MAGA has long been hostile to Big Tech. So now that Big Tech is shifting rightward, what does that mean for MAGA?“We’re seeing a true political coalition having to navigate very, very big questions about how to keep themselves together,” James Pogue told me. He’s a contributing writer at Times Opinion who has been covering the intellectual ferment on the New Right for years. And he just published a great piece about the tensions between the techno-optimists and skeptics within the MAGA coalition.In this conversation, we cover a lot: How the New Right’s intellectual scene has evolved, the renewed fascination with Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, why some of the most passionate critics of tech are also the most online, how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fits into this world, the New Right’s ideas about masculinity and how much Donald Trump cares about any of this.Recommendations:Regime Change by Patrick Deneen“God’s Socialist” by Darryl CooperBetween Two Fires by Stephen PyneThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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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.
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