Reagan,
by the way,
ordered hundreds of terminated
research projects reinstated.
And when issuing his ruling,
he stated,
"I've never seen a record where
racial discrimination was so palpable."
"I've sat on this bench now
for 40 years."
"I've never seen government
racial discrimination like this."
"And I ask myself,
'How can this be?'"
And while I appreciate him
being willing to call this what it is,
I should note: the Supreme Court
decided last month, five to four,
to block that judge's order,
allowing the administration
to pause paying grants to researchers
as the case proceeds in lower courts.
So, where do things go from here?
Well, I don't really know.
And I'm not sure that this
administration does, either.
But even if there is not a fixed
destination, there's a clear direction,
and that is that they want to turn
back a clock that, quite honestly,
had taken
way too long to move forward,
and restore the role of academia
to being a training ground
for those looking to uphold old systems
of power instead of questioning them.
You can have problems with academia.
You can think it's too cloistered
or too liberal, you can think
it's becoming too expensive,
or that its resources
are misallocated.
But the notion of the state
suddenly executing
a sweeping takeover of higher
education, to this degree, is chilling.
And if this administration's actions
have taught us one thing so far,
it's that no capitulation
will be enough,
and they will never stop
demanding more.
So given that, I'd argue that,
to the extent they can,
these institutions need to stop
yielding, stand firm and fight back.
Because while I do get the appeal
of thinking just one more concession,
one more payoff might safeguard
your independence
or let you live to fight another day,
it's worth asking,
at what point
have you compromised so much
that the thing you're supposed
to be defending is gone?
And if institutions need some
inspiration in facing that challenge,
maybe I can remind them
of one plucky little guy
who would not stop,
no matter the odds,
no matter the forces that tried
to push him backwards.
I guess what I'm saying is,
universities:
you need to act like that shrimp,
get your head down,
and pump your 20 legs
like your fucking life depends on it!
Get out there
and show people who you are!
Go! Go! Go!
And now, this!
And Now: The Wit And Wisdom
of Future Presidential Medal
of Freedom Recipient, Rudy Giuliani.
This is Rudy Giuliani, and this is
"America's Mayor Live," from Mars.
I mean, Fred Mertz, who used
to be on "I Love Lucy"
who's now
the Chancellor of Germany.
Going around asking, "How did
the media cover this up?"
- Jake Ta-Tap-Tap-Taptap?
- Jake Tapper.
Jake Taptap. Tapper!
Senator whatever the hell his name is,
Von Boomboomboomboom.
This little fat doctor is walking
around after him saying,
"He's in a great health!
He's in perfect health!"
"He's cognitively cognitive!"
They think it could be
around 10%.
Will you put boots on the ground?
No! Vladimir, no!
They must be going around
like…
What's that?
Meanwhile…
- I'm a flag.
- There's a flag waving in the wind.
So, shall we take a short break?
Yeah, we'll take a short break,
and we'll be right back with more.
That's our show, thank you
so much for watching.
We are off for the Emmys next week,
back September 21st, good night!
Trick Nasty.