Watch JD Vance Try to Define Socialism

Vice President JD Vance was asked to define socialism on Thursday. Instead of even trying to sincerely engage with the concept, the Harvard-educated lawyer and author offered a brain-dead, tailored-for Fox News answer.

Vance was fielded the question at a press conference in which he announced that Microsoft and other tech firms would be temporarily suspended from sponsoring H-1B visa workers seeking green cards.

“Oh man.... It’s a hard term to define these days because very often socialism … classically, you would think socialism is about prioritizing workers. And yet in reality, most of the self-described socialists running across the United States of America are going to howl about this announcement today, which is prioritizing American workers over foreign workers. So I don’t know what the term means anymore,” he said.

“I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is that you wanna replace American workers with foreign workers and you want boys to play in girls’ sports. That’s what unites the socialists that I see running across the United States of America today.”

There are quite a few different definitions and perspectives on socialism. There are the so-called “sewer socialists,” like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who believe that Americans should have “whatever they need to live a dignified life” and that it is “the government’s job to deliver on that.” The more specific, classical definitions go beyond filling potholes and housing affordability, advocating for a future in which wealth is redistributed from a small minority of elites to the working class. It can have both market and non-market models and takes various economic and social formats.

Regardless of what you think socialism means, it is certainly not “replacing American workers with foreign workers” and wanting boys to play girls’ sports.

This was a confusing, unintelligent answer from a man who’s supposed to be quite smart. What does Vance have to lose by just answering the question in good faith, especially as someone uniquely positioned to answer it? I bet Secretary of State Marco Rubio would have had a more interesting response.

White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities to be inhumane.

The Department of Homeland Security shot down a plan to construct immigration detention facilities that were more humane, a government contractor told NPR News Thursday.

At a meeting with the DHS deputy director, the contractor pitched constructing a FEMA-style camp, believing that would be more humane than building megaprisons inside of warehouses. But his company’s plan was rejected.

“No one that we spoke to at DHS was for this idea whatsoever. The deputy director told us point-blank that they had pushed back very hard on it. Everybody knew warehouses are horrible places to put people,” the contractor told NPR.

The contractor believed that the directive to construct facilities with the worst possible conditions came from the White House itself—specifically Stephen Miller, who was not present at the meeting.

“Miller did not want the facilities that were comfortable. He did not want facilities that were humane. We were told point-blank that that was not what the administration wanted,” the contractor said.

“Steve Miller certainly seemed to make that point to everyone that he wanted it to be cruel. This was what Miller had stated to the DHS at that time, to the DHS director and deputy director. What surprised me was just how adamant the people were that it was going to happen. Damn the consequences. I would say in 25 years of working with the U.S. government, I’ve never been in that position before.”

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis told NPR that the contractor’s comments were “false hearsay allegation(s) from someone who has never even met or talked with Stephen Miller,” and that the comments were “defamatory.”

Under Miller’s leadership, ICE has subjected tens of thousands of people—including U.S. citizens, lawful immigrants, and immigrants with no criminal convictions—to overcrowded rooms, unsanitary conditions, insufficient food and water. Immigrants have been denied adequate medical care, and legal counsel, and were even locked in cages. As of earlier this week, 28 people have died in ICE custody in 2026. In 2025, ICE reported 33 detainee deaths, the highest in two decades.

MAGA world has turned its fire and fury toward two of the president’s closest advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, after it was revealed that the pair were more interested in assisting a pro-Russia Balkan regime than helping Republicans win the midterms.

“This has opened the floodgates,” a person close to the White House told Politico Thursday. “The knives are now fully out for these two.”

Donald Trump tapped both men to oversee his midterm advertising campaign. But LaCivita and Blair were not stateside last week amidst the Republican blitz, instead visiting a small self-governing territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Republika Srpska ahead of its regional elections, according to several sources that spoke with The New York Times Tuesday.

Republika Srpska is closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin and, according to the Times, has made a considerable effort to make inroads with Trump and his allies.

Blair and LaCivita were paid well for their time and, presumably, their connection to the president, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars through a Washington-based law firm affiliated with Republika Srpska’s government.

Trump, for his part, was apparently unaware of the duo’s travel plans. In a post on Truth Social Wednesday, Trump immediately tried to distance himself from his beloved strategists, claiming that Blair and LaCivita were “outside consultants” and “do not work for me.”

Yet the sudden disownment is a convenient revision of Blair and LaCivita’s broad influence on the MAGA movement. Both have held significant positions within Trump’s orbit: Prior to running the president’s midterm spending campaign, Blair served as Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff. LaCivita worked as the chief strategist of Trump’s primary super PAC, MAGA Inc., and later became chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee.

Both are also connected to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles—but even the famed “ice maiden” reportedly couldn’t protect Blair and LaCivita from the White House’s ire.

“[Trump] has been livid for awhile over how things have been heading, and he hates nothing more than when people make money off him, especially when those people abandon him like this,” another person close to the president told Politico, noting that Trump could “could cut them off forever” if the situation continues to go south.

But outside of the White House, political strategists have viewed LaCivita and Blair’s disembarkment as a sign of Trump’s troubled waters.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie explained to Politico that “if your top political advisers are not paying attention to the midterms and instead are paying attention to taking money off the table in a foreign country, that seems to indicate to me that they’ve moved on from Donald Trump as their top priority, and I think you’re going to see a lot of that.”

Others were simply stunned by Blair and LaCivita’s foreign affairs. James Carville, who worked on former President Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, told Politico that the entire scandal was “jaw dropping.”

“Everything I did, I cleared with the White House,” Carville said. “When I saw this I did one of those sitcom spit takes.”

Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that the Trump administration is targeting multiple universities that he claims “bring in foreigners to undercut the wages of American residents.”  

Vance singled out Yale University, Harvard University, Stanford University, Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Davis, the California Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and the University of Pittsburgh at a press conference, saying that the government would be investigating them. 

Vance said the Trump administration believes that these institutions exploit the J-1 visa program, which allows foreign students to work and conduct research in the United States. The investigation will also include a team examining visa fraud. 

“Something weird is going on at these universities,” Vance said. “They’re using these visas way too much. They’re using them to undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers, and it simply has to stop.”

In the same press conference, Vance defended tech CEO Elon Musk’s contributions to the country as a positive example of a foreign student. Musk came to the U.S. on a J-1 visa as a student but never enrolled in the Stanford University graduate courses his visa was tied to, instead working illegally on a tech startup. 

“It’s one thing if you were to bring in a person like Elon Musk. I think 99 percent of American citizens look at somebody like Elon Musk or Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, and say, obviously, ‘If that person wants to come in and build something great in the U.S., we support that,’” Vance said, before attacking companies and institutions who hire foreigners as accountants and pay them far less than American citizens. 

A reporter pressed Vance about Musk, noting that he didn’t build his companies overnight, and asked how the government would determine if a prospective immigrant was the next Musk. 

“Does the person coming in fill a position that simply cannot be filled by an American worker? That’s question number one,” Vance said. “Question number two, very importantly, is this person a truly elite human being, are they truly bringing in a special set of skills, and abilities, and work ethic, and competence?” 

Vance seems to be trying to thread a needle by saying some foreign students are OK but others are not. Musk committed the very fraud the Trump administration claims to be trying to combat. But the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is the world’s richest man, supports Trump, and has racist ideas about immigration, so he gets a pass. 

Vice President JD Vance was forced to eat his words in real time, accusing Microsoft of hiring too many foreign workers on the same day President Trump plans to award Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Vance criticized Microsoft while announcing the tech company would be temporarily suspended from sponsoring H-1B visa workers seeking green cards.

“We obviously want you to thrive in the United States of America. We want people to invest in the United States of America. Particularly the American technology sector, we’re the bigger boosters of your industry. We want you to continue to grow and to employ … American workers,” Vance said at his Thursday morning news conference. “So our message to Microsoft is, ‘You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.’”

This is a common argument against the H-1B work visa program, which allows foreign professionals to work in the United States.

Vance was questioned about the ironic timing of his comment just minutes later, and tried to have it both ways.

“You had some harsh words for Microsoft at the top of your speech just then,” a reporter raised. “In that case, why is President Trump awarding the nation’s top technological medal to the CEO of Microsoft this afternoon?”

“Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them, they do a lot of important things. They also laid off 6,000 American workers while replacing them with 6,300 H-1Bs,” Vance replied. “And our message to Microsoft is not that we wanna harm your company, it’s that we want your company to thrive, but we want it to thrive by employing and empowering your fellow Americans.”

The last time Vance waded into the H-1B debate he ended up dragging his wife, Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, into the fray.

“You can believe on the one hand that there’s a lot of fraud in the H-1B system, while also believing that there are people who have come to the United States in the past who have enriched this country. And look, I’m married to the daughter of immigrants from India, and, you know, I love my in-laws.… They’ve been great contributors to the United States of America,” he said at a Turning Point USA event last spring. “But I also think when you become an American citizen … one of the obligations of citizens is that you have to think about the best interest of the country, and not the country you came from before.”

Vance seems to have applied that thinking to Microsoft today—perhaps without running it by Trump first.