Shellenberger on Carlson
You used to be able to draw a line across California. South of Santa Cruz, where those Lost Boys hung out, things started to stink of something right-wing. By the time you hit Orange County, you were in Oklahoma. San Francisco was Peter Coyote and sandal-wearing freaks. Los Angeles was Goldwater country, Reagan’s launching pad, and a hotbed of libertarianism.
Tucker Carlson hails from SoCal and has the political disposition to prove it. Michael Shellenberger comes from the Harvey Milk part of the state, working as a socialist activist in 1990s San Francisco. If this clash of X-geners had taken place 25 years ago, Maury Povich would’ve begged to host it.
But it’s not 1999. It’s 2025. If a conservative is someone who’s been mugged, then Michael Shellenberger must’ve been mugged, beaten, and left for dead in a Haight garbage bin of discarded syringes.
Shellenberger is in the vanguard of a third wave of liberal emigration.
When totalitarian ideologies threatened to swamp the West in the 1930s, a batch of thinkers dropped Leftism faster than Disney dropped Gina Carano. Whittaker Chambers escaped Communism and then suffered decades of derision from the Left who dismissed him as a homosexual (marking the last time the Left used that time-honored middle-school debate tactic). James Burnham switched lanes like a driver about to miss his exit, leaving Trotsky’s worldwide Communism in 1939 and publishing the Bible of today’s liberal emigration wave, The Machiavellians, in 1943.
Another wave took place after the 1960s. Radicalism and neo-Marxism cattle-prodded a herd of thinkers to the Right. This wave included The Man.1 Many of these thinkers suffered from that mad cow disease called “neo-conservatism,” but it had a few good ideas before it became the marionette of a military-industrial complex that stages endless wars so military contractors can sniff cocaine off naked call girls.
There’s now a third wave. The Left pulled out all the stops these past few years. Failing to abort populism in 2016, they tried to smother it in the crib: to destroy Donald Trump and silence dissent. They wore sandwich boards for Big Pharma and Fauci, nodded acquiescence during Drag Queen Story Hour, and gave everyone gaslights so they could read the news after all the normal lights had gone out. This Kafkaesque vaudeville show sent an army of Lefties for the exits: Taibbi, Andreessen, Zuckerberg . . .
and Michael Shellenberger.
Shellenberger’s not just thinking like a conservative. He feels like one.
Go to 1:08:34 (as measured by the Spotify platform) of his interview on Tucker. You’ll hear them grope through a thing they call “physicalism.”
Southern California is no longer a hotbed of any political thought besides airy Leftism. Shellenberger contrasts this airy and abstract approach of people living in the City of Angels with the “physical” approach required to survive. The Leftists want to live in their bubbles, away from the plebs, wrapped in their ideological abstractions that never require the metaphorical rubber to meet the road, and then they’re shocked when literal fire engulfs their neighborhoods. Shellenberger says these people need to detach their real lives from the fantasy lives that drive their work in the entertainment industry.
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Eric Scheske
