Earlier this week The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft interviewed author and Newsweek Opinion Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon on her latest best-selling book, “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.”
Batya Ungar-Sargon made a huge splash on Bannon’s War Room in March when she went on to discuss her book that so adeptly defines the abuse of the working class Americans by the privileged elites and the love of the average working class American for President Donald Trump and his movement to Make America Great Again.
Batya, a former liberal from Queens and an opinion editor at Newsweek, shared her journey from hardcore New York leftist to working class supporter. And it was amazing!
On Wednesday Jim Hoft and Batya Ungar-Sargon discussed her new book best-selling book, “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women” and the recent violent anti-Israel protests on American campuses.
On her new book Second Class
Batya Ungar-Sargon: Thank you so much for those kind words and for having me. It’s really a pleasure to be here with you. I know that you speak to and for many of the same kinds of people that I spoke to for the book. And so it’s really an honor to be here. And I’m very humbled by your invitation. And I know we’re gonna have a really good time. I wrote second class because I just was fed up with the contempt that the elites have for regular Americans, working class Americans, middle class Americans. There’s never been a country like America today in 2024, just a deeply, deeply tolerant country that just wants to live and let live. I mean, the values that this great nation was founded on, they have simply never been brought to life anywhere in the globe, in the history of humanity the way they are today in America.
And I am just so sick of turning on my tv or looking at The New York Times with Washington Post, CNN or MSNBC or what have you, and just seeing this wall to wall canards, just the contempt for the average American who, despite everything that the elites have thrown at them, insist on being good hearted, on loving their fellow Americans, refuse to be polarized, even though everyone is telling them to hate their fellow American.
So I just. I wanted to give voice to the people that I felt had been silenced. And we never hear from working class people. The media and the political centers of this country are now completely peopled. I mean, 98% by people with college degrees and multiple degrees, you simply do not hear how average people think and talk. And so both their plight and their struggles and their triumphs and their tolerance and everything about them that makes this country special has been erased in the squabbling between the elites on both sides.
And so I wrote Second Class because I wanted to correct the record. I wanted to give working class people a voice in this conversation. I wanted to know, who is the american working class and do they still have a fair shot at the american dream? So I traveled the country for a year. I interviewed people from all backgrounds, all walks of life, all political persuasions. And I’m sure we’ll get into this, but what I found was, like, amazing consensus on the issues, whether people voted Democrat or Republican, because the parties were so bad at representing what they actually wanted, that it was kind of a crapshoot which party they voted for.
On Trump Derangement Syndrome and Present Lower Competence on the Left
Batya Ungar-Sargon: At some point, if you’re an honest person, you cannot sustain the derangement syndrome because you see things that, you know, contradict it. So those, like, sort of my first, and then there was this study that I’ve talked about a lot, but there was this 2018 Yale study. Yale. So we’re not talking about some, like, right wing outfit, right. That came out that found that there was a big difference between how white liberals and how white conservatives talk to black and Hispanic Americans.
And the difference was that white liberals, it’s called present lower competence, which means they dumb down their vocabulary because they assume that a person of color is less educated than them. It’s so disgusting. And I remember when I first saw that study, and I realized it implicated, like, not just everybody that I knew, but our worldview was implicated in that. This worldview that somehow blacks needed our special care, you know, like, our beneficence and our coddling, because they cannot do it on their own. They cannot be expected to, you know, deal with a, you know, white person at their full competence. I mean, it’s so disgusting, but it is so endemic to everything that animates the left. And so that was a really tough thing for me to see, not just the study itself, but the recognition within myself that I was doing that. And I was like, something has gone terribly wrong with me, with my soul, and it must be rectified.
So then I was like, okay, so they’re wrong about this woke stuff. They’re wrong about race relations in 2019. There was this huge outburst of anti semitism on the left. And I was like, okay, well, so they’re wrong about Jews. They’re wrong about blacks. They’re wrong about Trump. Then at some point, you’re like, okay, well, what is the likelihood that they hate Jews but are right about everything else? Right. They’re right about everything else, but, you know, they just accidentally are wrong about Jews in Israel. I was like, what is the likelihood that that is the case? Very, very small. And I think that this is sort of where I’ve ended up, which is you. People ask me why I feel so passionately about the working class. And, you know, I feel truly humbled that I, with my PhD in 2016, was so blind to what Trump was actually doing, which was taking the US economy that both parties had sold out to the elites and single handedly turning that entire ship around.
Jim Hoft: And this is exactly what your book goes into. The middle class, the working class wanted somebody to stand up for them and say, enough. And as a Republican, I’m often, often just disappointed, including recently with the leaders in Washington who seem to have nothing in common with me. Nothing. The fact that they would pass this legislation recently and send this money to Ukraine, a war that appears to be, it appears to be lost in some respects. Nobody wants the peace. They’re just ramping it up. They’re giving missiles that are long-range missiles now to Ukraine. I mean, what is that going to do except escalate the whole situation? So I completely disagree with that. And then they left nothing for the border. And anybody can see that this border is, it’s completely broken. It’s open.
On Open Borders and the Middle Class Squeeze
Batya Ungar-Sargon: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s very much by design. People don’t remember this, but in 2019, during one of the Democratic primary debates, the question was, if you were elected president, would you decriminalize illegal border crossing? That was the question. And on the stage was Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Marianne Williamson, Bernie Sanders, and a couple of others. And every single one of them except one guy, I forget who it was on the far left, but every single one of them raised their hand and said, yes, we would. We would decriminalize illegal border crossing. That is what Joe Biden did. He decriminalized illegal border crossing very intentionally because the Democrats platform is simply a plunder of the middle class. It is a decades long plunder of the middle class. So in 1971, which was the high watermark for working class wages, the largest share of the GDP was in the middle. And today, over 50% of the GDP, it’s not in the billionaires the way that the left likes to tell us. The share of the GDP controlled by the billionaires has not significantly changed between 1971 and today.
So where did all the GDP go? There was a middle class squeeze, and some of it was squeezed up. And so the top 20%, those over credentialed, multiple degreed couples who now marry each other and live on the coasts, the top 20% now controls over 50% of the GDP.
On the Purposeful Destruction of Middle Class Jobs
Jim Hoft: I know that if you’re working class and if put in a new tax hike like I think Joe Biden might be proposing right now, they can’t afford it. They just can’t afford it in the middle class. You know, an interesting thing, when I was younger, there was, of course, meatpacking plants in Iowa. And, you know, with a lot of manufacturing jobs back then for the middle class, those were terrific jobs to have. There was a family I remember had like nine kids also and, and put them all through catholic school. And the only job they had, their father worked at a meatpacking plant. But the manufacturing back then was paying so much higher. So, so you could do that. And today it’s just not the manufacturing jobs. It appears they keep going down, you know, and so it’s, it’s a travesty. And then, of course, they’re moving so many jobs overseas or they’re having manufacturing places like meatpacking plants today where they’re bringing in migrants to work because they can pay them lower wages.
So it’s horrific to see those good paying jobs that used to be middle class jobs. They’re no longer there. And so I understand completely when people are saying, and you see this, you know, we have a writer, Cara Castronuova, who is from New York. And she went down to the Bronx and she talked to the people down there. She was talking to mostly blacks and Hispanics, and she talked to them about how they thought Biden was doing. And these people, they’re suffering because of the inflation and stuff. So all of that really hurts exactly what you’re saying.
Batya Ungar-Sargon: Totally. And I’m so glad you brought up that up about meat packing because the left will often bring up jobs that have been degraded over the last 30, 40 years as evidence that we need illegal immigrants because Americans wouldn’t want to do these jobs, right? Like, that’s their favorite narrative. And it’s like, well, they wouldn’t want to do them now because they don’t pay a living wage and the conditions are extremely dangerous. But that didn’t used to be the case, right? Like that is that it’s a chicken and an egg. With illegal immigration, you bring in millions and millions of migrants to compete with Americans for these jobs. That actually downgrades the wages that they pay because it increases the supply of labor. Like, this is the most obvious, like supply and demand 101, you know, and it’s like they’re in totally on both sides, left and the right. They’re in total denial about this. And you know that the more people you bring in, the less those jobs are going to pay.
On the legacy media’s support for the Palestinians
Batya Ungar-Sargon: It’s so insane. Like, the New York Times just cannot quit Hamas. And you would think after the first time that Hamas made them look insane. Insane and stupid, the second time they made them look stupid the third time that they would have some mechanism in place for not simply regurgitating what like these terrorist rapists are telling them is true. But no, no, they have to repeat, like, there’s something in them that cannot help but give Hamas the benefit of the doubt. These mass raping, child dismembering murderers. I mean, it’s. It’s totally insane. But the reason for it is actually not about Israel and it’s not about Jews. It’s a much bigger problem. The anti semitism we’re seeing on the left and on the university campuses and the publications, which I don’t know if you’ve been reading the New York Times recently, but they are so totally on the side of these anti-Semitic protesters on college campuses.
Like, they’re weeping for them. It’s so gross. But it’s actually a symptom of a much bigger problem. They hate Israel because they hate America, and they hate the Jews because they see us as an extension of everything that makes America great, which they also hate. This is not uniquely about us. Although, of course, like, everybody, you know, hating Jews has its own unique flavor. But, you know, like, this is much, I think this is, at this point, much more extreme than things we’ve seen in other contexts, but it’s not much more extreme than the BLM protests. You know, then the chance they were chanting against the police and against white people during the BLM protests. Right. This is part of a much larger ideology that has taken the difference between right versus wrong upon which every civilized society is founded on. Forget. Forget it. You’re Christian, I’m Jewish. Like, obviously, like, we believe that we, you know, we brought these values into this world, and we could not imagine living without that as our guiding principle. But put aside religion. I mean, you cannot have a civilized society without the distinction between right versus wrong.
The left does not believe in that. They have replaced right versus wrong with powerful versus powerless, oppressor versus oppressed. And they believe that whoever is the oppressor in their model is inherently evil to their DNA and irredeemable. And whoever they deem to be the oppressed is inherently virtuous. Whatever they do, that is the virtuous thing to do. To do it is their law of nature. It’s like the way I believe if I drop this pen, it will fall. They believe that if you have less power, according to their schema, you are virtuous, and everything you do is correct. And that includes Hamas. So to them, because Hamas is in a fight with Israel and Israel has more power, therefore they have to side with Hamas. It is really that simple. And that’s what we’re seeing on the university campuses.
Watch the entire video below.
It was a privilege to speak with Batya Ungar-Sargon.
** Don’t forget to purchase her new book – “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.”
The post TGP’s Jim Hoft Interviews Author Batya Ungar-Sargon on the Forgotten American Worker, the Anti-Israel Movement and the Trump Phenomenon appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
