From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - The Shameful Classism Exposed At The Southern Border

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

How has the crisis at the Southern Border revealed the class divide in the United States? Deputy Opinion Editor at Newsweek Batya Ungar-Sargon joins to discuss how left-wing border policies expose Democrats' disdain for working-class Americans and how the surge of migrants could impact the economy. Later, they talk about how President Biden's economic policies have harmed the middle class, and what Republicans can do to win back the working class in the next election cycle. Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy, along with my co-host for the podcast, my partner in life, and my wife,

Rachel Campos Duffy. Sean, it's great to be back at the kitchen table. And today we have a great guest and a friend of ours, Batia Ungar Sargon. She is, as you know, the editor at Newsweek. And she has an amazing column at my new favorite website. It's called Compact. It's where left and right meet with all kinds of, it's sort of like, I think it's the new wave here. There's a lot of issues Americans agree on post-COVID after so much has been exposed.

And Batia is on the forefront of that, along with others at Compact Magazine. And so we are so happy to have you, Batia. Thank you so much for having me. I feel like I'm hanging out with the cool kids. You guys, I just feel like the way that you bring your marriage to the public sphere and make it seem like such a beautiful institution. And it's such an enviable thing to be part of. It's so important in addition to obviously all of the brilliant commentary and wonderful emphasis on unity that I just am so simpatico with. So thank you for having me.

Thank you, Batia. That's a really nice thing to say. And I'm glad you I'm really touched that you mentioned that. This is the second time you've done a podcast. I think the last time, the first time we did a podcast with you, I remember because we were at our cabin in the corner of the cabin. And we did the podcast from there. And it was, again, hard to set up. So welcome back to the kitchen table.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for that. So what are we talking about, Rachel? So today we're going to talk about the border because Batia has such an interesting perspective. And it's a perspective that I join you with, Batia, which is that the border crisis is exploding, obviously, because of Title 42 going away. But it's been burning for a long time. But what it's really revealed is a class division. And that's something, Batia, that you have been focused on for a long time, that the problems in America are not race, they're class. Yeah, 100%. You know, Democrats

love to talk about immigration, like they're this sort of moral font, you know, and that the Republicans are these evil, cruel people who hate people of color. And this is about white supremacy and whatnot. And nothing could be further from the truth. Your views on immigration are 100 percent a reflection of how much money is in your bank account. Essentially, it is low wage and working class Americans who are being displaced by this flood of illegal migrants, you know, 2 million, 6 million people coming in here. And it is so devastating to watch right now because we have this tight labor market, which

in a normal functioning country with a normal functioning president and a normal functioning border would mean huge gains for the working class, right? We all know how hard it is to get working class people today because of this labor shortage. A lot of people dropped out during COVID. We have a lot of men who are not in the workforce. We have a lot of women who are choosing to stay home and raise their kids now. This should be leading to huge gains for the working class. And while there are some gains and the labor market does seem to be still tight, staying tight, the labor market does seem to be still tight, staying tight, those gains are being undercut by 6 million new available workers who are willing to work for a fraction of the cost. So of course, that's really good for corporations. And it's really good for Democrats because they

don't like this labor shortage. They don't like this tight labor market because they're not part of the working class anymore. Their base is now the people who consume working class labor. And so they want the service industry to be cheap. They want their food and their products to be cheap and they want labor to be cheap because that's not their base. Their base is at the top, the over-credentialed elites who consume working class labor. And then of course, the dependent poor who they want to have on this sort of perpetual government support. So to unpack that a little more, I look at the Trump years and the economy did really well. And there had been a debate about should we raise the minimum wage? But what happened was because of the economy, there was real competition for labor and the market had to pay people more to get them to come into their business.

COVID hits and a lot of people left the workforce. They were paid some because it was necessary, but some just were paid to stay home. And a lot of those people haven't come back into the workforce. And a lot of those people haven't come back into the workforce. And if you bring all of these new people in to work in America, and at one point, if you – and again, Republicans are pushing this. Again, you have to work to get benefits. If you just can't sit at home any longer and you, again, have to, as an American, get into the workforce, all of a sudden, to your point, you're going to saturate the workforce

with workers. And the consequence is you're going to drive wages down, which doesn't help the American middle class or lower class. It actually hurts them. It's going to give them lower wages and make it harder for them to rent or buy a house and put food on the table and buy a car. Just the necessities of life will be much more challenging. And it begs the question, why would Democrats do this? Right. It's such a great point. There's this scene during a congressional hearing, a senatorial hearing about, I want to say, a month ago. Bernie Sanders hauled Howard Schultz, who started Starbucks in front of the Senate,

and was sort of badgering him and saying, you know, you're union busting and this and that. And Schultz looked at him and he said, you know what the starting wage at Starbucks is? It's $17 an hour. And then he said, Senator Sanders, when you put forth a national minimum wage bill, you were only asking for 15. We chose because we thought it was good for business to go up to $17 an hour. And you know, when you talk to people who work at Starbucks, people even who work at Amazon, you know, I spoke to a woman who lives in West Virginia the other day, she works at Amazon, she makes so much more than anybody else she knows. She loves it. She said it's the best job she's ever had. Now, because of inflation, she's still struggling to buy groceries. And that is the problem there. This good labor market,

it is creating some level of improvement for working class people, even people working at these big corporations. But at the same time, the inflation is eating away at those gains. Now, to your question, Sean, why are the Democrats doing this on immigration? why are the Democrats doing this on immigration? I believe that President Biden thinks that inflation is being kept high because of the gains that working class Americans have been making in the workforce. I think that he believes what the Fed believes, which is that, you know, low unemployment and high wages is contributing to inflation. Now, first of all, wages is contributing to inflation. Now, first of all, that's such an anti-worker way of seeing things, right? The worker always has to pay for it, right? They have to pay for inflation at the grocery store when the price of food is high. But also, they're the ones responsible for getting it

down by having lower wages. It's so infuriating to hear, especially Democrats, talking this way. What I think happened was two things. The first is President Biden put a person in charge of the border, Alejandro Mayorkas, who truly believes in open borders. I mean, he truly does not believe that we have the right to have a national border and to say to people, you can't just walk in here. I mean, it's clear the way he talks. But he also ends up talking about the economy all the time. Why is the head of DHS telling us about the job market? But he always brings it up. He is always talking about the labor shortage. I mean, they really have, to a certain degree, partnered with the

cartels as some sort of, you know, jobs program to bring in low wage workers to undercut American working class. But at the same time, I think President Biden, as we put Mayorkas in charge, who really does not believe in having a border. But the generous reading here is that President Biden thought that like the Fed, like Janet Yellen, like a lot of terrible economists, that the real culprit in inflation is the working class making a living wage. And so he thought the way that we combat inflation is to bring in millions and millions of people who are willing to work for much less. That will increase production and it will bring down prices. Now,

that's nonsense, right? Because workers have to eat. So if you import six million low wage workers, they're also going to be buying food, right? I mean, like, it's just it makes no sense. But when I'm trying to think like him and think, okay, he's not evil, what could possibly be motivating it? It's the fact that their base consumes service industry labor. And so they want it to be cheap. And the fact that I think he probably thought this would help with inflation,, of course, we've seen it's done nothing of the kind. So you would say to conservatives who think this is about voting, right? They think that this is about bringing in six to 10 million more voters or God knows how many more. And I want to I do, by the way, want to get to what's happening at

the border, because I think there's a lot of secret stuff happening. It's much worse than we even think, or at least than we're being told. But you would say that this is a way to deal with the economy and inflation and deal with all the economic issues they need taken care of prior to the election rather than bringing in new people who will eventually become voters, presumably Democrat voters because they assume that since they're poor and probably coming here for benefits, et cetera, and to be part of that dependent class that you described earlier in the show. progressives and liberals, when I hear them, you know, the way they're, you know, Nancy Pelosi put it back, we need them to pick the crops, right? You know, the Democrats, the base that they're counting on is, you know, this upper crust elite who need people in their houses to watch the children and clean, you know, clean their homes and, you know, pick their crops and do their

landscaping. And they don't want to pay a lot for that. They want to be able to get a contractor for whatever, you know, whatever price and then the dependent poor. So I don't think that they you know, they already want that group of dependent poor to be much bigger. Right. This universal basic income idea. Right. They just want to pay people not to work. They don't believe in the American dream. They don't believe in the dignity of labor. They don't believe in any of these values that are core to who the American working class is. I mean, these people work so hard. And to me, the real question is how to get how to get a conservative pro worker agenda through that is pro capitalist pro business, but does not allow someone like this woman in West

Virginia to be working 12 hour days, loving her work, committed to her work and can't afford a frozen pizza because it's just too expensive. And I think one of the problems with that is, again, it goes it goes back to inflation. And this is not an inflation conversation. But again, when you shut down American energy, that's driving the cost not just of gas in your car, but it's also driving the cost of food. When the administration comes out and says, oh my goodness, a third of all carbon emissions come from farms, we need new rules on farms. The signal is, we're going to find new ways to regulate and tax you on farms, which is going to again, drive up the cost of food in the grocery store. So I think you're right, Bhatia, I think this administration is missing the boat on what's driving inflation. But what gets me is the liberals who are the

wealthy part of the Democrat Party, they love the policy of open borders and maybe bringing people in. They get a benefit of cheap labor from that, to your point. They can feel compassionate, too, because these are brown people, right, coming across the border, and aren't we great? Yeah, but they don't live with the consequences of the policy. So the migrants that come in and have to stay now in the gyms of schools, where now- Public schools. Public schools, right? Their kids don't go to those schools. To Rachel's point, they're in private schools. Their kids aren't missing out on FIAD. Those kids aren't having their gyms full of migrants. Also, the cities, Chicago and New York, are paying millions of dollars out of their budget to fund housing and food for migrants. And the wealthy don't get the benefits of the city welfare programs, right? They actually pay in to fund those programs.

But it's those lower income Americans that need those programs that instead of going to them, it's actually going to migrants who are non-citizens. And that's why I have a hard time wrapping my head around this, but also recognize that if you're a liberal, the policy you love, you don't have to live by it. It's everyone else who has to live by your policy. Or veterans being kicked out of hotels for, you know, where they were staying to stay off the street. And then, I mean, they kicked them out and put migrants. It's like, I don't understand how Democrats or the people pushing these policies can possibly justify this. These are American citizens, people who served our country.

Yeah, I always say that, you know, the Democratic Party right now is sort of like a plane and they're all sitting in first class. Yes. And they sort of they pulled the curtain shut. Yes. And what they say is, you know, everybody else can fly for free. We're going to we're going to fund everybody in coach. But we decide where we're going. And better not, you better not try to use our bathroom. Right. I mean, that was that woman weeping and saying Te Amo on Martha's Vineyard and she called the National Guard to deport these migrants, right? Weeping. I love you Te Amo while she's deporting them. But this is true of every issue in the Democratic Party's platform. true of every issue in the Democratic Party's platform. When it comes to environmentalism, for us private jets, for you, the bus, right? For you, the subway, where you might get kicked in the face by a mentally deranged person. If you try to defend yourself, you'll go to jail,

right? Defund the police. We are going to live in our private gated communities, and you're going to live with all this crime in the streets. Immigration, open borders, right? Our jobs in the elites, you know, as college professors and journalists and politicians will never be threatened by people who can't speak English. Right. We'll get all the benefits. And you you live with the consequences. And each of these things makes them feel like the heroes of some sort of like morality play. And the other side is evil and racist when the truth is, no, this is just virtue signaling.

They're high off their own virtue. They create these vanity morals and then they demand that the American working class pay for it. We'll have more of this conversation after this. This episode is brought to you by Miller Lite. Miller Lite's all about celebrating friendships, especially during fantasy football season. And there's no better way to show your friends slash fantasy league's last place finisher that you love them than Miller Lite's last placements, where you can get their face on a billboard. Yep, a real billboard. Just go to lastplacements.com to find out how. Miller Lite. Tastes like Miller time.

A perfect example of that is AOC, right? When this subway situation happened with the Marine, with Daniel Penny, the Marine, who ended up, I think, accidentally killing this mentally ill man. She never has to face the indignity of going on the subway. She's taken in black cars to work. It's unbelievable what she does. But this brings me to an interesting point.

Because, again, when we intro'd you, we didn't indicate or clarify, you are a classic liberal. You and I probably vote very differently, Batia. But maybe this year we might vote the same, who knows? But in any case, you're a classic liberal. I understand you went to the University of Chicago. Many of the people who graduate from universities like the University of Chicago or Harvard, they're not all elites. Many of them come from the middle class or the working class, and then they become the professional class. Explain to me why so many of them, just like AOC, who went to, I think, Boston University. She wasn't working class. Let's not pretend she didn't come from Westchester.

She wants to pretend like she's from Brooklyn and she's a working class bartender. But in any case, many middle class people come through these university systems and then they sell out the working class. What is happening in the university system? Why do so few of them come out like you out of elite universities, but who are still defending the working class and calling out the hypocrisy of the elites who are keeping people down? I look at AOC and I mean, I honestly like, you know, it's hard for me not to see her as someone whose heart is in the right place. I disagree with her about everything. I think she's wrong about everything. But, you know, in general, I think, look, this is a person whose heart just bleeds for for the less fortunate but then when she's when she called that murder um when she said Daniel Penny murder Jordan you like you have to hate the working class to say something like that yeah you have to hate the working class to subject them to that

indignity and violence of having to ride that subway day after day and encounter people like that. And the funny thing is, I was literally on the subway. And there was a guy just like Jordan Neely on the subway while I was that's where I was when I learned about this story. I was scrolling Twitter, learning that and there was a man walking around the subway car pants around his ankles, you know, just threatening everybody being completely you know just terrorizing the subway car as they do and you're just sitting there thinking like why are they on the side of the criminals and never on the side of the victims and i i think it does come back to this college degree so you know the in my view the main dividing line in American public life today, in American life today, is that diploma divide. Having a college

degree is by and large the number one predictor for upward mobility, living longer, living healthier. You make on average a million dollars more throughout the course of your career than a person who doesn't have a college degree. And while not everybody who has a college degree is part of the elites, I mean, that is the pathway up. And that is where the progressive energy comes from, you know, progressive politics are a smokescreen for class privilege. So they get to college. And the thing about a college degree today in America is, you have to go through these courses that teach you how to, you know, ostensibly how to write, you know, these composition courses. And those are taught by English majors. And those English majors have gotten that, you know, elite degree because to get that, you know, to become a professor, you have to have gone to the most elite schools. And in those elite schools, what they are invested in doing is reproducing status, right? It's justifying the sticker price of this college degree. And so they have to convince the people going there, you're getting a special rarefied product that makes you special, well, you know, you tell them that what makes them special is their opinions, is their views, which are not like those, you know, dirty working class people,

right? Or those lame middle class people know you're in the elites. And how do you produce elite belonging? So in England, you do it with an accent, right? You have that accent, which tells everybody how much money your father made, basically, and you know, within 200 miles where you grew up, right? I mean, that it's a sign of class status. We don't have accent accents in this country because for a long time, we like to think of ourselves as a classless society. What we have instead is words like Latin X, right? That's what you have instead of an accent, a word you can throw out there that shows your belonging in the good guys, your belonging in the elite status.

And it's like, you think about it, it's like a Tesla, right? A Tesla is a perfect virtue signal. By the way, I believe AOC has a Tesla. Yes, she does. Not only does it signal you're like, that you are a good guy, because you care about the environment, but it's expensive. So it shows that you're rich at the same time. And that's, that's the argument I'm trying to make is that so much of what passes for leftist policy is just about showing elite status. And the way you do that is by calling anyone middle class or working class, racist, evil, instead of saying, look, we just have a disagreement about this. Exactly. The deplorables. That's it. So I look at this, Batia, and I think of it in the same way, but also a little bit differently. Exactly. The deplor speech. Speech is violence. They don't believe in the Second Amendment. They don't believe that people have a right to bear arms. And if you convey these sets of ideas into a group of people who are going to

be the next politicians or the next business leaders, you're able to really expand that Marxist viewpoint throughout the country. And what they do is, again, if I can't afford a Tesla and you give me a rebate to buy a Tesla, or if I can't afford to rent my apartment and you give me money for my apartment or food stamps for my food, what then happens, because the cost has gone up, mainly because of the Green New Deal, all of a sudden, I'm reliant on you, the government, or you, the corporation, and that means you have power and I don't. And I think this is a power differential. They want to see, again, the elites have power and the lower class rely on them, which means

they have no power. But I want to get to another topic here on the border, which is... Can I just, on your point there, I mean, Lenennon said, give me four years and I will change everything with your, give me four years with your children and I can change anything. And I think we are seeing the fruits of that. I remember when AOC was elected, I believe we were giving a fundraiser for you when you were in Congress. And she had been elected the night before. Sean had this event. And both of us were like, we were at this event,

and people were still laughing about this bartender who took this seat. It was sort of like, what happened? And we were both like, watch out. This is the beginning of that class of, and I say class, not a classic classist way i mean just cohort yeah yeah this cohort of people who have now come through probably i would guess aoc k through k through college um has been fed this you know she's basically a communist i mean many of her staffers have left to now, left her campaign to head up the Communist Party in New York or whatever. Her comms director is now doing comms for the

Communist Party. Exactly, exactly. So this is the new leaders. And I guess we see it a little more, I agree with everything you say, Batia, about, you know, class allegiance and where they see themselves. And there's probably some, you know, middle class angst. You know, I remember Garrison Keillor always saying all these Midwesterners running away from their pot roast past. I mean, they want to be part of the elites, right? They want to be and they want to use those words and show they're more clever than their parents, you know, who, you know, are middle class. I get all that. But I think there's something else at the universities. We are seeing AOC, I think, was the harbinger of this new cohort, as you say, taking over positions of power. I think she is

incredibly powerful, incredibly savvy. And these are going to be our new masters, our new rulers. And by the way, just on that point, I don't think AOC is an incredibly smart. She cried at the border with kids in cages with Trump. She's nowhere to be seen on the border where there's thousands of young kids who we don't have parents for. We actually brought let them in the country and we can't find, we can't track the kids. And so that, which is what I want to ask you about. I mean, the policy, again, we've talked about the economics of what does this do to the American worker and their wage and their opportunity. But also it's having a huge impact when we're letting young kids come into the country that are being sold into sex trafficking or they're sold into almost slave labor or indentured servitude so they can make money and pay back the cartels.

We also have the cartels, very powerful in Mexico, now getting root in America and expanding and growing their presence. By the way, they're the most violent, ruthless group of people on the face of the planet right now. All of these things are going to have a huge impact on who we are as America. And a Democrat party, which again, I think has really kind of gone off track of where you would say you were a traditional Democrat or a liberal Democrat, they say they care about people. Yeah. And if you care about people, why would you ever allow this to happen to little kids coming

into our country, whether it's for sex work or indentured servitude or let the cartels into this country to wreak havoc in our communities. Yeah, I can. It's very hard for me to talk about this because it's so horrific. But I mean, nine, 10, 11, 12 year old girls being given these basically rape kits. Yes. You know, they're given a condom. They're given birth control because it is assumed that they're going to be raped between when they leave their home country, cross the Darien Gap.

It is so unbelievably horrific that we have incentivized this, that our government has essentially effectively partnered with these cartels. Nobody reaches the Darien Gap without the cartels say so. No one. So every one of those six million people is a slave to the cartels. And now they're here. That connection isn't severed. So when they pass through that Darien Gap to get here, every migrant gets a bracelet. And the color of that bracelet determines how deeply in debt they are to the cartels, how much they owe them, meaning what form of slavery their labor is going to take when they get here.

Sixty six percent of women admit to being raped on the way, which means obviously the number is astronomically higher. Now, how have we allowed this to happen? And then that whole you, the kids in cages, the weeping at the border. And Rachel, you have been vindicated so many times over this because you were the lone voice who said when Trump implemented the family separation policy, who said those are not their children. They have committed the act of cruelty in coming here in the first place and using their child in this way or someone else's child in this way for some sort of economic benefit. Who puts a child through that? No. And we know that these are not asylum seekers. We know that they're economic migrants.

90 percent are economic migrants, meaning, by the way, that all of the people with real asylum claims across the universe, across the globe. Now, forget it. You're out of luck. Yeah. So you were vindicated. And I think Trump was so clever in how he spoke about this during the CNN town hall, because he was asked by Caitlin Collins, would you consider going back to family separation? And it's really the first time we heard him address it. And what he said was, the point of that policy is to prevent people from coming because people love their families and they love their children.

And if they know we have that policy in place, they will not come. And if they do, that is on them. And you know what? I have to say, I really heard him when he was saying that. I think that's so true. And the fact that there are still a thousand children who have not been reunited with their parents, that means no one is looking for them. I mean, you guys have nine children. Can you even imagine if somebody had taken them

seven years later, having no idea where that child is, when everybody in the government is desperate to give them back to you and there's just no one asking for them. No one cares who these parents and and I'll do one more thing yeah it does get back to the labor thing because they found them working for corporate yes children working for corporations so the biden administration has effectively partnered with the cartels to import a slave cast which includes 80 000 children to undercut american workers and that's the compassionate side we'll have more of this conversation after this the score bet app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news yeah hey who should i

take in the boston game well statistically speaking no more statistically speaking i want hot takes i want knee-jerk reactions that's not really what i do is that because you don't have any knees? Scoreback. Trusted sports content. Seamless sports betting. Download today. 19 plus. Ontario only. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please go to connexontario.ca. It's really important that we talk about the jobs. I mean, first of all, they found some of them working at 2 a.m. in McDonald's. They found some, I mean, some cleaning. I mean, imagine it's bad enough to work in a slaughterhouse. Now you're cleaning out the slaughterhouse. But as you

mentioned, some of them were working for blue chip companies. I mean, like big Kellogg's and all these things. So these companies are benefiting from this as well. But again, the trauma of what happens coming over, I believe that many of these children were kidnapped off the street of Mexico or Central America because, as you said, nobody, and they're being used over and over. So if you come with the child, I think people don't understand that. If you come with the child, you are guaranteed to be given, you're guaranteed to stay. And they'll give you a court date that's like 10 years from now, and you're in. And so they're reusing these children. As they're reused, they're re-raped along the journey. It is absolutely horrific. I can never forget, there were several scenes that were captured. Imagine what we don't

capture. I mean, that little boy that was abandoned by the cartel in the middle of the hot desert, and they found him in tears. And he was in Spanish saying, they left me and they were, and I don't know where my parents are, blah, blah, blah. And they just reunited him with some, you know, obviously irresponsible uncle in Miami. We have no idea who his parents were. responsible uncle in Miami. We have no idea who his parents were. I remember Maria Bartiromo was at the border and Border Patrol showed her these two little girls. One was a little older than the other, was probably, you know, seven and four years old. They were dressed in the same outfit. They had little backpacks. Their mother, something, they were along the journey with their mother, they explained in Spanish. And when they made a stop at some place, something happened to the mother, and the mother never returned.

God knows what happened with the mother and the cartels. They were on this journey. They arrived alone, completely traumatized because something had happened to their mother along the journey. And she just disappeared. She never came back. Who knew what happened? This is a horrific, dangerous journey. We should be doing everything we can to stop this. And yet we're facilitating it. And Representative Kat Kamat calls Joe Biden the sex trafficker in chief. And I don't think we can argue with that, Batia. That's very, very accurate.

And I think you're seeing now President Biden so smugly saying, look, the situation's much better at the border now than you expected after Title 42. But of course it's better. They send 80,000 000 was it national guard that's the last thing the cartels want because they use these migrants to distract the border patrol so they can smuggle in fentanyl and kill 100 000 americans a year so of course they told everybody stop rushing the border the other thing is the biden is the reason they're not rushing the border is the biden administration opened hundred regional centers to start fast tracking migrants to giving them work permits and paroling 30 000 a month i mean

it's just what he didn't want was the scene of the chaos what he didn't want was the american people to know what's happening and so he just shifted it to a different place a sex trafficker and treat i mean that is that is apt apt. I can't disagree with that. I can't either. So just a couple of points. When I went to the border as a congressman, a lot of the border patrol when we met behind closed doors were saying, listen, we see that these kids are coming over with people who we believe are not their parents. Not all of them, but there's – we can tell who's not a parent and who is. And so they were asking, we should have resources to do DNA tests.

We can do them very quickly to tell whether there's a relationship here. And the federal government won't allow the DNA test. The privacy of the migrants takes precedence over the fact of, is this child actually with someone who they don't know that's not their parent? I didn't know that, Sean. I did not know that. Huge problem. And so, again, it allows for

the scam, to your point of allowing children to be used to go back and forth over the border, bringing people in. Who wouldn't want, I mean, what mother in America or father in America wouldn't want a DNA test on these children to find out if they're being trafficked. I mean, it's, but this is, they don't care about kids. They care about ideology. They care about power. And I'm sorry, all of that was exposed to me very clearly during COVID, but it's hard to believe that with these vulnerable children, I just, I'm in shock. And Bhatti, here's what I find fascinating. When you mentioned this, that Mayorkas, he'll come on and say the border's secure. There's not chaos at the border.

Joe Biden will say, listen, it's going way better than we thought it would at the end of Title 42. And it's going better in air quotes because they've got massive amounts of resources to process more people. And just you don't see the lines then. You don't see the backup. You don't see all of the folks at New Mexico waiting to come in. But I think it's interesting that the media, the mainstream media doesn't really cover the border.

And if they did, most Americans would say, I'm absolutely opposed to an open southern border. I'm opposed to millions upon millions of people coming into the country for the very reasons that you've laid out, which is why Joe Biden also says, hey, listen, I'm not going to speak frankly about my policy. Yes, the border is open. Yes, we want massive amounts of new workers to come in and provide cheap labor to corporations. Yes, we're not going to really vet them. Yes, there's more Chinese, more terrorists that are coming in the country. He's not being honest about the policy. And the media is actually covering for Joe Biden and this policy, which is a real head scratcher for me. I don't know why the media wouldn't lay into the story to go, hey, we're going to tell the complete truth about this and let you make a decision on

whether this is a good policy or a bad policy. Instead, they're like, we're not even going to talk about it. So most Americans don't even know about it. Right. And when they do cover it, it's always from the point of view of, you know, a migrant. They tell their like very sad story, which a lot of them do have very sad stories, you know, and it's never from the point of view of like these people are props of the most murderous, vicious organization in the world right now. I mean, if you go on Reddit, you can find videos of the cartels dismembering women who are still alive. I mean, it's just the most horrific thing you've ever seen in your life from these groups. And the other thing they don't show is, you know, the black community in Chicago, absolutely up in arms about the fact that

all of their resources are being given, The few resources they have are being given now over to migrants, veterans being kicked out of hotels. I mean, people they don't because they don't believe in the difference between, you know, citizen and non citizen. And so that's why they try to racialize it. They try to erase the difference between what it means to be an American because they don't believe in this country. They don't believe in the American dream. They don't believe America is a good country. And so it has no value for them. And so to them, these are just people of color. They're not people from other countries. Right. And to them, the people opposing it are white supremacists, even though, you know, as we know, Latinos living in border communities are

deeply devastated by this. The black community devastated by this. This has nothing to do with race, but they use the race talk to hide the class divide and the way that they are benefiting from it. Yeah. I mean, I always tell Sean, you know, we need the border communities have been totally forgotten. These are often, again, very poor to working class communities. Good, good people. And they are as American as New York City, and they are forgotten. No one cares what's happening to them. I interviewed Dr. Siegel, and he says there's a rise in TB in those communities. There's a rise in all kinds of infectious diseases that we thought

were eradicated because no one's testing. It used to be you come to this country, you pass a test, you pass a health test, we figure out who you know, who you are, where you came from. I mean, this is a free-for-all. So in any case, listen, Batia, it's been great having you. I think understanding this issue, not just from the devastation that it's causing on the southern border, but also in our communities and urban cities, but also just understanding the race. I mean, the class politics behind it is really important. And by that, I think you've done a wonderful job exposing the economics of this and how it hurts people who don't have the same voice that you have, the power of your voice, the power that we have to talk about their stories.

I think that's that to you, that's incredibly noble. And I know that so many people are grateful that you'll have their back and fight for them to go, hey, listen, I'm the one that's getting hurt. I don't get on national television. I don't make a huge amount of money. I can't make political contributions, but it's hurting me. And hopefully there's good people out there willing to tell the story of the economics of this policy that are devastating for poor middle class Americans. You can catch Batia on Newsweek where she is the opinion editor, but also you can go to Compact where she and other friends of hers have a lot of very interesting thought pieces. And it's a great site.

You can also find her usually once a week on the bottom line on Fox Business at six o'clock. So we always like that she swings by and dispenses with them. Yeah, and when I step out of line, Sean always puts me back in line and always write about everything at the end of the day. I've got to give her an elbow on the side there. Come on, Batia. But again, it goes to the point that Rachel mentioned. I mean, you're a you're a liberal. And I do think there's this this interesting phenomenon in America of kind of basic American principles that the left and right agree on. And they're kind of coming together maybe to push back against this Marxist, more radical movement, which I think is positive. And you've been a leading voice, you know, willing to speak truth to Democrats and Republicans. You're the uniter that Joe Biden said he was going to be, but it's actually Batia.

The great uniter. Oh, my gosh, I wish that were true. And I hope that is true. But I think I think in your in your way and you from your little perch, you are doing that, Batya. So we're really grateful for that. Batya Ungar Sargon, thank you so much for joining us at the kitchen table. Very grateful. Thank you. Bye, Batya. It's a fascinating conversation with Batya.

I do think she is a free thinker. And again, there's a lot of stuff that we don't agree with Batya on. But these core principles, we see eye to eye, and it's unique. But again, you see Bill Maher going in this direction, Elon Musk, a Democrat who's going, hey, this is crazy town stuff. On free speech. On free speech, yeah.

But I think that what's really fascinating is that classic liberals like her who have thought for a long time and advocated for a long time for policies that help the working class, that help American labor. I think for a long time, a lot of conservatives felt like if we just did the bidding of, you know, low taxes and all these things that ended up just helping the corporate class, that it would trickle down. And I actually think what Donald Trump did was expose that there were trade imbalances that were hurting the working class, there were things that were hurting farmers, policies that were coming out of, you know, the Democrat Party, by the way, that were hurting farmers. But there was this place that we could come together economically. And I think it's interesting. I think it's more that conservatives have moved towards protecting and caring about the working class. And that as so many Democrats have moved

up to the elite class interests, then people like Bhatia are left there with us. We've now moved over into that. It wasn't that we didn't care about the working class before. It's that we thought that these other policies would get us there. And it's really, it became really apparent that they weren't, that they were hurting blue collar communities. Well, listen, if corporations with, you know, reasonable tax codes and smart regulation allow them to be more competitive, the more competitive they are, the more jobs they're going to have here, the more innovation they'll have, and hopefully the higher wages they pay. I still believe that. But what you've seen recently is corporate America

is really involved and engaged in the culture wars. They want to play harder in that space. Well, they're being forced to by ESG, right? Listen, they willfully take on the ESG, right? They're not. Listen, they willfully take on the ESG jacket. You think so? Yeah. And they put on the ESG hat. And what I think you mentioned, Donald Trump, you're right.

He has he's been listen, I corporations great, but I'm going to fight for America as a whole. And whether it's the workers or the corporations, I'm going to put this country first, the American worker first. And it was phenomenal that you saw union workers look at Donald Trump and go, Mr. Trump, you're going to actually put tariffs on countries that are taking our jobs away? They couldn't believe it. And I mean, the union bosses may not have supported Donald Trump, but the union members are some of the largest Trump supporters out there. And you've seen a trend. By the way, politics, I view, always seems to be static. It doesn't move. But we're in the midst of a major political realignment and movement.

Yeah, transformation and realignment. I agree with you, Sean. Democrats are becoming, again, they are the party of the elite and the party of corporations and Republicans are becoming the party of the working class, middle income American. And just a side note on that, corporations, because we're in the middle of this transition, corporations are, they're led by Democrats. They love the Democrat party. They give their resources to Democrats and then Democrats get elected. And all of a sudden Democrats do what they used to do, which is, hey, we want to raise your taxes, increase your regulation, force you to do

things as a corporation that doesn't make business sense. And then the corporations will come to the Republicans who they hate, who they actually gave their money to defeat and go, hey, listen, will you help us out and defeat? AOC has a crazy proposal. The Democrats have a crazy proposal. Will you help us fight it and beat it? And Republicans today have been like, listen, God love you, brother corporation, but go talk to the Democrats who you put in office that have these crazy policies. Are they really doing that? Yeah, they are. Oh, they are. And to a far larger extent, not everybody, but many of them look at you're a Democrat funder,

don't talk to me, go talk to your Democrat friends. And it's really starting to freak them out. That's very interesting. So we'll see. We'll see. I do think I think it's a powerful realignment. I think it's not just looking at workers, but what works for families. What you know, how do we help, you know, families, you know, make up, make a living and help family formation. I think there's a realignment on a lot of stuff and we'll continue to have that conversation. But I love that we had Batia on because there are a lot of liberals who aren't on board with the woke, crazy crap coming out of AOC. liberals who aren't on board with the woke, crazy crap coming out of AOC. And those kinds of people like Batia are people that I think this middle ground, this new realignment will be a part of, that coalition.

No doubt about that. Listen, we want to thank you for joining us on our podcast. Thank Batia for joining us as well. If you like our podcast, you can rate, review, subscribe. Wherever you get your podcasts, we would ask you to subscribe. As I always mention, we're a friendly competition with other Fox talent. And we're close to surpassing a couple of them. So if you subscribe, we're always better off.

You can also get our podcast at foxnewspodcast.com. You can subscribe there as well. And fascinating conversation. Yep. We'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye. Bye. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription, an Apple podcast, and Amazon Prime. Members can listen to the show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.

Hi, everybody. It's Brian Kilmeade. I want you to join me weekdays at 9 a.m. East as we break down the biggest stories of the day with some of the biggest newsmakers and, of course, what you think. Listen live or get the podcast now at briankilmeadeshow.com.