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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American power, politics and society.

On each episode, I will talk to an American expert or an expert on America

about something that's going on in America in 2023. I am delighted to be joined again for the third

time by James Pope, who is a writer at Harper's and Vanity Fair, who has just written another brilliant piece about the dissident right in America.

This one is under the headline inside the dissident fringe, where the new right meets the far left and everyone's bracing for apocalypse.

It's quite a long headline, I think because it's quite hard to capture

what you're talking about in this piece. And I don't mean this as a criticism. I mean it's praised.

The piece is quite sprawling because what you're talking about is in chaos. And this scene,

this movement, this drift towards exit, as they call it, dissidents removing themselves from

American society, is incoherent in many ways. It's picking up all sorts of ideas and running

with them in lots of different directions. Tell us a little bit about how you got involved in

writing this piece, how it's an extension of what you've written before?

Well, so, you know, for people who read my last piece, or people who didn't, actually,

that one was more focused on what is known as, like, the new right, which is a term that, at least in some circles, is falling out of favor for various reasons, which sometimes are obscure even to me,

and I'm friends with a lot of these people. But the dissident right is this kind of fringier

element of people who share the conception of the sort of like buttoned up think tanker types

in the new right, but who, like they share the conception that we are ruled by a sort of globalist

regime, essentially. And some people wouldn't use the word globalist, but a neoliberal even regime

that is sort of operating under the ghost of its own power now, and that is running us into

a kind of like hyperspace of technology ruling our lives, of social disorder,

of all this sort of thing, right? And I got interested in this world actually via people who,

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