Michael Shellenberger
speaker
1,228 appearances
6 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
And look at where then the revolution comes from. I mean, certainly there's been, I think you can argue there's been some return to some spirituality. There's been some return to, you know, some appreciation of marriage. But the real revolution is around the nation state and binding us together as a nation. That is what did it and what is doing it around the world.
And nationalism in its modern form, I'll say, there's a debate about nationalism. how long it goes back, but nationalism in its modern form is fundamentally democratic because what is nationalism if I follow Leah Greenfield's
definition, nationalism is a common people, a common citizen bound by a sense of equality, that we're all, you might be rich, I might be poor, you might be smart, I might be dumb, we're all Americans, or we're all British, and that that comes with entailments. There are consequences of of your national identity, but it is fundamentally democratic.
Once you're a citizen, you have a say, you have a vote. And so what got eroded with the snobbery, the elitism, the hubris, the pride, the arrogance of our elites,
and this is out of Toynbee and this is how civilizations fail, the creative class or the elites in a civilization start to identify with the elites in a different civilization and also sympathize and want to bring in the working people of another nation. Well, that's exactly what we saw happen in these Western countries where the allegiances between with other elites
you know, mediated by organizations like the World Economic Forum or the United Nations or any one of these elitist organizations.
And so you've seen this beautiful populist nationalist backlash to it that says, no, we have thousands of years or hundreds of years of a national tradition that's special, that hands us a set of virtues and values that have sustained us and our families and our societies. And no, it wasn't all oppressive. It wasn't all colonialist or patriarchal or like it was a beautiful- Power predicated.
Yeah, it wasn't all just based on might makes right. It was also based on a very strong sense of principles created by gentlemen in a civilized way.
Incredible, incredible history of progress.
Yeah, it's the pride of the gentleman that they've earned. Andrew Tate's not a gentleman.
Yeah, I mean, I think to your point of we've— We now know that the greatest pleasures come from delaying gratification and that hedonism is actually a poor strategy to gain pleasure, that happiness is something that comes as a side effect in pursuing happiness. Pursuing your bliss, in the words of the great Joseph Campbell, or at least life's purpose, living a meaningful life.
And so what got stripped out of this globalist WEF vision was a vision that had just stripped every nation of its core meanings. It just had basically... just it had not just disregarded it had started they had all turned on their own incredible traditions as somehow as evil that these incredible national traditions and I'm with you on the subsidiarity concept by the way I love that
I want the French to be the most French. I love France. I don't want France to be like some universal monoculture. Which, by the way, it's so ironic. I mean, it's a whole other story.
Yes. Well, I hope that this prodding that the president's doing is... I hope that the prodding is actually inspiring a healthy response from Canada to say, because I think the question goes to Canada goes great under the Trudeau vision that Canada is just part of this global monoculture. Well, then who cares if you become part of the United States?
That's just one step in towards becoming part of a global government. I mean, you know what? It's just it's it's a soullessness issue. that got exposed, that, you know, that creeped in. And you realize, like, when you get down to what is a nation, it's got a soul, it's got a culture, it's got a set of traditions, it's got a set of values. And they're meaningful. And they give life's meaning.
They give something to aspire to. And so to just go and denigrate them, as has been done for decades, as just slavery and oppression and these, you know, these... singularities of singularity, it's all just, you know, the modernity and civilization just culminated in the Holocaust and the atomic bomb and climate apocalypse.
I just think we have, I think that the great thing that's occurred is at least in the United States, I think that is now repudiated and that the left isn't going to find, Democrats aren't going to find any success there. I think you're going to see a victory by AFD in Germany this month. It won't probably be first, but they're going to make a huge victory.
It looks like Nigel Farage's party is coming very strong, certainly in France. So I think we could be seeing a re... And I don't think it's as... I think the funny way it's manifesting is that it's very moderate in...
Actually, you know, like this rebalancing, I mean, they can call it radical, but what was radical, the extremist was what the establishment was pursuing in the name of countering populism, in the name of countering the return of democracy. So, you know, Jordan, I'm filled with. A lot of optimism. I mean, just the executive orders.
Last time I was here with you, we were dealing with the sterilization and mutilation of children. I mean, that's where things got. The elites got to the point where they said, no, no, we're going to go ahead and sterilize and mutilate your children. And look, here's a peer reviewed science article telling you that it's good. I mean, that is how far things went.
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