Welcome to Twadpockle Thursday (#TPT), weekend edition!
Today’s link of consequence finds scientific evidence of Cultural Supremacy in the U.S. It’s not just a song, people!
Newsweek Opinion Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon spent some time away from her Zoom calls and went outside, where she found “working class” people and talked to them “IRL.” Then she returned indoors and wrote a book about them on her laptop.
Elite Exclusion of the Working Class... with Batya Ungar-Sargon - System Update #267 (segment), Glenn Greenwald
aired 6 May 2024
This topic ends at 36:00.
Batya, who has described herself as formerly woke and is still quite progressive, sheds some light on the mentality I called “insufferably illiberal” a few posts back.
The idea that Americans are still divided, 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, 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 vs. 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, 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 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.
—Batya Ungar-Sargon [2:11-4:03] replying to Glenn Greenwald’s first question
(I removed extraneous “ums” and “you knows” and the like.)
The guest and host have appeared together on a variety of topics, including their vehement disagreement on the whole Israel thing, without a hint of defaming, suing, boycotting, or de-platforming each other. Never fear, our culture’s supremacists have made up for it by branding them both “far right” and pretending their reporting does not exist.
Batya Ungar-Sargon describes herself as formerly woke, still a progressive fan of Our Democracy, and Orthodox Jewish. She is best known for proving that an elite journalist can possess several ounces of high-quality introspection.
Glenn Greenwald describes himself as progressive, gay, secularly Jewish, and a former Constitutional attorney turned journalist. He is best known for breaking the story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, back when his Leftist peers adored that sort of thing.
The book
Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women,
by Batya Ungar-Sargon