Michael Moore's Anti-Trump Film Is Unhinged And Ridiculous
Michael Moore's Anti-Trump Film, Fahrenheit 11/9, Is Unhinged And Absurd. He actually claims that Gwen Stefani is the reason Trump ran for president. He actually shows historical footage of Germany to compare Trump and his supporters to the people then. The film is an attempt to cater to the modern left but Moore seems at odds due to his anti-globalist stance and his support for globalist Democrats. It becomes difficult, in my opinion, for Moore to support illiberal social justice reactionaries and white working class union members at the same time. The base in the US seems split with the forming of a new left and a new right and Michael Moore right in the middle struggling to stay with a left that has left him behind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCkSAtqt2LY&index=2&list=PLxQaod7tWvYKPWKxGRRL1yf78WdyBRuvD&t=0s
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I think we've got a pseudo-get-woke-go-broke scenario with Michael Moore's latest film, Fahrenheit 11-9.
Last night, I went to go see the film.
I thought it was going to be a documentary about how Donald Trump came into power, what caused it like the media, and the sentiment among the American public.
It kind of was, but it jumps back and forth between subjects that I felt were rather random, like the Flint water crisis, the teacher strike in West Virginia, and the Parkland shooting, which I just didn't want to sit through because it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
But Michael Moore also made extremely wild and, in my opinion, unhinged claims about Donald Trump and the media and how he came to be president that I thought had no basis in reality.
It's actually rather absurd, so we'll talk about that.
But the main thing I want to focus on today is how I feel that Michael Moore, in his attempts to stay centered on the left with what is viewed as the mainstream left, has actually caused him to lose his audience and lose his support.
Michael Moore's first film, Roger and Me, was about factories in Michigan being moved to Mexico.
Sort of.
It was about factories closing down.
And you had white working class union Americans who had lost their jobs, and that's what his documentary was about.
I'd have to imagine a lot of his support came from these people.
And who did those people vote for in the 2016 election?
Probably Donald Trump, because he promised to bring back these jobs.
And even Michael Moore has acknowledged that.
But as Michael Moore tries his best to stand the left, in my opinion, I think he's actually pushing his real audience away.
From Variety, Fahrenheit 11.9, Why Michael Moore's Trump Doc Bombed.
They start by saying that his film picked up an abysmal $3.1 million when it opened 1,719 venues.
It was the best start for the left-wing filmmaker since 2009's Capitalism, A Love Story, but a far cry from 2004 when Moore's doc, Fahrenheit 9.11, launched with a record-breaking $23 million.
At this point, Fahrenheit 11.9 will be lucky if it matches the opening weekend of Fahrenheit 9.11 during the course of its run.
To quote Moore, how the F did this happen?
Now they go on to say that we're in a different era.
People aren't going to go to the movies to watch a documentary about Trump when we're inundated by Trump news all day and every day.
And that Moore is just, he's old.
It's just times have changed.
But let's be real.
The documentary just wasn't that good, okay?
If people went to see the documentary, and it was good, they would tell their friends to go see it, and word of mouth would pick up, and the film would do better.
But in my opinion, I would recommend against seeing it, because it was around two and a half hours long, and there were parts that seemed to make no sense, that had no basis in reality, and there were segments of the film that didn't need to be in there.
And I mean literally, had no basis in reality, because even USA Today has run this story.
Michael Moore claims Trump ran for president because of Gwen Stefani.
This sounds like the rantings of a conspiracy theorist.
In the beginning of the film, Michael Moore actually says That Trump ran for president because he wanted to increase his salary at NBC and prove he was more valuable than Gwen Stefani, which just sounds like he literally made that up.
Did President Trump run for office because of Gwen Stefani?
That's what Michael Moore thinks.
The director, who takes direct aim at the president in his upcoming documentary, Fahrenheit 11.9, shared his theory on why Trump ran for office during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter Wednesday, saying he made his Trump Tower campaign announcement after realizing Stefani's performance fees on The Voice were higher than his own on The Apprentice.
Donald Trump has talked about running for president many times, and he actually ran before.
This is made up, but the documentary presents it as fact.
He doesn't say in the documentary, I think this is why he did it.
He says this is exactly why he did it.
Another thing Michael Moore did that isn't as egregious that I do want to point out is that he claims Trump was intentionally delaying his rallies to piss off the media, to string them along.
I actually covered many of Trump's rallies.
And the reason why his rallies were delayed wasn't because Trump was trying to string the media along.
It was because he was flying from city to city on private planes and just couldn't make his scheduling.
It's actually rather simple.
It's not a conspiracy against the media.
And no, I really, really doubt Trump faked his presidential campaign announcement because of Gwen Stefani.
In the film, Michael Moore says that Donald Trump didn't actually want to run for president, but because he wanted to prove he was more valuable than Gwen Stefani, he decided to do a fake campaign announcement, which would subject him to a bunch of campaign finance laws and is ridiculous, and then only after NBC severed ties with him did his sons actually convince him, maybe you should actually run for president.
That is fantasy, nonsense, conspiracy, and it's insane.
And as soon as I saw that, I was actually shocked to see that Michael Moore made such a ridiculous claim in his film that had no basis in reality.
And right then and there, I realized why this film bombed.
Because no one, even people who don't like Donald Trump, are gonna go tell their friends to watch that complete nonsense.
At the end of the film, he starts comparing Trump to Hitler.
I have to imagine that the white working-class people who supported Michael Moore in the past also aren't going to want to watch a film that compares them to Nazis.
Now, Variety has some theories as to why they think Michael Moore has lost his audience, and they do not go the get-woke-go-broke route.
They simply say it's times are changing.
They point out that the internet has fractured how we get our information, and that people don't really need to watch documentaries anymore, and I think this is actually true.
I have seen a downtrend in interest in documentaries personally, so maybe that's the case.
They talk about how his audience has aged out.
Also, probably likely, the younger generation isn't interested in going to the movies to watch a documentary about news when they get their news from social media.
But they do point out a bit of the get-woke-go-broke scenario when they say, in 2009, Moore made Capitalism A Love Story, and it was a seriously problematic movie, a riff on what had gone wrong in America in the last 50 years that wound up fingering capitalism itself as the culprit.
But it's as if Moore, in all his acumen, had forgotten the old saw about capitalism.
That it's the worst system except for all the others.
The movie was a free-form harangue, hectoring yet fuzzy, all sealed with the let's-get-socialist boosterism that has become Moore's signature parting gift.
Michael Moore has pushed for socialism.
In fact, in the film, he talks about how young people want socialism and how the mainstream Democrats aren't going left enough.
He criticizes mainstream Democrats for rejecting the left in favor of moderate policies and centrism, and he says that's a contributing factor to how Trump won.
When in reality, I think the fact that Hillary Clinton, you know, kind of stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders and was an awful candidate who supported globalist free trade policies, which fractured many people on the left and pushed them towards the Republican Party.
I think that was omitted.
And I think this might be the case, especially when you look at Michael Moore's first film, Roger and Me.
According to his Wikipedia page, it says, the 1989 film was Moore's first documentary about what happened to Flint, Michigan.
After General Motors closed its factories and opened new ones in Mexico, where the workers were paid much less.
Since then, Moore has become known as a critic of the neoliberal view of globalization.
Who else is very critical of neoliberal globalization?
Trump voters.
When I went to all these Trump rallies, I didn't meet diehard conservatives.
Most of the people I talked to told me they had never voted before, they were independent, or they used to be Democrats.
People called them Reagan Democrats.
I have to imagine there are a lot of working class people who heard Donald Trump say, I'm going to bring manufacturing back to this country, and heard Hillary Clinton say, we want more free trade agreements, and said, if we vote for Hillary, We will lose our jobs, and it's already been really bad on us.
And now with Donald Trump as president, his policies, whether it's his policies or not, whatever you want to believe, the economy is doing better than ever, and unemployment is at its lowest in a long period of time.
I don't have the actual stats pulled up.
But a lot of people are talking about, hey, the economy is doing really, really well.
And you have to imagine that.
That people who live in Michigan would probably vote for the guy who says, let's bring back the factories and reinvigorate jobs.
And I think that's why Donald Trump won Michigan.
Because he was saying, bring back the factories, and Hillary was saying, more free trade.
Donald Trump only won by a little bit.
But I feel like Michigan is a good example of the new left and the new right in this country.
I feel like a lot of people who used to be considered liberal are now voting Republican and supporting Donald Trump.
I have met former Occupy Wall Street activists who tell me now they are Trump supporters.
There are many Trump supporters who used to be on the left, and personally, when I look at the comments on my videos, I feel like a decent amount of the people who watch my videos on both channels are actually centrists, moderates, and former Democrats.
Michigan seems to be a good example of what happened.
You've got the working class base who supported Trump because they want to end these free trade agreements, and then you have the left which kind of just votes for left for specific social policies.
This is a graph I showed in my video from the other day, and we can see that when his groundbreaking Fahrenheit 9-11 came out in 2004, the median Democrat and Republican were very close to each other and rather centrist.
Today, I should say when we go to 2017, we can see that that split is ridiculously huge.
And what Michael Moore is trying to do, in my opinion, is fit this line here to attract the median Democrat, who has very little in common with the median Republican.
However, Michael Moore is actually right here.
This is where the people who like Michael Moore are, and they are being divided.
And if Michael Moore is going to try and attract these people, who probably don't like his ideas and his policies and the work he's done in the past, well, he's losing out.
And that's why I say it feels kind of like a Get Woke, Go Broke scenario.
Michael Moore is trying to move with the wave.
Unfortunately, the people who believed in him, the people who liked his work, the people from Roger and Me are probably over here because they want their jobs back and Michael Moore knows it.
So why he would try and make the claim that they're like Nazis and that Trump is like Hitler is mind-blowing to me.
Perhaps he really believes it.
The scariest thing of all, in my opinion, is that at the end of the film he kind of calls for a violent revolution.
I don't know if that's what he's really trying to say, it's my opinion based on what he was saying, but he talks about how the elections don't work, how the Mueller investigation probably won't work, and there's only one thing that we can do.
And I don't know what that one thing is, but if he's saying elections don't work, and even special prosecutors don't work, I can only imagine he's talking about revolution, because then he shows a man in flames running through the street.
The whole thing seemed absolutely ridiculous and unhinged.
And it's unfortunate.
It is, because Michael Moore has done good work in the past, but here we are today, where, in my opinion, he's trying so hard to stay with the mainstream left, which is moving socialist, that he's lost sight of what actual Americans really want.
I do not believe the average American is going to advocate for extreme identitarian policy and hardcore communism.
When Michael Moore says capitalism is bad, I think he's missing the bigger picture, and I think he's trapped in the Twitter bubble.
He's trapped in this isolated chamber of a very small group of people, and the rest of the country doesn't care.
I talk to my friend in Milwaukee.
Hey, do you know about what's going on in politics?
No.
Do you know about Kavanaugh?
Who's that?
I play video games with my friend online.
I'm like, hey man, did you hear about the Supreme Court?
And he goes, what Supreme Court?
And I'm like, oh, the nomination process.
He goes, what, why, no, what's going on?
The average American, and these are my friends who are Democrats, they're on the left, they have no idea about any of this.
I think too many people are getting caught up in the Twitterverse, and they think Twitter is real life, and it isn't.
And if Michael Moore actually got out there and talked to real Americans, he might realize something profound.
That he is entering fringe territory, and those people either don't have money, or don't want to watch his film, because...
He's not far left enough!
At least I can say for now, I did not like this film, I would not recommend other people see it, and I thought it was pretty damn nuts.
But let me know what you think in the comments below, we'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast, stay tuned, new videos every day at 4pm, and more videos on my second channel, youtube.com slash TimCastNews, coming up at 6pm.
