Do Your Own Research: What JD Vance and Tucker Carlson Actually Believe w/ James Pogue

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
American Empire is in a very deep crisis. That much is obvious. But what's less well known is that it has very serious critics from the right.
JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, many of the Americans who voted for Trump in the 2024 election.
But what are they thinking now?
Everyone has a game, of course, but what is it?
Well, the person who knows is my guest this week, James Pogue. James is a truly exceptional reporter. He's reported on the decline of global empires from West and Central Africa, where the Russian Wagner Group picks over the corps of France Afrique, the French near colonies. He's reported from deep rural America where accessionist movements try and break away from the state of California. And he's reported from now Washington, DC., where the true absurdities of American empire are all contained and expressed. Of all the people I know personally, James is also the closest to JD Vance, the current US Vice President, and therefore just one heartbeat away from becoming president or an election in two years time. But what makes James such an interesting and thoughtful person to talk to about this is that he knows it's not just about the people. It's also about the structure. The US empire is at the highest level a machine that makes whoever runs it up to and including the president themselves do what it demands of them. The number one job of the US president, including possible future president Vance, will be to keep the system going. That means juicing asset prices, keeping the stock market going up, and supporting the military industrial complex. So can anyone truly change it? And would we actually want them to? Well, the person next in line to try is JD Vance. A man with some truly radical and frankly, baffling views about America, its history and the world that it governs. This show connects to my conversations with Alfred McCoy on the decline and fall of empires, to the conversation with Quince Le Bodine and Ben Tarnoff on the tech right and the empire of Elon Musk, to my conversation with Theoria Frankos on extraction and state control of critical minerals. The full map is always available on the Novara Media website and the link for that will be in the show notes. James Pogue, welcome to Your Own Research.

**James Pogue** (2:40)
Thank you very much. Nice to be back.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:42)
We spoke about, oh, a year ago, year and a half ago, just after Trump had been elected. And there are a load of things in that conversation that were fantastic. And I want to come back to some of those points we had there.
You'd just done some amazing reporting for Granta about Wagner PMC, the private military security contractor Wagner, very famous for fighting parts of the Ukraine War, and what they were doing particularly in Africa, which is its own spiralling story that people should go back and check out that episode on Novara FM, a different podcast from this one, but on the same podcast feed.
You've done an extraordinary variety of reporting since then, before then, and so on. And one thing you told me was that you were always looking for barbarianism. You were attracted to barbarian states of existence, right? And a previous guest on this show, Luke Kemp, told us, I think, very convincingly that civilisation is a term of propaganda, right? And the idea that the barbarians are somehow sort of out there and uncivilised and unsophisticated and so on is a piece of propaganda, really. So first question is just like, where are you finding barbarianism now? Where are you looking for it?

**James Pogue** (3:56)
That's a good question.
Yeah, it's interesting because I've sort of, since we spoke, I sort of transitioned into like, or I tried, I guess, I'm not sure if it worked. I tried to like transition into being an Imperial Court reporter because I, I mean, I kind of, you don't get the opportunity that much anymore. And like some of my stuff from like out on the fringes and whatnot, like it just got so much attention that, like I was sort of allowed into the world of reporting on DC without having to like compromise, I thought what I do too much, you know? So I like came into DC and I, you know, I set out to profile the Treasury Secretary and write all these politics pieces and I kind of took on contracts at VF and the New York Times. And in a certain way, like, it's been an interesting lesson because first of all, I think I realized not that I didn't per se know how things worked, but I didn't have the like granular ability to describe them. And so I spent a lot of time going back and doing stuff like studying monetary systems and studying like the history of the handover from the British Empire to the American and this kind of stuff, like stuff that I think a lot of my peers kind of like learned in grad school when they studied with Sam Moyn and this kind of thing. If you know that kind of set of reporter. And I had just never done that. And by the time I felt like I was really like with my feet on the ground were at war in Iran and the empire is over. And suddenly the barbarians are like crashing the gates. So it was sort of...