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May 12, 2024 - Info Warrior - Jason Bermas
29:11
A NEWSWEEK Editor And I Talk Class Warfare
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And we are joined by Bacha Unger Sargon.
Thank you so much for joining us.
You've got a new book out, but...
Well, thank you for coming.
But you're also in the mainstream media.
And I've not been a fan of the mainstream media for decades now.
I'm sure you can understand why.
However, Newsweek is one of the few publications that I often cite and does have insightful, in-depth pieces that, although you're the opinion editor, really do tell the story most of the time down the line, which is much appreciated.
So when you wrote this book, What was the mindset that you were coming in with?
First of all, thank you so much for saying that about Newsweek.
We try so hard to have a product that really people from across the political spectrum can enjoy and read.
At the opinion section, what we do is every day we have a daily debate, and so you'll have somebody from the left and somebody from the right on the same topic.
And my hope in doing that was to make readers of both sides feel seen and heard so that they feel safe enough to hear how the other side thinks.
And it's been a real success.
People are really hungry for that, I think.
And we have also a fairness meter on our political articles.
So all of your viewers can go and rate our articles so that we know that we are being as fair as possible.
So thank you so much for saying that.
It's something we work really, really hard at.
I came into this book wanting to understand more deeply who is the American working class and do they still have a fair shot at the American dream?
Because something I had noticed over the last five years is that the real divide in this country is not between left versus right.
It's between the college-educated elites who run the country in the media, in Silicon Valley, And the working class, the people whose labor we all really rely on to survive.
And increasingly that divide between the elites and the working class is not just about how much money you make, although it's really, really there as well.
A college grad will make on average $1.2 million more throughout the course of their career.
But somebody with a college degree will also live longer, be healthier, be more likely to be a homeowner, It's really become one of the avenues left to the American dream.
And the outrage there is that people who are working class are increasingly struggling.
They don't make enough money.
They can't afford to buy their own homes.
And even though they are the ones doing the work that the rest of us rely on.
And so I thought that was really unfair.
Working class people have effectively been deplatformed.
You don't hear from them anymore in the media.
You don't hear from them in politics.
And so I wanted to give those people a voice.
So let's talk about that a little bit because, you know, I think it really does depend on what kind of college degree that you have.
I was just at my alumni weekend.
I didn't graduate. I'm a beauty school dropout.
I make more money than the vast majority of the other people that do have degrees.
Now, they're in New York.
I moved out to Iowa.
But they also, when they do make more money than me, they live in Long Island.
And, you know, I took the Thruway home.
It's $5 for a bottle of water.
I mean, things are over-the-top priced in New York State and especially in the city and below on the island, which is totally crazy.
However, there is this elitist attitude.
All the time. Not only from that area, but the East Coast, the kind of Harvard, Yale-y, you know, even Cornell University types where they do think that they're smarter than the average person.
However, I've seen many blind spots When you see those people.
And to me, they're really the last hangers on of watching the CNNs and the MSNBCs of the world.
You know, I went to my best friend.
I hadn't seen her in over a decade.
She was the valedictorian of my high school.
Smart girl. Married to a smart guy.
Both kind of yuppies.
They're going to retire by 55.
And we just kind of started talking.
We hadn't talked in a while. And she asked me, she's like, wait, were you there on January 6th?
I'm like, yeah, I covered it.
I covered it in December. I was there.
Wait, do you think the election was stolen?
I'm like, yeah, I do.
And she's like, what do you mean?
And I go, well, it's not that there wasn't no evidence.
You understand that they ruled that there was no standing to look at the evidence.
No clue whatsoever.
Believe the insurrection narrative.
Believe the white supremacist narrative.
Almost every talking point you've seen thrown at the mainstream media, these are smart people.
Why is it, do you think, that that college education, and I guess that paycheck for a long period of time buying into the system, doesn't allow these people to question anything?
Oh, the answer is very simple.
It's because it's very much in their economic interest not to because they have been the beneficiaries from a very real economic point of view of all of these policies and the demonization of the working class.
And that's why you have so much contempt of working class Americans in the mainstream media.
They use that contempt to hide the ways in which they have sold out the futures of America's children to other countries, China and Mexico with NAFTA, to children coming in across the border from Venezuela, right?
They have sold out the American dream, sold out the American working class, broken the contract with the working class.
But what happens when you do that is there was effectively an upward transfer of wealth from the middle class to the college-educated elites, right?
So in 1971, which was the high-water mark for working-class wages, the biggest section of the economy, of the GDP, was in the middle.
Today, the top 20%, those MSNBC CNN viewers, Control over 50% of the GDP. So they squeezed it up from the middle into the elites.
And they did that with policy like NAFTA, shipping really good working class jobs overseas to China and Mexico so they could import cheaper goods and pay less for the stuff they needed while their working class neighbor now no longer has a job.
Or by defunding vocational training so that working class people who used to go into becoming plumbers and electricians, like you say, people who make a lot of money as working class people who could then compete with the elites for housing, well now we have a dearth of plumbers because they don't teach vocational training in high school anymore.
They have less people competing for the homes that they buy.
The open border, mass immigration, was a giant upward transfer of wealth from working class people To the elites who employ the illegal migrants and now can pay them much less than they would have paid an American.
So you see how all of these policies that are supposedly liberal policies are actually ways in which a college credentialed elite has plundered the middle class.
So, of course, they're not going to admit that, right?
Because they're liberals and so they think they're better than everybody else.
So they needed an ideology that could justify They're wage theft from the working class.
And so that's how they came up with this wokeness, with this radical extremist ideology around race and gender.
It's where the environmental movement comes from.
It's where the whole you're a racist if you don't want an open border comes from.
It's why they are so convinced that Donald Trump is a criminal because Donald Trump created an economy that did the opposite.
It funneled money back into the pockets of the middle and working class.
And that was a huge threat to them because it was a threat to their oligarchy.
And so they became, they had to be convinced of everything they heard about Donald Trump because otherwise the truth would have been out there, which is that he was undoing all of this stuff that they worked really hard to do to line their pockets of what was once middle class wages.
You know, I have my issues myself with Trump, but one of the things I specifically talk about is on day one, I had more money in my pocket as soon as he signed those tax cuts, which were almost immediate.
And the economy obviously was doing better.
I don't like what he did at the end of the COVID-19, or I guess the beginnings of the COVID-1984 nightmare where we just started printing money out of nowhere and we've got this massive wealth transfer that people aren't talking about.
But where do you see I see this going in the future because I do see many people now with college degrees that don't have jobs.
And a lot of people were thinking that AI and automation were going to take out the truck drivers first, right?
The self-driving cars. That's not what's happening.
Actually what's happening, it's the people that are in the paralegal industry We're good to go.
In this book are issues that basically everybody's coming together on.
You know, they may be projecting that this transgender ideology, for instance, is okay in schools, but the vast majority of people on quote-unquote both sides of the spectrum don't like it in the schools.
And that's not because they're bigots or they hate gay people.
They don't want their kids sexualized.
So, you know, we have those issues we can come together on.
Will more and more of these people that were making a great living and now out of work, you know, kind of see the light?
It's a really good question.
In my book, I traveled around the country interviewing people from both parties and found what you're saying, which is that there's just vast consensus on the issues, whether it's social issues, economic issues, working class people on the left and on the right by and large agree on the vast majority of the issues.
Which is like astonishing, right?
Because we're constantly told that we're a nation divided and it turns out that we're not divided left versus right.
We're divided working class versus elites.
And to your question about whether college educated people who have been sort of locked out of the knowledge industry and are now struggling You know, it's hard to see them joining forces with the working class because the number one thing that they are taught at university is not actual skills.
It's woke ideology, which makes them have a lot of contempt for average Americans.
So you would struggle to find like a college grad You know, who is not really on board with the transgender ideology, certainly from an elite university or an elite institution, because that is really what they're teaching them at universities.
Of course, there are people who could see through it, but a lot more of them don't, and so what they come out with is, you know, The typical stereotype is like a Starbucks barista who has a college degree who's doing the same thing as somebody who doesn't.
That person, though, is not very likely to have the same views as even a Democrat who's working class simply because they have that college degree.
You know, when I was in college, a lot of people were gravitating towards the education arena.
You know, it's a state school, but people were either in business or they were in the education field.
We've kind of seen that come into fruition with younger teachers allowing a lot of these things and not pushing back on these ideologies, especially the transgender ideology, but also the racial ideology.
The ideologies out there, the identity politics, which is very troubling to me because, again, I come from the generation that was taught that you judge somebody by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
The generation that first saw Martin Luther King Jr.
Day come to fruition, and that's what it was all about.
It was coming together, seeing past skin color, and now the bias of skin color and people of color is almost everywhere in the education system.
How do we get around that issue?
It's so amazing because the woke ideology that said Dr.
King was wrong, right?
Like, we need to re-racialize America, right?
It's racist to want to live in a colorblind society.
That ideology began in elite universities And the reason it began there was because these universities and their students needed a way to prove that they were the elites, and so they had to distinguish themselves from, you know, middle-class values, right? That's how you prove you're an elite.
You don't believe the same things as your parents or as your plumber, right?
You have this special ideology that you could only learn if you paid $90,000 a year to attend Columbia, right?
And so they turned on Dr.
King's vision and said, It's racist to want to live in a colorblind society.
It's racist to say that we've overcome the horrors of our past, right?
That view then trickled down It trickled down through the media because, of course, the majority of journalists in America today have a college degree.
Not that you can teach somebody how to be a good journalist, as we can see from the quality of our mainstream media, right?
So it trickled down into the mainstream through the media, trickled down to state schools, and then eventually, because people who go into education Get a master's degree, right?
They came out of their master's degrees believing this nonsense and started to now mainstream it through high schools and through schools, right?
And it's a total disaster because it is undoing all of the work That this great nation went through to overcome the darkness of our history.
And it is really, really awful.
But again, this view was designed to burnish the elite status of people with degrees, multiple degrees, and show their distance from the working class so they could justify why they had so much more money than them.
We've got to take a quick break.
When we come back, I want to talk about the upcoming election in 2024, what this separation of ideology means for that, and much more.
More Making Sense of the Madness after this.
And we are back.
Badia, when I look at the Biden administration, there has never been more of an outward puppet administration in my lifetime.
You know, I've always been critical of people like Bush, too, for instance.
Was he really running the country?
I don't know. But he had very capable demons behind him.
People like Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc.
You look at Kamala Harris, not very impressed.
And I'd say maybe Blinken in there is calling some shots.
But when I bring this up to my left-leaning friends, it's hard for them to deny that Joe Biden is running nothing.
I mean, the guy can barely talk.
Is he signing off on things?
Is he reading from a script when he can?
Barely. But he's there.
And that's extremely troublesome, especially in a constitutional republic where we're supposed to be represented by our leaders, and this guy is a farcical excuse for a leader.
Now, a few years back, I did an interview with the New York Times, and it was on the other side of the spectrum.
I've done some documentary films, so they wanted to interview me.
But I never do it unless, one, they let me record the whole interview, because I don't trust the mainstream media.
And if they don't want me to put that out, then they have to come on my show for a half an hour and face the music after the fact.
So, of course, when they come on to do the first, oh, we can't let you tape.
No, we're going to do it or I'm going to hang up.
So they let me tape it, and then he comes on.
Kevin Roos of the New York Times.
And I posited this to him.
I go, do you really think that Joe Biden, can you look me in the eye and say Joe Biden runs the country?
And he tried to spin it and flip it on me like some kind of QAnon thing where I was pretending people like white hats were running the country.
No, Joe Biden can't run the country because he can't talk.
Is he an establishment guy?
Is he a lifelong politician?
You know, was he out there in Delaware?
Yes. Was he part of the Barack Obama administration?
Yes. I would say even past that, somewhat relevant.
But by the time he was running in 2020 in those Democratic primaries, it was clear he wasn't there.
What do you do to push back on that reality?
This guy's supposedly running again.
We're not going to see a debate.
There is a chance he might be the President of the United States again in 2024.
What does that say about our country and the quote-unquote other side?
Because again, to me, I hate both parties, but that's the other side of reality if you're acting like Joe Biden runs anything.
It's very interesting because when I think about, let's say, you know, President Obama had gotten a third term and, you know, he was the president right now.
And I try to pinpoint anything that President Obama would have done differently.
It's very hard to. But honestly, even if, let's say, Gretchen Whitmer was the president or Gavin Newsom was the president, it's very hard to pinpoint what they would have done differently than Joe Biden.
Would they have opened the border? Yes.
Right? Would they have passed this Title IX nonsense that hurts girls and women?
Yes. Right? Would inflation be here?
Yes. Would they have stopped drilling?
Yes. Right? So there is this sort of lockstep in the Democratic Party I do have to say, the only thing I think Joe Biden did that another Democrat wouldn't have done if they were president was keep all of President Trump's sort of trade stuff in place, the tariffs on steel and aluminum, the tariffs on other Chinese imports, right?
And of course, they're much softer on China.
But in some crucial ways, they really kept some of President Biden's very important trade policy intact, which It signals to me, anyway, the real impact that President Trump has had on the economy.
So, you know, I hear what you're saying.
Like, there's something disconcerting about having a president who it's very hard to see as sort of running things.
The Democrats are so in lockstep that effectively it doesn't really matter that much.
They don't have someone like Trump who's really willing to take on the orthodoxy of both parties and say, none of this is working.
We're going to try something new.
In fact, Joe Biden can't even turn the ship around on immigration, which is a mess that he made completely on his own.
And so I sort of see where you're coming from.
But also I think, you know, I don't know how much it matters that You know, there's sort of like a sort of deep state that's controlling things and running things, because I think that would be there either way.
Well, I think to some extent it's always going to be there.
Everybody wants to say they're going to take it on, but then you look at the Trump administration.
The first time around, I would say he was hampered by guys like Bolton, like Pompeo, like Barr.
I could go down the list. Liddell, McMaster, all these maddest people I don't want to see in this second administration.
And very much in my opinion, one of the reasons that he's now being criminally prosecuted, he chose the wrong people and then really abandoned those that he chose that were the right people, like General Flynn and Bannon in particular.
Both of which imperfect beings, but I think certainly in the long run would have given him better advice than what he got down the line.
That brings us to 2024.
We've got the criminal case now in New York.
We've got three more of those.
We just got them weighing in on Florida.
What does this mean for the election?
Obviously, you made the point, and I think it's the correct point, that we are not as divided as the mainstream media wants to put out there.
I'm constantly hearing civil war, unrest.
That's not real.
And to me, I think there is a certain class that would like us to fight amongst each other, whether it be the college-educated neighbor versus the working class, and make it about race.
But we'll never have another true civil war in this country.
The times are just too different.
The demographics are so much different.
You know, I look at that time period, and number one, we were armed with the same things.
We were much smaller.
We were not mobile or sophisticated in the manner we are now.
So when you hear This rumbling of civil war unrest on the way up to the election.
And then you have these cases with Trump, and let's be honest, I know that you've spoken about it.
Trump is the most popular political figure in my entire lifetime.
There's no doubt. You went across the country.
I moved to Iowa. I drove all the way to South Dakota and back.
I've been to California and back in my car.
There's no doubt about it.
Trump is beloved all over the place.
Yes, there are people with TDS, but I never saw it for Clinton.
You know, you may say, you know, Barack Obama was definitely a cult personality.
They had t-shirts in malls, entire style lines, but never across the country the way that Trump is.
So where does that leave us?
Not only as a culture and a people, but for this election, which I'm not so sure is going to be a free and fair one.
When you go down the list of priorities that the American people have, so it goes like this, right?
Immigration, the economy, protecting democracy, which, by the way, Trump rates a little higher than Biden.
It's funny because on the left, they think that that question is always about, you know, Trump.
But it's funny. Trump is now outranking Biden on that as well.
But, I mean, the point being, on all of the issues, on safety in our streets, law and order, The economy, inflation, all of the things that matter most to the American people, transgender issues, he gets higher marks than President Biden.
There's only one issue that President Biden outranks him consistently by a large margin, and it's healthcare.
And to me, the most important thing that the Republicans could do right now is come up with a healthcare plan, a way to ensure that more Americans have access to high-quality, affordable health care because when I was traveling around the country interviewing working-class Americans, it was the only issue that made people still vote for Democrats because on every other issue they trusted Donald Trump more.
I don't want to say the Republicans because As I'm sure you know, there's only one thing that working-class conservatives hate more than the Democratic Party, and it's the GOP, right?
Like, they hate that sort of Nikki Haley version of the party.
But it was the only area where people would say, like, you know, Trump put money back in my pocket, but, you know, I've got a kid who has a disability and, you know, the Democrats are just stronger on health care.
They're willing to talk about it.
And they're not good on health care, you know, but they're willing to talk about it.
And so, to me, you know, the most common set of ideologies, of ideas, of policies that I encountered was people who, on the one hand, wanted to greatly restrict the number of immigrants coming into this country legally and illegally, and greatly expand access to health care.
And this was whether they were Republicans or Democrats, they agreed on that.
I mean, anyone who came to that Any politician who came out at the gate saying, we need to limit immigration, expand, healthcare would get an immediate 60% of the vote.
And so, you know, people ask me a lot, well, you know, you're telling me working class people, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, they agree with us on wokeness, they agree with us on trans issues, they don't like it.
They agree with us on abortion, they think it should be, you know, legal only for the first trimester.
They agree with us on immigration, they agree with us on inflation, they agree with us on everything you're telling us is important to them, you know, the economy, You know, who can get them better jobs?
Trade. They trust Trump on trade much more, right?
All of this stuff that really contributes to working class life.
And yet, how is it that he's not got a super majority?
And I think the answer is it's just healthcare.
And so to me, when I'm talking to Republicans or conservatives, I'm sort of like begging them to be willing to discuss this because it really is the pathway to getting more Americans the representation That they really, truly want and deserve because this is a democracy and can't get.
You know, I think you just made a really good point there that there should be a supermajority, okay?
And there were so many people out there during 2022, you heard, Red Wave, Rick, they were guaranteeing it because these policies were so disastrous.
Now, one of my big things, even before the 2020 election and the mail-in ballots and the ballot harvesting, are these machines.
And I know nobody Nobody wants to say the D word, Dominion, but Dominion's not the only one.
Diebold, back in the day, had these machines.
They've been around for the better part of 20 years at this point, really implemented after the hanging Chad saga of 2000.
And it's proprietary software, and we can't audit them.
And we've seen what happens when we attempt to audit them in a national election in 2020.
It's actually worse than most of the court systems coming out and saying you don't have standing and we're not going to look at the evidence.
Then on the flip side, because of that, they're actually criminally prosecuted.
And many of these people are forced to plea down and then become guilty of something.
Another talking point from my friend when I brought, well, they're guilty.
That doesn't mean they didn't commit crimes.
No, they didn't commit crimes.
So isn't that the real issue?
That we don't have a system of an election where we have voter ID, A paper ballot and a true way to audit them for the American people because I truly believe if we had that system, then the voting would change.
Then the politicians wouldn't be so arrogant.
Then maybe we would have seen that red wave in 2022.
And I think it would be no question that Donald Trump would probably come away with 2024.
In light of RFK Jr.
not really able to overtake, although I think he's a viable third-party candidate.
In other words, I think we're in a recipe for disaster for 2024 and beyond if we keep these systems in place.
Because, like you, you know, again, I think a lot of people agree on these issues.
And I'm not so sure they're voting the way they're telling everybody they are.
So I don't agree with that 100%.
I feel like probably the machines are working.
To me, the reason there was no red wave in 2022 is because a lot of the Trump candidates have no economic agenda.
They're like Ron DeSantis.
They don't want to talk about economics.
And that is really like what Trump represents to his supporters is an economic agenda that puts them first.
And so to me, it's sort of like it makes a lot of sense.
You know, the Democrats wanted to say it was about abortion.
It wasn't about abortion. It was about the fact that many even people in the Trump MAGA camp do not truly understand what Trump and Bannon are saying and what they're representing.
I think the machines work.
I don't, you know, have that same kind of suspiciousness about them.
But I think it's a problem that people don't feel like that the elections are fair.
But to me, the reason they think they're not fair is because of things like, you know, when they say, like, they don't trust the outcome, it's because of things like the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which had a big impact, right?
So it's sort of much more, I think that's really where the suspicion lies and not so much in the counting.
Although, you know, Obviously, it's a problem when people don't feel like they are going to be represented and have their vote counted.
I think if Trump came up with a health care policy, you know, there would be no amount of early voting that could really compete with what he could walk away with.
I heard from a lot of people who had voted for Joe Biden that they were planning to vote for Donald Trump.
And I think the polling is showing that he's sort of, you know, pulling ahead in poll after poll because he has better policy.
And I think that's where sort of the energy should be Well, for me, that issue has been a really long-standing one.
Beth Harris, black box voting, HBO's Hacking Democracy back in 2006.
And I think the issues only got worse.
I do think there are those other problems.
And I kind of agree with you on health care.
But at the same time, if they're going to give us health care the way they did during the COVID-1984 nightmare, I'd also say no thank you.
No thank you to that.
So, Bayo, what would you like to leave the audience with?
And where can they get the book?
Oh, wow. Thank you so much for having me and for the spirited discussion.
It's so nice to be able to talk to you and your audience.
You can get the book on Amazon or at Encounter Books, although it's cheaper on Amazon.
But I know some people don't like Amazon, so you can go to EncounterBooks.com and get it.
You know, I spent the year traveling around the country interviewing working class Americans and I came away so humbled by how patriotic they are, how united they are around the values that this great nation was founded on.
And I came away so upset at the contempt you hear for hardworking Americans in the mainstream.
And so if you want to sort of hear what it's like to hear from working class people in their own words, because Most of the book is them talking, is in their own words about what would help them and what would improve their lives, about their struggles and their triumphs, and really to combat all of these awful canards out there, like white rural rage and all this garbage, and read about how working class Americans of all races are truly united.
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