Apparently having a Substack newsletter is enough to get you a White House press credential as long as you’re enough of a Trump suck-up, as we now see San Fransicko author Michael Shellenberger in White House press briefings.
We have occasionally mentioned the underemployed crackpot Substacker Michael Shellenberger in SFist coverage. He’s the guy who broke into the Tenderloin Linkage Center to rat out that there was sanctioned drug use going on there back in January 2022, and he was one of those alleged journalists who was responsible for the nothingburger that was “the Twitter files,” which Elon Musk commissioned and which produced nothing newsworthy. Shellenberger also wrote the book on complaining about San Francisco for Fox News attention, his 2021 book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.
These days, Shellenberger has a Substack newsletter called Public, which we’re told has a substantial readership, though it does not appear in the top 100 of Substack’s own top News or top Politics rankings. Either way, Shellenberger has ridden his Substack newsletter into a spot in the White House Press Briefing room, now that the Trump administration has taken those seat assignments away from the White House Correspondents Association so more seats can be given to Newsmax, OAN, and Lindell TV (yes, Lindell TV actually exists).
Shellenberger got a seat at his first White House press briefing on Tuesday, in the video that is seen above, and will make you realize that America is probably now stupid it will never be a superpower again. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt gives Shellenberger the very first question, and of course he just dregs up his own debunked Twitter files claims, supposedly framing it as a question.
His “question” (if you would call it that) brings up “increased censorship of online platforms, of American platforms, and efforts to censor Americans. I’m personally being investigated, under investigation, with my Brazilian colleagues for publishing the ‘Twitter Files Brazil.’” Shellenberger eventually gets around to asking if Trump is "considering doing anything” about Shellenberger’s own pet causes related to his whole Brazil Twitter Files deal that never made any substantial news.
It is exceedingly clear that Shellenberger is carrying water for Elon Musk (maybe being paid by him?) and asks the White House Press Secretary questions about a topic that virtually no other American cares about. But the grift has clearly paid off for Michael Shellenberger, and maybe we should just be relived that he has some wackadoodle topic other than San Francisco to obsess about.
Image: Associate Press via Youtube
