Batya Ungar-Sargon exposes how media and Democrats now prioritize racial inequality over economic class, catering to wealthy, credentialed elites who control 50% of GDP while pushing redistributionist policies like open borders and welfare. Outlets like the New York Times weaponize outrage via metrics like "Project Feels" to monetize digital engagement, ignoring working-class concerns—Trump’s tariffs briefly cut inequality by boosting bottom 25% wages while capping top earners’ gains. Neither party truly represents labor, and Ungar-Sargon warns that Kamala Harris’s "free money" approach may backfire, deepening elite betrayal as knowledge industries dictate policy. The shift reveals a systemic abandonment of wage dignity for ideological and financial gain. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Bacha Unger Sargon, who is the author of, she's not just the wife of the Prince of Persia for you video game fanatics, but she is also the author of Bad News, How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.
One of the things I hope you've noticed that we've been trying to do in the past several months is we've tried to up our interview game by only bringing on people who can expand your knowledge of what is actually happening.
I mean, when you do interviews, everybody wants to come on and plug their stuff.
We've just started saying no to many of my friends who now hate me and all kinds of people who we didn't feel were going to expand your information base.
As a result of this, I find myself reading books as research and then I can't put them down.
I told you that was true of Ask Nad by Maureen Callahan about the Kennedy Women.
This book, Bad News, How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, is, first of all, it's beautifully written.
It's wonderfully researched, but it also will give you a feeling for the media that you simply do not have right now.
I'm going to read to you a paragraph and then we'll talk to Bacha.
Put simply, journalists rising to the American elite and journalists mainstreaming radical ideas about race are two sides of the same coin.
The recent obsession with identity has allowed journalists to pretend, indeed, to believe they are still speaking truth to power, still fighting on behalf of the little guy, even after they have themselves ascended to the ranks of the powerful, even when they are speaking down to an audience who, in more cases than not, have less than them on every measurable scale.
It has quite simply been a displacement exercise.
Instead of experiencing economic guilt about rising inequality and their status among America's elite, members of the news media, along with other highly educated liberals, have come to believe that the only inequality that matters is racial inequality.
The only guilt that matters is white guilt, the kind you can do absolutely nothing to fix.
Bacha, thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you again.
Thank you so much for having me.
You were reading that and I was like, wow, who wrote that?
That's great.
And it made me feel a little bit less guilty about taking the spot of one of your dear friends.
So thank you so much for having me.
I'm a longtime fan of yours and I'm so honored to be here.
Oh, thank you, Bach.
It's nice to hear.
You know, I keep saying nice things about the books we're bringing on, but we're just only picking the select books that actually matter.
And this one, I think this is a really, really important book.
I have to thank Mark Hemingway for recommending it to me.
Let me start with this.
I would say you're more on the left than on the right.
What moved you to write this book?
Wow, that's a really good question.
I really hate bullies and I hate liars and I hate people who lie to hide their bullying, which is what our news media does every single day.
And I think that's probably the main motivation behind it.
I tried to write another book before I wrote Bad News.
I'd been doing a lot of traveling during the Trump years and especially in the South.
And I had been surprised in a big way to find that actually more unites us as Americans than divides us.
And I wrote a whole proposal about that based on my reporting from the South.
And I just couldn't sell it, Andrew.
I had editor after editor after editor telling me there is no market for a book.
I wanted to call it a more perfect union about how Americans are much more united than divided.
And finally, a very kind editor said to me, look, I can't sell this book, but you keep telling me we're more united than divided.
Why do I think we're so polarized?
Maybe you should write that book.
And that's, I think, what bad news is.
It's an explanation for polarization because we actually aren't polarized, but our elites are very polarized.
And because they are very polarized, they try to convince the rest of us to hate each other because they get a lot of money and a lot of power out of doing so.
And so that led to bad news.
And then after I wrote bad news, I really did want to explore the class divide more fully because the central thesis is basically that we're divided along class lines, not political lines.
And so that was my second book, Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, which came out this year.
And they're really companions to each other because that is really the central feature of American life is the class divide.
That's kind of why I think I'm a leftist because I'm obsessed with class and I'm obsessed with this idea that people can work much harder than me, like backbreaking labor at two, three jobs and not be able to feed their families.
I think that that is an outrage.
And I think it is an outrage that the Democrats lost the working class.
And so that obsession, I think, is what led me sort of certainly more to the center, more to the Trump camp for sure.
But from that leftist point of view, somebody recently joked and said, we need to get you a t-shirt that says commies for Trump, you know?
You know, that's exactly why I became a conservative.
I hate bullies.
That's exactly why I became a conservative.
And I always tell people I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal and that's where the liberalism has gone, you know?
That's great.
So like I'm fascinated.
I'm fascinated by the media.
And I want to talk to you about the class thing more, but I am fascinated by the idea that the media is suffering from elitism, that elitism, that everything they're doing is for the elite.
Status Revolution Among Journalists00:05:13
Explain how that works out in questions of race.
I mean, you think when your people are talking about questions of race, they're talking about, you know, people who are underserved, but then you come up with ideas like defund the police.
And you think, have you ever met a poor person?
Have you ever met gone into a neighborhood where there are poor people?
I mean, that's such an insane idea.
Why do those two things go together like that?
Right.
And the perfect example of this, just so your audience has like an object in mind that really solidified it.
Back when I used to get the New York Times in 2020, it arrived at my house one Shabbat morning.
And, you know, on Saturday, you get like a lot of the Sunday paper and it has a magazine in it.
So I pull out the magazine and on the front cover of the New York Times magazine was Angela Davis, the sort of big black activist.
And on the back cover of it was an ad for a Cartier watch.
And like that, you know, people would say, those don't go together.
No, of course those go together.
Those are two sides of the same coin.
That radical activism, the radical chic, as Tom Wolf called it, you know, all those years ago, you know, that is part and parcel of economic privilege today.
So we've seen this massive realignment that you talk about a lot in your show.
You know, the Democrats used to represent labor.
Working class people used to be the majority of journalists.
They came from working class backgrounds.
They didn't go to college.
In 1930, only a third of journalists had a college degree.
You know, the kind of person who would become a journalist was the kid who sat like in the back of the room, classroom, like cracking whys, making fun of the teacher, getting kicked out of class.
And so when all of his friends went to work the line at the local factory, they wouldn't take him, you know, because he doesn't follow orders.
He'll be a danger to everybody.
So instead, he went to Washington to hold the powerful accountable in the name of his friends who were working the line.
And they would live in working class neighborhoods and working class communities.
Actually, the vast majority of journalism for most of the 20th century was local journalism.
People were accountable to their local communities and they were working class.
And what happened was there was a status revolution among journalists, just like the status revolution among who the Democrats cater to.
So if the Democrats used to cater to labor, over the course of the 20th century, they really abandoned the working class to cater to highly credentialed college elites on the one hand and then the dependent poor on the other hand, right?
It's this sort of uneasy coalition between the two, although it's actually quite easy because if there's one thing rich liberals love to do, it's pay higher taxes and redistribute them to the poor, right?
So those things really work pretty well together, right?
You know, so they abandoned the working class and journalists, because they tend to be liberal, they tend to have bleeding hearts, they still saw themselves as, you know, the heroes, right, on the side of the little guy, even though they were part of this radical assent of Democratic voters who used to be middle class and now are upper middle class.
Now they're really part of the top 20% because they created an economy that really rewards having a college degree in a big way and really penalizes people who work with their hands for a living.
And the status revolution in journalism specifically was one of the primary enablers of this.
And the way you can think about this is, you know, it used to be journalism was created for the masses, but as journalists started to become more and more highly educated and as a result, be able to command higher and higher salaries, they started producing journalism for themselves and their friends who were other college educated elites.
And so when Bill Clinton showed up and proposed something like NAFTA, journalists no longer lived in communities where their friends from high school were going to be put out of a job by something this terrible.
And so they saw NAFTA from the perspective of a highly credentialed consumer who, of course, wants cheaper goods, right?
Rather than from the perspective of the working class, which is how they would have seen NAFTA if this had happened in the 50s or in the 40s or even in the 60s.
So you had this status revolution among journalism that became one of the sort of lubricants of the Democrats' abandonment of the working class.
But of course, they didn't want to admit that, right?
They didn't want to say, well, now we write journalism for, you know, the corporate lawyer who lives next door to us, whose kids go to the same kindergarten as us, right?
So what they did was they shifted the center of gravity of their activism from being class-based to being race-based, because then they could still pretend that they were on the side of the little guy, the little guy now being anybody who had darker skin or, you know, I don't know, different chromosomes, right?
Or identified as gay or transgender or what have you, right?
They created a kind of object of pity to replace their fellow Americans who actually had lost the ability to achieve the American dream despite working much harder than them.
Working Class Betrayal00:14:21
And that's really the story that I tell in Bad News is how this status revolution and the abandonment of the working class reached its apex in the woke discourse because the woke discourse enabled them to still masquerade as on the side of the little guy while themselves benefiting in massive economic terms from the Democrats plunder of the middle class on behalf of the top 20%.
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That's amazing.
And it is absolutely true.
You know, I get notices from the New York Times and it'll say breaking story, breaking story this, and it's race this, race that.
And then every fifth one is an ad for some fantastically expensive piece of jewelry or how to make the perfect, you know, Mai Tai or something like that.
You know, it's just, it's just insane.
So I was a newspaperman in the 1970s after Watergate, and I worked in a small town newspaper with Adam Ncurney, who went on to be the head political guy at the New York Times.
And he was far left to me.
I mean, I was a lefty.
I was a liberal, but he was far to the left.
But he used to berate me if I was not objective, if I was too liberal, if I let liberal assumptions come in.
And then he became the perfect New York Times guy.
When did objectivity become a bad thing?
Right.
I think that was much more recent.
First of all, objectivity only entered the scene as a kind of journalistic value in the post-war era, right?
So, you know, I often joke like in the 1920s in New York City, you could be a communist and there would be seven communist newspapers that you would never dream of reading because they were the wrong form of communism, right?
The press was very partisan, but it was partisan on behalf of labor and on behalf of the working class.
Why?
Because they were most of the population.
And so if you wanted to make money, you write for the biggest consumer in the market, right?
The biggest share, market share of the consumers, which was working class people and poor people.
And so the journalism was super, super biased on behalf of labor.
And because journalists were themselves working class, you know, they would write about issues in the economy from the perspective of labor.
Of course, the New York Times always catered to the elites.
There were always elite newspapers, right?
But this was sort of by and line.
Most newspapers cater to sort of, you know, the vast middle, which is where people were at, but they were quite left in terms of like their politics.
What happened after in the post-war era was this was a time of massive upward mobility for the working class in the 50s, the 60s, and the 70s.
You really saw working class wages skyrocketing.
And there was a kind of cultural homogeneity that came along with that because the largest share of the economy was in the middle and working class people were upwardly mobile, right?
You really had this feeling that everyone was consuming the same kind of culture.
That upward mobility had a really unifying effect on the nation culturally.
And as a result of that, you had journalists who wanted to get the largest share of the readership, but that meant really tacking to the center.
For the elite, even New York Times elite readers would have been embarrassed in the 70s to read a newspaper that their neighbor who was a conservative wouldn't have been able to read because it was so insulting to conservatives, right?
Which is the truth about the New York Times now.
95% of New York Times readers now are Democrats, right?
Because it is so insulting to anyone who's not a Democrat to read it.
That would have embarrassed even the elites in the 70s.
But the real reason that the papers strove for objectivity was because most papers were local newspapers.
And this was before the great sorting.
And so most newspapers were in towns where you had, you know, 40% of the town were Democrats and 60% were Republicans or vice versa or 50-50 or 70%.
And every publisher was faced with a decision.
He could allow his journalists to follow their natural lefty inclinations and report the news from the leftist perspective and sacrifice potentially up to 70% of his readers, or he could force them to report the news straight and have a balanced op-ed page.
And of course, because that was the profit motive at stake, that's what most people did.
And that started to shift in a big way in the 60s and 70s, along with the great sorting.
As Democrats started to become upwardly mobile, they started to talk amongst each other in this kind of more leftist language as a way of masking their abandonment of the working class.
But it really took off with digital media because with digital media, of course, you're measuring success not in terms of the broadest, broadest spectrum of readers, but in terms of the highest intensity of engagement, right?
I mean, we all know this who produce content for the internet is you want, you don't want just page views.
You want comments, you want shares, you want engagement, right?
That is the secret sauce.
You want people to stay on page longer so you can mine their data and sell that to a third party, right?
And because that's how you make your money, it's sort of obvious like the most engaged readers are always going to be the most extreme.
And so the New York Times and all these other places that were learning the tricks of the trade of digital media sort of started tacking far to the left because that's where the wealthy readers were.
They wanted to read about racism, right?
Because it let them off the hook.
It let them feel like they were morally superior to their like slightly less leftist neighbors, you know, in their like wealthy neighborhoods.
And New York Times really, really perfected this.
They did this thing called Project Feels, where basically they're favorite parts of the book so far, by the way.
It's so wild.
They would ask, they took about 100,000 of their readers and started to ask them how certain articles made them feel.
They would give them like a list of like, you know, 10 emotions to rank them from.
And like, obviously, like the more, you know, angry they felt, you know, the longer they, the more angry that they felt about everything they were reading, the longer they would stay on the page and then the more likely they were to click on an ad, right?
And so they understood that inherently, you know, the way that you make money in digital media is by making people angry or making them feel extreme emotions.
And then you monetize those emotions.
That's what they did.
They monetized the emotions of their readers.
And so all they had to do was figure out what makes wealthy leftists with multiple degrees feel really angry.
And every time you open the New York Times, like that's what's happening there.
They're monetizing the rage of wealthy liberals.
So this is, we're talking about bad news, how woke media is undermining democracy, but you have a new book called A Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.
Now, what's interesting to me about this is obviously elites have always abused working men and women and have been forced.
You know, I always tell people unions are a terrible thing, but we already know what the world is like without unions.
So it's like, it's not, it's not like they were unnecessary.
They had their moment.
The second class, how the elites betrayed America's working men and women.
But why not in a world where wages have actually become fairer and working conditions have become better and all this, why not bring the working class along?
Why did the elites betray America's working men and women?
The reason for why is because it was in their economic interest to do so.
And I think we're very used to thinking of sort of, you know, evil, kinieval, billionaire corporations, CEOs as being the culprits here.
But the argument I make in second class is that actually, if you compare the share of the economy that's controlled by billionaires between today and you compare that to the 1970s, 1971, which was the high watermark for working class wages, it has not changed significantly at all.
So leftists love to say, you know, rail, you know, Bernie Sanders, he used to rail against millionaires and billionaires.
Then of course he became a millionaire and suddenly it became the billionaires and the billionaires, right?
You know, by the way, I don't hold that against him, you know.
But he, the, the, the idea is that back then at the high watermark for working class wages, the share of the economy and today is, it didn't change significantly.
So where did all of the middle class wages go?
They did not go to the billionaires.
They actually went to the top 20%.
So the top 20% now controls over 50% of the GDP.
And that's the dirty secret here that the left really, really, really doesn't want you to recognize or acknowledge.
And it's that there is this top 20% that is a rent seeker class that works in the knowledge industry and is suddenly making, you know, on average, two or three times what their plumber is making or their cleaning lady or the person who delivers their groceries.
And while working much less hard than them at jobs that are much less crucial to the success of our society.
And that was done very intentionally by President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama, and President Joe Biden, who successively weakened the power and the market share of the working class in this sort of plunder of middle class wages, this upward transfer of wealth to the top 20%.
So I think they did it because it was in their economic interest.
Now, I do think these people maybe don't know this about themselves.
Like they don't realize that like they believe that the reason they want an open border is because their heart bleeds for desperate Venezuelans.
But I don't think they could have made such a terrible miscalculation and been so wrong if it was not very much in their economic interests to be so wrong.
And I think that's sort of the main quibble that I have, honestly, with economists on both sides of the aisle.
You know, there is this impulse among economists to sort of lecture people who have, you know, 34 bucks in their bank account and four kids to feed and to get to school and back about what economic policy is best for them.
And the idea that someone in such a desperate situation is wrong about economic policy when they have zero cushion to be wrong about it.
I find that extremely offensive.
And I think that's probably why I wrote the book.
So let me ask you about this, because I think this is a really important point.
We're talking about, now we're talking about a book, Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women by Bacha Ungor Sargon.
I'm sorry.
That's my video game, love of video games keeps coming back to that name.
Let's talk about this for a minute.
It drives me insane when the press does, as it's doing now, the media says, people don't understand how great this economy is.
They just don't understand.
As if you woke up and did not know that you couldn't afford to buy your kids the things that they need.
It's insane that ordinary people don't know that the economy is bad for them.
They know and they've absolutely got that right.
But it is possible that they might not understand what would make it better.
It is possible that you need an economist to say, well, if you do this, it's going to, you know, because what the government is always doing, saying, I'll make your life better by giving you, I'll print this money and I'll give it to you.
But in fact, that transfers wealth to Jeff Bezos because that's where they spend it.
They spend it on buying stuff at Amazon and it all goes to him.
And then they have no money because there are fewer jobs because of all that spending, of all the government spending.
And money is worth less because of all the government spending.
So, I mean, you can buy people off short term in ways that hurt them long term.
I mean, this is one of the reasons I actually became a conservative is because I became convinced that some conservative economics sounds heartless, but isn't.
I mean, is it not possible?
Well, let me ask you this.
What would you say is the way forward when so much, there is so much inequality?
It has gotten much more unequal in ways that are bad.
And I know plenty of right-wingers who do not get that and don't understand how bad it is.
But still, what is the way forward out of that predicament?
So for second class, I traveled around the country for about a year interviewing working class people from across the political perspective, Democrats, Republicans, progressives, from everything, big, a lot of Trump support, but also a lot of Democrats.
Working Class Against Welfare00:06:38
It probably will not surprise you to learn that working class people, including the ones who are struggling, working really hard and really not making it, they hate welfare.
They do not want welfare.
And it's so funny because when I started writing Second Class, I went and read all of the ethnographies of the working class that were written by academics, sociologists over the last five years, 10 years.
And it was so funny because they all had the same problem, which was they would interview a lot of working class people and the working class people would say to them, we hate welfare.
We hate welfare.
And all of these ethnographies would end with the same conclusion.
And so you see the thing that would really help the working class is more welfare.
And, you know, I was expecting Democratic working class people to say, Section 8 housing would be great, would really help me.
Food stamps would really help me.
No, they do not believe in this redistributionist model.
They want an economy that protects their labor, that gives them dignity.
They get so much dignity from their work.
The problem is, is that there is corporate price gouging.
There is corporate malfeasance.
So these very hardworking people, and Andrew, these people work so hard.
Like it is so humbling how hard they work and how little they want.
And they're conservatives, by the way.
That was the other thing that I found, you know, this theme of unity.
I mean, they agreed on like almost all cultural issues, you know, almost all policy issues, whether they voted Democrat or Republican.
Like there was so little daylight between, you know, the gay certified nurse's aide working in Florida in a nursing home and then the Trump voting, you know, West Virginia Amazon truck driver.
These women, you know, agree on everything, whether it's abortion, LGBTQ stuff, you know, it's so amazing, immigration, welfare, everything, housing, like you name it.
They would have this very similar view.
The problem is like neither party was really speaking to them.
And so, you know, they don't want welfare.
They don't want redistribution.
I will tell you, Kamala Harris coming out with this sort of economic platform designed specifically to speak to the cost of housing, the cost of groceries, the cost of retirement, the cost of childcare.
This is the kind of stuff that people are really going to be listening to.
And, you know, for conservatives just to label it communism, it's just not going to cut it.
I mean, there are real problems in our economy.
And the people who work the hardest, these people deserve our respect and they deserve for us to say, okay, how can we draw the line between a policy and you guys and making your lives easier?
I will say the one thing, you know, there are many things that Donald Trump did in the economy that helped a lot and that helped both in real economic terms, put money in people's pockets, which even the Democrats would say over and over, but also made people feel really seen and heard and like they weren't forgotten anymore.
Closing the border, just like number one, it's like the most obvious supply and demand.
The more you have of something, the cheaper it's going to be.
You bring in 15 million people, labor's going to be cheaper, right?
We should want labor to be more expensive.
Yeah, that's going to make life for us more expensive.
But Donald Trump's major policy achievement in his first term was that he was the first president to shrink income inequality and the wealth gap in 60 years.
And no one wants to talk about it because the left doesn't want to give him credit for it and the free market right doesn't care at all about inequality.
So no one is recognizing this massive, massive achievement in 2019.
You had a situation where the bottom 25% of wage earners saw a 4.5% wage increase the first time in 60 years and the top 25% only saw a 2% increase.
Okay.
That's why they hate him because he took money out of their pockets and put it back in working people's pockets with things like tariffs, with closing the border, with a trade war with China.
I mean, he just had this instinctive understanding.
I think with American hero Steve Bannon, who's currently a political prisoner with a lot of his insight, but he understood that what these people wanted was not redistribution.
They wanted protectionism.
They wanted the fruits of their labor to be respected and to be able to afford them the most modest version of the American dream.
Wow.
Wow.
That's something else.
I mean, I'm disturbed.
It's not that I just don't believe you.
I'm disturbed to hear you say that Kamala Harris's programs are going to speak to them because I think this is the problem when you offer people free money.
You know, the minute anyone uses the word free, it's like using the word dragon.
It describes something, but it describes something that doesn't exist.
And so when you offer people free money for this, this, and this, it may sound like it's going to solve their problems, but it ultimately gives them bigger problems later on.
I mean, the best thing you can give somebody is a job that pays a fair income, you know, in a way so they can pay their way.
I mean, that's obviously what they're saying.
That is really interesting.
I'm sorry, I have to end.
You can come back here anytime and talk some more.
I'm really interested.
I'm interested in how much our ideas are aligned.
What you just said about the far left doesn't want the lower class to rise and the far right, not the far left, the left doesn't want the lower class.
And the right doesn't care about inequality.
That is a real problem.
I mean, it genuinely is.
So anyway, Bacha Ungersargen, two books.
One is Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.
The one I'm reading is Bad News, How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.
Terrific writer, great researcher.
Really interesting to hear you talk.
Like I said, come back anytime.
Thank you so much.
God bless you.
God bless you.
It's great.
Really interesting talking to her.
Her books are so well written, I have to say.
And just it makes me worried about the upcoming elections.
We're going to have to see whether Trump can speak into this class divide better than the Democrats have in the past, but also better than they're going to do now.
We'll find out more and come on Friday to the Andrew Clavin Show, and I'll be there.