American Thought Leaders - How the Economic and Media Elite Plunder Working-Class Americans: Batya Ungar-Sargon

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

“The media really gave the liberal and leftist elites a language with which to pretend that they are the crusaders on the side of the good, when actually they themselves are the villains in this story in a big way. And that language is wokeness.”Batya Ungar-Sargon says she used to suffer from what’s been called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” But after speaking to people outside of her political bubble, she now believes he’s actually a centrist candidate.“Any time you turn on cable news, you will hear liberals casting him as a unique threat to democracy, when he is really the opposite of that. He’s the sort-of apotheosis of a democratic system that will not allow the billions of dollars spent trying to stop him to get in the way of the will of the people,” she says.Ms. Ungar-Sargon recently traveled the country, speaking to everyday Americans about how they perceive the political, economic, and cultural climate. She compiled her findings in a book: “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.”“The most shocking thing I found was that the American Dream for working-class people is much more alive and well and healthy in red states than it is in blue states,” says Ms. Ungar-Sargon.We discuss how, according to her, the democratic party betrayed middle-class Americans by creating a knowledge industry consisting of credentialed elites who benefit economically from illegal immigration and trade liberalization.“I think much of the Democratic policy today is part and parcel of this upward transfer of wealth, whether it’s student-loan forgiveness, whether it was the lockdown policies, whether it’s the open border, whether it’s the climate agenda and the Green New Deal, Defund the Police—all of this stuff is about the fumes, the virtuous fumes that the over-credentialed elites create out of their ideology. And they always demand that the working class pays for it,” says Ms. Ungar-Sargon.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The media really gave the liberal and leftist elites a language with which to pretend that they are the crusaders on the side of the good, when actually they themselves are the villains in this story in a big way. And that language is wokeness. Batia Ungar Sargon says she used to suffer from what's been called Trump derangement syndrome. But after speaking to people outside of her political bubble, she now believes he's actually a centrist candidate. Anytime you turn on cable news, you will hear liberals casting him as a unique threat to democracy when he is really the opposite of that.

He's the sort of patheosis of a democratic system that will not allow the billions of dollars spent trying to stop him to get in the way of the will of the people. Batia recently traveled the country, speaking to everyday Americans about how they perceive the political, economic, and cultural climate. She compiled her findings in the book Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Fatiha Ungar-Sargon, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you so much for having me back, Jan, and for all of the important work that you do. Very much appreciated. You know, back in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency, you noted that two-thirds of the working class basically voted in his favor. And I've kind of forgotten this. But what happened afterwards was more astonishing. There wasn't this sort of big soul-searching among the Democratic Party to try to figure out what happened, but it was almost like a blame. And so how do you account for that? That's such a great way to put it, a blame. It's so true. The side that likes to portray itself as the defenders of democracy

were extremely upset that a Democratic election did not go their way. And in many ways, most of them pretty aggressive. They sort of tried to undermine the results for the four years that Donald Trump was president by impeaching him and by portraying his supporters as racists or rubes or deplorables, right, whatever was totally astonishing because, like you said, he got two thirds of white working class voters and he is now positioned to get certainly that many white working class voters. But also he is now dominating with Hispanic voters and he's looking at a third of black male voters just in terms of polling right now. So the whole idea that his support came from the white working class, that is no longer the case. He is now the working class candidate. And in my view, that is really the reason that the Democrats have been so intently trying to destroy him, whether it was with the impe or now with the lawfare. Why, anytime you turn on cable news, you will hear liberals casting him as a unique threat to democracy when he is really the opposite of that. He's the sort of the apotheosis of a democratic system that will not allow the billions of dollars spent trying to stop him to get in the way of the will of the

people. So the question is, why didn't they have a reckoning and realize, well, you know, we were wrong about Donald Trump, he really is representing working class voters. And it's because the vast majority of people in those elite positions on the left, they are not just liberal, but they are part of an economic elite whose economic interests are very much in tension with those of the working class voters who Trump represents. And so rather than admit that, admit that, you know, these leftists have been the beneficiaries of income inequality in America and that the top 20 percent is now hoarding over 50 percent of the GDP, as well as the pathway to the American dream,

they would much rather simply cast Donald Trump and his voters as evil, because it's the perfect alibi, right? Then they don't have to deal with the fact that they themselves sold out these voters many years ago. And that's why they're turning to Trump. You know, you've done something really astonishing here. You've, you know've gone out and spoken to people and found out what they think about all this. Talking about Trump here a little further, it was the Democratic Party, but it was actually kind of like the whole system, actually, right? That went after him, painting him as a Russian stooge, which of course was preposterous on its face from the beginning. And the part that I find astonishing, and I only kind of really saw this looking back in time, that it took, and this speaks to your first book, it took a very compliant legacy media to kind of make people actually believe a lot of this stuff,

because it's so outlandish. They weren't just compliant, they were very much the drivers of the narrative. The media plays a huge role in how the elites see the world, not in the way regular people see the world. Regular people tend to believe their own lying eyes and not what the cable news channels want them to believe. But when you get a college degree, especially if you get a college degree from an elite university, you get a graduate degree, you become inculcated into a way of seeing the world that is very much echoed by the elites in the media. And so they have a lot of purchase with that elite, especially because they're coming at things from the same point of view as them.

And they're defending their economic interests, but in a language that dresses them up like they're some sort of, you know, high-minded morality. The media really gave the liberal and leftist elites a language with which to pretend that they are the crusaders on the side of the good when actually they themselves are the villains in this story in a big way. And that language is wokeness. And you're right, that's what my whole first book was about. Bad news, how woke media is undermining democracy. And then what I really wanted in my second book was to understand, well, who is the other side of this? I understood that there was this massive class divide in America and that that was the story that was not being told.

So who is the working class that have been abandoned by these Democratic and leftist elites? And so I traveled the country to find out. America was, I think for a lot of its history, a highly meritocratic place. And I mean, when I say highly, I mean more so than most places, right? And that is what you portray through your discussions with all these people, that that has really changed and people are deeply aware of that. That is one of the central themes, I think, if I dare say so, from what I picked up reading. There is an elite class in America, and it took a while for us to fully grasp how significant that is and how differently they may think than a lot of the rest of us.

We were a meritocratic society or more meritocratic than many other places. But that all started to change somewhere in the 1970s. 1971 is the high watermark for working class wages. And they really started to stagnate after that, even though corporate profits and productivity have been skyrocketing. So they used to sort of travel in concert with working class wages and then they really decoupled in the 70s. And now working class wages are down when you factor in inflation and the fact that the cost of groceries is up 18 percent. I mean, my God, people living on a shoestring budget and they can't afford groceries. It's really terrible. The process whereby the elites abandoned labor in order to cater to a highly credentialed, it escalated in the 80s, but it really started to take hold as a new paradigm with President Bill Clinton, who signed NAFTA into law, which was a multi-country trade agreement in which 5 million good paying working class jobs that secured a middle class standard of living for these laborers were shipped off to China and Mexico to build up their middle class. So that was the beginning of this dissent. After that,

you had President Barack Obama who showed up and said, you know what, those jobs are not coming back and defunded vocational training, which was another great avenue to the American dream for working class Americans simply defunded it. And the idea was everybody was going to go to college and join the knowledge industry and obviously become Democrats as a result, right? Because we know what happens to people when they go to American universities. And then Joe Biden really sealed the deal by opening the border and welcoming in, you know, 10, 12, 15 million illegal immigrants to compete with the working class for their jobs. And if you look at the graph of working class wages and you align it with the graph of the

number of immigrants in the country, they are in complete correlation. So as the number of illegal migrants and legal migrants entered the country, the wages that working class Americans were able to command simply dropped because there was a larger supply of labor and the vast majority, certainly of illegal migrants, are competing with working class people for jobs. So when you look at those two graphs together, you really see a compelling picture of why not only working class wages stagnated, but why working class Americans are so gung ho for Donald Trump, because he showed up on the scene and was the first person to have the guts to say, actually, this is crushing working class Americans. And for his pains, he and all of his voters were cast as racists, as though the border has anything to

do with race. It doesn't. It's all about the economy and the wages that a working class person can command. So that to me is sort of the narrative of how the Democrats abandoned the working class and started catering to a college credentialed elite whose economic interests were in tension with that working class. And each of these stages, you can see how it improves the economic fortunes

of people in the knowledge industry at the expense of the working class. Well, and this other element that just jumps to my mind right now is just this vision of a flattened world, right, where sort of all people are fungible, that, you know, you can might as well be someone in a different country that creates the product, we bring it here, it'll all work out in this sort of, you sort of perfect free trade world. This idea is very also central to this elite class where the borders in some ways stop being as important to them, but perhaps the acquisition of capital became the only purpose. I don't know. What are your thoughts?

No, I totally agree. I mean, if you work in the knowledge industry, your economic fortunes are not limited to a certain place or time. We really saw this with the pandemic. You could go anywhere and work from anywhere. And that sort of more cosmopolitan elite has much less of a tie or feeling or an emotion of belonging to the United States, but also to any place at all. There's a real crisis of patriotism in terms of these people. And a lot of that comes from the fact that in order to graduate from an American university, you have to take a composition class, which is taught by an English PhD who has gone through the critical theory training and the critical race theory training. And of course, a central

component of that is that America is, you know, a deeply flawed white supremacist state, whose racism is baked into its DNA and is irredeemable. So when you spend the longer time you spend in university, the more time you spend exposed to those ideas. And think about it, a lot of these people have a graduate degree, you know, so they spent a lot of time being educated, educated, right, let's put that in quotation marks, by people who believe this very deeply. And as a result, they don't really feel the same kind of connection to this country or to its borders. And then you have to take into account, you know, here's my Marxism coming through. but the economic piece of this, the college credentialed elites are the consumers of low wage labor. They are the consumers of the

labor of the working class. And as a result, of course, they want more illegal immigrants because it drives down the wages that they have to pay their cleaning lady or their landscaper, right, or their construction worker or for a meal in a restaurant. And as a result, they love the open border, because it's effectively a control on the wages that working class people can command. And it literally puts money back in the pockets of those very elites. So it's effectively wage theft, it's an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to the over credentialed college elites, the top 20%. And they have effectively plundered the middle class over the last 40, 50 years. And that's where the class divide comes from.

What strikes me here is that there's no moment in history that sort of demonstrates this better than the shelter in place or lockdown policies and the effect of them as they were initiated, you know, basically here in the US. You had people who were in the knowledge industry who could work from anywhere. Suddenly they're working from home. I spoke with lots of people that were kind of happy, in a way, to be able to do that.

And they felt virtuous for, you know, basically doing what you were supposed to do, which is shelter-in-place, sort of ignorant of the fact that there was this whole humming economy of people that was running the society for them, delivering their food, delivering their, basically every aspect of their life. It just came through the door and they didn't even need to interact that much. At the same time, we had the largest upward transfer of wealth in history by a significant margin. All of this

happened all at once. And based on what you're saying, it doesn't sound like an accident to me. No, I don't think it was an accident at all. I think much of the democratic policy today is part and parcel of this upward transfer of wealth, whether it's student loan forgiveness, whether it was the lockdown policies, whether it's the open border, whether it's the climate agenda and the Green New Deal, defund the police. All of this stuff is about the fumes, the virtuous fumes that the over-credentialed elites create out of their ideology. And they always demand that the working class pays for it. And it literally does put money back in their pockets. And lockdown is such a great example of that. These people immediately worked from home, immediately saw the values of their homes skyrocket. And meanwhile,

while they were demanding these lockdowns, the children of the working class fell further and further behind. Of course, the elites' children went back to school very quickly. And then, of course, relying on the labor of working class people who they sent out into the plague. I mean, it used to be that people in the elites had a sense of noblesse oblige, like a kind of humility about their good fortune. That has evaporated. The idea of the meritocracy, which used to be that everyone should have access to the American dream and equal opportunity, has instead become an ideology that protects the elitism and the status of the over-credentialed elites who are convinced

that the reason that they have so much money, so much more money than anybody else, is because of their own virtue and their own merit, because they're good at studying for tests or whatever. So let's talk a little bit about some of these amazing people you talk to. I wanted to put people in the book who were both interesting and fascinating and had great stories, but also who were representative of larger trends. So what I first did was I went to, there's an amazing professor at Brigham Young University called Joe Price, and he has a group of grad students. And you can ask them to call the data for you. And I asked them to give me a snapshot of the working class in 2000. And in 2020, I wanted to know who they were, how old are they? What are the races, what are the

occupations, who is a homeowner, which occupations are most likely to make homeowners, where do people live, how much money do they make? And they gave me this snapshot, which helped me analyze the trends in working class life. And that's the entire first chapter of the book is devoted to this data analysis. What was the most shocking thing that you found in this data? The most shocking thing I found was that the American dream for working class people is much more alive and well and healthy in red states than it is in blue states. I was not expecting to find that, but just the price of housing alone is so radically different between red states and blue states. And if that is an essential component of how you define the American dream, which I think it is,

it is for most Americans, the American dream is much healthier in red America than it is in blue America. There's so much of this love of the possibility to be able to work your butt off to get ahead. And the hope, you know, the American dream is really that that will translate into elevating, creating a good life for your family and so forth. That is what I understood to be the American dream. Of course, homeownership is a piece of that. But, you know, despite everything, quite a number of the people that you spoke to still believe that this is possible, even though it seems a lot harder. Yeah, there was such a deep love of this country and a deep respect for work. I think this is something that's really lost on the left.

To Democrats and to the left, the way that you help the working class is with more welfare, having more people qualify for welfare, for example, people with a higher income. That's not what working class people want. They take a deep pride in their work. They see it through a spiritual lens. They see it as a uniquely American inheritance and something that connects them to their parents. They talked a lot about seeing their parents get dressed to go to work every day. And they took so much pride in their jobs. The problem was, was that these jobs were no longer able to afford them the most basic hallmarks of stability, no matter how hard they worked. That's the problem. It's not that they don't want to work or that, you know, they should be getting more help from the government. No, the problem is, is that they work really hard. And yet the cost of a middle class life relative to the wages they bring in, there has become a total mismatch, which is completely unacceptable because our entire country relies on their work.

You know, somehow these big corporations were able to offload all of their risk onto their workers. And that's unacceptable. It's unacceptable. The cost of employing somebody should even out at some point in their life, by the time they're in their 30s, to a living wage where a person can sustain a family. I mean, that's like it's so obvious that a democracy depends on that. And instead, what we have right now is an oligarchy of the credentialed where the only people who can be guaranteed that American dream are people in the top 20 percent in the knowledge industry who do jobs that, let's be frank, most of us would not miss them if they disappeared tomorrow. But if all the truckers disappeared tomorrow, we would starve. And yet somehow a truck driver cannot be guaranteed the most basic, fundamental, modest version of what it means to have a stable life.

So I did about, I want to say between 75 and 100 interviews. I traveled for as much of it as I could until my money ran out. And I did the rest of them on the phone. And basically, I then took all of the interviews and culled them down to the people who I felt had the most sympathetic stories that represented larger trends. And it was very hard finding people because obviously we each have our own networks, but I really did not want to be, I didn't want my confirmation bias or anything random about my life to determine the picture that I was trying to paint. You know, the other books that exist in this genre, they're often done by academics who have at their disposal, a team of 10 or 20 or 30

researchers, you know, where they have a foundation and unlimited amount of money or time. You know, some people spend 10 years. I didn't have that. I have a day job. I work at Newsweek. And so I really had these constraints. But I also felt that it was better to have whatever I could come up with than not have such a book at all. And so I hired somebody. He found about five or six of the people in the book for me. He happened to be in Appalachia. And so he would drive around and I would tell him what stores I was looking for people from or what kinds of industries. And then a lot of it was sort of word of mouth. I put up ads places. I used Facebook groups. The one thing I was very hesitant to do is to approach people at work because I felt that there was a consent issue

there. I would approach them. They would assume I was a customer. And that made me very uncomfortable. And so I tried not to do that. But there's a lot of working class people around us all the time. It's just a question of engaging them in a dignified way. And I was totally surprised by how willing people were to share their stories with me, which were deeply personal. And I was very grateful. It's a remarkable, remarkable set of stories. You know, one of the things that you highlighted in here, which I hadn't really thought that much about, is I believe it's called, you know, this benefits clip. There's, if you're not able to make a certain amount of money, you're eligible for all sorts of benefits. And then, of course, at some point you're making a lot

of money. But there's this amount of money, which seems like there's quite a few people making that where you can't get any support, where it would actually be helpful. You're working your butt off, but it's very hard to actually, you know, save anything or just do anything more than live basically month to month. So kind of tell me about that reality. Yeah, the benefits cliff is a really big deal. It came up a lot in the interviews. Basically, let's say you're a single mom and you're working for $11 an hour and you have a kid and the kid maybe has some sort of disability or some sort of medical issue. And so the kid has Medicaid, which is, you know, the Cadillac of healthcare. And you're working $11 an hour, and you're getting by because you

get free healthcare from the government, you get food stamps, maybe you get help with housing, right? There's a lot of help available to people who are poor. But then let's say you're a really good worker, You show up on time, you work really hard, you're invested in the job, and your boss notices and says, hey, I think you'd be really good at the next level. I want to give you a raise to $15 an hour. If that single mom takes that raise, she will lose the equivalent of $25,000 a year in government benefits, even though what she'll be making in addition will only be around $8,000 to $10,000 a year in government benefits, even though what she'll be making in addition will only be around $8,000 to $10,000 or $11,000 a year. So it's a massive sacrifice. We've incentivized people to

stay below a certain level of income. If she gets married, she will lose the vast majority of these benefits. She could take the job, which maybe even it comes with health care, but that health care is probably going to have a $5,000 deductible. It's probably going to be terrible health care. And so she's actually screwing over her child because how could she give up this amazing government health care for this terrible health care, right? So in all these ways, we are incentivizing people to work against their interests, even though the vast majority of working class Americans, in fact, everybody I interviewed said they would rather have a better job that paid better than have anything from the government, which they were not really interested in. And yet so many of those jobs don't afford them the things that they need. This is a really big problem because they were

very upset at this idea that people had to choose not to work or would choose not to work. But then they themselves, if they needed help with a little thing here or there, they could never get the help they needed. They all had stories of people who they knew who worked so hard, who needed a little bit of help and could not get it. People often who had disastrous things happen to them as a result, couldn't afford to feed their families, people who worked, and then felt very much frustrated that there was a lot of help for the people who they felt did not deserve it as much. But this benefits cliff is real. We have to find a way to stop incentivizing the worst behaviors and start incentivizing the behaviors that lead to autonomy. The system is basically set up to just to keep people down.

That's kind of what you're telling me here. The other part, if I may add, you mentioned that if they get married, they lose these benefits. I mean, if there's one thing that guarantees success statistically, is to have a stable marriage for the kids, for the family. I mean, it's the golden ticket,

but that is de-incentivized in the structure you're describing. Personally, I've seen the data too about the success sequence. I actually did not find that in my interviews. I met a lot of people who had followed the success sequence and were still working poor. And I met a lot of people who didn't, who had children with multiple partners out of wedlock who made it. But, you know, those trends are obvious. We know that the number one predictor for downward mobility for a child is whether they are born out of wedlock. And yet somehow we penalize people for getting married and doing the thing that would most help their children to succeed. It's insane. It's appalling. The other thing that would most help their children to succeed.

It's insane. It's appalling. The other thing that another kind of, you know, sort of jargon term, which has been sort of stuck in my mind since I've been reading is this idea of degree inflation. Yeah, there's something called the diploma divide, which really represents the way in which having a degree can ensure you the hallmarks of a middle class life. People who have a college degree live longer. They are healthier. They will make on average a million dollars a year more than a person without a college degree. And they're really insulated from the kinds of precariousness that plague

working class life. It's a real problem because it's not like these people are coming out of college with a succinct set of skills that they then deploy in the workforce. We know that over 50 percent of Americans with a college degree are underemployed, meaning they're working in jobs that didn't require that degree, although infuriatingly, they still make more than people who don't have a degree. And so that degree really has become a gatekeeper of the American dream when it was supposed to be a pathway for it, one of many. People that work with their hands, people that have to work in the real world, so to speak, versus people that work at a computer

and work with ideas and more in the virtual world. They have to deal with reality. If you need a degree to be able to get a job, even some jobs that someone without that degree could maybe do much better because of their real world skills that they've developed, for example, you also have had to kind of go through this past this ideological litmus test now which has you know ever increasingly over time become a

big part of how uh you know i guess universe even getting into university has decided and certainly succeeding in university to decide i've had people talk about this with me on multiple shows as well. So it's another, it almost becomes another kind of ceiling where all sorts of people that are getting into jobs are of this more woke ideological persuasions or flexible enough to run with it, so to speak, as opposed to people who would just look at it and go, hey, this is crazy. This has nothing to do with me, you know? Yeah, I would say that the woke ideology

is very alien to working class Americans of all races. The way I would define wokeness is you take a worldview that was based on right versus wrong and replace it with a worldview that only distinguishes between powerful and powerless and ascribes all virtue to the allegedly powerless who have no agency and no responsibilities. And then you say, okay, all people of color are powerless, and all white people are powerful. And that's it, then you have your sort of your matrix and your rubric and your binary and people of color are inherently virtuous and have no agency and no moral responsibility to act because they can't act at all. And all white people are inherently

evil and you know, run the world, right? That's kind of the woke ideology. And this is very foreign to how working class Hispanics and black people see themselves. They find it insulting and alienating and people even taking responsibility. In fact, I would say they take, they over ascribe responsibility to themselves. You know, they're much more likely to blame themselves for why things are going wrong than the market that's sort of stacked against them, which is, of course, why they're so patriotic. And so I would say like that whole, they really don't like the woke ideology because they see it as intolerant. But by the same token, they also really don't like Republicans who build an entire agenda around fighting wokeness because they see that as intolerant too. And, you know, I would say like the most common view, for example, on LGBTQ view, view issues that I encountered among working class Americans that I interviewed was they were extremely pro gay and

extremely worried about the transgender agenda. To them, there's no LGBTQ. There's like the gay people in their lives who they want to see treated with love and respect and who they want to get married and raise children in a loving environment. And then there's the transgender ideology that's, you know, coming for the schools and coming for the sports. And they really didn't like that. The reason they don't like wokeness is because they see it as intolerant and they are deeply, deeply tolerant people. And, you know, I would urge any Republicans listening to this to keep that in mind. They believe that people should be able to make their own decisions for themselves, but they didn't like the idea of a coercive ideology saying, this is how you have to be, this is how you have to think.

Absolutely. It comes back to Trump. To the left, to the Democrats, Trump is an extremist. But to his supporters, he's a moderate. And they love that about him because they don't look to politicians to tell them what their values should be. They know what their values are. They look to politicians to embody and to pursue policy that reflects those values of theirs. And because they are extremely moderate, they want a moderate agenda. And when you break down Trump's agenda, you know, tariffs, trade war with China, controlling immigration, 15 weeks on abortion, he's pro-gay, he's courting unions, he's courting blacks like that. That's it. I mean, that's very close to what I found working class people want. Now, they're not all going to vote for him. For some of them, the character is really, it's an issue. Although that's increasingly, I think, very much, you know, an economic privilege that many of them was very important to people was health care. So the vast majority of people I interviewed wanted a total moratorium on immigration.

OK, Trump has that piece. But they also wanted some kind of government-backed, catastrophic health care plan. They couldn't stand the idea that people would go into medical debt and that they who work with their hands for a living, who do physical, manual labor, should over the course of their career see their bodies break down and then not be able to afford to see a good doctor. It was really offensive. You know, something that you wrote in the book that's just jumping back to me right now is the increase in the cost of an individual, the health care of an individual person per year, I forget what the stat was exactly, but it was like, you know, 100 times increase or more than that. Like truly an

unbelievable increase relative, you compare it to wages or inflation, or frankly, almost any measure. Yeah, I believe the increase was like, you know, in the 60s, it cost $120 for a family to have health care. And now it costs like $25,000 a year. Like it's something disgusting and obscene. It's their cartels, the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies are cartels and everybody cartels to them. And the first party to arrive at the combination of saying we're going to police the border and protect American jobs, and we're going to make sure you can afford to see a good doctor is going to have a ruling majority. And I don't know which party will get there first. I'm not particularly invested in which party gets there first, but that is the winning formula right there. And I just hope people are listening because

it's astounding to me that nobody would want to sort of pick up this formula and run with it. Well, the thing that you mentioned, which I find amusing, and you've been on some news shows, actually, I might run a clip from this because I love how people react to you when you say this, is you say, well, you know, Trump is the centrist candidate here, right? And of course, it's a very centrist agenda. It's obvious looking at it on the face of it. But somehow, this is missing in people's minds. It's missing because there is a lot of energy expended in trying to hide this, right, on both sides. So the Republican donor class and the Republican elites don't want to admit that Trump is a centrist, but also the Democrats don't want to admit it because he effectively picked up the Democratic agenda from the 90s that the Democrats had abandoned when they of the Democratic Party come back to haunt them.

And so they have to destroy him because he literally embodies their own failures. He is the exposure of their own failures. And that's why you have all this narrative, this language about him being racist and his followers being racist or him being a unique threat to democracy, despite being the most popular politician in the country, you know, they have to portray him as some sort of unique threat because to admit the truth is an indictment of themselves and their own failures and what they did. So, Batia, who needs to read this book? So if you're a working class person, if you want to read this book, you will find in it people like you talking about the things that matter to you and talking about how to help widen the pathway to the American dream for you.

And I hope that it will give working class people comfort and a sense of relief to see their own views represented because they have been silenced effectively. And if you are part of the elites, you should read this book so you know how your fellow Americans are living. It's just appalling to have neighbors who are working so much harder than we are and yet struggling to achieve the things

that we take for granted. And it's not always easy to learn about that and to see the things that we should have humility about. But, you know, I had the Trump derangement syndrome. So this has been a long journey for me. I was wrong about Trump and I feel very humble towards the people who were right about him, who have a fraction of my education. And I don't think that's an accident. So I would hope that people on the left and on the right, because it's a nonpartisan book, would find something here to really help them remember what this country is all about. And that so much more unites us than divides us. You mentioned that you had this Trump derangement syndrome. I understand it to be a kind of like brainwashing that people are subjected to by just like all these sort of big media and other

institutions are all pushing the same line repetitively again and again. What a profound impact that has on us as human beings. And I think that's part of it. How do you understand that? And how did you, I guess, suddenly see through it? Well, I didn't suddenly see through it. It took a long time to deprogram myself. It started with realizing how corrosive the woke ideology was. My rabbi also, who's the most amazing person I know, always really loved Trump.

And when he first told me that, it was sort of like a crack in the armor because I know he's an incredible person and obviously not a racist or anything. So there was that. There's a local bar here that I go to, a working class bar, and people there sort of helped me along gently. And then also, I think throughout 2018 and 2019, the wokeness was ramping up and becoming more and more obviously psychotic and more and more anti-semitic and just disgusting i mean i i started to become

really uncomfortable with the way the people in my milieu talked about black people um and i started to understand that my black friends felt really uncomfortable with the way that you know the woke media talked about race in general. So it was like, it was like slowly and then all at once to get it first. There's like, you have to get rid of the derangement syndrome. And then you kind of slowly start to think, well, okay, if they were wrong about all of his supporters being racist, what else are they wrong about? Okay. They were wrong about the Russia hoax. What else are they wrong about? Okay, they were wrong about the Russia hoax. What else are

they wrong about? Okay, they were big time wrong about COVID. What else are they wrong about? You know, the sneering of the elites vis-a-vis the working class always bothered me. And then I started to see that as very much connected to the way that they covered Trump. And I started to think that his analysis of himself as sort of absorbing the blows of their contempt for the working class started to ring truer and truer to me. And I guess that's how you end up here. Well, in this book, Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women is obviously the product of your journey. An incredible book. I want to highly recommend it to our viewers. Batia Ungar Sargon, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much, Jan. God bless you.

Thank you all for joining Batia Ungar Sargon and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.