Academia, the legacy media, and the entertainment industry’s embrace of Woke ideology amounts to another form of warfare by elites on the American working class, a media critic has told CNN. Woke ideology, which prioritizes the embrace of Critical Race Theory, masks the most powerful forces in society’s exclusion of and contempt for those in much more precarious financial positions, she said.
This results in “affluent white liberals using the real pain of black Americans in order to withdraw from the common good and abandon the working class of all races,” said Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek and author of the book “Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.”
“A lot of this conversation around Wokeness is actually about class,” she said.
“We are hiding a class divide in America,” she told Brian Stelter on Sunday’s episode of “Reliable Sources,” sounding a note not often heard on CNN. “We are hiding the total dispossession of the working class of all races by focusing on a very highly specialized, academic language around race.”
When Stelter implied that Glenn Youngkin’s victory in last week’s Virginia governor’s race called her thesis into question, she replied, “The media’s response to Youngkin’s victory is literally the reason that he won.”
She noted that hosts on MSNBC began to spin the victory by saying, “White supremacy wins again. Racism wins again,” but in fact, his lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears, “will be the first black woman to hold that job.” She added that his ticket attracted broad and diverse support statewide. “Glenn Youngkin managed to flip majority black districts, when he managed to get between 40% and 50% of Latino voters. Are all those people white supremacists? Of course they’re not.”
She said Youngkin voters said they “worried about number one, the economy … and number two, schooling. And it seems to me it is such a self-own” for the media “to tell people who are worried about the economy that that is white supremacy.”
“You are essentially criminalizing the views of working-class Americans,” she told Stelter. “You saw the same thing with the conversation around Critical Race Theory,” when pundits said that “these people don’t know what Critical Race Theory is” and insisted, falsely, that it is not taught in public schools.
“That is not a political statement. That is a class statement,” she said. “They are not educated enough to be opposed to Critical Race Theory. How dare they oppose it.”
Short clips of my interview with @bungarsargon have been making the Twitter rounds. So here's the entire segment. She began by saying "it's very brave to have me on," so I asked why… pic.twitter.com/1nxX1Cb1fl
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 8, 2021
One such example took place just one day earlier, on MSNBC’s “The Cross Connection,” when Nation magazine’s Elie Mystal told host Tiffany Cross that the white working class wants to murder black people. “What the Democrats’ theory of the case is, is that the white non-college-educated voter cares about things like kitchen table issues like infrastructure and pipes and how many gallons of milk you can put on the table,” he told MSNBC viewers. “I contend that what they care about is using their guns on black people and getting away with it. That’s what they want. That’s what they actually are in it for.”
Here's me making the connecting the dots from the Ahmaud Abery lynching to the Democratic election losses. https://t.co/NQdRPZFFdb
— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) November 6, 2021
Ungar-Sargon’s unexpected critique usually extends to CNN. Late last month, she told Megyn Kelly that Don Lemon used “moral panic about race to hide the … abandonment of the working class by both sides” of the political spectrum.
She added that “the real difference between CNN and Fox is really about class. It’s not even about politics as much or about polarization. It’s about the fact that the Fox News audience that’s pictured by … Fox News as a channel is a working-class person, as opposed to at the liberal outlets, where they are picturing an increasingly elite, educated audience.”
“In 2012, only 25% of CNN’s viewership had a college degree, which is on a par with Fox. Now, it’s about 50%,” she added. “So, something they were doing was signaling to working-class viewers — to liberal, working-class viewers — this is no longer a channel for you.”
Ungar-Sargon’s appearance went viral on Twitter and garnered positive reviews from media critics. Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “Kudos to @brianstelter for airing this smart, incisive critique of the fundamental rot of CNN/MSBNC/liberal-corporate media discourse.”
Kudos to @brianstelter for airing this smart, incisive critique of the fundamental rot of CNN/MSBNC/liberal-corporate media discourse: https://t.co/KztN9De3TY
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 7, 2021
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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