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Fahrenheit 11/9: Rewatching the Michael Moore Movie from 2018
I rewatched Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9. The 2018 film is mainly a screed about all the bad things Trump was going to do as president. Time is a cold mistress: basically nothing Moore said four years ago about what was going to happen actually happened. Moore was wrong about Trump’s ties to Russia, Moore was wrong about Trump being the last elected president because he would seize total power, and Moore was wrong about the lasting impact of the progressive heroes of that year, the Parkland High School survivors.
Sorry to get ahead there. You do remember the mass shooting in a Parkland, Florida high school, right? A handful of “survivors” were insta-made into media sensations. Barack Obama supposedly personally wrote the Time magazine cover story saying they had “the power to insist that America can be better” we’re lead to guess he himself did not have.
In his film Moore portrayed the kids were examples of the anti-Trump force sent by the universe as a balancing mechanism, and that the power of activism was America’s only chance to remain a democracy. I can’t do justice to the hyperbole of Moore’s narration; you would think by listening these kids had the power to raise the dead simply by amassing RTs on Twitter. A good chunk of the movie is just Moore staring at the kids at work changing everything by being online, the filmmaker’s expression somewhere between pedophile on the playground fence and a proud dad.
Back in his heyday, there was a meme among businesspeople “Michael Moore just walked into your office. What do you do?” The answer back when was to lawyer up, call security, etc. Today the proper response would be to tell Mike sorry, you’re not hiring, and offer him a bottle of water if he’ll leave quietly. Moore created a style of documentary journalism where facts don’t matter if the conclusion (in this case, “guns and orange man bad”) is righteous enough. He forgets that in his earlier movies this sort of worked only because his generous abuse of facts and the actual conclusion were often close enough to one another, as in Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine, and Fahrenheit 911.
But it is almost painful to watch him in this movie, claiming how the Parkland kids organized the massive March for Our Lives in Washington on March 24, 2018 all by themselves without asking them how a few high school kids in Florida secured marching permits from the notoriously persnickety Washington DC bureaucracy and National Parks Service, how they secured the massive security bonds and insurance needed, arranged stage construction, Porta Potties and sound reinforcement, set up security, ran an international media campaign, and so forth, all from study hall. Taking over the National Mall is not something you do by saying “Alexa, tell me how to take over the National Mall.” Moore thinks he’s fooling the rubes in ignoring such things when in fact he’s taking a dump on his subjects, setting them up to be blown over by the lightest of questions.
Moore himself is a thing to be pitied. You see him in this movie, hunchbacked and obese, searching the country for old-school Bernie-style liberals to champion. He doesn’t realize the parade passed him by sometime during the George W. Bush era and he comes off like some 80s hair metal band playing Holiday Inns with only one original member on stage. He gets caught up in his own narratives, in this film an extended side story about how the water is still bad in Flint, Michigan which ends up inadvertently highly critical of Saint Barack. His wandering call for Bernie to re-emerge walks dangerously close to admitting Hillary Clinton engineered that political castration. Moore awakens about half way through the movie aware who he is really criticizing for the most part and quickly pivots to more familiar ground, an extended lip syncing of a Trump speech to some iconic Leni Riefenstahl Nazi propaganda footage of Hitler.
In the case of the Parkland kids, by refusing to let them off the pedestal Moore in the end exposes them as the media-hungry fakes they are, or, to be generous, were made to be. A major scene shows kiddie activist David Hogg using Twitter to cancel a male candidate for some minor state seat in Maine and engineer his replacement with a woman. We don’t know anything about either candidate, only that Hogg did it with Twitter during fourth period (Moore assures him on camera it’s OK to fail his psych class to accomplish global-level change) and this is what the future is going to be.
The problem is the movie was made in 2018 and we can judge Moore’s vision of the future. Nothing really happened. The Parkland kids misunderstood, and Moore celebrates, emotional manipulation, weaponized self-pity, and claims to victimhood are not action. Gun laws are pretty much the same post-Kids, and who can count the number of mass shootings since Parkland? Apart from lip service by the Democrats, there is no effective gun control legislation on the stove. Yes, yes, conversations were started and awareness was raised, but Moore falls into the same naïve hole the Parkland kids live in, mistaking noise and political stunts (like being Michael Moore) for real change.
Moore of course will never make a follow-up film, but here’s what it would contain if someone else ever did.
Emma González is famous for standing in silence at a lectern for a little over six minutes to commemorate how long it took for 17 people to be killed during the shooting. In 2018, Madonna, the Michael Moore of the pop industry, even sampled Emma’s voice for an album. González later advocated for Joe Biden, thoughtfully tweeting “a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for fascism.” Today she has become a hollow woke caricature. She’s changed her first name to “X” because “I don’t want people thinking that they’re my friends just because they know my name.” X is pursuing a degree in activism, with classes such as Manifestos, Alternatives to Capitalism and Socialism, Post-Colonial Literature; and Theory, Black Social and Political Thought, and Global Politics/Radical Comics at the prestigious New College of Florida in Sarasota. How do we know all this? X is back in the media for the first time in almost four years, pimping a movie on the Jimmy Fallon show about the her of almost four years ago.
David Hogg was the skinny white Parkland kid with the Brylcream hair and oddly triangular face. He was raptured out of the swamps of Florida to attend Harvard after the shooting. In addition to promoting the same film as X, Hogg also started a semi-defunct pillow company in 2021 to challenge Donald Trump ally Mike Lindell and his My Pillow company. The Hogg pillow company quickly amassed more than 80,000 Twitter followers but not so many sales. The whole thing was so egregiously awful that Cameron Kasky, a fellow Parkland survivor, attacked Hogg, saying “To those of you who marched, donated, lobbied, and called for change… I’m so sorry this is what it turned into. This is embarrassing. Welcome to America, everything ends up a grift.”
And right, be sure to check out the merch on the March for Ours Lives website. The #MarchForOurLives “Stop Gun Violence” T-shirt is about as likely to help stop gun violence as it is likely to stop a bullet for the wearer. And for the record, Colin Kaepernick, who makes a cameo in Moore’s movie, has seen his own net worth grow to some $20 million via paid endorsements for McDonald’s, Jaguar, Electronic Arts, and MusclePharm. Moore’s film was originally funded by everyone’s favorite carnivore, Harvey Weinstein. Michael Moore himself owns nine homes and is worth $30 million, a helluva way to help redistribute wealth, to himself.
Michael Moore should take his inspiration for his next film from that Parkland Kid statement, “Welcome to America, everything ends up a grift.” It’s the only true statement in this whole mess. It was never about actually doing something about guns, it never is. It’s about getting a free ride into Harvard, pimping a documentary, starting an odd pillow business. It is all always about profiting personally from victimhood, the retirement strategy of most Americans under 40 today, and of Michael Moore.
What was intended by Moore in 2018 as a rallying point, a radical film to drive young people into the streets to defeat National Socialism, looks just a few years later like another contribution to a generation’s cynicism. How many heroes pumped by the media — Robert Mueller, James Comey, Michael Avennati, and Michael Moore come to mind — need to implode before young people figure out the grift and turn away. Now that might be the start of the movement Michael Moore imagines he’d be the guy to lead.
Fahrenheit 11/9 is irregularly available on Netflix. Scroll past the Pride section, Black Stories, and Marginalized Voices down to the part that might be labeled “Stuff You Can At Least Tolerate When Your Friends Come Over and No One is Talking to Each Other.”
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Elon, Time to Kill Twitter
Nothing would be better than for Elon Musk to buy Twitter and then kill it. Take it off line. Delete it. Make it go away.
What is the point anymore? Like some aged European monarchy, the service has become too inbred to say anything useful. It consists now as a giant push survey, claiming the appearance of action equals action. Even the poltergeist of Twitter, cancelation of people, is like a magic spell that you have to believe in for it to work. Live outside the Twitter demographic and it does not matter. Listening to people talk, you’d think Twitter had the power to raise the dead, or more often, the opposite. Twitter is the physical embodiment of what Glenn Greenwald describes as Democrats criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology. Dissenting ideas are “disinformation” and must be censored. Trump voters are inherently criminal (“insurrectionists”) and should be imprisoned or at least banished for thought crimes.
Recently rewatching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, it is obvious the 2018 film is mainly a screed about all the bad things Trump was going to do as president. Time is a cold witch of a mistress: basically nothing Moore predicted four years ago about what was going to happen actually happened. Moore was wrong about Trump’s ties to Russia, Moore was wrong about Trump being the last elected president because he would seize total power, and Moore was wrong about the lasting impact of the progressive Twitter heroes of the year, the Parkland High School survivors.
You do remember the mass shooting in a Parkland, Florida high school, right? A handful of “survivors” were insta-made into social media sensations by presenting their views on gun control unopposed and uncommented on. In his film Moore portrayed the kids were examples of an anti-Trump force sent by the universe to Tweet as a balancing mechanism, and that the power of their online activism was America’s only chance to remain a democracy free of daily massacres. You can’t do justice to the hyperbole of Moore’s narration in print; you would think by listening these kids had the power to change something simply by amassing RTs on Twitter. A good chunk of the movie is just Moore staring at the kids changing everything fascistic in the world by being online, the filmmaker’s expression somewhere between pedophile on the playground fence and a proud dad.
One can imagine Moore’s reaction if he was still relevant enough to quote to Musk’s impending takeover of Twitter as a twist on the absurd: Musk will have too much power to make Twitter into anything he wants, even a full-on bastion of unfettered speech. Instead of relaying on the Terms of Service to ensure people like the Parkland Kids face no opposition online, Moore might worry just the opposite, that the opposition, left to its own point making, might overwhelm the dumbass ideas that tend to come from 16-year-olds handed a very big microphone with no supervision. For those new here, that is the point, to allow better ideas to overwhelm poor ideas.
Have a look at what Twitter had done in the name of “free speech” and ending “misinformation,” the rallying cries now of so-called progressives. Twitter took an entire subject of critical interest, Hunter Biden, off the media menu and thus out of public viewing just prior to the last presidential election. Twitter silenced the loudest voices of opposition to the Democrats, people like Donald Trump himself and others like Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Call them what you want to, the idea in a free country is you’d have the opportunity to hear what they had to say if you wished to or maybe encounter speech that made you rethink your own views by accident (protip: that’s a cornerstone of Jeffersonian democracy, oh wait, Jefferson is on the outs now, too, sorry.)
Twitter also found cause to black out the satire site Babylon Bee and Libs of TikTok. The Bee’s violation? Naming transperson Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year.” Libs of TikTok only reposted clips from left-wing users on social media, including from drag queens and gay and transgender activists but that too was too much. Things got so stupid that Trump Derangement Post Child Robert Reich in his role as the Rob Reiner of faux-intellectuals tweeted, “When multi-billionaires take control of our most vital platforms for communication, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for oligarchy.”
“We are calling for careful content moderation that balances the important ideals of democracy, free expression, and public health and safety,” said Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, a media advocacy organization. Imagine that, a group which says its supports a free press demanding censorship. But why pull punches — Politico wonders “If Musk sticks with his word and removes most of the content moderation rules in place, which could include those that ban hate speech, extremism and vaccine and election misinformation — it may turn into a platform that poses a threat to democracy.”
Irony aside, look what they are afraid of: unfettered free speech brought to you by one of the few men rich enough to pay for it for us.
And that’s why Musk should instead kill off Twitter, and any other social media he can acquire. His legacy would not be to be the oligarch who gave us a smatter of free speech but the oligarch that helped break the grip oligarchs, whether progressive or otherwise, now have on our speech. Burn Twitter to the ground to save it, er, us, from any attempts to adjudicate further what we can read and listen to. If a social media outlet can’t present a democratic platform in a democratic way (i.e., without a rich guy paying our way to freedom like an abolitionists buying slaves only to set them loose) then we should not want it. We’ve gone too far in turning “content moderation” into crude censorship and viewpoint discrimination.
Public forums need to just that, public. You do not achieve free speech via censorship no matter who wields the red pencil. Musk can’t change that we’ve reached a point in democracy’s evolution where some half of us fear free speech, but there it is. His contribution is to kill the beast that Twitter has become, and hope something more democratic rises in its place.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Michael Moore.com Supports We Meant Well
Thinking they can sell their version of events– punish the whistleblower (me) instead of investigating the allegations ($44 billion wasted on Iraq reconstruction)– the State Department continues its dripping treacle hypocrisy, proclaiming rights for internet advocates and free speech abroad while citing “regulations” they wrote themselves that prevent free speech within its own ranks.
Good news is that not everyone is swallowing this. MichaelMoore.com today asks:
Dear Hillary: Please Speak Out Against
This Attack on Free Speech in a Far-Away Land – Clinton’s State Department moves to fire Peter Van Buren, foreign service officer, author and MichaelMoore.com blogger for writing unflattering things about his time in IraqPowerful Words! Where Is This Lady Now?
“In America, we are proud of our long and distinctive record of championing [] freedom of speech … we have worked to share our best practices.” – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, three short months agoAwesome, Now We Need Russia to Protest for Us
“The American media, always ready to stand behind Russian whistleblowers, shows remarkably little interest in whistleblowers operating closer to home.” –Voice of Russia, radio network run by Putin’s governmentDO SOMETHING: Call Hillary Clinton at 202-647-4000. Politely remind Secretary Clinton that her nice-sounding speeches about freedom of speech would come across better if they weren’t all a bunch of crap.
Diplopundit today sadly catalogs the Foreign Service blogs (“free speech”) that have gone dark, wondering if this is “is the ‘Peter Van Buren’ effect on the FS blogosphere.”
Some inside the State Department are secretly proud of the blogs closing down, knowing that by stiffling free speech they have made their internal bosses happy. State is a terminally inward looking bureaucracy, doomed to a slow ride into irrelevancy, largely because it is so inwardly focused. Drones will continue to write speeches for Hillary demanding free speech in China while two floors below them other drones crush dissent within Hillary’s own employee ranks.
State doesn’t seem to care, or even realize, that the rest of the world sees through this hypocrisy. The result? Pretty soon no one will listen to Hillary anymore but her own loyal lickspittles, making a perfect circle inside the Department while the rest of the world turns the channel. No wonder Congress continues to cut back State’s budget and reduce its ranks year after year.
With just a little more effort, the State Department will become the late-night cable public access show of the world, watched and listened to only by its own staff. They’ll be happy then.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style: A Frat House With Guns in Baghdad
If you did not have a chance to read my article, Occupying Iraq, State Department-Style: A Frat House With Guns in Baghdad, yesterday at TomDispatch, or work at the Department of State where TomDispatch is still blocked because it once had some Wikileaks spunge on it, you can catch up at one of your fave sites, below:
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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