This episode is brought to you by the Master of Arts and Catholic Education program at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology.

Dedicated to the renewal of Catholic education, this degree equipped school teachers and administrators to bring Christ to the center of every classroom

through a focus on sacred scripture, theology, Christian anthropology, and the traditional liberal arts.

Batia Ungar Sargon is opinion editor at Newsweek, an author of bad news, how Woke Media Are Undermining Democracy, which we actually

covered on the podcast. Her new book is Second Class, How the Elites Betrayed America's

Working, Men, and Women, Our Topic Today. Welcome, Bata. We'll be on a first name basis since this is

our second time we've been on the air. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real thrill and pleasure to be here

with you. Who are the elites? Who are they? Who do you mean? So the premise of the book is that

you know, we're often told that this country is deeply polarized along political lines or racial

lines. The truth is, is that none of that is true. We are not polarized along political or

racial lines. There's a lot of unity actually in this country, even around issues that seem

very contentious if you watch the news. But there is a class divide in this country.

Increasingly, there is one class that is controlling the vast majority of the GDP that is

healthier, lives longer, and has a shot at the American dream. And then there's a class that really

does not have those things anymore, is struggling to achieve the American dream,

even struggling to achieve basic stability. This other class is plagued by deaths of despair,

deaths from alcoholism, suicide, fentanyl overdose, things like that. They struggle to become

homeowners and their lives are characterized by a kind of precarity that would

be completely alien to the other caste. And what is the dividing line between these two classes?

I argue in the book based on enormous amounts of data that the barrier there, the dividing

line is a college degree. And so when I talk about the elites, I'm really talking about the top 20%

who at this point control over 50% of the GDP. People with a college degree, often more,

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