Just in time for Christmas, Rolling Stone released a recorded interview of Michael Moore showing the Roger & Me filmmaker in pure Scrooge mode.
Shortly before Election Day, 2016, Moore had famously characterized a likely Trump win as middle America’s rebuke of the establishment. “They’re not racist or rednecks,” he sympathetically said of the Trump voters he had talked to, “they’re actually pretty decent people.”
But white men, he now proclaims, are “not good people.”
What’s the ‘deplorable’ ratio?
“Two-thirds of all white guys voted for Trump,” offers Moore. “That means anytime you see three white guys walking … down the street towards you, two of them voted for Trump. You need to move over to the other sidewalk because these are not good people that are walking toward you. You should be afraid of them.”
Before Trump’s election, sympathy; after, antipathy.
Why the change of heart?
He provides one clue. “I refuse to participate in post-racial America,” he fumes. “I refuse to say because we elected Obama that suddenly that means everything is ok, white people have changed. White people have not changed.”
Has it always really been about racism?
Another theory, though, would look at part of Moore’s 2016 prophecy: white working class men would be worse off with Trump.
Yet employment is way up; even Ford is moving back to Michigan, as Tim Poole notes. Could Moore be bitter because his enemy seems to be succeeding where his side has failed?
A movie now in the theaters may get to the real issue. Moore, by engaging in hatred and fear-mongering, has gone over to the Dark Side of the Force.
Power corrupts; partisan powerlust corrupts partisanly.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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