Podcast / The Time of Monsters / Jul 21, 2025

How the Tech Billionaires Bought Radical Journalists

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, I talk to Eoin Higgins about how rich tech weirdos co-opted huge chunks of the media.

The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer
The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.

How the Tech Billionaires Bought Radical Journalists w/ Eoin Higgins
byThe Nation Company LLC

Tech lords such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are among the richest humans who have ever

lived and have an enormous sway over the American political system but even that isn’t enough

for them. They also want a compliant media, one that echoes their ideas, doesn’t investigate

their business practices, and goes after their enemy. This is the subject of a new book by Eoin

Higgins: Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. I

talked to Eoin about two of the major figures in this story, Peter Thiel, a plutocrat who is eager

to abandon the human species and Matt Taibbi, a onetime anti-establishment voice who now

has become a standard reactionary.

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Peter Theil

Peter Thiel

(Nordin Catic / Getty Images for The Cambridge Union)

Tech lords such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are among the richest humans who have ever lived and have an enormous sway over the American political system, but even that isn’t enough for them. They also want a compliant media, one that echoes their ideas, doesn’t investigate their business practices, and goes after their enemy.

This is the subject of a new book by Eoin Higgins: Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. I talked to Eoin about two of the major figures in this story: Peter Thiel, a plutocrat who is eager to abandon the human species, and Matt Taibbi, a onetime anti-establishment voice who has now become a standard reactionary.

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The Nation Podcasts
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Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.

How to Close a Camp w/ John Washington / Fighting Fascism
byThe Nation Magazine

“The first and crucial step to closing a camp is being against the camp. Not a camp, not that camp, not a newly proposed camp or this particularly atrocious camp. But against camp as concept, against camp as practice—against all camps. Against locking people up because of where they were born or where they are.”

This is the thesis of How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention by John Washington. Washington is a longtime reporter on the border and immigration detention, and he joined us to discuss what we can learn from the organizers and activists who’ve been leading the fight against America’s expanding network of immigration camps—and why these mechanisms for indefinite detention without the benefit of due process or trial by jury are obviously the infrastructure of authoritarianism.

Check out John’s book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2880-how-to-close-a-camp

And here’s Aaron’s review of the book for The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/213448/closing-detention-center-rarely-single-strike-it-siege

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Subscribe to The Nation to Support all of our podcasts

Jeet Heer

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The GuardianThe New Republic, and The Boston Globe.

More from The Nation

https://bookshop.org/a/15865/9780316450850

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