Who is Batya Ungar-Sargon?

It’s March, and Batya Ungar-Sargon is appearing on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher for the third time. She has flown from her home in New York to Los Angeles to appear on the comedian’s panel, where Donald Trump and the left come in for equal measures of ridicule. Raven haired and sloe-eyed, she wears a sleek, sheer-on-the-shoulder top and flaunts, as always, a silver Star of David around her neck. She introduces herself as a “MAGA leftist.” (“That makes no sense,” quips Maher.) Sitting opposite her is Sam Stein, the MSNBC contributor and managing editor of The Bulwark, there to provide some liberal pushback, if he can get a word in.  

Maher opens by asking Ungar-Sargon whether, two months into the administration, she regrets throwing her lot in with Trump.  

“Oh, no, I feel the opposite,” she responds. “When I look at what President Trump ran on and the agenda that he’s enacting right now, he took a Republican Party that was built on social conservatism, foreign interventions and wars, and free trade and free markets, and he basically took an ax to all of those.” Her defense builds momentum as she elaborates on Trump’s departures from traditional conservatism. “He’s pretty pro-gay. It’s pretty obvious. He appointed the highest-ranking out gay person, Scott Bessent, our secretary of treasury, which is incredible, and he sidelined the pro-life wing of his party.”  

She then adroitly pivots to what she really wants to talk about—economic populism. “Trump looked at our destroyed manufacturing base. He looked at the downwardly mobile working class. He looked at the fact that working-class Americans can no longer afford the American dream.” Her cadence picks up. “There was a handshake agreement between both parties that we should somehow have free trade, which resulted in shipping 5 million good manufacturing jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico. What they did was they brought in millions and millions of illegal migrants to compete with the jobs that remained here … What Donald Trump said was we have to stop selling out the working class. That agenda that he laid out is socially moderate, antiwar, and anti–free trade, protectionist. That,” she concludes, “is a leftist position!” 

This message, delivered with resounding conviction, has made Ungar-Sargon perhaps the first new media star of the second Trump presidency. To scroll through today’s fractured media landscape is to play an inadvertent game of “Where’s Batya?” One hour, she’s on HBO, then she’s on Fox News or Fox Business, explaining why immigration is secretly class warfare; later, she’s on Sky News, denouncing the terminal wokeness of American journalism. She often turns up in Piers Morgan’s split-screen hellscape, where she methodically dismantles hapless opponents. Ungar-Sargon has a day job, too, running the Opinion section at Newsweek. And she even finds time to write columns for both Compact (where anti-woke Marxists and Catholic theocrats find common ground) and The Free Press (the buzzy, heterodox Substack juggernaut). Her debut column in April traced her becoming a “MAGA lefty.” Her voice saturates the podcast world, notably as a regular on Honestly with Bari Weiss. (Weiss is the editor of The Free Press.) On social media, her presence spans Steve Bannon’s War Room and cage-match bouts with progressive Twitch streamers. If she sleeps, it’s hard to know when. 

In all these venues, her message remains consistent: America’s liberal elites (academics, journalists, woke corporate types, what she calls “the laptop class”) have abandoned working people for identity politics, open borders, and globalization. And she, Batya Ungar-Sargon, former liberal/leftist (she uses the terms interchangeably, which is a tell), is exposing their scam.  

Hers is not an unfamiliar argument, and it is not without some merit. She turns the volume up to 11 by insisting that this neoliberal triumph was not the result of well-intentioned but arguably flawed policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement or China’s ascension to the World Trade Organization. Instead, it’s the inevitable American carnage—to borrow a phrase—caused by educated elites “who hate the working class.” 

How a woman who cut her journalistic teeth writing for liberal outlets became what National Review calls “one of MAGA’s loudest voices” is a media story for our time. Of course, America has always loved a good turncoat narrative, but there’s more to her success than that. Across TV, podcasts, and digital and social media, there’s an almost unlimited demand for Trump-friendly voices who are pugilistic and nimble on their feet, but also personable enough to sit on a panel without being too robotic or too nuts. It helps that Batya isn’t pure MAGA. She’s a critic of Elon Musk (for his pro–skilled immigration stance) and of RFK Jr. (And, in our unfair world, being smart and beautiful with a broad smile also might have helped speed her ascent.) 

But to give her due credit, Ungar-Sargon is far more intelligent and compelling than Fox’s average Ivanka wannabe bodysuit blonde. “Fox never has populist-nationalists on, hard-core MAGA people like her,” Steve Bannon told me. “For whatever reason, they’ve decided Batya is an acceptable populist-nationalist.” He raves about his fellow class warrior that “she’s serving up the red meat on MAGA economics and anti-elitism, and she comes in so hard, my audience just eats her up.” 

Many of those watching or reading her might not fully appreciate the distance Ungar-Sargon has come in a few years. How did this academic Marxist (by her own admission), once an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter, become a darling of Steve Bannon? Her emergence as the Norma Rae of MAGA messaging is even odder coming from someone whose background bears so little resemblance to the working-class Americans whose cause she trumpets. 

Ungar-Sargon grew up in the privileged world of Brookline, Massachusetts, the wealthy and liberal Boston suburb where John F. Kennedy was born and the clan made their home. She is descended from rabbis and was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household; her father is a neurologist. She’s married, but Ungar-Sargon is her family name, not a marital hyphen. With a bachelor’s from the University of Chicago and a PhD from UC Berkeley—both degrees in English—she’s what central casting looks for in a “coastal elite” walk-on.  

She stumbled out of academia and into journalism during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. After finishing her PhD dissertation—Coercive Pleasures: The Force and Form of the Novel 1719–1740—Ungar-Sargon was living in Brooklyn when the storm clobbered Gotham. Armed with a social media account and comfortable shoes, she documented the weather’s devastation on working-class communities, sharing raw photos and posts of New Yorkers abandoned by systems meant to protect them. When a friend suggested that she formalize this reporting, Ungar-Sargon began covering the storm’s aftermath for a publication called City Limits. This work led her into the trenches of urban inequality—tenants facing predatory landlords, immigrants caught in Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmares, and working-class New Yorkers priced out of their neighborhoods. Her early bylines reveal someone firmly planted on the progressive left—“Amid NYC Restaurant Boom, Are Chefs of Color Getting Their Share?” reads the headline of a 2016 article, the artifact of an ancient self.  

Her Berkeley dissertation offers a window into her former views. It opens: 

Coercive Pleasures argues that the early novel in Britain mobilizes scenarios of rape, colonization, cannibalism, and infection, in order to model a phenomenology of reading in which the pleasures of submission to the work of fiction—figured as analogous to these other coercions—reveals the reader’s autonomy as itself a fiction. This is a project about the novel but also about the way in which literary forms mediate political models of subjectivity. Literary histories of the novel tend to relate its “rise” to the emergence of a liberal subject whose truth resides in her interior, autonomous and private self. I propose instead that privacy and autonomy are the price rather than the payoff of fiction. 

I’ve tried my best to understand this tour de force of left-wing academic jargon. I think she’s arguing that early-18th-century novels like Robinson Crusoe and Pamela were truly radical critiques of emerging liberal ideals like autonomy, consent of the governed, and individualism. (I would have asked her about it, but she declined to be interviewed.)  

Her dissertation isn’t just a historical marker; it also foreshadows the rhetorical strategy that defines her post-academic career. Where she once deconstructed the phoniness of liberal values from the academic left, she now attacks them from the MAGA right. Both projects share a Marxist fascination with power masquerading as virtue and an impulse to critique the systems that manufacture consent—whether through literature or media. Both projects rely on her ability to speak the language of her in-group, whether academic critical theorists or MAGA true believers.  

She now speaks of a “crisis in masculinity” that can be solved with Trump’s tariffs, while she used to chide others for critiquing the excesses of the #MeToo movement. When the anti-woke but Never Trumper journalist Cathy Young wrote a piece defending Al Franken that Ungar-Sargon agreed to publish in The Forward, she says Ungar-Sargon scolded her afterward. “Batya and I had lunch and she told me that she thought I was bending over backwards to be nice to men,” Young wrote over email. Perhaps nothing better captures Ungar-Sargon’s political metamorphosis than her 2016 essay for the intersectional feminist magazine Dame, “Trump Ruined My Favorite Haunt.” Written just weeks after the 2016 election, the piece mourns Hillary Clinton’s defeat and, with it, Ungar-Sargon’s enjoyment of a neighborhood bar, where it turned out that the regulars and bartenders had voted for Trump: 

Because while they didn’t vote for Trump because he courted white supremacists or boasted about his sexual exploits or rape allegations, none of these facts kept them from pulling the lever for him either. And that is personal—to me, and to Muslims and women and immigrants and people of color, who are under threat by this administration … Those of us who had our pussies grabbed over and over, against our will, as children, as teenagers, as adults, now have to call that animal our president. And despite the rallies and the hashtags, Donald Trump is about to be my president. That’s what democracy means. While nearly 3 million more people voted for Hillary, because of our Electoral College, more Americans in three key states voted for him. That’s why I can’t go into the bar anymore. 

In these raw, pained sentences lies the ghost of a different Ungar-Sargon—one who saw Trump voters not as a persecuted class needing a crusader but as flawed citizens too willing to overlook a demagogue’s grave moral failings. In the wake of her Free Press piece, she recalled the Dame article as part of her years in the sway of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But it’s reminiscent of a different kind of derangement—that of a certain Faustian vice president whose political persona now embraces the very people and perspectives he once held to a higher standard. But what makes her transformation so striking is its comprehensiveness. The woman who couldn’t bear sharing a bar with Trump voters now defends them with evangelical fervor and tars the president’s critics as elitists pulling one over on real America. Her new convictions are just as absolute as when they were facing in the opposite direction. 

What happened to Batya Ungar-Sargon? Like Leo Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each political conversion is unique. In 2019, she agreed to participate in a panel on antisemitism at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. At the time, her writing and views reflected a familiar liberal criticism of Israel—that the lands taken in 1967 had made the country an occupier, at war with its democratic ideals. As many American Jews would discover after October 7, 2023, there was a rising voice on the left that rejected not just Israel’s territorial acquisition from the Six-Day War, as they did, but Zionism itself, finding in Jewish nationalism the world’s most contemptible regime, far worse than North Korea or Sudan, unsuitable to be among the family of nations. 

She was warned that protesters from Bard’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine planned to interrupt the conference. She documented what followed for The Forward. “But we’re not even talking about Israel,” she said to the conference organizers, understandably. “How does that make sense?” As the protesters started to gather in the lobby, she approached them. She told them she respected their passion and commitment to what they thought was right but asked why they had picked this panel. “Come to my panel tomorrow,” she said, naively. “Come protest my comments on Zionism. I’ll be talking about the occupation. Bring your signs.” Unsurprisingly, the protestors had no more interest in her liberal Zionism than they did in Likud imperialism and disrupted her panel on antisemitism anyway. In some small sense, it foreshadowed when Hamas unleashed carnage on the liberal kibbutzim. 

Ungar-Sargon stopped calling it an “occupation” after enough incidents like the one at Bard wore her down. That same year, Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, responded to a tweet about then House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy threatening to punish Omar and another congresswoman for their criticism of Israel. Omar wrote back, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” a line about $100 bills ripped from a P. Diddy song. Ungar-Sargon jumped on the tweet and said Omar was trumpeting a damaging, harmful trope about Jews. But to Ungar-Sargon’s surprise, progressives online and even colleagues at The Forward, America’s century-old and most renowned Jewish publication, accused her of being racist and putting Omar and other “people of color in danger.”  

While this bit of performative rage might have left others rolling their eyes, for Ungar-Sargon it was personal, career threatening, and understandably upsetting. When she later reflected on it, she said that was when she decided that the left’s identity politics were putting certain groups beyond reproach and ripening others for condemnation. 

A 2018 Yale study she came across validated what was becoming her new worldview about the identity politics she once promoted. Researchers found that white Americans who hold liberal sociopolitical views use language that makes them appear less competent to get along with racial minorities. For Ungar-Sargon, this was proof of a bait-and-switch: elites abandoning the material concerns of working Americans to virtue-signal with minorities. 

Like the neoconservative intellectuals who migrated from left-leaning lunch tables at City College in the 1930s to mainstream liberalism in the 1960s to an embrace of Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and ’80s, Ungar-Sargon’s political transformation is an exercise in political migration but at digital speed. In 2018, in print, she forcefully condemned the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade for distinguishing between migrant children and “our kids,” calling his comments nationalistic, racist, and xenophobic. A couple of years later, she started deploying similar rhetoric herself, framing immigration as a hostile invasion led by a partnership between cartels and cosmopolitan elites looking for “slave labor.” The language she once condemned became central to her political identity.  

Obviously, Ungar-Sargon isn’t entirely wrong to highlight trade and immigration as issues where elite liberal consensus has wobbled. But she mischaracterizes the terrain. On trade, there’s long been a populist wing of the Democratic Party—think Richard Gephardt’s anti-NAFTA crusade, Sherrod Brown’s “dignity of work” campaign, or Bernie Sanders’s consistent opposition to free trade orthodoxy—that has loudly criticized globalization’s impact on working-class jobs. That view was more prominent among Democrats than Republicans for decades, thanks partly to organized labor. But that faction consistently lost out to the Wall Street–friendly, free trade wing of the party that defined the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama years. 

Similarly with immigration, in the 1990s, Clinton skillfully rode a wave of anti-immigrant public sentiment and GOP policy overreach to put himself and his party on the right side of the issue. During Trump’s first term, most congressional Democrats opposed his crackdowns while remaining within the bounds of popular opinion—opinion that, by 2020, had grown more favorable toward immigrants than it had been in decades thanks to Trumpian cruelty like family separation. The fundamental shift came from activist nonprofits, left-wing funders, and young progressive staffers radicalized under Trump. This faction—not “liberals” writ large—pushed for maximalist policies like decriminalizing border crossings and ending deportations. They briefly hijacked the Democratic Party’s messaging, even triggering a government shutdown over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2018 before leadership quickly reversed course. These same activists then were involved in Joe Biden’s early immigration policy and steered it toward a series of unpopular, chaotic moves—until more pragmatic officials reasserted control and brought numbers down. 

This environment coincided with the transformation of opinion journalism from a constant money loser to a traffic-generating powerhouse. Op-ed sections, once relatively staid parts of newspapers, became engagement engines in the digital age. Hyper-prolific figures with strong, unapologetic opinions—like Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post and now at The Contrarian, the anti-Batya in political orientation and high-speed ideological shapeshifting but similar in traffic-generating potential—became one-person audience machines.  

Ungar-Sargon’s popularity accelerated after she found common cause with Bari Weiss, another Jewish journalist who endured unpleasant treatment from the left (in Weiss’s case as a Columbia undergraduate and then famously at The New York Times). Soon thereafter, Ungar-Sargon began appearing at National Conservatism Conferences alongside intellectual architects of the anti-liberal new right: Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, J. D. Vance, and Peter Thiel. She cites the work of the Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony as a particular influence. Hazony frames nationalism as a moral virtue, grounding his arguments in the Hebrew Bible, where ancient Israel is a model for national self-determination. He positions the Torah’s vision against “universalist” (imperialist) notions ranging from the British Empire to the European Union, which he criticizes for seeking to impose homogeneous values across diverse cultures. To get a sense of this logic, Hazony believes that the Nazis couldn’t have been nationalists—they were imperialists, he says, because they invaded other nations. 

This “nationalist” version of Ungar-Sargon, who graces stages with Hazony and Vance, traded in her old faith in overbroad, deterministic Frankfurt School–style critiques for new right theories that have the same crackpot qualities—skipping over the pragmatic liberal center altogether. 

These right-wing intellectual gatherings validated her arguments about media elitism and immigration within a broader conservative intellectual realignment. This period saw the publication of her 2021 book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. In it, she argued that journalism had transformed from a blue-collar trade into a clerisy for coastal elites. The volume synthesized her evolving critique: Modern media wasn’t just liberally biased—a decades-old chide—but fundamentally disconnected from ordinary Americans, obsessed with identity politics that served its elite interests while deliberately ignoring economic realities faced by the working class. 

Sitcoms that were once about working-class families and procedurals about police detectives became shows about professional urban singles and FBI agents—distinguished from their police brethren by their college degrees. Elite tastes started to separate from the two-thirds of the nation without a college degree as those elites became so much richer. Then they took over the entertainment and media industries, from where they could define the values and the norms of the rest of the country. That created enormous downward pressure, not just economically but spiritually, too. 

Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent war hardened her worldview. Through this lens, she saw progressive politics not just as misguided but as existentially threatening to Jewish safety. She had spent her high school years in Israel. This helps explain her embrace of the MAGA crowd she didn’t want to have a drink near. If progressivism now threatened Jewish survival, no price was too high to defeat it, not even excusing Trump’s attempt to overthrow the previous election. In October 2024, Ungar-Sargon, who had claimed to be undecided, contributed her endorsement on X: “American Jews should vote for Trump because he is the candidate who stands most clearly for the things that have defined us for centuries. A love letter to my community on the eve of the election—on where we come from and our enduring commitment to America’s working class.” 

Her second book, Second Class: How Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, amped up her right-wing Marxist interpretation. In the preface, she writes that she “spent a year traveling around the country interviewing working-class people to get their sense of whether they had a shot at the American Dream, and if not, what might make it more of a reality, or even a possibility.” She isn’t clear how many interviewees there were or how their stories fit into the statistics she presents. Through her anecdotes, she hones her grand theory of the American economy: a rigged system where elites used mass immigration, outsourcing, and identity politics to crush working-class prosperity while insulating themselves from consequences. Bannon told me he “sold a ton of copies” and praised her for articulating the economic nationalist vision he had long championed. Thus, the intellectual journey that began with questioning progressive tactics culminated in full-throated advocacy for “MAGA economics.” 

After the endorsement, gradually, the gently phrased populism of her books would be reduced to absurdities. A few examples exemplify this: “Trump is such a forgiving person,” Ungar-Sargon posted on X, presumably with a straight face, commenting on the cordial exchange of smiles between the 47th president and Obama at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. “A few months ago, President Obama spoke of Trump as a racist threat to democracy with a small penis, and Trump is just over it. Talk about spiritual goals!” Trump’s willingness to sit with the Kenyan-born presidential impostor was really something! 

“Putin only became Enemy #1 in America when the elites decided he got Trump elected. It’s hatred of Trump all the way down, which is in essence just hatred of the working class,” she wrote after Trump and Vance’s Oval Office fiasco with Volodymyr Zelensky, ignoring that deep concern about Vladimir Putin began two decades ago with Moscow’s imperialism and its crushing of Russia’s green shoots of democracy.  

“Our economic policy for the last 60 years was put in place by people who are too lazy to get out from behind their laptops, and so they imagine that nobody would want to work in a factory…because they would rather die than work in a factory…they would rather die than watch their own children…or clean their own toilets,” she declared on Michael Shellenberger‘s podcast this week. “So they shipped manufacturing overseas and imported a slave caste to do all of the service industry jobs.”

What exactly catalyzed Ungar-Sargon’s transformation may never be fully known, even to her. Political metamorphoses rarely stem from single revelatory moments; they’re typically complex cocktails of intellectual evolution, personal grievance, and social reinforcement. For Martin Peretz, a Eugene McCarthy supporter who purchased The New Republic in 1974 and steered it rightward, support for Israel was the gateway drug to a broader set of hawkish views. Neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, who underwent similar journeys, were propelled rightward by ideological reconsideration, concerns about Israel, personal resentments toward former allies, and the intoxicating embrace of new intellectual circles.  

But with Ungar-Sargon, it’s hard to resist a Marxist interpretation: The economic and media opportunity was much more prominent on the right. How else could someone so intelligent end up slinging such crude political analysis on Newsmax? Her view of trade and immigration operates with mechanical and reactionary simplicity—more immigrants mean lower wages, period—ignoring heaps of economic research suggesting that’s not true. She has no interest in antitrust, universal health insurance, or other reform projects that might antagonize her new friends. She rages against elite exploitation of workers while remaining conspicuously silent about the most proven pathways to working-class prosperity: union membership, minimum-wage increases, and the expanded child tax credit that lifted millions of children out of poverty before it expired in 2021. These mostly Democratic policies, which put dollars in pockets, merit barely a mention in her jeremiads.  

Even if you accept her political journey as an honest, if misguided, effort to help forgotten Americans, it’s led her to a place where she’s embraced bad actors, promoted dubious policies, and misread history. Consider this from her Compact column: “Back in 1970, the high-water mark for working-class wages, immigrants represented just 4.7 percent of the total U.S. population. Today, immigrants account for 13.7 percent of the U.S. population—closing in on the highest it’s ever been, in 1890—which coincided with The Gilded Age, another period characterized by extreme inequality.”  

But this framing is incoherent. If the Gilded Age was dystopian, as she suggests, how does she reconcile that with her hero Trump’s repeated invocations of William McKinley’s tariffs and the 1890s as a national high point? Moreover, she argues that the foreign-born share of the U.S. population is now at Gilded Age levels and implies that this correlates with rising inequality. This is lousy history. America also experienced large waves of immigration in the antebellum years, yet Alexis de Tocqueville and others saw it as astonishingly egalitarian. And some other factors might explain the Gilded Age’s extreme inequality better than immigration—monopolies, the lack of labor protections, unregulated child labor, and the virtual absence of social safety nets, to name a few.  

It takes a similar torturing of history to blame the decline of the working class in our day on immigration and trade, as she does, and skip past the vast deregulation of the economy imposed by policy makers in both parties beginning in the late 1970s. These decisions led to de-unionization, rampant industry consolidation, collapsing rates of entrepreneurship, hypertrophic growth of the financial sector at the expense of industrial production, the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s, the financial crisis of 2008, and the decline of airline and other transportation services to towns and smaller cities across America. 

Most glaringly, Ungar-Sargon’s passionate defense of working Americans coexists with enthusiastic support for a MAGA movement that is further dismantling their protections. The Trump administration she supports has systematically weakened the National Labor Relations Board, appointed union-hostile judges, proposed massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, and is gutting the mostly working-class federal workforce. It has decimated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, dropping nine lawsuits the CFPB had brought on behalf of consumers and workers. Trump illegally fired two commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, leaving the independent agency in limbo. Among other things, it is now pausing cases against pharmacy benefit managers who jack up the price of insulin. Ungar-Sargon’s silence on these contradictions shows that she’s abandoned whatever intellectual independence she may have had and has poured the Kool-Aid straight down her throat.

She believes that American workers have borne the brunt of globalization, but she offers no good evidence that blunderbuss tariffs, instead of precise ones, can bring back their jobs and increase living standards. Her faith in this unprecedented economic tariff experiment, which hasn’t been tried since Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression, is unabashed and led to her being mocked online as “Baghdad Batya.” One viral video of her TV appearances has the communist anthem “Internationale” playing in the background. Her Free Press debut column cheering Trumponomics appeared on April 3, when the tariffs were announced. She was on TV as the markets were crashing, defending the Trump taxes on everything from tea to Toyotas over the grim news that the economy was getting killed by the protectionist gambit.  

What sets Ungar-Sargon apart is her fluency in the hermeneutics of suspicion of the Frankfurt School—tools meant to decode power and ideology—making her a state-of-the-art pundit for the Trumpian new right. She deploys the grammar of critique to defend a politics of resentment. That paradox is central to her telegenic appeal and authority—and ensures her continued prominence, regardless of whether her analysis serves the people she claims to champion. On the bright side, it seems safe for her to drink at her old favorite bar. 

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