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- [00:00]
Julian Walker
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying.
- [00:08]
Derek Barris
It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have.
- [00:12]
Julian Walker
One of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.
- [00:15]
Derek Barris
I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com.
- [00:18]
Matthew Remsky
Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms at Mintmobile. Do Foreign.
- [00:43]
Derek Barris
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.
- [00:53]
Matthew Remsky
I'm Matthew Remsky.
- [00:54]
Julian Walker
I'm Julian Walker.
- [00:56]
Derek Barris
You can find us on Instagram and Threads Conspirituality Pod as well as individually on Blue Sky. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspirituality or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
- [01:26]
Julian Walker
Conspirituality243 Free market contrarians Edward Snowden is largely only a public name, thanks to Glenn Greenwald's reporting, for which he was one of the contributors to a Pulitzer Prize winning series for The Guardian in 2014. For a while, Matt Taibbi was considered the heir to Hunter Thompson when his gonzo journalism tore open the 2008 financial crisis and gave the public the term the Vampire Squids. Yet in more recent years, both men have swerved right Glenn became a darling on Fox News and Taibbi was recruited by Elon Musk as one of the Twitter files journalists. How did that happen? We're joined by journalist Owen Higgins, whose new book How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left dives into the career arcs of both Greenwald and Taibbi and how they confuse and distort right left alignments.
- [02:34]
Derek Barris
This week in Spirituality.
- [02:36]
Matthew Remsky
So guys, I've got a little bit of a breather with a yoga story before plunging back into US Chaos. But before I get there, I just want to mention that as of our recording today, this is Tuesday the 4th of February. We've just learned that RFK Jr. S nomination has cleared the Senate committee with the folding of the one GOP senator that might have stood in the way. That would be Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. He's a doctor and he actually grilled Bobby in the hearings. And unfortunately, he's now released a statement that he has met with JD Vance, who has set his mind at ease, saying that Bobby is to be just great for, you know, better food and a healthy America. So if Bobby is confirmed over the next few days, that's going to be our next show because we've covered Bobby for years now and it's going to be kind of like a Bane takes over Gotham moment.
- [03:36]
Derek Barris
I love how Bill said that J.D. vance gave him an honest assessment of Kennedy. I'm sure it was quite honest.
- [03:43]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, totally honest. So I want to pick up on a story from about three months ago. And that's the untimely death at the age of 53 of the yoga celebrity Sharath Joyce, also known as Sharath Rangaswamy. He's the grandson of Pattabhi Joyce, who is the inventor of Ashtanga yoga. Now, after Pattabhi Joyce's death in 2009, Sharath served as the director of his family's institute in Mysore, which he rebranded as the Sharath Yoga center in 2019. Now, Sharath died of a heart attack while hiking on a trail close to the University of Virginia where he was teaching an intensive workshop. He traveled all around the world giving these week long teachings. Now, I wrote a book about Patapi Joyce's very troubled Ashtanga world. And so I followed this death pretty closely. My social feeds filled up with a lot of shock and grief from this global community of enthusiasts who were materially, but also, I think, spiritually dependent on this guy and what he represented. And, and you know, 53 is really young. And it was hard for a lot of folks to reconcile that with the traditional yogic promises of health, vitality and youth. Unsurprisingly, there was also a chunk of folks who immediately put him into the died suddenly column wondering if he was a vaccine victim. And of course he wasn't. But I think this highlighted how, to his credit, Sharath Joyce had required travelers to his Mysore institute to be vaccinated after Covid travel restrictions lift. He paid for that. He was met with a lot of blowback over it from his more red pilled wellness followers. There were a lot of them. Now anyone can die of a heart attack at 53, says the guy who's 53. And I'm very sad for his partner and his kids and for all of the people who feel that they lost a source of stability and inspiration. But with regard to this community confusion around his early death I do have to say that Sharath Joyce, I think, experienced a ton of stress in his life, ironically because of yoga. Here was a guy who by his own account, woke up at around 2am every morning to practice these insanely joint torturing postures for hours. The injuries that come along with Ashtanga yoga are legion. That was a big part of my book. And then he would teach and adjust hundreds of students in round after round of classes while fasting on really strong South Indian coffee, black, not eating till noon. And then he would run the administration for a global business for the rest of the day. And so there are decades of pictures of him looking absolutely exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes. And I'm not saying that these things killed him because I don't know, nobody knows. But I think they highlight the contradictions between extreme yoga lifestyles and the perceptions of health. Now, before his grandfather died, I think the stress was worse because for more than a decade he was his grandfather's personal assistant. And so that meant after his 2am practice, he helped Pattabhi monitor and adjust students. Although what Pattabi was up to was actually sexual assault every day under the guise of manipulating students bodies into postures where he would grope them and worse. And Sharath knew about this, as did many of Pattabhi Joyce's senior students, most of whom went on to have lucrative careers as international entrepreneurs of his method. So Sharath was in that room morning after morning. He watched it happen. In my book, I have reports of how he made some attempts or was involved in some attempts to intervene on this behavior, especially on tour dates in the US where angry women threatened to call in the police. But he was unsuccessful, you know, ultimately. And my takeaway was that he was deeply mortified about his grandfather's crimes, but perhaps also paralyzed by the family legacy, maybe cowardice. He couldn't really fully distance himself or move towards making any kind of reparations to Patapi's victims. I think his strategy was to remain confident that he himself was not like his grandfather, that he could do this thing, he could run this business properly, and that the past was best left in the past. When really pressured by, you know, the women who I interviewed and by my journalism, these women made public call outs. He did issue a statement of apology on Instagram on behalf of his family, but it wasn't published in any formal place and it didn't stay up for very long. Now, it's not surprising that this community crisis reduced down to the ethical fiber of this one guy, because it was just a family business. Sharath had no board of directors to help him take accountability for the crimes. I mean, I think for him, the goal and the method was to protect and elevate his personal integrity and also inflate it, because after inheriting the business, he began calling himself, or allowing himself to be called Paramaguru, which translates to ultimate Spiritual Guide. I mean, come on. The very sad part is that Ashtanga students invested all of their material and spiritual sort of, you know, credulity in the very body of Pattabhi Joyce. And this meant that no one in the world could be permitted to teach the Ashtanga method without being manhandled by him in class. And that manhandling, paradoxically, often consisted of these assaults. But then when he died, the magic touch idea passed on to Sharath. And that meant that students around the world continued to line up for his blessing and his alone. But there's no succession plan. So in my view, the Joyce family has left an extremely mixed legacy. And a big part of that is generating the illusion of some kind of eternal, transcendental lineage, which then suddenly collapses because it's a family business. And the wounded prince entrepreneur dies. So it's a very sad story. My hope is that the people who came to love each other through this community, I know there are a lot of them, many of them are my friends. I hope that they continue to find ways of growing together and blessing each other. And also, you know, it's time to create new things.
- [10:20]
Derek Barris
I don't remember when I first came across Owen Higgins's work, but I do know we started following each other on Twitter a few years back. And I've always appreciated his thoughts and his writing. So when I saw he had a book coming out on the same publisher as we did, no less, I knew I wanted to chat with him about it. And I'm glad, Julian, you joined me in that interview, which we'll hear in a few minutes. Now, Owen's book is called Owned How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. Julian and I have covered the two men covered in Owen's book, who are Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. On a number of briefs and during bonus episodes, most people will know Glenn as a co founder of the Intercept, which he launched after he helped break the Edward Snowden documents in The Guardian in 2013. In 2019, he helped uncover the infamous Operation Car Wash corruption scheme in Brazil, where he now lives, where he also runs a substack and hosts on Rumble. Matt Taibbi spent many years in mainstream journalism following a stint reporting in Moscow, which was pretty controversial back then, and it's kind of trailed him throughout his career now. I remember him from his famous Vampire Squid Rolling stone article in 2009, and I read his subsequent book based on that, Griftopia. Now, if you haven't followed him for as long as I have, you probably know him as one of the Twitter Files journalists. When Julian and I both said that, it's in quotes here, to be clear, that's why we say it that way. And that's when Elon Musk hand selected a bunch of writers who he thought would just repeat what he wanted them to in what ultimately turned out to be a nothing burger of a case. Matt also now runs a highly successful substack. Now we've interviewed him. You're going to hear that in a minute. Matthew, you've heard the interview. Any thoughts on this?
- [12:19]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, one thing that stood out to me about Owen's comments was his reflection on this disappointment that left of center people in the US can feel when they watch guys like Taibbi and Greenwald slide diagonally or to the right and also away from journalism into punditry. And Julian, you kind of got to this point with the question I'm really interested in when you asked Owen, were these guys really on the left to begin with, and Higgins gave this really nuanced answer saying it could be argued that both have held some left libertari positions for years. And then, you know, we can talk about their record too. But then, you know, how do we explain? Here they are polishing Musk's boots with like free speech arguments all the way to this guy now staging a literal coup of the whole financial apparatus. We should have pinged that in this episode too. That's going on. It's February 4th. What I'm thinking about is a basic heuristic for seeing just how left a position someone is starting from and how stable that position is. And for me, that measure is how strong and consistent was their general critique of capitalism. And I might be like missing things or generalizing here. I know you both know these guys better than I do, but my basic search on Greenwald, Taibbi and Bari Weiss too, alongside critique of capitalism, sends back the general picture of reformists, which means that, you know, when so moved, they can effectively investigate and even like rail corporate corruption and excess, crony capitalism, media bias and corruption, injustice in the courts, they can express a range of opinions on foreign policy. But I haven't come across anything that suggests that any of these folks ever had a fundamental critique of the morality and function of capitalism itself. You know, at most. And now this is in the rearview mirror, they present as, like, liberal left reformists, where, you know, the political imagination often ends at the criticism of excess or cheating or unfairness, but not a criticism of the system. That obviously makes excess inevitable, including their own right, which is, you know, what they are most, I guess, embroiled with now because they seem to be pursuing journalism as a form of Robin Baron entrepreneurship.
- [14:40]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I mean, as Derek mentioned, Taibi's brightest moment is that series of pieces on the subprime mortgage crisis, including that famous about the Goldman Sachs being a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In terms of our beat, specifically on the podcast, he had previously also been relentlessly critical of 911 conspiracy theories. He went on to write books titled several different books, but some of them titled the Divide American Injustice in the Age of the Wage Gap. Insane Clown President, which was about Trump on his way to becoming president. And then while he was in his first term. And then another one about the killing of Eric Garner, one of the major Black Lives Matter martyrs, we should say. As for Greenwald, he may not have been an anti capitalist, but the bulk of his work was focused on the surveillance state. And he was as critical of Obama as he was of Bush. And then with his academic background, one of his books was titled Liberty and Justice for Some, how the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. And then he has one about the Republicans called the Great Hypocrites. So it's easy to understand how people would say that. This checks a lot of boxes in terms of what we think of in general terms about the left.
- [16:00]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. So let me add something about the vampire metaphor, which I think might be instructive or helpful. Both of you have pinged it. The reason that. And so I'll focus on Taibi, not so much about Greenwald, but the reason that Taibi doesn't get leftist brownie points from me for this particular line is that it's just banal because, like Marx described capitalism itself per se, as vampiric, no matter how ethical the capitalist tries to be. Capital is literally dead. Exploited labor accumulated from the past, appropriated and kept alive by bosses in the form of money and the ability to gain credit. And then it's used to control present and future labor. Like a vampire, like the owner takes the past labor of workers and uses it against them. And it's not evil in some sort of moral sense like the vampirism is baked into the machine. And as far as our beat goes, I think this is a super important point because from a leftist point of view that understands that or holds to that, QANON and similar anti semitic conspiracy theories erupt in part as a way of scapegoating the vampirism of an entire system, the general exploitation that probably everyone but the super privileged can feel, and then just loading it onto a single despised group. So yeah, I mean he, he came up with a great image, but I think he kind of, it's really at the surface level.
- [17:29]
Julian Walker
So I mean it sounds like your, your position is that journalists are only really, it's only really accurate to say a journalist is on the left if they are fully bought in on that Marxist analysis.
- [17:43]
Matthew Remsky
I would say it's a good heuristic for understanding whether or not they're going to like skitter or slide. Yeah, I would say, not that I purity test the people that I read, but like I'm not surprised when I hear so and so is going this way because I'm like, yeah, well what did I actually hear from them? From years, for years.
- [18:02]
Derek Barris
The one thing that strikes me when this discussion is the idea that capitalism can lead to excess, which is definitely true in some circumstances. But our other use cases, socialist or communist countries, I would say there's been a tendency to slide into excess for some amount of the population in those spaces as well, for sure. So I would rather think about this in terms of the human condition rather than any specific imagined ideal government that we've had and rather focus on what we're dealing with here. So I mean, this has always been a thing with our podcast and our internal discussions. It does feel like a purity test at times because I am left of center, but I'm not as far left as other people. And I think people who, I think in the, in terms of this discussion, it came up something to the effect of their treating elements of capitalism or you know, expressing disgust with elements of it without the system itself. That is certainly a position that I fall within. And when I get into these discussions where it does feel like it can be a purity test at times, it definitely pushes me away from other good natured conversations that could be happening because it feels like, well, what are we really talking about here? It goes back to Loretta Ross's circles of influence to me, which is not everyone is going to agree with what I think at all times. And that's fine. But who is going to be on my side fighting for most of the values that I agree with?
- [19:36]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. So where's the coalition? Right? And if, and if the, if, if it is a purity test, just to use the shorthand, I don't mean it in any mean spirited way, but if it is a purity test, how many people will pass it? How, how big is that audience? How many, how many thinkers on the public stage of any, of any reputation are really left enough to say that they're having an influence culturally or politically?
- [20:00]
Matthew Remsky
I can't answer those questions and I agree that, you know, we should be in coalition and I think the three of us provide a good example for that. But I also think that it is important to stress the difference between those who criticize capitalism and those who criticize capitalists who make capitalism look bad. Those are not the same thing. Those are just not the same thing. And you can tell, tell the difference if you listen to somebody for long enough. You know, it's not. The thing about the purity test language is that it sounds like it's moralizing. And for me it's much more of a theoretical. Is this, is there a piece of the puzzle there, a piece of the machine in, in your political imagin, in one's political imagination that is clicking like, it's like, it's like actually we can find a reasonable way of exploiting the earth and people and its resources like we could. Right. If that's, if that's going on, then there are going to be downstream problems that I think, you know, we'll have to be, we'll have to go back upstream to address.
- [20:59]
Derek Barris
Well, you said theoretical there and that's, that's a good point. I think I fall more on the, on the side of. Okay, so then show me instances where all of these ideas actually worked in practice. Because I just get personally a little tired of theoretical. And this isn't with you, it's with everything. It's, it's like what's happening with Oregon and health care for all right now, like making moves to actually implement healthcare access for everyone and not just theorizing about how great would it be. And that's something that is more relevant to me personally.
- [21:31]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I think that the perpetual like sort of struggle and aspiration of the left is to actually create those circumstances. And there's always a lot of opposition. And I would never say that center left or reform minded capitalists all inevitably slide to the right. Like if somebody waved a lot of Money in front of you, Derek, I would be very surprised if you started following, you know, Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi down some garden path. Like, I'd be super surprised. Like many folks that I know hold their ground. They fight the good fight. They promote the best policies and the most functional forms of capitalism that they know. But I also know there's a lot of committed leftist journalists who would just laugh if at the idea that, you know, somehow more substack money would. Would come if they. If they gave up on their basic principles.
- [22:21]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, to go back to the guys we've been talking about and, and your robber baron characterization, which, which fits here too. I mean, it's certainly where Tybbi and Grenwald Greenwald seem to have ended up, but I think if you spoke to either of them in the late 2000 teens, they would have told you that their turn toward more independent journalism was actually an attempt to be free of liberal legacy media biases and establishment loyalties by utilizing newly available self publishing tools. And a lot of people really thought that this was. This is what it represented. And, you know, in terms of their bona fides, Greenwald has in the past very controversially opined that pro Israel sentiment and censorship of critiquing Zionism in the US Was as bad as the kind of Islamist intolerance that led to the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
- [23:08]
Matthew Remsky
You know, the only point that I really wanted to make was, you know, when people are disillusioned or disappointed with their particular commentators that begin to slide. And I just want to say, if people develop the impression that their charismatic journo pundits, you know, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, or their favorite youtubers are leftists, even if they label themselves as such. I think it's worth looking closely at their content before investing hope in them. Are they reformers or do they have a structural critique? Because we know, you know, how easy it is for this ecosystem to pull people without, you know, real anchors to the right. We know how strong the right word current is.
- [23:51]
Julian Walker
Yeah, and that's the thing I. This is the topic of the episode, right, Is that this stuff can be so beguiling, it can be so confusing, it can be so contradictory. You know, one thing I found interesting is doing a quick search on Glenn Greenwald and his appearances on Amy Goodman's Democracy now, which you flagged in the past, Matthew, as a legitimate left wing media source. Glenn Greenwald was on 140 times, Matt Sahibi over 30 times. So there was a Moment in which their work was really valued and platformed as seen. And seen as aligned in specific ways with that left wing agenda.
- [24:26]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. It also shows that Goodman will like, boost solid, original reporting on capitalist corruption, and she doesn't have a purity test for that. And I bet they're not appearing there now, right?
- [24:34]
Julian Walker
No, no, no.
- [24:35]
Matthew Remsky
Right.
- [24:44]
Derek Barris
Well, as you can tell from our discussion, it's not always a straight line, which is something Owen addresses in the book and which we talk about in our. In our interview here. Without giving too much more away, the book frames how fluid politics and attention seeking can be when tech billionaires and audience capture Enter the picture. Owen Higgins is currently a reporter with IT Brew, focused on cybersecurity, IT and government tech. He previously worked at the Intercept, so he had somewhat of a relationship with Glenn, who actually agreed to be interviewed for Owen's book. Owen has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post and News Statesman. Oh, and you give us a unique look inside the conversion from left leaning journalism to right wing operatives. And I say unique because you worked alongside one of the book's focuses, which is Glenn Greenwald, and the other is Matt Taibi, of course, who you've. Who we've covered often on this podcast. Julian and I have actually done a number of episodes both on Matt and Glenn in the past. And you even talked with Glenn as recently as 2024, based on quotes in the book. When did the idea of actually putting this down and looking at these two figures as a book come into your head?
- [26:07]
D
Well, first I would say that I did work with the Intercept while Glenn was there. I never worked with him directly on, on anything. Just, you know, because he is very pedantic about stuff like that. I was approached to write this book by bull type. They wanted something kind of examining how Greenwald and Tybee had. Their politics had shifted. And I was really interested in this. I mean, one of the reasons that they approached me was that I had done a lot of writing about this already. I, you know, I just wanted to do it in a way that would include the kind of tech billionaire influence and how that kind of played into their evolution or de evolution. However you want to look at their. Their change. They're moving from being these nominally left wing, slash, left wing affiliated figures to these kind of partisan right wing personalities, pundits whose output at this point is really partisan. Partisan to the right in a way that I think is disappointing to a lot of people. This book is not describing a phenomenon. Right. People who know who these guys are are unfamiliar with, you know, I mean, I think everybody who has had any kind of affiliation or admiration for Taibbi and Greenwald has watched this change in their politics and watched the way that they have switched the way that they speak about things and seen that with a lot of disappointment. I have been friendly with Glenn online, at least at the time. We shared a lot of political beliefs. You know, I say in the book that, you know, I. I consider myself like a civil libertarian leftist, that that was kind of the political persuasion that I. That I had, especially during the Bush years. And now was, you know, kind of watching this guy who I had really admired through the Obama years too, like, pushing back on the way that a lot of Democrats and liberals embrace a lot of those policies of the Bush administration because Obama was doing it. I also agreed with both him and Taibbi that the reaction to Trump getting elected in 2016 by focusing on Russiagate and all manner of unprovable and ever increasing conspiracies was not like, the right way to go. But that was the decision that a lot of liberals made, and that was very frustrating for me as well. So it was good to, as I was starting my career and writing about this stuff, to also have some people who were also doing it. So I didn't feel quite so alone. So this is not coming from a place of I never liked these guys or I thought that, like, reporting on the Snowden Leaks was bad or any of that stuff. It was just that over the course of the past five years, especially, perhaps longer, depending on, you know, the topic, have really just watched as these guys have kind of gone to the partisan right and been very disappointed in it.
- [28:58]
Derek Barris
I know you say that Matt wouldn't engage with you. I think he replied something like, no, thanks, lol, or something that you write in the book. You did talk to Glenn in 2024. Did he know it was for this book?
- [29:11]
D
I reached out to Glenn, I think, in December 2023, to say, hey, you know, I'm working on this. I would like to talk to you about. About, you know, I'd like to give you the opportunity to, like, respond to the things that I'm reporting on, to react to the accusations people might make or allegations people might make, or just, you know, just like, give me your perspective. He said yes. I think, I mean, the only condition that he laid on me was that he wanted to see his quotes that I was going to use, not that he wanted, quote. I had to be really, really clear. He did not want, quote, approval. He said Explicitly in the email, if you use it anyway, it's whatever. But he wanted to see them just so that he would be able to respond if he felt that I was cutting something out of context. Right. So if he felt that, like, you know, a sentence that he had spoken didn't have, like, the context before it, that he would be able to react. That was the only condition he had. So we talked for about, like, two hours. It was a cordial chat. I would certainly say that it was combative at times. We went back and forth on a number of issues, but I wouldn't say that nobody was yelling, nobody was like, you know, there were no ad hominem attacks. It was after. After that experience, I was like, you know, Glenn online is much different than Glenn, kind of like, quote unquote, like in person. Right. And I think a lot of people are probably like that.
- [30:27]
Julian Walker
Yeah. I mean, to that point, it seems like both Tybee and Greenwald have kind of thrived based on this aggressive oppositional style, especially online. And that sort of relates to speaking truth to power and trusting their instincts in terms of the stories they go after. So there's this maverick independence that seems like it also leads to making enemies at work and being embroiled in conflicts, but then it leads to journalistic fame and praise. And so to the point of something you were saying a moment ago, when the target of their work, say Goldman Sachs or the Bush administration, is on the political right and is surveilling or financially harming ordinary Americans, it's easy, I think, for a lot of us observing, to assume that their exposes constitute a critique from the left of those kinds of targets. Right. But now it looks like they've gotten sucked down some right wing pipeline. So my question for you is, how are you perceiving this? Were they ever really on the left, or could we see them more as these pugnacious opportunists with an appetite for the personal notoriety that comes from speaking truth to power, and who's perceived as having that power has maybe shifted.
- [31:33]
D
Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it. It's an interesting question. Often with the benefit of hindsight, people will say about Greenwald that he was always a conservative, that he only made common cause with the left temporarily. One thing that I think is important to know about Glenn and I get into this in the book, obviously, is that his politics have always been somewhat fluid. I mean, he's smart, so it's like in. In the way that he does this. Right. So it's less that he is explicitly saying that he has a view that is ideologically conservative, for example. Right. And it's more that he is hedging what he's saying in such a way that it can be interpreted, it can be interpreted both as, as left and as right, depending on when you're looking at it. And more importantly, though, is it's not so much the way that he talks about what he talks about, because if you look at the way that he talks about, say, Palestine, you look at the way he talks about Palestine 10 years ago or even 15 years ago, it's very similar to the way he talks about it now. Now he's kind of using it to attack liberals a little bit more. But, but putting that aside, like the fundamentals of the conflict. Right. Are the way that he talks about them are the same, similar with national security state in the US and surveillance. The way that he talks about that then and the way that he talks about that now are very similar. So you could be forgiven for looking at that and being like, okay, well, this guy is ideologically consistent and maybe things have changed a little bit. And now people see him as on the right because now he's allied with the right because the right is now has kind of moved over to him. It's not quite that simple. What you also have to look at is you also have to look at what he's highlighting and what he's choosing to cover and what he's choosing to talk about. And when you start to look at that, you can see that there is an ideological shift in the way that he speaks about things and the way that he targets people and the things that he decides to target. I mentioned Palestine earlier. Right. So he's been writing about the conflict there and the activism around that for many, many years. The way that he used to write about it really didn't, I think, ever go after the left at all, because he understood that the left was the side of the political equation that I think had like a more principled and at least palatable at that point approach to this topic. Now he criticizes conservatives and Republicans and people on the right for their rejection of free speech principles around this topic. Right. Now I'm still like, we're still like in the balance of like, what we expect from him. Right, okay. But here's the other thing. What? The way that he does it now is to say that essentially the right is now acting like the left, the censorious left, the liberals who somehow control the entire government. Even now, even during the first Trump administration, somehow they controlled all of this national security state, they control all social media. They control all of the discourse. And the way that they are talking about this, the way that the people on the right are talking about this, they're being no better than the left and things like that. Even though that may sound like a small and somewhat inconsequential turn of phrase, but those turns of phrases are more and more frequent over the last five years. And the way that they are targeted is towards the left and liberals. And taken in total, this approach to discourse and this approach to who you target and who you decide to go after with your principled ideological principles, I think shows actually that they're not being consistent. They're not being applied consistently. What they're doing is you are now using the same sort of language to get across a different message. Now, Taibbi is a lot sloppier with this stuff. I think that he doesn't care as much about being seen as consistent. He's also, I think, has kind of really bought into the ideological project of the culture war on the right in a way that I think Glenn has as well, but not to the same extent. I would say that Taibbi is kind of a true believer at this point. So I don't think that he really cares about how he's perceived. But Greenwald, the way that when I look at Greenwald's social media posts and the way that he says things and the way that he presents his information, I always kind of feel like this guy is thinking a few steps ahead of where someone like Taibbi might be in that. Like, Glenn is, like, at some point, I may have to pivot back, back. If I have to pivot back at some point, I want to be able to have the groundwork here, to be able to say, hey, yeah, I may have been misled. I may have thought too highly of the right, but if you look, I wasn't saying things that were inconsistent with the way that I was talking about before.
- [36:12]
Derek Barris
You're using these terms left and right. And we've covered a political theory called diagonalism a few times, and we had the coiners of the term on our podcast shortly after their article came out. And basically, it can fuses the binaries of horseshoe theory, because people don't always fit into easy categories. Now, you note that Glenn believes his politics still align with the left on certain issues, and that is entirely possible. And we've regularly confronted with things like this with, like Luigi Mangioni, for example, who when you track back, it's like, wait, where is he actually falling? So as someone who has just written a book about a left to right slide, how do you cover more complex political alignments like this?
- [36:56]
D
What I try to do in Olind is to approach this from maybe two different angles, right? So the first is kind of like this vulgar materialism where it's like, look at the money, look at what they say, line it up like by, by timeline, who they're benefiting from. You know, I did this study about Glenn, I think, back in 2021, looking at his tweets and the way that he talked about Fox before and after they were having him on a lot, breaking down the money behind it and looking at what that means for how these guys are talking about things or behaving. But the second one is what you're talking about. This is a more nuanced take. So it's like, obviously people are complex. Humans are complex creatures. People have different self justifications for the things that they do. While I do believe that fame, money and attention are the three main drivers here, for two people whose politics I believe are probably a little more fluid and self serving than they might want to admit, I do think that there is some nuance to how they think about politics just as people. And in the book near the end, I gave Glenn just like a block quote to really talk about this because he was talking about Taibi, but I felt like he was kind of talking about himself as well and speaking about how as people get older, their politics may tilt to the right slash. They may start to feel like they want to have more security and they want to feel like things aren't changing too much often because maybe they have children or they're nearing retirement or they're just thinking about things in a different way than they did when they were young. And I think there is a lot of that too. And finally, I would just say that I believe for just. If you look at the way that these guys have talked, especially about trans issues, you know, basically like college kids yelling at them on Twitter. If we weren't talking about two guys who were best selling authors and world famous, you know, not like Taylor Swift level, but world famous, like journalists. And you were just talking about like their political evolution, you would probably say, oh yeah, that makes sense. Like they didn't feel as comfortable in the world and maybe they just, you know, made this shift. So I feel like there, there is a natural ideological movement to the right that they were describing. I'm not saying that Everybody has it. I'm not saying that happens to everybody, but I'm saying that what Glenn described to me and what I kind of walk the reader through as far as, you know, their. Their changing views, especially on social issues, I think are nuanced and somewhat predictable. And Glenn does say that he believes that certain issues, he's, you know, probably closer to the left. But, you know, maybe. Maybe this is intentional, maybe it's not. But those issues that he's talking about there, like economics and certain aspects of politics and political expectations, that's all well and good. Those are not the issues that he opines about. Now, maybe he's not talking about because he doesn't want to alienate that audience. Maybe he's not talking about because he doesn't feel about that strongly. But I think it's notable that the two issues that he brought up specifically were not really issues that he really ever, like, pontificates about.
- [40:03]
Julian Walker
Yeah. You know, not seeing Greenwald advocating for, you know, better health care or defending gay marriage against evangelical conservative attacks or unions.
- [40:13]
D
Right. Yeah.
- [40:14]
Julian Walker
Yeah. So, you know, you have this explosion of online independent media, and the incentives that you were. You were describing a moment ago, I think really get amplified by some of these algorithmic dynamics. Right. And how contrarian positions gain traction more easily online that require less expertise, less facts and evidence. They create then these feedback loops that people sometimes talk about in terms of audience capture, but then intersecting with this. And you mentioned this a little bit ago, so let's go back slightly. There does seem to me to be these watershed moments that broke a lot of people's brains and that put this kind of diagonalist dynamic on steroids. One was the Russian interference investigation and the other was Covid. And both of these seem to have predictably been prisms through which certain people made the journey that we're talking about here. How do you think about those two things with regard to Tybee and Greenwald? And then in terms of this broader left to right arc that your book.
- [41:13]
D
Explores, the thing about Russia and the 2016 election that made me frustrated, and I assumed also made Glenn and Matt frustrated for the same reason, was that the evidence seemed flimsy that whatever this was had done much to change votes. More importantly, to me, it was like the Democrats are avoiding having, like, a difficult conversation here about what just happened. And what they're doing is they're kind of projecting everything onto this kind of boogeyman. And now we have, you know, figures on cable news talking about how, you know, Russia's going to hack the Vermont power grid. And we don't know like, what they did to voting machines and stuff like that. And I think I mentioned there, like, Jonathan Chait, like, talking about, like, maybe Trump's been a Russian agent since the 80s. And like, it just expanded and it became all consumed and it became all consuming. Like, if we're going to talk about incentives, one of the reasons that became all consuming is because audiences were eating this up. Msnbc, CNN were making tons of money off of this because people were watching this. They wanted to know, people wanted an easy answer. And I understand that. And so there was a concerted kind of pushback from elements the left, which I would include myself and I would include Adam Johnson, who I interviewed for the book, from citations needed in as well, saying like, whoa, hold on a second, second, let's calm down a minute. Like, let's, let's take a breath to the extent that any of this stuff is true or mattered, like, okay, but like, let's try and, like, let's try and contextualize it with everything else and let's try and be like, realistic about like, what actually happened. And also let's try and have like a more interesting conversation about politics and why this election got lost. Right from the left, you are kind of talking to a liberal audience often because that's the part of the mainstream political spectrum that you are trying to, to reach with your arguments. For Glenn and Matt, this became evidence of the utter corruption and evil of the Democratic Party to the point that it became like an all encompassing reason for everything bad that was happening to the left and that centrists and liberals were the real threat under Trump. Instead of being frustrated that liberals and people on the center to center left were opposing Trump in ways that felt incomplete or ineffectual in the medium to long term. Not only is this a bad way to react to him, but actually it means that we should support Trump against these attacks. And that is where the brains start getting broken on the other side. Because to a point, I'm with all of this, right? Like, yes, like, this is too much concentration on this. This is an example of the Democrats not wanting to see what's in front of them and they're not doing a smart opposition to the kind of threat. I don't feel like they're seeing the threat for what it is. But the difference is that at no point am I thinking, oh, but that means that the threat is not from Trump, right? At no point does that mean that Trump's actions on immigration or the economy or trying to start World War three at least twice during his presidency with Soleimani and dropping the MOAB in Afghanistan. Oh, yeah. Not to mention the Abraham Accords and just trying to destabilize these, like, tinderbox areas of the world. I'm just talking about the international stuff. I'm not even talking about the domestic stuff. To like, look at all of that and be like, actually, the real problem is that liberals are being really annoying and myopic about Russiagate is just. I just don't understand. For Taibbi's journey, you can trace a lot of that back to it. Not so much his writing about Russiagate and against this liberal impulse, but what that did was it made him kind of one of the public enemies number one for liberals who were really invested in this way of kind of opposing Trump. He tried to reset that relationship with his Eric Garner book in 2017, and then during his book tour. These MeToo allegations surface right at the height of MeToo. I don't want to downplay the things that he wrote and said that he did because they're horrible, but it should be noted that this was a cynical deployment of this by elements of the far right like Mike Cernovich and Jim Goad, who kind of intentionally went after him with this stuff. And then, of course, but it was picked up by a lot of people who, you know, felt quite rightly that this was disgusting and that he should have to answer to account for it. Notably, he didn't really. He kind of shifted all the blame off to his co author from there. You know, we get to Covid. By the time Covid rolls around, Taibi is kind of, like, very primed for this right wing turn. Glenn, I think at this point has been going on Fox News enough that he is kind of starting to become, like, feel like, affiliated with them. I mean, if you just look at the way that these guys were talking at the beginning of the pandemic to, like, the way that they were talking that summer, it's just. It's like, it's a huge change, right? Like, they're saying that, you know, we should take this seriously. Like, this is dangerous. I'm hunkering down with my family. Hope everyone's, like, keeping safe to, like, you know, in the summer, during the Black Lives Matter protest that exploded after George Floyd was killed. Like, the big thing that Glenn wanted to say about that was that liberals were being hypocritical for, like, going out and maybe not always wearing masks when they were outdoors in the Summer for a protest that's just such a strong indication that something is like that, that you're just not seeing, that you're refusing to see or refusing to allow yourself to see what's actually going on here and what the actual threats are politically and ideologically to the politics and ideology that you claim that you have. And then, you know, he then leaves the intercept over the Hunter Biden laptop. His reporting on that doesn't pass muster with his editors. And he leaves, he goes to Substack, joins that Matt's already there.
- [47:06]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I'd love to pick up on that. Because it seems like the irony of this digital media as an independent alternative to mainstream legacy outlets that are framed as being supposedly more biased and they're owned by corporate interests. But the irony is that these open ended business models like Substack and Rumble that you just mentioned of new media actually seem to be more porous to bias and corruption. And now you have the journalistic guardrails of fact checking and editorial oversight and concerns about legacy reputation. All of that is out the window. And the intimate relationships between advertisers or financiers and these small content creators who reach massive audiences, it's actually much more enmeshed. So one of the journalists that you cover, who I think is a powerful example of this is Bari Weiss because she's taken that journey from being a somewhat left of center employee at the New York Times to now ending up essentially, I think, as Peter Thiel's lapdog, but owning this blog come media company that apparently is valued at about $100 million. So how do you make sense of this? The way that appeals to what used to be more left wing values, Right. Independence, free speech, having the moral courage to speak truth to power, have led to these strange inversions where you have people like Thiel and a lot his cronies entering the game.
- [48:30]
D
I'm so glad you asked that before talking about Weiss. I just want to, I want to pull back a little bit and kind of do like more of a broad kind of overview here. Back In, I think 2021, I wrote an article about this for Business Insider. Just an opinion piece, but I was talking about how for tech billionaires, like I think I use Marc Andreessen as the, as the primary example for this article. But they were upset that media, whether it was mainstream or independent critical media, had begun to kind of what Andreessen would call like more recently, like a betrayal of the deal. Right. And the deal was for tech reporters that you would get to have Access to cool gear and products, and you would get to go to cool conferences and you'd be treated like a superstar. And in return, you just give like this kind of sycophantic media coverage to tech companies. Cover everything that they do. Like, it's super cool. You can see like, like a lot of, like Apple coverage is still like this. Around 10 years ago, around 2014, 2015, with the Snowden revelations, that started to change a little bit. I mean, there always been some critical reporting of tech, obviously, but more mainstream reporting, more, more overall reporting began to become more critical of tech and tech billionaires. Now there had been Valleywag, which is a Gawker media Property, in the 2000s, which is why Peter Thiel killed Gawker in 2016, 2016, which itself added to more bad press. Right? This is a tech VC investor, billionaire Facebook guy who spent millions of dollars to kill Gawker because Gawker said some things that he didn't like, some of which I agree was bad, and some, you know, you shouldn't be outing somebody. But like, as, as I say in the book, like, people that I talked to who were in Silicon Valley at that time said that they believe that maybe, you know, he was more concerned about how they made him look and seem. After Trump is elected along with Russiagate. Another thing the Democrats focused on that was, you know, a better thing to focus on was like, how are social media platforms impacting our elections and our discourse? I can see the argument and the discussion right around, like, how much do you want the government to get involved in this because of free speech concerns? Absolutely, absolutely. But asking them questions like, these are massive corporations bringing them to congressional hearings to answer these questions, that's fine. Like, like, I don't see what anybody would probably, you know, who, who doesn't like core power would have a problem with that. But the tech companies did not like that. And they felt like they were being kind of attacked from all sides. Instead was they wanted to go back to the way that things had been, but that media didn't exist anymore. This is now me kind of theorizing on their motivations. So I want to be very clear about that. The way I see their actions is they knew that the way that they do things in Silicon Valley is to move fast and break things, invest, throw everything at the wall, you know, strip things down, build them back up, whatever. And I think that they just took that approach to media and they were like, we're going to do that with the media, and then what comes out of it will be something that's better because there are a lot of problems with media and it will also be friendlier to us. What they ended up getting out of that was a kind of decentralized alternative independent media that was more dependent on their funding, therefore could be expected to be, if not completely sycophantic, could be expected to at least leave alone like their pet projects to bring it to Weiss. Right. So Weiss is a centrist. Possibly. I mean she would probably have described herself as left of center, right. When she was for the Times. She'd been to the Wall Street Journal before that she was doing that interesting little dance, right where you're kind of like on some issues I'm, you know, I'm a social liberal. But then, you know, when it comes to this stuff, I really see the conservatives point that is a well worn tactic I think for opinion writers. So she makes this shift and she's kind of like, it almost feels like she's trying to get fired from the New York Times and that they won't fire her. So finally she's like, okay, in that case I'm just going to quit. I'm going to put out this letter about why I quit. This self important letter about why I quit. She founds this substack called the Free Press. Then Marc Andreessen invests in it around 2018, 2019. And then they have money that they're able to offer to writers to come to the service and build up a subscription base. But the money is supposed to kind of like, here's a free year to figure that out. And you know, if you make more than that, we get everything. And if you make less than that, we take the loss, like whatever. And they did this with a lot of writers who were on the right and the left. But the effect of doing this was that they weakened the institutions that they were taking those journalists from. They made it so that those institutions no longer had the same level of prestige and didn't have the writers there who were able to put out a lot of reporting, no editor, no fact checking, no thought of prestige really which, which does matter, right? Like that does matter in for, for how this stuff works. So, so in doing something that was very like Silicon Valley vc again like this kind of just like break it down, build it up. They were also living their dream of breaking independent media, oppositional media. I started my career in independent media and I am a big supporter of independent media. But I think that we need to just be clear eyed about what is happening here. Almost like to call this stuff independent media, I feel is somewhat of a.
- [54:05]
Derek Barris
Misnomer, I think, often about the evolution of journalism. I actually started in this field in 1993. In the late 90s, I was designing websites for magazines. So I've seen it through many iterations. Now that we're entering a second Trump administration, where you can argue journalism is really important, and you can also argue that when people use the term journalists, they don't understand what the ramifications of that, that career are. Let's end with your big picture thoughts here, Owen, for you, as a journalist, what role do you feel compelled to play moving into the future?
- [54:44]
D
Now, my defense mechanism is like, you know, how people have like fight or flight, I tend to move toward fight. Faced with the kind of administration that we're seeing right now with, with Trump's second, second term coming up here, I think the role for journalism should be to not only to challenge him and what he's doing, but also to challenge the people who are benefiting from it. In a lot of cases, as we saw in the deus when he was getting sworn in, but also if you look at, like, government contracts, if you look at who's making decisions, if you look at who is, well, not so much making decisions, but having input on decisions, who is benefiting from this materially, financially? If you're going to rev up ice like this and detain people and surveil people, a lot of profit here for tech, you have Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post deciding not to endorse in the 2024 presidential election. Amazon Web Services has so has billions of dollars in government contracts. And that has to be a motivator for him to try and stay on Trump's good side. You have Musk, who's maybe running the government at this point, as like, there's some reporting that might indicate that, which is terrifying. You have someone like Thiel, whose Palantir is going to be used for surveillance. He has investments. I think that it's important to keep an eye on these guys and to report about them critically. The problem is that what is happening now, they can courtshop to hit you with defamation, they can sue you just to be a nuisance for these guys have so much money that losing millions of dollars suing you is nothing to them. It doesn't matter, but it's going to cause you a lot of pain and anguish. And that's what they're doing to not so much like individuals, but that's what they're certainly doing to like these larger companies trying to silence them. And then also, you're seeing things like large media companies are being sued, quote, unquote, by Trump, and then they are settling, quote, unquote, with Trump. And then it just so happens that maybe they have, like, a merger that they're trying to get approved is blatant bribery. And again, like, why do I know that? Because I've been reading the reporting on it. So I so I do think that there's a lot of great journalism that's going on already. Reporters at mainstream and independent outlets are doing a really great job of contextualizing this stuff and making clear what's going on. I'm a big believer in the flick, the comfort comfortable and comfort, the afflicted. I think that that is the way that journalism should be. If you're not doing that, I have to question.