526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

DailyWire+

Education, Science, Society & Culture

4.6 • 34.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2025

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jordan Peterson sits down with journalist, bestselling author, and founder of Public.News, Michael Shellenberger. They discuss the key moments that ushered in rapid transparency for the U.S., from the Twitter Files to Donald Trump taking the white house. They also explore how new generations can take political responsibility for the future of the West, the need to rebuild trust in public institutions, and how to make every desert bloom. Michael Shellenberger is the founder of Public, the C.B.R. Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin, and the best-selling author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (HarperCollins 2021) and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (HarperCollins 2020). He is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, Dao Journalism Prize-winner, and Founder of Civilization Works. Michael has broken major stories, including on the Twitter Files, for which he won the 2023 Dao Award for journalism; the Censorship Industrial Complex; San Francisco’s cash incentives for homelessness; the “Amazon Forest are the lungs of the world” myth; climate pseudoscience; climate anxiety; the U.S. government support for fracking; and forest management, climate change, and California’s fires. This episode was filmed on January 14th, 2025 | Links | For Michael Shellenberger: On X https://x.com/shellenberger?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Public.News on Substack https://www.public.news/ Michael On Substack https://substack.com/@shellenberger Preorder Michael’s upcoming book “Pathocracy” https://www.buffalostreetbooks.com/book/9780063421578

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you don't shoulder your political obligation, then the tyrants will take the right to do so out of your hands and use it against you.
0:08.4	I think the last 12 years, we should think of it as a woke reign of terror.
0:12.8	I mean, really, it starts with Black Lives Matter, ends with the election of President Trump.
0:17.0	We discover, thanks to the Twitter files, the existence of this elaborate censorship
0:22.3	industrial complex complete with government-run disinformation efforts.
0:25.8	How much of government spending is wasted?
0:28.1	You know, it's classic Elon.
0:29.3	It was chaos.
0:30.5	It was contradictory.
0:32.1	The only natural resource is trust.
0:34.7	You know, Jordan, I'm filled with a lot of optimism.
0:40.0	You need to get married. You need to have some children.
0:45.7	Your family has to be an integrated part of your community. You have he was a Democrat at one point, like so many
1:13.6	people, and has turned more to the, well, I wouldn't say conservative side exactly. He's turned
1:21.7	to whatever this new emergent side is that's signified by the union, let's say, of Trump
1:26.7	and Musk and J.D. Vance and
1:28.8	Mehmet Oz and Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, et cetera, et cetera, whatever that is.
1:36.0	And I've had Michael on as a guest a couple of times on the show. He's a journalist. He broke the
1:43.4	Twitter files. Elon Musk gave him access to the Twitter back end to delineate what had been occurring before Musk purchased the platform. And Michael was also instrumental in breaking the W-Path files.
2:01.6	And W-Path is, well, you could call it an organization,
2:06.6	but it's more like a cabal of perversion and incompetence, I would say.
2:11.6	And W-Path put themselves forward as a scientific consultation group that established gender-affirming care
	...

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