Michael Moore: Expanded Profile

By Lowell Ponte
DiscoverTheNetworks.org
2005


Michael Moore is a multi-millionaire filmmaker and author of several books. He has been called “the left’s only well-known shock jock,” and was compared by Christopher Hitchens to Nazi film propagandist Leni RiefenstahlMoore’s production company is Dog Eat Dog Films. His agent Ariel “Ari” Emanuel is brother of Congressman Rahm Emanuel (D.-Illinois), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a former White House operative for President Bill Clinton.

Michael Moore was born on April 23, 1954 in Davison, Michigan, a lily-white middle class suburb 10 miles east of Flint. His father Frank assembled AC spark plugs, and his mother was a clerk-secretary, for General Motors (GM) in Flint. For a few decades following World War II, America’s global power (relative to war-shattered Europe and Japan) and the benefits provided to employees by GM and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union made life pleasant.

Moore’s parents enjoyed ample income, free medical and dental care, four weeks of paid vacation each year, and had two cars in their well-to-do Davison home. Moore’s Irish-American father had spent workday afternoons playing golf. After he retired at age 53 with a full pension, he enjoyed a life of ease, golf and volunteer work at the local Roman Catholic church. Moore and his two younger sisters “were raised in what amounted to a mini-welfare state, where powerful unions took care of most of their members’ basic needs, right down to prescription eyeglasses,” wrote Ella Taylor in 2004 in the left newspaper LA Weekly. “No wonder there’s so much fellow feeling between Moore and Canada, which has socialized medicine, not to mention Europe, where he is hugely popular.”

After eighth grade Moore enrolled in a Catholic seminary. “He admired the Berrigan brothers [radical anti-Vietnam War Catholic priests Daniel Berrigan and Philip Berrigan] and thought that the priesthood was the way to effect social change,” wrote The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar in February 2004. “This resolve lasted only through his first year, though, after the Detroit Tigers made it to the World Series for the first time in Moore’s life and the seminary wouldn’t allow him to watch the games.”

Returning to school, at age 16 Moore gave a speech in a local contest in which he condemned the Elks Club for barring blacks. He won not only the contest prize but also a first intoxicating, taste of fame as media reported his fledgling political activism. CBS called to ask about his views. He soon sought more attention with an Eagle Scout award-winning slide show accusing what Moore called the worst polluters in his town. He was learning that the road to fame was a harsh accusation against some established conservative group or company that, if it fit the liberal political template, would be accepted without question by the liberal media.

At age 17 he saw what remains Moore’s favorite film, A Clockwork Orange, a depiction of futuristic street bully “ultraviolence,” rape and brainwashing, by Moore’s still-favorite director Stanley Kubrick. At 18 Moore ran for city school board on a simple platform: “Fire the Principal.” He won. The Principal, who had been kind to Moore as a child, resigned and died soon thereafter of a heart attack. Moore reveled in the nationwide publicity he received for becoming America’s youngest elected city official.

Moore began studies at the local campus of the University of Michigan but soon dropped out. He was given a job on the GM assembly line but “called in sick the first day and never went back,” which is the closest Moore ever came to being part of the working class. He became a local hippie and host of a Sunday morning radio show he called “Radio Free Flint.” He honed his skills at getting on local TV news by staging whatever stunts and protests would attract the media attention he craved.

In 1976, at age 22, Moore created a small left newspaper the Flint Voice (later called the Michigan Voice), which he edited for 10 years. This position gave him access to left activists, fundraisers like singer Harry “Cat’s in the Cradle” Chapin, and the opportunity to do occasional commentaries for the National Public Radio (NPR) show “All Things Considered.”

Michigan was a hotbed of student radicalism. The radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held their first meeting in 1960 in Ann Arbor 50 miles south of Flint, and the SDS manifesto The Port Huron Statement was signed in 1962 in that Michigan town only 64 miles east of Flint. Moore remained involved in left politics at the University of Michigan and elsewhere in the state. “Moore was interested in the usual lefty international issues of the time,” wrote MacFarquhar. “He travelled to Nicaragua in 1983 to check out the Sandinistas.”

In 1986, because of his growing reputation as a hotshot leftwing journalist, Moore was hired as editor of the San Francisco-based socialist magazine Mother Jones, beating out its Managing Editor David Talbot (who later founded and continues to edit the left webzine Salon.com). Four months later the magazine fired Moore. Adam Hochschild, chairman of the foundation that owns Mother Jones, described Moore as “arbitrary; he was suspicious; he was unavailable.” Moore’s high-handed bullying and authoritarian arrogance had alienated most staff members. And Moore had censored a piece by veteran left writer Paul Berman, rejecting it because it mildly criticized the human rights record of Nicaragua’s Sandinista dictatorship. One of America’s farthest left magazines fired Michael Moore because, among other reasons, he was too far left for it.

Using what have become his familiar tactics, Moore responded by staging a media-grabbing public demonstration, by going on a Bay Area radio show to accuse Berman (as MacFarquhar described) “of being a traitor to the left and giving aid and comfort to [President Ronald] Reagan,” and by suing Mother Jones for $2 million. Moore eventually pocketed $58,000 from its tax-exempt Foundation for National Progress, which became seed money for his first “documentary,” Roger & Me, an agitprop assault on General Motors, its chief executive Roger Smith and its recent worker layoffs in Flint.

After Moore was fired by Mother Jones he was rescued from near-destitution by another critic of GM, Ralph Nader, author of the seminal bible of anti-business consumer activism Unsafe At Any Speed. Nader paid Moore to edit a media-criticizing newsletter. Moore soon lost this job too. The reason, according to Nader, is that Moore spent most of his time away in Flint instead of writing the newsletter. According to Moore (who routinely trashes those who disagree with him) Nader was jealous that a publisher had paid Moore an advance of almost $50,000 for a book (that in the end Moore never completed) about General Motors.

After completing Roger & Me, Moore showed it at the Telluride Film Festival where he tracked down Roger Ebert, movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and (then) for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Ebert is a liberal who almost without exception gives big thumbs-up approval to any movie that is leftwing, politically-correct or criticizes America. Moore’s fact-bending documentary was all three. Rave reviews from Ebert launched Moore on a high trajectory to wealth and superstardom. Thanks to Ebert’s support, Moore sold his documentary to Warner Brothers in 1989 for an unprecedented $3 million.

Hollywood came courting, and in 1995 Moore gave birth to Canadian Bacon, his only non-documentary movie (unless one counts his music videos for groups such as Rage Against the Machine and R.E.M.). Its fictional plot centered on a President of the United States who boosts his popularity by engineering a war with Canada. It died at the box office. Moore said he was sabotaged by the studio PolyGram because it is “owned by Philips of the Netherlands, makers of weapons.” (Moore always finds ways, however absurd or conspiracy-based, to blame others for his failures.)

Moore then directed and hosted his own television show TV Nation, a provocative and uneven magazine show. Nine episodes aired on NBC in 1994, and 8 episodes aired on FOX in 1995. It died twice for lack of viewers.

What happened behind the scenes at TV Nation gives a glimpse of the real Michael Moore. “He disliked sharing credit with his writers” like longtime David Letterman associate Merrill Markoe, wrote MacFarquhar. And he disliked sharing money as well.

When two of the show’s young writers, who had been given the title Associate Producer, took steps to join the Writers Guild (the powerful union for movie and TV writers), Moore took them aside. “I’m getting a lot of heat from the union to call you guys writers and pay you under the union rules,” Eric Zicklin recounted Moore’s words for MacFarquhar. “I don’t have the budget for that,” Moore threatened them, “But if they keep coming down on me that’ll mean I’ll only be able to afford one of you and the other one’s gotta go.”

“We were scared out of our minds,” recalled Zicklin. “It was like a theme from Roger & Me” with Moore as the unfeeling, bullying anti-union boss.

“I can’t accept [Moore] as a political person,” another TV Nation employee told MacFarquhar. “I can’t buy into this thing of Michael Moore is on your side … For the preservation of my own soul I have to consider him just an entertainer, because otherwise he’s a huge a--hole. If you consider him an entertainer, then his acting like a selfish, self-absorbed, pouty, deeply conflicted, easily wounded child is run-of-the-mill, standard behavior. But if he’s a political force, then he’s a jerk and a hypocrite and he didn’t treat us right and he was false in all his dealings.”

“He was the most difficult human being I’ve ever met,” his former Hollywood manager Douglas Urbanski told the Times of London. “There was no one who even came close.”

Moore struggled to stay on television with The Awful Truth (1999-2000), a satire show jointly produced by the cable channel Bravo and Britain’s Channel 4, and with Michael Moore Live (1999), which broadcast from New York City but aired only in the United Kingdom. He also created The Big One, a documentary of the tour for his 1996 book Downsize This! Threats from an Unarmed American (Perennial/Harper). One common thread in Moore’s documentaries is that they all star, and are designed to glorify, Michael Moore.

In 2002 Moore’s anti-gun documentary Bowling for Columbine reached theaters. His depiction of America as a gun-crazed violent culture was honored at the Cannes Film Festival in France and won the 2003 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, despite growing evidence that much that was “documented” in it as fact had been staged, concocted or dishonestly and deceptively edited by Moore. The sincerity of Moore’s anti-gun outrage became clear in January 2005 when one of his own bodyguards was arrested in New York City for possession of an unregistered handgun.

Much of Moore’s documentary was “fiction.” The “weapon” factory he photographed in Colorado manufactures weather satellites, not weapons. The clips he included of National Rifle Association President Charleton Heston had been edited together from several speeches given months apart so as to create a dishonest collage of sentences. The rifle Moore claimed to have walked out of a bank with as his reward for opening an account was a staged event that for real customers involves a six-week clearance process. Even the title Bowling for Columbine derived from a false claim that two adolescents who went on a fatal shooting spree had gone bowling that morning. They had not.

Similar deceptions and falsehoods can be found in all of Moore’s so-called documentaries. How does he get away with this again and again? One answer is that the establishment media shares Moore’s left-of-center ideology, and because most reporters and reviewers agree with his aim and conclusions they express few quibbles over how he got there. They regard Moore as right even when his method is wrong. One New York Times reporter likened Moore’s work to editorial cartoons, which are designed not to be accurate so much as to sell a point of view by distorting reality. Those who share Moore’s left agenda and, e.g., favor ever-more gun control, will applaud Moore’s editorial cartoon Bowling for Columbine.

Moore defends his falsehoods by claiming that he is a mere entertainer,. When Lou Dobbs of Cable News Network (CNN) pressed Moore about his inaccuracies, Moore dismissed Dobbs’ questions saying: “You know, look, this is a book of political humor…. How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?” To deflect another questioner, Moore declared that Roger & Me was not a documentary but “an entertaining movie, like Sophie’s Choice.”

When criticized, Moore also accuses his critics of trying to censor a free press, as if he were delivering honest, ethical journalism and not lies for laughs or manipulative political agitprop. In 2004 Moore declared himself a victim of censorship by the Walt Disney Corporation, which he accused of suddenly blocking the release of his latest documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 for political reasons. Publicity reasons would be more accurate, since Moore’s censorship claim came days before the opening of the Cannes Film Festival. Moore later admitted that Disney had told him a year earlier it would not release his film.

The stunt worked. Fahrenheit 9/11 won the highest award at Cannes from a panel of leftward judges headed by director Quentin Tarantino.

How credible is Fahrenheit 9/11? “Even if one agrees with all of Moore’s arguments,” wrote one reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter, “the film reduces decades of American foreign-policy failures to a black-and-white cartoon that lays the blame on one family.

Like other Moore documentaries, Fahrenheit 9/11 was, in fact, packed with lies and calculated distortions, a cheap and shoddy Swiss cheese fabricated with more holes than substance. One of Moore’s biggest claims in his film was that members of Saudi Arabia’s bin Laden family (in which Osama is one of 53 children, a disowned black sheep born not to the patriarch’s wives but to a concubine) had been allowed by Bush to fly out of the U.S. unquestioned only hours after 9-11. In fact, they did not leave for at least six days, after being questioned by the FBI, and permission for their departure was given without any outside prompting solely by Bush critic and Fahrenheit 9/11 hero, Clinton counter-terrorism holdover Richard Clarke, as Clarke himself acknowledged.

At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Moore was treated like royalty and given a seat of honor at the side of former President Carter in his presidential box. (Mr. Carter’s toppling of America’s ally the Shah of Iran precipitated the Iran-Iraq War, the military buildup of Saddam Hussein, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that empowered Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, led to the oppression of millions of women and opened a Pandora’s Box of other problems, including America’s incursion into Iraq. But Moore was proud to sit next to the Democrat whose incompetence had paved the way for all this horror.)

Democratic leaders such as then-Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota embraced him and joined other prominent Democrats at the premier of Moore’s documentary that trashed President Bush. Moore was invited to write columns from the conventions for the newspaper USA TODAY. Propaganda and the left had carried Michael Moore a long way from Flint, Michigan.

How far left is Michael Moore? “Capitalism is a sin,” said Moore on the Cable News Network (CNN) show Crossfire in 2002. “This is an evil system.”

If Moore despises Big Businesses like General Motors, how does he feel about small business like the local mom-and-pop shop? “You know in my town the small businesses that everyone wanted to protect?” he told a reporter from the Arcata Eye in 2002. “They were the people that supported all the right-wing groups. They were the Republicans in town, they were in Kiwanis, the Chamber of Commerce – people that kept the town all white. The small hardware salesman, the small clothing store sales persons, Jesse the Barber who signed his name three different times on three different petitions to recall me from the school board. F**k all these small businesses – f**k ‘em all,” said Moore. “Bring in the chains.”

Moore, incidentally, shows little “Buy American” patriotism for the GM cars his father, mother, uncle and grandfather helped build. “When I became an adult, I decided I didn’t want a General Motors car,” wrote Moore in his 2002 book Stupid White Men…And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! (Regan Books), …so I bought Volkswagens and Hondas and drove around town with pride.”

“Horatio Alger must die!” wrote Michael Moore in his 2003 book Dude, Where’s My Country? (Warner Books). “We’re addicted to this happy myth,” wrote Moore, “…that anyone can make it in America, and make it big…. Listen, friends, you have to face the truth: You are never going to be rich…. The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever.”

Those who become millionaires, Moore wrote, are “about one in a million.” If he is right, then America with a population of 295 million would have only about 295 millionaires. In fact there are more than 5 million millionaires in America, seventy percent of whom are self-made.

The irony in Moore calling for the death of Horatio Alger, of course, is that Moore is one of these ultra-wealthy few, now probably worth more than $50 million. He claims to be a working class egalitarian who wants society to be open and honest, but Moore has always refused to make public his and his company’s tax, income and net worth records. He claims to give a third of his income to worthy causes, but he refuses to make public any of his records that would confirm this. If he “pays his fair share,” as leftists like to demand of the rich, and uses no tax avoidance methods, Manhattanite Moore should be paying more than half his huge income in taxes….but is he? His obsessive concealment makes one wonder what this self-appointed People’s Watchdog has to hide.

“Michael Moore would never withstand the scrutiny he lays on other people,” his former manager Douglas Urbanski told the Times of London. “You would think that he’s the ultimate common man. But he’s money-obsessed.”

Moore owns a New York City apartment worth at least $1.9 million. He owns a beachfront estate in Torch Lake, Michigan worth at least $1.2 million. (His comrades at the leftwing propaganda operation Media Matters frantically attacked a 2004 report that Moore was simultaneously, and therefore illegally, registered to vote in both places.) His daughter Natalie, born in 1981, got much of her education not in public school but in elite private school.

Moore’s typical audience is not workers but college students, who pay dearly for the honor of his celebrity presence and speeches. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) launched an investigation into Moore’s 2004 “Slacker Uprising Tour” of dozens of colleges and universities, most in swing states, during the closing days of the presidential campaign. The filmmaker charged student organizations or the schools up to $30,000 per appearance to hear his ideological views. In many instances, this may have involved a one-sided, and hence illegal, partisan use of government facilities and money at state universities and colleges to subsidize Moore’s propaganda effort in support of Democratic candidate Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and against Republican President George W. Bush.

“The slacker motto,” Moore told one cheering crowd of adolescent college students, “is ‘Sleep till noon, drink beer, vote Kerry November 2,’” adding “’Pick nose, pick b*tt, pick Kerry” and ending with an echo of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels from the Communist Manifesto: “Slackers of the world, unite!”

“We need to let the working class know that we don’t think we’re better than them,” said Moore. We? Them? Shades of Ross Perot referring to the NAACP as “You people.” As Daniel Radosh, son of famed author Ron Radosh, wrote of this in June 1997 at Salon.com: “If [former Republican House Speaker] Newt Gingrich said anything so patronizing, the Left would never stop ridiculing him.” Moore’s response to Radosh was to smear Radosh by falsely accusing him of being right-wing, to smear Salon.com by accusing it of taking ad money from Borders Books (a company that Moore claimed banned him after he tried to help unionize its workers), and to smear Salon publisher David Talbot by accusing him of a “personal grudge” from when Moore beat Talbot by becoming editor of Mother Jones. Moore also threatened a lawsuit against Salon.com. As Slate.com editor Jack Shafer wrote “Moore’s hysterical, empty threats” to sue critics of one of his documentaries shows that he “appears to believe in free speech only for himself.”

To be fair, capitalism, Republicans and conservatives (or as he calls them, “hate-triots”) and America are not the only things Michael Moore despises. He apparently hates Protestants, and has semi-seriously proposed that the way to resolve the conflict in Northern Ireland is to forcibly re-baptise all Protestants there as Catholics. Moore hates Cuban-Americans, largely because they vote Republican. Moore, writes Humberto Fontova, author of Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant (2005, Regnery), has also said that Cuban-Americans are “terrorists,” “drug smugglers,” “gangsters” and in Moore’s word, “wimps” for not staying in Cuba to create a better life under its totalitarian dictatorship. In 2000 on his web site Moore wrote an “Open Letter to Elian Gonzalez” in which he accused the boy’s mother (who drowned bringing her five-year-old from Castro’s prison island to freedom in America) of money grubbing. “The truth is your mother and her boyfriend snatched you and put you on that death boat,” wrote Moore, “because they simply wanted to make more money.” Cuba’s government-run television broadcast Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 unedited because it was by Castro’s exacting Marxist standard, perfect anti-American propaganda.

Moore apparently hates Jews, at least those in Israel and their supporters. As David Brooks wrote in the June 26, 2004 New York Times, “In Liverpool, [Michael Moore] paused to contemplate the epicenters of evil in the modern world: ‘It’s all part of the same ball of wax, right? The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton.’”

Moore dedicated his book Dude, Where’s My Country? to Rachel Corrie, an activist with the pro-terrorist International Solidarity Movement (ISM) accidentally killed by an Israeli bulldozer she was attempting to impede as it destroyed tunnels used by terrorists to smuggle weapons. “In their hearts [Israelis] know they are wrong,” wrote Moore “and they know they would be doing just what the Palestinians are doing if the sandal were on the other foot.”

No wonder Moore has been honored by the Islamacist American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Muslim American Public Affairs Council. And no wonder that an affiliate of the Iran-linked terrorist group Hezbollah offered to help promote his film Fahrenheit 9/11 in the Middle East, especially after, as reported in the February 16, 2004 New Yorker Magazine, Moore tried to prevent his movie from being shown in Israel.

Moore’s affections on the other hand are clearly offered to the Zarqawi terrorists in Iraq who behead his fellow countrymen: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation [i.e., against American, British and other coalition forces] are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy,” said Moore. “They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow – and they will win.” Reciprocating Moore’s support for anti-American and anti-Western terrorists, the Indonesian convicted of the Bali terror bombings of 2002 had his lawyer read to the court excerpts of Moore’s Stupid White Men as justification for his hatred of the West.

Moore has said he wants “regime change” of the democratically-elected governments in Australia, Italy and Japan because they are part of the coalition helping to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq.

Like a petulant child Moore also hates and attacks those who refuse to give him whatever he wants. When Pete Townshend of the British rock group The Who refused to give Moore the rights to use his song “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore trashed Townshend in the press and accused the musician of supporting the war in Iraq, even though it was widely known that this was untrue.

Several web sites have addressed Moore’s shortcomings and deceits. Among these are Moore Watch, Moore Exposed, Spinsanity on Michael Moore and Moore Lies.

In June 2004 the publisher of Moore’s book Stupid White Men, Regan Books, published Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man. Its co-authors are former U.S. Interior Department attorney David T. Hardy, who founded Mooreexposed.com, and Jason Clarke, creator of Moorelies.com. This book gives precise details about the distortions, contradictions, hypocrisies, errors and outright lies in each of Moore’s writings and film documentaries, as analyzed by two of Moore’s most relentless critics.

Moore has said that he is at work on a sequel to his 2004 political propaganda film Fahrenheit 9/11. He is also preparing a documentary critical of the pharmaceutical industry and American healthcare that Moore has tentatively titled “Sicko.” Moore is likely to schedule its arrival in theaters for mid-2006 to provide propaganda intended to be helpful to Democrats running in that year’s congressional elections. However, candidates Moore has embraced, or who have embraced him like defeated Senator Daschle, have so far lost on election day, leading some to wonder whether receiving a political blessing from Michael Moore is a curse. Analyst Collin Levey called Moore “the new Ralph Nader,” an ego-driven leftwing albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party. His shrill propaganda was a sermon to the choir that converted almost nobody, but diverted tens of millions of liberal political dollars from the campaign to Moore’s own pockets.

On November 1, 2005, World Net Daily reported that the anti-capitalist Moore -- who has proudly declared "I don’t own a single share of stock!" -- in fact owns tens of thousands of shares in U.S. stocks. His portfolio includes nearly 2,000 shares of Boeing, almost 1,000 of Sonoco, over 4,000 of Best Foods, more than 3,000 of Eli Lilly, and more than 8,000 of Bank One. Most notably, Moore owns in excess of 2,000 shares of stock in Halliburton -- the gas and oil company he excoriated in his film Fahrenheit 9/11.