(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Shellenberger, Pielke, Wielicki Using Substack To Support Themselves After Failing Out Of Real Life [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-07-20 Right-wingers have been attacking normal people for decades, with conspiracies, disinformation, and all manner of nonsense. What’s new is that now, with social media, they can turn disinformation into a career. Way back in 1964, Richard Hofstadter's foundational Harper’s article "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" chronicled how "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds," who are given to "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy." “Paranoid Style” has basically become shorthand as a response to anyone who thought that the radical conspiracies of the Republican Party that came to the forefront of politics in response to the first Black president (supposedly being born in Africa) were an aberration, instead of a characteristic, of American conservative politics. Similarly, the John Birch Society newsletter is the historical counter to claims that social media has somehow changed humanity to unleash a never-before-seen undercurrent of hate and discontent. For years in the mid-20th century, the racist, conspiratorial organization printed right-wing propaganda and posted it directly to subscriber's mailboxes. So what's new? Social media. Conspiracy theories aren't an invention of social media, nor are hate speech, harassment, or hawking opinions that may or may not be true and may or may not serve someone's financial interests. But social media has monetized these tactics, so that instead of it costing time and money to produce something hatefully conspiratorial like the John Birch Society newsletter, the combination of algorithmic amplification and monthly subscriptions via Substack or Patreon mean that feeding a wealthy audience of idiots a bunch of reassuring (but false) narratives is now a career option for someone who's otherwise failed out of the real world. Michael Shellenberger basically admitted it last year, becoming the template for a dis(info-)influencer. For years after it was relevant, Shellenberger touted his TIME: Hero of the Environment award from 2006 to show that his criticisms of environmentalists were supposedly in good faith . But that schtick only lasted so long (about a decade) before he was removed from the group he co-founded, and had to create another: Environmental Progress . But that, too, was unsuccessful in maintaining funding, leading him to run for Governor of California under a ' fund the police to be crueler to addicts ' platform seeking to unite both conservatives in the state and liberals nostalgic for the War on Drugs. He's now barrelling forward with a chaotic mix of covid, climate, and censorship conspiracies that are popular on Twitter (especially in its Musk era) and selling subscriptions to the Substack with UFO "whistleblowers" straight out of Ancient Aliens . He went from 'I'm just like you, I care about the environment, and I'm just a very sensible, serious person so I think environmentalists are always wrong about everything ,' to 'The government is hiding UFOs from you.' Quite the career arc! The same fate perhaps awaits former University of Alabama climate scientist Matthew Weilcki , who's left academia and moved to Colorado to, apparently, do Substack "science" and fall for obvious parodies , while posting things like " Fossil fuels are directly responsible for ending slavery " on Twitter. We'll see, as he chases subscription sign-ups , how quickly and how far he strays from the anodyne science-y explainers denying climate science connections to things like heatwaves , and chases the clicks further into UFO territory. Because he wouldn't be the first. According to a note in his Substack, CU-Boulder professor Roger Pielke Jr. has been not just relegated to a tiny office (which he considers "unusable" because it's filled with boxes of his past failures) but has also now, per a July 2023 update on "Conflicts of Interest", says he has been removed from his department and has "no research funding other than support via Substack." While still tenured there, he apparently only receives nine months of salary, so he's hoping to use Substack to fill the gap and per his pinned tweet , has made blogging his "profession, not just [his] passion". Apparently that means a lot of friendly conversations with climate deniers and Covid conspiracy theories , while also criticizing climate activists and journalists for good measure. And like Shellenberger's UFO whistleblower (to abuse the term) Pielke too has found a whistleblower, supposedly , though this one is complaining about a shadowy conspiracy shutting down a thoroughly - criticized climate paper, so Pielke's not yet venturing to the Shellenbergian territory of shadowy conspiracy hiding evidence of UFOs or China's supposed shadowy conspiracy to develop Covid as a bioweapon targeting white people and sparing Chinese and Jewish people. But in each case, people who should just maybe stop being wrong all the time are being insulated from the consequences of being wrong all the time and instead are being rewarded for it, incentivizing more of exactly the sort of behavior that left them ostracized from the real world in the first place. It's not that Substack is inherently bad: Independent media is absolutely crucial, and Heated and other great journalists take full advantage of the benefits of a newsletter platform. But the combination of a Twitter algorithm that rewards right-wing propaganda and the financial need to generate subscriptions is going to apply quite heavy pressure on disinformers who have otherwise branded themselves as sensible centrists to embrace lucrative conservative propaganda. After all, centrists aren't the ones signing up for Substacks about COVID or climate conspiracies, and how long can you cater to a rabidly anti-science audience without starting to foam at the mouth a bit yourself? 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