#2465 - Michael Shellenberger

Appreciate you having me back; the world feels unhinged—war just broke out—and even before we set this up, everything got wilder.

I still get the odd Trump ping on Truth Social, but this Iran strike felt out of nowhere—did you see it coming?

The old rules-and-committees era is over; this signals a new phase where America flexes power without the think-tank choreography.

I don’t read it as neat regime change so much as flipping the negotiator and using leverage with Iran and Venezuela.

None of it lines up cleanly, especially with fake clips in the feed; sorting real damage from viral nonsense in Tel Aviv is a mess.

Like him or not, Trump’s clearly acting on his own and sidelining the foreign-policy priesthood; there’s not a lot of visible second-order planning.

It even feels like we acted for someone else’s interests, maybe Israel’s, and the nuclear logic is fuzzy.

He got impatient with talks and swapped counterparts rather than strategies; it’s not about oil, and they haven’t signaled a ground war.

He ran on ending dumb wars, so people feel burned when the rationale’s hazy.

I don’t like bypassing Congress and the Security Council either, but all signs point to Trump making independent calls, donors included.

So it really is that simple—he just does what he wants?

He listens widely and then decides; there’s no evidence of strings here.

Iran has a legal right to civilian nuclear tech and enrichment, but Trump rejects the Obama-style bargain and believes Tehran wants the bomb.

I’m seeing chatter about activated terror cells—that’s scary.

Small-arms plots are plausible, and if they hit here, support for war likely falls, not rises.

With Gaza and Ukraine already burning, this starts to feel like a road to a wider war.

Iran looks isolated; I’m torn between hating that regime and recalling Reagan’s moral offensive as a case for pressure.

My hunch is Trump keeps targeting leaders until someone will cut a deal, which is both brutal and a bet on chaos.

And now AI is set to drive autonomous weapons.

AI firms are split—OpenAI’s autonomy lead quit and Anthropic balked at DOD work—while Trump folds industry, defense, borders, and trade into a single nationalist strategy.

I’m conflicted: invest at home and defend Western norms, yes; but bombing Iran or the Venezuela gambit may not serve Americans, much like prolonging Ukraine.

The last crew’s “tolerance” looked like open borders to juice blue-state counts, plus massive Medicaid fraud.

Biden seemed to hand the left what it wanted, but importing voters is shakier than people think; Latino voting is fluid, and if every eligible voter had turned out, Trump might have done better.

Voter ID is common sense, and mail-in has long had fraud concerns; California’s no-ID stance is absurd.

I support ID too, though tightening rules can have odd effects since Trump energizes reluctant voters; progressives frame restrictions through a Jim Crow lens.

People were furious about an estimated 10 million crossings, yet mass roundups with rookie ICE tactics quickly killed support.

Minneapolis showed how that backfires in a radicalized city; the suspect should’ve been detained days earlier, which might have averted the flashpoint.

The gun mattered too; that SIG P320 is notorious for accidental discharges, which could explain the first shot and the panic that followed.

We’ll likely see multiple enforcement errors; whatever the shove or spray, physically jumping in isn’t the nonviolent tradition and invites disaster.

Social media and paid activism supercharge radicalization; this isn’t the civil-rights model, and bot-fueled outrage blurs reality.

Today’s NGO activism often aims to break institutions, not join them, which is why I reject calling it empathy—it’s anti-civilization zeal.

California proves the homelessness racket; tens of billions spent, audits blocked, and the streets got worse.

Perverse incentives pay SRO owners and nonprofits to warehouse addiction under “permanent supportive housing” instead of building real psychiatric and recovery care.

If you paid for exits from homelessness, you’d fix it, but that would end the industry.

Most of them genuinely believe the ideology—victims get everything, responsibility is optional—and bigger budgets feel like virtue, not failure.

San Francisco used to be magic; now it’s sick, and even the mayor’s bodyguard scuffle looked amateur hour.

Another angle shows the mayor actually running to get help, but the guard escalated first and got outmuscled.

It points to a broader security gap—undertrained officers, low morale, and hiring bonuses can’t replace respect and competence.

The White House picked a public fight in a far-left city and it boomeranged, even if the goal was to target documented fraud.

The core tactic is spectacle to drive self-deportation while avoiding e-verify to keep business allies happy, which leaves an underclass in limbo.

For years the left warned mass migration depresses wages while corporations profit; that prediction arrived.

Democrats once balanced unions against open borders, but now a working-class GOP embraces supply-and-demand reality and tighter controls.

Meanwhile California taxes harder, wastes more, and calls billionaires greedy while gas creeps toward eight dollars.

Powerful unions are pushing a billionaire tax to fund Medicaid for undocumented residents, and the Curley Effect locks in one-party rule as moderates leave.

It’s so nice there that many just tolerate whatever new nonsense shows up.

Tech finally woke up in 2024 and is backing moderates like San Jose’s mayor; one Soros shouldn’t define politics without a counterweight.

I still don’t see a quick turnaround.

Things that can’t go on won’t; with a new governor and serious mayors in L.A. and San Francisco, California’s fixable, though Oakland may be too far gone.

Skid Row is 50 blocks of tents, which is hard to grasp until you see it.

Those districts grew from old SRO hotels into subsidized addiction zones; despite the bleakness, I’m still betting on better governance to turn it.

Let’s shift to the UAP frenzy: Trump’s saying he’ll dump the files, Obama teased and dodged, and my friends like Jesse remain skeptical it’s anything real.

Even if it’s theater, it’s historic to see presidents acknowledge it, and any declassification momentum beats decades of denial.

We should get precise about asks; John Greenwald’s FOIAs show redacted ‘potential explanations’ and unreleased sensor data and footage beyond the Gimbal and GoFast clips.

The risk in revealing a crash program is contractor capture, fraud, and budgets in the shadows that could implode under scrutiny.

I’m doubting reverse‑engineering claims after Eric Weinstein grilled Eric Davis; breakthroughs of that scale need huge teams, and secrecy that deep is hard to sustain.

AARO feels built to dismiss, while the UAP Task Force seemed sincere but under‑accessed, which tracks with how limited their public ‘explanations’ look.

People like Lazar also say fake documents are seeded to catch leakers, which fits the mess of counterintelligence around this.

MJ‑12 reads like a sophisticated plant, and the Bennewitz case shows the Air Force weaponized UFO lore before; using aliens to mask black projects often backfires by drawing more attention.

Crop circles get stranger the closer you look: massive precision, woven stalks, heated nodes, and no footprints.

The ‘circlemakers’ claim they made them, deny the nodes and weaving, and MIT’s replication attempt fell short; the pi diagram and the Julia set still boggle me.

I’m more with Jacques Vallée: loads of images and incidents, little certainty on what it is, and a phenomenon that behaves like a cultural mirror rather than simple ET visits.

That’s his strength—he resists tidy answers while noting the pattern shows up across centuries.

He frames it as a ‘control system’ evolving with us, from airships to Marian visions, which starts to sound like how people talk about God.

It’s the secular version of providence for alien‑curious folks, a higher order minding the store so we do not wreck the place.

William James argued there’s ‘something more,’ and the joy on Commander Fravor’s face looks like a spiritual brush, not just a radar plot.

If Fravor’s tic‑tac data are accurate—insane acceleration, multi‑sensor confirmation, no heat—dismissing a meticulous pilot is lazy.

Even if more files surface, I doubt they settle the essence; Hal Puthoff’s group once weighed disclosure and judged the social fallout too great, which explains the long stall.

Trump might ignore that calculus if he sees advantage, and the press already blew simple follow‑ups when Obama hinted he knew more.

Ancient texts like the Book of Enoch talk about ‘watchers’ and giants; Isaiah’s Dead Sea Scroll match suggests old stories can be preserved across ages.

It’s arrogant to write off the past as delusion; we act like the last century solved mystery, but it did not.

I see oral retellings of some real encounter behind Ezekiel’s ‘wheel,’ and I think Jesus’ teachings remain a flawless playbook for a better life even if the miracles are parable.

Via René Girard, Christianity breaks scapegoating and opens a universal ethic; it’s beautiful despite human betrayals done in its name.

Blame people for atrocities, not Christ’s ethic; I also see a revival brewing among younger folks.

UFO wonder can nudge humility the way faith does; loving your enemies is brutal to practice, but it’s the right aim.

Psychedelics crack certainty and often birth reverence, which might underlie many religious moments we outlawed instead of studying.

They loosen ego‑grip, help you admit you’re not your takes, and re‑center the soul; it is hard to keep faith amid evil, but free will is a decent answer.

Revelation‑obsessed briefings that tie bombing Iran to Armageddon are reckless; that is not how Jesus would roll.

Better to do practical good than chase end‑times theatrics.

On Epstein, I’m confident ‘shrimp’ is code for young women; pizza and grape soda are creepy but unproven, and the cannibal talk feels like reach.

Ritual violence exists, so it’s not crazy to suspect elites could be depraved; the files are already bizarre and we only have about half.

The blackmail‑op theory lacks hard evidence in the docs; he reads more like a manipulator, fixer, and financier than an intelligence case officer.

He bragged to a reporter about flying in minors; if that was just rumor‑surfing, it was a strange flex.

He abused girls in Florida because he was a pervert, not a CIA project; meanwhile, some redactions protect innocents, and today’s panic is nuking bystanders like Peter Attia.

He barely did real time and got a pillow‑soft deal, with whispers he was ‘intelligence’ steering leniency.

That claim is thin hearsay; his money trail shows giant legal brokering, like the Rothschild DOJ settlement via Kathryn Ruemmler, plus self‑inflation in academia.

He also meddled in funding and may have kneecapped cold‑fusion research, which could threaten entrenched interests if it worked.

World‑changing energy requires armies of people; keeping that secret strains credulity, which is why I doubt hidden tech programs too.

His death is a stack of oddities—camera gaps, naps on duty, a contract‑killer cellmate, and a prior strangulation claim.

I once leaned homicide; now I honestly do not know, because clinicians flagged suicide risk, the earlier incident could be a ploy to ditch a cellmate, and the system is often just inept.

The report notes Epstein said his bunkmate tried to kill him, while the bunkmate said he awoke to see a ligature on Epstein’s neck.

With money deposits to a guard, missing video, and that cellmate choice, agnosticism feels safe but the smoke is hard to ignore.

Fair end state: uncertainty; you can argue both ways, but the record does not close the case.

Here is where I land: we do not know if it was suicide or murder, his intel ties look old and contractor level, and aside from that one strange email we have no hard proof of a sex blackmail ring. What we do have are notes about hidden cameras tucked into tissue boxes with motion sensors, which raises the question of intent.

If you are running leverage, recordings and drugs at wild parties make people pliable, and that email where he jokes that the island predator is him does not help his case. If someone killed him, they would do it clean, and right now we have no clear link to any group plus a mountain of missing files.

I read that email as sarcasm, not a confession, and I doubt he would ever type an admission like that. People do kill themselves, people also get killed before they flip, but I do not see footprints of an intelligence hit here.

There were long running claims of piles of tapes, and that Manhattan place even had a lead lined panic bathroom with closed circuit screens, which screams surveillance. The whole stew of grape soda, shrimp, pizza, and jerky references is just plain off.

The FBI did seize a lot of media, but actually deploying blackmail is risky, as the Bezos extortion saga showed. My read is he often got what he wanted with money, prestige, and access to big names, and the filming could reflect his own perversions, while the files we do have paint him as a magnetic fixer rather than a man waving threats.

New Mexico is finally reexamining the ranch after federal agents skipped it the first time. However you slice it, what we have is unsettling and incomplete.

I saw a sprawling thread tying him to a bizarre lottery angle, plus chatter about that State Department mansion and a curious notarization, and the missing files seem to cluster around 2001. It is all weird, but it is a tangle.

Before we go, can I ask about UAPs and Elon. Someone high up told me on the record that he is very close with the federal government, and I brought a Texas UFO clip that looked better on a phone than it does here.

I think he knows more because of his NASA work and what people have quietly shared with me, but he never tells me anything because I have a big mouth. That video was a letdown, we should have screened it first, and we will leave it there for today, thanks.