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
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 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, 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.
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.'" 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.
Mm-hmm. You know, I talked to the head of Claremont about this. And 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... 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 JD'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 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.
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
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, It'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.
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