Non-Leftist Media and the Michael Shellenberger Problem

Repeating the same grievances over and over again isn't political analysis

I’ve written quite a bit about the right’s fake news problem. Influencers who just make stuff up have built massive followings. But there’s another kind of analyst that is many ways more annoying, and perhaps more pernicious because this type tends to get taken seriously by those who should know better.

In the minds of many critics of the left, Michael Shellenberger is the answer to the mainstream media. He is the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin. As Jesse Singal recently showed in a two-part series, Shellenberger often plays fast and loose with the facts, and is hesitant to correct his mistakes. Even setting that aside, there’s a kind of hollowness to his enterprise that reflects quite poorly on the current state of right-wing and anti-establishment discourse.

There are many things that might be said about Trump’s recent cabinet appointments. Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F Kennedy, Jr are quite unusual picks. How to make sense of them, especially in light of more conventional selections like Rubio for Secretary of State? According to Shellenberger, though, you don’t need to worry about any of the issues involved. As he wrote on Twitter at the beginning of a recent thread,

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.

This was accompanied by a video making the same points. He also mentions mandatory DEI statements later in the thread.

Personally, I’m worried about things like RFK contributing to a measles outbreak in Samoa, his decades long advocacy against vaccines, and his belief in 5G being detrimental to human health. One may worry about the Gaetz appointment indicating that Trump is seeking to use the Department of Justice for his own personal ends. Peter Hegseth has serious character issues, including a history of serial philandering that includes a credible accusation of rape, and time spent advocating on behalf of war criminals.

Shellenberger makes a show of defending Trump’s picks without any grounding in the relevant facts. Any criticism you make of Trump or his choices must be rooted in “elite narcissism.” Just invoke the Iraq War, trans ideology, and drug overdoses. That’s all the analysis of Trump’s cabinet picks you need.

Note how completely devoid this opinion is of any connection to the news it uses as a hook. Shellenberger could’ve written the script for his thread and video before the election, and then just filled in the names of anyone Trump appointed to his cabinet. There is zero useful intellectual content here. And he can do this for the next four years! Trump could crash the economy, start wars, or help unleash a pandemic. You can always reply by complaining about elites and reading the same list of grievances forever. One could just write the articles now and fill them in with the details regarding current events when they happen.

Shellenberger wraps up his thread by saying that the grievances he lists explain why the American public hates elites so much. This ignores that Kamala Harris received just under half the two-party vote, and probably would’ve won the election had inflation been a little lower over the last few years. Even if the American public was in fact united in hating elites, that alone wouldn’t justify Trump’s picks, which need to be defended on their own merits. But Shellenberger is of course exaggerating the level of anger among the masses, and not giving us any real reason why we should take his suggestion to dismiss criticisms being made of people like Gaetz and Kennedy.

The inclusion of the Iraq War in Shellenberger’s list of grievances is particularly interesting in that it exposes the intellectual shallowness of his whole critique. The biggest boosters of the invasion were in conservative media, including figures who are still major influencers on the right today like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. Trump pretends he was always against the Iraq War, but in the run-up to the invasion he actually expressed his support. Also, regarding drug overdoses, they were still going up while Trump was president.

Now, I don’t know what the Iraq War or drug overdoses have to do with Matt Gaetz’ many scandals or whether we should want an anti-vaxxer in charge of HHS. But if you are going to use elite failures to argue everyone should just blindly trust Donald Trump on everything, then I don’t know why he doesn’t get any share of the blame regarding things that have gone wrong.

Talking about amorphous elites is usually a sign of sloppy thinking. I would bet, for example, that the elites who were most in favor of lockdowns were surely among those most likely to oppose the Iraq War. If you’re mad about both endless lockdowns and endless war in Iraq, there are very few people who supported both of these things. There are certainly many who opposed both and still think RFK is out of his mind, and Matt Gaetz does not have the character to be Attorney General. I think public health performed abysmally during Covid, and it reduced my estimation of the field, but it didn’t change my view on say the Federal Reserve or whether the theory that 5G is being used to control our behavior is an acceptable position to hold for a high-ranking government official.

Moreover, the Iraq invasion was over 20 years ago! The elites of the time were pretty old, and many of them are no longer in positions of power or even alive. At what point can the Iraq War stop being an excuse not to trust American elites and have it inform all your opinions about who should run the government today?

Shellenberger is not alone. The path he’s taken is pretty common for analysts who need to cultivate a MAGA base but can’t bring themselves to actually defend all of the crazy things Trump does on their merits, like picking RFK to run HHS. This allows one to appeal to both the true crazies on the right, and also those who might not be into ideas like stolen elections and anti-vaxx but just want to hear elite-bashing.

In some ways, I find the popularity of this kind of analysis more depressing than the straight up fake news. A lot of the people who fall for completely fabricated stories and narratives just don’t have the skills to know any better. But what kind of person follows Shellenberger just to hear him say “trans madness, Iraq War, covid lockdowns, censorship” over and over again? What benefit does one derive from this? Stupidity can’t be helped, but there’s something particularly disturbing about people who get their fix by just hearing the same words constantly repeated in new contexts and disguised as original analysis.

For those of us who do think elite institutions have a lot to answer for, little will be accomplished by media figures using their sins as a get-out-of-jail-free card for Trump and all those who attach themselves to his movement.

Scroll through Shellenberger’s X feed, and you’ll have difficulty finding anything that might antagonize Trump’s online base. When a right-wing position can be justified, he’ll justify it directly. When it can’t, he’ll just point to something leftists or “elites” have done. If you want to be a right-wing propagandist, fine. But it would be a lot more dignified to just ignore the truly indefensible stuff like the RFK nomination than it is to bring up lockdowns and the Iraq War and pretend like this contributes to anyone understanding what to expect from Trump’s cabinet. And a guy can’t present himself as an independent truth teller when every single argument he makes appeals to one political tribe over the other.

Sometimes comparisons are useful. For example, when discussing who to vote for before the election, I shared thoughts about how I balanced the strengths and weaknesses of Trump and Harris. This makes sense in the context of an election where people must vote for one candidate or another. But Shellenberger does not present any nuance in his analysis, and makes comparisons for the purpose of scoring points against the other side rather than furthering anyone’s understanding of politics and current events.

The popularity of his brand of journalism illustrates the degree to which the right has become an oppositional culture. There is relatively little direct interest in ideas or real analysis among the Trumpist base. If you are an influencer and don’t want to go down the fake news path, just keep signalling against elites, and repeating the exact same complaints against them. It’s a good way to make a living, but a terrible way to try to learn about the world or reform flawed institutions.