Review of How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left by Eoin Higgins (Bold Type Books, 2025)
Glenn Greenwald
In the mid-2000s, Glenn Greenwald decided to leave his constitutional law practice and devote himself to political commentary full time. He established a positive reputation among liberals during the later half of the 2000s as a ferocious critic of the Bush administration’s War on Terror. This reputation continued to some extent during Barack Obama’s first term; although he criticized the Democratic president for continuing many aspects of Bush’s foreign policy, he found himself a semi-regular guest on MSNBC programs and wrote glowing blurbs for books by two of the network’s hosts,Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes. . He was known for attacking Fox News for its crude right-wing propaganda. During Obama’s second term, he grew visibly more radical: his relationship with MSNBC liberals soured as he deepened his involvement with the national security whistleblower cases of Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. Noam Chomsky considered him a political ally.
When Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, Greenwald began the first of his dozens of appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program where he attacked the Democrats for promoting unfounded rumors and smear about Donald Trump in their Russiagate campaign. He clearly became intoxicated with the positive feedback he received from Carlson’s audience for the fact that—although a man of the left—he criticized liberals for their attacks on Trump, their hero. As he became more prominent as a Carlson guest—and also on other Fox shows like Ingraham Angle—he noticeably stopped criticizing Fox News in his writings. He tried to justify his appearances on Fox by saying that he was giving viewers of that channel the opportunity to hear anti-imperialist arguments to which they would otherwise never be exposed. However, in his Fox appearances, Greenwald almost never advocated left wing views: he used his airtime to endorse right wing talking points about the horrors of progressive identity politics (and other aspects of “wokeness”) and liberal plots to suppress conservative voices (“cancel culture”) as well as the supposed gross injustices and falsehoods embodied in the Democrats campaign to discredit Trump.
As he moved further to the MAGA right, he tried to justify his political shift by idiotically claiming that modern right wing populism–represented by MAGA–was carrying on the economic populist principles and attacks on American militarism and the national security state historically embraced by progressives. He argued that American intelligence agencies launched Russiagate as punishment for Trump supposedly for having anti-war and anti-militarist tendencies. In his promotion of MAGA’s anti-war virtues, he pointed to the positive coverage of Julian Assange by Fox hosts like Carlson–right wing demagogues had suddenly and opportunistically discovered the virtues of Wikileaks in 2016 when it had dug up dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, Greenwald’s right-wing turn was illustrated in numerous other ways. For example, Greenwald and his husband, the late David Miranda, were subjected to extensive harassment and threats in his adopted home country of Brazil in 2019-20 after he took part in investigative reporting hostile to the regime of Trump’s ally Jair Bolsanro. However, a few years later, he began expressing the opinion that Bolsonaro was actually an authentic populist who was being unjustly subjected to repression by Brazil’s ruling class and hostility from the Biden administration after his supporters staged a January 6th style riot in January 2023 after Bolsonaro lost his bid for re-election to the social democrat Lula da Silva. Meanwhile, he not only defended Tucker Carlson’s promotion of a version of the Great Replacement Theory but personally endorsed it himself. Clearly full of gratitude to Carlson for allowing him to be on TV—and just as he once spoke glowingly of Maddow and Hayes–he wasted no opportunity to publicly slobber over the Fox News demagogue as one of the great journalistic iconoclasts of our age, idiotically describing Carlson as a serious anti-war and anti-corporate thinker. He reversed his previous support for transgender rights and began speaking positively of transphobes. After for years ridiculing Alex Jones as a beyond the pale conspiracy theorist and psychopathic idiot, he began developing friendly relations with the Infowars demagogue. Although showing definite signs of a rightwing drift prior to 2020, in that year his increasingly MAGA friendly orientation became especially explicit as his hostility toward Black Lives Matter protests and alliance with right wing views on Covid and vaccines brought him increasingly MAGA friendly audiences. After the 2020 election, he melodramatically resigned from the left wing publication The Intercept, which he had cofounded in 2014, claiming the publications’ editors had tried to suppress an article of his about corruption revealed in the Hunter Biden laptop.
At present Greenwald hosts a podcast called System Update on Rumble, the right-wing video platform in which the reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel has been a heavy investor. Thiel’s company Palantir was involved with the American national security state during the Obama administration in secretly digging up dirt on persons involved with supporting Wikileaks and Edward Snowden—this was, of course, before Greenwald made his right-wing turn. It should be noted that although Greenwald’s podcast substantially panders to right wing audiences, he has also used his forum to righteously attack Israel for its genocidal war on the people of Gaza.
Matt Taibbi
Meanwhile, Matt Taibbi is a journalist with a similar right-wing trajectory to that of Greenwald. He was known to liberal-left audiences as a muckraking book author and journalist for Rolling Stone, exposing Wall Street corruption. In 2019, he published a book Hate Inc. which professed to be influenced by the 1988 classic Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman; one of the appendices in Hate Inc. includes the transcript of a friendly interview of Chomsky by Taibbi.
Like Greenwald, Taibbi’s drift to the political right became visible during the first Trump administration. Like Greenwald, Taibbi attacked the Democrats obsession with Russiagate, describing it as a monstrously unjust conspiracy by establishment media and political hacks to destroy Trump. Also, like Greenwald, he began attracting favorable right-wing attention with denunciations of the supposed menace of left-wing identity politics and cancel culture. Like Greenwald, Taibbi’s right wing drift became especially visible in 2020, as he criticized Black Lives Matter protests and expressed skepticism about the “official narrative” regarding Covid and vaccines. In 2021, on his Substack page Racket News, he attacked Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States—a book he had admired in his younger years—as resembling “the rantings of a mental patient.” He praised the transphobia of Matt Walsh, the far-right podcaster and filmmaker. After October 7th 2023, he publicly criticized protests on college campuses against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
In late 2022, Taibbi agreed to take part in Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda campaign called the Twitter Files. The genesis of the Twitter Files was that shortly after purchasing Twitter that year, Musk ordered the release of tens of thousands of internal company documents produced prior to his ownership of the company to a handful of select journalists, including Taibbi. The documents, pre-selected for the journalists by Musk’s people, supposedly proved that Biden administration officials secretly pressured Twitter to suppress conservative voices criticizing the “official narrative” about Covid, vaccines and alleged election fraud against Trump in the 2020 election. Taibbi argued that this intervention against pro-MAGA voices on Twitter was one piece of evidence showing a vast plot by the American ruling class to suppress MAGA because they feared it as a genuinely populist movement.
By mid-2023, Taibbi had had a falling out with Musk and the latter ordered the shadow-banning on Twitter of all posts originating from Substack—then, as now, Taibbi’s primary writing venue (and primary source of income from writing). Prior to that, Taibbi publicly professed to believe that Musk was a passionate warrior on behalf of free speech; even as Musk’s Twitter was, at the same time, assiduously cooperating with Narendra Modi’s government in India to censor posts on Twitter by Modi critics. Modi’s government has been extremely generous in granting concessions to Musk’s businesses in India.
Taibbi was apparently unpaid for participating in the Twitter Files; however, he received a massive increase in exposure to right wing audiences, with subscriptions to his Substack page increasing dramatically as did his follower count on Twitter.
Last year was especially important for Taibbi’s right wing evolution. Early in the year, he appeared on the podcast of Donald Trump Jr. to discuss the evils of Russiagate. Shortly before the 2024 election, he spoke at a public rally entitled Rescue the Republic with other luminaries of MAGA world such as Russell Brand, Tulsi Gabbard, Brett Weinstein and Jordan Peterson. After the presidential election in November, he appeared to indicate that he’d voted for Trump.
Owned: Taibbi and Greenwald
Many of the highlights mentioned above in the careers of Taibbi and Greenwald are featured in a new book about these two men entitled Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. The author is Eoin Higgins and it is his second book–the first featured a small series of articles on the 2016 election. He is a journalist whose work has appeared in such publications as Counterpunch, The Intercept, Salon.com, The Appeal and The New Republic. He was once counted among Greenwald’s devoted admirers. Early in the book, Higgins writes that as someone much less established in the investigative journalist game than Greenwald, it was sincerely pleasing that Greenwald described an article Higgins co-wrote in 2020 for The Intercept (with Ryan Grim and Daniel Boguslaw) as “Pulitzer worthy.” Last year, Greenwald agreed to an interview with Higgins for this book and Higgins quotes excerpts from it at length. As for Taibbi, Higgins writes that he was standoffish regarding interview requests.
The book has notable relevance for current times in its contention that the right wing political turn of both Greenwald and Taibbi has been motivated, in part, by a desire of the two men to please the right wing Silicon Valley billionaires led by Elon Musk who are currently exercising such an outrageously outsized influence over the Trump White House. Higgins alleges that the two journalists are serving as pawns in the efforts of the tech billionaires to reshape online American media in ways that promote right wing social and economic ideology as well as protect the billionaires’ business interests. He describes Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter as part of these efforts as well as Peter Thiel’s investments in Rumble, the platform hosting Greenwald’s podcast System Update. He also describes Thiel’s successful efforts to use his wealth to destroy Gawker Media during the 2010’s as part of an effort to destroy media platforms critical of Silicon Valley billionaires like himself.
The connection between the two journalists and right-wing billionaire tech bros was illustrated nicely when both Greenwald and Taibbi appeared at a 2022 convention for fans of David Sack’s podcast All-In. At a convention event, the two men sat together on stage for a congenial discussion with Sacks, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is currently the AI and cryptocurrency czar for the Trump administration. Sacks praised the two journalists for taking principled stands against progressive orthodoxy.
The Evidence
Higgin’s evidence that Greenwald and Taibbi are pawns of right wing tech billionaires is not particularly voluminous, although that which he does present makes his argument at least plausible. His most direct evidence in the case of Taibbi’s is the latter’s above mentioned cooperation with Elon Musk. He notes that Greenwald has avoided criticizing Peter Thiel on his System Update podcast and the particularly bizarre enmity that Greenwald holds for New York Times technology reporter and social media influencer Taylor Lorenz. Higgins writes that Greenwald’s public excoriations of Lorenz have been based on a desire to kiss the rear end of Marc Andreessen, the MAGA friendly Silicon Valley billionaire whose ire has been stoked by Lorenz’s reporting. Andreesen became a major investor in Substack in 2019 and successfully used his leverage to push that platform to amplify more conservative voices. After leaving The Intercept in late 2020, Substack was Greenwald’s leading writing platform and income source so he attempted to cultivate Andreessen’s good graces.
A particularly peculiar connection of Greenwald to the tech world’s far right politics was illustrated last year when he spoke at a convention of the Network State movement founded by Bajaji Srinivasan, a confidante and business associate of Thiel and Andreessen. The Network State philosophy–similar to that of Curtis Yarvin, another prominent influence on Thiel, Andreessen (and Vice-President JD Vance)–espouses explicitly anti-democratic ideas, arguing for certain American cities to be made autonomous from the rest of the country and run in ways similar to neofascist or semi-feudal lines by tech moguls or their allies. Greenwald told Higgins during their 2024 interview that he found much of Network State’s philosophy “creepy.” He said that he attended the conference for the opportunity to make a speech about his pet obsession–deep state government plots to censor online speech–and not out of any broader attraction to Network State ideology.
While Greenwald is probably indeed not an adherent of Network State ideology, his speaking at one of its conferences is highly indicative of the type of audience he has sought to cultivate in recent years for his own writing.
Looking Forward
While I think that Higgins is correct to note the influence of the right wing tech billionaires on the rightward political shifts of Greenwald and Taibbi, I think this factor is probably a less important motivation than the the desire to gather their share of podcast and Substack subscriptions among the vast audience for online right-wing populist influencers, podcasters and writers. Right wing populist podcasters—everyone from Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman to Tim Pool, Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson and Patrick Bet David—attract large audiences with their conspiracy theories and vibe of being dynamic and “anti-establishment.” In the era of Trump, the populist right has used rhetoric traditionally associated with leftists, attacking the “deep state” and the military industrial complex, showing markedly less enthusiasm for overseas US military interventionism than the typical neoconservative prominent during the Reagan and George W. Bush presidencies. One common theme among these online personalities has been vaccine skepticism and advocacy of quickish medical theories about Covid. Online audiences have eaten such ideas up. Higgins does not mention it, but I believe that Taibbi and Greenwald have, to a significant extent, echoed the common themes of these podcasters and other influencers in order to appeal to the same right wing populist audiences.
Higgin’s book is a relatively quick read and–through the prism of the careers of Greenwald and Taibbi–provides some food for thought about the struggle for influence and power among media influencers in this era of Trump. He is careful to note that, along with the grift factor, there is probably a certain sincerity in the expressed beliefs of Greenwald and Taibbi: the right wing political shift of both is based on their own flawed thinking as well as the old cliche that many people get more conservative as they get older.
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