James Pogue
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
It felt cooler and it felt as I think anybody even, you know, coming from the left or coming from a fairly liberal persuasion could look at Twitter during some of those years, you know, sort of 2016 up through 2020 and and just feel like it was only really allowing people in the mainstream to have a very circumscribed worldview.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And in so much as Twitter operated as quote unquote, the ultimate editor of institutions like the New York Times, it gave them a huge amount of freedom to kind of experiment and yet 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Can you build technologies that in fact help people, 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 thing they believe about men need a searching quest, men need violence, men need competition, are we going to go take Panama?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And so 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?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Yeah. I mean, 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... you know, sort of vague if you're not already a little bit in the headspace and understanding where he's getting to.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 is, I do think that like really came to shape, not just leftism, but liberal centrism across the Western world.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
For most of my lifetime, you know, living under this kind of neoliberal establishment consensus, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And he said, the regime is the 20% 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
sort of NGOs work to shape policy and to shape worldviews in the United States. It's also this cathedral. It's also this complex of media enforcement of an ideology that they see emanating from institutions like The New Yorker and The New York Times. And the tech companies. And the tech companies, although that's a little bit changing.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Yes. And they would argue, 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 equality essentially globalism.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And so fundamentally, like part of what goes into conservatism is that all men are not created equal. Some men are born to be elites. Some men are born to rule.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Yeah, like a weird, I'm not even sure they, some places claim he was a nobleman, some don't. And, 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And so you'll hear, to go a little bit afield here, you'll hear Alexander Dugin talking in Russia about solar Putin and things like this. And that's coming from this traditionalist ferment
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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-
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
America is even, you know, on the right, like some form of Zion concept. put here by God to lead people into a better future and things like this. These are, in their own ways, spiritual views, right? And they retained a great deal of force on the right for a long time.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
a 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Well, so, yeah. I mean, I, yet again, couldn't agree more with that. That, you know, the term that people will use is heritage Americans. And, you know, I sometimes get confused because there's a little, like, weirdness in how they use that. Like, are Italians who came in the Ellis Island era heritage Americans? And candidly, like, most people who are using this phrase would not say that's true.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Right. There is something about the heritage American that comes from those original tribes of largely Scots-Irish or English people settling the Trans-Appalachian or the Northeast. And an America that derives its culture from the song, story, and religion of those people that is being diluted. And...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 being completely unreasonable because their point would be that just happens to be the Americans who built the nation. 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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. This is fundamentally particularly on this continent in this nation built on ideas and things like that. This is fundamentally anti-American.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 that, In the pages of the New York Times, America is not an idea. America is a people.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I put this to J.D. 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?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And there's this idea on the new right that, 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 of reaction. Like, and you're like, come on, like this is ridiculous. And so the backlash now is, is, I think, pretty purely racial.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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, right? Where it was the achievement of, you know, whatever worldview we want to describe here.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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, right? Like, wait, why is the future female?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Like, it was too far outside of the shared worldview that was shaping the entire Western project.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Well, that depends if Donald Trump agrees, right, on what the MAGA project is.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Okay, wait, maybe he's going to shift to this other thing. And so I didn't really anticipate that, actually.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I'm not convinced he actually ideologically does represent an alternate pole, if only because his views are too inconsistent and malleable.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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, you know, did not, 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 Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 America's 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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
I don't want to repeat stuff from 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 Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Um, 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, like 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?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
So there were a lot more of these people who were kind of in Trump headspace before. 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Yeah. So I would say that as regards the counterestablishment versus establishment question, just to sort of set up like how a Donald Trump would view this. Yeah. 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
intuitively just because he's exposed to the cloud of ideas on Twitter at all times.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 generally out there in what the context of American politics has been before. But you're right.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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,
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
There is a possibility that they dissolve into nonsense and that we get something that looks a little closer to 2016.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
rewarded 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
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Do you have to like remilitarize 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. And when you say people, who is talking about that?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 rightish 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 super dynamic, tech-driven revitalization of the American defense base
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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? Yeah. It's so hard to explain to someone who's not a part of the headspace because they go, well, wait, how does invading Panama have anything to do with family formation?
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
But if you are in the headspace, it's almost sort of Marxian or millenarian because it's just everything explains itself. It 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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, I think it's pretty important. I would recommend Patrick Deneen's book, Regime Change.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 Deneen 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And that some people might find like 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 the 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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— And it's a really revealing way of seeing from the right how they think that everything actually went wrong.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
And it's something that I think if you kind of can get into it, and 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 like very anathema.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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,
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Let's not say necessarily they'd never been invented, but if some, let's say, societal agency, some force within our society have been able to corral how they function and what they did to us during that period.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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... Well, I mean, there's a million, million different ways this could all end up going bad, and in certain ways it already is.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 sackums around you and you say, well, that guy's got a constituency and I've got to keep that guy happy.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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,
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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, 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...
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
Well, so to go into like how this really worked, like there was something about Twitter pre-Musk that actually like 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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 build your world out of this? And 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.
The Ezra Klein Show
MAGA’s Big Tech Divide
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... Interesting to a lot of people who weren't even necessarily right wing.