Michael Shellenberger
speaker
811 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 18 Feb
Michael Shellenberger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We have all the talent. We have the AI. We have all the energy. We remain the most secure country in the world, not just because of our nuclear weapons and military, but also because we're protected on both coastlines by huge bodies of water. So, I mean, the United States is still arguably the big superpower. Obviously, China's a superpower, but it's not...
it's not playing anything, you can't even imagine China playing anything close to the role of the United States played after World War II. So we're in a moment of, You know, we're just trying to figure out what's going on. I think everybody's trying to figure out what's going on. And much less, we've got to spend some time figuring out what do we want the United States to be. And J.D.
Vance and Trump are further along in that thinking than anybody. But honestly, it's not like there's a consensus even within the Republican Party about what the United States' role in the world should be in this post-Pax Americana, post-Cold War period. Yeah.
65%.
Yeah, well, there's a lot there. I mean, I think to start with, we say, we hear a lot, waste, fraud, and abuse, right? as though they're kind of all equal. Waste is inevitable to any system. You try to reduce it, but one of the things we find is that you can waste more energy trying to reduce waste.
It's often why when you go to these studies of buildings and whatever, there's a high level of energy efficiency. You can always get more efficiency out of a building. And they always go, well, if we put more energy and time into reducing efficiency, yeah, but then you wouldn't be running your business anymore, right? So there's like, you can waste time trying to deal with the waste.
Then there's fraud. That's bad. That shows... not just a kind of, you know, I think people tend to think of fraud like, oh, the police haven't done a good enough job or the police are corrupted. It represents a weakening and corruption of the body, of the system, that you're actually, as you said before, there's always parasites, there's always viruses.
When the host becomes vulnerable and weakened and old and prone to disease is when you're prone to fraud. And then you get... the worst of them all by far, which is abuse, by which is abuse of power. And we are coming out of a period of extreme abuse of powers. I mean, we can debate the period of time that's relevant. I think the last 12 years, we should think of it as a woke reign of terror.
meaning a period of great fear, certainly universities, media, wokeism. I mean, it really, it starts with Black Lives Matter, ends with the election of President Trump in 2024. That was a period of abuse of power. Every single major institution, medical power, educational power, media power, political power. And what gets revealed when Elon and Trump break open the U.S.
government is we see this agency that was always there in their peripheral vision. Everybody sort of knew about, but you kind of forgot about, USAID, Agency for International Development. And what opens up is a bunch of, you know, things that you had forgotten but are important to remember. The first is that human economic development, prosperity, growth comes from within.
It comes from the core values of within, namely delayed gratification, hard work, saving on principle, waiting to get married until you can afford your own home and sustain your own family, which means, you know, healthy marriage. sublimation, that those things are the recipe.
The Congo. Yeah, I mean, I think that that picture that you're describing is the same one that Harvey Mansfield lays out in his wonderful book, Manliness, where he has three levels of masculinity. The first is weak men who are incapable of defending themselves and others. Manly men, who are strong men who look down on the weak men, but will also abuse their power.
And then the gentleman, who has the power of the manly man, but keeps it in reserve to protect his family, you know, his bride, his children, his family, his nation, etc. civilization, but he's not going to abuse his power. So we've seen a regression where civilization was created by gentlemen, as you said.
They became gentlemen, in the process of creating civilization, they become gentlemen, or in the process of becoming gentlemen, they create civilization, which is to say a society based on universal rules, on the view of humans as all equal under first God and then equal under the law. and that everybody has these fundamental inalienable human rights.
This is the basis of what we call Western civilization, and it's a civilization of gentlemen. Well, we've seen a mass derangement over the last 12 years, but particularly with the election of Trump, you saw a derangement occurring in every institution. And what happens with USAID,
And within the intelligence communities and the foreign policy establishment is a massive derangement and abuse of power where the gentlemen stop being gentlemen. They become aggressive manly men, and they decide that they know what's best, and they can't stand all this democracy, which they dismiss as populism, and they describe populism as its opposite.
They project onto populism, totalitarianism, and in the name of preventing totalitarianism, create a censorship industrial complex, which was already, we know, was international. U.S., U.K., U.S., Brazil, U.S., Europe.
Canada involved in it, particularly the Five Eyes, all run, all coming out of the intelligence community because they're the ones that had run the censorship and disinformation operations, again, in Arab Spring and then the color revolutions. They turn all that back on the United States, first with the Russiagate conspiracy theory,
This idea that Trump is secretly controlled through a sex blackmail operation by Putin. Second, through the dismissal of COVID origins, then you see with the Hunter Biden laptop, an elaborate conspiracy theory that the laptop is a Russian information operation as opposed to which they knew it was not because the FBI had the laptop seven months earlier and used it.
Basically, Jedi mind trick brainwashing to pre-bunk or program the journalists and the social media companies into thinking that a future story about Hunter Biden and Burisma would be a Russian hack and leak operation and spreading disinformation in advance, programming people and then demanding censorship on the basis of it.
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