A Response To The New Book"Owned"And It's Attack On Glenn Greenwald And Matt Taibbi.
Responding to the new book from journalist Eoin Higgins and it's Criticism of journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.
Pictured Above: Glenn Greenwald (left) and Matt Taibbi (right) speaking to “reason” magazine.
In his recent book, titled “Owned, How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left” author Eoin Higgins argued that journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have been “bought off” by tech oligarchs to move to “the right”.
While there is some valuable information about tech billionaires in the book, it is rife with unsubstantiated claims and major misrepresentations of the two reporters’ work and political views.
In this article, I will respond to some of the claims made by Higgins in the book.
Full disclosure, while I don’t agree with the two reports on all issues, they are both heroes of mine and have played a massive role in inspiring me to start this outlet.
Higgins Misrepresents Greenwald’s Feud With The Intercept.
In writing about Glenn Greenwald's resignation from the Intercept, Higgins glosses over the real problem with what had become of the outlet.
For starters, Higgins massively glossed over the Intercept’s handling of the Reality Winner leaks and Greenwald's criticism of it.
For context, Reality Winner was an NSA whistleblower who leaked a document to the Intercept, which claimed to have proof of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
This Intercept massively botched this and accidentally revealed Reality Winner’s idetntity when publishing the document, leading to her arrest and imprisonment.
In the book, Higgins claimed that this upset Greenwald because:
Greenwald felt blamed for Winner’s arrest. And though he had nothing to do with it, in his view Intercept editors and reporters didn’t make clear that he wasn’t involved.
This is a complete misrepresentation of Greenwald’s issue with the Reality Winner case. In reality, he was upset that The Intercept -the outlet he founded to support whistleblowers - landed a whistleblower in prison by sloppily not redacting her name before sending the document to government sources for verification.
He pointed out that the Intercept was so desperate to prove their “Russian interference” narrative that they didn’t do their basic journalistic duty of protecting their source.
As he wrote in his resignation letter from the Intercept:
It was Intercept editors who pressured the story’s reporters to quickly send those documents for authentication to the government — because they were eager to prove to mainstream media outlets and prominent liberals that The Intercept was willing to get on board the Russiagate train. They wanted to counteract the perception, created by my articles expressing skepticism about the central claims of that scandal, that The Intercept had stepped out of line on a story of high importance to U.S. liberalism and even the left. That craving — to secure the approval of the very mainstream media outlets we set out to counteract — was the root cause for the speed and recklessness with which that document from Winner was handled.
Far from the only one who criticized the Intercept’s handling of the Reality Winner case, the former CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou said at the time that “The Intercept should be ashamed of itself because it did nothing to protect its source.”
Kiriakou noted that the Intercept failed the basic principles of “journalism 101” pointing out “They would have known that NSA marks its documents and regardless of who this source was, whether this source was known to the reporters or not, the source would then be identifiable to NSA, and indeed she was”.
Furthermore, the leaked document which alleged that Russia hacked into voting machines to try to swing the election didn’t exactly back up its case well. As the journalist Kevin Kotzstola pointed out at the time, the document was only the “view of an analyst” and “does not conclude that there is Russian interference” only that “voter registration systems are vulnerable to spear phishing attacks”.
To recap, the Intercept was so desperate to prove their “Russiagate” narrative that they failed basic journalistic principles and landed their source in prison over a document that didn’t even prove what they thought it did.
Furthermore, Higgins completely misrepresented Glenn Greenwald’s resignation from the Intercept.
He left because the outlet he founded refused to allow him to publish an article about Joe Biden’s corruption in Ukraine and China before the 2020 election.
This time Higgins at least fairly represents Glenn’s complaints. He quoted Greenwald, noting that Greenwald said: “I remember the night of the election, I was kind of shocked, People were crying, but also a lot of people (at the Intercept) were, like, ‘We owe the world an apology for the role we played in helping Trump win” “I couldn’t believe that that was a sentiment in the newsroom—that we had done reporting harmful to Hillary and therefore we had done something wrong now that she lost.”
Greenwald noted that the reason he was not allowed to publish his Hunter Biden story was because his neo-liberal colleagues did not want to be blamed again if Joe Biden lost the presidency.
However, Higgins tried to undermine this by claiming he was not allowed to publish his article on Joe Biden because the content was “unverified”. He quoted Intercept editor Betsy Reed saying the Intercept censored the story because “Given the highly politicized and unusual way these materials came to light, we just felt that context should be provided in the story, and that care should be taken to ensure that we did not read anything into the emails that weren’t there”.
Higgins also quoted Intercept editor Roger Hoge who claimed Greenwald’s article was censored because it was “attempting to intervene in this election by mainstreaming a far-right conspiracy theory” and was “running offense” for Donald Trump.
Higgins concluded that Greenwald was censored because “the allegations Greenwald wanted to publish were unverified” and because “the content was deemed insufficiently strong, and the provenance and legitimacy of the documents and emails in the reporting—which came from a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden—were unclear.”
There is some major context to this left out by Higgins. For starters, the Intercept wanted James Risen to edit Glenn Greenwald’s piece on Joe Biden- an Intercept reporter who to this day believes in the Russiagate conspiracy theory- which Higgins himself concedes was a “misinformation movement overtaking the Democratic Party and mainstream media”.
Secondly, The Intercept was willing to publish anything and everything including Q-Anon-level Russiagate conspiracy theories and flat-out false information if it aligned with the DNC narrative but all of a sudden cared about fact-checking when it was a story about Joe Biden.
As Greenwald noted in his resignation letter to the Intercept, the outlet repeated the CIA lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation”.
The aforementioned James Risen repeatedly published false information. For example, in an article,he wrote that Trump campaign affiliate Roger Stone used the left-wing comedian Randy Credico as an intermediary between himself and Jullian Assange.
This is just flat-out false. The only communication between Wikileaks and Roger Stone during the 2016 election was a DM sent to Stone by WikiLeaks which asked him to stop making “false claims of association between them”.
While Stone did try to get into contact with Assange through Randy Credico, Credico had no backchannel to Assange, their only contact during the 2016 election was a public interview, which Credico conducted with Assange on his radio show.
Even the New York Times reported that Roger Stone “had no real ties to Wikileaks”.
After the Muller Report was released and the Russigate conspiracy collapsed, James Risen argued in the Intercept that the reason Muller found no collusion was because “Trump’s Grip on the Justice Department Sabotaged Robert Mueller’s Investigation”- a blatant conspiracy theory for which Risen provided zero evidence.
The Intercept once ran a giant smear piece on Jullian Assange by attributing some unsavory Twitter DMs from the Wikileaks Twitter account to him without mentioning the fact that the account was run by various staffers at WikiLeaks, not Jullian Assnage.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, Greenwald’s article was not factually incorrect at all.
Glenn pointed out in the article that Joe Biden’s son Hunter got “20% of the equity in the venture” from the Chinese energy company “CEFC China Energy” and in an email told the company to “hold another 10% for 'the big guy” who Glenn said was likely Joe Biden.
Hunter Biden has since admitted that “the big guy” was indeed referring to Joe Biden.
Furthermore, the Ukraine corruption Glenn brought up is undeniable. Joe Biden was vice-president in 2014 when the United States overthrew Ukraine's democratically elected government led by Viktor Yannakovitch.
In a leaked phone call, then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught plotting to install Arseny Yatsenyuk as the interim prime minister of Ukraine, noting that “Biden’s willing” to go along with the plan.
After the United States succeeded in this coup, Forbes magazine noted that “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund's demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency. Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind.”
Joe Biden also got his son Hunter a job at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma after this coup where he made 50,000 dollars a month despite having no experience.
Biden then played a role in getting the U.S.-installed the government in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor that was looking into his son's role in Burisma.
So to recap, the Intercept was fine with publishing outright false information and batshit conspiracy theories that aligned with the DNCs narrative but had an issue with Glenn publishing a factual article about Joe Biden’s corruption.
Higgins Ignores Shifting Political Landscape
Another talking point Higgins makes to argue Glenn Greenwald has moved to the right is that he used to appear on MSNBC and then later often appeared on Fox News.
Higgins noted that pre-2016, Glenn Greenwald said that “MSNBC still provides some independent and intellectually honest journalism”.
Higgins argues that “Suddenly it was Fox, rather than MSNBC, that provided the “independent and intellectually honest journalism,” according to Greenwald and this was because Fox would have him on and not MSNBC.
He claimed that “Greenwald’s posts about Fox took a noticeable turn to the positive” saying that he engaged in “pro-Fox commentary” by “promoting his own appearances and defending Carlson to boosting other people’s appearances on the channel”.
What Higgins misses is that before 2016, on the issue Glenn focused most on -U.S. foreign policy -MSNBC was the only network that would allow some limited criticism.
However, post 2016 with the rise of Russiagate the only network that would air any limited criticism of American foreign policy was Fox, specifically Tucker Carlson’s show, where Greenwald appeared most.
Grandit, from my perspective, Tucker offers a very limited critique of American foreign policy getting it right on many issues but often slipping in CIA talking points about China used to justify a new cold war with the country.
With that issue aside, post-2016 his show was the only one on TV (outside of foreign- government-funded networks like Al Jazeera or RT), which offered any pushback against U.S. foreign policy.
For example in a 2018 monologue on neocons pushing Russiagate, Carlson said on Fox:
The people yelling the loudest about how the Russians are our greatest enemy and Trump is their puppet, happen to be the very same people who have been mismanaging our foreign policy for decades. The people who invaded Iraq and wouldn't admit it was a mistake, the people who killed Muammar Gaddafi for no obvious reason and prolonged the horrible Syrian civil war … the ones still defending the pointless Afghan conflict and even now planning brand new disasters around the world in Lebanon, Iran and yes in Russia.
This type of criticism of the history of neocon foreign policy would never be seen anywhere near MSNBC or CNN at that time.
Furthermore, Carlson was often more critical of Trump’s foreign policy during his first term than MSNBC.
Tucker Carlson opposed Trump’s missile strike on Syria, while MSNBC host Brian Williams practically orgasmed on air while watching footage of the missile strike take off, stating “We’re guided by the beauty of our weapons”.
The same was true of Trump’s Venezuela coup attempt. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow lambasted the fact that Trump was not listening to his national security advisor John Bolton on Venezuela (who wanted to invade the country) and speculated that he didn’t want to invade because he was controlled by Putin.
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson interviewed Grayzone journalist Anya Parampil after reporting on the ground in Venezuela who called out Trump’s “coup” in Venezuela and even exposed the fact that the “humanitarian crisis” in Venezuela was “the intended result of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela since 2015” citing the report from the Centre for Economic and Policy Research which found the sanctions killed 40,000 people in one year.
Carlson also opposed the Trump administration's strike on Iranian General Qasem Soleimani saying that “the risk of terror is increased by bombing other people's countries” while other mainstream outlets mostly supported the strike.
Some of Glenn Greenwald’s appearances on Tucker Carlson’s show included him opposing American sanctions and interference in Cuba, calling for Julian Assange to be freed, and opposing U.S. intervention in Syria.
Higgins somehow ignored that Greenwald had been saying the exact same things about foreign policy and national security on Fox as he was on MSNBC, but that for some reason post-2016 Fox News was the only American cable news outlet that would air it.
Free Speech Is Not “Right Wing”
A big plank in Higgins's argument that Greenwald and Taibbi are now “right-wing” is that they support free speech which he wrongly sees as a “right-wing” tenant.
A very bizarre argument that Higgins consistently makes in his book is that Glenn Greenwald defends free speech values in countries that don’t have free speech, which is somehow a bad thing.
Higgins takes issue with Greenwald defending free speech in his country of residence, Brazil, because he claims it is “an almost parochial appeal to US sensibilities and politics” and that censorship is acceptable in the country because it free speech is just “legal doctrine Greenwald grew up with” but it is “irrelevant to the Latin American country’s doctrine of harmony of rights, where no right can be so important that it abrogates another.”
He also argues that Greenwald should not defend free speech in Brazil because “In Brazil, freedom of expression is not absolute.”
I found this to be one of the strangest arguments in the book. Greenwald has always been a strong defender of free speech, so why would he not defend it in his country of residence where he has lived since 2013?
Furthermore just because “freedom of expression is not absolute” in Brazil doesn’t mean it should not be. By this logic, no one should be able to want to change laws or systems in their country.
In another section, Higgins lambasts Greenwald for defending free speech in Britain wiring:
When the UK government went after comedian Russell Brand’s ability to monetize his TikTok and Rumble channels, Greenwald wrote an angry email to Parliament asking whether it was standard practice to strip someone of their income for unproven charges. The pundit wondered if the practice of forcing social media companies to fall in line with British politics was the norm, another example of Greenwald’s inability to understand that the rest of the world—not only Brazil—isn’t governed by the US Constitution
The UK is the perfect example of what can go wrong when a country does not have free speech. As I have written about extensively, the UK government has been weaponizing Section 12 of their “terrorism act” -which makes it illegal to say something supportive of a “proscribed terrorist” organization- to go after journalists who oppose the Isreali genocide in Gaza.
The UK government has now gone after journalists Richard Medhurst, Asa Winstanley, Sarah Wilkinson, and activist Richard Barnard because they have reported critically on Israel’s mass murder campaign against civilians in Gaza.
In the case Greenwald was talking about with Russell Brand, it was clearly political as well. For context, the British government pressured social media to censor the accounts of comedian and political commentator Russell Brand after sexual assault allegations surfaced against him.
As journalist Kit Klarenberg noted it was likely not a coincidence that :
Brand’s videos analyzing political developments and topics such as the Covid-19 pandemic, corporate media propaganda and the Ukraine proxy war have earned him an audience of millions, making him one of the world’s most influential alternative media personalities
Klarenberg also reported that the censorship demands against Brand were brought by former British government minister, Caroline Dinenage who “was responsible for London’s crackdown on dissent during the Covid-19 pandemic” and “was personally responsible for overseeing construction of the repressive, World Economic Forum-endorsed Online Safety Bill, which has been criticized by rights groups for threatening the rights to free expression, and privacy.”
Klarenberg also noted that Dinenage is married to Mark Lancaster, the head of the “British Army’s 77th Brigade” which “maintains a vast militia of real, fake, and automated social media accounts to disseminate and amplify pro-state messaging, and discredit domestic and foreign enemies”.
This is not to say the allegations against Brand should be discounted, but the censorship demands were clearly political.
The UK is the perfect example of a society that does not have free speech and has become deeply authoritarian as a result. The fact that Greenwald has called on the UK to follow free speech principles, is a good thing.
Moving to his critique of Matt Taibbi, Higgins takes a swipe at this platform, Substack. Higgins cites a story by Substack writer Jonothan Katz about him finding neo-nazi Subsatck accounts and pushing for them to be shut down which was was rebuked by the Substack leadership on free speech principles. He writes:
The writer Jonathan Katz, himself a Substacker, investigated the rise of this far-right material. He found at least sixteen accounts showing overt neo-Nazi content. When asked about their presence on the platform, Substack replied that they didn’t want to engage in overmoderation. “We don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views,” McKenzie wrote in an open letter. “But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.”
He claims that Taibbi was a “right winger” because he responded to Katz's article by “calling him a tireless busybody and a scold whose only goal was deplatforming people.”
He argued that Substack and Taibbi have taken a “right-wing turn” because they have a “conservative view of free speech”.
This of course ignores the long history of the left defending free speech.
As Noam Chomsky famously said:
If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.
Noam Chomsky himself defended the right of French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson to publish his views based on this principle.
The left-wing ACLU took this principle a step further, defending the right of Neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, a Chicago suburb “that was nearly half Jewish and home to hundreds of Holocaust survivors.”
The free-speech absolutist view is only “right-wing” if you ignore the long history of the left such as Noam Chomsky and the ACLU defending it.
In his book, Higgins includes a quote from the writer Luke O’Neil saying “When people talk about free speech, that’s basically a dog whistle which means you can say whatever you want about trans people and do race science–type shit”.
The answer is Yes, as Noam Chomsky and the ACLU demonstrated, defending free speech means defending the right of hateful and vile views from censorship, otherwise you are not in favor of it.
An argument made by the ACLU was that if the Neo-Nazis were not allowed to march in Chicago, the precedent would then be set and used against civil rights protestors. As the legendary former head of the ACLU Ira Glasser said :
The Martin Luther King Jr. Association, a civil rights group in Chicago, used to demonstrate in the park in favor of integration, so it became a place where neo-Nazis and civil rights activists would frequently clash in contiguous demonstrations. I don't remember it breaking out into violence, but it was always tense and the city was always busy policing it. So the city threw up its hands, tired of spending time and energy navigating these two groups exercising their free speech rights, and passed a law saying nobody can demonstrate in Marquette Park unless they first post a $250,000 insurance bond against the possibility of damage to the park.
I feel the same way about censorship on Substack. If substack listened to Jonothan Katz and indeed did censor the vile neo-nazi accounts he listed in the article, I don’t doubt for a second that people like myself would be next on the chopping block for my work on Palestine, Foreign Policy, and National Security Issues.
Furthermore writing free speech absolutism off as a “right-wing view” completely erases the history of some of the most important figures on the left like Noam Chomsky and Ira Glasser’s dedication to free speech.
Higgins Misrepresents the Twitter Files.
Higgins, in his attack on Matt Taibbi, attempts to undermine the impact of his reporting on the Twitter Files leaks. In the book, he says that the “findings themselves were, for the most part, smoke and mirrors.”.
What the documents actually showed was that government intelligence agencies such as the FBI and CIA were directly trying to influence tech companies to censor the speech of Americans.
They showed intelligence agencies pushing for social media to censor speech, often that which was critical of American Establishment narratives.
For one of the many examples, the FBI sent a list of accounts to Twitter to be censored, from the Security Service of Ukraine which they claimed were “spreading fear and disinformation” which included the IF Stone award-winning journalist Aaron Mate.
I know Higgins is not very well versed on free speech issues, but this goes beyond being a violation of free speech principles and becomes a violation of the First Amendment because these are Federal government agencies attempting to censor the speech of Americans.
I would not call a blatant constitutional violation “smoke and mirrors”.
Higgins goes on to quote Renée DiResta, the research manager from the “Stanford Internet Observatory” who said the Twitter files “didn’t reveal a corrupt system” and instead “showed a group of people managing high-stakes, unanticipated events within the parameters of the company’s terms of service.”
What Higgins ignores is that the Stanford Internet Observatory was exposed in what was one of the most damning revelations on the Twitter Files.
The Files Showed that the U.S. government tied Stanford Internet Observatory’s “Varility Project” was pressuring Twitter to take down accurate information that went against the official narrative on COVID-19.
It pressured Twitter to take down “True content that might promote vaccine hesitancy” including “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel hesitancy”.
They also pressured Twitter to take down “criticism of vaccine passport systems for their imposition on rights and freedoms, and even discussion of legitimate scientific research on breakthrough infections on natural immunity”, as Reason Magazine reported.
Higgins repeats the statement from the Observatory, without mentioning that their version of “managing high-stakes events” includes silencing real stories of adverse reactions from the vaccine and silencing criticism of vaccine mandates.
Higgins accused Taibbi of “overhyping the threat of social media moderation policies and hinting at a broader conspiracy against freedom of expression” when in reality this “moderation” (an annoying euphemism for censorship) included the American government trying to censor accurate reporting on their proxy war in Ukraine and real adverse reactions some had from the Covid vaccine among other things.
Higgins Fails To Back Up His Thesis
Probably the weakest argument in the book is the main thesis in it: that Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald have been “bought off” and are “owned” by big tech oligarchs.
Higgins begins by quoting journalist Taylor Lorenz accusing Glenn Greenwald of being the “little lapdog” of tech billionaire Marc Andreesen.
Their evidence for this is some of the most absurd guilt-by-association I have ever seen. Higgins and Lorenz argue that Greenwald is paid off by Andreesen because he has invested in Substack, and Glenn Greenwald has a Substack page. Higgins wrote:
Once he was making money through Andreessen-backed Substack—a platform on which Greenwald now depended almost entirely for his income and attention—he changed his tune. Andreessen’s enemies were his enemies.
This is such a bizarre argument, as many will know, Substack writers are paid by their readers through paid subscriptions, not by the website itself. Even more hilarious is that both Higgins and Lorenz have Substack pages themselves (Higgin’s is called “The Flashpoint” and Lorenz’s “User Mag”). By this logic, they are paid off by Marc Andreesen as well.
Their evidence for Greenwald being the “lapdog” for Mark Andresen is the fact that he mocked Lorenz for claiming the tech billionaire said the word “retard” in a chatroom when in fact he did not.
In reality, Greenwald took issue with what he called the “Tattletale and Censorship Industry” arguing that by writing articles about how people said naughty words in a chatroom, Lorenz was “using her platform to virtually jump out of her desk to run to the teacher and exclaim: he used the r-word.”
As a free speech supporter and as a journalist who cares about substantive issues, it is completely logical for Greenwald to think it is ridiculous for Lorenz- who at the time wrote for the New York Times- to use her massive platform to write about issues as trivial as this.
Lorenz herself- while accusing Greenwald of ties to the “far-right-” has no issue defending people who whitewash actual swastika dawning neo-nazis if they agree with her pro-censorship agenda.
When Joe Biden temporarily created an Orwellian “disinformation governance board” as a sub-division of the DHS, he picked Nina Jankowitz as the head, a so-called “disinformation expert”.
After severe backlash, the Biden administration shut the board down. In the Washington Post, Lorenz defended Jankowitz saying that she had been the victim of “repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them” from “far-right influencers”.
In reality, journalist Lev Golinkin exposed in The Nation that Jankowitz previously worked for the Ukrainian “counter disinformation” think tank “Stop Fake” where she defended the Ukrainian paramilitary groups “Aidar, Dnipro-1, Donbas, and Azov” who “all have a documented record of war crimes, while Azov is an outright neo-Nazi group”.
In fact in the video where she defends the battalions “the Azov patch shown in Jankowicz’s video has a stylized Wolfsangel (the “N” with the sword)—a popular white supremacist rune used by groups like Aryan Nations.”
I don’t know about you but I would wager that the person put in charge of policing social media whitewashing neo-nazi war criminals is a bigger deal than some tech bro saying “retard” in a group chat, yet Lorenz defends the former and makes a big deal of the latter.
Higgins also claims in the book that Glenn Greenwald is bought off by Peter Thiel because he has a show on the streaming service “Rumble” which Thiel invests in.
However, If Greenwald having a show on Rumble means he is paid by Peter Thiel, Higgins is paid off by tech oligarchs as well.
In the book, he admits that he negotiated a contract for “$1,200 a week” on the app “Callin” -which is funded by PayPal executive David Sachs- to “produce a weekly podcast”, by his own admission he has been paid by the same tech billionaires he accuses Taibbi and Greenwald of being “bought off” by.
In another part of the book, Higgins claims that Greenwald is paid off by tech oligarchs to defend the neo-con, zionist commentator Bari Weiss.
He claimed that Greenwald stopped criticizing her because her outlet “The Free Press” takes funding from Marc Andreessen and David Sachs writing:
For all his past criticism of Weiss, Greenwald has largely made nice with her since they’ve both moved to tech-backed independent media. Perhaps that’s unsurprising. Investors in The Free Press include Marc Andreessen and David Sacks.
This is just straight-up false. Some examples from Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble show of his criticizing Wiess include: criticizing her for claiming Tulsi Gabbard is an Assad supporter, criticizing her for claiming oppostion to Zionism is anti-Semitic, criticizing her for supporting the censorship of Palestinians, and criticizing her for defending the Isreali genocide in Gaza.
Higgins is accusing Greenwald of being paid off to stop criticizing someone who he has continued to criticize- something a basic Google search would show.
At the end of the day. Higgins just does not agree with Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. Instead of just taking on their arguments he decided to misrepresent their reporting and views while creating a non-existent theory that they are bankrolled by Big tech oligarchs.
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Higgins is a propagandist and a loser.
It has been clear to both sides of the culture war for a long time that only one side can defend their position thru open debate, the other side had resorted to lies, smears and censorship. The farther they have been pushed to defend the indefensible, the more ridiculous and unpopular they have become.