Author James Pogue, one of two of Vanity Fair’s “chief chroniclers of right-wing culture,” and most recently of “Inside The Dissident Fringe, Where The New Right Meets The Far Left, And Everyone’s Bracing for the Apoalpse”:

Audio:

03-23hhs-pogue

Transcript:

HH: Joined by James Pogue, an author who’s recently come to my attention, and a very interesting one. James, welcome. Thank you for getting up early wherever you are this morning to join me.

JP: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

HH: Where do we find you this morning?

JP: I am in California.

HH: All right, very good. Now James, to give you a little background on how I prepared for this, I first heard you on the podcast, The Culture Journalist. And then I went back and looked you up, read your Harper’s notes on the State of Jefferson article, read your Vice article on the Oath Keepers Are Ready For War With the Federal Government, which is maybe the first thing ever written about the Oath Keepers in 2016. Then, I read your Republicans article in Granta. Then, I read your Vanity Fair Inside the Dissident Fringe, where the new right meets the far left, and everyone’s bracing for the Apocalypse. And I see you’ve done a brand-new podcast with Vanity Fair where they call you one of their chief correspondents on the new right. Have I missed any of the key articles?

JP: I mean, that’s pretty comprehensive. I appreciate that. The one I would add is that I did a big Vanity Fair piece about what’s called the new right about focusing on now-Senator J.D. Vance, who I’ve written a bunch about, who’s a long subject of mine, and now has become a kind of big deal. But I kind of follow the fringes of American politics, and so it seems like you’ve covered a bunch of the stuff that I’ve done here. So a lot to talk about, I guess.

HH: Yeah, the Inside the Dissident Fringe, I thought that was the J.D. piece, where the new right meets the far left, and everyone’s bracing for Apocalypse. It is simply coincidence that J.D. Vance was on the show last hour, just simply coincidence, because he’s a regular guest. So I want to begin with a little bio, and then some political GPS, and then dive into the dissident right, which is a term I believe you’re going to get credit for if it sticks. I think you’re the first I saw use it. You are a Buckeye like I’m a Buckeye. You’re from Cincinnati, I’m from Warren, Ohio. What year were you born?

JP: I was born in 1986, so I’m a little younger than J.D.

HH: Oh, yeah. Yeah, and you’re 20 years younger than I am. Where did you go to high school in Cincinnati? Are you a St. Xavier’s guy?

JP: I actually went to CPS, Cincinnati public schools. So I went to the Arts High School downtown and over the Rhine for people who know Cincinnati. And then I went to Clark, kind of weird, experimental school. So I was a product of the inner city kind of public school system.

HH: You’re also a product of Quaker parents, I gather. I think I read that in one of your articles. Is that correct? Are you yourself a Quaker?

JP: Not at this time. I’m sort of on a journey a little bit like, you could actually say a little like J.D. towards more towards Catholicism, if anything, but yeah, I grew up, actually, with very left-wing parents, very like inner city Ohio, you know, late 20th Century kind of left-wing social worker type people. So I have…

HH: Okay.

JP: I come from a lot of these different spectrums.

HH: Did you go to college in Ohio?

JP: I actually went to McGill in Montreal.

HH: Okay.

JP: I wanted to get as far away as possible, which you know, is a kind of common thing for guys in my generation.

HH: Yeah, now let me start by GPS’ing you. And James, I do this with every first-time guest. You’re not special, but I ask them the same set of questions so the audience can compare across weeks, months, years. And I’ve been on for 23 years doing this, and I’ve done this over and over again, so it’s not particular to you. First of all, in your opinion, James Pogue, was Alger Hiss a communist?

JP: Yes.

HH: All right. Have you read The Looming Tower?

JP: I have not.

HH: All right. One out of two’s not bad. Do you know the nuclear triad and the theory behind it?

JP: I would not say I’m an expert, but I’ve got an idea.

HH: Give me your idea.

JP: I’ve got to be honest. You’re going to get me in trouble here. I’m going to let you explain your thoughts to me here on this one.

HH: It’s just, you know, okay, it’s a technical term. It’s okay not to know it. Do you own a gun?

JP: I do. Several.

HH: Okay, so that’s important for the audience to know. What kind of weapons do you own?

JP: I just bought a .357 revolver, which I have not tried out too much, and I’ll be honest, I’m not great at shooting, yet. I have a Ruger 10/22. I’ve got a Remington 870. I’m looking into buying an AR, but I have a California residence, so I’m going to have to build it myself, and it’s going to be a bit of a problem, you know.

HH: I’m not sure that’s legal in the Golden State, James Pogue, but you…

JP: Well, there’s ways around it, but you’ve got to work for it.

HH: All right, now I do the rundown of the voting so people can figure out if you’re with them or against them. Did you vote for Trump or Biden?

JP: I have voted for one, in one election ever in my life, presidentially speaking, and that was 2012. I voted for Obama for the reason being that I thought Mitt Romney and his kind of brand of, you know, rah rah American-style capitalism was a kind of, it was a money-centric thing that I just, I felt like it was taking the soul out of Americans in certain ways. I probably would have voted for Bernie if he had gotten the nomination, but other than that, I stay away from presidential elections.

HH: Fair to say you are a man of the left who’s heavily armed?

JP: That is correct.

HH: All right. I just, that’s so funny. I’m a man of the right who has not and does not own weapons, because I’ll shoot my foot off. I’m sort of like Ralphie in the Christmas Story. I’ll shoot my eye out. So I think that’s very interesting. Let me start with, and I assume you are 100% in favor of unlimited abortion on demand and every other usual progressive position? Am I right? Is there anything else that stands out that’s unique of your progressivism?

JP: Oh, yeah, I wouldn’t put it that way. I wouldn’t put it that way at all. I’m coming around to the kind of thing that we need a certain level of, I don’t know how to put it, cultural center to make a country work, and a certain kind, I don’t know, I’m a weird kind of mix, because I’m very libertarian. I’m very sort of anti-corporate, but I also, I do believe in the idea of a culture that shapes a nation and stuff like that. So there’s certain conservative ideas and certain ideas that are swirling around what you might call the young right that I would tend to share. So I’m a little bit of a weird flux kind of position.

HH: All right, that will come out as we talk. I must say the piece I found most interesting of all your pieces is the Granta piece, Republicans. You went to Ireland in search of the Provos, and by way of introduction, have you read The Great Hunger by Tom Hayden?

JP: I have, but a long time ago as a teenager. And I couldn’t really tell you much about it. I knew Tom Hayden.

HH: So did I, very well. He was a guest on my show so many different times. Hayden and I didn’t agree on anything, but The Great Hunger was a fine book. And it sort of traces our genuine roots. And I am both Orange Irish and Green Irish, two generations removed, my dad from Saintfield in Northern Ireland, and two generations removed from my mother in County Clare.

JP: Yeah.

HH: So you are also, you’re Green Irish, right?

JP: Well, actually, same deal. Same deal. My last name, Pogue, is a classic Scots-Irish Protestant name, and my Pogue ancestors were Protestants who came from County Cavan.

HH: Okay.

JP: My dad’s side came from County Donegal and are Catholic.

HH: And that’s the reverse of mine, and they had to get married at the side alter in 1946, because Protestants weren’t allowed to marry Catholics at the main alter in 1946. So James, you went looking for the Irish Republicans. One more question about what you have read. Have you ever read Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe?

JP: Yes.

HH: What did you think of the book?

JP: Well, so that’s really funny. So that book, for people who haven’t read it, that book is based a lot on this kind of failed project of an Irish journalist named Ed Maloney, who describes disillusionment with the peace process in many ways. And he describes the kind of backstory of the Provisional Irish movement where there were, you know, not to go too far into it, but a lot of lies, a lot of killings that were held up, or sort of concealed. There was a kind of project by the leadership of the Irish Republican movement to move into respectful politics in this kind of new, hey, post-Nelson Mandela liberal version of a happy liberal future that was going to solve all problems, and economic progress was going to lead us to a bright, new, happy world where culture didn’t matter. And that didn’t really work for a lot of reasons. And so I’d been interested in that story, actually, even before Patrick Radden Keefe got into it, and I knew Ed Maloney. And there’s this kind of funny thing that goes into these politics, where the Provisional Irish Republican movement, the thing everybody kind of knows of as the IRA, shifted into respectful politics. But then there was this other fringe of people who I went and I knew the codes and the mores, because I’d been in that world a little bit. And you have this whole other rebel side in Northern Ireland of people who opposed the peace process, who are still kind of arming, really involved in a lot of smuggling and crime and dissidence, and weirdly. So there’s this kind of, I mean it’s just a true fact. I’m not talking out of line here. There was an international conspiracy to hide the fact that the IRA still existed. And what now the IRA does is basically police a lot of the communities in Northern Ireland and keep that rebel fringe down. And so I was there sort of talking on the fringes between the two.

HH: Now James, I’ve wandered the streets of Northern Ireland on a couple of occasions, because I’m interested in where my forbearers, the Scots-Irish came from, and I’ve been to Southern Ireland for where the Green Irish came from. And I do not sense that there are many Provos left. And I’ve got to tell you, my daughter-in-law is Irish. Her mother is Irish. They’re American citizens now, but they’re Irish Irish, and they know this world very, very well. Did you find any Provos left, because my way of thinking is they really did leave?

JP: Oh, yeah, I mean, well, the Provos, not to put too fine a point on it, but the Provos are the ones in politics, right? So you know, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, people, names people will have heard of, Bobby Storey, all of these, you know, people who used to be “hard men” back in the province there, they moved into respectable politics, into the party now known as Sinn Fein. And so if you go less so to some of the famous places like the Falls Road in West Belfast and places like that, but if you go into what Margaret Thatcher back in the day called Bandit Country, through South Armagh, East Tyrone, places like that, you’ll see on the streets and in the bars, you’ll see a division where the “Provos” who now represent Sinn Fein, now represent the power structure, will be on the corners. They have shaved heads. There’s big guys. They’ll be on the corners, and they’ll be watching. They’ll be talking. They’re kind of policing the zones. And then underneath that, underneath that, you have these dissident groups, people who oppose the peace process, and who with a few beers in them will start talking, and they’ll start saying pretty crazy stuff about how, you know, their friends have been attacked by what is now the Provos, which weirdly, they represent respectable politics. And then there’s this other fringe of, you know, and these are not necessarily nice people. These are smugglers, maybe run diesel across the border every night. They’re accumulating guns. They don’t have a ton, but these are the people, for example, some people might have heard there was an attack recently in Northern Ireland where these kind of like fringe groups, Real IRA and stuff like that, will make attacks and try to kill people.

HH: That’s what I was, that’s why I was drawn to the Granta piece, James, is because you went looking for and found some of the fringe in Ireland, both north and south. How many are there? I mean, as a, I’m a facts-driven guy. And the one thing we’re going to come back to in your arguments about the dissident right is I need numbers. What percentage of Irish want to go back to the troubles and actually embrace violence?

JP: I would say it’s a very low percentage. The thing to keep in mind, though, that you know, in the mid-80s, and in the era where the IRA was controlling territories, some territory, and was one of the world’s most powerful paramilitary force, is when you’re talking about a province the size of Connecticut, they had like 550 guys under arms, right? And that was enough to hold off the British Army. It doesn’t take a lot to really shift politics.

HH: But what I’m getting at is I want the audience to understand the number of people you were looking for, that is those who are, have not sworn off violence in Ireland, is very, very small.

JP: Very small.

HH: And very small. And that brings me to your Vanity Fair piece, Inside The Dissident Fringe: Where the New Right Meets the Far Left, and Everyone’s Bracing For Apocalypse. How big is the dissident right? And I mean, in terms of numbers, your estimate of how big it is?

JP: Well, I would say just based on Twitter, it’s actually much bigger than you would think. And so the funny thing now is that this is, you know, this is a very online phenomenon. And I would call it almost like an emerging realm of thought. It’s of people who view, broadly speaking, view like the American system, but also the global system that America leads as led by this kind of quasi, what they call a regime of corporatist influences, the deep state, if you want to call it that.

HH: I don’t. By the way, we don’t use that term. The administrative state is fine. We don’t have a deep state. People do not get arrested and taken away in the middle of the night like they do in totalitarian regimes like Iran, China, and Russia. We do not have a deep state. We have a permanent government, an administrative state, and we’ve got elites. They just got bailed out in the Silicon Valley Bank. But I’m talking about the dissident right that you identified in the Mountain West. How many, because the answer bigger than you think is not a number. And I’m a lawyer. I just like to get numbers. Hillary Clinton and I agreed on a number on this show. What’s James Pogue think?

JP: Oh, let’s go with the numbers of actually people moving up to the Northern Rockies to get ready for the, somebody joked, the sort of fake vast right conspiracy, that is very low. I mean, we’re talking dozens, hundreds of people, not more than that.

HH: Thank you.

JP: The online phenomenon is much bigger.

HH: Yeah, we’ll come back to online. In terms of people who are actually a domestic terrorist threat in the United States as the result of their right-wing views, not their left-wing views, but the right-wing, not, like the people in Ireland that you followed first who have not forsworn violence, in the United States, you think it’s dozens or a couple hundred?

JP: Yeah.

HH: On the left, how big do you think, and I don’t know, I didn’t see any of your work looking into Antifa or any of the radicals on the left. But I used to study the SDS pretty well and the Weathermen extensively. How big is it on the left, do you think, James Pogue?

JP: You know, I actually, I wrote a piece about a group called the Socialist Rifle Association. This is a few years ago, and there’s a few of these groups, the John Brown gun clubs and things like that. And their memberships, I actually kind of had a general idea. There was a few thousand, I think, in the Socialist Rifle Association. That’s not to say these are people who are arming to overthrow the government, but these are explicitly armed left-wing groups. Most of those groups that I knew about at the time have since imploded, which is pretty typical of left-wing groups. So maybe about equivalent in certain ways.

HH: So James, my theory, and you’re an excellent writer, but my theory is that you amplify both in Ireland and in the United States Mountain West, a very small number of real people into a, it’s sort of like fear porn. And the fear porn about the right, like the fear porn about the left, doesn’t interest me, because it doesn’t deal in the specific numbers of people, which are very, very small, and really do not represent a threat to the Constitutional order. That’s my theory after finishing all of the pieces of yours. How do you respond to that?

JP: Oh, well, see, I actually, I would push back on the idea that I amplify anything. My interest has always been in fringe politics and how they represent what people in the mainstream are thinking, right? And so Northern Ireland’s actually a very good example where you have pretty small numbers of people, and historically, you had very small numbers of people throughout the entire 20th Century history of Ireland who were actually interested in engaging in violence themselves. But in terms of the support based on the ideas they represented, that was enough to change world history. That was enough to change the entire politics of how Europe functions. So and that was true in the Basque region. That’s been true across many, many sorts of fringe groups and how they interact with mainstream politics.

HH: That’s absolutely true. But in terms of the whole threat to the United States Constitutional order, what I try and tell people is I don’t like fear porn from the left about the right, and I don’t like fear porn from the right about the left, because in fact, the Bell curve in the United States is the Bell curve everywhere. There’s a tiny, little tail on both ends that are extreme, and some of them are violent, but we ought not to get worked up about them, because they’re not a real threat to the Constitutional order. Agree or disagree?

JP: I tend to agree about the actual physical threat to the Constitutional order. In terms of the idea that people are falling out of belief in the order that we use as mainstream politics, I think that’s much more true. And I actually think it’s more true now than it was even in the 70s when you had these kind of like huge bursts of left-wing terrorism, huge bursts of activity by the Weathermen and groups like that, the Angela Davis types. I actually think that there’s more people that are falling out of belief that our Constitutional system functions in their interests, and that you have these fringe groups that to some degree represent that view. I do not think that like militiamen in Michigan are about to overthrow the government.

HH: And I just don’t think it’s a significant problem in the country. We’ve got significant problems. We’ve got 70,000 homeless people in L.A. I don’t know if you’re in Southern or Northern California. And they’re drowning in this winter. And we have got, you know, millions of people crossing the Southern border, and we’ve got fentanyl deaths over 100,000. And you’re talented. Why focus on a fringe of a fringe instead of major problems where a progressive left voice might persuade people of new approaches? I mean, why amplify the nuttery instead of focusing on systemic enduring problems?

JP: Well, actually, I think those two things are interrelated, right? And so for example, I’m spending a lot of time right now, I’m splitting my time between far Northern California, up by the Oregon border, and down here in Southern California. And up there in Siskiyou and Shasta Counties, focusing on Shasta County, the militia up there, which you might want to have written off as a fringe, the militia up there, their proxies and allies actually just took control of the county board. And they have succeeded, to some degree, in sort of getting rid of their enemies. They have made the militia up there into, and I’m not even saying this as an alarmist. These are people, you know, that I get my haircut at the place, at the headquarters, essentially, of the militia. It’s at the barbershop. One of the guys, Hugh, runs the militia. I do Brazilian jiu jitsu. He has a Brazilian jiu jitsu gym in Redding.

HH: Do you worry about them committing acts of violence? I mean, winning a majority on the board of supervisors in Shasta County, I’m going to put down more to the fact that the California Department of Fish and Game has run roughshod over their property rights with the owls and other things. I don’t think they’re a danger. Do you think they’re a danger to anybody?

JP: Certainly not to me. I mean, they’re very friendly to me, right? There are, the thing that is happening is less that they’re going to launch an armed insurgency against the government than that there’s a kind of weird, it’s actually very similar to how Northern Ireland functions. There’s a weird kind of crossover between armed politics and kind of this sense of looming dread that a lot of liberals have that actually has worked greatly to the benefit of some of the people involved in the more militia-style politics. And it gets them democratically-elected.

HH: Let’s close on that sense of looming dread, James. This is the problem. That sense of looming dread on the left is amplified endlessly by my old friends at MSNBC and by Vanity Fair and by others, and it’s just not healthy for the left to think that there’s a significant number of crazy right-wingers. There just aren’t.

JP: Well, it’s funny you’re saying this to me, because what I get from the left is that I play all this stuff down. I’m always getting shouted at from the left for being not alarmist enough. My whole political project is just to actually, to some degree, I let people talk for themselves and let people make their own decisions. I am actually not a professional alarmist. And so interestingly enough, I actually take a lot of stick sometimes from my Vanity Fair pieces in particular, because I don’t add a lot commentary to it. And I actually, I kind of let people just talk and engage, to some degree, in their critiques of how society is going. And I allow people to make their own judgments. And what’s really interesting is often times, people on the right like it and people on the left like it.

HH: Well, I don’t think it matters how much people react. I think what matters the most, I want to give you the last word, is how many facts can someone take away from a work of journalism? How Thomas Wolfe invented, you know, new journalism in the 70s. You’re a practitioner of new journalism now, letting people speak for themselves. But if you find the five craziest people in a state, they’re not speaking for the state. They’re speaking for their five crazy people. And I think it’s a waste of talent, James.

JP: Well, I guess my response to that would be to have people read the work, because I actually don’t think that when I’m talking to, whether it’s J.D. Vance or indeed the militia people that I talk to in Northern California, I would disagree with you when you say that they’re the craziest people. As a matter of fact, I often think they’re the most interesting people. And that’s kind of what I’m doing in my work, is even if they’re expressing a kind of politics that people haven’t heard before, it’s often the most interesting politics at play. And that’s what I like writing about.

HH: Okay, I’m going to extend and revise my remarks. They are interesting. The articles are very interesting. They are not significant, meaning that the number of people, very interesting people that you are profiling do not rise to a significant political mass about which we ought to be concerned. You get the last word, James, as all my guests do.

JP: Well, I’ve been told that many times, and I’ve often been told that the people I’m writing about have no political significance, and it’s very frequently the case that six months later, they end up in office. So I would challenge you on that front, because a lot of times, I’m identifying people who are going to come and to have a greater significance going forward.

HH: All right, I’ll go back and read it when it comes forward. I do recommend, I really loved the Republicans piece. I thought that was fine journalism. The Dissident Right, not so much. But James Pogue, good Buckeye talk. Glad to make your acquaintance. Keep coming back, and thank you for getting up early to join me on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

JP: Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

HH: Thank you.

End of interview.