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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Nov 3, 2021 • 9 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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Van Jones: “Democrats are coming across as annoying and offensive and out-of-touch. I think there is a message here.”

Anderson Cooper. “It seems annoying to a lot of people”
The Democratic Party has become “moralizing” and “self-righteous” agree @davidaxelrod & @VanJones68
“Voters are being brow-beaten in being told they’re voting for racists. People do not believe that about themselves and do not believe that America is full of the hateful kind of people that McAuliffe & Biden told us Virginia was full of”
“Moderate Democrats feel put down by pundits & progressives when they express an opinion that maybe schools should open, teachers should listen to parents, or Joe Manchin has a point when he says 1.7 trillion is a lot of money. They don’t want to be insulted by progressives”
The elections were a repudiation of the progressive agenda across the country
Called it
Twice
michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not…
Van calls on Democrats to abandon progressivism and embrace triangulation

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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 17
Trump's nominees are weird, say elites. But it was the elites' weird ideas that caused wars, addiction/OD crisis, Covid lockdowns, trans madness, censorship, and worse. Trump's nominees trigger the covert narcissism of elites who are rightly defensive at their appalling record.
Democrats act like they’re starting to get it, but they’re not. Their problems are all much worse than they realize. It’s not just that the Party is leaderless. It’s that the Party and the establishment institutions upon which it relies are discredited with half the country and are about to become more discredited with even more Americans as the truth fully comes out about censorship, Covid, weaponization of government, the transgender medical mistreatment scandal, and much else that the media and elites have lied about over the last 20 years. The media isn’t what people thought it was. It was never a reflection of reality. It was a reality distortion machine and propaganda industry in service of maintaining the narrow interests and power of a tiny group of decadent and psychologically disordered elites and their deeply deformed, dishonest institutions. Some might be reformed but others are too far gone to be saved.

x.com/RNCResearch/st…
This is the kind of unAmerican garbage that Democrats made pervasive. It will take many years to root it all out from our institutions.

Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 16
The media says Trump's nominees are dangerous, but they're not. Their positions and priorities are well within the mainstream. The threat they pose isn't to the American people, it's to the pathocrats who created and worsened our border, public health, and foreign policy crises. Image
Over the last few years, the American people have come to believe that our establishment institutions are at least partly responsible for a series of self-inflicted wounds. Our health and medical establishment either failed to address or enabled declining life expectancy, a mental health crisis including an addiction epidemic, and a botched response to Covid. Our military and foreign policy establishment unnecessarily started and prolonged war and conflict in the Middle East and violated civil liberties at home in the name of fighting terrorism. And liberalized migration laws have depressed working-class wages, swamped the ability of cities to absorb the new migrants, and created a humanitarian disaster on the border.

Given all of that, the President-elect Donald Trump’s nominations make sense. As Border Czar, Thomas Homan will take strong action to close the southern border and deport criminals. National Director of Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard will bring greater skepticism to foreign military entanglements and calls to restrict civil liberties for national security. And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will stand up to the corporations that most everyone agrees have put self-interest before the public’s interest on everything from drug safety to food quality.

We shouldn’t be surprised that some of them hold views that many of us disagree with. The main criticism of Trump’s nominees is that they have dangerous and fringe views. Homan said he would deport whole families. Gabbard said the Russian-backed Syrian dictator was not America’s enemy. And Kennedy espouses marginal and unsubstantiated views on everything from nuclear power to 5Gs.

But Homan has made clear his focus will be on deporting criminals, not families, whatever one thinks of Gabbard’s position on the Syrian conflict, it’s obvious from the context that she made her remarks in service of her loyalty to the US, not Russia, and Kennedy has said, repeatedly, that he won’t ban vaccines.

And throughout history, most real reformers and innovators have held fringe views and have had aspects of their personalities that are problematic. In most cases, those flaws or idiosyncrasies proved to be a small price to pay for their willingness to overcome the many obstacles required to achieve serious reforms of deeply entrenched institutions. This is true not just of Homan, Gabbard, and Kennedy, but also of Defense Secretary and Attorney General nominees, Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, respectively. The accusations the media has made against the two men are so far unsubstantiated by the available evidence.

And none of the allegedly wrong views or bad deeds of Trump’s nominees outweigh the potential of the nominees to reform the institutions that are directly responsible for the invasion of Iraq, prolonged occupation of Afghanistan, entanglement in foreign conflicts, corporate capture of the FDA, the weaponization of government, Covid school closures, authoritarian and gratuitous Covid vaccine mandates, unhealthy diets, the addiction crisis that kills 100,000 Americans per year, the humanitarian disaster along the border, and the mistreatment of children with pseudoscientific transgender medicine.

Strong leaders committed to reforming America’s military and foreign policy establishment, its public health, food, and medical establishments, and its immigration and border security establishment are precisely what the American people wanted when they voted for Trump. If those nominees pursue destructive agendas in lieu of doing their jobs, we will be the first to call them out for it. But the establishment has no ground on which to stand...

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😂

Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 15
Over the last decade, Democrats & the media said that those of us who opposed DEI, racial quotas, and open borders had gone “far right.” We hadn’t. Rather, Democrats and the media had gone far left. We are only now emerging from 10+ years of extreme, psychopathic gaslighting. Image
Make no mistake: it was the mainstream news media that induced the mass psychosis that radicalized Democrats into believing that the US had somehow become *more* racist, against all available evidence. Image
The media did this. The mass brainwashing came from college-educated elites in control of the most powerful propaganda machine in world history. They got Democrats to believe the ludicrous view that their fellow Americans had somehow become secretly racist, practically overnight. Image
Read 13 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 14
None of @RobertKennedyJr 's views "have any value whatsoever," say the media. But even the author admits RFK's right about fluoride, raw milk, and the danger of Big Pharma. Elites are freaking out because they know RFK will hold them accountable for their gross abuses of power. Image
This article is downright nasty: "But RFK Jr. is indeed a grade-A crank. Why should he have input on anything?"

Anything? Really?

"Let’s not pretend that Kennedy’s views have any value whatsoever."

The author is guilty of the obnoxious and over-the-top rhetoric he accuses @RobertKennedyJr of.

I don't agree with RFK about nuclear and vaccines, but it's wrong and gratuitously malicious to say Kennedy's views have no "value whatsoever" and to suggest he shouldn't have "input on anything."

Even the author admits that RFK is right about excess corporate power. "I’m ready to acknowledge the merit of Kennedy’s frequent claim that medical regulators are beset by conflicts of interest."

But then the author completely misrepresents his views, saying "Kennedy sounds less like a reformer and more like someone trapped in a web of conspiracy."

That's just false. Kennedy's views of Big Pharma are little different from the conventional, Ralph Nader-influenced views of the Democratic Party from 1962 to 2016.

Kennedy is criticizing the revolving door between Big Pharma and the government, which is the opposite of a "conspiracy" or a "theory."

RFK's whole problem with the revolving door is that it's legal and right out in the open, i.e., the opposite of a conspiracy, which is secret and (usually) illegal.

It is notable that the author never mentions the disastrous Covid lockdowns, abusive vaccine mandates, and other abuses of medical power.

His entire focus is to attack the people who rightly denounced the over-reaction.

The author is particularly disrespectful toward two of the people who were most right about the disastrous Covid lockdowns — @DrJBhattacharya @MartyMakary @VPrasadMDMPH — and most courageous in speaking out against them.
The author can't keep his own argument straight. He says Kennedy is wrong about everything — and then agrees with him on three things, one of which, corporate oversight and accountability, is at the center of Kennedy's career.

The author then claims that "Neither Makary nor Prasad responded to requests for comment for this story" before saying that, in fact, one of them did: "Bhattacharya wrote back to say that “politically minded doctors” such as myself “have done much damage to public confidence in public health.'”

That's some amazingly blatant "medical misinformation" coming from a magazine that has been one of the main advocates for government censorship of "medical misinformation" on X and other social media platforms.

The unhinged quality of the article may be explained because the author is rightly triggered at the possibility that politically-minded doctors, journalists, and the medical establishment upon which both groups depend may finally be held accountable for their role in the disastrous Covid lockdowns and authoritarian vaccine mandates.Image
Image
Read 9 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 12
The US and Australia have had a strong relationship for decades. Why, then, is Australia's Prime Minister @AlboMP attacking our relationship by pursuing mass global censorship, overtly aimed @elonmusk & X, which under previous management had banned @realDonaldTrump ? Image
Do the people of Australia know that their Prime Minister is undermining their nation's historically special relationship with the United States? Why would @AlboMP be doing this just days after the election of @realDonaldTrump, which was made possible by free speech on X?
@AlboMP @realDonaldTrump Is @AlboMP aware that Twitter, before it was purchased by @elonmusk , banned @realDonaldTrump, even though Twitter's own "Trust and Safety" Staff had determined that he had *not* violated its terms of service?

Here's what happened:

Read 17 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 9
They call it the “Democratic” party, but it’s not. They rigged 2016 for Hillary to beat Bernie. They got Klobuchar & Buttigieg to quit for Biden in 2020. They got Biden to quit for Kamala in 2024. Now they’re trying to get Sotomayor to quit for Kamala. It’s an authoritarian party Image
😳 Image
Kamala waited three whole days before getting the knives out Image
Read 10 tweets

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