How Elites Betrayed Working People - Batya Ungar Sargon
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
173.09549
Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I speak with the author and political philosopher Yitzchak Batya about why there is no political polarization in the United States, and why there should be one. We talk about his new book, Pivotal: Why Americans Don t Split Over Abortion, Guns, and Abortion, and how the two parties are playing to the extremes.
Transcript
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who are enslaved to the cartels who brought them here.
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Like if this country is going to go down for the Jews,
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They're going to take this country from my cold, dead hands.
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in that you must be one of the very few people in the world
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who says that the polarization that everyone's talking about
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in America, and maybe in other Western countries too,
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I'm unique, I guess, in the elites and the chattering class
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And the reason for that is because the people pushing
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are the people who are making a lot of money off of that idea
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So it's elites in the media, elites in politics,
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regular working class Americans, middle class Americans,
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as I did in my book, you find that there is huge,
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massive consensus on the issues that we think of
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And this has been hidden from view because the people
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telling the story about this nation have a vested interest
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You know, looks like this is a country at each other's throats.
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You know, people are pro-life, people are pro-choice.
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You look at the polling and half the nation says
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I'm pro-life and half the nation says I'm pro-choice.
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they only want abortion to be legal for the first trimester.
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exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the mother.
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And of course, this is totally hidden from view
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because you have politicians on the right pushing for
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and politicians on the left who effectively refuse to say,
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OK, at what point should it be illegal to have an abortion?
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Most Americans are pro-gun and pro-background checks and pro,
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but I would never take that right away from a woman
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whose circumstances I don't particularly understand.
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There's a sort of radical, radical moderateness
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threading itself through the American working class.
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want much fewer immigrants and much more access to health care.
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So again, neither party is representing that point of view.
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OK, we'll talk about access to health care and expanding that,
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We believe in having really stricter immigration laws,
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60, 65% of Americans with these extremely moderate views,
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He really did sort of look at that sort of forgotten middle,
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It almost sounds like you're saying that Americans
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don't disagree, but they are polarized by the parties.
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Do you think that's because the parties are playing
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and therefore taking positions that are stronger
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And so we have one party that's really getting 70%
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of the working class, which is the Republican Party,
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And then you have the other party, the Democrats,
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who are catering to the college-educated elites
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So you have the Democrats sort of taking the economic polls
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And in this election cycle, it's been fascinating to watch
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how that class divide has turned into a gender divide,
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because, of course, women are 15 points more likely
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And so what that does is, when you have that college degree
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in America, you have more access to the American dream.
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which frees you up to vote on things like abortion
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whereas working class people are really struggling.
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And so they're very, very focused on economic issues.
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to some distant racist past as the way you hear about it
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when you turn on MSNBC or CNN or read the New York Times.
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They just want a little bit more breathing room
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Batcha, I saw a video where you said that the Democrats
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So the polarization in this country is really along class lines.
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So the last 50 years of democratic economic policy
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has effectively been an upward transfer of wealth
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You know, the left loves to rail against the billionaires.
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to the share of the economy that was controlled
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by billionaires in 1971, which was the high watermark
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for working class wages after which they started to drop,
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Having a college degree has become the gatekeeper
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of whether you have access to the most modest version
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your children having the option to get an education,
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being upwardly mobile, or even just being stable
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These are all things now that are heavily correlated
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you're very likely to be struggling to be downwardly mobile,
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to be working two jobs, not to have the same protections
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starting with Bill Clinton, who signed NAFTA into law,
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which meant that this wonderful avenue to the middle class,
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for people who don't like to sit and study for hours
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and hours on end, who are not good at listening to authority
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and sitting in the front row of school and answering every question
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These people still had an avenue to the middle class
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through the sweat of their brow and their brawn,
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And so these two, you know, the factory jobs and vocational training,
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these were two very good avenues for working class men into the middle class
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that were destroyed by successive democratic administrations.
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And then, of course, both parties had a very lax immigration policy,
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which meant that we were routinely shipping in millions and millions of low wage competition
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And it's very interesting because at the same time that these economic policies were being put in place,
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what you had was this discourse in the 80s and 90s arise around toxic masculinity, right?
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This idea that somehow being a macho man, being a provider, being the head of a family,
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being a man who protects and supports and hits on women in bars and knows,
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you know, mating rituals and excels at them, that this was somehow poison.
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And it's my view that this discourse took off because it was operating as an alibi for the left,
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for the fact that they were destroying the self-esteem, but also the ability of men to provide for families
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and heavily weighting the economy in favor of women who go to college, who are more studious,
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who have more social skills in favor of this knowledge economy that rewards women and men
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who excel at more sort of feminine qualities like, you know, social science, so social qualities that
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you need in these sort of laptop desk jobs, you know, how to, you know, respond nicely to people
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who ask you for things, you know, how to sit for long hours staring at a screen, talking on a podcast,
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talking on a podcast, you know, being very, you know, good with authority,
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knowing how to climb the corporate ladder by pleasing your higher ups and all of this stuff.
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So in my view, that that's sort of how we're seeing right now really is the culmination of that,
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of the class divide and the gender divide really sort of becoming one in the same.
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And I've seen you talk about this where you talk about, and I think it's a great example,
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which is the meatpacking industry. Can you talk about that? Because I found that fascinating,
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It meatpacking used to be the job to have. You would have a town where the economy was
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really built around a meatpacking plant. You know, a lot of the men, a lot of the women would get
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employed there. The wages were incredible. The hours were incredible. The retirement was incredible.
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When you got that job, you knew that you were going to be able to support a family and retire in
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dignity and have a home and have a truck and maybe have a pool in the backyard. These were amazing jobs.
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And you look at who is doing those jobs now. It is teenagers who have been trafficked here,
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who are enslaved to the cartels who brought them here from failed socialist countries in South
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America and Central America. They get a bracelet when they start making the journey. And that bracelet
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has a color. And the color tells you how much money they owe the cartels. We know that 50% of the women
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who have made that border crossing admit to being sexually assaulted. So you can imagine what the
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actual number is. We are importing slaves and sex slaves. A lot of them are children. And that is who
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is now packing the meat. They are almost entirely staffed by undocumented, often underage workers.
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It is absolutely appalling. And this was 100% by design. So every time Alejandro Mayorkas,
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who's the head of the Department of Homeland Security, who's supposed to be in charge of
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securing the border, was hauled before Congress or before the Senate, and they asked him,
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why is the border open? He would say to their faces, our corporations are desperate for workers.
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It has become the Democrats' party line that without a cast of slaves, our economy cannot survive.
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And it's absolutely appalling because there is a direct correlation between downward mobility for
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the working class and the rise of immigrants. So you look at 1971, again, the sort of high watermark
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for working class wages. We can say, okay, what was working there that stopped working so that the
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wages stagnated and then began to decline precipitously when you factor in inflation?
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The share of the population here that was foreign-born was 4%. Today it is 15%,
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the highest it's ever been in American history. The last time it got close to this, it was 14%,
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and that was the Gilded Age, a time in American history that is characterized by radical inequality,
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by an oligarchic rich, and then the masses and masses of poor people competing at the bottom of
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the income distribution. And again, the Democrats very cleverly developed a language and a discourse
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to hide their crimes. The alibi was this time what we'll call the white working class racists because
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they oppose mass immigration. So if you're a man and you've seen your good job shipped overseas,
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and then you've seen millions of competitors brought in to compete with the jobs that are left
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here, and you objected to that, you were called xenophobic or racist for objecting to the selling
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out of your children's future. And this worked so well because Donald Trump showed up at exactly the
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right time. And if you remember his signature promise from his 2016 campaign, it was build the wall.
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He was effectively saying to millions and millions and millions of working class people,
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there's nothing wrong with you for objecting to the fact that you cannot support your family
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anymore. We're going to restore dignity to you and to your labor. And I'll just make one more very quick
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point, which is that in so doing, in saying, you know, they're racist for objecting to immigration,
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in erasing the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, this was much easier to do the first time
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round. Because Trump did very, very well with the white working class and much worse with people of
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color. You look at how he's polling now. And of course, we'll know that the reaction, we'll know
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whether this turned out to be true. But I'm very, I feel pretty certain that he's going to do very well
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with black voters. He's going to do very well with Hispanic voters. He's polled as high as 40% of black
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voters, which is historic. I mean, it's unimaginable for a Republican at this point. You talk to black voters,
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I talked about voters in the book, and you can hear them talk about this stuff,
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why they're drawn to him, why they feel disgusted with the Democratic Party for how it emasculates
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men. He's polling a majority of Hispanic voters and overwhelmingly working class community.
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Now that the working class that he represents is truly multiracial and multi-ethnic, the whole
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edifice of this, you know, you're racist if you object to mass immigration has really crumbled.
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Hmm. And one of the things, it's interesting, you're clearly positioning this as a kind of left
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versus right, Democrats versus Republicans. I don't know that George Bush, for example,
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was any better on, you know, globalization or any of this stuff. Is that fair?
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Oh, yeah. There was a neoliberal handshake agreement between both parties.
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Right. And the reason I bring this up, Batch, is that one of the things I'm kind of thinking
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about a lot is how much we usually under, we think technology is very important, but we nonetheless
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massively underestimate the impact that it has. And just like the colonization of America wouldn't
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have been possible without the invention of, you know, sailing across oceans and lots of other things
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that were created around that time, the caravel and so on. I think the same is probably true of mass
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immigration in the sense that large waves of people traveling the sorts of distances that they do now
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in order to get into a foreign country just wasn't possible before. And likewise, globalization,
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the idea that you could ship an American job to China and then ship back the produce, that didn't
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exist either. So do you think that, you know, I'm sure, I'm sure it's true to say that the Democrats
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are worse on this stuff than the Republicans, but really what we're dealing with is the fact that
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the entire political class has failed to recognize the moment that we're in and to think about the
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impact globalization would have on people who they never meet. Because that's kind of the reality,
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right? The people who benefited from globalization, which was a lot of people, let's be honest,
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globalization did improve our GDP and raise wealth for lots of people, just not the people that you're
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talking about in the book. I think we have a moral obligation to care first about our families and
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then about our neighbors and then about our state and then about our nation. And when everybody in my
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nation has access to the American dream, I'll worry about poor people in other countries.
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So to me, that's from the moral point of view. I think it's immoral to care more about people
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you've never met than the people who live next door to you or than your cleaning lady, you know,
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or the person who does your landscaping or watches your children. To rely on the labor of your neighbor
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and say, I'm totally comfortable with her never being able to own a home. I find that to be morally
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disgusting. I feel pity for everybody. But that doesn't take away the fact that we have a world
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based on nation states. And I'm very happy about that. You know, there's the sort of Hannah Arendt
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perspective, which I totally buy into, that, you know, the only human right that we truly have
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is the right to civil rights. And a civil right is something that's guaranteed by a government. It's a
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contract we make with a government that we vote for. You can't, it's not a gift that, you know,
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a Western nation can bestow upon a non-Western nation. It's a compact that we make with a government.
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They, you know, ensure our rights. They protect our rights from themselves and from our, you know,
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fellow Americans. And in return, we vote for them. And you cannot have that agreement without borders,
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without citizenship. So beyond the moral question, there's this question of rights. I am zealous of
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my rights. I mean, that's what it means to me to be an American, to be zealous of my freedoms and
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the freedoms of my neighbor. And as a person who is zealous of those freedoms and in love with this
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country that gave them to me, we have to think about how do we protect those? You cannot have an
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open border and have civil rights. So there's the economic piece, of course, which is the selling out
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of the working class. Then there's the moral piece. And then there's the civil rights piece.
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In terms of whether the global economy has simply progressed past having borders.
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You don't need to convince anyone here about the stupidity of open borders. We've talked about
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it plenty. I guess what I'm saying is, do you think this is largely a technologically driven
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issue, which is we have a world now which is able to operate in a way that it never could,
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hence the pressures on our borders. And then you combine that with, you know,
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seemingly Western elites disappearing into this craziness of wokeness and whatever.
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But prior to that, there was a very long period of time when globalization was seen pretty much
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as uniformly good thing until people started to realize the impact it was having on working
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class communities. I don't think that we have progressed to that point.
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I think that having lax immigration laws, decriminalizing illegal border crossing,
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which is what Joe Biden did, is very much in the economic interests of the elites.
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It literally puts money back in their pockets, right? It's an upward transfer of wealth to have
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an open border because the people who consume the labor of those people are all in the elites.
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They're people who, you know, are working very long hours for a very good paying job and they
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don't have time to do their own landscaping or clean their own dishes or raise their own children.
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They go to restaurants and they want it to be cheap when they go to restaurants. They drink wine
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and they want the wine to be cheap when they buy it. So they are the consumers of low wage labor.
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It is very much in their interest to have an open border. It literally puts money back in their
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pockets. It's wage theft of their working class neighbors and puts money back in their pockets. So to me,
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there's no sort of, I think this is the problem I have with economics as a discipline, if you'll
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forgive me for saying so, but it measures things in the aggregate and we do not live in the aggregate.
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So every economist will tell you, every economist, there's one who won't, will say to you, well,
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mass immigration raises the GDP. Of course it raises the GDP. It makes rich people very, very rich
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to have a slave caste to employ rather than their fellow Americans. The problem is GDP is not equally
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distributed. And the law of supply and demand holds with labor as well. The more you have of something,
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the cheaper it is. The less you have of something, the dearer it is. We should want our fellow Americans
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to be paid well. We should want a smaller gap between the elites and the working class. And instead,
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what I think is, you know, they made the decision that opening the border would bring down inflation.
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And of course they were right, because in their view, inflation was being caused by
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working class wages going up. I mean, this is what the argument I'm trying to make is, it was by design,
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not because this is where the world economy has arrived at, but because it was very much in the
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interests and the economic interests of the Democrats base of college educated women and men. And then,
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of course, the poor who don't compete with the work with, with, with, uh, with immigrants for labor
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because they don't work. So the dependent poor and the educated rich.
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Patrick, do you think as well, look, I think human beings by and large don't overly care that much
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about things that don't affect them. But what has actually happened with the open border is suddenly
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wealthy kids are dying from fentanyl overdoses. All of a sudden, wealthy neighborhoods are becoming far
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less safe because of criminal gangs. And all of a sudden, wealthy people are realizing that the
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homelessness problem is spiking as well as a result of the open border. Do you think it's now everybody's
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just starting to wake up and everybody's realizing that, okay, you can pick up a bottle of wine for
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five dollars cheaper. But if your kid is at risk of dying from a fentanyl overdose because they purchase
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it's rittling on the black market, that's not really a fair trade off.
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I think that would be the case if Donald Trump weren't in the picture. But he is so blinding
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to the elites. Their hatred of him is so intense that I think that even though everything you're
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saying is true, you know, this is the kind of discourse you would hear maybe a year ago.
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It's much harder to picture people saying that now. Now what they would say is,
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but what about the threat to democracy, right? So people, it's a very, I think that was definitely
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something that could have happened if somebody other than Donald Trump represented reasonable
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immigration policy, because that's certainly happened. Of course, very rich people, of which
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there are, you know, quite a few on the left now, about 65% of Americans making over $500,000 a year
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now are Democrats. You know, very rich people at this point just hire their own private security,
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and so they don't have to worry about these things as much. But to be fair to them, they do have a
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point with Trump because his rhetoric was unacceptable when he lost the election. It was actually,
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it was unacceptable from a former president. You can't have that type of rhetoric being used.
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It is dangerous and it is inflammatory. Which rhetoric specifically? Saying that he won?
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Yes. And that the election was stolen. Hillary Clinton said that the election was stolen,
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right? She said she called Donald Trump an illegitimate president and said he would not have
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won if Putin had not, you know, changed the voting tallies. After the 2016 election, 2018,
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they did a poll of Democratic voters and 66% of them thought that the election had been stolen by Putin.
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So I agree with you. It's, but it's a problem that's shared by both sides pretty equally. I mean,
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Trump went further because he was truly convinced that he won. But you know, it is a president's right
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to pursue all of the legal avenues to challenge an election. Did he go too far? Maybe. I think that
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that's something that a lot of reasonable people think. But the other side is guilty of a lot of
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attacks on our democracy, including trying to imprison, you know, the most popular
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politician on the other side. So I do think that it is in the nature of power to try to hold on and
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expand itself. It is not in the nature of power to share itself in a democratic fashion. And I think
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that the American institutions have proven very good at containing Trump's unacceptable behavior and
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very bad at containing democratic bad behavior. Yeah. I mean, Hillary did call him an illegitimate
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president after he was elected. I think your point, though, that many reasonable people
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think about what euphemistically is now called the threat to democracy. But I think for a lot of
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people, what happened on January the 6th really complicates everything with Trump. And the concern
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is that he won't let go of the reins when his time is up. That's kind of, I think, what people are
00:25:17.920
I understand why people are concerned about that. I am not concerned about that. I look
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at January 6th as a horrible day. He did say that they should be peaceful in their protest. I don't
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think he wished for violence to happen. I think he truly believed that he won. And he still left
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pretty peacefully. I mean, he, you know, could have, he did not cover himself in glory on January 6th. He's
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not a person of, you know, that kind of character. But the idea that he would be a completely different
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person this time around than he was last time seems to me to be fallacious. I understand why
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people have a problem with his character. But I think two things on that. The first is,
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you know, you have to have a lot of economic privilege to vote on character. And I wish working
00:26:03.120
class people had that luxury. You know, I wish that that was the conversation we were having.
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I don't think that that's in the cards for a lot of people. They are looking for policy. They voted for
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Trump on policy. They can point to the specific policies, the tariffs and the immigration policy,
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the First Step Act that put money back in their pockets at the end of the month. And for people who
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are really struggling with this kind of an economy, that's the most important thing. And the other
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thing I would say is, you know, to character, when Trump took on this neoliberal consensus between
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both parties, you know, that we should have free trade and ship all these good jobs overseas, have
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very lax immigration laws, import, you know, millions and millions of slaves, defund vocational training,
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you know, all of this stuff. He took on both sides, right? He was not making a very
00:26:59.120
unique and aggressive change to the status quo while having a political party backing him as
00:27:06.080
he took on the other side. He did this while taking on both sides and saying, I don't care that 100% of
00:27:13.520
the political power in America is against me. This is what I know my voters elected me to do and I'm
00:27:19.040
going to do it. And it's my view that nice people can't do that. I don't think, I mean,
00:27:25.440
it's very rare. You guys do it, you take on both sides, and you know what that's like. It's very
00:27:31.280
hard. It's very hard to take on both sides, to fight so vigorously, and then to have to call out
00:27:38.400
the side that thought you were on their side because they did something wrong. And then they all turn on
00:27:42.880
you suddenly, and they're all smearing you, right? That's not fun. It's nice people don't do that. You
00:27:49.360
have to have something in your character that says, screw all of this. I don't care what people
00:27:54.080
think about me. I'm going to do what I think is the right thing. And if you talk to economists,
00:27:58.720
they will admit, oh yeah, well, I guess on, you know, I guess on immigration and on tariffs and
00:28:03.200
trade, you know, he was good for the working class, you know, but what else did he really do for them?
00:28:07.520
You know, it's very frustrating. People will say his signature achievement was a tax cut for the
00:28:12.640
wealthy. It's like, I mean, working class people and middle class people got a much higher percentage of a tax
00:28:18.000
cut in that tax cut. Of course, you know, overall the amount was less, but they were getting 15,
00:28:24.320
20% tax cuts. And that's what they remember. They remember that money coming back to them at the end
00:28:28.560
of the month. One of the other things that Donald Trump was good on was keeping the world
00:28:37.040
relatively stable. And one of the things you've talked about a lot is why Americans support Israel.
00:28:44.720
And you've made the point that actually you think it's very different to the way that people feel in
00:28:49.040
European countries. Can you talk a little bit about that?
00:28:51.040
Yeah. It's very interesting. One of the things, so for my book, I interviewed about 100 people,
00:28:57.600
150 people across the country, working class people. What I found was very, very shocking to me. We
00:29:03.920
started with how there was, you know, near consensus on these very, very, very contentious topics from
00:29:09.920
healthcare to immigration, to abortion, guns, whatever. Another issue on which there was
00:29:15.120
extreme consensus was the war in Ukraine. I can't think of a single person who didn't, you know,
00:29:20.720
independently bring it up and say, I just don't understand why we're funding this or why this is
00:29:26.320
our problem. And it's very funny because their view was very much the view of Barack Obama in the 2012
00:29:34.160
presidential debates when they were, he and Mitt Romney were asked, well, what's the greatest
00:29:38.640
threat to America? And Romney said, Russia. And Obama laughed him off the stage. He basically said,
00:29:46.000
the 80s called, they want their foreign policy back. You know, what are we even talking about
00:29:50.320
at this point? It was his view that Russia was a potential ally in the fight against China.
00:29:54.880
And, you know, not to justify the aggression against Ukraine, but in 2014 when Ukraine,
00:30:01.520
when Russia next Crimea, this was not viewed by the Democrats as a reason for us to get involved
00:30:07.280
there. You know, this was accepted basically by the Obama administration, you know, and they just
00:30:14.880
don't see why that's our fight. They don't see Russia as an enemy or a threat. It seems pretty clear that
00:30:22.640
when democratic policy changed was in 2016, when Hillary Clinton became convinced that Putin was
00:30:28.080
the reason that Donald Trump had won. And so now you have democratic policy in Eastern Europe, which
00:30:34.080
is again, just a mirror image of their domestic policy, which is their fight against Donald Trump.
00:30:39.680
And if you talk to working class people, you'll just see that like they don't, no one has been forced
00:30:45.040
to, to explain to them why $200 billion that could be very well spent here has been spent on this fight.
00:30:55.040
So I think that was something that really surprised me. And I was of course also surprised by just the
00:30:59.600
level of support for Israel. They don't see Israel in the same way as they see Ukraine.
00:31:06.240
So Americans are extremely, extremely philo-semitic. There's a deep, deep love of the Jews that runs
00:31:12.640
through the working class. It runs through Christian Americans. American Christians are the only
00:31:20.880
population in human history to organize their religion around the protection of Jews rather
00:31:27.920
than oppressing Jews. There was a very famous letter that George Washington wrote in 1790 to the Jews of
00:31:34.640
Newport, Rhode Island. He visited them. They were the first Jews in America. And he said,
00:31:38.400
you will always be welcome here. You will always be tolerated here. You know,
00:31:41.200
religious tolerance was always a really big, big deal for Americans. And they were very proud of
00:31:48.640
accepting and welcoming the Jews here. Of course, Americans have this sort of Protestant ethic,
00:31:53.120
the work ethic. So being sort of, you know, seen as upstarts or entrepreneurial never hurts you here.
00:32:00.080
It's always seen as, you know, in a country that sees itself as beyond classes, that's a sort of very
00:32:05.120
appealing character trait. Whereas in Europe, I think that, you know, the stereotype of the Jew that was
00:32:10.720
considered to be something that was disruptive of the social order. But, you know, American Jews,
00:32:15.520
especially, I mean, American Christians, especially evangelicals, and then after 1967, American
00:32:20.320
Catholics as well, have always been deeply, deeply protective of Jews. And I don't know many Jews
00:32:26.240
who don't feel very grateful about that. It's so different. If you go full anti-Semite here,
00:32:33.040
you know, it's over. Like, there's no way to bring that into the mainstream in the United States.
00:32:39.120
Yeah. And it's interesting because with the point that you make, I think the white working class as
00:32:45.200
a whole, I don't think, and I've spent a lot of time working in those communities,
00:32:50.240
I've never seen a trace of anti-Semitism. I think when you look at people like Corbyn and the communities
00:32:57.040
that he appealed to, I mean, you know, with Islamic communities, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in
00:33:02.960
there. And also the people that support Jeremy Corbyn, a lot of them are actually middle class.
00:33:07.040
Yeah. Yeah. Or upper middle class. Yeah, exactly.
00:33:13.920
Let me just follow up on this stuff about Ukraine and Israel. I understand love for the Jews,
00:33:20.720
as you put it. That's fine. Although looking at Twitter sometimes doesn't,
00:33:23.520
I'm not persuaded by that. And also some of the big kind of conservative voices in this country,
00:33:30.000
too, in recent months. How do you explain that for a start?
00:33:36.640
Yeah. Well, I don't know. Would you say Candace Owens is far right? I don't know. But it just seems
00:33:42.320
like that's a pretty prominent conservative voice in this country, right? And she doesn't seem to be
00:33:47.440
exhibiting the sort of Christian love of the Jews that you talk about.
00:33:50.080
No, definitely not. She's gone full anti-Semite. But I think if you look at the comments now on her
00:33:56.320
videos, a lot of the names sound, they're not American. She now has a global audience. Of course,
00:34:02.800
we know there's many billion Muslims, right? Not all of them very friendly to the Jews. I mean,
00:34:08.160
I don't want to stereotype. I have very close friends, of course, who are in that community. But
00:34:12.000
globally, there's a huge appetite for content bashing Jews specifically. I mean, she really has
00:34:18.880
sort of gone past the like Israel and Zionism to just full on, you know, conspiracy theories about
00:34:24.720
Jews. And I think she's lost her... I would hazard that if somebody would take an honest look at who
00:34:30.560
her audience is now, they would find that she has lost a huge chunk of her American audience. You don't
00:34:35.840
see her doing events with Donald Trump, which I'm sure she would love to do. There was an event
00:34:42.240
announced in which she and Don Jr. were supposed to be at the same event. And within six hours of
00:34:48.560
it being announced, her face was taken off the poster because she had been added after he had agreed to
00:34:52.720
it. So she's been marginalized, I think, in a really big way, in a way that I take a lot of heart from.
00:34:58.880
Of course, the left now is sort of like, well, I wonder if she has a point, right? Like, you know?
00:35:18.560
Anyway, I wanted to ask you about Israel because that doesn't make sense to me.
00:35:22.960
You can love the Jews and not think a foreign country far, far away
00:35:26.400
it merits billions in American funding and weaponry.
00:35:33.280
So, and for me, and I think we probably disagree about Ukraine, the argument for
00:35:39.440
supporting Ukraine is exactly the same argument as for supporting Israel.
00:35:43.200
Now, to an evangelical, there may be some kind of religious and historical explanation,
00:35:46.800
but on a practical geopolitical level, these two countries are our allies and it is in our
00:35:53.680
I think, um, so I'll say how I see it because I don't want to, I, I, I, there's a huge debate,
00:36:00.640
a healthy debate about whether we should be funding Israel.
00:36:04.000
I, I subscribe to the sort of pro-Israel view that
00:36:07.120
Israel is being harmed by the level of aid that we're giving them.
00:36:10.800
They've given up a lot in terms of developing their own military industrial complex,
00:36:15.360
a sacrifice that has resulted in them having to cave to pressure,
00:36:19.040
not to invade Rafah when they wanted to, maybe they could have saved those six hostages and killed
00:36:25.360
Yassinwar much sooner. So I, I think Israel is paying a heavy price for taking that aid. I do
00:36:30.480
think we get a lot out of it. So militarily, when Israel, they have to spend the money in our, um,
00:36:38.160
military industrial complex. They have to spend that money with our companies.
00:36:43.280
It's also true of Ukraine. Yes. Um, uh, Israel then improves on the weapons and improves on the
00:36:49.040
planes and the jets and everything that it gets, and then gives us back that intelligence for free.
00:36:53.680
There's a lot of intelligence sharing that has led to things like the death of Soleimani.
00:36:57.840
Um, Israel is fighting our enemies, right? Israel is taking on people who chant death to America,
00:37:05.360
death to Israel. The Houthis who are shooting at our soldiers, our boys. Now we could argue about
00:37:11.200
whether they should be there. Probably I wouldn't want them to be there, but they are there and the
00:37:14.720
Houthis are shooting at them. The Houthis are disturbing trade to the United States and we're
00:37:20.080
just taking it like cowards. It's, it's horrible. Like we're just letting them make a mockery of us.
00:37:26.880
So in that sense, there are actual enemies. I mean, actual threats. I don't think anybody denies that
00:37:32.640
Iran poses a threat, maybe not an immediate one, but certainly something we need to be very,
00:37:37.840
very concerned about in terms of its stated goals. And, and so in that sense, we get a lot in a very
00:37:45.840
material way from our relationship with Israel. Now, again, I think that Israel is paying a very
00:37:50.960
high price for that by taking our aid and it should, you know, in, in the Obama version of
00:37:55.440
the memorandum of understanding, it used to be that Israel could spend, I think, 20% of the aid on
00:38:00.240
their building up their own military industrial complex. Obama made that zero. And so now they can't
00:38:06.160
even create the bullets that they need to shoot. Right. And so they've really painted themselves
00:38:10.320
into a corner and it's really, I think, time for them to start. If you think that sovereignty is
00:38:14.800
important, which I do, I'm sure we all agree on that, you know, being a sovereign nation at a time
00:38:19.440
of wars is unbelievably important. And, but I wouldn't even say Israel is like a client state in the
00:38:24.720
traditional way because of how much we receive from that relationship. And that's just in purely
00:38:30.160
material ways. Of course, there's the spiritual connection, the democracy component to it,
00:38:35.280
the religious component to it. You know, a lot of, as you mentioned, a lot of Christians feel that way.
00:38:40.240
They feel like they want to be able to go and visit and walk down the streets that Jesus walked down or,
00:38:45.440
you know, so, so there's a lot there that feels significant and feels right and feels like we're
00:38:52.640
getting something out of it such that an America first mentality could include a very close relationship
00:38:58.560
with Israel. And I just think the same cannot be said from Ukraine. What are we getting from that
00:39:05.760
relationship? I mean, we're sort of harming Russia's military capabilities, but those military capabilities
00:39:11.600
would never have been trained on us. And while I hold Putin responsible for invading Ukraine and
00:39:17.680
responsible for the tragic 500,000 dead young men, I mean, it's unthinkable what that does to a society.
00:39:26.640
At the same time, I think that we could have done much, much more to respond to what at some point
00:39:32.480
were reasonable demands, like that Ukraine not join NATO, which it wouldn't have because of the level
00:39:38.240
of corruption there. I think the US would never have allowed China to put, you know, military weapons
00:39:45.360
in Mexico. And if they did, we would have invaded. And so I think to ask of another country to behave
00:39:52.240
in a way that we would not have accepted for ourselves and our people, and to deny the recognition
00:39:58.720
of the status quo on some principle, I asked myself, what was that principle that was so important for
00:40:05.760
Kamala Harris to go out and say, no, of course, Ukraine one day will join NATO, right? Why poke the bear?
00:40:10.960
And I think that had to do with domestic policy. And I think that that's a bad reason to do this.
00:40:18.000
No, I think it's undeniable that a lot of the Western elite left has, they see Ukraine as some
00:40:26.800
sort of like LGBT type issue where it's just like, you know, but that's basically it, right? It's like,
00:40:34.160
we have the pride flag, and we have the Ukraine flag, they don't think about it as a geopolitical
00:40:38.880
issue. My argument would be about America first. And look, I'm not an American. So people should
00:40:43.920
dismiss my opinion as they wish. I just think you can't be the dominant superpower in the world
00:40:49.200
and not maintain your assets around the world and not maintain your position and allow other
00:40:55.920
countries to try and, you know, Putin and Xi, and they've all talked very openly about how they want
00:41:01.120
a multipolar world. What does that mean? That means America's thrown off its pedestal. So
00:41:07.040
you can't be America first and be isolationist at the same time. I just don't think those two
00:41:11.200
things are compatible on a practical level. And also as well, just a point to add to that,
00:41:16.000
stability is good for everybody. The moment you let Putin run rampant, you destabilize Europe. Once
00:41:22.160
you destabilize Europe, that is going to have huge ramifications globally, but particularly for America as well.
00:41:28.000
So this is, this is an argument against Obama as well in 2014, right?
00:41:32.320
No, no, no. The weakness they showed then is why 2022 happened.
00:41:36.640
So you feel the U.S. should have responded with a war or with a...
00:41:40.480
No, not a war, but, but the U.S. should have made it very clear at that point that that was
00:41:45.600
unacceptable and then done everything possible to prevent 2022 from happening. And that means what
00:41:51.200
we're probably going to end up with, which is some kind of demilitarized zone between the two
00:41:54.800
countries, right? If Trump, by the time this goes out, has won, let's say, that's what he's going
00:42:00.160
to try and get to. But I agree with you that the U.S. should have done everything possible
00:42:04.080
to prevent 2022 from happening. I think they did everything possible to ensure that it would happen.
00:42:10.960
Well, but I think we disagree about what we mean by what they did.
00:42:17.200
You think NATO expansion and all of that. And by the way, I don't, I don't deny that that is a massive
00:42:22.880
irritant to Russia. Of course it is. But Russia didn't respond to Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania,
00:42:29.600
leaving the former Soviet Union in the 90s because they weren't strong enough and they weren't willing
00:42:34.480
to challenge the United States at that point, right? So it's all about the relative perception of power.
00:42:39.760
The reason Putin did what he did in 2022 is that he had a go in 2014. And what did he see? No response.
00:42:47.520
Weakness. That's why he felt comfortable to continue with that policy over time. That's my
00:42:52.560
view anyway. But by the way, you know, people will know that I'm very pro-Ukraine, but when I was
00:42:57.920
traveling around America with Jordan Peterson on his tour, it was the bit of the tour that I was on is
00:43:03.280
kind of like small, medium-sized towns, you know, the Tulsas, the Oklahomas. We did New York and stuff,
00:43:09.360
but mostly it was fairly small, medium-sized places. And when I was there, you know, I'd look
00:43:15.600
around, you know, I'd go to a bar after the show or whatever. I couldn't understand why those people
00:43:20.960
would care either about a conflict very, very far away because it's just very far away. But my point
00:43:27.360
is you cannot be the hegemonic superpower of the world that benefits from its global empire,
00:43:32.560
which is what America does, without at some points having to maintain that global empire,
00:43:37.680
including through force. And my sense is, yes, the Kamala Harris's and other people have sort of made
00:43:44.480
this some kind of moral crusade. On a much more practical level, the example you set for China
00:43:50.880
with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, with how you responded to Russia in 2014, all of these
00:43:57.680
sequential indicators of weakness is why I think Iran felt comfortable to orchestrate October 7th,
00:44:04.000
is why I think 2022 happened in Ukraine. It's just my view. And also as well,
00:44:08.080
the capitulation in Afghanistan sent a very clear message that, you know, you could go and do,
00:44:13.840
you had carte blanche basically to do whatever it was. I guess the point I'm making, and this is what I,
00:44:18.880
sorry, we've been talking for ages, but the point I'm trying to get to you and hear your answer to is,
00:44:24.400
I don't think America first is compatible with isolationism because America depends on being
00:44:31.280
a global empire and you can't, and if you want to maintain a global empire, you're going to have
00:44:36.960
A hundred percent agree with that. I'm not an isolationist and I don't think Trump is either.
00:44:43.920
It's about being strategic about which kinds of force to use. And I think Putin was very open to
00:44:49.920
the West at some point and felt very betrayed at some point. Now, again, I'm not saying that to
00:44:54.880
sanction his emotions or what have you, but I think the other side, and I'm curious what you would say
00:45:00.560
to this, has decided that Russia is allowed to have no legitimate concerns about the expansion
00:45:08.800
of Western power. And I think that if there had been more respect for a nuclear power and for what
00:45:17.920
that means, that there were ways to prevent Ukraine for sure, to get out of it after two weeks,
00:45:24.320
to get out of it after six months, and to enlist Russia in the fight against China, which is a much,
00:45:32.000
much greater threat to us. Putin just has the nukes, right? China has our economy by the balls.
00:45:41.120
And I think, you know, thinking strategically the way that some people do and some people don't,
00:45:47.520
I agree with you, of course. I don't think we should be isolationists. We should be a superpower.
00:45:56.720
But you have to have the consent of the governed in terms of deciding when to use military force
00:46:02.960
and when to use soft power. And I just think on this issue, we don't have the consent of the
00:46:08.080
governed. And that's a really big problem. And do you think partly that's because
00:46:11.600
there have been a sequence of wars abroad that are seen as just wrong? I mean, Iraq,
00:46:21.120
for example. It just, like, a lot of people supported it at the time. But a lot of us were
00:46:27.440
saying at the time, this is crazy. And those people have now been proven correct. And now
00:46:32.640
everyone's looking at it kind of going, they see every war now through that lens. Is that?
00:46:37.680
It's very interesting because they don't see Israel's war through that lens. The left does.
00:46:41.600
And I think it's because the left has forgotten what it's like to fight a just war, right? I mean,
00:46:47.200
because America has had these disastrous entanglements. I cannot feel that way about a war
00:46:55.920
that I think we could have prevented. I can't. No, fine. Forget about it. I'm just asking.
00:47:02.240
Yes. In general, I think the support for Israel sort of belies that point a little bit, I would say.
00:47:09.360
Okay. Is it possible to be Jewish now and be on the left? When you look at the attitude of some people,
00:47:19.520
thought leaders, shall we say? It's a really good question. The left will accept any Jew
00:47:27.760
that renounces their national identity, their attachment to their fellow Jews,
00:47:35.120
that portrays themselves as the good Jew, that's anti-Zionist, that hates Israel.
00:47:41.120
It's very easy to get in if you're willing to renounce your people. I find that to be utterly
00:47:49.360
undignified, a price no one should pay. But unfortunately, a lot of people in America are
00:47:57.440
paying it. And the reason for that is very interesting. I get asked a lot by Americans,
00:48:02.160
American Christians, working class Americans, why are Jews so Democrat? Why are they so affiliated with
00:48:08.720
the Democratic Party? And for many years, you know, beginning of the 20th century was because
00:48:13.920
Jews were working class. And so they were part of the labor movement. And then they were very involved
00:48:19.360
in the civil rights movement. Something like above 75% of the white people involved in the civil
00:48:25.920
rights movement were Jews in the leadership, played an unbelievably prominent, prominent role.
00:48:31.920
I think in the post-Holocaust era, they felt like this was our fight.
00:48:36.240
But when the left moved from labor to civil rights and then finally to wokeness,
00:48:43.600
abandoning the working class, abandoning civil rights, abandoning concepts like rights and equality
00:48:48.560
for identity politics and marginalization and a worship of weakness and a worship of abjection,
00:48:55.200
which is the defining characteristic of the left today. Unfortunately, a lot of American Jews go to
00:49:01.760
college, about 60% are college educated, which is double the national average. And so they study all
00:49:07.520
this critical race theory, all this crap. And what pollsters found in 2015 was that every group,
00:49:17.760
whether it's white conservatives, black conservatives, black liberals, Hispanic conservatives,
00:49:22.880
Hispanic liberals, normal people, every group in America, prefer their group to other groups.
00:49:28.160
They have a higher rate of in-group positive feeling than out-group positive feeling. That's
00:49:33.840
sort of the nature of humanity. There's one group that likes itself less than it likes all the other
00:49:40.080
groups, and it's white liberals. It's white progressives. That's what you learn in college.
00:49:45.120
That's kind of the perspective, that strength and power and being at the top of a hierarchy,
00:49:51.360
being talented in some way, having been given privileges makes you unworthy of having a moral
00:50:00.000
compass. You don't get to have a moral compass. You have to cede it to the oppressed. And unfortunately,
00:50:06.480
there's a lot of young Jews who have fallen prey to that mentality. And so I don't see this mass exodus,
00:50:13.520
and you're seeing it from older people who are sort of flipping, but people who've been through that
00:50:17.600
education system. You really have to deprogram yourself. I was woke. I remember what it felt
00:50:23.200
like to worship abjection and to feel that strength and power and dignity and believing that you have a
00:50:32.240
right to protect yourself and to protect the people you love is bad. And that white people don't get to
00:50:36.880
do that. White Jews don't get to do that. And the oppressor doesn't get to do that. And it takes a long time to
00:50:43.520
sort of think your way out of that. And I think for a lot of Jews who were in that mindset until October 7th,
00:50:48.960
there's been a real rude awakening. Do you think partly as well, it's kind of programmed into the
00:50:53.920
Jewish psyche of like, you know, let's not get above our station here. Let's not, you know, make ourselves
00:51:00.720
too much of a target because we all remember, just look at history, what happens when you make yourself too
00:51:06.480
much of a target. So therefore, let's not piss people off. I think a lot of British Jews feel that way. My
00:51:11.520
dad's a British Jew. Yeah. And I always say to him, you know, Papa, on October 7th, the British
00:51:17.280
Jew and you died and an American Jew was born because American Jews don't feel that way. We feel
00:51:22.080
like, no, this, I mean, the way I feel, I would never move to Israel. Like if this country is going
00:51:27.040
to go down for the Jews, I'm going down with this ship. They're going to take this country from my cold,
00:51:31.360
dead hands because we feel like, no, this country has been so good to us and so good to our parents and
00:51:37.120
our grandparents. Like, no way am I going to, and that's why you see so many prominent anti-Zionist
00:51:41.920
Jews at the front lines of these movements, right? The anti-Zionist, anti-Israel movement, because
00:51:51.440
But Batia, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:51:55.600
Thank you so much. Before we head over to Substack, where our supporters get to ask their questions to
00:52:01.600
you. Our final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we
00:52:05.600
really should be? Before Batia answers the final question, when the interview is over,
00:52:10.400
make sure you click the link in the description, head to our Substack to see this. How do you view
00:52:15.920
reports that both campaigns are preparing their arguments to not accept the election result?
00:52:21.120
How does she survive at Newsweek? Is she vilified by her colleagues? Is she given
00:52:25.280
journalistic independence, even if that means, for example, she writes a pro-Trump article?
00:52:37.840
It's such a good question. I mean, we just had an amazing conversation about all the things I think
00:52:43.360
are most important to talk about. And I'm so grateful for that. One thing people are talking
00:52:47.760
about that I'm very glad they're talking about is how amazing this show is and what a lifeline you
00:52:52.240
both have been to people who are on the side of the good and the right at a time of very murky
00:52:58.960
morality and moral inversions. And I would like to end just by saying from the bottom of my heart,
00:53:06.720
thank you so, so much as an American and as a Jew for making the right and the good
00:53:15.120
seem cool and funny and smart and interesting and important and pressing and urgent and giving voice
00:53:22.880
to what so many people really don't want to acknowledge and don't want to hear in a way
00:53:26.800
that is unignorable due to your endless, endless charm, intelligence and humanity. So from the bottom of
00:53:33.280
my heart, thank you. Favourite guest ever. I was going to say we're British so this entire bit has made us very
00:53:41.040
uncomfortable. We're moving to America mate, I like it here. Don't get this, do you in London?
00:53:46.880
No, no one in the UK has ever said anything like that. No, no. No, the best you get after a good British
00:53:52.640
interview. Cheers for that. Yeah, thanks mate. A couple of tea was nice. All right, head on over to
00:53:58.480
Substack where we ask Batu your questions. Do you see any way back from mainstream journalism or will
00:54:05.440
alternative outlets become our only reliable source of information?