Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I'm Nima Shirazi.

I'm Adam Johnson.

We do these news briefs from time to time in between our regularly scheduled episodes.

In the meantime, you can follow the show on Twitter and Blue Sky at CitationsPod.

Facebook Citations Needed and become a supporter of the show, if you are so inclined,

and we hope that you are, through Patreon.com slash citations needed podcast. All your support

through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. And this time, we are

thrilled to be joined by journalist and author Owen Higgins, who has a new book out.

We are both very excited to have Owen on today to talk about, among other things,

the public meltdowns of, say, former leftist heroes,

which is part of a wider alternative media takeover by right-wing tech billionaires.

Yeah, we're going to be discussing the kind of new dynamics of conservative media ecosystem

in the era of MAGA, which had a weird four-year blur in between it.

And then we're going to discuss kind of the not left or right guy, the kind of branded iconoclast

as a floating piece of driftwood towards a stream which drifts right and what the new ecosystem

looks like, which is what our guest writes in detail and analyzes these somewhat fraught

and nuanced questions, I think, quite intelligently.

So we're excited to talk to him today.

That's right.

So without further ado, we are now joined by Owen Hagan's,

journalist, historian, and author whose work has appeared everywhere, including Deadspin,

Washington Post, outline the intercept, New Republic, the nation splinter, all over the place.

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