“The media really gave the liberal and leftist elites a language with which to pretend that they are the crusaders on the side of the good, when actually they themselves are the villains in this story in a big way. And that language is wokeness.” Batya Ungar-Sargon says she used to suffer from what’s been called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” But after speaking to people outside of her political bubble, she now believes he’s actually a centrist candidate. “Any time you turn on cable news, you will hear liberals casting him as a unique threat to democracy, when he is really the opposite of that. He’s the sort-of apotheosis of a democratic system that will not allow the billions of dollars spent trying to stop him to get in the way of the will of the people,” she says. Ms. Ungar-Sargon recently traveled the country, speaking to everyday Americans about how they perceive the political, economic, and cultural climate. She compiled her findings in a book: “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.” “The most shocking thing I found was that the American Dream for working-class people is much more alive and well and healthy in red states than it is in blue states,” says Ms. Ungar-Sargon. We discuss how, according to her, the democratic party betrayed middle-class Americans by creating a knowledge industry consisting of credentialed elites who benefit economically from illegal immigration and trade liberalization. “I think much of the Democratic policy today is part and parcel of this upward transfer of wealth, whether it’s student-loan forgiveness, whether it was the lockdown policies, whether it’s the open border, whether it’s the climate agenda and the Green New Deal, Defund the Police—all of this stuff is about the fumes, the virtuous fumes that the over-credentialed elites create out of their ideology. And they always demand that the working class pays for it,” says Ms. Ungar-Sargon.

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