TRIGGERnometry - How Elites Betrayed Working People - Batya Ungar Sargon

Episode Date: December 22, 2024

Batya Ungar-Sargon is an American journalist and author Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You look at who is doing those jobs now. It is teenagers who have been trafficked here, who are enslaved to the cartels who brought them here. We are importing slaves and sex slaves. A lot of them are children. Mass immigration raises the GDP. Of course it raises the GDP. It makes rich people very, very rich. The problem is GDP is not equally distributed, and this was 100% by design. We don't have a political divide in America. We have a class divide. I would never move to Israel.

Like if this country is going to go down for the Jews, I'm going down with this ship. They're going to take this country from my cold dead hands. Batchez, so you're pretty unique in that you must be one of the very few people in the world who says that the polarization that everyone's talking about in America and maybe in other Western countries, too, isn't really happening. What are you talking about? I'm actually not that unique.

I'm unique, I guess, in the elites and the chattering class to have that view. And the reason for that is because the people pushing the fact that we're polarized as a reality are the people who are making a lot of money off of that idea and getting a lot of power off of that idea. So it's elites in the media, elites in politics, social media companies. But the truth is when you look at polling and when you talk to average Americans, regular working class Americans, middle class Americans, as I did in my book, you find that there is huge, massive consensus on the issues that we think of as the most contentious, most divisive issues. And this has been hidden from view because the people telling the story about this nation

have a vested interest in pushing the idea that we're polarized when nothing could be further from the truth. So I'll just give you a few easy examples, abortion, right? You know, looks like this is a country at each other's throats. You know, people are pro-life, people are pro-choice. You look at the polling and half the nation says, I'm pro-life and half the nation says, I'm pro-choice. But if you dig down into those numbers, 65% of people who say, you that they're pro-choice, they only want abortion to be legal for the first trimester, so 12 to 15 weeks. And the people who say they're pro-life, 92% of them say there should be exceptions for

rape, incest, and the health of the mother. So you're already looking at, you know, there's a position here that has 80% support among the American electorate. And of course, this is totally hidden from view because you have politicians on the right pushing for total abortion bans with no exceptions, and politicians on the left who effectively refuse to say, okay, at what point should it be illegal to have an abortion? What is the upper limit on that? The same thing is true. You look at guns. Most Americans are pro-gun and pro-backround checks and pro-reasonable gun legislation. Most Americans are pro-life, but anti-band. They don't

want to see abortion get banned, even if they would say to you, as many of the people in the book said to me, I myself would never get an abortion, but I would never take that right away from a woman whose circumstances, I don't particularly understand. There's a sort of radical, radical moderateness threading itself through the American working class. Most working class Americans, everybody interviewed for my book and again polling backs this up, want much fewer immigrants and much more access to health care. So again, neither party is representing that point of view. You've got one party that says, okay, we'll talk about access to health care and expanding that, but we believe in an open border.

And then the other party that says, well, we believe in closing the border. We believe in having really stricter immigration laws, but they'll never say the word health care except as a slur. And so you really had the working class, this sort of vast American middle, 60, 65% of Americans with these extremely moderate views,

sort of falling between the two parties. And that's really where I think a lot of Donald Trump's support comes from. He's not a conservative. He really did sort of look at that sort of forgotten middle both from an ideological point of view and from an economic point of view and say, okay, what can we do for these people? How can we represent them? Do you think the reason that it almost sounds like you're saying that Americans don't disagree, but they are polarized by the parties? It sort of feels like that. Do you think that's because the parties are playing to the extremes of their base and therefore taking positions that are stronger than what the average person would want? We don't have a political divide in America.

We have a class divide. And so we have one party that's really getting 70% of the working class, which is the Republican Party, and that's increasingly of all races, the multiracial working class. And then you have the other party, the Democrats, who are catering to the college-educated elites and then the dependent poor. So you have the Democrats sort of taking the economic polls and the Republicans representing the middle. And in this election cycle, it's been fascinating to watch how that class divide has turned into a gender divide because, of course, women are 15 points more likely to have a college degree in America now. And so what that does is when you have that college degree in America, you have more access to the American dream, you have more stability in your life which frees you up to vote on things like abortion or symbolic issues like January 6th,

whereas working class people are really struggling. And so they're very, very focused on economic issues. And Donald Trump really did create an economy that was very protectionist in nature and managed to somehow keep inflation low while working class wages were on the rise for the first time in 60 years. And I think a lot of people are feeling, we just want to get back to 2019. You know, it's not like they're trying to get back to some distant racist past as the way, you know, you hear about it. You know, when you turn on MSNBC or CNN or read the New York Times, they just want a little bit. more breathing room in an economy that's become very prohibitive for working class people.

Batcha, I saw a video where you said that the Democrats are the party of the college-educated woman. What do you mean by that? So the polarization in this country is really along class lines. You have an educated elite, the top 20 percent, who now control over 50 percent of the GDP. So the last 50 years of of democratic economic policy has effectively been an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to this educated elite. You know, the left loves to rail against the billionaires.

But if you compare the share of the economy that's controlled by billionaires today to the share of the economy that was controlled by billionaires in 1971, which was the high watermark for working class wages after which they started to drop, has not significantly changed. So what did change? Where did all of that GDP that used to be in the middle class,

it went to the top 20%. Having a college degree has become the gatekeeper of whether you have access to the most modest version of the American dream, home ownership, being able to retire in dignity, your children having the option to get an education, being upwardly mobile or even just being stable and having adequate health care. These are all things now that are heavily correlated with having a college degree. If you don't have that college degree, you're very likely to be struggling to be downwardly mobile, to be working two jobs, not to have the same protections and the same safety net. And what ended up happening was, starting with Bill Clinton, who signed NAFTA into law,

which was a disastrous trade deal that shipped 5 million very good paying working class jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico's middle class. You then had President Barack Obama who defunded vocational training in schools, which meant that this wonderful avenue to the middle class for people who are not studious, for people who don't like to sit and study for hours and hours on end, who are not good at listening to authority and sitting in the front row of school and answering every question and studying algebra and Shakespeare, these people still had avenue, an avenue to the middle class through the sweat of their brow and their brawn, very much associated with masculinity

and men. And so these two, you know, the factory jobs and vocational training, these were two very good avenues for working class men into the middle class that were destroyed by successive democratic administrations. And then, of course, both parties had a very lax immigration policy, which meant that we were routinely shipping in millions and millions of low wage competition for working class Americans. And it's very interesting because at the same time that these economic policies were being put in place, what you had was this discourse in the 80s and 90s arise around toxic. masculinity, right? This idea that somehow being a macho man, being a provider, being the head of a

family, being a man who protects and supports and hits on women in bars and knows, you know, mating rituals and excels at them, that this was somehow poison. And it's my view that this discourse took off because it was operating as an alibi for the left for the fact that they were destroying the self-esteem, but also the ability of men to provide for families and heavily weighting the economy in favor of women who go to college, who are more studious, who have more social skills, in favor of this knowledge economy that rewards women and men who excel at more sort of feminine qualities like social science, social qualities that you need in these sort of laptop desk jobs, you know how to, you know, respond nicely to people who ask you for things,

you know how to sit for long hours, staring at a screen. Talking on a podcast. Talking on a podcast, you know, being very, you know, good with authority, knowing how to climb the corporate ladder by pleasing your higher ups and all of this stuff. So in my view, that that's sort of how we, we're seeing right now really is the culmination of that, of the class divide and the gender divide really sort of becoming one and the same. And I've seen you talk about this where you talk about, And I think it's a great example, which is the meatpacking industry. Can you talk about that? Because I found that fascinating the way you described it.

Meatpacking used to be the job to have. You would have a town where the economy was really built around a meatpacking plant. You know, a lot of the men, a lot of the women would get employed there. The wages were incredible. The hours were incredible. The retirement was incredible. When you got that job, you knew that you were going to be able to support a family and retire in dignity and have a home and have a truck and maybe have a pool in the backyard.

These were amazing jobs. And you look at who is doing those jobs now. It is teenagers who have been trafficked here who are enslaved to the cartels who brought them here from failed socialist countries in South America and Central America. They get a bracelet when they start making the journey and that bracelet has a color. And the color tells you how much money they owe the cartels. We know that 50% of the women who have made that border crossing admit to being sexually assaulted. So you can imagine what the actual number is.

We are importing slaves and sex slaves. A lot of them are children. And that is who is now packing the meat. They are almost entirely staffed by undocumented, often underage workers. It is absolutely appalling. And this was 100% by design. So every time Alejandro Mayorkas, who's the head of the Department of Homeland Security, who's supposed to be in charge of securing the border, was hauled before Congress or before the Senate,

and they asked him, why is the border open? He would say to their faces, our corporations are desperate for workers. It has become the Democrats' party line that without a caste of slaves, our economy cannot survive. And it's absolutely appalling because there is a direct correlation, between downward mobility for the working class and the rise of immigrants. So you look at 1971, again, the sort of high watermark for working class wages, we can say, okay, what was working there that stopped working so that the wages stagnated and then began to decline precipitously when you factor in inflation? The share of the population here that was foreign-born was 4%. Today it is 15%, the highest it's ever been in American history.

The last time it got close to this, it was 14%, and that was the gilded age, a time in American history that is characterized by radical inequality, by an oligarchic rich, and then the masses and masses of poor people competing at the bottom of the income distribution. And again, the Democrats very cleverly developed a language and a discourse to hide their crimes, the alibi was this time, well, we'll call the white working class racists because they oppose mass immigration. So if you're a man and you've seen your good job shipped overseas and then you've seen millions of competitors brought in to compete with the jobs that are left here and you objected to that, you were called xenophobic or racist for objecting to the selling out of your children's

future. And this worked so well because Donald Trump showed up at exactly the right time. And if you remember his signature promise from his 2016 campaign, it was build the wall. He was effectively saying to millions and millions and millions of working class people, there's nothing wrong with you for objecting to the fact that you cannot support your family anymore. We're going to restore dignity to you and to your labor. And I'll just make one more very quick point, which is that in so doing, in saying, you know, they're racist for objecting to immigration, in erasing the distinction between citizens, a non-citizen, this was much easier to do the first time around because Trump did very, very

well with the white working class and much worse with people of color. You look at how he's polling now. And of course, we'll know the reaction. We'll know whether this turned out to be true, but I'm very, very, I feel pretty certain that he's going to do very well with black voters. He's going to do very well with Hispanic voters. He's polled as high as 40% of black voters, which is historic, I mean, it's unimaginable for a Republican at this point.

You talk to black voters. I talked about voters in the book, and you can hear them talk about this stuff, why they're drawn to him, why they feel disgusted with the Democratic Party for how it emasculates men. He's polling a majority of Hispanic voters in overwhelmingly working class community. Now that the working class that he represents is truly multiracial and multi-ethnic, the whole edifice of this, you know, you're racist if you object to, mass immigration, has really crumbled. One of the things, it's interesting, you're clearly positioning this as a kind of left versus right, Democrats versus Republicans. I don't know that George Bush, for example, was any better on globalization or any of this stuff. Is that fair? Oh, yeah.

There was a neoliberal handshake agreement between both parties. And the reason I bring this up, batch, is that one of the things I'm kind of thinking about a lot is how much we usually under, we think technology is very important, but we nonetheless massively underestimate the impact that it has. And just like the colonization of America wouldn't have been possible without the invention of sailing across oceans and lots of other things that were created around that time, the caraville and so on. I think the same is probably true of mass immigration in the sense that large waves of people traveling the sorts of distances that they do now in order to get into a foreign country just wasn't possible before.

And likewise globalization, the idea that you could ship an American job to China and then ship back the produce, that didn't exist either. So do you think that, you know, I'm sure it's true to say that the Democrats are worse on this stuff than the Republicans, but really what we're dealing with is the fact that the entire political class has failed to recognize the moment that we're in and to think about the impact globalization would have on people who they never meet. Because that's kind of the reality, right? The people who benefited from globalization, which was a lot of people, let's be honest, globalization did improve our GDP. and raise wealth for lots of people, just not the people that you're talking about in the book. I think we have a moral obligation to care first about our families

and then about our neighbors and then about our state and then about our nation. And when everybody in my nation has access to the American dream, I'll worry about poor people in other countries. So to me, that's from the moral point of view. I think it's immoral to care more about people you've never met than the people who live next door to you or then your cleaning lady, you know, or the person who does your landscaping or watches your children, to rely on the labor of your neighbor and say, I'm totally comfortable with her never being able to own a home. I find that to be morally disgusting. I feel pity for everybody, but that doesn't take away the fact that we have a world based on nation states and I'm very happy about that. that, you know, there's the sort of Hanna-A-R-R-N perspective, which I totally buy into, that, you know,

the only human right that we truly have is the right to civil rights. And a civil right is something that's guaranteed by a government. It's a contract we make with a government that we vote for. You can't, it's not a gift that, you know, a Western nation can bestow upon a non-Western nation. It's a compact that we make with a government. They, you know, ensure our rights, they protect our rights from themselves and from our, you know, fellow Americans, and in return, we vote for them. And you cannot have that agreement without borders, without citizenship. So beyond the moral question, there's this question of rights. I am zealous of my rights. I mean, that's what it means to me to be an American, to be zealous of my freedoms and the freedoms of my

neighbor. And as a person who is zealous of those freedoms and in love with this country that gave them to me, we have to think about how do we protect those. You cannot have an open border and have civil rights. So there's the economic piece, of course, which is the selling out of the working class. Then there's the moral piece and then there's the civil rights piece. In terms of whether the global economy has simply progressed past having borders. No, Batchel, that wasn't my point. You don't need to convince anyone here about the stupidity of open borders.

We've talked about plenty. I guess what I'm saying is do you think this is largely a technologically driven issue, which is we have a world now which is able to operate in a way that it never could, hence the pressures on our borders. And then you combine that with, you know, seemingly Western elites disappearing into this craziness of wokeness and whatever. But prior to that, there was a very long period of time where globalization was seen pretty much as uniformly good thing until people started to realize the impact it was having on working class communities. I don't think that we have progressed to that point.

I think that having lax immigration laws, decriminalizing illegal border crossing, which is what Joe Biden did, is very much in the economic interests of the elites. It literally puts money back in their pockets, right? It's an upward transfer of wealth to have an open border because the people who consume the labor of those people are all in the elites. They're people who, you know, are working very long hours for a very good paying job and they don't have time to do their own landscaping or clean their own dishes or raise their own children. They go to restaurants and they want it to be cheap when they go to restaurants. They drink wine and they want the wine to be cheap when they buy it. So they are the consumers of low wage labor. It is very much in their interest to have an open border.

It literally puts money back in their pockets. It's wage theft of their working class neighbors and puts money back in their pockets. So to me, there's no sort of objective. I think this is the problem I have with economics as a discipline, if you'll forgive me for saying so. But it measures things in the aggregate, and we do not live in the aggregate. So every economist will tell you, every economist, there's one who won't, will say to you, well, mass immigration raises the GDP. Of course it raises the GDP.

It makes rich people very, very rich to have a slave caste to employ rather than their fellow Americans. The problem is GDP is not equally distributed. And the law of supply and demand holds with labor as well. the more you have of something, the cheaper it is. The less you have of something, the dearer it is. We should want our fellow Americans to be paid well. We should want a smaller gap between the elites and the working class. And instead, what I think is, you know,

they made the decision that opening the border would bring down inflation. And of course they were right, because in their view, inflation was being caused by working class wages going up. I mean, this is what the argument I'm trying to make is it was by design, not because this is where the world economy has arrived at, but because it was very much in the interest, in the economic interests of the Democrats' base of college-educated women and men, and then, of course, the poor who don't compete with immigrants for labor because they don't work. So the dependent poor and the educated rich. Batchett, do you think as well, look, I think human beings by and large don't overly care that much about things that don't affect them.

But what has actually happened with the open border is suddenly wealthy kids are dying from fentanyl overdoses. All of a sudden, wealthy neighborhoods are becoming far less safe because of criminal gangs. And all of a sudden, wealthy people are realizing that the homelessness problem is spiking as well. as a result of the open border. Do you think it's now everybody's just starting to wake up and everybody's realizing that, okay, you can pick up a bottle of wine for $5 cheaper, but if your kid is at risk of dying from a fentanyl overdose

because they purchase Ritalinthelan, that's not really a fair trade-off? I think that wouldn't be the case if Donald Trump weren't in the picture, but he is so blinding to the elites. Their hatred of him is so. intense that I think that even though everything you're saying is true, you know, this is the kind of discourse you would hear maybe a year ago. It's much harder to picture people saying that now.

Now what they would say is, but what about the threat to democracy, right? So people, it's a very, I think that was definitely something that could have happened if somebody other than Donald Trump represented reasonable immigration policy, because that certainly happened. Of course, very rich people, of which there are, you know, quite a few on the left now, about 65% of Americans making over $500,000 a year now are Democrats. You know, very rich people at this point just hire their own private security, and so they don't have to worry about these things as much. But to be fair to them, they do have a point with Trump,

because his rhetoric was unacceptable when he lost the election. It was actually, it was unacceptable from a former president. You can't have that type of rhetoric being used. It is dangerous and it is inflammatory. Which rhetoric specifically? Saying that he won? Yes. And that the election was stolen. Hillary Clinton said that the election was stolen, right? She said she called Donald Trump an illegitimate president and said he would not have won if Putin had not, you know, changed the voting tallies. After the 2016 election, 2018, they did a poll of Democratic voters, and 66% of them thought that the election had been stolen.

by Putin. So I agree with you. But it's a problem that's shared by both sides pretty equally. I mean, Trump went further because he was truly convinced that he won. But, you know, it is a president's right to pursue all of the legal avenues to challenge an election. Did he go too far? Maybe. I think that that's something that a lot of reasonable people think. But the other side is guilty of a lot of attacks on our democracy, including trying to imprison, you know, the most popular politician on the other side. So I do think that it is in the nature of power to try to hold on and expand itself. It is not in the nature of power to share itself in a democratic fashion. And I think that the American institutions have proven very good at containing

Trump's unacceptable behavior and very bad at containing democratic bad behavior. Yeah, I mean, Hillary did call him an illegitimate president after he was elected. I think, your point, though, that many reasonable people think about what euphemistically is now called the threat to democracy. But I think for a lot of people, what happened on January the 6th, really complicates everything with Trump. And the concern is that he won't let go of the reins when his time is up. That's kind of, I think, what people are concerned, from the people we speak to anyway. I understand why people are concerned about that. I am not concerned about that. I look at January 6th is a horrible day. He did say that they should be peaceful in their protest. I don't think he wished

for violence to happen. I think he truly believed that he won. And he still left pretty peacefully. I mean, he could have, he did not cover himself in glory on January 6th. He's not a person of, you know, that kind of character. But the idea that he would be a completely different person this time round than he was last time seems to me to be fallacious. I understand why people have a problem with his character, but I think two things on that. The first is, you know, you have to have a lot of economic privilege to vote on character. And I wish working class people had that luxury, you know. I wish that that was the conversation we were having. I don't think that that's in the cards for a lot of people. They are looking for policy. They voted for Trump on policy. They can point to the specific

policies, the tariffs and the immigration policy, the First Step Act that put money back in their pockets at the end of the month. And for people who are really struggling with this kind of an economy, that's the most important thing. And the other thing I would say is, you know, to character, when Trump took on this neoliberal consensus between both parties, you know, that we should have free trade and ship all these good jobs overseas, have very lax immigration laws, import millions and millions of slaves, defund vocational training, you know, all of this stuff. He took on both sides, right? He was not making a very unique and aggressive change to the status quo while having a political

party backing him as he took on the other side. He did this while taking on both sides and saying, I don't care that 100% of the political power in America is against me. this is what I know my voters elected me to do and I'm going to do it. And it's my view that nice people can't do that. I don't think, I mean, it's very rare. You guys do it. You take on both sides and you know what that's like.

It's very hard. It's very hard to take on both sides to fight so vigorously and then to have to call out the side that thought you were on their side because they did something wrong. And then they all turn on you suddenly and they're all smearing you, right? That's not fun. It's nice people don't do that. You have to have something in your character that says, screw all of this.

I don't care what people think about me. I'm going to do what I think is the right thing. And if you talk to you comes, they will admit, oh yeah, well, I guess on immigration and on tariffs and trade, you know, he was good for the working class, but what else did he really do for them, you know?

It's very frustrating. People will say his signature achievement was a tax cut for the wealthy. I mean, working class people, and middle-class people got a much higher percentage of a tax cut in that tax cut. Of course, you know, overall, the amount was less, but they were getting 15, 20% tax cuts,

and that's what they remember. They remember that money coming back to them at the end of the month. Not loving your AT&T or T mobile bill. Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news. Bring your AT&T or T mobile bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal. So get away from that unfortunate phone bill

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That's Verizon. Best network based on root metrics, best overall mobile network performance U.S. second half 2025. All rights reserved. It must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person who gave me the deal. Additional terms, conditions and restrictions apply. One of the other things that Donald Trump was good on was keeping the world relatively stable. Yeah.

And one of the things you've talked about a lot is why Americans support Israel. you've made the point that actually you think it's very different to the way that people feel in European countries. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. It's very interesting. One of the things, so for my book, I interviewed about 100 people, 150 people across the country, working class people. What I found was very, very shocking to me. We started with how there was near consensus on these very, very, very contentious topics, from health care to immigration, abortion, guns, whatever. Another issue on which there was extreme consensus was the war in Ukraine. I can't think of a single person who didn't, you know,

independently bring it up and say, I just don't understand why we're funding this or why this is our problem. And it's very funny because their view was very much the view of Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential debates when they were, he and Mitt Romney were asked, well, what's the greatest threat to America? And Romney said, Russia. And Obama laughed him off the stage. He basically, said, the 80s called, they want their foreign policy back, you know. What are we even talking about at this point? It was his view that Russia was a potential ally in the fight against China. And, you know, not to justify the aggression against Ukraine, but in 2014, when Russia next Crimea, this was not viewed by the Democrats as a reason for us to get involved there. You know,

this was accepted basically by the Obama administration, you know? And they just, don't see why that's our fight. They don't see Russia as an enemy or a threat. It seems pretty clear that when democratic policy changed was in 2016 when Hillary Clinton became convinced that Putin was the reason that Donald Trump had won. And so now you have democratic policy in Eastern Europe, which is, again, just a mirror image of their domestic policy, which is their fight against Donald Trump. And if you talk to working class people, you'll just see that. Like, they don't, no one has been forced to, to explain to them why $200 billion that could be very well spent here has been spent on this fight. So I think that was something that really surprised me.

And I was, of course, also surprised by just the level of support for Israel. They don't see Israel in the same way as they see Ukraine. Why is that? So Americans are extremely, extremely phylo-Semitic. There's a deep, deep love of the Jews that runs through the working class. It runs through Christian Americans. American Christians are the only population in human history to organize their religion around the protection of Jews rather than oppressing Jews. There was a very famous letter that George Washington wrote in 1790 to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island.

He visited them. They were the first Jews in America, and he said, you will always be welcome here. always be tolerated here. You know, religious tolerance was always a really big, big deal for Americans, and they were very proud of accepting and welcoming the Jews here. Of course, Americans have this sort of Protestant ethic, the work ethic. So being sort of, you know, seen as upstarts or entrepreneurial never hurts you here. It's always seen as, you know, in a country that sees itself as beyond classes, that's a sort of very appealing character trait. Whereas in Europe, I think that, you know, the stereotype of the Jew that was considered to be something that was disruptive of the social order.

But, you know, American Jews especially, I mean, American Christians, especially evangelicals, and then after 1967, American Catholics as well, have always been deeply, deeply protective of Jews. And I don't know many Jews who don't feel very grateful about that. It's so different. If you go full anti-Semite here, you know, it's over. Like, there's no way to bring that into the mainstream. in the United States. Yeah, and it's interesting because with the point that you make, I think the white working class as a whole,

I don't think, and I've spent a lot of time working in those communities, I've never seen a trace of anti-Semitism. I think when you look at people like Corbyn and the communities that he appealed to, you know, with Islamic communities, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in there. And also the people that support Jeremy Corbyn, a lot of them are actually middle class.

Yeah. Yeah, or upper middle class. Yeah, exactly. Well, I love hearing that. Let me just follow up on this stuff about Ukraine and Israel. I understand love for the Jews, as you put it. That's fine, although looking at Twitter sometimes doesn't, I'm not persuaded by that. And also some of the big kind of conservative voices in this country, too, in recent months.

How do you explain that for a start? The conservative, the far right? I don't know. Would you say Candace Owens is far right? I don't know. But it just seems like that's a pretty prominent conservative voice in this country, right? And she doesn't seem to be exhibiting the sort of Christian love of the Jews that you talk about. No, definitely not. She's gone full anti-Semite. But I think if you look at the comments now on her videos, a lot of the names sound, they're not American. You know, she now has a global audience. Of course, we know there's many billion Muslims, right?

Not all of them very friendly to the Jews. I mean, I don't want to stereotype. I have very close friends, of course, who are in that community. But globally, there's a huge appetite for content bashing Jews specifically. I mean, she really has sort of gone past the like Israel and Zionism to just full-on, you know, conspiracy theories about Jews. And I think she's lost to her memory. I would hazard that if somebody would take an honest look at who her audience is now,

they would find that she has lost a huge chunk of her American audience. You don't see her doing events with Donald Trump, which I'm sure she would love to do. There was an event announced in which she and Don Jr. were supposed to be at the same event. And within six hours of it being announced, her face was taken off the poster because she had been added after he had agreed to it. So she's been marginalized, I think, in a really big way, in a way that I take a lot of heart from. Of course, the left now is sort of like, I wonder if she has a point. Right? Like, you know. Really?

I've seen, there's like a now... The left is going to embrace canvas. Maybe the far left. That's interesting. I mean, she started off on the far left. Did she? Yeah. I didn't know that.

She was very progressive. Well, everyone returns to their route. Anyway, I wanted to ask you about Israel because that doesn't make sense to me. You can love the Jews and not think a foreign country far, far away merits billions in American funding and weaponry. So, and for me, and I think we probably disagree about Ukraine, the argument for supporting Ukraine is exactly the same argument as for supporting Israel. Now, to an evangelical, there may be some kind of religious and historical explanation, but on a practical geopolitical level, these two countries are allies, and it is in our

interest to not have the Western world recede. I think, so I'll say how I see it, because I don't want to, I, I, there's a huge debate, a healthy debate about whether we should be funding Israel. I subscribe to the sort of pro-Israel view that Israel is being harmed by the level of aid that we're giving them. They've given up a lot in terms of developing their own military industrial complex, a sacrifice that has resulted in them having to cave to pressure not to invade Rafah when they wanted to. Maybe they could have saved those six hostages and killed Yixenwar much sooner. So I think Israel is paying a heavy price for taking that aid.

I do think we get a lot out of it. So militarily, when Israel, they have to spend the money in our military industrial complex. They have to spend that money with our companies. That's also true of Ukraine. It's also true of Ukraine, yes. Israel then improves on the weapons and improves on the planes and the jets

and everything that it gets and then gives us back that intelligence for free. There's a lot of intelligence sharing that has led to things like the death of Soleimani. Israel is fighting our enemies, right? Israel is taking on people who chant death to America, death to Israel. The Houthis who are shooting at our soldiers, our boys. Now, we could argue about whether they should be there.

Probably I wouldn't want them to be there, but they are there, and the Houthis are shooting at them. The Houthis are disturbing trade to the United States. And we're just taking it, like cowards. It's horrible. Like, we're just letting them make a mockery of us. So in that sense, there are actual... enemies, I mean, actual threats. I don't think anybody denies that Iran poses a threat, maybe not an immediate one, but certainly something we need to be very, very concerned about in terms of

its stated goals. And so in that sense, we get a lot in a very material way from our relationship with Israel. Now, again, I think that Israel is paying a very high price for that by taking our aid, and it should, you know, in the Obama version of the memorandum of understanding, it used to be that Israel could spend, I think, 20% of the aid on building up their own military industrial complex. Obama made that zero. And so now they can't even create the bullets that they need to shoot, right? So they've really painted themselves into a corner, and it's really, I think, time for them to start.

If you think that sovereignty is important, which I'm sure we all agree on that, you know, being a sovereign nation at a time of war is unbelievably important. But I wouldn't even say Israel as like a client state in the traditional way because of how much we receive from that relationship. And that's just in purely material ways. Of course, there's the spiritual connection, the democracy component to it, the religious component to it. You know, a lot of, as you mentioned, a lot of Christians feel that way. They feel like they want to be able to go and visit and walk down the streets that Jesus walked down. So there's a lot there that feels significant and feels right and feels like we're getting something out of it, such that in America

first mentality could include a very close relationship with Israel. And I just think the same cannot be said from Ukraine. What are we getting from that relationship? I mean, we're sort of harming Russia's military capabilities, but those military capabilities would never have been trained on us. And while I hold Putin responsible for invading Ukraine and responsible for the tragic 500,000 dead young men, I mean, it's unthinkable what that does to a society.

At the same time, I think that we could have done much, much more to respond to what at some point were reasonable demands, like that Ukraine not joined NATO, which it wouldn't have because of the level of corruption there. I think the U.S. would never have allowed China to put military weapons in Mexico, and if they did, we would have invaded. And so I think to ask of another country to behave in a way that we would not have accepted for ourselves and our people and to deny the recognition of the status quo on some principle. I asked myself, what was that principle that was so important for Kamala Harris to go out and say, no, of course Ukraine one day will join NATO, right? Why poke the bear? And I think that had to do with domestic policy.

and I think that that's a bad reason to do this. No, I think it's undeniable that a lot of the Western elite left has, they see Ukraine as some sort of like LGBT type issue where it's just like, you know. But that's basically it, right? It's like we have the pride flag and we have the Ukraine flag. They don't think about it as a geopolitical issue. My argument would be about America first. And look, I'm not an American, so people should dismiss my opinion as they wish.

I just think you can't be the dominant superpower in the world and not maintain your assets around the world and not maintain your position and allow other countries to try. And Putin and Xi and they've all talked very openly about how they want a multipolar world. What does that mean? That means America is thrown off its pedestal. So you can't be America first and be isolationist at the same time. I just don't think those two things are compatible on a practical level. And also as well, just a point to add to that. stability is good for everybody.

The moment you let Putin run rampant, you destabilize Europe. Once you destabilize Europe, that is going to have huge ramifications globally, but particularly for America as well. So this is an argument against Obama as well in 2014, right? Totally. No, no, no. The weakness they showed then is why 2022 happened. So you feel the U.S. should have responded with a war or with a...

No, not a war, but the U.S. should have made a very clear at that point. that was unacceptable and then done everything possible to prevent 2020 from happening. And that means what we're probably going to end up with, which is some kind of demilitarized zone between the two countries, right? If Trump, by the time this goes out, has won, let's say, that's what he's going to try and get to. But I agree with you that the U.S. should have done everything possible to prevent 2022 from happening. I think they did everything possible to ensure that it would happen. Totally agree. By, yeah. Oh. Well, but I think we disagree about what we mean by what they did.

Right, right, right, right. You think NATO expansion and all of that. And by the way, I don't deny that that is a massive irritant to Russia. Of course it is. But Russia didn't respond to Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, leaving the former Soviet Union in the 90s, because they weren't strong enough and they weren't willing to challenge the United States at that point, right? So it's all about the relative perception of power. The reason Putin did what he did in 2022 is that he had a go in 2014 and what he was. What did he see?

No response. Weakness. That's why he felt comfortable to continue with that policy over time. That's my view anyway. But by the way, you know, people will know that I'm very pro-Ukraine, but when I was traveling around America with Jordan Peterson on his tour, it was the bit of the tour that I was on is kind of like small, medium-sized towns, you know, the Tulsa's, the Oklahoma's. We did New York and stuff, but mostly it was fairly small, medium-sized places.

And when I was there, you know, I'd look around, you know, I'd go to a bar after the show or whatever. I couldn't understand why those people would care either about a conflict very, very far away because it's just very far away. But my point is you cannot be the hegemonic superpower of the world that benefits from its global empire, which is what America does, without at some points having to maintain that global empire, including through force. And my sense is, yes, the Kamala Harris's and other people have sort of made this some kind of moral crusade. On a much more practical level, the example you set for China with the withdrawal from Afghanistan,

with how you responded to Russia in 2014, all of these sequential indicators of weakness is why I think Iran felt comfortable to orchestrate October 7th is why I think 2022 happened in Ukraine. It's just my view. And also as well, the capitulation in Afghanistan sent a very clear message that, you know, you could co and do, you had carte blanche, basically, to do whatever it was. I guess the point I'm making, and this is what I, sorry, we've been talking for ages, but the point I'm trying to get to you and hear your answer to is, I don't think America first is compatible with isolationism because America depends on being a

global empire. And you can't, and if you want to maintain a global empire, you're going to have to get physical at some point, right? A hundred percent agree with that. I'm not an isolationist, and I don't think Trump is either. No. It's about being strategic about which kinds of force to use. And I think Putin was very open to the West at some point and felt very betrayed at some point. Now, again, I'm not saying that to sanction his emotions or what have you. But I think the other side, and I'm curious what you would say to this, has decided that Russia is allowed to have no legitimate concerns about the expansion of Western power. And I think that if there had been more respect for a nuclear power and for what that means,

that there were ways to prevent Ukraine for sure to get out of it after two weeks, to get out of it after six months, and to enlist Russia in the fight against China. which is a much, much greater threat to us. Putin just has the nukes, right? China has our economy by the balls. And I think, you know, thinking strategically the way that some people don't and people don't, I agree with you, of course, I don't think we should be isolationists.

We should be a superpower. But you have to have the consent of the governed in terms of deciding when to use military force and when to use soft power. And I just think on this issue, we don't have the consent of the governed and that's a really big problem. And do you think partly that's because there have been a sequence of wars abroad that are seen as just wrong. I mean, Iraq, for example.

A lot of people supported it at the time, but a lot of us were saying at the time, this is crazy and those people have now been proven correct and now everyone's looking at it kind of going they see every war now through that lens is that it's very interesting because they don't see Israel's war through that lens I the left does and I think it's because the left has forgotten what it's like to fight a just war right I mean because America's had these disastrous entanglements I cannot feel that way about a war that I think we could have prevented I I can't. No, fine, forget about it.

I'm just asking. Yes, in general, I think the support for Israel sort of belies that point a little bit, I would say. Okay. Is it possible to be Jewish now and be on the left when you look at the attitude of some people, thought leaders, shall we say? It's a really good question. the left will accept any Jew that renounces their national identity, their attachment to their fellow Jews, that portrays themselves as the good Jew,

that's anti-Zionist, that hates Israel. It's very easy to get in if you're willing to renounce your people. I find that to be utterly undignified. a price no one should pay. But unfortunately, a lot of people in America are paying it. And the reason for that is very interesting. I get asked a lot by Americans, American Christians, working class Americans. You know, why are Jews so Democrat?

Why are they so affiliated with the Democratic Party? And for many years, you know, beginning of the 20th century was because Jews were working class. And so they were part of the labor movement. And then they were very involved in the civil rights movement. movement, something like above 75% of the white people involved in the civil rights movement were Jews in the leadership. Played an unbelievably prominent role. I think in the post-Holocast era, they felt like this was our fight.

But when the left moved from labor to civil rights and then finally to wokeness, abandoning the working class, abandoning civil rights, abandoning concepts like rights and equality for identity politics and marginalization and a worship of weakness and a worship of abjection, which is the defining characteristic of the left today. Unfortunately, a lot of American Jews go to college, about 60% are college-educated, which is double the national average. And so they study all this critical race theory, all this crap. And what pollsters found in 2015 was that every group, whether it's white conservatives, black conservatives, black liberals, Hispanic conservatives, Hispanic conservatives, Hispanic liberals. Normal people, every group in America prefer their group to other

groups. They have a higher rate of in-group positive feeling than out-group positive feeling. That's sort of the nature of humanity. There's one group that likes itself less than it likes all the other groups, and it's white liberals, it's white progressives. That's what you learn in college. That's that's kind of the perspective that strength and power and being at the top of a hierarchy, being talented in some way, you know, having been given privileges, makes you unworthy of having a moral compass.

You don't get to have a moral compass. You have to cede it to the oppressed. And unfortunately, there's a lot of young Jews who are kind of have fallen prey to that mentality. And so I don't see this mass exodus, and you're seeing it from older people who are, sort of flipping, but people have been through that education system. You really have to deprogram yourself.

I was woke. I remember what it felt like to worship abjection and to feel that strength and power and dignity and believing that you have a right to protect yourself and to protect the people you love is bad and that white people don't get to do that. White Jews don't get to do that and the oppressor doesn't get to do that. And it takes a long time to sort of think your way out of that. And I think for a lot of Jews who were in that mindset, until October 7th, there's been a real rude awakening. Do you think partly as well, it's kind of programmed into the Jewish psyche of which, like, you know, let's not get above our station here.

Let's not, you know, make ourselves too much of a target because we all remember, just look at history, what happens when you make yourself too much of a target. So therefore, let's not piss people off. I think a lot of British Jews feel that way. My dad's a British Jew. Yeah. And I always say to him, you know, Papa, on October 7th, the British Jew and you died and an American Jew was born. Because American Jews don't feel that way. We feel like, no, this, I mean, the way I feel, I would never move to Israel. Like if this country is going to go down for the Jews, I'm going down with this ship. They're going to take this country from my cold dead hands because we feel like, no, this country has been so good to us and so good to our parents and our grandparents.

Like, no way, am I going to. And that's why you see so many prominent anti-Z Zionist Jews at the front lines of these movements, right? The anti-Zionist anti-Israel movement, because we like to have our say. But Batia, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much. Before we head over to Substack,

where our supporters get to ask their questions to you, our final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Batia answers the final question, when the interview is over, make sure you click the link in the description, Head to our substack to see this.

How do you view reports that both campaigns are preparing their arguments to not accept the election result? How does she survive at Newsweek? Is she vilified by her colleagues? Is she given a journalistic independence, even if that means, for example, she writes a pro-Trump article. This is from another brilliant name.

It's such a good question. I mean, we just had an amazing conversation about all the things I think are most important to talk about, I'm so grateful for that. One thing people are talking about that I'm very glad they're talking about is how amazing this show is and what a lifeline you both have been to people who are on the side of the good and the right at a time of very murky morality and moral inversions. And I would like to end just by saying from the bottom of my heart, thank you so, so much as an American and as a Jew for making the right and the good. seem cool and funny and smart and interesting and important and pressing and urgent and giving voice to what so many people really don't want to acknowledge and don't want to hear in a way that is unignorable due to your endless, endless charm, intelligence and humanity. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Favorite guest ever.

I was going to say we're British, so this entire bit has made us very unpleasant. We're moving to America, mate. I like it here. Don't get this, do you in London? No, no one in the UK has ever said anything like that. No, no. No, the best you get after a good British interest. Cheers for that. Thanks, mate, yeah.

A cup of tea was nice. All right, head on over to Substack where we ask Batty, your questions. Do you see any way back for mainstream journalism or will alternative outlets become a reliable source of information? Get ready to ride. The Rocky Mountain Jamboree returns to Richfield, Utah, September 14th through the 18th. 2026. Join hundreds of OHV enthusiasts for five days of guided rides through Utah's legendary Paiute, Gooseberry, and Great Western Trail Systems. Enjoy daily breakfast, prize raffles,

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