News Brief: Silicon Valley Patronage, How To Subtly Drift Right, and the New Conservative Media Ecosystem
Citations Needed | February 12, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: We do these News Briefs from time to time in between our regularly scheduled episodes. In the meantime, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show if you are so inclined, and we hope that you are, through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support on Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. And this time, we are thrilled to be joined by journalist and author Eoin Higgins, who has a new book out. We are both very excited to have Eoin on today to talk about, among other things, the public meltdowns of, say, former leftist heroes, which is part of a wider alternative media takeover by rightwing tech billionaires.
Adam: Yeah, we’re going to be discussing the kind of new dynamics of conservative media ecosystem in the era of MAGA, which had a weird four-year blur in between it. And then we’re going to discuss kind of the Not Left or Right guy, the kind of branded iconoclast as a floating piece of driftwood towards the stream which drifts right, and what the new ecosystem looks like, which is what our guest writes in detail and analyzes these somewhat fraught and nuanced questions, I think, quite intelligently. So we’re excited to talk to him today.
Nima: That’s right. So without further ado, we are now joined by Eoin Higgins, journalist, historian, and author, whose work has appeared everywhere, including Deadspin, Washington Post, The Outline, The Intercept, The New Republic, The Nation, Splinter, all over the place. He also writes for Morning Brew’s tech newsletter, IT Brew. His new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, was just published in early February by Hachette Books. Eoin joins us now. Eoin, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Eoin Higgins: Really happy to be here.
Adam: So I want to begin by discussing the overall thesis of your book, and why you think it’s an important intervention. Because I think that we have our own thoughts on this, about why, again, figures which you discuss prominently in your book, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi. And then, of course, there are others we can discuss. I guess you could say Jimmy Dore, although he has his own thing going on. Why you feel like they pivoted more to the right during the Trump years, and why you think that this is a bigger story than just kind of taking these prominent journalists down a peg. Because I think the perception, maybe for some is that it’s kind of just petty Twitter score-settling, which I’m not above, don’t get me wrong, but there is actually kind of a bigger story here about the gravitational pull of a certain ecosystem of media. Not to make excuses, but that’s something that those on the Left, or even liberals, I suppose, have to kind of contend with. So I want to sort of begin by asking you, what you think that the, I think it’s fair to say at this point, manifest and documented drift to the MAGA Right by people like Taibbi and Greenwald, what do you think it says about the modern conservative movement, and to what degree it’s kind of more sophisticated than perhaps our fathers’, you know, William F. Buckley, conservative media?
Eoin Higgins: Well, I think I would start by saying that when I was first approached to write this book, it was kind of pitched to me as primarily, like, a takedown of Greenwald and Taibbi, like, why they went to the right. Maybe takedown is a little strong, but, you know, just kind of like an examination of that. But I wanted to really get into the role of tech money in explaining this shift, because I think that that is what elevates this from Twitter score-settling, right, to something that is poking at a larger discourse and media story. And that is that you have these figures, Greenwald and Taibbi I use as the primary examples of this, because I consider them to be important and influential and to have a certain amount of credibility that I think someone like, I mean, you mentioned Jimmy Dore, I think someone like him doesn’t have that. If you told somebody 10 years ago, Hey, this guy, Jimmy Dore, who’s, like, on The Young Turks or whatever, is going to be a big Republican Donald Trump guy in like, 10 years, I think most people be like, well, first of all, like, Who is that?
[Laughter]
But then also be like, I guess that makes sense, you know, he doesn’t really have a lot of beliefs. But I think if you said that about Greenwald, maybe, I think they would be surprised, and I think for two separate reasons, right, for Greenwald, and we can get more into this later, but I think his, irrespective of what you think about his personal politics, he’s kind of had this appeal to the Left and to liberals for a long time. It’s kind of come and gone, but he’s, until relatively recently, been seen as a kind of a consistent voice, and Taibbi certainly kind of embraced liberalism and center-left, I think, a lot more just in his writing. Now for them to make this shift is an actual intervention in how not only they were perceived, but also how they were kind of pushing forward ideas and pushing forward political agendas. I think one thing about both of them that I’ve always, until recently, found pretty admirable is that they didn’t pretend that they were kind of doing this neutral journalism, but instead, were very open about the fact that they were pursuing an agenda, that they saw some things as right and some things as wrong, and that fighting for those ideals was more important than some kind of pretense of objectivity. And so to see that, and then to see what they’ve become, is where the story is.
Nima: I’d love to hear your short version of the trajectory of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, not entire bios, but the idea that who Greenwald was during the Bush and Obama years, kind of how Taibbi emerged. Greenwald writing on his own, I think, blog, and then moving to Salon, and then the Guardian, being instrumental, of course, in Edward Snowden’s leaks and won an Oscar for Citizenfour. And then, you know, co-starting up The Intercept. And then how that shift continued to evolve, and you saw him move toward the right with the rise of Trump, and certainly following Trump’s first victory over Clinton. And then there’s kind of a similar trajectory, with Taibbi writing about wealth and economics, you know, outsized wealth in our media and government systems, writing for Rolling Stone, publishing books, and then having a similar trajectory. Is there anything that I missed in there, anything, any kind of other things that you want to note that you kind of outline in your book for how they kind of made this shift? And then we can get into kind of the funding behind that.
Eoin Higgins: Yeah. I mean, I think the ideological basis, I think Greenwald kind of went into punditry, blogging, with this idea that civil liberties were kind of like this, be all and end all. And so the Bush administration represented a betrayal of those ideals for Americans. And when Obama came into office, there was kind of a hope that things would change and be different. And instead, Obama, I mean, it was different, but the mission really didn’t change that much. And so I think that for Greenwald, if you just kind of look at his writing, there’s a lot of frustration and anger toward all, like, the liberal bloggers and liberal media figures that he had kind of come up with, who then were kind of defending this stuff because Obama was doing it, and I think after eight years of that, I think that’s why he was kind of, like a little bit more amenable to Trump probably in 2016, although I certainly at that point would not call him a supporter of Trump, or even really someone who was promoting or supporting these conservative ideas.
But I think that over time, and then kind of over those four years, just kind of watching the way that Democrats and liberals reacted to Trump, which was not to, like, try to offer an alternative. And here I’m kind of projecting some of my own complaints here, obviously, but like, you know, not to offer an alternative, but kind of to spread this kind of conspiratorial ideas of Trump being owned by Russia and, like, seeing it as this James Bond, Cold War, you know, radio play where the good guys are like, on the side of American values in the state, and the bad guys are Trump. And Trump is this kind of anarchic figure who’s trying to destroy America, etc., etc., etc. And I think that for Greenwald, if you kind of look at his writing, his tweets throughout this time, you can see the frustration for that start to build.
For Taibbi, I think that it was kind of a combination of things. Primarily, I think his rejection of the Russiagate stuff put him in a position where liberals who had loved his work for a long time started to turn on him. I kind of see his book about Eric Garner, I Can’t Breathe, as an attempt to kind of reset with liberals, with the center-left, and right as that’s coming out, right as he’s doing the book tour for it, MeToo hits. And then there’s all this stuff around his writing at The Exile back when he was in Russia in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Stuff that is, you know, he and his co-author, Mark Ames have said repeatedly that this is satire, but I think even if you take them at their word, which I don’t think anyone really shouldn’t, but it’s still pretty misogynistic stuff. It’s pretty vile. And so that coming out at that time really gave liberals who were already kind of poised to feel a lot of antipathy to him, a lot of ammunition against him. And so that’s kind of a long way around saying, if I had to kind of pinpoint his ideological shift to one thing, I would pinpoint it to there. Well, I would say the Glenn’s kind of was like a longer process.
Nima: Mm-hmm. And then once you become kind of, you know, no longer the darling of the Left, there’s the openness to maybe rail against that, right? Like your former allies then become your enemies, and then you kind of are looking for a new home.
Eoin Higgins: Right. I mean, that’s a tried and true strategy. People have been doing that for a very long time. There was an early formation of the book idea, which would have looked at the evolution of this tendency for decades. You know, during the Cold War, I think if you look at like the neocons, a lot of those guys became disgusted with the Left for whatever reasons. I mean, even people who I think were still somewhat center-left, like Todd Gitlin, if people aren’t familiar with him, he was kind of one of these SDS people back in the ’60s. And if you read his book The Sixties, you can kind of see this break happen with elements of the Left that were more radical and extreme, and kind of the elements of more reform-minded liberals maybe, like Gitlin. And so if you kind of take that and extrapolate that out and say, Hey, well, what would this be like if instead of, you know, just being like, Well, we want to be reform-minded liberals and kind of reject this radicalization. You were just like, Actually, no, we’re just going to go straight up to the right. That’s kind of the neocon thing. I’m not trying to get, like, too far afield here, but just trying to contextualize this and like, this is a longstanding way for people on the Left to make this move. And I also think that there is a sense that if you are someone who is kind of repeating or adhering to well-established, liberal, mainstream narratives, or even, I guess in the alternative media sphere, like liberal, left-leaning narratives, there’s certainly like a place for you, but you’re probably going to be part of a larger group. And if you are like, Actually, no, I’m going to leave the Left and here’s why, there’s going to be more of an opportunity for you to be heard, because you’re kind of going against the grain. But you’re also not part of the Right. You’re this kind of contrarian other.
Adam: Right. So I want to talk a bit about the gravitational pull financially, because obviously there is a kind of innuendo, if not an explicit statement, of venality, and it’s hard to tell, right? It’s kind of the thing we negotiate a lot on this show, which is corrupt or just bad ideology? It’s hard to distinguish on many an occasion. You pinpoint specifically funders, Mark Andreessen, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, a lot of these Silicon Valley, I think, a term now people are using as brotocracy, that kind of suck in the so-called politically homeless people, which is a popular self-identification for a lot of people, especially those who grow angry at liberalism, which I think can start off for good reasons and then veer into, like really petty cultural reasons. And I think a lot of this break really does come down to, like, this division, where do you hate liberals more than fascists? Most on the Left hate fascists more than they hate liberals, as much as they hate liberals, and as annoying as they are and as pernicious as they are, that when it comes down to it, liberals are preferable to fascists. And then there’s some who I think kind of, ostensibly are on the Left, or at least, kind of in that milieu, who ended up not really minding fascists that much because they wanted to own the libs and hate the libs. And that, of course, will, when there is funding, really from kind of two camps primarily, liberalism and fascism, right? There’s not a lot of funding for the Left. Clearly. That’s why we have to beg you people every goddamn time we go on our show. That once you alienate yourself from liberalism and you don’t really seem to mind fascism or the Right, then naturally you’ll sort of gravitate towards that, especially if you’re one of these kind of, I’m Not Left or Right guys, or kind of self-identified iconoclasts, which we did in Episode 170, we did the Not Left or Right guy, which I think is a big kind of dynamic here at work.
So talk to me if you could about these funding models, because obviously Substack and things like that have changed how it works. And obviously there’s a lot of opacity. There’s a lot we sort of don’t know. But in your research and your writing, what did you find was the kind of funding ecosystem? I know that Rumble plays a big role here. Can you talk about that? And can you talk about how simply going on Tucker Carlson can boost one’s Subtack tremendously, even if they’re not necessarily getting paid by Fox News?
Eoin Higgins: Yeah, so I think those are two kind of different things. I’m going to start with the first one, the funding model. One of the overarching theories of the book is that a primary reason for this kind of tech takeover of alternative media, is that these tech billionaires were used to kind of fawning, business-friendly media coverage for many, many years. And then as things started to get a little more critical, they got very angry. They got outraged. Because I think actually, Marc Andreessen, relatively recently, said this, I believe, on Rogan’s show, but it may have been on something else. But what he said was that there was this unspoken deal between Democrats, between liberals and Silicon Valley, and that the Democrats and liberals basically broke it. And that deal was not that there would be some sort of, like, specifically public policy hostility towards them, not that there would be some kind of material action, although, like, some of that stuff has happened, but not a lot of it. It’s that they didn’t want them to be mean to them. And Andreessen was specifically talking about the Biden administration, like, quote-unquote, “debanking” crypto.
But if you look at his kind of ideological journey over the last 10 or 15 years, you see somebody who kept on getting more and more radicalized to the right the more and more people on Twitter basically told him to go fuck himself. And for someone like that who’s kind of insulated in this bubble, that’s quite offensive and annoying. And so what happened is that they decided that they wanted to have an alternative media structure that would be the kind of media that they want. They want a captured media. And so they started to invest in these alternative media models. Famously, Andreessen invested in Substack. Substack then had a lot of capital, and they were able to go out and get writers. They went out and they offered money to writers on the Left and the Right, but the big money tended to go towards people on the Right, or at least kind of like these iconoclastic journalists. So these are people like Andrew Sullivan, I believe is one of these guys, Matthew Yglesias.
Now, Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald were not enticed away by being given huge contracts by Substack, but they were enticed away because they knew that they could bring their audiences over. And as they brought their audiences over, Substack continued to promote them. Substack continued to promote this kind of right-leaning, tell-the-truth media, and that kind of corresponds to Andreessen’s money and Andreessen’s influence. And I interview Luke O’Neill, who’s a really early Substack success story, and he talks about the reason that he’s not on the platform anymore is just that they just started continuing to promote stuff that was going further and further into, like, rightwing narratives, conspiracy. Transphobia certainly was a big one. And this kind of stuff also kind of aligns culturally with the kind of thing that Andreessen is interested in, these kind of rightwing narratives. Now, is it possible to directly link him giving money and him giving instruction? I mean, I think that’s going to be really hard to do, unless you can get internal communications, which is kind of thing that you would have to have some sort of lawsuit to get out. But I think that if you just kind of look at the shift and the way that things happen, I think that it makes a lot of sense.
Andreessen also invested in this app called Clubhouse, which was a big pandemic thing. It was kind of like an audio social media, kind of, where you could go into these rooms and talk with different people. This ended up being a failure, as was David Sacks’s Callin, which I was on for a while. And these platforms are supposed to kind of bring an alternative to the established, what they see as kind of like liberal, I guess in this case, podcast network for the audio stuff, liberal, you know, magazines in Substack’s case. Rumble is a different case in that this is, from the beginning, presented as an alternative to YouTube, like a rightwing alternative to YouTube, where you could go, like a free-speech alternative, right, but these are code words for the Right at this point. And Rumble was somewhat successful. I guess I wouldn’t say that it was huge or anything. But then it got seed capital from Peter Thiel and JD Vance, and this money really just supercharged it. And then they did give a deal this time. Glenn did take a deal to move his entire show over there, and then also to move from Substack to Locals, which is the Dave Rubin-founded blogging platform that Rumble bought and folded in. And if you don’t know, if those words don’t all make sense to you, listener, then feel good about that.
Adam: Yeah, we’re sort of getting in the weeds here. But yeah, the general idea was that there was a gravitational pull for those who were not, you know, again, once The Intercept began to collapse and lose its money, there really wasn’t anybody that was going to pay anyone. Not to sound like a Malibu divorce lawyer, but obviously Glenn got accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and obviously there’s an expectation there based on, again, a genuine popularity and genuine following. And there are those who want to promote that brand of free speech. But again, it’s like anyone who knows anything about user-supported content will know that there’s kind of these streams you can just kind of jump in, and they’re usually partisan, and they really are kind of liberal and MAGA, and I want to be careful not to come off too sanctimonious here, but if you don’t sort of jump in those streams, and you don’t operate within those streams, it is hard to actually get any kind of widespread visibility and popularity, because there’s nodes online that kind of share things based on those streams. Camps, if you will.
And anyone knows that if you do anything vaguely MAGA-adjacent, or if you do anything that is Blue MAGA to use a pejorative people use on social media, it can go long, it can go far, you can build a following on that. And the incentives to kind of gravitate towards those audiences, and to pander to those audiences are quite tremendous. And of course, not every writer does that. You have your kind of people who do their own thing, and that’s, not everyone does that. But five minutes into the kind of user-supported model, which obviously we are here, you realize pretty quickly what those streams are. And I think that my interpretation has always been like, Oh, he realized that, owning-the-libs stuff just trafficked really well and got him a lot of praise and attention, and he genuinely hated libs anyway. And again, not to discount ideology, because I do think people like Greenwald and Taibbi do have, especially Greenwald do have, like, genuine rightwing sympathies, or hyper-libertarian sympathies, which can become rightwing pretty quickly. But yeah, there’s a fucking well there, there’s a vein you tap, and then it sort of sets you right. And you don’t have to do a lot of, like, searching for an audience, because you have one that’s built in.
Eoin Higgins: I would also say that it’s not even just exclusive to media. I mean, you can break it down even more in like, a simple way, which is to say, if you’ve ever had a job where the boss wanted things done a certain way, the boss doesn’t have to tell you that. The boss doesn’t have to tell you that every single tiny thing that you do has to kind of align with that, or there’s going to be, you know, you can’t buck the trend too much. And so when you see all the money coming in from these rightwing tech billionaires into these media outlets that you’re making money off of, I think that it’s a pretty simple thing. I mean, it’s not, it doesn’t have to be, often people will be like, Well, can you trace the exact, I mean, this is one of Glenn’s things that he does online a lot. He’s like, Well, I’ve never actually taken a dollar from those guys. And you can’t actually trace me getting money from these guys to me taking a position. It’s like, Well, okay, we can’t trace it exactly to like, Peter Thiel sent you a text message telling you to say something, sure, but we can say that, you know, you went on Rumble and you started promoting these ideas. I didn’t put this in the book, but there was a moment when he started talking up Jack, the former Twitter founder/CEO, and started talking about, like, crypto and all these things that Jack was interested in, and then it came out, like, a month or two later that that was because Jack was giving a huge donation to his charity in Brazil. So it was kind of like, yes. Do I think that Jack directly texted him and said, Do this or I won’t give you the donation? No. Do I think that it’s probably pretty likely that he was doing this for that reason? I think that it would stretch credulity to think not.
Adam: Let’s talk about Russiagate, because I think that’s something that looms over this, in terms of breaking a lot of people’s brains, both anti- and pro-, for obvious reasons. Obviously we’ve dunked on a lot of the Russiagate extremists, the kind of low-hanging fruit, where I really kind of, I think we have the same general take on Russiagate, which is that there was obviously some shady stuff going on with Russia and Trump’s campaign, certainly worth investigating, but a lot of the kind of more lurid interpretations, whether it’s pee tape or kompromat, or any of these kind of things that spiraled into their own, it sort of became its own overarching explanation for everything. It became a kind of theory of everything with Trump, in a way that was not very helpful, and, of course, laundered the reputation of the worst neoconservatives on Earth, and really kind of downplayed the nativist antecedents of Trump to the point that we thought it was not particularly healthy for the body politic. It had a coercive element, and of course, pumped a bunch of money into the national security state. So I want to sort of talk about the anti-Russiagate ethos that began to become its own, you would think that Russia as a country didn’t exist.
[Laughter]
It sort of got to a point where it’s like, Does Russia do anything? And I think the ways in which Russia-aligned media promoted, I think fairly obviously, white nationalism, antisemitism is just rife, and that kind of got downplayed and belittled because the libs were promoting it, and the kind of neoconservatives were maybe pointing it out, and therefore we have to do the opposite of whatever they do, rather than trying to just call it as you see it?
Nima: Right. It became contrarian, rather than some kind of ideological consistency.
Adam: Yeah. To the point of just flagrantly dishonest, in my opinion. And again, I know we’re kind of in muddy waters in terms of trying to figure out venality versus genuine ideology, but talk, if you could, how Russiagate features into this theory as a kind of anti-lib accelerant. It sort of made people who hated liberals hate them more, and then it kind of spiraled into its own two various worldviews.
Nima: It’s the Turbo Boost button.
Adam: I can’t believe I’m trying to be the center guy, but I am, because I just think sometimes in life there are cartoonish extremes, and I think this is one example. So talk about Russiagate and how it features into your research and book, and how it played a role in this kind of severance.
Eoin Higgins: Yeah, well, I think your overview of it is pretty sharp. That’s pretty dead-on to how I feel about it. I mean, I know that you and I certainly have written a lot of not similarly topic, but similarly-minded things. I think that we probably come from a pretty similar place on this, and my work on it was certainly praised by Glenn at times because I also, I kind of shared that skepticism of how this was supposed to explain everything about Trump, I think, is how you put it. And I think that’s right. But eventually it did kind of come to the point where there were kind of two competing things happening, I think. And this is an exaggeration, obviously, but on the one hand, it kind of seemed like the liberal side, any time anything would happen, would say, Well, this is just an example of Russian influence over Trump, and Trump just doing this to make Russia happy. Literally anything that he would do. You know, there are people online and some people in the media who would just say, Well, if you kind of look at Russian influence and like, this is what they want to happen.
During the Black Lives Matter protest in 2020, I mean, there were liberals being like, This is Russian disinformation. They’re trying to sow division. Blah, blah, blah. And then I think on the other side of it, Black Lives Matter is kind of an interesting thing, because some of these kind of reactionaries at that point, were kind of stuck in this position where they were like, Well, I don’t like the protests either, though. And I don’t know if I would say that Glenn and Matt really did this, but there were elements of people who were just saying, you know, whatever Russia does is fine, and/or Russia only acts in reaction to US aggression, which I find to be kind of a paternalistic way of looking at one of the most powerful countries in the world, which is going to make its own decisions and do its own thing for its own reasons.
Now, having laid all that groundwork, watching this stuff kind of radicalize Glenn and Matt and other people kind of in their orbit, at first, I was like, Yeah, you know, I tend to agree with you guys. I think that the liberal reaction here is ridiculous. The neocon laundering, as you said, as someone who was very much, kind of came of age politically during the Bush years, that kind of made me insane to watch that happen. But then it kind of turned into more about owning the libs. And then the other thing that happened is then it became this kind of reflexive defense of Trump, right? So then, like, if in your perception, every time a liberal criticizes Trump, they are falling into conspiratorial ideas about Russia and Russiagate, then it only can logically follow there that the natural reaction here has to be that any time that Trump is criticized, that must be pushed back against.
Adam: Well, it’s the politics of petty online grievances versus, like, being oriented or cemented in some ideological foundation.
Nima: Well, and the refusal to kind of hold multiple ideas in your mind at the same time.
Eoin Higgins: Yeah, totally, yeah. I think that’s what it is. And I think that if you look at Glenn and Matt specifically, I mean, I was just looking at his Twitter page for a project related to the book, and on January 7, 2025, he’s writing this Substack post about the origins of Russiagate. This stuff was, like, eight years ago, man. It’s time to let it go. And I’m not even saying that to make fun of him completely. I am a little bit, but not completely, because this is no longer a very important issue at this point. It’s something that I think media studies should probably look at, and to the extent that it still exists, that sucks, but it doesn’t. It’s not really a motivating factor anymore.
Adam: Well, actually, now we have the problem of all the Russiagate funders and rich liberals are now either silent or supporting Trump.
Eoin Higgins: Yeah.
Adam: But we have the worst of both worlds. First we get the neocon Russiagate stuff, and now we have the neocons being like, yeah, Trump’s not so bad. He’s gonna go after China, he’s gonna go after Gaza protesters.
Eoin Higgins: Yeah, being proven right about that exact thing happening is not the kind of thing that you want to be proven right about. But that was kind of obvious, that the minute that Trump started to do any of that stuff, that they would love him. As far as Glenn and Matt go, I think this was a precipitating event for them, and I think that it was something that made both of them kind of be done, like, quote-unquote, “done,” with liberals. But I do think that it was kind of maybe something that was going to happen no matter what, anyway, to an extent, and this was just, you know.
Nima: The nudge. Yeah.
Eoin Higgins: Yeah.
Adam: I think it was an accelerant. I’m gonna go back to using that word. Because it was so bizarre and so unprecedented in terms of, like, how people politically oriented. I just think it broke a lot of brains. I know that’s kind of a, maybe a pat thing to say, but I just think the political orientation switch and everything around that, really, people tried to champion some great realignment. I know that, again, this is one of Glenn’s hobby horses. There’s going to be a realignment, supposedly, with, like, the fascist Right being anti-war. But of course, they never are, because they’re fascist.
Nima: Well, right, because meanwhile, you know, Glenn is, I think, consistently good about calling out Israeli war crimes, calling out threats against Iran, things like that, right? When it comes to, kind of, a libertarian approach to foreign policy, he’s there, but not always with just libertarian arguments, right? And I think that that’s part of this sort of really interesting glide from being a, you know, Left hero during the Bush and Obama years, and calling out those things regardless of which administration is in power, and then Russiagate kind of hits, and it breaks his brain.
Eoin Higgins: I think that’s right. I mean, Glenn is, I think, more ideologically interesting than Matt is, frankly, just because he does have those different arguments that he can make. He’s more willing to kind of bounce between ideology to make his point. Maybe that’s the kind of the lawyer brain that he has. But it’s been interesting watching him figure out how to play the next four years on the fly, right? Because if you watch what he’s doing, you can see that he’s trying to figure out, like, what his angle is going to be. And I would argue that Matt has already decided that his angle is going to be, like, I’m just going to go to the right. I’m just going to be a conservative culture warrior. That’s just what I’m going to do. And Glenn, I think, is more at one point in the book, I mentioned this idea, and I believe that it was told to me by Anna Merlan, or that we were discussing it, that the idea that these guys are all kind of sharks, and they have to continue to move in order to survive, and that their movement is this kind of reactionary arguing with people. And for a long time, Twitter kind of presented that, especially with the libs, right, owning the libs, that’s something that just keeps you going. But as that pool continues to shrink, as people start to abandon that site, they end up turning on each other. And I think that that is kind of, if you kind of widen the lens of that out to now, their allies are in power, their enemies are defeated, but I don’t think that they really know what to do with the car now that they’ve caught it, to mix metaphors a little here, and so they are now going to have to figure out what to react to now.
And I think that, honestly, defending Trump during Trump’s first term was a viable strategy for these guys, because he was under attack by the quote-unquote “Deep State.” And by that, I mean just, you know, just all of these people in the intelligence and security services sectors who were, you know, calling him a Russian agent, saying that he was a threat to national security, and the liberal outrage. But now we’ve already seen this happen once, arguably, the damage to the international order over the last 15 months dwarfs almost anything that Trump was able to do in four years. So there’s this situation now where things are just completely different. Trump is coming into power in a completely different situation, and what that kind of puts them in position of is, like, so how do you react to that?
Nima: And how do you stay iconoclastic in that?
Eoin Higgins: Exactly. So for somebody like Glenn, who needs that, I think that’s something that he really does need ideologically in order to make these arguments. It’s interesting to think of where he’s going to end up, because defending Trump, defending the President of the United States, who has both houses of Congress behind him, and is going to embrace some of the worst aspects of the national security state in ways that are going to be a lot more difficult to explain away, I don’t think that’s going to work for what Glenn wants to do. And so I think that for him, it’s going to be a matter of, kind of finding where to land again, like Matt is writing for Glenn Beck’s the plays, and, you know, I mean, we already know where he’s going, but Glenn is going to be an interesting one to watch.
Nima: Well, your book could not be more timely, Eoin. Thank you for joining us today. I really encourage everyone listening to pick up. Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, which was just published by Hachette Books. You can find it everywhere. But this has been so great. Thank you for joining us. We, of course, have been speaking with Eoin Higgins, journalist, historian, and author, whose work has appeared everywhere from Deadspin to The Outline, Washington Post, The Intercept, The New Republic, The Nation, Splinter, all over the place. He also writes for Morning Brew’s tech newsletter IT Brew and like I said, but I’ll say one more time, his new book is Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. Go pick it up. Oh, and thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Eoin Higgins: Thank you guys so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Nima: And that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Thank you all for listening. We will be back very shortly with more full-length episodes of season eight of Citations Needed. So stay tuned for that. Of course, in the meantime, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and do consider becoming a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded, and so your support is incredibly appreciated. But that will do it. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, February 12, 2025.
