[csusbpeace] ‘I’m deadly serious’: why film-maker Michael Moore is confident of a Democratic midterm win

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To: "CSUSBPEACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <CSUSBPEACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2022 10:28:44 -0700

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‘I’m deadly serious’: why film-maker Michael Moore is confident of a
Democratic midterm win

The Academy-award winner has been emailing a ‘daily dose of truth’ to
mobilize supporters of the party to vote in November

Michael Moore also correctly predicted Trump’s win in 2016 – against common
judgment and political punditry. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

For the past month, Academy Award-winning documentary maker Michael Moore has
been emailing out a daily missive “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth”
<https://www.michaelmoore.com/s/mikes-midterm-tsunami-of-truth?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=menu>
on why he believes Democrats will win big in America’s midterm elections
next month.

Moore calls it “a brief honest daily dose of the truth – and the real
optimism these truths offer us”. It also – at this moment in time – flies in
the face of most political punditry, which sees a Republican win on the cards.

Making predictions is a risky undertaking in any election cycle, but
especially in this round with Democrats banking they can hitch Republican
candidates to an unpopular supreme court decision to overturn federal
guarantees of a woman’s right to abortion. Republicans
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicans>, meanwhile, are
laser-focused on high inflation rates, economic troubles and fears over crime
rates.

But political forecasting has become Moore’s business since he correctly
called that Donald Trump <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump>
would win the national elections in 2016 against common judgment of the media
and pollsters businesses.

The thrust of his reasoning that this will be “Roe-vember” is amplified daily
in the emails. In missive #21
<https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/midterm-tsunami-truth-21> (Don’t Believe It)
on Tuesday, he addressed the issue of political fatalism, specifically the
media narrative that the party in power necessarily does poorly in midterm
elections.

“The effect of this kind of reporting can be jarring – it can get inside the
average American’s head and scramble it,” Moore wrote. “You can start to feel
deflated. You want to quit. You start believing that we liberals are a bunch
of losers. And by thinking of ourselves this way, if you’re not careful, you
begin to manifest the old narrative into existence.”

Reached by telephone last week, Moore, 68, told the Guardian that his
purpose, in effect, is to puncture herd-thinking. He points to three recent
examples where political norms were wrongly interpreted.

“If I said to you six months ago, ‘you know Kansas, right? It’s a huge
pro-abortion state and this summer by a margin of 60% they’re going to keep
abortion legal’ you’d think I had made a crazy statement,” he says.

“If I’d told you at the same time that in the congressional election in
Alaska, a hard red state, that it’s not only not going to be won by a
Democrat but a Native Alaskan Democrat, again you’d have to question if I was
out of my mind.”

Finally, he draws attention to Boise, Idaho, where an incumbent Republican
candidate for the board of education was endorsed by a far-right group, the
Idaho Liberty Dogs, and lost to an 18-year-old high school senior and
progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who was also co-founder of the Boise
chapter of climate group Extinction Rebellion.

In each case, Moore says, conventional thinking was challenged.

“I have a high-school education so probably, maybe, you shouldn’t be getting
your news from me, if you’d just been paying attention in the last six months
to Kansas, Idaho and Alaska you’d have seen the red flags going up,” he says.

Moore likes to go off in a different direction. He comes from Michigan with
its strong connections to anti-government movements – Moore went to the same
high-school as Oklahoma bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols.

His read is not metropolitan-orientated. Last year he wrote Democrats have
“insurrectionist envy” <https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/insurrectionist-envy>
of the January 6 Capitol riot. “Deep down in your soul, as you watched what
your eyes could not believe was happening, admit to me that in that appalling
moment on January 6, 2021, you were – how do I say it – jealous that it was
the fascists who had risen up, and not us long before now,” he wrote.

Moore insists he’s not simply being provocative in predicting a Democrat
landslide. “I’m sixty-eight and I don’t have time to mess around. I’m deadly
serious.”

Moore predicts the election will see a record turnout of younger voters whose
views pundits and commentators often miss. “If you spend any time with women,
the Dobbs decision struck them personally and deeply. This was a religious
edict based on conservative Catholic principles.”

Moore’s political musings are not limited to critical observations of the
right. Missteps by Democrats are also apparent. “The biggest hurdle to what
I’m doing with the series is the Democratic party,” he says. He’s been
watching Democrat governor and state election debates on the US public
broadcaster C-Span. <https://www.c-span.org/>
“It’s very disheartening and it would make even me question how we’re going
to pull this off. The Democratic party consultants are feeding lines that are
so lame and weak. They don’t go for the jugular like a Republican would. It
doesn’t inspire people at home.”

“We stand here on the precipice of a very important election and our greatest
enemy could be the Democratic party itself,” he adds.

But Moore has a further point, often made but not always heeded, that biggest
political grouping in the US is not Republican or Democrat, but non-voters.
This non-voter party, which is perhaps the most potentially powerful but also
the most inaccessible, is whom Moore wants to reach.

“The non-voter party don’t see how politics benefits them, they’re disgusted
with the hypocrisy, a lot are disgusted with the crazy fighting that goes on,
and the craziness that Trump amped up,” Moore says, adding that when he turns
on the TV in the evening he doesn’t necessarily go to a news channel but
looks for a comedy.

Moore’s call-to-arms then is to reach the non-believers. “Everyone of who
does care, and feels like our democracy could be hanging on by a thread” now
“has to do something in these last three weeks”.

In his case, he says, it could be as simple as calling a cousin who doesn’t
vote to give them reasons why, this time, it’s important and that “she can go
back to non-voting after this.”

But what would he say to them?

“Aren’t you tired of nothing getting done? All this deadlock bullshit. One
way to undo this logjam is to give Democrats
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/democrats> a chance to pass legislation
and let’s see how it works out. Maybe it won’t work. Maybe they’ve got bad
ideas. But no idea and no decision is paralyzing and hurts the country. If we
talk like that, talk normal, that could be a huge help.”

[csusbpeace] ‘I’m deadly serious’: why film-maker Michael Moore is confident of a Democratic midterm win

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