James Pogue
speaker
179 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
James Pogue’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm so honored.
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.
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 J.D., You know, he had a conversion to a worldview that is, I would say, now pretty general amongst magospheres, 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 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, you know, JD 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, right?
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. 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 what it has done to us on a personal level in terms of sort of.
enfeebling you know what they might call you know like enfeebling men enfeebling 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
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...
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.
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