Michael Shellenberger

The motivation of Trump's would-be assassin is a mystery, say the media. But it's not. He had "savior's complex," which is far more common on the Left than the Right. I should know, since my own savior's complex led me to become a radical left-wing activist in my youth.

Cole Allen, the man who sought to murder high-ranking Trump administration officials, as well as the president, at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner late last month, is an enigma, according to many in the media. A former student of Allen called him a “kind of a normal guy.” Allen was of above-average intelligence, graduated from Caltech with an engineering degree, obtained a master’s in computer science, and received teaching credentials. In December 2024, Allen’s employer named him “Teacher of the Month.” Understandably, then, investigators told reporters they had not yet pieced together a motive. But it’s clear Allen had a savior complex. He felt a moral duty to sacrifice his life to save people he considered victims. “I’m not the person raped in a detention camp,” he wrote. “I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up, or a child starved, or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration…. I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Allen not only sought to play the rescuer, he also sought recognition for his sacrifice. “Oh, and if anyone is curious is [sic] how doing something like feels,” he wrote in his manifesto, “it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays; I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.” There is still much we do not know, including about Allen’s mental health. Jim Clemente, a former FBI profiler who worked the Unabomber and DC sniper cases, said that Allen “doesn’t sound like a psychopath.” But new facts are likely to radically alter the conclusion that he had a savior complex. Clemente noted that Allen wanted to “be some kind of hero, and that would make him feel better about himself, and it would be worth it to lose his life doing this.” And individuals with a savior complex may also suffer from intersecting issues like grandiose delusions, cluster B personality disorders, or depression. At the heart of progressive politics is rescuing victims. Consider Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who law enforcement shot after they interfered with police operations in Minneapolis. Good used her car to disrupt an ICE operation. Pretti was killed by federal agents after he placed himself between an agent and a woman the agent had pushed to the ground. Both appear to have been gripped by the savior complex. All of this matters because Allen’s case comes at a time of rising left-wing violence in the name of protecting vulnerable people. Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah man, killed Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in September 2025, saying, “There is too much evil and the guy spreads too much hate.” Nicholas Roske, the California man sentenced to ninety-seven months for arriving outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a Glock and a tactical knife in June 2022, told the FBI he wanted to kill three conservative justices to swing the Court for “decades to come.” The savior complex appears on the right as well. People who bomb abortion clinics cast themselves as rescuers of unborn children. Anders Breivik killed seventy-seven people in Norway in 2011 in the name of rescuing civilization. But more on the Left than the Right have a savior complex, in my experience. The language, behaviors, and thinking of Allen, Pretti, and Good are familiar to me personally, as I had a savior complex starting in my teens, which contributed to my radical left-wing activism. But what is the savior complex, exactly, and why is it so prevalent on the Left?... x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video! x.com/shellenberger/…

The motivation of Trump's would-be assassin is a mystery, say the media. But it's not. He had "savior's complex," which is far more common on the Left than the Right. I should know, since my own savior's complex led me to become a radical left-wing activist in my youth.

@EricBrakey @RyanHoliday 🎯 x.com/shellenberger/…

Hey Ryan, I appreciate and learn a lot from you. This does not seem to me, however, you at your most stoic. It probably is performative on her part, but you don’t know her life and her situation (and neither do I). To suggest that, if she was truly practicing stoicism, she would stage an intervention with her father — this assertion does not seem like a practice in recognizing what we do not know or control. I also have my deep frustrations with the current elected leader of the American empire (especially the mass murder and wars of choice). I hope you journal about it. I do frequently. Otherwise, keep doing good work. We are starting a group for stoicism discussion in @FreeStateNH. Let us know if you are ever in New Hampshire.

Lol. Rolling your eyes at the performative philosophy of a member of the most corrupt family in American history is apparently 'fuming'? Although if there was anything to be mad about these days, I think objecting to people lighting the world on fire so they can make a killing in prediction markets and kickbacks is probably it. yahoo.com/entertainment/…

@RyanHoliday Your entire video contradicts core precepts of Stoicism. Do you really not see that? x.com/shellenberger/…

@dailystoic Stoicism is a beautiful philosophy, and your condemnation of @IvankaTrump violates several of its core precepts. x.com/shellenberger/…

Ryan Holiday's Response to Ivanka Trump

Stoicism is one of the West’s most influential philosophical traditions, and author Ryan Holiday is its greatest advocate. And so, when he says that Ivanka Trump’s praise of Marcus Aurelius is “as cringe as it possibly gets, because it’s not real and it’s totally missing the point,” anyone who cares about Stoicism should pay attention. While Ivanka’s quotation of Marcus, on how “the soul becomes dyed the color of its thoughts,” reproduces the sentence accurately, explains Holiday, she fails to live up to the philosophy because she has not, in his terms, staged “an intervention with your dad whose life would be dyed with his horrible, negative, mean bullying thoughts all the time.” But what Holiday demands of Ivanka contradicts the stoic philosophy he claims to teach. “A man must know many things first,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in Book 11, “before he be able truly and judiciously to judge of another man’s action.” And yet Holiday does not entertain the possibility that Ivanka has thought carefully about her relationship to her father, that she has considered and rejected the path of public denunciation, or that her loyalty might itself reflect a moral commitment. Instead, he assumes that her silence about her father proves her unethical. Donald Trump’s tweets, his rallies, his rhetorical style, and his political career are not Ivanka’s to control. The very first sentence of Stoic Epictetus’s Handbook says, “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions...” x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video! x.com/shellenberger/…

Stoicism values humility, emotional control, and loyalty to family. And yet America's leading popularizer of it, @RyanHoliday, displays none of those qualities in his angry, TDS-fueled condemnation of @IvankaTrump. He displays an arrogance every wisdom tradition warns against.

@energybants 👏🏼🔥🌹

Extraordinary EU energy development: The Belgian Government has just announced it intends to buy all seven nuclear units from owner Engie. Perhaps 3, 5 or more reactors are now potentially going to be saved and restarted. Decommissioning work may be stopped immediately.

President Donald Trump is a grave threat to free speech, say Democrats and many in the media. The Justice Department this week indicted former FBI Director James Comey for a second time, charging him with threatening the President over an Instagram post last spring of seashells arranged to read “8647,” which the president described as mob talk for calling for someone to kill him. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr ordered Disney’s ABC unit to file early renewal applications for its eight broadcast licenses, days after Jimmy Kimmel joked that Melania Trump had “the glow of an expectant widow,” a quip that aired three days before a gunman opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump has gone after the media before, many note. He sued CBS over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, later amending the claim to $20 billion, and Paramount, CBS’s parent, settled for $16 million last July. The Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in research funding for Harvard. A Trump executive order prohibits federal funds from going to K-12 schools that teach critical race theory or gender ideology. And another directs the Attorney General to coordinate with state and local prosecutors against teachers who facilitate the social transition of minors. But these objections are rather rich coming from representatives of the same Party whose activists canceled colleagues, oversaw mass online censorship, and endorsed the assassination of their political enemies. The murder of Charlie Kirk last September inspired widespread celebration by progressives on social media. Trump’s latest attempted assassin, Cole Allen, was a radicalized leftist. Fifty-five percent of self-identified left-of-center voters said the murder of President Trump could be justified. Democrats and progressives inside and outside government built a sweeping Censorship Industrial Complex in the United States and Europe that censored millions of Americans for legal speech, including questioning Covid, climate, transgender, and migration policies. Over decades, leftists drove moderates and conservatives out of the news media and the academy. Today, 60 percent of university faculty are left of center, while only 18 and 17 percent are moderate and right of center, respectively. And where the share of US journalists who identified as Democrats rose from 28 percent to 36 percent between 2013 and 2022, the share who identified as Republicans fell from 7.1 percent to 3.4 percent. As for federal funding decisions, they are not censorship, and much of what the Trump administration acted against were policies that violated the rights of Asians, whites, and minors. The Supreme Court already ruled in 2023 that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies violated the law. Public schools are state actors, and what they teach has always been subject to democratic and legal control. And teachers and administrators who tell children they can and should change their gender are endangering their health and well-being, as the WPATH Files show.... x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative jouralism, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video! x.com/shellenberger/…

When it was out of power, the Left opposed censorship. Then, after decades of purging heretics, it gained control over the universities and media. Facing populist revolts against its misrule, a majority of Democrats came to support censorship, repression, and violence.

@Pauline__Voss Scary

Mit einem klaren Bekenntnis gegen die Meinungsfreiheit rundet Friedrich Merz eine kommunikativ gelungene Woche ab: „In den sozialen Netzwerken kann jeder anonym sagen, was er denkt und wie er denkt. Ich find‘s bedauerlich."

Yale University released a candid report last week documenting why Americans no longer trust higher education in general and the Ivy League in particular. A ten-person faculty committee spent a year examining the collapse. One-third of Yale undergraduates, they note, no longer feel free to express political views in class, up from 17% in 2015. Public confidence in colleges and universities fell from 57% a decade ago to a historic low of 36% in 2024, according to Gallup. Seventy percent of Americans today say the sector is heading in the wrong direction. And Americans are more skeptical of Ivy League universities than any others. But the report fails to identify the cause of the rising censorship and public mistrust, and Yale’s special role in it: the intellectual assault on Western civilization. That academic attack, or “deconstruction,” is aimed at undermining the central commitments of Western civilization, including the pursuit of truth. And it has been going on at Yale and other universities since the 1980s, and arguably longer. There are, of course, other reasons for the worsening of the quality of American universities. The Yale report identifies several contributing factors, each of which is real. Social media amplifies conformity and shaming, and smartphones distract attention. Activist administrators enforce political dogma and overstep their role. Yale employs more than 6,000 managerial staff, roughly matching the undergraduate population. Students self-police. And there is grade inflation. But many of those are downstream of the prior assault on the foundations of the West. When professors teach that all claims to truth mask power, students learn that the moral move is to shame dissenters rather than argue with them. When an institution declares that its mission is “improving the world today,” as Yale’s 2016 mission statement now does, rather than the older and narrower goal of seeking the truth and creating and preserving knowledge, everything becomes political. The Yale report treats self-censorship as a generalized climate, noting carefully that “discomfort appears to be rising across the spectrum.” The phrasing implies symmetry, but a survey of 517 Yale in fall 2025 found that 79% of Republican students say they often self-censor in classroom discussions, while only 29% of Democratic students report the same. A separate survey found that 75% of Republican students and 47% of independents self-censored, compared with 26% of Democrats. In December 2025, researchers found that across Yale’s 43 undergraduate departments, the Law School, and the School of Management, 82.3% of identified faculty are registered Democrats or donate heavily to Democratic candidates, while only 2.3% are Republicans. That is a 36-to-1 ratio. At the School of Management, the ratio runs 78 to 1. At Yale Law School, the faculty is 94% Democrat versus 1.5% Republican. The Political Science department identified exactly one Republican. Twenty-seven of 43 undergraduate departments contained zero Republicans, and three departments contained neither a Republican nor an independent. All of this matters because Yale has a broad societal impact. For example, the “Yale and Slavery Teachers Institute” trains K-12 teachers and promotes teaching the 1619 Project to fourth through sixth graders. The 1619 Project, created and promoted by the New York Times, argues that America began with slavery, not with the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The 1619 Project frames the United States as essentially racist. The reality is significantly more complex. Thousands of Americans died during the Civil War to end slavery. The Civil Rights Movement is widely viewed as a high point in American history. And the US has taken extraordinary efforts, far beyond other nations, to reduce racial discrimination to the point of creating widespread racial preferences for nonwhites in hiring, contracting, and admissions. No one is arguing that slavery, colonialism, and racial injustice should not be taught, but rather that it should be taught rigorously and in full historical context. Few who peruse Yale’s teaching of slavery will view it as fair or balanced. Instead, it trains teachers to teach children that America is dominated by “white supremacy” and that black people remain victims of it, a false and demoralizing message. The report notes the partisan imbalance in passing but pivoted to the softer language of “intellectual pluralism” and “echo chambers,” calling for department self-studies. It never asks the obvious question: what is the intellectual source of that imbalance?... x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's defense of free speech, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video! x.com/shellenberger/…

Trust in universities fell 57% to 36% in the last decade, and 70% of Americans say they're headed in the wrong direction. A new Yale report whitewashes the reason why: because they're obsessed with teaching students to hate Western civilization and American values.

@TheCMelore @FrancMilburn @DailyMail thank you

@shellenberger @FrancMilburn @DailyMail Appreciate you reading our report @shellenberger and reaching out. The report was updated to include a link to your testimony, where @FrancMilburn and David Grusch were both mentioned 4 times. Please feel free to DM with further concerns.

My thanks to @FrancMilburn for sharing his detailed insights on the life and death of scientist Amy Eskridge with @DailyMail . dailymail.com/sciencetech/ar…