By Ed Meek

Eoin Higgins’s Owned is a provocative take on our shifting politics and the instrumental role the media plays in how the superrich maintain power.

Owned by Eoin Higgins. Bold Type Books, Hachette, 304 pages $30

Eoin Higgins is a successful journalist who has written about the media for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and Huffington Post. In Owned, he delves into the rightward turn taken by the tech industry and billionaires like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel, and how they gained influence over two formerly liberal star journalists: Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald. Higgins goes into Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) and details the negative effects that has had on the platform. He explains how the libertarian world of Silicon Valley is apolitical — as long as the tech bros are making big money and being left alone by the government. Higgins posits that they decided Trump would keep the money coming without such bothersome requirements as DEI.

For those who were surprised by the depth of the Trump-adjacent transformation by high tech, corporate CEOs, and Elon Musk, and flabbergasted by the turn of former crusaders against the amoral rich and complacent authorities Matt Taibbi, who covered politics for Rolling Stone, and Glenn Greenwald, who wrote in support of WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning, Higgins digs into what drove their transition to the right.

Higgins’s argument is that it’s all about the money. Taibbi could leave Rolling Stone and build a higher paying audience on Substack. Greenwald found a platform on Fox and The Intercept, which he co-founded. Musk took over Twitter, ostensibly to promote free speech, but instead he and his minions have pushed wild conspiracy theories, such as Tucker Carlson’s “great replacement theory,” which claims that Democrats are pro-immigration in order to import liberal voters who will undermine the culture and identity of America. (Factoid: in the last election, Trump received almost half of the Latin vote.) Musk also censors left-wing speech on X — with the repressive, “flood the zone” strategies of the MAGA crowd. Lately, Musk has been calling for a new political party; he has attacked the Big Beautiful Bill as irresponsible because it increased the deficit and would steer America toward financial collapse. (The legislation would also pull the plug on federal tax incentives for electric vehicles, directly impacting the fortunes of Tesla.)

Many left-leaning readers were puzzled by the rightward turn of Taibbi and Greenwald. Taibbi wrote scathing articles about the Trump campaign leading up to 2016. Just before the election he realized that Trump could win after he witnessed the cult-like support generated at rallies. You may remember that, on the other hand, The New York Times predicted Hillary Clinton had a 90 percent chance of winning. Taibbi also wrote a series of speculative articles about the 2008 crash that insisted (oversimplistically) that it was rooted in corruption. Glenn Greenwald was a brave voice who supported Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks, a journalist who was willing to take principled positions outside of the mainstream media consensus.

Higgins follows Taibbi’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop (a favorite target of MAGA supporters). The Biden administration, with Twitter’s cooperation, may have suppressed information about wrongdoing in these files, but Taibbi never really found anything substantial. Meanwhile, he was critiqued by the left, relentlessly, for investigating what partisans saw as a trivial distraction. This led to Taibbi’s move to Substack, where he has a big following. Higgins points out that Substack was funded by Andreessen (founder of Netscape) as a way to move liberal journalists out of mainstream publications. Along with creating a space for independent voices, Owned posits that the right wing has been very effective at manipulating and creating new media to influence Americans to support Republicans. Substack was part of that divide-and-conquer strategy.

Higgins is on solid ground when he takes these and other positions, and his descriptions of the financial/ideological machinations make for interesting reading. At the same time, he glides over the excesses of the left that became commanding (to many) during the Biden years. Although Biden was elected as a moderate, he and his allies embraced DEI and gave in to pressure from nonprofits and academia to regulate business and big tech. At the same time, academia was insisting on the adoption of alternative pronouns, terms like Latinx and trans rights, as well as defending revisionist history, such as the 1619 Project. These and other causes were not sufficiently debated — they were heavy-handedly proclaimed.

Part of the reason Greenwald, Taibbi, and high tech turned against the left was because of what they saw as the oppressive push for restrictive positions taken by the left wing of the Democratic Party. The libertarian party may be insignificant as a political organization, but many Republicans are libertarians. The Paramount+ series Yellowstone, at one point the most popular show on television, is a self-governing dream of a rancher so rich and powerful he can do whatever he wants, regardless of the law. Also, Andreessen has invested in cryptocurrency and has actively supported its expansion. The Biden administration blocked crypto where it could. Trump decided to endorse virtual money because he could profit from it. Now laws have been passed to legitimize the electronic currency.

Higgins’s Owned is a provocative take on our shifting politics and the instrumental role the media plays in how the superrich maintain power. The book offers valuable analysis, but it doesn’t offer a solution to the rightward lurch our country has taken — other than to point out that no individual should be rich enough to completely control the media for the sake of political dominance.

Ed Meek is the author of High Tide (poems) and Luck (short stories).