Crotty is gobsmacked by Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, a rare media elite who gets MAGA.

"These people are not voting for Trump because they think he’s moral. They’re voting for him because it is undeniable what he accomplished and because he represented their future."

There must have been a political sex change over at Newsweek because I am shocked that they have allowed a deputy opinion editor to utter true and fair things about Donald J. Trump and his base. Per Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon, speaking about the first GOP presidential debate, "...Trump’s accomplishments were so vast on behalf of the working class. To ask people to not vote for a man who immeasurably improved their lives, who made this country feel like it cared about them for the first time in generations, who put money in their bank accounts, and for the first time made the American dream feel like something they could start dreaming about again—to ask them not to vote for him is not just ridiculous … These people are not voting for Trump because they think he’s moral. They’re voting for him because it is undeniable what he accomplished and because he represented their future."

I love it when another highly educated thought leader finally gets it. It’s been very solitary out here since 2015. Going by the shamefully paltry subscriber numbers for the Crotty Farm Report, it still is!

Batya Ungar-Sargon put it perfectly. We are not electing a saint for canonization. We are electing a President to run what is still the most powerful country on earth at a time of great peril in our cities, at our borders, inside a corrupted Department of Justice, an influence-peddling Oval Office, a dissembling media, a censorious social media, biased search, and from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and anti-American Socialist ideology on the march in pre-school, grade school, high school, college, corporate America, nonprofits, religion, entertainment, fashion, art, and beyond. This is a tipping point, a turning point. And if we have to elect a bona fide narcissist braggart to right the ship, most working-class Americans will exclaim, "hell yeah!"

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, which takes a view long foreshadowed by leftist Stanford philosopher Richard Rorty in his work Achieving Our Country that the Democratic Party and Democrat-dominated media have stopped caring about working-class lunch bucket issues. As the nature of newsrooms becomes increasingly elitist, they instead obsess over nationalized “High Theory” discussions about far Woke virtue signaling. In the closed American minds in most DC and New York media, Trump voters are a mess of racist, homophobic “deplorables.” These smug groupthink snobs do not grasp Trump voters because MAGA is not part of their work, social, and parenting coffee klatch.

But, like some weird Darwinian mutation, Batya Ungar-Sargon, who likely floats in those same circles, gets MAGA. She might be the first editorial elite, outside myself, who grasps its true egalitarian nature. As she noted in her Free Press comments about the debate, “The GOP base is the working class, and the working class is not hardcore. They are extremely tolerant. They’re conservative by and large on social issues, much more so than Democrats, but they are deeply, deeply tolerant people. And the class issue unites them much more than a political identity. And, you know, this is something that I think is very hard for people to understand: working-class conservatives hate the Republican Party. They hate, hate, hate the Republican Party.”

Speak it, sister. The reason guys like myself also losthe the Republican Party is that we see what the pre-Trump GOP did to America’s working class: at the border, with China, with horrific unilateral wars of choice abroad, with the opioid crisis. Since I am not culturally working class, MAGA doesn’t recognize me. Since I call out their Trump derangement, bicoastal elites hate me. But I recognize them both. As the Black Keys just sang into my heart at the Minnesota State Fair, “I’m a lonely boy.”

Batya Ungar-Sargon does not stop there. She is perhaps the only other serious author besides myself––I worked for years in the South Bronx striving to elevate black male academic achievement against the backdrop of Soros-funded indoctrination––who grasps the growing solidarity between black men and MAGA. In this regard, Ungar-Sargon’s take on Trump’s signature criminal justice reform initiative, the First Step Act––which got over 5,000 African Americans released from prison––is salutary. Now that Trump himself has a mug shot, the irony is not lost on black men released due to the First Step Act. In her Newsweek editorial role, Batya Ungar-Sargon is giving a forum to those forgotten black voices. As formerly imprisoned Craig Scott says in his Newsweek op-ed, “It's hard for me to imagine others like me released from prison under the First Step Act voting against the man who freed us. Having seen his mugshot only makes us more inclined to vote for him.”

There is hope in Mudville when Newsweek starts giving voice to the proto-Trumpian voiceless.