National Post (National Edition)
Michael Moore is a non-progressive now
Michael Moore is a progressive’s progressive. He is a container of every correct progressive idea.
He bludgeons capitalism. He despises the big corporations. He wears a baseball cap. Susan Sarandon admires him. He hated George W. Bush. He endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016. He despises Donald Trump. He is an outsider who wins Academy Awards. He is many times a millionaire. He always champions the little guy. Robert Redford used to love him.
The best Canadians worship him.
When he attended the 2018 Toronto Film Festival, in his honour red bandanas were handed out on opening night for Fahrenheit 11/9 to represent “resistance.” (Note: not the French.) Up until this week he was great buddies with Naomi Klein.
In the high cathedral of the progressive thought (the term is a loose one) Michael Moore is outstanding (pun, deliberate) buttress.
Truth to tell, Moore has always been specious, clever-cute, manipulative and one-dimensional in his presentations. His films, though labelled documentaries, were always more agitprop than analysis, more bent to making a persona for Moore, as that of a rotund dishevelled Don Quixote for the forgotten workers of America, than any worthier goal.
This was an easy ambition in an America that endows Hollywood
with the right to adjudicate worthiness, and which gave its tinsel Oscar to Al Gore for the tendentious and radically alarmist An Inconvenient Truth. Even the eminences of Hollywood must have known that as a film it was a flop, a glorified slide show. I tend to agree that the Oscar was a consolation prize to the man who lost to Bush.
Gore’s preachy epic, such is the power of consensus or herd-thinking, also won a Nobel Prize. That award turned the world’s most distinguished medal to a trinket for poseurs.
However, there is nothing more unstable than fashion, unless it be fashionable beliefs. Over the last week Mr. Moore’s fame has peaked again.
Shifting his flexible perspective he has let his cameras loose on what are carelessly called renewables, arguing that renewables, wind and solar, are a scam. They are emphatically not the answer to global warming they are held to be, but distract from the only real solution, which is — naturally for a progressive — population control.
Planet of the Humans, as his latest work is called, argues that massive subsidies from governments are a precondition for their adoption, that they are always contingent on the fuels they are supposed to replace, and that they ruin landscapes, kill birds, and will never work. This line of thought is a first-order heresy in the church of global warming.
He also, inexorably, links corporations with their success, insisting that green renewables are fattening the coffers of those dread institutions, that green leaders such as Bill McKibben, with his bio mass delusion and other mischiefs, have been “co-opted” — the hardest epithet in the progressive lingo — by Big Oil.
Planet of the Humans has already hit near six million viewers, and been a vivid presence on the modern day drum-telegraph of the Twitter feed. Facebook abounds with postings on it. Likewise the big media.
By far the most hilarious aspect of Moore’s departure from the velvet sofa of approved thought comes from his erstwhile worshippers. The anathemas ring out from every crevice. He is viewed now by one and all of them as a miscreant, a turncoat, a toy of the establishment and a “danger to the planet.” Even harsher terms have been deployed. From icon to wretch at the turn of a sprocket.
Elizabeth May, our own queen of green, is fraught and distressed. She sees the documentary as “dangerous.” Bill McKibben of 350. org, weeps and wails at length in Rolling Stone over Moore’s defection from climate truthery. The Sanhedrin of the global warming establishment are of one mood. Kill the movie. Ostracize their erstwhile hero. He is now a “non” progressive. There are famous people who would pay to shake his hand a couple of months ago who would now avoid a parking lot he once walked by.
Can these things be? That Michael Moore, truth teller of yesteryear, archangel of leftist correctness, knight of the anti-corporate establishment, honoured presence at Democratic conventions, fan and supporter of Bernie Sanders, devastator of George (chimpanzee) Bush, and podcaster with guest Naomi Klein, is now to this same crowd, persona non grata, outcast and deceiver.
It appears so.
As to the film itself, I see no reason to believe it is better or worse than any other he has done. The reaction to it, however, has been — let me summon the eloquence of the MasterCard commercial — priceless.