MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
01:34:29 Share

From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

Second terms are usually intellectually exhausted. And maybe if Trump had been reelected in 2020, that's how it would be. But he wasn't. And so between 2021 and 2025, the ferment driving MAGA's ideas deepened quite a bit. The nature of its coalition expanded quite a bit.

How much does Trump himself care about this fight over ideas, these visions of the future? I'm not sure he does. But the people who are staffing his administration, both people at the top, but much more than that, the 20 and 30-somethings who actually do the work of presidencies, they do care. Ideas do matter. The intellectual cultures that form political parties, they matter.

James Pogue is a contributing writer at Times Opinion, and he's been covering the new right at Vanity Fair. And over the past few years, he has published piece after great piece on the MAGA intellectual scene and the various factions and ideas and people within it. And so I wanted to talk with him about the ideas that hold MAGA together, the factional fights that threaten to tear it apart, and whether any of this actually affects what President Donald Trump does or thinks. As always, my email is reclineshow at NYTimes.com.

James Pogue, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm so honored. So you've been covering the new right for a while now. How would you describe the thing you've been covering? Is it a coalition? Is it a scene? What's the term for it? It's a coalition now. I think what we have seen over the time that I've been paying attention to this stuff is

which goes back to the first time I met J.D. Vance at a diner in our mutual hometown. At that point, I had never heard these words that are sort of the buzzwords of the whole movement. The regime, you know, elite replacement, this attempt to...

Essentially, like, reshape not just American politics in the way that elections always do, but actually reshape the ruling oligarchy of the United States. I didn't know anything about this stuff. And now, you know, suddenly this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's often...

somewhat exaggeratedly, but often described as sort of the dark lord, intellectual godfather of this whole thing, suddenly he's mainstream. And so we're seeing like a true political coalition having to navigate very, very big questions about how to keep themselves together. Well, let's go back a couple of years. It's 2022. Donald Trump is not yet officially running for president again. He'll announce very, very late towards the end of that year. J.D. Vance is certainly not the vice presidential candidate yet.

And you're covering these people. You're going to their parties. You're, you know, outside having your smokes with them. If I had asked you then what ideas bound them together, what would you have told me?

It would be, I mean, J.D. is the perfect person. J.D. is the sort of unifying figure within the coalition. He is for this intellectual wing, like, as they would say, their guy, which is a term that comes up a lot in these worlds. And what that means is not just he shares some politics with us. It means he's formed by the same forces as them, which is largely derived from Twitter and old neo-reactionary blogs and things like that.

But so with JD, you know, he had a conversion to...

to a worldview that is, I would say now, pretty general amongst magaspheres, but wasn't in 2022. He had a conversion towards a politics where he saw a global empire deriving from the imperial seat here in Washington, D.C., that was run by people who were actively engaging in politics detrimental to and plundering the wealth and essentially value systems of

of the people he came from. And he describes them as my people in a way that, you know, when you hear it, you go, what is the subtext of that word? And you could sort of argue that J.D. Vance is in the modern era, the first type of politician to use phrases like my people with the subtext of possibly that means, you know, Anglo-Saxons and Scots-Irish people living in middle America and building a politics around them. And so, yeah,

You know, J.D. came to this with an idea that the Jamie Diamonds and the Mark Zuckerbergs and people like that were not just sort of like enemies because they weren't conservative. They're actually class enemies and enemies of an oligarchy that they wanted to replace and essentially become. One of the things that struck me reading your dispatches and it has long struck me reading these people is a really profound pessimism in this intellectual class about modernity.

This sense that these people share that feels very much in a way like 70s leftist to me, that human beings are now living in a very inhuman way. Very much so. Spin up their critique of modernity. What do they say about it? Well, so Curtis is a reactionary and we use reactionary in a very casual way. Curtis is a reactionary in the way that he thinks that, you know,

Pennsylvania farmers in 1800 were better formed people than people today. And Curtis, you know, is to some degree a technologist. He's founded a tech company. He comes from the tech world.

But he's actually written, as you may have seen, like he's written against the idea of techno-optimism because he thinks that technology has weakened us and degraded us. I think J.D. Vance is very much the kind of person who comes from that world. He's a little less strong on the kind of like tech skepticism stuff than some of the people you'll hear in this world. But just to give a really easy, good example, Bollinger.

Basically, everybody in this kind of intellectual elite would kind of argue that the communications technologies that we have developed in the past few years are not really very beneficial to human life. And like, candidly, like, that's a kind of inarguable point. And this kind of like world we've built where everyone's addicted to their phones and everyone is in this, you know, sort of...

what we might call a rent-seeking economy, where the incentive structures for a great number of American corporations that are, to some degree, our most powerful entities today, are sort of built around this thing of getting you to pay money every month. And so it's not so much that when you hear these kind of luminaries of this world, like Blake Masters,

Pretty famously, when he was running for senator from Arizona, he recommended that people read Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. And this created this kind of big scandal. But Blake's point was there's a lot to learn here about what tech has done to us and what it has done to us on a personal level in terms of sort of investing.

infeeling, you know, what they might call, you know, like infeeling men, infeeling their power to do things in the world, but also in the sense of kind of creating a feudal structure under which human agency is kind of withdrawn from a human who now can't really control the device that decides everything they do all day.

And so if I may be candid, I actually find that critique quite compelling. And I think you're right. It does go back to a 70s leftism, as in fact, a lot of this thought does.

Ted Kaczynski, he's been on my mind recently because he seems to be popping up in a lot of places. So he was there in Luigi Mangione's Goodreads. He is, as you note, referenced quite often on the new right, famously by Blake Masters, a Senate candidate from Arizona who's a Peter Thiel protege.

And it's worth noting, Masters lost. This is not necessarily coming out of this world the most politically optimized way of talking about things. J.D. Vance underperformed in his Senate election in Ohio compared to other Republican candidates, compared to the Republican governor of Ohio. And Masters lost a quite winnable race in Arizona. But Masters recommended people read Kaczynski. He's coming back a little bit as a—

contrarian spirit of an age. Why? Well, I mean, in so much as you and I sort of like exponents here of the regime media can be compelled and interested by this, you know, literal terrorist manifesto, like it clearly was hitting on something that a lot of people came to feel. I would argue that

You know, sort of post-2016, when our politics became consumed by these kind of like technological forces that were causing like waves of outrage and...

like divisions and hatreds within our society that seemed actually impossible to corral because of these like network forces that everyone was like completely addicted to. And, you know, candidly, it's just not true in my opinion that this is just like politicos who are feeling like this. It's just, my mom is on Facebook, you know, like it's not, everybody is experiencing this. And I think it started to kick people into a gear where

It's a physically unpleasant way of going through life, like staring at a phone, your head hunched over, you're losing your eyesight because you're staring at this thing so close. And so all of a sudden, things that Kaczynski were saying, you know, in his critique of industrial society, in his critique of something that goes a lot deeper than communications technologies, all of a sudden that started to make sense to people on a gut level who would have never shared this years ago. And...

I think broadly speaking, we may still have an entire societal consensus on both left and right that once the technology is here, you can't really put the genie back in the bottle.

But I think we also have a pretty broad-based societal consensus on left and right that these technologies are not benefiting us and that it would almost be better if, let's not say necessarily they'd never been invented, but if some, let's say, societal agency, some force within our society had been able to corral how they function and what they did to us during that period.

I don't want to jump too far ahead in our story, but I think it would be strange to listen to that answer and then not ask this question. We just nearly turned off TikTok. Right. And the movement that saved TikTok and that put TikTok's CEO in a prime seat at the inauguration was not the Democratic Party in the cathedral or the regime or whatever you might want to call it.

It was Donald Trump, the icon of the new right, with J.D. Vance sitting not far from him. Has there been a mass howl over this? You know, I mean, this is kind of if you want to talk about like how this whole thing could, in my opinion, end up going pretty bad. Oh, I mean, there's a million, million different ways this could all end up going bad. And in certain ways, it already is.

But part of it is that Trump himself, as the sort of kingly figure looking down over this squabbling coalition, he's a patronage politician at this point. And, you know, if you're a patronage politician, you look down at the Saccums around you and you say, well, that guy's got a constituency and I've got to keep that guy happy. And so, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was originally Trump saying, yo, TikTok, we got a problem here.

And then he flipped because he discovered that there was a constituency for it that was going to hurt him if he lost them. And so I would wager, you know, based on the conversations I've had with JD over the years, I would wager that if JD had had his way, there would still not be TikTok. I would say as well, just from my own perspective to editorialize a little bit, like,

Something opened up in our society when we saw TikTok go down for a minute. Because I think there's been a pretty long period in our history where we just thought,

We do not have the state capacity to shut something with 170 million users and however many billions of dollars in revenue that it has. And through some combination of sort of Trumpian resurgence and a real belief that they can suddenly like wield the levers of state in ways to do their stuff that are far more powerful than they believed in 2016, something has opened up where everyone kind of realizes now that the state has to get back in the driver's seat.

Ooh, that's interesting. I'm going to think about whether I think that's true. That's an interesting point. And I'm not sure that the way the political system has absorbed that moment of TikTok shutting itself down in order to generate outrage and then opening itself back up and saying, thank you, President Trump, is being taken as evidence of state capacity or state incapacity. I mean, the whole thing has looked very weak to me on behalf of the government.

There is a strange dynamic to these people, a strange tension in literally who they are to me, which is on the one hand, if you ask me, what is an interesting view they all seem to share? It's that the mega communication technologies upon which we now do our communicating and our thinking in public and our thinking together are

are bad for us. And then if you said to me, what is another characteristic they all share? I would say they are the most online politicians in America. And that goes for JD Vance and it goes for Blake Masters and it goes for a lot of these people that we're talking about. To the extent anything is forming, these people and their worldviews, it is a very unusual level of engagement with what I would call the replies of

And the comment threads on YouTube, right? It's a digging deeper into the online wormhole, which seems to be creating a sort of reflexive despair. I can never even tell if the despair is projection by seeing what it's doing to themselves. They say, well, this definitely seems bad. But there is this kind of strange tension in this movement of this rejection and then complete actual literal embrace of tech modernity.

So to keep with the old school leftism for a second, what's the phrase, you know, dismantling the master's house with the master's tools?

The phrase is you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools, which I think is a useful Freudian slip there. Wow, that's very funny, actually. Because soon enough, then Elon Musk buys the house and becomes your leader's best friend. Like, I mean, you're literally watching it play out in a way. Well, so to go into like how this really worked, like there was something about Twitter pre-Musk that actually like made...

made their culture very vibrant. And it essentially worked, not that anyone understood this at the time, I don't think, but it worked to serve their movement incredibly well. Because basically to succeed on Twitter, as they will describe this, to be good at Twitter, people talk about this. Are you good enough at Twitter to like build your world out of this? And, you know, these Anons who are coming up, who are...

I mean, I don't want to blow up anyone's spot because some of this I don't have completely fact-checked. But I will tell you behind the scenes that 100%, some of these people who came up as Twitter anons are now going to be going into the administration. They're going to be taking jobs in the actual seat of power now. And they built that by having this worldview that was just...

to a lot of people who weren't even necessarily right wing. It felt cooler and it felt as I think anybody even, you know, coming from the left or coming from a fairly liberal persuasion, like,

could look at Twitter during some of those years, you know, sort of 2016 up through 2020, and just feel like it was only really allowing people in the mainstream to have a very circumscribed worldview. And in so much as Twitter operated as quote unquote, the, you know, ultimate editor of institutions like the New York Times, it gave them a huge amount of freedom to kind of experiment and yet not

not drive themselves into super extreme positions because if you went into super extreme positions, suddenly you're banned and you're not getting a lot of engagement.

Post-Musk, that has changed. And so what you've seen, in fact, and people on the right will criticize this a lot, actually, is you've seen a lot of jokers and morons who can really drive conversation by being really adversarial, by policing the bounds of the movement, by jumping on anything that deviates even a little bit from what they've decided is the sort of MAGA agreed, this is how we do it.

kind of worldview. And so, for example, when the H-1B visa dust-up happened over Christmas just now, what you saw were really extreme voices of people who are pretty much openly saying America is a nation built by white Europeans and we should get it back to being a nation built for white Europeans. And that was what basically became the general view because that's now what succeeds.

There's other issues here, too, though, that you see in some tributaries of the movement. I mean, RFK Jr. in some ways is an awkward fit in a Republican administration, but actually in this movement—

His concerns about microplastics and vaccines and the way that we have moved away from a natural way of living and what that is doing to our bodies fits. There's a, I'm a weightlifter, but there's a lionization of the aesthetics and I would say almost spiritual dimensions of weightlifting. There's a movement back to very much older visions of masculinity, a kind of Spartan aesthetic. You see it in people at its max, like patriarchy.

bronze-aged pervert, but you also just see it in sub stacks that Marc Andreessen writes. Talk to me a bit about this broader embrace of the past over the future.

Or the present even. Well, so I think what we've basically seen in the last few months is a consensus built that the way back to the past is by rocket shipping into the future. And some of that is actually coalition politics. Some of that is, I think, in my opinion, some people who are more tech skeptical just kind of saying, all right, let's try this.

And so you can go back to, for example, I was friends with David Graeber, you know, the great anarchist philosopher. And David did a debate with Peter Thiel on tech. And the critique was technology is not actually benefiting us. It's become this rent-seeking capitalist kind of evil. In fact, like, check on human progress. And...

This is a bit of a famous moment for some people who follow this stuff because Thiel sat down with David and agreed in broad strokes. If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, take those same people and then tell them they're not going to get any resources at all unless they spend the majority of their time competing with one another to prove to you they already know what they're going to create.

Well, that's the system we have. And it's incredibly effective in stifling any possibility of innovation. So I'll leave off at that and see what Peter has to say. Well, there's...

A disturbing amount. I actually agree with David on here. And, you know, he would have said, well, the way we fix this is by unleashing capitalism. Graeber thought it was by building a more communal society where people had more agency amongst each other. But the trick here is that when you talk, for example, about masculinity, um,

There's a really fundamental question that you're seeing even people like Mark Zuckerberg wrestle with now, where he's saying, you know, masculine culture has been excluded from American corporate culture and things like this. And

What people are wondering is, you know, do men need violence to feel good? Like, are men supposed to be ultra competitive and, you know, the best men get the best women and the others are sort of shunted aside? And, you know, that's sort of the Bronze Age pervert kind of thing. Do men need a physical culture in order to feel good in their lives and progress and do excellent work in whatever field they've chosen? And like,

You know, what we're seeing is that turns out to be quite compelling, even to bring back Zuckerberg to someone who has discovered, as I did many years ago, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And if you're in the world of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, like suddenly you are in a very masculinist culture and it's not a super violent, competitive, bad, I don't know, misogynist world.

But it is a world where I think everybody gets on the mat and goes, if I didn't have this, like, I wouldn't be okay in my life. And so, you know, you could argue, and I will argue here, that probably Mark Zuckerberg is pretty far into these new right-ish conversations about masculinity. And I think this sort of goes back to the tech skepticism. Can you build technologies that in fact help people understand

in this case men, as they're very preoccupied with, can you help men

work in tech fields that are going to build things, that are going to go Mars, that are going to answer that sort of like thing they believe about men need a searching quest, men need violence, men need competition. Are we going to go take Panama? You know, some of this is literally going back to just understanding tribal societies and thinking like, if men don't have a project to go to war and do something for their collective nation or tribe, they're going to feel lost. And because

And behind the scenes, you will hear people, I did, this has been years I've been hearing this, like, we have to invade Mexico and take out the cartels, not because it's good policy, but because if we fight China, it's going to get really bad. But if we don't have a war, nobody's going to have anything to do or shape us. War is a force that gives men meaning. Exactly.

And so that's kind of how you square that circle, at least how I understand it. And just to jump in here, I know this is a long answer, but I think it's relevant. You know, it's the podcast age, man. All the answers are long from here on out. And, you know, so like RFK is a super, super compelling addition to this coalition.

I think it's actually in a weird way the most interesting part of this coalition. But, you know, RFK, you could think of a strong ally of the worldview that RFK is bringing as being someone like Thomas Massey, who's not really new right. Do you want to say who Thomas Massey is? So Thomas Massey is a Kentucky congressman who actually he represents a district right across the river from where J.D. and I grew up.

And he built his own home, you know, from limestone he hewed from his land. But he lives off grid. He drives a Tesla. He powers his home with a Tesla battery that he repurposed. But he's also a regenerative farmer. And he raises beef and cows.

Micah Metacroft, who's I think one of the smartest people in all of this world and not by any means a true radical. Micah described this to me as really an attempt to rebuild a sense of yeomanry in the United States, a sense of agency that you have control over your physical environment. So they'll talk about right to repair, which, you know, people on the left talk about as well.

But the right to actually get into your highly complex new Toyota Tacoma and have the government say, no, you're supposed to be allowed to work on this thing. Have the right to manipulate your land in ways that, you know, certain environmental policies do make a little bit difficult depending on where you are. And so yet again, it's all of a piece of sort of like.

I don't want to say purely masculine agency, but it's a way of rebuilding a sense of yeomanry and agency in this new golden American dynamic dawn that everyone's now promising. I've been thinking about this for some months, and I've tried to draw it out in different conversations, and I feel like I've mostly failed, so I'm going to try to do it again here. One intellectual difference between the left and the right that has felt very salient to me over the past couple of years is

is that the right is very interested in an old idea, something you used to read much more about. It's all over classical texts of human formation, of how do you flourish into a man or a woman and pursue a certain sort of excellence. And the left is interested in something different.

Some people connect it more to original sin, but it's a little bit about purging. It's about moving away from being what your base nature would make you and becoming enlightened above it. It's a remaking of the self away from your impulses, away from implicit bias, implicit discrimination. There were very big podcasts on the left in this period, like Maintenance Phase, that are very hostile to most self-improvement cultures. And

I've actually thought this is a much bigger division line in our politics. If you look at what get called the bro podcast, you know, but that's a pretty big world, but they're very self-improvement focused. And the left is very therapeutic focused, right? You know, process out the emotions. Don't, you know, I don't feel like I have this completely nailed down, but in terms of the intellectual cultures, it is one of the ways they differ now most in my mind. Yeah. I mean, I,

To go back to Uncle Ted, as people call him, a lot of what people like in that manifesto in the right-wing world is actually not purely the tech critique. It's the parts where Kaczynski talks about how over-socialized the left is. And what he means there is sort of vague if you're not already a little bit in the headspace and understanding where he's getting to. But

I mean, I'll start by saying that I don't think you could possibly be more right about that fundamental dividing line. I think broadly speaking, it's not even just a leftist project. Liberalism is to some degree an idea of, you know, we got to a point where we almost thought we can reduce harms as a societal project almost to a millenarian extent.

The left really did feel like, you know, men can just be better. Like we don't have to, we can suddenly have a societal conversation and suddenly men are going to behave in ways where in the workplace, we no longer have interpersonal sexual issues and we can get rid of this.

And the idea of reshaping human people into some into forms that actually just like fit into collective structures well, and then policing the bounds of their behavior when they don't fit into those collective structures. I do think that like really came to shape, not just leftism, but liberal centrism across the Western world.

And so it becomes a very, very difficult conversation to have suddenly an election where half the country has via Twitter and podcasts and all kinds of different things that liberals are not even aware of 90% of the time. And suddenly people are saying, no, no, we actually have a different conception of human nature than you. And I'm 38 for most of my lifetime, you know, living under this kind of neoliberal establishment consensus and

That conversation wasn't even possible to have in the public realm. And arguably, it's still not possible to have in the public realm because the media spheres are so separate.

This is

app is essential. The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place. Download it now at nytimes.com slash app. I want to go at this other concept that has been dancing around the conversation, which is the regime. Yeah. When someone like J.D. Vance talks about the regime, what is he talking about? So I have a very clear answer to this, actually, because when I first met J.D.,

He was talking about the process that now they are trying to fully achieve of overthrowing the American regime. And

You know, I met him just sort of coming from the left as a curious observer, writing a skeptical piece actually for the American conservative, which is a really weird project. And it was it was kind of like nice of him to be willing to participate. So he had to do this process. And this is what year we're talking in. This was when he was just entering into his Senate race.

And he had to kind of sit me down and explain the basics as though to a kindergartner. And I asked, you know, what is this regime? And he said the regime is the 20 percent of the American public that knows that its children are going to have to get into one of the IVs or Chicago or Stanford in order to get ahead in this essentially oligarchical culture that he believes we live in.

And so when people think about the regime, they frequently kind of mistake what the right is talking about these days because they're frequently thinking that it's synonymous with the deep state. And it's not really that. What it is, is this complex of university professors, NGOs, which I'm sure we'll talk about at least a little bit, and the way that

And the tech companies.

And the tech companies, although that's a little bit changing. Well, now it's changing, but I think this is an interesting question about it, because as I understood this set of concepts, it was the idea that even compared to other periods in American life, that you now had a unity of culture across the commanding heights of society.

American thought and policymaking. So the people who run the government and run the military believe the same thing as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who believe the same thing as the nonprofit heads and everybody sort of moving back and forth, believe the same thing as the people in the media and they're all talking to each other and going to Davos together. And it's not exactly about money. There are plenty of rich right-wing billionaires, the Adelsons and so on.

And multimillionaires. But it's about a sense of a loose coalition of institutions that can set the boundaries of acceptable thought. Yes. And they would argue that

perhaps compellingly, and perhaps this was for the best, that the idea of equality and equity became the sort of governing worldview. The idea that all men are created equal became the governing liberal worldview shared across all institutions. And then another ideology of essentially globalism. And so fundamentally, like part of what goes into conservatism is that

All men are not created equal. Some men are born to be elite. Some men are born to rule. I think it's worth talking about this question of equity because it cuts in different ways here. You could imagine a worldview of the kind you're describing being extremely pro-regime. If you have made it to the top of Harvard or the top of the Ford Foundation or the top of government or the top of the military, you know, not all men are created equal. And here we have the ultimate outcomes of our society.

meritocracy or our system of selection. And you have to accept that. This is not a world of people, though, who say Barack Obama represented the very best of us. And the problem is we did not give him sufficient fealty. This is a world of people very much contesting who is on top. I've had Patrick Deneen on the show. One of his big arguments is about replacing the elites with other elites. And so I think it's worth bringing in

Some of these concepts are unusual for people, I think. This sort of other thing that is stewing that I think is more connected to Donald Trump than a lot of the pieces we've been talking about. But people say Trump is a nationalist, but there's this related idea, traditionalism, which I think maybe does not mean what people think it means when they hear that, that Steve Bannon is very into. What is traditionalism?

So traditionalism is like a really loose ideology. And the traditionalist thinker that probably most people will have heard of is this guy, Julius Evola. A household name, if there ever was one. Yeah, exactly. Everybody loves weird Italian. Yeah, like a weird, I'm not even sure. Some places claim he was a nobleman, some don't. And, you

You know, Evola had this whole deeply esoteric philosophy of... I can't even really go into it. You know, ideas of solar-influenced people and nations and lunar-influenced and things like that. And so you'll hear, to go a little bit afield here, you'll hear...

You know, Alexander Dugin talking in Russia about solar Putin and things like this. And that's coming from this traditionalist ferment. But, you know, essentially traditionalism is an attempt to formalize a lot of what we're talking about. That there are these kind of like fundamental, honestly, like elites. That there are fundamental beliefs.

differences between peoples. You know, Suivola very much was one of these people that thought that whites were above other races and things like that. And, you know, we can sort of speculate and talk for days and days and days about whether or not Bannon believes that racial element of the traditionalist thing. I have talked to him a lot and he's very careful about saying, hey, my populist nationalism is pro-American citizen.

I don't care what color of an American citizen you are, but I am pro-American citizen. And so very strong ideas about who should become an American citizen.

The reason I'm bringing this up to just because you're right, getting into Ebola can be incredibly both complex and bizarre. I do really recommend this great book by a guy named Matthew Rose called A World After Liberalism, which if you would like to be introduced to more ideas like this, I think people should pick up. But the reason I'm bringing it up is that nationalism is, I think, an idea people think they know about. George W. Bush was

was in many ways a very strong nationalist. And after 9-11, we had this period where everybody's wearing flagpins. What Steve Bannon, what a lot of the new right people seem to share, what I think Donald Trump intuitively represents, you could call it a more ethnic nationalism, but I think it's more of a mystic nationalism. And, you know, they'll all protest and park his blood and soil has very dark

But they'll protest sometimes, I think, if you say it's a blood and soul nationalism. But you have people like J.D. Vance in his RNC speech get up and talk about how many generations of his family are buried in Kentucky. It is not, I think, just about becoming a citizen. They're not excited right now about the idea that you had H-1B visa holders who would have children and they become citizens. They're trying to stop that from happening. It's not about being a citizen. It is about being in some way connected at a level they respect to the American people.

homeland and spirit such that you will fight and die for it and that your connection to it is not merely rational or opportunistic or instrumental. I mean, you could correct what you think I'm saying that's wrong here, but that's my best rendering of it. I think that's very true, but you have to kind of incorporate another element to it. So,

To go back to someone like George Bush or Ronald Reagan, I agree, they're nationalists. And at the end of the day, these kind of spiritual conceptions that existed latently in our culture long through the modern era of, you know, America is a shining city on a hill, America is a special project, America is even, you know, on the right, like some form of Zion put here by God to lead people into a better future and things like this. These are, in their own ways, spiritual views, right? Yeah.

And they retained a great deal of force on the right for a long time. But what a Steve Bannon would say is that actually the politics, the superstructures of global politics made being a casual nationalist increasingly impossible. And so the forces of globalization, the worldview that, hey, like it doesn't matter how many people come in,

What Bannon does is basically say, like, look, this is the structure. This is how it works. This is how the dollar system works. This is how our system of overseas bases works. This is how global trade flows work. And this is why you can't have that nationalism anymore. And that's why we have to destroy it. So the Bannon project actually very much is that.

kind of policy-based attempt to explain to people in Kentucky why he feels like they have been screwed and why he feels like their leaders no longer allow them to say, it'd be great to have my kids buried in the same cemetery as my grandparents. Because suddenly, I think this is true, suddenly that did start to sound like a weird thing to say.

And for most of American history, that would have just been normal. Sure, yeah, that's great. Like, you want your whole family buried in the same cemetery. Like, we all want to stick together. We're all one little group of family. But no, wait, wait, I want to stop this for a second. I'm not saying you're making this argument, but I don't agree that that's what was notable about what J.D. Vance was saying. And I had heard him say this first at the NatCon conference, which is a very sort of interesting ideological dimension of all this. But what he was saying was that because Americans

of that lineage of burial, that his relationship to America was very different. He talks about why people will fight and die for homeland. And there's a whole thing. I mean, you talk about it at points in this movement about, you know, who really fights for America? And I think Bannon has his line. It's like, the elites don't fight. That's just not what they do. And, and,

It's a fundamental questioning. I mean, this is why it becomes politically controversial. It's a fundamental questioning of the allegiance of a naturalized immigrant or a second-generation American to the land, which, by the way, a lot of immigrants and children of immigrants fight if you look at the numbers here. But there's an argument about who's a real American here and that something is coming through, being connected to the soil here.

that, you know, all these immigrants coming over the southern border, even if they all learn English, they don't have it. And so if you let a bunch of men, you're going to fundamentally change the character of the nation. And that's why I connect this to Trump. I think there's a lot of ideas we're talking about here that Trump does not give a damn about. But I do think he's a very intuitive sense that nations are connected and

To ethnicity, to, you know, length of time here that that his sense that you have a bunch of immigrants, you will change and corrupt the character of a nation. Like he believes that I think very strongly without having all of Steve Bannon's architecture of complex theories about, you know, international bases and dollar exchange rates. Well, so, yeah, I mean, I yet again couldn't agree more with that.

The term that people will use is heritage Americans. And I sometimes get confused because there's a little weirdness in how they use that. Like our Italians who came in the Ellis Island era, heritage Americans. And candidly, most people who are using this phrase would not say that's true. There is something about the heritage American that comes from those people.

you know, original tribes of largely Scots, Irish, or English people settling the trans Appalachian or the Northeast. Um, and an America that derives its culture from the song story and religion of those people that is being diluted. And, you know, it's funny because I think a lot of people in this world would look at liberals as sort of like pearl clutching and

And being completely unreasonable because their point would be that just happens to be the Americans who built the nation. And if you'd want France to suddenly be a country where it doesn't matter at all that you had French heritage going back to the Gauls, then that's fine. But then you just don't care about countries at all. And then you and me can sit here and go, well, downstream of that, you're basically saying that all these people can never be real Americans again.

This is fundamentally, particularly on this continent, in this nation built on ideas and things like that, this is fundamentally anti-American. And so you probably saw, I quoted Jeremy Carl, who I know quite well, who worked in the Trump administration, and who wrote a book about, you know, so anti-white racism. And Carl will say...

In the pages of the New York Times, America is not an idea. America is a people. And it's the line Vance uses a version of that in that speech. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas like the rule of law and religious liberty, things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea.

It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation. I want to go back to the question of what this fight is actually about. Because in a way, I think it's about Barack Obama.

I don't think it's in any way an accident that Donald Trump arises. He's a main pusher of the birther smear, but that his movement and what powers him arises in response to Obama, because there is this question of what Obama represents. I mean, is it the triumph of America that you can have this man, Barack Hussein Obama, with the complex international history he has, with the heritage he has?

who rises up through every single level of the American meritocracy, dominates it, is elected president in a overturning, in many ways, of the most toxic and abhorrent way

elements of American history and its past, a kind of triumph of our idea over our actual history. And he's this brilliant guy and judicious and, you know, a million different things, right? Is this what we were going for? And then there's this whole part of the country that does not feel good about this at all. And that gets talked about as racism, and certainly some of it was, but there's also something else that I think they have to begin to describe why they don't like this.

And I do think they come up in part, not just with this sort of heritage Americanism, but with this idea that

What the meritocracy is getting you now are people who aren't the best in America. They want to take America too far from what it was. They want to take it over, right? This is actually a war for control. And the people J.D. Vance comes from and represents, they're being screwed in this war for control, not because necessarily they're white or they're black, but because it's really a class war and equality has become a cudgel for them.

in the class war that the globalists are using to sort of beat you down. You know, this is like a very, I think back about certain details heading into the 2008 election. And I think about how things might have gone differently. And I'm actually not sure. And you could hear in Appalachia, as I did, somewhat to my shock, you could hear Dr. Ralph Stanley, one of the great bluegrass luminaries,

doing radio spots in Appalachia saying Barack Obama is going to help keep our kids able to stay home. And so actually at that time, and I'm not saying this was shared by everyone, but there was a feeling there that Barack Obama actually cared about some of this sort of reindustrialization stuff, that he cared about, he had a vision of things.

some kind of step back from absolute end of days, financialization and capitalism are just going to shape our lives and we have no ability to check these forces. I put this to JD once. He was almost the localist candidate in the 2008 race. And I think it was a really, really powerful part of how he was able to win some of these states. So the question that then comes due and that like speaks to what you're asking about is,

Why was that sense lost? And I think there's some way to look at what happened with Obama and think, oh, so he actually didn't do all the labor stuff. He actually didn't do all the populism stuff that he promised, or at least that perhaps people thought with some fantasy in their brain that he was going to be able to do. He did not reorient things towards this dispossessed working class that he

he actually was able to speak to pretty compellingly. And so the sort of like, if you're trying to absolve Bannon of why he would now be where he was, that would be the argument. I think in a much darker way,

What you're saying is completely true. And I think they tapped into those forces that you're talking about. Donald Trump tapped into that force of like, there's something really off here. And there's this idea on the new right that somehow like it wasn't racist or whatever to talk about the birtherism stuff. That that was just, oh, that was such a liberal media overreaction. And you're like, come on. Like, this is ridiculous. And so the backlash now is...

is, I think, pretty purely racial. If not purely racial, it's racial tinged with this idea that he is the kind of end-stage representative of this meritocracy that they hate, of this thing that elevated this worldview that was so lockstep, so overwhelming, that you almost couldn't not speak to it. And you see Barack Obama...

wrestling with this, when he's recommending Patrick Deneen's books, and when he's talking about how like, hey, you know, he says it very delicately, but he says changes have caused people to get very upset. Changes are threatening the liberal order that has existed for hundreds of years. Even he wrestles with these questions. I mean, Obama, one of his great talents as both a politician and thinker is he's very deeply a pluralist, and he holds a lot of conflicting views.

tendencies in America inside of himself, and he balances them. And look, I think, you know, if Obama could have run for a third term against Donald Trump in 2016, I think he wins. So these things always tip a little bit on the margin. But to what you're saying a second ago, it's strange because I am like quite far on the other side of this movement. There are things like the big tech stuff I'm sympathetic to. But in my idea of America, I'm

deeply emotionally pro-immigrant and not only for reasons of sympathy, but also I think that as a sort of a nationalist, I think immigrants are a tremendous and could be a yet more tremendous source of American strength. I do think there was, there's this difference endlessly between what presidents do and what their cultural meaning is. What Donald Trump did in office from 2017 to 2021 is very different than his cultural meaning. Some things connect,

tariffs on China, but he means something much bigger than what was from a policy perspective, a fairly modest presidency. And Obama also means something very different. The way his meaning is taken up by the institutions and culture around him is as a kind of wave of power change. The meaning was interpreted and communicated, you know, in Hillary Clinton's campaign, in cultural things like Hamilton, as this country is changing.

And the people who are going to be on top of the change are in this mix of they've both won the meritocracy, but they have the culturally polite and right ideas. And ideally, they're not white. And ideally, they're not men. And, you know, it does become, I mean, a lot of things that happen are in these books and sub stacks and podcasts that we're all talking about and that I'm, of course, part of are, you know, it's intellectualization of a power struggle.

And, you know, some of there's backlash. It is simply racism. And there's also backlash or response, you

And I think you see this in a bunch of places. I think you see it in sort of the gender dynamics right now. You're seeing the future is female. No, absolutely not. It's male again. Maybe it didn't need to be a power struggle in the same way that it was. But I don't think you can completely separate – there's what Obama did, even what Obama himself thinks, and then the culture of Obamaism, which was always actually I think quite different or at least somewhat different and so it was different after him than his personal politics. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, correct me if you think this phrasing is too simplistic. But to me, the way I look at it is essentially that Obama was the sort of end stage of the end of history. And there was a promise with Obama, going to your point, completely independent of actual stuff Obama did.

where it was the achievement of, you know, whatever worldview we want to describe here, but a worldview that essentially we, a technocratic society, have figured all this stuff out and that we're going to build a more interconnected, diverse society forever now. And, you know, everything was going to get solved by this kind of Thomas Friedman idea of,

You know, now there will be a McDonald's in every country and there'll be no incentive to fight. And we're all going to be the world will be flat. Right. And what Donald Trump, when he took office in 2017, represented above everything else was just the end of the end of history. And it really shocked people. Like if you look at what Donald Trump did in 2017, it's.

I mean, am I too harsh in saying that it was virtually negligible? With the exception of a tax cut that worked entirely against the stated goals of his entire project.

But it opened for the people around him this sense of a coming dawn that suddenly all of these things that they really wanted to get back into the conversation were legal to say again. Like, wait, why is the future female? Like, what was good about that? Like, you know, all of a sudden you started hearing at, you know, cocktail bars, people who are working in government going like,

Wait, are you sure women are equipped to run the country and stuff? And, you know, under the era of Obama, I don't think that sources of mine would have dared even say that at a bar with a recorder off. Like it was too far outside of the shared worldview that was shaping the entire Western project. ♪

I'm Julie Turkowitz. I'm a reporter at The New York Times. To understand changes in migration, I traveled to the Darien Gap. Thousands have been risking their lives to pass through the border of Colombia and Panama in the hopes of making it to the United States. We interviewed hundreds of people to try and grasp what's making them go to these lengths.

New York Times journalists spend time in these places to help you understand what's really happening there. You can support this kind of journalism by subscribing to the New York Times. So I think this brings us back then to the story about Trump, because there is always a lot of debate and disagreement about what Donald Trump represents. And Donald Trump is not himself reading these sub stacks and participating in a lot of this discourse. And then he picks J.D. Vance.

And many people, when he picked J.D. Vance, understood that as a signal that these ideas and this thinking are the future of MAGA. He had picked the MAGA ideologist, not in Doug Burgum, the business-friendly moderate, not in Marco Rubio, the compromise candidate between the different wings. He had picked the guy who read the substacks. Mm-hmm.

And people took that as a signal that he was endorsing, as a future of MAGA, this set of ideas. Was that what you thought it meant that he picked J.D. Vance? Yeah. And as you're asking this question, I'm getting a sense that I know where this may go next. And, okay, so yes, I thought that picking J.D., first of all, it represented...

a desire on Trump's part to build a legacy.

Because, I mean, challenge me here if I'm wrong, but there probably isn't a comparable figure who could be expected to go forth and win one or two terms after Donald Trump and carry on a true MAGA project with a true deep understanding of what formed it other than J.D. Vance. Well, that depends if Donald Trump agrees, right, on what the MAGA project is. That's my question a bit. Well, true, but...

So with J.D., like what you saw, I think, was the first bit of the coalition politics forming because Trump had already figured out he's going to bring the Doug Bergens and the Nikki Haley's along. They were going to bend the knee. They bent the knee in 2016. This wasn't hard to him. The question was.

Are all these guys with crazy names on Twitter who are really driving the energy of this thing, are they going to stay with him? Are they going to ride this carnival all the way to election and keep this true...

You know, we forget this in liberal society sometimes, but like you win politics by tapping into animal forces sometimes. And Barack Obama did that as much as anybody, right? There was something spiritual about watching Obama in later stages of even 2012, I felt. And so I think J.D. was a way to tap into that. I, after J.D. got the nomination...

I had to take a step back because I had seen him right before, just privately. And then I had sort of like this fear of becoming like J.D. Vance's amanuensis as he rises. And so I didn't watch the RNC. I actually just couldn't watch him accept the nomination because it was like just a weird...

I felt too strange and I felt sort of too wrapped up in it. And I thought it would be better for my reporting to just watch football replays. I thought, and now I may turn out to be proved wrong, I thought that what this meant was that that was going to mean JD's wing was ascendant. And that would be not to make it far too simple here, because I think JD does bridge the worlds a little bit, but...

That would be the Tucker side of things. That would be the Bannon side of things. That would be the real sort of like hardcore MAGA thing. That would be his friends who talk about heritage Americans and this kind of thing. I assumed that that was a signal from Donald Trump saying, this is the force that is going to get me into the presidency, and these are the people I'm going to listen to. What transpired and what we're seeing now was,

was this kind of, as Mark Anderson calls it, I always quote this because I don't know how else to describe it, but this preference cascade amongst people who are much more on the fringes of this kind of thing. Like, you know, even people like Sam Altman, who I think not long ago was just pretty clearly a liberal, even if he was exposed to all of this stuff in his own way. You had this preference cascade of people coming and saying, you know what?

We don't really share all that stuff with those guys, the real nationalist populace, but we're not repulsed by it. And so the natural alliance becomes, if you're Donald Trump, the really, really rich guys who you actually just completely depend on for your political dollars and for your staffing decisions. Okay, wait, maybe he's going to shift to this other thing. And so I didn't really anticipate that actually.

This feels like the emergence of this other strain that is in some ways like competing in the background and then flowers. And I feel like the key people here are Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. And Thiel is more connected to the parts of the movement you're talking about, a funder of parts of it, and much more of a fellow traveler inside of it. But then Musk comes in.

And he clearly becomes the other pole. If J.D. Vance represents this more traditionalist new right, Musk represents, I mean, I'm not sure it's well-defined yet, but between the money he has and the attention he controls and Trump's obvious affection and interest in him, all of a sudden, Vance, who seemed like the future of this...

You know, you see Onion articles going around saying, you know, J.D. Vance begins to suspect there's another group chat, right? He begins to get pushed to the side, at least visually, right? There's the UFC fight that, you know, Musk is at and RFK Jr. is at. And where's J.D. Vance? What is Musk to you? And how has he been greeted or understood by the people you talk to on The Snoo Wright Show?

I would put some nuance to the idea that Musk represents a genuinely sort of like opposite pole in so much as there are poles to this thing. For the simple reason that Musk is so visibly Twitter-brained and so responsive to the whims of, shall we call it the mob on Twitter, that

If you look at like what his priorities are, yeah, he wants to do his technologist grand future and go to Mars and all of this. But then meanwhile, he's out there talking about the AFD and supporting the German far right movement, the German far right movement there. I mean, he was backing. Am I wrong about this? He was backing Tommy Robinson, you know, in England, who's this sort of like.

widely viewed there as the white nationalist celebrity, that's sort of their version of what Richard Spencer used to represent back in the day. And so I don't really... Of course, he doesn't know what that salute means. Right. He's just very involved in nationalist adjacent parties worldwide and a bunch of debates about a German party that is under controversy. I've been driven a little crazy by this because in a weird way, I have too much respect for Elon Musk.

And his intelligence to believe this is all totally coincidental, even if you just think it's a form of trolling, which I am open to. Right. I'm not saying the guy's a neo-Nazi, but the idea that he is maybe trolling with signals of the very fight that he has chosen repeatedly to pick does not seem so far fetched.

or condemnatory to me. Yeah. And my very distinct impression of Musk, and I'm really, I'm not trying to get drone struck here. My very distinct impression of Musk is that he really, really needs people to like him like in a big way. And he's ultra, ultra responsive to whims of people who are really in a pretty tight bubble on this thing that he has created, this vast sort of

talking chamber of X that to some degree actually like does just shape policy in this administration because everybody's sort of doing it. They're having it out like in a public forum that just never existed in the previous history of American politics, if for no other reason than it wasn't technologically possible, right? So,

I'm not convinced he actually ideologically does represent an alternate pole, if only because his views are too inconsistent and malleable. He may not represent an ideological pole. I actually think that's correct in some key ways, at least to J.D. Vance, who is a more protean figure than some of the new right ideologists we've been talking about. But what he does create is, I think, two things.

One is just an alternative pole of power. You know, if the idea was that J.D. Vance is going to be the person who is organized and knows how to hire staff and is going to be running policy as Donald Trump acts as a ceremonial king of his own administration, that's no longer the case or doesn't appear to be the case. And then the second, though, is that Musk starts the preference cascade. Right.

of rich CEOs and tech billionaires and attention oligarchs in particular moving towards Trump. And I guess this is where it does seem like there's a tension to me. You can say all you want that you don't like big tech modernity, but if your top advisor is the guy who runs, owns X and is, as you say, quite Twitter-brained,

Doesn't seem like you're that against it. And if now Mark Zuckerberg is in one of the front rows of the inauguration, and so is Sundar Pichai, and so is Jeff Bezos, and the TikTok CEO is a couple rows back. I don't know, for a movement of intellectuals who a couple months ago seemed to think that they were the ones who are counter-regime and counter-establishment and hate what big tech has done to the world, this doesn't seem like the inaugural visual that they were promising.

Well, okay, a couple of things here. My girlfriend was at the inauguration. She covers Trump full time. And, you know, to quote her,

People read a lot into the seating chart. And like, I think she was kind of saying people read a little too much into the seating chart. And like, we do have to keep everyone clear if they're not following this stuff at a granular detail. Like, Mark Zuckerberg is not popular by any means on this movement at this time. Nothing has changed about that.

And Donald Trump loves it when people come to bend the knee. He loves to get a million dollars from people to support his inauguration and then toss them an invite and have them come see him rise in his pomp and seize power again. So we might be overreading some of the presence of some of these people around it in terms of like...

whether or not Musk represents politics that are really, really opposed to like J.D.'s worldview. Like we have to keep in mind, J.D. is not anti-tech. That's not where he's coming from. And he's skeptical of what tech has done. He is skeptical of what you might call the complex of big tech, such as we have known it in the last 10 years. All of that is true. But he's not...

like Bannon. He's not one of these people who is thinking that technology itself is somehow a truly detrimental force in American life. That's not anything I've ever gotten from him. And as myself, a tech skeptic, I'm sometimes like, I've tried to push him on this a little bit. I think you're right as well to look at the somewhat confusing question about Peter Thiel, who did not

Like he didn't just not back Trump this time. He has really taken a step back from politics in a really extreme way. And that is because Thiel is skeptical actually that

The political movement such that we're seeing now can actually do the kind of stuff that they're talking about. He's very skeptical about whether or not we can actually handle the debt. He's very skeptical about the idea that like America is not going to face a gigantic fiscal crisis in a very short period of time. Thiel is a bit of a doomer, actually. And so he's an outlier and I don't want to.

I don't want to like repeat stuff from like off the record conversations, but you can get a very distinct impression from him that he doesn't necessarily share a lot of the views that you're getting from some of these public figures who are coming to bend the knee. And he doesn't need to bend the knee.

I mean, he's Peter Thiel, right? The person who I would say actually has a thought-out philosophy that he articulates in very serious ways that is fundamentally, in certain ways, completely opposed to a lot of what the MAGA movement wants is Marc Andreessen, who is very popular in these worlds. But, you know, Marc Andreessen is the author of something titled A Techno-Optimist Manifesto. You know, so he's the one who's really articulating this stuff. And...

We should probably keep in mind, yes, Musk was the big one who...

made it look like suddenly there was a massive shift in tech to run towards Trump. But Andreessen was already there. David Sachs was already there, famous host of this All In podcast, and, you know, a big skeptic of American involvement in backing of Ukraine. So there were a lot more of these people who were kind of in Trump headspace before Musk officially made his grand sort of

jump onto the train and gave the money and put on the dark MAGA hat. This was already happening. I take your point that ideologically, there's probably a lot of common ground between people like Vance and Musk. On the other hand, Steve Bannon, who is on the outside and it's never clear to me exactly how much influence he still wields. I think you would have a much better sense of that than I do.

But he hates Musk, you know, gave this interview, said Musk is evil and he was going to put all of his energy into purging him from the movement. And there is, I think, this question of does Donald Trump want to be the counterestablishment or does he want to be the establishment? Is the problem that he had, separate from the sort of new right philosophers you talk about, is a problem he had with the establishment, the regime, the cathedral, right?

Not that its ideas or it was bad for American life or human flourishing or the formation of human character, but that it was not on his side and it did not pay enough fealty. And as long as it's instrumentally backing him, he's fine with it and will flip from counterestablishment to establishment in an instant. And people like Andreessen and Musk, who I agree, like, they have lots of complex ideas about things. I think it's very hard to say the richest man in the world and the best known VC in the world are not the establishment.

And do not represent power. And so there is this, I don't know, it's not an irresolvable set of tensions, but there is a difference between being the Mos Eisley Cantina and being the Death Star. Yeah. So I would say that as regards the counter-establishment versus establishment question, just to sort of set up like how a Donald Trump would view this.

We saw a real process of, frankly, like people who are truly in the American establishment, people who have offices on Billionaire's Row, who are looking out over Central Park, who know all the right people there and that kind of thing. I mean, Bill Ackman is a good example, the hedge fund manager. We saw Bill Ackman contort himself into just very strange places, trying to say like,

I don't really like the direction of the country. I don't like where this is all going. So we're going to try to get an alternative to Biden. And, you know, I'm not like a Trump person, but like, I agree, like, this is all really crazy and this sort of thing, right? Whereas a Musk, in so much as we're talking about this counterestablishment, his worldview, the worldview of these people coming from tech actually just is different. He doesn't need to be explained. He doesn't need to contort himself in anything. He gets it

intuitively just because he's exposed to the cloud of ideas on Twitter at all times. But I would argue that, yes, the counter-establishment thing is a little bit real in so much as even if these are the most powerful people on Earth, which they are, and even if they do represent perhaps a new establishment, they're not coming from a place where they understand the world in the way that the establishments of finance and energy and things like that that funded the Republican Party for a long time shared.

And so I do think it's very, very important to Donald Trump to surround himself with people like that. I also think it's very important for Donald Trump to just surround himself with people he likes and with people he knows well and with people who are really rich and can help him. And so this always surprises people when they hear it, but like...

amongst people I know who cover Trump pretty intimately, which I don't, but who are really like sort of there in the inner circle talking to people all the time. He's a very loyal guy. And so we have these backstories of Roy Cohn being abandoned back in the early days, of Michael Cohen, that falling out, that kind of thing. But for the people who look like they share the idea of the project that is Donald Trump,

He's extremely loyal and likes to keep them around. And so I think with Musk, it's a pretty natural pairing because Musk just really likes being around Donald Trump. You can kind of see it. There was a statement, I believe, where Donald Trump was like tweeting like, Elon's been gone from Mar-a-Lago. Where's Elon? It's almost like he misses him. I think he tried to send him a message on Tree Social and accidentally posted it, if I remember this moment. It was...

Sweet in a way. Yeah. I mean, that is a very Trumpian thing that I think a lot of Americans don't understand. The flip side, of course, is that frequently Donald Trump falls out with the people he's closest with because they challenge him or they get too close or they fly too high. But we're talking around this nuance here.

But it's like frequently hard as a reporter to explain this. No, Donald Trump doesn't really know that much about any of these grand plans, whether it's to remake a heritage America where people remember Appalachian ballads and we've reestablished this land where we can have our children buried in the same plots as our grandparents. I don't think he has a great sense of that.

I also don't think he has a great sense of like what Stargate means for America. I think he feels like it's both the big AI data center energy project. Right. And I think he thinks both are like directionally pretty good and directionally pretty aligned with what he's trying to do. But as long as you're demonstrating loyalty and it's not causing friction within the coalition, he'll be fine. He doesn't really care. What will end up mattering here?

Because you look at the Trump administration, we've talked a huge amount now about J.D. Vance, about Elon Musk, a little bit about Steve Bannon. But you look across it, Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, kind of normal finance guy, used to work for George Soros, in fact. Pete Hegseth is Fox & Friends anchor that Donald Trump likes and feels aligned with. Susie Wiles is a very longtime Republican operative, is going to be the chief of staff. It's always, I think, a little bit tricky to tell.

Are you watching a really new ideological impulse announce itself in American life get translated into policy? Or are you watching...

kind of normal transition that is going to do things that are pretty normal within the context of American politics. It's like Elon Musk has a lot of wild ideas, you'll see him say on Twitter. And then what is he actually directly involved in or responsible for? Well, in the executive order, Doge is about software modernization. And like, that's a very different expression than the sort of more wild ideological impulses that he's become over

with. Stargate is interesting and, you know, they're very much AI accelerationists around Donald Trump, but Stargate was happening before Donald Trump. I mean, this big set of investments was already underway. I mean, didn't take Donald Trump's election for Microsoft and OpenAI to realize that they were interested in AI dominance.

And so I think this is, you know, as we come to the close here, like my big question for you, you were covering all these people in 2022 and before. Do they matter?

Yeah, I think that's why you see the intervention that you saw from Steve Bannon. I think that's why Bannon actually sees it being worth going to war on some of this stuff at an early stage so that he can get in there and say like, hey, we're the ones who hold power. And this is going to sound very ironic, but I actually genuinely think this is true.

There's a poll here that we're not talking about per se because it's more interesting to talk about the tech billionaires and the populists and they're the people with ideas that are genuinely out there in what the context of American politics has been before. But you're right. There's just a kind of, I don't want to say centrist, but there's a kind of normie Republican wing of all of this that is frankly just larger. They already live here. You don't need to vet them in the same ways. They're just around. They're on Fox News. They're in...

one might even say the establishment. And so like, I think it's okay for me to say this in public, but so I attended the passage ball that I wrote about in my last New York Times piece, which was sort of billed as the outsider ascendancy ball. And I talk about it in there because it was explicitly set up as like, last time the outsider ascendancy ball was the deplorable and it was like goofy and it was like insane and had all these like white nationalists and all this blah, blah, blah.

The passage ball was black tie. Steve Bannon spoke. There were tech people there. Curtis Yarvin's there. The Red Scare Girls are there. This is the cool kid thing. And Bannon gave a speech where...

to the, quote, tech bros in the audience, he offered an outstretched hand. He did not go to war there. He said, we all need to be together because if we're not all together on this, this is all going to get lost in another failed charge up the hill to conquer the deep state. And so ironically, in all of this, my guess would be that actually if the tech right is

and this sort of new right, or however you want to put it, the MAGA core, can actually stay together and get their people in and form a coalition that feels powerful to Donald Trump, then we really are going to have a pretty intense change in how American government works. And we're going to see a lot of pretty intense stuff that they do. There is a possibility that

they dissolve into nonsense and that we get something that looks a little closer to 2016. And I would just add to this, like, as much as people might talk and think about the ideological differences between these people,

In terms of the social worlds, when you go to a party at a tech billionaire's house in the Bay, when you go to a party hosted by Palladium Magazine, when you go to the social spaces where this kind of new aspiring counter-establishment socializes and meets people and that sort of thing, you're having people from both wings. They know each other better than the more normie Republicans. One sense I have that maybe...

connects to that is that these ideological currents we're talking about are much stronger and more dominant at the 20-something-year-old staffer level

Than at the 50-year-old-something principal and cabinet secretary level. Yes. Is that fair? Yes. I mean— I mean, this seems to me to be what young Republicans are now. Yeah. The interesting test case would have been if Matt Gaetz had gotten confirmed. Because, you know, sort of behind the scenes, and I'm sure you probably are exposed to this too, like, I have leftist anti-monopoly lobbyists and activists texting me going, wow, this

Whatever you think of Gates, like if he gets confirmed, he's going to go hard on like anti-big tech, anti-monopoly, things like that. And so there are some people who are exposed to these worlds who are in the inner circle and in the potentially cabinet level echelon. There are people...

You know, I actually don't know at this time what position, if any, Blake Masters will get, but he probably will get something. Even someone like Thomas Massey, who we talked about earlier, who's a very traditional libertarian congressman, but actually can speak these languages very well. But you're still talking here about the boldface names. The thing I want to do is drill down a bit because, look, I've covered many administrations. And I guess to use Biden as an example here.

You look at the Biden administration and you look at the cabinet structure and principle level of the Biden administration. And here you have one of the oldest national Democrats still in public life. He's been around for the longest of any major figure in the Democratic Party. Beneath him, you have a lot of names you would recognize from the Obama administration. There's Brian Deese, you know, at the National Economics Council. There's Jake Sullivan as a national security advisor. And you could just kind of go down a list like that.

So you might say, OK, this is going to look like average out Joe Biden and the Obama administration. And you can predict this administration. But at least economically, this looked like the Elizabeth Warren administration.

And the reason that happened, I mean, in part, they had won some of the ideological fights inside the party, but the staffer level was very Warrenite and was coming more from that wing. And that's where the ideological trends were among, you know, 20-something and to some degree young 30-something ambitious, smart, democratic policy staffers. Now, people can debate whether or not that was good for the Biden administration. There are a lot of fights over that.

But if you had just been looking at its top level, you would have completely misunderstood it because administrations are run by staff. And Washington is run by 20-something and 30-something-year-olds, you know, who can work 14-hour days. And so what ideological and policy world they're coming out of often matters even more than where the principles come from. Mm-hmm. You know, I talked to the head of Claremont about this, and he

I've actually, I've talked to several people who you would think sort of would be in the world of feeling like their kids, so to speak, are ascendant and are going to take these positions. And candidly, it's less clear to me that that is happening at the scale that I thought it would than I had expected. So I talked to the head of Claremont, which is

I think we could justifiably say is going to replace the traditional Republican think tanks as the shaping ideological shop going forward in this administration. And he said, yes, I think that's true. And I said, are you placing people? And he said, some. And I talked to the new editor-in-chief of the American Conservative, and I was sort of like, so are you...

I talked to him on election night and I said, you know, so you're the new House Oregon for the Golden Dawn future empire. And he looked at me a little confused. He was like, I don't know if that's going to be the case. And so I think you actually do raise a good point. Like in J.D.'s office, yes. In the broader, I mean, this vast structure of the federal government that is going to remain vast however much they want to trim it. Is this ferment going to reshape everything?

I don't know. I'll tell you like just in terms of rumors, things like this, right? Like I don't want to name the person, but I know a guy who he was saying like, yeah, I'll probably be doing Latin America policy. And there's a bunch of sort of Twitter anons basically who go to El Salvador all the time and are friends with the president down there. And like, yeah, if you call someone up and you fight for a job, those people are getting jobs as far as I understand.

And so as far as scale goes, like this social world is still not that big. I mean, there were at the passage ball, I mean, there's a few hundred people, right? They're not setting the tone in the sense that they actually have the bodies and the mass to be like, we're the big team. Our boys are the ones that get to go. But in terms of the ones who are here and around and get invited to the right parties, yes, if they want a job, they're coming in.

I want to end close to where we started. We talked about how the new right has this deep concern about character formation, about how our people, our kids, our Americans, growing up in a world and in a culture that is going to correctly build the virtues that antiquity so correctly honored. A lot of people, I'm the kind of person who would say that's an odd fit with Donald Trump, who has certain virtues, but I think lacks others.

But just more broadly for these kinds of concerns, concerns about the fertility rate, this sense that we have lost some fundamental humanness and things are breaking down, it's very hard to legislate any of that. When you talked about the despair that people like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters had sort of looking at modernity and looking at where we're going, what do they want to do about that despair now that they have power? Is that despair even amenable to the things that the kind of power they now have can do?

Well, on the one hand, a friend of mine who is actually not even particularly right-wing, although in this sort of the weirdness of American politics these days, I think like a liberal would regard him as sort of anathema. But a friend of mine on one of these vast group chats that people get invited to where you have this politically heterodox, crazy world getting discussed right now, said something right after the election that was just like,

The first thing that has suddenly happened and that will happen is that the cultivation of virtue and displaying public virtue as a good that is cool again is coming back and it's coming back now. And he may in fact be right about that. And I don't, you know, I agree with you. That's a very difficult thing to square with the figure of Donald Trump who does not seem to exactly cultivate any of that. But you don't always need...

You know, Napoleon becomes a symbol beyond Napoleon's behavior and actual activities. And that's very much sort of the role that Trump occupies right now. In terms of the stuff where you're trying to get to the point of family formation and reward, for example, like have men be...

in public and seen as honorable and good for what they do for being family men and fathers instead of for being like a cool DJ, you do have to do policy to make that happen, right? You do have to do some kind of policies in the JD Vance kind of realm of like, how do you remake family formation? You do have to, I mean, in what I find to be like a little bit of a horror vision, like

Do you have to, like, re-militarize society? Do you have to do what I know plenty of people are advocating right now, which is, like, invade Mexico just as a reason to send young men to go defend their communities from fentanyl exporters? Like, people are talking about that. When you say people, who is talking about that? I mean, I...

Like, I have to be very careful about, like, not revealing, like, off-the-record stuff. But, like, yeah, intellectuals in this general space of, like, new right-ish, heterodox...

I know this is going to sound funny because we've spent this entire time talking about the divisions between the nationalist populace and the tech right and this kind of thing. But it really is true that it's a pretty small world and people know each other. And there are people who sort of like swim in this stew. And so some of it is like jokers who are trying to like make a name for themselves by saying we have to invade Mexico. But in this particular case, which I bring up,

There's demonstrably been some influence from that because Donald Trump has refused to deny the possibility that American special forces will go attack cartels. So you can see it. And there's a sort of return of – I think people are talking about it as expansionist, but I actually think in a cultural sense it's more this warrior masculinity, this kind of –

The way they are fascinating on questions like the Panama Canal, Greenland, right? Men conquer. Yeah. I think you understand what is happening and the things that they are getting interested in much better if you think about the idea men conquer than if you think about critical minerals or shipping lanes. Yes. There are a lot of things we can do about critical minerals or shipping lanes. I'm a neoliberal technocrat. I hear a lot about this stuff.

You get very interested in the Panama Cal and sending special forces to Mexico and getting Greenland if you are trying to recapture an older ethos of muscular nationalism.

that you think America grew soft and abandoned? In a certain way, this is all connected, right? So, okay, if you're Blake Masters or J.D. Vance and you want to be able to have a man on a single income raise a multiple child household with your wife living at home...

Okay, well, one way you get there is you have this like super dynamic tech driven revitalization of the American defense base. And then eventually when all rising powers come to conflict, these men do get to conquer and go do their thing. And, you know, it's pretty hard for families to raise kids.

a ton of kids while the man is off working without the benefit of community. So suddenly probably people are going back to Catholic church way more. And like the whole thing kind of fits together in this beautiful puzzle that'll just rise. Like if we can just adjust our value structure, right? It's so hard to explain to someone who's not a part of the headspace because they go, well, wait, how does like,

invading Panama like have anything to do with family formation. But if you are in the headspace, it's almost sort of Marxian or millenarian because it's just everything explains itself. It's all fits together. It all works. And I think for better or for worse, people are going to actually start to grasp how that vision fits together because it is going to be at least in part America's new governing vision.

I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Yeah, I've been thinking about this. This is a square. My first recommendation is a square one, but I think it's for people who are coming a little new to this, like I think it's pretty important. I would recommend Patrick Deneen's book, Regime Change. I like to think of it as like Curtis Yarvin for normies, but it explains this whole idea of elite replacement and what you're trying to do and what

Dineen calls a constitutional regime change that I think a lot of people on that side of things are now hoping we're living through. So I would recommend that. I'm going to recommend next something that I hope doesn't get me in trouble and that some people might find very, very distasteful, but is book length. And it would be the work by Martyr Maid or Daryl Cooper, who...

did perhaps like most revealingly a history of Jim Jones, the guy, the Kool-Aid guy that retells not so much the Jim Jones. When you say the Kool-Aid guy, you don't mean the guy who made Kool-Aid, but. I do not. I mean, the guy who led his followers in the people's church down to Guyana and eventually had them all commit suicide.

Martyr Made does an extremely long podcast series where it essentially does a counter-narrative of the entire history of post-1960s progress. And it's a really revealing way of seeing from the right how they think that everything actually went wrong. And it's something that I think if you kind of can get into it,

Some people will violently, violently disagree with a lot of what he's saying. And they've probably seen little snippets of things that he said on Tucker Carlson about World War II that really blew up and made this guy look very anathema. But if you want to understand the worldview, that Jim Jones series, I think, really helps people get into the headspace of how a lot of these people on the new right think we got to the point that we're at. And it really helped me in understanding this whole thing.

And then I guess my last book would be a little disconnected, but I do live in Los Angeles and I've been very, very disillusioned by some of the rancor and lies and idiocy around the fire policy stuff. And

There's a great, fat, really boring, way too detailed, but really revealing book called Between Two Fires that is like a history of American fire by a guy named Stephen Pine. And it really teaches you a lot about the American landscape. And I think people might benefit from it. James Pogue, thank you very much. Thank you. I really appreciate this. Thank you.

Thank you.