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
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 J.D. 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 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. Even people like Sam Altman, who I think not long ago was just pretty clearly a liberal, even if he's 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.
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 is the white nationalist celebrity that's sort of their version of what Richard Spencer used to represent back in the day.
Right.
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 thing.
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 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.
Well, okay, a couple of things here. My girlfriend was at the inauguration. She covers Trump full-time. And... To quote her, people read a lot into the seating chart. And I think she was kind of saying people read a little too much into the seating chart. And we do have to keep everyone clear if they're not following this stuff at a granular detail.
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 over-reading 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's 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, like he's not one of these people who is thinking that technology itself is somehow like a truly detrimental force in American life. That I don't, I don't, that's not anything I've ever gotten from him.
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