A journalist who described herself as a left-wing populist railed against liberal elites’ betrayal of the working class Sunday.
Batya Ungar-Sargon appeared on an episode of Regressives, part of the Lost Debate podcast hosted by former Obama staffer Ravi Gupta.
Ungar-Sargon spoke about her book, "Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy," and how there is a class war between wealthy liberal elites and a more socially conservative working class. When explaining her political trajectory she noted, "I was woke for a long time," but she managed to "claw her way out."
She described the real divide in America she sees now as one between wealthy, college educated liberal elites like those who work in mainstream media and the working class.
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"Leftists and liberals went to college and then created an economy that works really well if you have a college degree and really poorly if you don’t," she said, noting that they, "from their perch of privilege," call their opposition "racist for not voting for the interests of the elites."
Ungar-Sargon added that such an imbalance of power has torn society apart.
"There is a class war happening between the working class and the college educated in this country, and so much of what is mysterious about what happened over the last 6 years in this country can be explained through that," she said.
She also discussed her take on how woke identity-politics are used by liberal elites to launder their privilege. "They get to be the beneficiaries of inequality while still convincing themselves that they’re the heroes of a morality tale and that the other side are the bad guys," she said. "That’s what woke politics allow you to do."
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She added, "if you can convince people" that the divide "is about race and gender, then you can distract from the fact that you’re benefiting from the class divide by smearing your opponents as ‘stochastic terrorists’, for example."
She said that liberal elites, even in different institutions, will aid one another.
"Journalists have class solidarity with people like Sam Bankman-Fried, they see themselves in him," Ungar-Sargon said. "He comes from the same background they do, an upper-middle class background, elite institutions, ‘making the world a better place through environmental activism and voting for Democrats.’ This is class solidarity; they didn’t need to be told to treat him with kid gloves."
Ungar-Sargon said that colleges act as gatekeepers, choosing what people have to be taught if they want to become influential elites in society.
"One of the gatekeepers of a liberal arts education at one of these elite institutions is an English PhD who has been taught a lot of fringe political theory and critical theory, which has made them really woke and really dumb on really important issues," she said. "But the most important thing that it teaches them is to have contempt for people without a college degree."
