Bhatia Ungar Sargar is a Newsweek Deputy Opinion Editor, and she has challenged the elitism of the left. Her book, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, is on sale now, and it is a rebuke of liberal elites who have taken control of our country.
00:00:12.620History is full of cowards disguised as saviors.
00:00:15.280The difference is that our cowards have absolute power, but pretend not to have the power.
00:00:23.060That's what happens when anti-establishment becomes the establishment.
00:00:27.320What happens when the activists who want to tear down institutions become the head people of those institutions that they swore they wanted to destroy?
00:02:07.440Congress and the president are marching towards socialism, and they will never willingly limit their own power.
00:02:14.180There is a trigger in the Constitution.
00:02:16.860It is up to us, we the people, to call a convention of states and propose constitutional amendments that put the federal government back in its place.
00:02:27.340Amendments can slap term limits on Congress, curb spending with an ironcloth fiscal restraint to get government out of our daily lives.
00:02:38.300The founders anticipated the federal government would get out of control, so they gave us Article 5 of the Constitution to allow us to turn back the tyranny without bloodshed and without opening up everything in the Constitution.
00:02:50.900Mark Levin, Daniel Horowitz, Governor Ron DeSantis, millions other, I am also on board.
00:02:58.400It is time for everyone to stop simply complaining and do something.
00:03:02.860Join me and my friend Mark Meckler by signing the petition at conventionofstates.com slash Beck.
00:05:38.360You know, when they started going after Trump, I called Chuck Todd, I called all of them off the record.
00:05:48.220And I said, please, please, you all have said, Glenn Beck's crazy man, please do not make the same mistakes that I made by being so strident and thinking you have all of the answers because you will screw it up and you will become everything you say I am.
00:06:10.700They wanted nothing to do with any of that information.
00:06:14.440And it really made me very sad because I could see what was coming our way.
00:06:22.220Do you do you think that now you are taking that advice in how you deal with the current administration?
00:06:32.100I want to preface that by saying I watched your show on January 6th and I found it not just compelling and moving,
00:06:44.620but I found it to be a kind of spiritual experience in that you came out while the the riot was still ongoing with no knowledge of how probably your audience was thinking about it.
00:06:59.240And you told them in no uncertain terms this was wrong.
00:07:12.480But I'm wondering if you are you a different kind of media personality than you were, you know, during the Obama administration, let's say.
00:07:22.600During the Obama administration, I I had two jobs.
00:07:27.240One was personal and one was professional.
00:07:30.120One, I worked for Rupert Murdoch, so I didn't pee on his couch, if you will.
00:07:41.300That was good because I thought by by packet.
00:07:47.560Nobody wants to hear an hour on Woodrow Wilson, but I could talk about Woodrow Wilson and the roots of modern progressivism if I made it entertaining.
00:07:57.380So what I was a little shocked at that I have changed a bit is, you know, you don't get the benefit of the doubt that, you know, Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or anybody else gets when it's a joke.
00:08:16.920And and and I was also shocked because I really thought there would be somebody in journalism that would go, man, I hate that guy because they were all watching me every day.
00:08:30.200And and I thought somebody would go, I hate that guy.
00:08:46.920Yeah, I think the I mean, the reason I wrote this book was because I just got sick of the the sneering at the working class and the smearing of the working class of all races as racist.
00:09:03.580And the contempt that you see from my side, the left, when it comes to the working class and to conservatives and to people who believe.
00:09:27.940The lack of humility or the group think that is going on, because it's confusing to me.
00:09:34.760You know, it's like I watch Hollywood movies and it will be the exact opposite message.
00:09:41.680You know, it'll be, you know, this is the bad guy, fascism, and they won't get it.
00:09:47.260You know, you're like, yeah, that's what we're talking about.
00:09:49.120But I look at the media and I think to myself, do they really think that they are are helping African-Americans by saying you're powerless without this government program?
00:10:10.220Do they do they know they're no longer on the side of the working class?
00:10:47.320And they found that white liberals dumbed down their vocabulary when they're talking to blacks and Latinos in a way that white conservatives do not.
00:10:57.420And I remember learning about this study and reading it and immediately recognizing everybody that I knew, my entire, you know, the whole class of liberal journalists that I existed in and thinking to myself, something is wrong.
00:11:14.840Like, and we call them the racists, but we we see this, the color of someone's skin and change our language.
00:11:45.140Good for you that you at least took too long.
00:11:47.660No, most people don't even recognize that.
00:11:50.020I just did a monologue on on the, you know, the truth will set you free.
00:11:55.700But it's going to make you miserable at first, because you have to change if you recognize the truth and it's not in line with what you believe.
00:12:06.000Most people just go, I'm not looking there.
00:12:08.600But for somebody, even if you delayed for somebody who go, wow, wait a minute, that's that's a chink in the armor here that I have to examine.
00:12:18.600That shows real bravery, real bravery.
00:12:40.980And the argument I make in the book is that it's not just that they have abandoned the working class.
00:12:45.440It's that they're actually lining their pockets with this.
00:12:48.660And what I mean by that is you take something like immigration, you know,
00:12:52.100it used to be a liberal point of view that mass immigration is bad because these people will take working class jobs.
00:12:59.640Right. That was the Democrats position.
00:13:02.200Right. It's like it's it's a very simple idea.
00:13:04.880Right. If you have an open border, there's no way to set a wage floor.
00:13:08.920Right. Which to lefties like me, that's, you know, it's very important that we have a wage floor for American citizens.
00:13:14.220Right. Today on the left, it's considered racist to believe that we should be enforcing the border.
00:13:19.940But it's, you know, who does that who at whose expense does that come and who does that benefit?
00:13:26.480I can't believe in 45 years of broadcast that I am now in the position of saying to you, let me talk to you about body armor.
00:13:36.800Being prepared these days means more than keeping food on the table, gas in the car, 72 hour grab bag, water.
00:13:44.280Believe it or not, living in today's world might include having body armor as a way of keeping your family safe and secure during troubled times.
00:13:56.980We saw the riots before and I don't think we're past those days, unfortunately.
00:14:04.280Now, you may not know it, but body armor is legal in all 50 states and it has never been as affordable and easy to purchase it is as it is now.
00:14:14.340Unfortunately, I've had body armor for a long time and it was wildly expensive.
00:14:21.320Now, our friends at AR 500 armor are they have made buying body armor easy, approachable and affordable.
00:14:28.440And if you are unsure of what type of armor you're needing, which is most likely, or you just need some pointers based on your needs, they have you covered.
00:15:51.260So it's you know, I don't want to say that they're cynical, like that they're they're literally sitting there going, oh, we're going to use this moral panic around race at a time when America has never been less racist, when there's never been more unity around the importance of fighting racism.
00:16:11.040I think they are really convinced they are really sort of hypnotized by this worldview.
00:16:14.640But at the same time, it does benefit them economically in very real ways.
00:16:19.720So to take immigration, for example, I mean, who benefits from mass immigration?
00:16:24.200Affluent liberals where the wife and the husband both have very demanding jobs, where they need a lot of domestic labor.
00:16:29.620Right. That's that's those are the people who are benefiting from this.
00:16:32.360Right. People who want to go out to eat and don't want to pay five hundred dollars in New York City for a nice meal.
00:16:36.960They are the people who are literally benefiting from this influx of immigrants, while it is poor Americans, working class Americans, black Americans who have seen who are who are bearing the burden, who are paying the cost for this.
00:16:48.520Now, this is something that it's if you say this to a liberal, they cannot.
00:16:51.960There's no it's not like they're sitting there that they know this.
00:16:54.760Right. And they're doing it on purpose.
00:24:50.200And we have to look at people's trajectory because they change.
00:24:54.380I think that the part of why conservative media and people like you are so hated by the left is because of your influence with the people that they have abandoned.
00:25:11.160Like the left, the liberal media, I write about this at length in my book, the 20th century is the history of the liberal media abandoning the working class.
00:25:21.900And it just, you know, it's a hockey stick.
00:25:23.400It started small, you know, around the 70s.
00:25:25.600It really started to escalate in the last 10 years with the great awokening and this whole woke revolution.
00:25:30.580It really that's just that is just the last stage of journalists abandoning the working class.
00:25:35.120They can't stand that someone like you, through respecting your audience and through speaking to them about the concerns of their life and not sneering at them and not talking down to them,
00:25:46.560that you have created a rapport with the people that they believe should be disenfranchised, essentially.
00:25:52.900And I'm not going to sugarcoat it, you know, like there really has been this.
00:25:57.360The reaction to Trump was very much that these people don't deserve the right to their franchise.
00:26:03.040They don't deserve the right to elect the people that we don't approve of.
00:26:06.600And and as the liberal media's influence has gotten smaller and smaller, because now it's only about catering to this top 10 percent liberal elites.
00:26:14.940Right. That's that's the the market right now.
00:26:17.360I think there's a lot of resentment about the relationship you have with your audience.
00:26:23.280But but they but it's so clear you cannot have a relationship unless it's an abusive relationship.
00:26:30.660You don't have a relationship with somebody who you despise.
00:26:35.380Totally. And they and they and they they know they despise the middle of America.
00:26:42.020They know it. So how could they be jealous of a relationship when they don't want a relationship with that person?
00:26:56.060I mean, I think if you look at the way religion and religious people are treated in the liberal media, it's it's just so clear, the contempt, you know, the way working class Americans are.
00:27:07.800And it's at a time when and you might disagree with me about this as, you know, somebody who's more free market oriented.
00:27:12.900But to me, it seems like we're living at a time where the economy is very, very good for people in knowledge industry jobs, people with elite educations.
00:27:22.700You know, 20 years ago, if you were an intellectual, if you were a journalist, if you were worked in a college, you weren't that much richer than, you know, a cop.
00:27:30.340You didn't make that much more money today.
00:27:33.420You know, the left, the liberal intelligentsia is now in the top 10 percent that they're not the economy is really working for knowledge age jobs.
00:27:40.980And it's really not working for the working class.
00:27:44.160It's really not working for the middle class.
00:27:46.120You see these deaths of despair that to me are just this perfect sign of what happens when you take five million good factory jobs, jobs that Americans of all races built their communities around and you ship them to China.
00:28:00.520You see the suicide of this way of life.
00:28:03.020And both sides have abandoned the working class.
00:28:05.580In my view, both sides are catering to elites in a way that's that's really, really, really an abandonment of the people who need us the most.
00:28:15.020Well, I think that's true, especially when you look at who was it I heard talking about how they're now catering to these giant corporations because it's a lot easier to talk to five giant corporations and get them on your side than it is to talk to, you know, 12,000 small entrepreneurs.
00:28:40.860And, you know, when you when you when you have to choose, I got to raise money, raise money over there instead of raising money over there.
00:28:49.660And everything now is being catered to I mean, it's it's it's it's so weird how we have changed positions.
00:28:58.940I've always, always looked at things like, you know, Blade Runner and, you know, I work for the corporation and I'm like, oh, please give it a rest.
00:29:08.800But now it is clear, especially as we're going into the the metaverse, it is clear that corporations are running things.
00:29:21.140And you've got the media, you know, the protectors of the average person being spokespeople for those giant corporations.
00:29:35.700It's just so it's not it's that it's on corporations, right, where, you know, covid was the covid economy was the biggest transfer of wealth in American history from the lower and middle classes up to these, you know, centralized economy.
00:29:50.540Essentially, you see it with with big tech silencing conservatives, trying to drive them out of the public sphere and liberal journalists cheering this on.
00:30:00.300You see it with free speech. Right. It used to be the right was the side of like blasphemy.
00:30:05.620You go to jail for swearing. Right. And the left was the side of like, no, we have to have, you know, these liberal values.
00:30:11.720And today it's totally the opposite. You see conservatives on the side of free speech and liberals on the side of silencing or look at science.
00:30:18.220Right. Like liberals used to be like the people saying, oh, everything is relative.
00:30:22.900Facts are not real. You know, science is a construct. It's created by people. Right.
00:30:28.540And you used to have conservatives being like, no, no, like, let's look at facts. Facts exist. Right.
00:30:33.800Today, there's been a total shift where the liberals are on the side of this, you know, state sponsored intrusion of, quote, unquote, the science into your life, even when it's not science.
00:30:43.900Right. Even when it's just, you know, experimental stuff and you have the right being like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
00:30:49.300You know, science, the scientific method is a process. Right. We have to wait and see, like, what's going on.
00:30:54.760There's been a total, total reversal. And to me, it is all about class.
00:31:00.100It is all about the fact that liberals have become extremely highly educated in a tiny number of very elite institutions.
00:31:08.740And those people, the people who come out of those institutions have a lock on culture.
00:31:13.280Like you were saying earlier, you know, you turn on any movie on Netflix, any TV show, and you know immediately which character is the evil Trump voter.
00:31:20.960Yeah. You could tell immediately everything is sticking to me that this is the bad guy, you know, you know exactly like when and we all just accept this, you know, as like.
00:31:30.240I was talking to a friend. I was talking to a friend the other day about this new show that I'm watching and I saw one episode and I was like, oh, that's funny.
00:31:41.040And then I started to see where it was going. I'm like, oh, there's a lecture coming.
00:31:46.820And it's a comedy. It's a mindless comedy. And I found out later, because I literally liked the premise of it.
00:31:53.680I found out later it's a BBC show. So I've now watched three seasons of the BBC show because there's no booby trap.
00:32:02.320It's just leave me alone. There's no booby trap in there that's political.
00:32:08.520Totally. And I think, though, and the worst part about it is like liberals don't know.
00:32:16.440They literally don't know that conservatives care about things like mass incarceration, police reform, you know, like they don't know.
00:32:27.060But that, again, is the media. I mean, you know, when when we are, you know, when when my audience raises 45 million,
00:32:38.520million dollars to take at risk women and children and minor religious minorities, anyone who's marked for death and we move them out of the region and the media says nothing.
00:32:53.380How do you expect the average Democrat to think anything other than conservatives are monsters that don't care?
00:33:01.800It's it's it's it's so horrible. I mean, literally Republicans have overseen the most extensive criminal justice reforms over the last decade, often, you know, being blocked by liberals, by Democrats.
00:33:17.280You know, someone like Chuck Schumer who blocks criminal justice reform.
00:33:20.740But you look at Georgia, you look at Idaho, these states that are just overseeing mass prisoner releases because that is in line with their Christian values.
00:33:28.560Right. And you can't hear about this anywhere. You can't. You just liberals are totally unaware of this.
00:33:34.460And so when you ask, how do I? Yeah. Do you do you consider?
00:33:40.360The average Democrat to be on board with this, because I really think you go into the center of the country.
00:33:49.260And this divide does not it doesn't seem to exist as much.
00:33:55.780Maybe it does. But when I go, I go up to Idaho.
00:33:58.760I have a place in Idaho, a ranch, and I'm around people who are generally conservative.
00:34:04.660But there are liberals there, too. But we we still know the difference between good and bad, good and evil.
00:34:11.680You know, it's not it's not these cartoon characters.
00:34:15.800It's they know my heart and I know their heart.
00:34:19.140And when it comes to something bad happening, we're both there on the front lines trying to help.
00:34:28.140I could not agree with you more. In fact, this book that I wrote was not the book that I initially wanted to write because I was doing a lot of reporting from the South during the Trump era.
00:34:37.800And I was shocked by what I was finding. I mean, none of this would shock you.
00:34:43.520But, you know, you're taught a certain thing about conservatives and you think it's true because everybody, you know, believes it.
00:34:49.860And then you go into the South and you see that it's completely different.
00:34:55.960I met these amazing pastors, Pastor Derek Hawken and Pastor Jay Stewart, the pastors of this church called The Refuge.
00:35:03.180And The Refuge used to be two churches.
00:35:05.140This is in Greensboro, North Carolina, the home of the civil rights movement.
00:35:08.820This used to be two churches, a historically black church and a white megachurch.
00:35:13.400And they decided to merge because they wanted to bring the kingdom of heaven onto earth.
00:35:18.940And this was in 2016, right after Trump was elected.
00:35:21.980And what the black pastor, Pastor Derek Hawkins told me was he said to me, you know, because, of course, his entire congregation voted for Hillary Clinton.
00:35:32.000And, you know, we can be sure that at least 85 percent of the white, if not more of the white evangelical church had voted for Trump.
00:35:38.780And what Pastor Derek said to me was, you know, I think if I allow an administration to come between me and a person of another race, that lacks maturity.
00:35:50.940And but that is that is such a that is to me, I was like, oh, that is so amazing.
00:35:54.620But, you know, he's like, no, everybody I know thinks this, you know, the divisions that we think that, you know, that represent the entire nation.
00:36:08.820Because they make money off of it and they get power off of it.
00:36:11.460They get power from dividing us as Americans.
00:36:13.680And, you know, if your listeners will take one thing away from this, it's something that I'm sure they already know, just like, you know, which is that so much more unites us than divides us.
00:36:22.100And we cannot allow people to use our hearts as the place where they're making money by teaching us to hate our fellow Americans.
00:36:30.160You know what the leading cause of death is in the United States?
00:36:33.980Leading cause of death and around the world.
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00:38:07.420I mean, you know, there are it is, you know, there's some great things that are going on in the country where people are being encouraged to reach out to people that they think they don't agree with.
00:38:21.920But it's not mass, I think the things, you know, I think one of the benefit, I'm a praying man myself, and there was a time in like 2010 or 11, I was seeing all of this stuff coming, all the seeds being planted.
00:38:41.380And I'm like, how, how, how, how, how do we fight this?
00:38:47.300And I was overwhelmed with the feeling that these aren't your enemies.
00:38:51.940They're his enemies, not mine, because the rights don't come from me.
00:39:22.800And is it these, is it these pivot points like Afghanistan that we, that we all recognize that was dishonorable and we shouldn't act like that.
00:39:47.900Well, as a populist who very much approved of, you know, President Trump's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, I'd probably fall on a different side of this than you do.
00:40:10.960But it's funny because somebody who used to be an ambassador to Obama, he gave me a really interesting explanation for why it was so bungled.
00:40:19.740What he said was, was that, you know, Biden brought in, he sort of brought the band back together.
00:40:25.400You know, he staffed the State Department with all of the Obama people.
00:40:29.740And all of those guys, they knew that Obama had said he would withdraw from Afghanistan.
00:40:33.860And they managed to make that not happen.
00:40:35.660And they knew that Trump said he would withdraw.
00:40:37.480And, you know, people managed to convince him not to.
00:40:39.300And they were very certain that they would be able to roll Biden over on this.
00:40:43.420And that's why, you know, Biden thought they were sort of following his lead.
00:40:47.220And they were certain that he was going to follow theirs.
00:40:48.980And that, to me, was actually kind of, it was the best explanation so far that I've heard for why it was such a mess.
00:40:56.240I honestly do think that wokeness is the reason that a lot of liberals are waking up, you know, that just the insulting nature of it, the way that it fails to accurately capture the richness of opinion in the black community, the way that it's, you know, like you said, the contempt that this worldview shows for their fellow Americans who they know are no longer racist.
00:41:23.320I think that people are just fed up with the attempt to re-racialize American society.
00:41:39.700They were all, all the media was on television while the lieutenant governor, the first black woman, is accepting and walking into the role.
00:41:51.800They're all saying this was a racist thing.
00:48:34.620I mean, because, you know, this Facebook farce with them coming up and going, she, I found I'm a whistleblower and she, we should regulate.
00:49:23.560And it's a moral panic that, exactly like you said, gives more power to the government and to, you know, the liberal control and centralized control over things like big tech.
00:49:35.220But I do think that the, I also agree with you that there's been just the decimation of small businesses in a way that's just horrific and the centralization of government.
00:49:45.000But at the same time, I do think that the government, I do feel that the government, this is like my quasi-socialism coming out.
00:49:50.960But, you know, I say I'm a socialist the way Donald Trump was.
00:49:54.120Like, he felt like it was the government's job to protect working class jobs to the extent that we can.
00:49:59.200And, you know, it was the government that sort of shipped those jobs overseas.
00:50:02.480And I think we should, you know, government should be bringing them back.
00:50:05.840Well, I will tell you the, if you read anything about the Great Reset, have you, are you up on that?
00:50:37.680And if we could just tell the government all around the world, you know what, people, if you're going to even suggest that, you should be having open meetings everywhere because you're talking about controlling and changing humanity.
00:51:08.740Yeah, it's so foreign to religious people like us because we believe that we were created perfectly and in God's image.
00:51:15.760And the problem is that, you know, our government has not always treated all people equally.
00:51:21.400But that is the standard we should be getting to is to having a government that reflects God's divine plan.
00:51:26.560You know, God creating us all as equal and as, you know, each one of us, every single one of us, no matter who we are, as being, you know, exquisitely created in the divine image.
00:51:35.320And equality before the law being a reflection of that, right?
00:51:38.760So, yes, we're still struggling with that.
00:51:40.540I believe we still need to pursue police reform, criminal justice reform.
00:51:46.220We're trying to, you know, to match God's perfection.
00:51:50.400Like humans don't actually, we are perfect already and we need to strive to fulfill that potential and to be perfect to each other.
00:51:57.740But the idea that somehow we need a revolution to change the nature of humanity is just, it's so foreign to religious people, which is still the vast majority of Americans.
00:52:07.080But we're yet we're being dictated to by these elites.
00:52:10.280So I have you heard the new album from Phineas, Billy Eilish's brother.
00:54:44.020I push back when people say that wokeness is a religion because to me, when I think about my religion, it's so built on the concept of chuva, which is, you know, return, you know, making amends, forgiveness.
00:54:58.700And I know that grace is a big component of Christianity and even Islam, like this idea that we are the point of religion is to have a standard that you're always falling short of.
00:55:22.040So Christians would refer to that, though, as and say this carefully, because people think when you say it, they think something else that that is an antichrist teaching.
00:55:33.000It's not it's not that they're the antichrist.
00:55:36.100It's that that is against the teachings.
01:08:15.520Social justice is blind and it has to treat everyone the same because as soon as that stops happening, now you've got all kinds of players and money and, you know, who's a favorite, all of that stuff that isn't good for the left and isn't good for the right.
01:08:35.560That's why I don't like big regulation is always bad because you think your side is going to be in.
01:09:35.600I felt like you brought this sort of like, you know, when you go to the chalkboard, there's something about that that is very like, it's both like campy, but also like, it really invites the viewer in where they're at.
01:10:45.280I lost a lot of friends, um, on the left.
01:10:50.500Like you would think someone is your friend and then you would log into Twitter and there they were denouncing you to the, to the world, you know, like that, that happened when I first, oh God.
01:11:12.580Um, but yeah, I think, um, I'm very lucky to work at Newsweek.
01:11:15.660They, they, they really have taken a sort of anti-cancel culture position.
01:11:18.940We run, I run people from across the political spectrum and, you know, I just take the, you know, there's a, there's a saying in the Talmud, take the truth where you can find it.
01:11:28.620You know, and that's sort of, I think that's really important.