Russia-Ukraine War Escalates Amid Nuclear Threats, Israel Was Motive Behind TikTok Ban; PLUS: Batya Ungar-Sargon on New Book
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Dangerous Escalation Threats (5:20)
Pro-Israel Repression (30:40)
Interview with Batya Ungar-Sargon (45:14)
Outro (1:31:36)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
The war in Ukraine, like the war in Gaza, drags on and on and on.
And while there is no progress on the battlefield, except for some moderate gains by Russian forces over the last several months, the serious risks from this war, which, remember, involve the world's largest nuclear power, continue to grow.
Over the past several weeks, several Western leaders Becoming increasingly desperate about the obvious futility of their war aims are now explicitly threatening to deploy NATO or other Western armies into Ukraine to fight against Russia.
As a predictable and obvious response, Russia announced this week that they were scheduling tests for the use of tactical nuclear weapons, the kind of radiological bombs that are intended for the battlefield.
Whenever countries involved in war begin explicitly musing about the use of nuclear weapons, and worse, when they begin accompanying those statements with actual nuclear tests, it is inherently a gravely dangerous situation.
Yet, for whatever reasons, the war fanatics in both parties in the U.S.
and leading liberal parties throughout the West continue to scoff at and trifle with this grave risk to humanity.
We'll examine the latest events and what is driving them.
Then, Israel's army, as it has long vowed to do, invaded Rafa, where over a million Gazan refugees have been living as the only place in Gaza where they can go, despite the fact that Joe Biden several months ago warned Israel against doing so, calling it a, quote, red line.
Now, we'll show you what the latest is there.
But as all of that's happening, on Friday night, we devoted our program to examining the similarities between the post-9-11 climate in the U.S., driven by expansive and reckless terrorism discourse.
Everything was terrorism and a terrorist, and that justified everything.
And the increasingly similar climate emerging in the U.S., in order to protest or punish and silence The protesters marching against the Israeli war in Gaza last week saw the approval in the house of one of the most extreme legislative assaults on free speech in years.
The incorporation of a radically expanded definition of anti-Semitism into federal anti-discrimination law.
A expanded definition that includes a wide range of obviously valid and constitutionally protected opinions about the actions of the state of Israel and the actions of various Jewish individuals.
Since that program just three days ago, the threats posed to core civil liberties in the United States in order to shield Israel from criticism and activism are only intensifying, and we'll show you why and how.
Finally, Batu Unger-Saigon is a friend of our program.
She was one of the pro-Israel supporters we had on our show after October 7th.
We had her on twice, in fact, to present both sides of the Israel debate and allow our viewers to hear each view subjected to debate and critical scrutiny so they can make up their own minds.
Tonight we'll talk to Batya again, this time about her new book entitled Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, which uses numerous interviews with members of the American working class to understand how and why they and their belief systems are being systematically excluded from elite American liberal institutions.
Some of her findings are one you'd likely predict.
Are not.
And we'll also use the opportunity about just being here to discuss some of the controversies in the U.S.
over the last several weeks involving free speech, campus protests, and the Israeli war in Gaza.
Now, before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Ever since the United States and NATO decided to involve itself quite heavily in the war in Ukraine, the question that has always lurked but never been answered is, the question that has always lurked but never been answered is, what is the reason for the American Meaning, what benefits do the American people get or what harms would they suffer?
If there was some change or shift or no change at all in the people who run provinces in eastern Ukraine, how would that affect the lives of the American people in any way?
And yet here we are, two and a half years into this war, over $180 or $160 billion spent in totally unaccountable ways, some of which, if not a lot of which, have disappeared into the coffers of corrupt officials in Kiev, as was completely predictable.
While the war itself does not make any progress, while the Ukrainian positions only weaken, and where even people in Ukraine are now recognizing that the war is futile, it doesn't mean the conflict is stagnant.
The risks of the conflict, which have always been very great, And also very ignored by people in Washington who support this war.
Those things are continuing to increase largely as a result of desperate and reckless statements by major political leaders throughout the West and now in the United States vowing to deploy troops to Ukraine because of their desperation and watching their war aims fail.
And the result of that is Or should be.
Extremely disturbing.
From the New York Times today, quote, Russia to hold drills on tactical nuclear weapons in new tensions with the West, quote, Russian officials claim the order was in response to comments from the West about the possibility of more direct involvement in Ukraine.
NATO called Russia's announcement, quote, irresponsible in contrast to NATO's threats to deploy French and British and American and NATO forces directly to fight the Russian army in Ukraine.
Quote, the announcement of the exercise was Russia's most explicit warning.
And it's more than two-year invasion of Ukraine that it could use tactical nuclear weapons there.
The Kremlin said it came in response to comments by two European leaders that raised the prospect of more direct Western intervention in the war.
The exercise, the defense ministry said, would involve forces of the Southern Military District, an area that covers Russian-occupied Ukraine and part of Russia's border region with Ukraine.
It said the exercise would take place, quote, in the near future.
Now, one of the officials, that New York Times article was referring to French President Emmanuel Macron and former British Prime Minister, currently the Foreign Minister of the UK, David Cameron, both of whom trifled with the idea.
In Macron's case, more than trifled, basically threatened that they would deploy troops in Ukraine if that was the only way to achieve their war aims and fight the Russian army directly, which by definition would be World War III.
It was also the Democratic Minority House Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and we call him the House Minority Leader, but as he boasted today, and this is certainly true, even though the Democrats are nominally the minority, they really run the House, since the only votes that pass and that get brought to the floor are ones they tell Mike Johnson to bring to the floor and then they pass with Democratic votes.
Because Mike Johnson's status and power depends on pleasing Democratic officials like Hakeem Jeffries.
So he's absolutely right when he boasts that even though the Republicans nominally control the House, the real power in the House lies with Democrats, thanks to Mike Johnson.
That's why they're protecting and saving his speakership.
So, Hakeem Jeffries, I think the most powerful member of the House, even though he's in the Democratic Party, nominally the minority, was one of the people who also talked openly about sending American troops to Ukraine to fight the Russians.
Here's what he said on 60 Minutes last night.
It was far beyond a regional conflict.
We can't let Ukraine fall, because if it does, then there's a significant likelihood that America will have to get into the conflict.
Not simply with our money, but with our servicewomen and our servicemen.
We can either stop Russia in Ukraine by continuing our military and economic support, or We can face a challenging situation where Vladimir Putin and Russia are able to overrun Ukraine and then threaten NATO allies.
No doubt that that's Putin's goal?
We have no doubt that if Vladimir Putin is successful in Ukraine...
I'm not sure why that cut off in mid-sentence but what he went on to say is that we have no doubt if he's successful in Ukraine he will then go on to try and conquer NATO countries.
Now this is pure fantasy.
The Russians have explained over and over why Ukraine is a particularly sensitive interest to them and the fact that Western leaders are now talking openly About deploying troops to go fight Russia directly, a NATO-Russian war over Ukraine, with the Chinese standing behind the Russians saying they have unlimited Chinese support, is nothing short of complete madness.
To risk nuclear conflict or another world war over which people run the Donbass, that is madness.
That is true madness.
Here is the French President Emmanuel Macron on May 2nd, so almost two weeks ago, in an interview with The Economist who asked him about his vow that he would send French troops to Ukraine to fight Russia if that was necessary to win the war.
The Economist asked him, quote, do you stand by what you said about possibly sending ground troops to Ukraine?
Macron said, quote, absolutely.
As I said, I'm not ruling anything out because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out.
We have undoubtedly been too hesitant.
By defining the limits of our action to someone who no longer has any and who is the aggressor, our capacity is to be credible, to continue to help, to give Ukraine the means to resist.
But our credibility also depends on a capacity to deter by not giving full visibility as to what we will or will not do.
Otherwise, we weaken ourselves, which is the framework within which we have been operating until now.
In fact, many countries said in the weeks that followed that they understood our approach, that they agreed with our position, and that this position was a good thing.
I have a clear strategic objective.
Russia cannot win in Ukraine.
If Russia wins in Ukraine, there will be no security in Europe.
It was always the case.
That the minute the West defined victory in Ukraine as expelling all Russian troops from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, which they've occupied since 2014 and view as an existential threat, their expulsion from Crimea to Russian national security, the minute the West defined victory in Ukraine was such maximalist war aims, it was always the case that the West was bound to be defeated.
And what they're now saying is it would be too humiliating For us to let things go as they're going, which is in the direction of Russia winning despite the hundreds of billions of dollars that we've sent there.
So they're now toying with this threat to send Western, NATO, American, French, British troops to go fight the Russian army directly in order to prevent them from overrunning Ukraine.
Of course!
That means that the Russians are going to view those threats and take them very seriously and do things like begin testing battlefield nuclear weapons.
The Washington Post, May 3rd, the same time Macron was threatening The Russians with direct military confrontation.
UK lifts restrictions on Ukraine's use of weapons against Russia.
The remarks signaled a sharp reversal in Britain's position, which had not allowed Ukraine to target Russian territory with British-supplied weapons.
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron announced that Britain has given Ukraine permission to strike targets on Russian territory with the weapons in a new $3 billion multi-year aid package it is providing.
Cameron's remarks in an interview with Reuters during a visit to Ukraine mark a sharp reversal in the position of one of Ukraine's staunchest supporters.
Now just imagine if you had Russia and China providing arms to one of the countries in our region.
Or, in this case, to make the metaphor more apt, a country immediately on the American border and explicitly said, we're not just giving you these arms to use defensively if the United States invades.
We're going to give you these arms to attack the United States on their soil if you choose.
Imagine what we would do to any country that did that.
And imagine how much more serious he would take that if it was preceded by eight years of interference by those countries right in say Mexico on the US border.
And yet for some reason we are constantly told that we shouldn't worry about the threat of nuclear weapons.
We should just carry on and just assume the Russians are bluffing.
From Politico on March 1st, quote, Putin's bluffing on nukes for now, says top NATO official.
Quote, we do not see any imminent threat of Russia using these weapons, said military alliance's deputy secretary general.
Putin issued the warning Thursday as French President Emmanuel Macron stood by his message that the West could not rule out sending troops to Ukraine to fend off Putin's full-scale invasion.
Quote, this really threatens a conflict with nuclear weapons, Putin said.
NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Genoa characterized Putin's nuclear saber-rattling as, quote, a discourse that delves into the logic of psychological intimidation rather than real intentions.
In an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais published Friday, he added, quote, we do not see any imminent threat of Russia using these weapons.
But these statements are in themselves very dangerous because they erode trust.
Russia knows the consequence of taking such a step.
Why should we be so blithely dismissive of the Russian threat to use tactical nuclear weapons, especially when the West is saying we may send troops to fight the Russian army directly?
The United States and Russia came extremely close to nuclear annihilation several times during the Cold War.
The most obvious and relevant example being when the Soviet Union, at the request of the Cuban government, put nuclear weapons in Cuba as a deterrence against US invasion.
And the mere placement of those nuclear weapons so close to American soil made the United States essentially enter a game of chicken with the Russians.
Saying we will nuke you unless you remove those weapons.
And it doesn't even have to be that the leaders go insane and decide that they're going to use nuclear weapons.
That can easily happen through miscommunication and misperception.
Especially when tensions are so high and the countries barely talk to one another.
In fact, history credits a single Russian submarine commander.
From, for averting nuclear war between the two countries because the submarine thought that things that were landing on it were actually a U.S.
attack with nuclear weapons and they called Moscow and were ready to launch until this commander realized that the U.S.
wasn't actually attacking it.
That's how close the world came to nuclear annihilation.
That, at least, the Cold War was at stake and the countries were in each other's regions Which is exactly what's happening now, although with really nothing at stake other than who will govern various parts of eastern Ukraine.
And yet, this has been the attitude from the start, from the Atlantic.
Tom Nichols in June of 2023, a fanatical supporter of the US war in Ukraine, the US involvement of the war in Ukraine, quote, "Putin talks tough while Ukraine makes games." Ukraine's counter offensive is on the move, but so are Putin's nuclear weapons.
Putin is trying to turn up the global temperature with some swagger about nuclear weapons.
This past March, Putin said that he would base Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus close to Ukraine.
Moscow and Minsk have signed a formal agreement.
Putin now claims that the first weapons have arrived in Belarus.
The leader of a nuclear-armed power, sounding like Tony Soprano, is alarming.
But Putin is likely emphasizing Russia's nuclear deterrent because his conventional forces have been repeatedly humiliated in combat.
Remember when we were always told that the Russians were losing the war, that the triumphant Ukrainians were feistily expelling them from the country, that Russia was being humiliated in defeat?
That was just nine months ago.
And now everyone acknowledges that Russia is advancing, the Ukrainian front lines are falling back, that the Ukrainians have no chance to win this war for so many reasons, just including the lack of people who are willing to go fight on the front lines.
And of course these people who said all this Just like happened in the Iraq War and every other war that they made false statements about that never came to be true, have no accountability, of course they're not going to go back and say, I know we told the American people that the Ukrainian counter-offensive was right around the corner, it was going to vanquish Russia, and none of that happened.
He goes on, quote, more to the point, although Russia still has a large military, Moscow has lost its best units and most highly trained officers and soldiers after a year of ghastly losses on the ground.
As for Putin's threats, the Russian president seems to be venting and showing off, which is one way to know that we are not yet in a crisis.
Putin is indulging his usual vulgar sense of humor, and though Americans, like Russians, also have some colorful local expressions, it is better for the Americans and NATO to be the resolute adults in the room, as they have been since the beginning of this criminal Russian onslaught.
So just place your bets on the fact that Russia is disbuffing They don't really consider this an existential threat.
They wouldn't really use tactical nuclear weapons, even in the face of Western threats, to go fight the Russians directly.
Just assume that won't happen and just carry on with your lives.
All to determine who governs Eastern Ukraine.
Now, one of the people who actually, inadvertently or otherwise, admitted how dangerous this war was, was one of the Prime Sponsors, Joe Biden.
Who said in October of 2022, as recounted by NBC News and many other outlets, Joe Biden warns the risk of nuclear Armageddon is the highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Quote, the President says it was the first time since 1962 that there has been a direct threat of nuclear weapons being used as Russian President Vladimir Putin's military struggles in Ukraine.
Late last month, Putin renewed nuclear threats he made at the onset of Russia's invasion.
Quote, if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people, the Russian leader said in a televised national address.
Quote, I'm not bluffing, he added.
Biden said Thursday that he takes Putin's threat seriously.
Quote, we've got a guy I know fairly well, he's not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.
I don't think there's any such thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon, Biden said.
And yet we've proceeded with this war as though somehow what's at stake there makes Risking nuclear war, let alone spending hundreds of billions of dollars and sending huge numbers of young Ukrainian people who are unwitting conscripts to their death, worth it?
Professor John Mearsheimer, one of the most frequent guests on our show, we think he's one of the most prescient and clear-eyed foreign policy analysts, was recently on Piers Morgan, where they began to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine, which Piers Morgan supports, and it veered into a broader discussion of the fairy tale Narrative that a lot of people have about US foreign policy that John Mearsheimer was able to Quickly, but very importantly debunk.
So I want to show you this because I think everyone should listen to this It's crucial not just to the foreign policy We're pursuing in Ukraine, but also with China and Taiwan and also financing the war in Israel Listen to how this discussion went You want to remember that if you look at what's happening in the conventional war, it looks like Putin's going to win.
Despite the fact that we've now passed this large-scale arms package for Ukraine, Putin is likely to win.
Why is that not a terrible thing for America and the West?
Because you have to prioritize the threats that you face in the world.
And the fact of the matter is that what happens in Ukraine does not matter that much to the United States.
I know for people like you this is a life and death matter.
The thought of any country on the planet that the West defends losing is a major defeat and has catastrophic consequences.
I mean you felt this way about us pulling out of Afghanistan.
I think that places like Afghanistan, even places like Ukraine don't matter that much.
I didn't really.
I felt with Afghanistan, America should have kept a small military presence there to maintain some kind of order.
And I think I was justified in saying that given what's happened since.
I thought throwing the country back to the Taliban was a catastrophic error of judgment and it wouldn't have happened in the way it's happened.
if America kept a couple of thousand troops there, as it does all around the world in endless bases.
So it seemed to me having done many, many years of hard work in Afghanistan as a response to 9-11 to then simply just overnight throw everybody out and leave the country to the Taliban, particularly for women's rights, never mind anything else, I thought was an abrogation of America's duty I thought was an abrogation of America's duty and the UK.
Now, obviously, that's the British mindset, that you just go around the world controlling the entire world, keeping your military all over the world.
Obviously the British no longer have anywhere near the ability to do so, so they constantly call on the United States to do it for them so they can feel tough and purposeful.
The idea that keeping 2,000 troops, some tiny residual force trapped on a base in Bagram or wherever, was going to enable the United States to govern and control that country and prevent the Taliban from surging, the Taliban walked right back into power as soon as the United States left, is laughable.
But so is the idea that the United States has the responsibility to go around the world controlling every country, even where we have no vital interests, and have the American public pay for it.
Now listen to how this conversation evolved.
Right, but this is your worldview, which is the United States has a responsibility to be everywhere, and to never quit until it wins.
Not everywhere, but they should certainly be preserving freedom and democracy.
Otherwise, why self-style yourself as leader of the free world?
You either are leader of the free world, and America still has, I think, half the world's military firepower, and obviously one of the biggest economies, you either are that Entity, leader of the free world, or you're not.
And if you are, then what comes with that is a responsibility to protect freedom and democracy when it comes under attack from totalitarian regimes, I would think.
I think if you look at the history of American foreign policy, it's very hard to make the case that our principal goal has been to protect freedom and democracy.
The United States has a rich history of overthrowing democracies around the world, and we have a rich history of siding with some of the world's
That is always the most staggering point to me, is that Americans are still capable of believing, or in this case, a subject of the British Crown, is still capable of believing that the reason we keep fighting all these wars all over the place is because we want to protect and spread freedom and democracy.
It's like a 6th grade fairy tale.
The United States' closest and most important allies in the Middle East are the two most savage and tyrannical regimes, the one in Saudi Arabia and the other in Egypt.
We have repeatedly helped overthrow democratically elected governments, like we did in Ukraine.
In Egypt, after the fall of the dictator Hosni Mubarak, When the protesters were in Tahrir Square demanding democracy, we cheered them, even though we had supported Mubarak for 30 years, and then Egypt finally had their first democratic election, but because they made the mistake of electing somebody the West disliked, Mohamed Morsi,
The United States helped General Sissi, the current leader, the dictator of Egypt, overthrow in a military coup the democratically elected government of Egypt.
And John Kerry, who was the Secretary of State under Obama at the time, called it an advance of democracy in Egypt.
So we constantly are helping uproot democratic governments and implanting dictators all over the world.
So how can you be so childish and so gullible to believe that the reason we're going to war in any place is because we want to spread freedom and democracy all over the world?
This is a complete contradiction to the most basic knowledge about U.S.
foreign policy, past and present.
Now I know it sometimes falls harshly on ears to hear someone like Mearsheimer say, look, we have to pick and choose what is important to us.
We can't just go around the world defending every country, intervening in every country, controlling every country.
And the reality is Ukraine is not that important to the United States.
I know it sounds so harsh.
Oh, what about the people of Ukraine?
But this has always been the basis of American foreign policy.
It's called vital interests.
We identify what our vital interests are, meaning the things that we're willing to go to war over, and then the things that are not in our vital interests, things we're not willing to go to war over.
And the view that who governs Ukraine is not in our vital interests was one that was defended not only by Donald Trump, but also by Barack Obama.
In 2016, March of 2016, he gave a major foreign policy interview to the neocon Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
And Jeffrey Goldberg spent a lot of the time attacking Obama for having been weak in the face of Russia, for not giving Ukraine lethal arms, for not confronting the Russians in Syria.
And there you see it, the Obama Doctrine, the Atlantic's exclusive report on the U.S.
President's hardest foreign policy decisions.
And here's what Obama said about why he was unwilling to arm the Ukrainians, even though members in both parties, like John McCain and the warmongers in the Democratic Party, were demanding he do so.
Goldberg wrote, quote, Obama's theory here is simple.
Ukraine is a core Russian interest, but not an American one.
So Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.
Quote, the fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do, Obama said.
There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not.
Now if there's someone who wants to claim in this town that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it.
The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.
So it was President Obama who was mocking the idea that we would ever go to war with Russia over control of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, because as he said, and Donald Trump also viewed it the same way, obviously Crimea and eastern Ukraine will always be of great vital interest to Russians.
It's right on the other side of their border, the part of their border that was twice invaded in world wars during the 20th century, but it is not and never will be a vital interest to Ukraine.
All that change since Obama, the hero of American liberalism, said that statement, which was not very controversial at the time except in warmongering and neocon circles in Washington, all that changed was that in 2016, the most cataclysmic event for American liberals happened, which was the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump, and they needed which was the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump, and they needed to be given a reason, a villain, a scapegoat to blame, other than Hillary Clinton
And they were told eventually, after a long list of other villains, New York Times, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, et cetera, that the main reason Trump won was because Russia, and they've been feeding on this anti-Russian animus for so long that you could draw a straight line between the Russiagate hoax that and they've been feeding on this anti-Russian animus for so long that you could draw a straight line between the Russiagate hoax that the CIA and the FBI manufactured and unanimous democratic support in Washington for this war in Ukraine, a war that even though
Earlier today in Gaza, the Israeli military, the IDF, began bombing and invading the refugee camp in Rafah, where over a million Gazans have been internally displaced where over a million Gazans have been internally displaced in ever since the war began.
It essentially became the only place that people in Gaza could go where they would be safe from Israeli violence and Israeli military attack.
And they've suffered famine and internal displacement, but it was the one place that had been safe.
And that was why two months ago, Joe Biden announced that the Israelis would not and could not be allowed to invade Rafah unless they had a real plan for evacuating the 1.1 million people there.
He called it a red line.
Netanyahu instantly announced that he would ignore Biden's red line.
Talk about American credibility when the president of the United States says this is a red line and other leaders ignore him, including leaders who rely on U.S.
funding.
That obviously is a pretty big blow to American credibility, but that's exactly what happened today.
That place in Rafa is filled with innocent children, innocent women, innocent men, as well as probably lots of Hamas elements.
But you're going to get enormous numbers of civilian deaths on top of the ones we've already caused.
And here's just a little of the videos, the images coming out of Rafa today.
So you're seeing yet again, massive bombs, Remember, the Israelis dropped more bombs and more tonnage in Gaza in the first two weeks of the war than the United States dropped on Afghanistan in any year, in any full year of that war.
Same with Iraq.
They were dropping 2,000 pound bombs on densely packed places in Gaza.
Now, One of the things we've been focused on a lot is not just U.S.
support for this war in Gaza, but also the erosion of civil liberties at home by Israel supporters who are increasingly using methods of censorship and other means of punishment, official state punishment, against people who are critical of the Israeli war, people who are engaged in activism against it.
And one of the things we reported on Friday night was that Major news outlets and the sponsors of the bill to either force a sale of TikTok or to ban TikTok all say that the reason that finally passed was because members of Congress became convinced that the reason so many young people were against the war in Gaza against Israel is because TikTok was allowing too much anti-Israel content to circulate.
Over the weekend at the McCain Institute in Sonoma, Arizona, which has become like the temple of bipartisan foreign policy consensus, the Republican Senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, sat down and spoke with Biden's Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
Where essentially Romney acknowledged, became just the latest person to acknowledge, that the real reason they had to ban TikTok or extract it from the current company and put it in the hands of a company that will do the US government's bidding even more was because too many young people were getting informed about what was happening in Gaza and that was turning them against the world.
Listen to what Mitt Romney said with Secretary Blinken.
Has the PR been so awful?
I know that's not your area of expertise, but you have to have some thoughts on that.
As you said, why has Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception?
An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel.
It's like, why aren't they screaming about Hamas?
Accept the ceasefire, bring home the hostages.
Instead, it's all the other way around.
Typically, the Israelis are good at PR.
What's happened here?
How have they and we been so ineffective at communicating the realities there and our point of view?
How this narrative has evolved?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I don't have a good answer to that.
One can speculate about what some of the causes might be.
I don't know.
I can tell you this.
We were talking about this a little bit over dinner.
With Cindy, I think in my time in Washington, which is a little bit over 30 years, the single biggest change has been in the information environment.
And when I started out in the early 1990s, everyone did the same thing.
You woke up in the morning, you opened the door of your apartment, your house, you pick up a hard copy of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal.
And then if you had a television in your office, you turned it on at 6.30.
or seven o'clock and watch the national network news.
Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs, every millisecond.
And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative.
And you have-- Do you see this mindset This is so important to understand.
What he's saying is absolutely true.
30 years ago, they were able to completely control the flow of information.
So the Israelis would go bomb Gaza and the only people who would inform the American public about it or not inform them was a tiny group of similarly owned major news media outlets and that was the only place Americans got their information.
They watched ABC News or NBC News or read the New York Times or the Washington Post exactly as Antony Blinken said.
The problem for them is that now there's a lot of other sources of information so people can actually watch What the Israelis are doing in Gaza, they can see how many dead children there are.
They can see the suffering in Gaza.
Is there any wonder why the Biden administration has been so obsessed with censoring the internet and controlling the internet and now wanting even to take this app that a third of Americans use voluntarily and either ban it or put it in the hands of American companies that they can better control?
He's saying we've lost control of the information flow the American government has because it used to be just a tiny number of a handful of media outlets that all were basically the same.
But now, unfortunately, there's too much information because the internet is free.
And that's what is endangering our ability to propagandize the public.
A social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost and the emotion, the impact of images dominates.
And we can't we can't discount that.
But I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on On the narrative.
A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature.
If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.
So I'd note that's of real interest and the president will get the chance to take action in that regard.
I mean, that's a startling admission from Mitt Romney.
But again, he's by far not the only person that has said that.
They've all said it in Washington.
I don't think they realize the magnitude of what they're saying.
They're saying that this TikTok ban has been lurking in Washington for years based on the supposed threat of China.
That was never enough to get it passed.
They didn't get anywhere near majority to enact this bill.
What changed was after October 7, members of Congress began believing That the reason so many young people were opposed to the Israeli war in Gaza is not because young people typically are opposed to wars like they were with the invasion of Iraq and the war in Vietnam, which saw camp protests far more intense and enduring than the ones we see now.
No, that wasn't the reason.
It was because TikTok was somehow a platform that was propagandizing and poisoning their minds against Israel.
And that's why it had to be banned.
I'm going to get to Batya in a second because I want to talk to her about several of these things, but also primarily focus on her new book about working class politics.
But before we do, I just want to show you a couple other incidents of the climate in Washington, how repressive and desperate it has become.
Now that they have lost control of the narrative about Israel and Gaza.
Of course, the U.S.
is funding this war in Gaza.
They're financing it and arming it.
So having it be perceived as a noble and just war is of great importance to the Biden administration.
Here is Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, a Democrat.
She's one of the most vocal supporters of U.S.
funding of the war in Ukraine.
And here she is asking the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, whether she's seen any evidence that the reason young people are against the war in Israel is because they've been brainwashed by Chinese disinformation.
Remember, Democrats have been spending years blaming every opinion they dislike On Russian manipulation and Russian disinformation.
No, people aren't really angry about the state of race in the United States.
They're not really angry about inequality.
They're being manipulated by Russia that wants to sow division in our country and now they're saying the same thing about China.
Now the reason so many young people are protesting against the U.S.
financed and supported war in Gaza is because they're seeing the kind of images that we just showed you in Rafa.
They've been seeing these for months.
But members of Congress cannot believe that any citizen would, on their own, reach a conclusion different than the one they want to impose if they're constantly looking around for boogeymen.
And here's what happened in this exchange with Senator Shaheen and the Director of National Intelligence.
And to what extent are we seeing those kinds of efforts attempting to manipulate the unrest that we're seeing on college campuses?
So I don't have any information that suggests that they're doing that at this stage, but that doesn't mean that it won't develop.
Really?
Because Rutgers had a report that looked at the back end of TikTok, which has now been closed off, that says that, in fact, the Chinese are manipulating through disinformation To populations who use TikTok to manipulate the situation in Gaza and spread misinformation.
You're not seeing any of that even though that that's been publicly reported?
Yes, that we're seeing with respect to the Gaza conflict.
Apologies.
I thought you talked about using that to instigate protests in the United States and that's what we're not seeing.
Does that make sense?
You don't consider the protests on campus protests in the United States?
I do, I'm sorry.
We are seeing misinformation, disinformation that is being, and even true information that is being exacerbated with respect to the Gaza conflict.
It's not directed at protesters so far as I am aware at this stage.
Does that make sense?
In other words, it's not looking to direct protests.
I'm not being clear because there have also been public reports that particular Chinese sympathizers are funding some of these protests to exploit the situation in Gaza.
I mean, that's been reported publicly for several months.
And in fact, even the committee in the House that's looking at China, Mike Gallagher, has talked about this.
So are we not-- are we seeing that?
I am not seeing information that indicates that the Chinese government is directing that.
So that's the piece that I don't see.
Okay, I'm sorry, but we do see Chinese sympathizers who are doing this.
That is part of FBI pieces as they're looking at what's happening within the United States and I defer to them and we can certainly get back to you on that question.
She's so angry that the Director of National Intelligence won't say and can't say that they have intelligence, that the Chinese government is behind the protests.
They're just always so desperate to blame foreign boogeymen and villains on things they can't control and things they dislike, as if students on their own, who spend all their time on the internet, aren't looking at the devastation in Gaza and deciding on their own that they're opposed to this war.
Which, again, is in the tradition of American college campuses and American young people.
Now, before we get to Bacha, just one last point.
Today, Reuters announced the following, quote, conservative U.S.
judges are boycotting Columbia grads over campus Gaza protest.
And it describes how a group of 13 federal judges said on Monday they will not hire law students or undergraduates from Columbia in response to the schools handling pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
Now, imagine If federal judges, liberal federal judges, announced that they refused to hire as part of their courts any school, students from any school, that allowed people to say that there are only two genders or two sexes, and if a school allows people to question, if a school allows people to say that there are only two genders, not multiple ones,
Then they will not allow students from that school to be hired.
This is the kind of, what has been called, cancel culture for so long.
And when you add this to all the other means to repress free speech in the United States in the name of protecting Israel and American Jews.
And Tablet Magazine, the Jewish Journal, editorially, scathingly denounced these efforts saying, we don't want this kind of protection.
As American Jews, what you're seeing is this kind of desperation to pile up all the punishments and coercive measures to prevent this foreign country from being criticized for activism organized against its war in the United States.
And it's incredibly disturbing.
Perfect.
All right.
Let's get to the next segment because we want to get to Bajo.
Bajo Unger-Sargon is the opinion editor of Newsweek.
She is also the author of two books, including her most recent book.
She's a prominent commentator living in Brooklyn.
She is the author of the previous book, Bad News, How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.
She has a new book.
Which I read over the last couple of weeks and really highly recommend, entitled, quote, Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women on How American Politicians and Elites, Institutions, Have Increasingly Excluded Working Class Values and Working Class People from Their Range of Concerns.
We'll talk about our new book as some of the, as well as some of the recent controversies I just alluded to over the last couple of weeks regarding free speech and campus protests and Israel Bachi.
It's always great to see you.
So happy that you're on our show again.
Thank you so much for having me, Glenn.
It is always such a pleasure to join you.
I'm honestly so in awe of what you do, and it's so amazing that you are willing to expose your audience to a range of viewpoints.
So thank you so, so much for having me.
Yeah, our audience always gets happy when I announce that you were coming on.
So many people in various forums said, I don't agree with Batya on Israel, but she is a very fair-minded commentator.
We love hearing from her.
So we're always happy that you're on.
We feel the same way.
So let's get to this book, because I spent a lot of time reading it.
And I really hope people will get the book, because I think it delves into one of the most important issues, which is the exclusion of working class people.
From elite American institutions, from our public discourse.
And one of the things you write in the book is, quote, the class divide has become the defining characteristic of American life in the 21st century.
Now, there are a lot of people who will say, oh, actually, the racial divide is the most important conflict in the United States and among American people.
They'll say the gender divide or the religious divide or the ethnic divide.
Why do you believe that it's the class divide that has become the defining conflict of America in the 21st century?
The other divides really evaporate when you look at the data.
I mean, the idea that Americans are still divided, you know, that there's some sort of racist right and that that is mainstream is just farcical at this point.
All of the data shows that much of the institutional as well as social racism of the past has really disappeared.
When you go out into working class communities, as I did, it's really obvious that people get along and they really just want to get along.
And so I became convinced very early on that the narrative we were telling about race in America was nonsense.
But Glenn, the binary of left versus right also sort of evaporates when you look at the polling Even on the ostensibly most controversial issues in America, whether they're social issues like abortion or LGBTQ issues, or whether it's more economic issues, whether it's about immigration, I mean, all of these issues, there's basically 70% consensus among the American people if you look at polling.
And I sort of started to notice this.
And my first book was really about, well, why do we believe that we are so divided racially and right versus left if this isn't the case?
And the answer is a lot of it has to do with the media and people in power and people in other elite institutions who get a lot of power and make a lot of money off of trying to make us hate each other.
But I started to notice that, you know, there actually is a divide in America.
There's a divide that separates out the elites, the college-educated elites, people with degrees, often multiple degrees, from the working class, and that that divide predicts how healthy you'll be, how long you'll live, whether you'll become a homeowner, whether your life will be insulated from the kinds of downward mobility and deaths of despair that are plaguing working-class America.
I mean, all of these things go hand in hand with having a college degree.
You live longer.
You'll make on average $1.2 million more than a person without a degree just based on having that credential.
So I wanted to explore this class divide.
I started to notice how seldom we hear from working-class people in their own words, and so I really wrote the book to platform working-class people, to give them a voice, to give that 70% a say, and that's really what Second Class represents.
So one of the things I like best about your book is exactly that, that it's based on this wide range of interviews and telling the stories of working class people.
And when you hear, you know, truck drivers and police officer, you know, the real working class, and you realize as you read these things that these are people you never hear from in certainly national media discourse.
The other thing that I found so striking about your book is I think there are assumptions or perceptions among both the left and the right.
About what the working class is and what they believe and I think your book affirms some of them but debunks many of them in terms of what these people are actually prioritizing and what they consider most important on the issues that we think that they're so clear on like social issues that are actually not in the place that many people assume.
One of the paradoxes that I found so interesting that I have to ask you about a little bit more is, on the one hand, it is certainly true that the people who compose the American working class Feel all the dissatisfaction for all the reasons that you document in your book.
The kind of loss of opportunity, the loss of representation, the, you know, community breakdown, the distressed deaths, and their communities being ravaged by addiction.
And this is the kind of dissatisfaction that I think Donald Trump so adeptly exploited.
And even Bernie Sanders in 2016 too.
And at the same time, despite how dissatisfied they are with all the things happening in the United States, they still feel this kind of optimism, you say, about the country and its promise.
They're not hating the country, they're not dismissing it as a place to live, as some fundamentally unfair or irredeemable country.
Quite the contrary, they kind of have this optimism about the country.
What explains that paradox?
Isn't it heartbreaking?
I mean, you know, they've really been betrayed by both parties.
I really feel that America has broken its contract with the working class.
These people work so much harder physical labor than people in the knowledge industry and yet their lives are so much more difficult.
They're plagued by precariousness.
So few of them can achieve the kind of middle-class stability and security that the elites take for granted.
And yet the elites hate America, and these people love this country.
They're so patriotic.
And the really, really heartbreaking thing is often they'll blame themselves for their own lack of success, their own ability to make it.
Even people who really did everything right and made all the right choices and work so, so hard.
I mean, everybody in my book who I profiled works really, really hard.
And despite all that, they still live these lives that are totally plagued and characterized by precariousness.
You're right.
There is a paradox there.
They are not willing to give up on this country.
They feel deeply, deeply connected to America and they feel that their work is very connected to the idea of what it means to be an American.
They take a lot of pride in their work.
They get a lot of dignity from it.
And I think this is something the left really struggles to understand about the working class.
If you've gotten a college degree or a couple of degrees and you are working in the knowledge industry and making, you know, $200,000 a year, You know, you really believe in institutions because they've really delivered for you, you know?
Like, they have probably delivered the American dream for you and your family.
And similarly, if you are part of the dependent poor, you have no reason to distrust institutions because they're delivering for you as well.
We do actually have, you know, something of a welfare state here.
A lot of people get support from that, a lot of people in the dependent poor.
And of course, those are the two halves of the Democratic Party's coalition right now, the college-credentialed elites and the dependent poor.
Working-class people, they really do not like that point of view.
They don't identify with that kind of paternalism of, let's just trust the government to redistribute our taxes in an equitable way.
They believe in autonomy.
They believe in hard work.
And what they want is for their work to reward them with, you know, the most modest version of the American dream.
And they really see work as a pathway to self-determination, to autonomy, to independence.
And these are all values that are very strong in the working class, which is why a lot of the Democrats' proposals for helping the less fortunate really fall flat with them.
So I want to ask you a little bit about this migration of working class people, more to the Republican Party, abandoning the Democratic Party.
I think it's one of the most important changes.
But before we get to that, I grew up, I would say, working class.
I was raised by a single mother.
She didn't get a college degree, so she had hourly wage jobs at McDonald's and the back room of offices and stuff.
My father was around, though, but he couldn't help much.
But in my adult life, as you alluded to, I've spent My adult life in these liberal elite institutions.
I went to, you know, top colleges on the East Coast.
I then worked in law for 10 years and then in journalism for the last 15 years.
So focusing on journalism, which I would say is the elite culture I now know best, it always struck me so much that everywhere I went, every media outlet I worked with, you know, Salon and The Guardian and The Intercept, but also a bunch of other outlets that I worked with during the Snowden reporting, NBC News and others, All had this kind of homogeneity.
They were all people who went to Harvard and Yale and Princeton and who grew up wealthy.
And I was, a couple weeks ago I was ill for like a week.
I had dengue fever and I was just in bed.
I couldn't do anything.
So I fell into all these different documentaries, these kind of like black holes.
And one of the things I got obsessed with was the reporting that local papers in New York City did in order to help expose and break down the organized crime families.
And Newsday, which is a pretty big paper, they want a bunch of pollsters, but still have that local journalism ethos.
The one guy who really led the reporting for decades was this legendary journalist named Bob Green.
I think we have his picture.
I've talked about it before, but you can see it on the screen.
He's sitting at this crappy desk, his shirt collar won't button, he's smoking on a cigarette, he's in front of one of those typewriters, that image of just like, and he would talk, they all talked to all these reporters like the neighborhoods they were covering, from the outer boroughs in the Bronx and Ozone Park they all talked to all these reporters like the neighborhoods they were covering, from They were covering the crime families from the places that they worked on.
And that image of the old iconic journalists sitting in a room with like, you know, a lot like ink stain fingers, they were very much these outsiders.
They didn't go to Harvard and Yale, and the corporatization of journalism has really made it so that the same kind of people who are chosen and rewarded in every corporation are now chosen and rewarded in journalism.
And when I, you know, every media outlet I've been involved with, they would always talk about diversifying the newsroom, And what that always meant was everything except class.
Oh, we need more black people.
We need more women.
We need more gay people.
And they would get them and they would all be from the same colleges.
They would all be from the same neighborhoods.
Their parents were all lawyers and, you know, partners in Goldman Sachs or hedge fund managers or whatever.
And it didn't diversify anything except on the surface.
I don't think I've met anyone from like a real working class background in any of these media outlets.
What do you think has been the effect of this transformation?
Not just in journalism, I describe that because I know it best, but I think it's been happening in every institution in terms of just the wholesale exclusion, like the devaluing of these people.
I mean, you hit the nail on the head.
My whole first book is about this, Bad News, How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, and I argued in the book that the problem with our media is not that it's left.
If only it was actually left.
It's not left, it's woke.
The left has developed a language around race and gender in order to mask exactly what you're describing, which is the ways in which people who were traditionally left wing have benefited in enormous ways from the Clinton Obama economy that funneled over 50 percent of the GDP into the top 20 percent into the credentialed professional managerial class.
They're now quite wealthy, especially compared to working class Americans.
And to masquerade this, because, of course, these people in these newsrooms would die if you knew how rich they were, they developed a whole new language around social justice so they could keep masquerading as the good guys, you know, on the side of the little guy.
And this is very, very unique, as you point out, for the vast majority of the history of American journalism to go through in the book.
Working-class people were the majority of people who became journalists.
You know, they were outsiders demanding justice on behalf of their neighbors, who they still lived amongst, and now journalists, by and large, live amongst the people in power who they're supposed to be adversarially covering, which, of course, they don't, because their kids all go to school together, and they went to school with them, and they went to fancy universities with them.
So we really lost that.
You're totally right.
It's in the media.
It's in Congress and the Senate, where I believe the number is over 90% of people Congress and the Senate have a college degree as opposed to just 30 percent of Americans.
And of course, as the journalism cast stopped being working class, they abandoned the working class that they used to belong to and started to cover the news from the point of view of the upper middle class consumer.
Right.
So they used to cover strikes from the point of view of the striking bus driver.
They used to cover strikes from the point of view of the striking bus driver.
Now they covered strikes from the point of view of the disgruntled office worker who can't get to their upper middle class job.
Now they covered strikes from the point of view of the disgruntled office worker who can't get to their upper middle class job.
And in so many ways, I mean, NAFTA could never have happened if journalists were still doing their jobs, still came from working class backgrounds, because they would never have allowed the politicians to get away with shipping their friends jobs overseas.
They simply didn't know anybody working class anymore.
So it's had a huge, huge impact.
And, you know, something you cover a lot, the war in Ukraine.
I got to tell you, Glenn, I interviewed a lot of working class people for this book, you know, across the political spectrum.
OK, they agreed on, I'd say, 90 percent of the issues, total agreement.
And like you said, people would be very surprised to learn, you know, where that agreement lies.
There's one topic that every single person I interviewed brought up on their own.
I didn't bring it up because it wasn't part of that.
You know, it's a book about, you know, economic, economic fate of the American working class.
Everyone brought up the war in Ukraine and asked me, why are we paying for this?
I just don't know.
And that gap between people, it wasn't just that they opposed it, it was no one had bothered to explain to them why they should be paying for this, because nobody has to, because no one is answerable to them, and that is a true outrage.
Well, and I also think that there's no answer.
That's when we started the show, talking about Ukraine.
And my question from the beginning has been, how does the question of who governs various provinces in eastern Ukraine or Crimea affect the lives of the American people?
any way, and there's absolutely no answer to that, but they deal with it by just flooding them with emotional propaganda about the evil Russians and then just ignoring them for the rest of the time and serving the special interest.
In Washington, of course, if you look at Congress, it's very much the same thing.
It's amazing how many of them all went to Harvard and Yale in the same schools and have billionaire families or very wealthy families who end up funding their political careers.
Let me ask you about this partisan issue because one of the things you say is, quote, the working class distrust both parties, that they distrust the Democrats now as these affluent elites and the Republicans as the party of the rich and large corporations.
Now, it used to be the case, you know, in the 50s, 60s, and 70s that the Democrats were the party of labor unions, the Republicans under Reagan were the party of the rich, you know, rising tide lifts all boats.
Let's And all of that kind of got scrambled when Bill Clinton purposely remade the Democratic Party by connecting it to all the big financiers on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in the pharmaceutical industry, and the Democrats became the party of big corporations, and it left this working class to kind of leave the Democratic Party and go to the Republican Party.
The problem, I think, is that while you do have some of the smarter Republican politicians in the Republican Party who believe that the future of the Republican Party is a multiracial working class, and I want to ask you about that in a second, The reality of what the Republicans still do, like one of the first things Trump did after getting into office was sign a major tax cut, a gigantic tax cut for the largest corporations, even though he had promised to raise taxes on the rich in order to, you know, protect Social Security, Medicare, and the like.
So what do you think is the potential of the Republican Party to replace the Democratic Party as the party of the working class?
It's a great question.
I want to separate out Trump from the GOP because something liberals don't understand is that, you know, there's one thing that conservative working class people hate more than the Democratic Party and it's the Republican Party.
Like, they really hate the GOP.
You know, they see it as the party of, you know, the Chamber of Commerce and free trade and foreign wars and all of the stuff that sold out their future, you know.
So they really hate the GOP.
And that version of the GOP, the pre-Trump version, was really embodied by Nikki Haley in her attempt to challenge Trump in the primaries.
And it was amazing, Glenn, because she outspent Trump two to one.
And honestly, it made me feel so much better about Citizens United because it got her nowhere.
I mean, just the sheer force of the will of the people was able to make the fact that the entire donor class of the Republican Party, which you're right, they only care about tax cuts, they all backed Haley.
And Trump still ran away with it by leaps and bounds because our democracy is actually really healthy, it turns out, you know?
If you're really popular, there's a really good chance you're going to win.
So I thought that was great.
I mean, however you feel about Donald Trump, I just think that you have to admit he does seem to prove that our democracy is functioning really well.
About that tax cut, when you ask working and middle class people about it, They don't talk about the money the corporations got.
They talk about the money they got.
And it's true that the rich got the largest amount of money from that tax cut, but they got the lowest percentages.
It was actually working class and middle class people who got between 15 and 35 percent in terms of money back.
Of course, that's you know, if you're a billionaire and you're getting five percent back, it's going to be a lot more than what a middle class person gets back.
But working class and middle class people will talk again and again about how Trump and his economy put money back in their pockets.
And honestly, you know, when you have thirty five dollars in your bank account, you know, You can't really afford to be wrong about which president is doing better for you economically.
If you're part of the elites and you've got, you know, $100,000 or $50,000 and a really nice, you know, real estate portfolio, you know, you can afford to be wrong as the vast majority of economists are.
But these people, I think that there's something just really, really disgusting about Assuming that somebody with such little of a cushion, which the majority of Americans don't have $400 to rub together, would be wrong about something like this.
They really saw Trump as an alternative to the GOP.
And so the question to me is whether the GOP understands that and whether after Trump they're going to keep doing what he did, which was take an axe to the neoliberal order, or if they're just going to try to go back to the Nikki Haley version.
All signs point to that.
The donor class really is ready for Trump to go away.
They hate him as much as the Democratic Party does.
I'm not very hopeful, but I'll tell you something interesting.
The most common combination of views that I found among working class people, and again, this is whether they vote for Democrats or Republicans, was first of all, Everyone I spoke to was extremely pro-gay and extremely worried about trans, so they don't see LGBT.
Everybody I met, including very religious Christians, said to me something like, you know, I believe gay people should be treated with respect.
A lot of people I met had a gay person in their life who they wanted to be treated with dignity.
They were extremely worried and extremely upset about trans athletes in women's sports, trans people in women's bathrooms, and children being taught about sexuality at a young age.
And this was, again, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, they were very, very suspicious of welfare.
Most people knew people who they felt were scamming the system, but they supported raising taxes on corporations.
And the most interesting thing was the vast majority of people I interviewed, whether they were Republicans or Democrats, supported basically a total moratorium on immigration for the foreseeable future, but also government backed health care.
So you could see how each party has like a piece of the pie, but is then like actively undermining the other piece of it.
And so the question is like, who's more likely to get to that combination of expanding health care and limiting immigration?
Honestly, I don't see either party giving up because they're each side's donor base is so invested in the view that is anathema to the Republican to the working class.
Either the Democrats by opening the border or the Republicans by refusing to talk about health care.
Yeah, I think it's such an important point about Trump and the Republican Party.
Remember, in 2016, the donor class did everything possible to sabotage Trump.
They first had Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, even they settled on Ted Cruz.
Like, anything to defeat Trump.
And Trump's entire 2016 campaign ran against the Republican establishment.
That was what he saw as his primary enemy, and he won and then did so again.
I want to just delve into a little bit more this issue of culture war stuff because it actually did surprise me.
I think the perception of the working class is, oh, you know, abortion and gay marriage are things that really motivate them.
They're hostile to it.
You look at polling data, you look at your interviews, and it shows that it's clearly not.
And on the one hand, I can understand why they see the trans issue differently.
For one thing, it's newer.
Gay marriage and gay rights have been around for 30 years.
A very new ideology about gender ideology that really started happening once gay marriage was legalized.
These gay groups didn't want to close up shop and they found this new cause.
Also, I think a big part of it is people in America always have had this view that adults, what they do in their personal life is their business.
We shouldn't be interfering in that.
And there's a lot of questions about targeting children and encouraging children to have gender-affirming treatments.
And so I just, I mean, that difference is very coherent, very cogent.
I wonder, though, and I believe that that's their views when you tell me that.
I wonder, though, how much they are motivated by that, how much they care about it.
Because I do think we've seen some evidence that when Republicans, including Trump-affiliated Republicans, run on a platform that's trying to get people animated about culture war issues, they tend not to be nearly as effective as when they're running on these more substantive issues like why are we paying for foreign wars and why is the economy so tilted against you?
Would you agree that even though they may have these views on cultural issues that are surprising, it's not really what animates them?
Oh, 100%.
I mean, it's similar to Israel-Gaza.
You know, people have opinions about that, but it's at the bottom of the list of things that are motivating people, including young people.
Definitely, working-class people don't expect their politicians to have any kind of, like, you know, lessons for them about morality or values.
They're not like the left, which has a lot of spirituality invested in the political sphere.
And I think the best example of this is Ron DeSantis, right?
Totally uninterested in economic issues, had no idea why Trump was so successful.
He misunderstood Trump in exactly the same way that the Democrats do.
He thought that people liked Trump because he was a bit of a bore and because he was sometimes I mean, people don't like the trans stuff.
I don't think that they're voting on that.
They're voting on their extremely pressing economic issues.
I mean, you know, when groceries are up by 25%, they just don't have the luxury of thinking about these cultural issues.
And what's worse is they feel really pimped out by the GOP, which is expecting them to throw away their one vote on these cultural issues that matter a lot to the elites, and even if they agree with them, they're not voting on that, I do think abortion is slightly different.
The most common view I encountered, and again, this was from both Republicans and Democrats, was women would say to me, I would never get an abortion, I'm against abortion, but I would never judge that woman for the decisions she might have to make.
And so they were against abortion, but also against banning abortion.
The consensus was somewhere around 15 weeks, but for there to be copious, copious exceptions and the idea of a ban felt very intolerant.
And I think, again, it comes back to what's the difference between, you know, supporting gay people and then really wanting to limit the trans agenda because they support black.
They support, you know, gay people the way that they support black people.
They see themselves as extremely tolerant people and they are extremely tolerant.
And the reason they don't like the woke left is because they think it's very intolerant and they think it's very intolerant to force, you know, a kind of trans ideology on a nation that's really just not there yet.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely evidence that the overturning of Roe versus Wade followed by this Republican rush to pass these very draconian anti-abortion bills is a big part of what motivated a lot of these Democratic Party wins.
And I think Republicans are now realizing that even their core voters, not all of them, of course, but many, don't want these massive bans.
They see it as controlling other people's lives in a way that makes them uncomfortable.
Let me ask you.
I have a bunch more questions, but I want to get to the recent events in the United States as well.
But I think your book raises so many important issues that don't get nearly enough attention as they should.
So let me ask you, I think one of the critiques of this new Republican attempt to be the party of the working class is that it's mostly just rhetoric and there's not a lot of action.
Now, whenever people say that, I always refer to things like When Bernie Sanders wanted to filibuster the COVID relief bill because it had no direct payments to the American people, the person who stood at his side and filibustered that COVID relief package with him was Josh Hawley.
And they got $600 direct payments to every single citizen, something that would have been unthinkable for a Republican in, say, the Reagan era to do, direct government payments to citizens.
And then Donald Trump ended up vetoing it because he thought it wasn't enough and demanded $2,000 in return.
I think that's kind of an illustration of where this is going.
And you have other ones like people like J.D.
Vance and a lot of people in the House who are doing real populist economic policies, even though I don't think the party is quite there yet.
But I remember one of the things that Josh Hawley said that has always stuck with me, I think it was after 2020, or maybe it was after the failure of the red wave in 2022, and he said, the future of the Republican Party is a multi-racial working class party.
Now, one of the reasons that struck me is because, again, you would never hear Republicans speaking that way 20 or 30 years ago.
That's not how they conceived of the party.
But also, I think in the past when we've talked about the working class, we've often thought about the white working class.
And one of the big changes in the United States is that a lot of people who are racial minorities are no longer in the category of poor.
A lot of them are working class.
And I think that's why you're seeing so many people of racial minorities migrating more and more, being more and more open to the Republican Party, at least under Trump.
What do you see as the role of race in the working class?
Honestly, I think it's becoming less and less significant because of what you just pointed out, which is, you know, Trump is polling extremely well with Black men and with Hispanics.
And because their issues are very similar to the issues of the white working class, um, the There's no issue like this, like immigration.
All of the data suggests that the people who have paid the most in real economic terms, but also in terms of mass incarceration and other sort of really negative, negative things, the breakdown of the family, the population that has paid the highest price for the mass immigration that's been encouraged by both parties has been the black community, especially black men.
It's really a travesty.
And the Democrats do this.
They'll pick some, you know, group to focus on and to cater to, and then they'll move on.
And they have really abandoned all sorts of civil rights issues in order to cater to the kind of open border.
And, of course, we can get into all of the reasons for that, all of the economic reasons for that, and the way that they hide those economic reasons with rhetoric about, you know, asylums and refugee and so forth.
But immigration is exactly one of these issues that really, really unites working class people of all races.
And this was really hidden because the black community really didn't like Trump in 2016.
And so it really seemed like, you know, it was easier for the Democrats to pin this allegation of racism on him because he walked away with, you know, 67% of the white working class vote, but a much smaller percentage of people of color.
But by 2020, you know, he was polling at 8% of black men, but he got 18% and he's now polling at 35% of black men.
And you know, I mean, it's anybody's guess how much he'll actually get on election day, but it's really taken the wind out of the sails of this accusation that Trump is somehow racist when, I mean, what could be less racist than improving the economic fortunes of people who are really struggling?
Yeah, I mean, he also got the first criminal justice reform bill passed in many years.
And also, you know, there was an article by Jamal Bowie at the time.
He's now the New York Times op-ed columnist, but he at the time was at the liberal journal, The America Prospect.
He would never write this now, but it was in 2012.
And he warned the Democratic Party that the more The more permissive you are with immigration, the more you risk alienating black voters because black voters perceive accurately that among the first people to pay for the influx of new cheaper labor are black people, specifically the black working class.
And I think that has, you know, mixed a lot of political allegiances and also on the culture war issue.
I think there's a lot of skepticism among black people and Latino people who tend to be much more socially conservative and they get alienated by that as well.
I want to ask you about a critique that I've heard, that I'm sure you've heard.
I think it's kind of an homonym critique.
It probably comes from people who haven't read the book, but nonetheless.
I'll just tell you about one of my experiences.
I went to visit my mother like five years ago.
And again, she was working at this like back office, very working class office.
It was very multiracial.
And she wanted me to come in, you know, show me off, whatever.
And so because I was there, they all started talking about politics.
I was there and after like two minutes I was shocked because they were like joking with one another in like racially like overt racial ways like playing with ethnicity and religion and like the way they were just but nobody got offended because they knew it was being done without malice and as this kind of anthropological visitor who hasn't really been involved in working class values for a long time I was kind of shocked like you can't say those things and I left realizing you know
God, although this is where I grew up, I'm so alienated from that now.
So I think a lot of people look at you and they see that you're an opinion editor at Newsweek, you're the author of books, you go on television a lot.
I don't want to delve too deeply into your family life, but I believe that your father is a neurologist or a surgeon or something like that, if I'm not mistaken.
And I think a lot of people say, Who are you to speak for the working class?
Like what do you have to do with the working class?
Or is this book just kind of like an anthropological visit to this species that you don't much interact with?
Or do you have any kind of personal stake or understanding or knowledge of working class life?
Well, I have working-class people in my family, and I live in a working-class neighborhood, and as an Orthodox Jew, I'm very familiar with the contempt that the college-educated have for people who don't go to college.
And, you know, I wouldn't say that most of the people in that community are, you know, Financially working class.
It's a very diverse community.
There's people sort of in all different kinds of jobs and occupations, although not, you know, like you would think of traditionally as working class.
But definitely I have, you know, in my social circle and familial circles, there's a lot of that, even though I myself obviously am of the class that I am critiquing in a very big way, which is why I know it.
So inside and out.
I mean, I got a PhD, you know, like what the university is like at that time.
But I kind of Yeah, I don't feel like I have to sort of prove that, you know, I have a personal investment in this, I'm invested in this topic as an American.
And, you know, as somebody who treasures our democracy and thinks it's really dangerous to live in a country in which there's only rich and poor people and nobody in between, I don't think you can have a stable democracy without a stable middle class.
And it seems kind of weird to be like, well, the only people that they would allow to make that argument are the people they've run out of the newsrooms.
I mean, there's like no one else to make it.
And, you know, they should read the book.
Most of it is really in other people's voices.
It's not me speaking for the working class.
It's the working class speaking for themselves.
And I would be just as happy if they were being interviewed here right now or, you know, have any of the opportunities that I have.
I try my best to platform people at Newsweek when I can and in other, you know, media outlets that I have access to.
But I think that the idea, to me, it seems like sort of like the reason people make that argument is because they don't want to hear what working class people have to say.
You know, their answer is never, you know, Batya, shut up.
We have a line of people here who are working class who we want to give a platform to.
You know, it's always just shut up.
You know, so.
To be clear, this is not a criticism I share.
As I said, it's an homonym.
But you know, there's a long history of people enacting policies to help the working class who aren't from the working class.
And I think, you know, one of the benefits of real journalism is just basic empathy leading you to be able to, you know, delve into other people and how they live and try and get as much of an understanding of what their perspective is by interviewing, by them, by letting them speak.
I remember when I was, when we created The Intercept, one of the ideas that we had, which unfortunately we never pursued, was exactly to kind of purposely try and get people to write for us who don't come from journalism backgrounds, who are like single mothers, you know, raising kids at like a lower middle class job or people who are unemployed raising kids at like a lower middle class job or people who are unemployed or, you know, just to try and give them a voice directly because it's done
I think it is important to have books like this that go and interview people and aggregate their perspectives and experiences.
Let me ask you about a couple of topics that aren't about your book, which I'm going to suggest people read again at the end, because I think people can see that it's a really rich and deep topic.
There's a lot of stuff that's happening over the last couple weeks, Batya, that we talked about when you were on my show, I think the first time after October 7th.
And one of the things was that you came on and you said, you know, you defended the Israeli war in Gaza.
You talked about why Israel is such an important cause to you.
But one of the things you said early on was that you were really concerned about and alarmed by this attempt to turn Jewish Americans into this new victim group, to suggest that Jewish Americans are unsafe, to use the safety as a language, to create Jews as kind of new special class that need these protections.
I'm wondering, this is, you know, four months ago or so, now we've seen these protests and there's a lot of sense that, there's a lot of claims that Jewish students are endangered, feel unsafe.
I'm wondering if you still feel that same hostility toward this victimhood discourse and if you do, how do you feel about all these attempts to now legislate and, you know, engage in executive action to create these special rights for American Jews?
I feel that way so much more than I did four months ago, because we now know exactly who the protesters are.
I mean, we've seen firsthand exactly what has happened and what has not happened.
And what has not happened is, you know, a mass mobilization of violence against Jews.
I mean, that just didn't happen.
I mean, at the time, I said, I don't think anything has risen to the level of incitement, but I guess time will tell, you know, and time has told.
There's just not been anything close to that.
And I feel even more just horrified and disgusted at the idea that Jewish people are supposed to be afraid of that.
I think it's so gross.
I mean, yeah, first of all, I hated the safetyism when it was about other groups, and I hate it when it's about Jews.
I hate the idea that we're a special class somehow, that we're in need of some sort of protections.
Especially now, you know, now that we've all seen the videos up close and personal, we know every, you know, inch of this, what it is.
Now, that is not to say that these protesters are not intimidating.
They are.
But the reason they're intimidating, and I know this because I was protested in 2019 on a college campus in a very similar way.
It's because they won't engage you.
They have this kind of almost zombified look.
They stare straight ahead and when you try to talk to them like human to human, they won't engage.
And that is very intimidating because we all watch zombie movies.
It's spiritually intimidating because it's really hard to address a person, especially a young person, who you feel like Why can't we just have a conversation about this like a normal person and they're kind of staring past you and there's a lot of them like there's something about that that is is chilling it is but like something being spiritually intimidating and chilling because as a human you feel that somebody has turned it off and is looking at you like you are not human.
That is not being unsafe.
That is something very different, and the whole point of this country was built on a First Amendment, and the whole point of the First Amendment was we can stop physical violence by allowing people to have their say.
And the idea that somehow Jews, instead of being the crucible upon which that value is proven, should be in our name, it should be broken, I'm so opposed to that.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I do think it would be one thing, a different conversation, although I would still be in favor of free speech, for sure, under every circumstance.
If there were, you know, mass waves of, like, Jewish students on campuses being violently and physically attacked, or bombs being set off in synagogues and Jewish centers on campus, I mean, this is not happening.
You know, you definitely have scenes where, you know, protesters are blocking the ingress and egress of Israel supporters, which I find to be, you know, An offensive tactic, like, not appropriate, not just.
But the idea that there's this, like, you know, wave of hate crimes and violence against Jewish people and Jewish students is just not true.
And I think telling people this is a way of, like, spreading neurosis and fear in a way that's completely unjustified and it's the kind of thing that leads to authoritarian enactments of laws.
Because when the population's in fear, that's when they most are susceptible to it.
I'm so glad to hear you say that you think this No, more than ever.
Last question.
I saw you say the other day, I think in a television interview, maybe in your social media account, That when you saw the New York City Police Department going into Columbia, you felt like this was such a vindication of this working class idea that you had the working class going in, namely the police officers, and confronting these kind of pampered, elite, you know, left-wing students in these very prestigious universities.
Now, I do think the working class, I do think police officers are completely working class in almost every country.
What I wonder though is, on some level, the reason the NYPD went in is because these administrators at Columbia and NYU called them in.
And the reason they called them in is because they're answering to big institutional trustees and large donors and to the U.S.
Congress.
And I do think the police, for sure, the individual police officers are working class, but isn't the police really an instrument of elite power?
Like, they go where elite interests want them to be and they kind of are directed by elite values.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
I was juxtaposing the discipline of the cops with what I consider to be the really fatal lack of discipline in the messaging of the students.
And, you know, Norman Finkelstein actually pointed this out, somebody who I don't agree with ever, But he gave a talk, I don't know if you saw it, at the Columbia protest where he said, you guys have to control your message.
You cannot chant things that Jews find triggering, that the average American is going to find offensive, like a line from Hamas's charter.
You know, he was saying to them, don't chant these things because your job here is to speak for the people of Gaza.
And so your job is to convince the most amount of people.
And of course, immediately as he finished talking, you know, a student took the microphone from him and went from the river to the sea.
Exactly.
I saw that.
So that was what I was talking about to me.
I was I was not juxtaposing the fact of the cops being there.
I totally agree with you.
This is all about answering to shareholders.
I was juxtaposing the discipline of the cops with which they really, really did this job, I think, from everything that I saw.
In the most, in the best possible way, nobody was hurt.
There was very little, I mean, there was a report of a shop being fired.
I think it's being investigated, but just the idea that they were able to accomplish that with nobody getting hurt.
I mean, it really is so different from the scenes that you saw in the 60s versus this fatal and unforgivable lack of discipline, which if you're like me and you care about Palestinians and you have people in those communities who you desperately want to achieve civil rights at some point, you want this bombing to stop, you have people who are close to you, who have family there.
The idea that this movement would very consciously choose not to do what Dr. King did, which was appeal to the common humanity in the average American, but instead choose purposely to use the most offensive but instead choose purposely to use the most offensive language, to me it seems, to shrink the number of people who you can convince to agree with you and thereby maintain a moral high ground.
That is my critique of them, and to me that is so much a critique of the university today, which is so much about burnishing elite status Distancing yourself from, you know, the average working class, middle class American.
That was what I was trying to get at in the tweet.
Not so much the fact of the police who didn't send themselves.
You're right.
Although, you know, most working class Americans are very much on the side of Israel on this issue.
And, you know, polling came out that they really felt that the cops had not been harsh enough.
You know, the most Americans felt that there, you know, there was Room for improvement in terms of how they treated the students.
So that's really the juxtaposition I was trying to get at.
Yeah, I get that.
I mean, we could always debate the history of protest movements.
I mean, this was the same critique made of, you know, the anti-Vietnam War protesters on campus, that they were all these hippies, they were unkempt, they had long hair, they were being lawless, they were alienating middle America.
And at the end of the day, I think just their mere kind of constant activity ensured that this debate about Vietnam and the war stayed in the public Spotlight.
I think young people are always going to be a little bit dumb, a little bit, you know, on the side of like being excessive and not very cunning and strategic.
But on some level, I don't know, I think in a lot of ways the emergence of this protest movement, even though people may not love the protesters, has had the effect of bringing this debate more into the light than it otherwise would be.
The constant harassing of Democratic politicians and the like, I think that's kept it in in the public eye, but we could always debate that, and I'm sure we will have you back to debate that and other things.
But I just wanna encourage people, once again, Batch's new book is Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.
I honestly had like seven more questions on these cards of things I wanted to delve in on your book, but we just didn't have time.
But I think what has happened to the working class, how the political elite in American institutions have treated them is clearly one of the top, top, most important issues.
And your book covers it in a very comprehensive way that I, again, think is going to be surprising to a lot of people.
So congratulations on writing that.
I know how soul-draining writing a book is, so I'm sure you're happy that it's out.
And, of course, I'm always appreciative of your time coming on and talking to us.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
I adore you, and I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to discuss the book and also other things with you.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're always welcome here.
Have a good evening, Bacha. - Thanks. - So that concludes our show for this evening.
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