“Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left” follows the political journeys of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, two reporters once celebrated by the left as era-defining voices of dissent who are now closely allied with the powerful, conservative capitalists who have bought out the industry around them.
“I've been interested in this overall story of how tech elites have kind of bought and created their own somewhat subservient alternative media aimed at disrupting and breaking down former either mainstream or independent, challenging media," said Maine-based journalist Eoin Higgins, who originally hails from the Southern Berkshire community of Monterey. "I've been interested in this for quite some time."
Greenwald and Taibbi were once his heroes, outspoken and influential critics of the wars, governmental efforts to erode civil liberties, and corporate malfeasance that came to define the decade after 9/11.
“They were aligned with and allied with elements of liberalism and the Democrats, and everybody was together against George W Bush from the war on terror," Higgins told WAMC. "Also, the GOP response to the financial crisis. And there was an expectation that when Obama came into office, that if he didn't live up to the expectations that the liberal blogosphere and that the liberal activists had, that there would be some sort of response from the left. And I think I can say pretty easily that they were both disappointed that that didn't happen.”
Higgins says the seismic shock of Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency contributed to their rightward drift.
“In 2016 when Trump came into office and promised to blow everything up, the response of Democrats and many of their allies in the Democrat, liberal aligned media was to say that he a threat to this international and national order that, for a long time, hadn't been working in the ways that had been promised, and that in a lot of in a lot of cases, media figures who had opposed that order and opposed that when it was under Bush, and now were supporting it because it was under Obama, and now were saying that we needed to protect it," he explained. "And so, there was a reaction to that, to say, this isn't the right way to oppose this guy, this isn't the right thing to do. But instead of it being, but we still have to keep our eye on the ball of what's really dangerous here, or, what's more dangerous here, they both took their preexisting contrarianism and this belief in liberals being more dangerous, and it just kind of became their entire politics.”
In Higgins’ view, Greenwald and Taibbi found themselves vassals of the very elites they made their brands condemning.
“Glenn, his career is based on fighting the national security state," said Higgins. "He now makes his income from Rumble, which is a YouTube clone, a YouTube alternative, heavily funded, or a funding round led by Peter Thiel, who owns Palantir, which is a surveillance company that works for the government- And they do the very things that Glenn used to say that he was opposed to.”
Thiel is one of the major players in “Owned.” After Gawker Media published criticism of his business acumen and controversially outed him as gay in 2007, the billionaire poured money into Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the outlet for publishing his sex tape. In 2016, the court decided against Gawker and the website shuttered under the weight of the $140 million in damages awarded to Hogan.
Taibbi, whose fiery coverage of the 2008 financial crisis once established him as a brash critic of the financial industry and its ties to government, found his unlikely patron for a short while in Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and owner of X, the website formerly known as Twitter.
“You have a guy who has made billions through his government contracts doing God knows what," Higgins said. "I mean, some of the stuff we know about, some of the stuff we don't his companies are intertwined into NASA and different surveillance aspects.”
The timeliness of the book grew exponentially as Higgins charted Greenwald and Taibbi’s eventual embrace with the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley and their emergence as key figures in the early days of the second Trump presidency. Figures like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, and Musk were literally foregrounded at Trump’s inauguration.
“It just became more and more relevant as time went on," Higgins said. "Elon Musk became further further radicalized to the right, and he became a big Trump supporter, big proponent of Trumpism and Trump's type of conservatism, and the preexisting publicly conservative tech figures like Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel became even further to the right and took some others with them.”
Higgins sees “Owned” as an intervention into the shifting sands of the media world, linking the evolving politics of Greenwald and Taibbi to the interests of their wealthy backers.
“Taibbi is basically an anti-vaxxer at this point," he told WAMC. "You could come across that and think that that he's giving credibility to it, or think that something like ‘wokeness’ is a big problem because you read something by Glenn that said that that was the real issue with government censorship, or that the government is coming to take away your Twitter account. I mean, this stuff is just kind of boilerplate right wing punditry at this point, but because it's being done by these guys who have this credibility, I think it's good to push back against that and to provide some context.”
“Owned” will be released on Tuesday.
