The consensus read on Mish Shedlock’s political consistency is that he has drifted left, captured by anti-Trump sentiment. A careful look at his own published scorecard, set against the specific policy charges he now levels, suggests the drift is elsewhere entirely.
What the scorecard actually shows on Mish Shedlock political consistency
Shedlock lists thirteen positions and concedes movement on precisely three. His stance on free trade shifted to allow exceptions for genuine national security. His flat-tax preference now incorporates a national VAT, excluding food and medicine. And on abortion, he moved from supporting Roe v. Wade to accepting the Supreme Court’s ruling as constitutionally correct, a states-rights reframe, in his telling, rather than a change in his underlying view that first-trimester abortion should remain legal.
The other ten positions, anti-war, small government, fiscal conservatism, ending the Federal Reserve, opposing open-borders immigration, rejecting mass deportation as economic lunacy, opposing free-money handouts regardless of which party proposes them, are, by his account, unchanged. The reader who wrote to him calling for the return of the ‘old Mish’ has not identified which of those ten has flipped. That is worth pausing on.
The popular framing (that critics of Trump from a previously sympathetic corner must have changed) relies on a specific logical structure: if you were with us then and against us now, you moved. It skips the possibility that the object of scrutiny moved instead. Shedlock’s answer is blunt: ‘It is not me who changed, but you.’
The Paxton addendum and what it adds to the consistency argument
The piece’s sharpest illustration of Shedlock’s stated position (equal-party criticism, applied without sentiment) comes in the addendum on Ken Paxton. Shedlock asks, flatly, whether there is any reason to support someone he describes as corrupt. Paxton, he notes, was impeached and protected a friend he characterises as a paedophile.
The specific case behind that charge has been reported in detail. CBS Austin has reported that Adam Hoffman, a Texas attorney, was charged with repeatedly sexually abusing a young boy. According to Fox 44 News, Hoffman was an admitted child molester who should have served 25 years. He was not required to register as a sex offender in Texas, according to the Texas Democrats, who have also noted that Paxton officially denied releasing records related to the case. The handling of that matter is what Shedlock has in mind when he describes Paxton as protecting a paedophile friend.
This is not a digression. It is the point. Shedlock’s claim to consistency rests on his willingness to apply the same standard to Republican and Democratic misconduct. The Paxton example is offered as evidence that the standard is still operating. You can dispute his conclusions, but you cannot fairly argue he is selectively targeting one party if the underlying charge concerns a Republican attorney general’s documented conduct in a criminal matter.
Where the contrarian read actually lands
The contrarian position here is not that Shedlock is right about Trump. It is that the framing of the original complaint (‘you have changed’) is doing a lot of work it cannot support. The reader’s charge assumes that sustained criticism of a sitting Republican president constitutes a departure from libertarian principle. Shedlock’s scorecard, taken on its own terms, does not support that assumption.
What has changed, in his telling, is the behaviour of the politicians being observed. Trump’s proposed $5,000 payments to all adult citizens, the tariffs, the executive orders struck down by a conservative Supreme Court, the pardons, these are new policy facts. A fiscal conservative who opposed Democratic free-money proposals and now opposes a Republican one is not behaving inconsistently. The consistency is the point.
Readers who find that argument unsatisfying are entitled to make the counter-case. But the counter-case requires engaging with the specific policy positions on the scorecard, not simply asserting that a critic has joined the wrong team. On the Hoffman case alone, an admitted child molester who walked without sex-offender registration requirements, the demand that Shedlock stay quiet to preserve partisan solidarity is a harder sell than his critics appear to have calculated.
