Michael Moore (Why Democrats will win big)

That's not the "media narrative". MSM stories range from how the abortion decision has significantly changed the midterm to how Trumpy candidates are endangering formerly safe suburban seats and hurting Republicans in statewide contests. 538.com has a 68% chance of Democrats holding the Senate, 30% to hold the house.

The reason we’re going to win in November is because the other side is a bunch of losers. Big losers. Bad losers. Sore losers.

And everything they’re doing right now is setting themselves up to lose again. Big Time.

Aside from the examples above, consider this one overwhelming fact:

The Republicans have lost the popular vote in SEVEN of the last EIGHT Presidential elections. That means in the last 34 years, since George the First was elected in 1988, they’ve only won the popular vote ONCE (George W in 2004, and only by one state)! That’s how badly the majority of the American people do not want the Republicans running this country.

Only because of the slave states’ demand for the Electoral College — and the Republicans’ #1 job of gerrymandering and voter suppression — do we even have to still deal with their misogyny, their destruction of Planet Earth, their love of guns and greed, and their laser-focused mission to bury our Democracy.

In the 2018 midterms, despite the Democrats receiving over 18 million more votes than the Republicans received for their Senate candidates, the Democrats remained the minority party in the Senate, holding only 47 seats to the Republicans’ 53 Senate seats. Again, the Dems LOST the Senate by winning the most votes (for our international audience still trying to figure this out — don’t. It’s not worth it). So the American public, wanting the Democrats to control the Senate, gave the Dems 59.3% of their votes, with the “winning” Republicans receiving only 39.1% of the votes. This system must be changed.

In the same 2018 midterm election, the voters gave the House to the Democrats with over 7 million more votes than House Republicans.

•

"So Mike, how are we actually going to win this time?"

Because they made a mistake. They pushed too far.

And this November, the Republicans are going to get whacked by an even larger loser mallet, wielded by the same arm of America that defeated the Confederacy in 1865, that defeated the Nazis in 1945, and that saved our Democracy in 2020, and again on January 6th, 2021.

Because that’s who we are. The side the majority of America sides with.

The winners.

Write it on your mirror! And stay in that mindset for the next 42 days.

SIX WEEKS TO VICTORY!

Note: Regarding the graphic at the top of this piece, I know there are some of you who don’t approve of conflating the modern day American fascists with the Nazis of old. That we as Americans had nothing to do with those original Nazis over in Germany. Here are a few links that may help you:

1. There were MANY Americans who admired Hitler and supported the policies of the Nazi Party. In 1939, 20,000 New Yorkers packed Madison Square Garden for a pro-Nazi rally billed as a “Pro American Rally.”

Watch the 7-minute Oscar-nominated short film A Night At The Garden directed by Marshall Curry.

2. Numerous American corporations did not want to give up their markets in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. So they kept operating under different names — General Motors as Opel, Coca-Cola as Fanta, IBM as Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft (after all, the Nazis needed their business machines to keep track of all those numbers tattooed on the arms of Jews in the concentration camps). The American companies hid their profits in Swiss Bank accounts. This story is now long forgotten. Read the book: “Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949” by Charles Higham.

3. Last week, Ken Burns premiered his latest documentary on PBS: “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” a shameful history of the little-told story of American efforts to prevent escaping Jews from entering the United States, among other “lapses” of moral judgment. Available on DirectTV Stream or YouTubeTV.

Don't underestimate the stupidity of people.

Michael Moore
Sep 29




There are so many ways the Republicans are trying to help the Democrats win in November, it almost takes your breath away. Perhaps they are so cocksure of their own prowess, including their special powers to resurrect Trump in 2024. Or, maybe they feel sorry for the Dems who have often been unable to fight and win for the things they say they believe in.

Or maybe they’re just nuts. Because why else would you purposely help your opponent win by running the biggest batch of nutters nationwide in American electoral history?

Don’t believe me? Well, my friends, to prove it I have scoured the country to find the biggest whackadoodles on the Republican side of the ballot — those candidates who are so insane, so absolutely bonkers they are handing their Democratic opponents the best early Christmas gift ever.

And, over the next 41 days, I’ll present to you…

The Whackadoodle 10

The ten best examples of why we are going to have a Blue Tsunami on November 8th — starting with….

10. Matthew DePerno — Republican candidate for Michigan Attorney General


Matt DePerno wants to be Attorney General of Michigan because he believes Plan B, the “morning after” birth control pill, is a form of murder. That’s right. Although what the pill actually does is prevent a spermicide from completing its job of fertilizing an egg, DePerno is the first anti-abortion activist I’ve met who believes that “life” doesn’t begin at conception. He thinks it should be against the law to stop a sperm from even getting near an egg. And if you do anything to interrupt the potential fertilization, well you’re ending the life of a human being.

To make himself even more clear, here’s what DePerno said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas last month:

“(We) gotta figure out how to ban this pill from (our) state,” DePerno said. “But (we) have to stop it at the border. It would be no different than (banning) fentanyl. The state has to ban it, and it should be banned.”

Comparing a safe and legal birth control pill to the most deadly drug in 2022 — fentanyl — is a sign of madness. And one more step by a man seeking public office so he can control the reproductive organs of the majority gender.

But DePerno doesn’t stop there. He’s a class A bigot and gay-hater. His Democratic opponent, the incumbent Michigan Attorney General, Dana Nessel, is also a lesbian. And that, according to DePerno, makes her dangerous and a threat to our children.

Gay-haters often accuse LGBTQ+ citizens of being on a mission to “groom” young people into “turning gay.” DePerno calls Attorney General Dana Nessel “Michigan’s Groomer General.” In an August tweet, DePerno also displayed a white supremacist symbol.


DePerno is running on the trifecta platform of hate toward women, gays and Black citizens. To help him out, Trump is traveling to Michigan this Saturday to hold a rally for DePerno and other Michigan Republican candidates (all of them election deniers) at Macomb County Community College in suburban Detroit.

Of course, DePerno is one of the top lawyers in the country who’s been filing one losing lawsuit after another to overturn the 2020 election.

DePerno filed his first lawsuit alleging voter fraud three weeks after the election, laying the blame on the Dominion Voting Systems machines, and asking the judge to allow him to take pictures of the vote tabulators in Antrim County, MI.

Months later, he filed another lawsuit claiming voter machine fraud in Michigan and sent subpoenas to at least 8 county clerks demanding access to their voting equipment, along with ballots, logs, and election tapes. Some of these counties didn’t even use Dominion voting machines.

And now DePerno finds himself under investigation by a special prosecutor in Michigan as to whether he and eight others illegally tampered with voting machines.

This insanity and other conspiracy theories has turned the majority of Michiganders against DePerno. And, to our good fortune, as luck would have it, including DePerno’s bid in Michigan, 10 out of 30 attorney general races nationwide have a Republican election denier on the ballot! The same report also found that election deniers will be on the ballot this Roevember in half of the gubernatorial races, and 44% of the races for secretary of state.

And in Alabama, Arizona and Michigan – GOP election deniers are running for all three top positions.

Hallelujah and Praise Jesus and all the unfertilized eggs! Thank you for helping us win in November.

Michael Moore
Sep 30




▷ LISTEN
SAVE


An empty Pennsylvania Ave. for Trump’s Inauguration Day Parade, January 20, 2017
There is one recurring comment I keep receiving from many of you and it goes like this:

“But Mike — there are tens of millions who still back Trump! He won before and he can win again! Look at his rallies! Thank you for your optimism and cheering us on, but I can’t get over my fear that he always seems to pull off the impossible! And he will in November because our side doesn’t show up to vote!!”

Part of any bully’s repertoire is to create the illusion that he has all the strength and you have none. He doesn’t have the wherewithal — or the strength — to fight you and everyone else. So by trying to appear like the Big Bad Wolf, he hopes that your fear of him will get you to back down. Much easier for him if you do the work by simply conceding defeat.

So to you it looks like Trump is as big as ever. Don’t even think of challenging him. Millions are behind him.

Let’s unpack this. Because if you don’t calm down and get busy in the ring, his minions will win in November.

Let’s start with the facts, the best disinfectant when a lying weasel is sucking up all the attention.

Trump lost to Hillary. By three million votes! This must drive him crazy. His only route to “victory” was that the Democrats had never bothered to eliminate the Electoral College. And because of that, he got the keys to the Oval Office. There were actually 10.6 million voters who didn’t want Trump to be president if you add in the votes for the Libertarian, Green Party and other minor party candidates in 2016.

But after four years of Trump, the American people poured out of the woodwork in 2020 with the highest turnout in over a century on Election Day. This was actually foretold by the 2018 off-year election results. Trump cost the Republicans 40 seats in the House! There were record numbers of young adult voters in many states. The writing was on the wall. Trump huffed and puffed — but you, my friends, weren’t afraid. You stood up. You registered voters. You organized. You got out the vote — during a pandemic! When the dust settled we had the House, the Senate and the White House! Only the Supreme Court lay in ruins because we let Trump get away with packing it.

So why is everyone so afraid of this November 8th? Trump is already wasted. He’s about to be indicted. He couldn’t get millions of people to sign up for his new social media project. On-the-ground journalists have been reporting that attendance at his Nuremberg-style rallies is down. People leave early.

Check this out:

Last spring, at a rally in Commerce, Georgia:

Twitter avatar for @stphnfwlr
stephen fowler
@stphnfwlr
It’s almost time for Trump to speak here in Georgia and there’s probably no more than 5,000 people here, the smallest Trump rally I’ve ever covered here. Way less than the Perry rally in 2021 (closer to 10k) and nowhere close to 2020’s 20-30k+ #gapol
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March 26th 2022

174 Retweets583 Likes
Twitter avatar for @stphnfwlr
stephen fowler
@stphnfwlr
People keep leaving during Trump speech. It’s cold and windy and there’s not much enthusiasm. Photos are from 8:50, 8:20, 7:20 from least to most crowds.
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March 27th 2022

143 Retweets560 Likes
Twitter avatar for @bluestein
Greg Bluestein
@bluestein
Folks are starting to file out …
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March 27th 2022

66 Retweets256 Likes
June 25 in Mendon, Illinois:

Twitter avatar for @MikeMiletichTV
Mike Miletich
@MikeMiletichTV
Trump said the press never shows his crowds, no matter who is covering them. Wonder why the former president decided to hold this rally on grass instead of the grandstand for the fairgrounds? There’s only a few thousand people here. Probably wouldn’t fill the stands. #twill
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June 26th 2022

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Even at the the now infamous QAnon rally on September 17th in Youngstown, Ohio, a local reporter for the conservative British Daily Mail couldn’t help but comment on the crowd:



And if Trump can’t make the rally, the numbers are worse — like the Pro-Truth Jan 6th rally in D.C. last Saturday…


I’m not saying there’s nothing to fear. Our Democracy still hangs on by a thread. And Trump and his cronies are masters of illusion.

Take that Daily Mail article reporting on the Youngstown rally. Two days later, that headline in the pro-Trump paper was changed, the photos and captions were replaced, and history was rewritten:





As scary as these mirages are, once they’re broken…

This election should already be in the bag for us. I’ve got 39 more reasons to give you as to why we are going to kick ass and win. But if we lose, then that’ll be on us. If we stay afraid, feel hopeless, expect the forces of evil to beat us into the ground, then that’s exactly what will happen.

Try to go through this entire weekend only talking about Victory! How we are going to WIN! What you’re going to do between now and November 8th to make this happen!

All you have to do is just go “BOO!”

And just like that, the bully runs away.

I saw this graphic flying around the internet and thought, “Wow. This says it all.” This ready-made, four-point “Republican Agenda” needs no explanation, no additions.

And yet… it won’t convince any Trumpsters who happen upon it to leave the Big Lie behind on November 8th because they’ve already blinded their eyes to the Truth.

And all you liberal and independent voters reading it now already know that everything in this agenda is absolutely the truth.

So how does it support my belief that in this November’s election we are going to crush the Republicans who tried to overturn our legitimate 2020 election?

Because the way for us to guarantee a whopping victory is to reach out to the 77 million voters who didn’t vote in the past two elections. Studies have shown that when nonvoters are asked their feelings about the major issues of the day, the majority of them lean to the left.

Obviously we’ll never convince 77 million nonvoters to show up on Election Day. But couldn’t we hold out our hand to, say, 3 million of them and welcome them to join us in this historic election? How good would it feel if we turned our 7-million person victory in 2020 to a 10-million voter landslide this November 8th?!

So why am I posting this? Who is this for?

Well, for months now I have been telling you that your job on November 8th is not only for just you to show up and vote, but also to convince 5 new Democratic voters to vote with you — and this graphic is perfect for your “Get out the vote” toolkit.

And how do you find these nonvoters in your life?

They’re all around you! Think of those you know who gave up on voting a long time ago. Make a list. I did.

Then reach out. No judgments. Tell them you understand why they don’t vote. But it’s still their country too!

Then show them this graphic, because they will definitely recognize themselves as the intended victims of the Republican Party platform. The majority of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck. They know all too well who is benefiting from keeping them poor, sick and uneducated. And half of them are women.

Read it over again. Remind yourself what we are fighting for here. And over the next few weeks, let’s organize the nonvoters — the ones we know.

It could make all the difference. (Remember… Hillary lost Michigan by only 2 votes per precinct!) It’s one more example of the power we hold in our hands.

Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth #7
Biden, Don’t F**k with Me


“Oops.”
(The mainstream pundits and party hacks have been telling you we’re going to lose. This daily series from me is to tell you they’re wrong and why they’re wrong and how we’re going to win.)

The Democratic Party leaders don’t want me telling you there’s good news ahead. They’re worried if I convince you we’re going to win, that you won’t show up to vote ‘cause you’ll think your vote won’t be needed. They think you need to be scared into voting, so they tell you constantly we’re going to lose, then flood your inbox with desperate appeals to send them money (“Just 10 more dollars by midnight tonight! Act now!”).

I think they’re wrong. And as per usual, I think they are underestimating you. I think fear is paralyzing.

I subscribe to the wisdom of Sun Tzu, “Know thy enemy, know thyself.” Knowledge is power. Power brings confidence. Confidence is mobilizing.

Most of the reasons I’ve given you so far in this first week about our impending victory have focused around the “know thy enemy” half — namely how the Republicans (unbeknownst to themselves) are actively trying to lose, and all the ways we should take advantage of that.

But today, I want to focus on the other half of that sentiment, “know thyself.” Specifically, the one roadblock that could derail us and cost us the election.

His name is Joe Biden.

You see, on Thursday, Joe went back on his word to forgive up to $20,000 on everyone’s student loan debt if they make less than $125,000 a year. That’s because hours earlier, six Republican Attorney Generals filed a lawsuit against Biden and his student loan forgiveness program. And, in traditional Democratic fashion, he then became frightened of the Republicans, and less than 24-hours later he started to unravel a promise he had just made at the end of August.

He announced that if your federal student loan was backed by a private bank, he would not forgive any of your student loan. In doing so, he reneged on nearly 800,000 voters who thought they had just been rescued from up to $20,000 of debt.

[Uh, excuse me. One moment, I need to call the White House, 202-456-1414]:

Mr. President, may I have a word with you?

Why would you, just 5 weeks before these crucial midterm elections, put a knife in the backs of 800,000 Americans? Don’t you know there are millions of us out here trying to remove the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted to stage a coup by overturning YOUR election? Why are you helping them by undoing part of your student loan forgiveness you promised to so many people? What else are you planning to do before the election? Reduce Obamacare? Lower the minimum wage? Come out for Roe but declare you’re against Wade?

Can you please let us know now?

[End call]

But here’s the thing, my friends. Before you freak out, hit the panic button, and glue yourself to cable news for the latest polling fallout, consider this, our Truth #7: Biden is not actually going to derail us and cost us the election. In fact, he’s irrelevant because WE are going to press forward no matter what crackpot thing Biden does between now and November 8th.

And that’s the reason we are going to win: No damn Democrat is going to screw this up for us again!

WE are tossing every Republican traitor out of office — even if Biden says the night is really daytime, the cow in fact jumped over the moon, or that I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! is really butter. That IS the Truth. We won’t let any Democrats blow this. We are cleaning house.

And if the Dems don’t understand that, then they’ll be next.

One of the many reasons we stand poised to crush the movement which seeks to destroy our Democracy is that there are millions more of us who are registered to vote than there are of them.

FACT: According to Ballotpedia, amongst 33 states and territories who let you affiliate with a party when you register to vote in the United States, there are currently 48 million registered Democrats vs. 36.4 million registered Republicans.

There are also 35.3 million registered independents. And polls show that the majority of independents usually vote for the Democrat. As Business Insider reported, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, “Democrats had a 38%-35% edge among independents.”

So, we’re all set, right?

Well, not so fast.

Unlike most democracies, we do not have one standard voter registration system for the whole country. 50 different states have 50 different sets of rules. If you have recently moved to a new state, if you go to college in a city different from where your parents’ home is, if you’re living in one state but working in another, if you are on the road, or if you have gone to help an ailing relative, or you are simply without a home or an address, there are numerous ways some states make it easy for you to register. And then there are the others who go out of their way to make it impossible for you to participate in the next election. So a lot of votes never get counted because the voter wasn’t registered properly and thus not allowed to vote.

And it is these ridiculous and unjust hurdles that unduly affect the poor, the working poor, the young, the single moms, the recently evicted, those formerly incarcerated, various transients and those who haven’t voted in so long they don’t even know if they’re still registered. And if you don’t know how to navigate the often Byzantine system of voter do’s and don’ts (especially in the anti-Democracy red states), this is the moment — this week and next! — when our side loses thousands of potential voters because we aren’t helping them get registered to vote.

So the purpose of this Substack today is to enlist you to TAKE ACTION! To pledge to be an ambassador of voter registration and convince just 5 Americans to sign up before voter registration closes in your state — which for some of you is THIS COMING WEEKEND! (I’m lookin’ at you Alaska, Rhode Island, and South Carolina! And another dozen or so of you are right on their heels…)

If, in fact, only half of you who are Americans and are reading this (so that’s half of the 700,000 of you) would commit to registering just 5 people, that would mean we’d have 1.75 million newly registered voters!


Here is all you need to assist the unregistered — regardless of what state your fellow Americans reside in:

Vote.gov

It’s a one-stop shop for voter registration information (and action!) for all 50 states, D.C. and U.S. territories. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still have to endure whatever rigmarole your state has in place (and in some states it may feel more like a fun house of horrors), but this site will give you a roadmap. Select North Carolina, for example, and here’s what you see:


So just go to your state’s page on Vote.gov, print out a dozen blank voter-registration forms and carry them with you every day along with a dozen stamped envelopes so you can mail them to your state elections office after she or he fills out the form. Or if they wanna do it online, have them pull out their device, go to Vote.gov and help them fill it out.

Finally, I know many of you are thinking as you’re reading this, “Mike — what about gerrymandering and voter suppression? The Republicans are going to win with they’re cheating ways!”

OK, look — I’ll have none of that talk here on my Tsunami! Yes, some Republican states will make it harder for Black people to vote. That’s their commitment to the White Jesus they worship. But they were doing voter suppression against African Americans in 2020 — and who ended up being the group in that election who put Biden over the top? Black America!

Our best defense against these crooked voting antagonists is to turn out so many voters on our side it will be very hard for them to win in the midst of our tsunami of a landslide (I will deal with the elimination of gerrymandering and voter suppression in a future Substack essay).

Let’s do this! I hereby appoint all of you Citizen Registrars! Let’s leave no voter behind! Let’s Roe the Vote!

A nationalist...is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.”— Timothy Snyder
The vast majority of Americans have always opposed any form of fascism, even though at times tens of millions of us have endorsed the genocide of our native peoples, the enslavement, raping and lynching of humans kidnapped from Africa, the prohibition of Chinese immigrants, the over 100 illegal invasions of other countries, the closed doors to victims of the Holocaust, the passage of laws legalizing white supremacy, the prohibiting of marrying or having sex with someone of your own gender and the government legalizing the second-class citizenship of all women, to name but a few. Yet, in spite of all this, the vast majority of Americans are repulsed by fascism.

And that is why those of the party that supports fascism will be rebuked and go down in a crushing defeat on November 8th.

147 Republicans in Congress participated in a treasonous act on the night of 1/6/21 by voting in support of the insurrectionists’ demands earlier that day to illegally overturn the legitimate and already-certified results of the 2020 election.

That was an act of fascism. Most Americans in 2022 are not fascists. We might be occasionally stupid, often ill-informed and woefully unaware we are being hoodwinked by capitalists, clerics and the NFL’s concussion “protocols,” but we are, most of us, nonetheless good-hearted people of conscience who believe everyone deserves a fair shake and a seat at the table. We love Democracy, even if we’ve yet to attain it. We’d like the “American Dream” to become the American Reality for all who wish to be here. We want all those around the world to have freedom, economic equality and a belief that we are all part of the same family and the same planet on which we can live and breathe and play Wordle.

And that is why we will win come Roevember. We don’t like authoritarians, mansplainers or fascists — all of which defines the Republican Party of the 21st century. It really is that simple.

Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truths:

Truth #1: The Campaign

Truth #2: Even a kid from 4th hour Trig class can beat this crowd

Truth #3: The Haters, the Bigots and the Supremacists Always Lose in the End

Truth #4: Introducing The Whackadoodle 10

Truth #5: Trump is not the Big Bad Wolf. But he is very afraid of You.

Truth #6: The Easy-to-Digest Republican Party Platform

Truth #7: Biden, Don’t F**k with Me

Truth #8: If you’re not registered, you can’t Roe, Roe, Roe the Vote!

Who Am I to Say the Republicans Will Be Defeated?
Over the past two weeks, I’ve given you 13 reasons why we, the people, are going to give Republicans the drubbing of their lives in the November midterm election. And I’ve got 31 more reasons to give you each day until November 8th — which is just FOUR WEEKS from Tuesday— as to why the pundits and the political hacks want you to believe the Democrats are going to lose. They want you demoralized, depressed, and fearful of The Return of Trump.

My job is to tell you the Truth. Let’s start with who I am, because you have a right to know who is telling you not only how we are going to win, but that we are, in fact, going to win big this November 8th.

Who am I to say this when I have nothing more than a high school education to back it up? That, and 50+ years of criss-crossing this great, flawed country listening to its people, learning from them, witnessing the crimes committed against them by the rich and powerful of this nation. I’ve written about it and I’ve filmed the effects that this economic system known as predatory capitalism has had on the poor and working poor and the middle class — people who were promised an American Dream, but instead were given the nightmare of living paycheck to paycheck (the majority of citizens never having more than $500 in the bank on any given day), or once again being deemed second-class citizens by the Supreme Court (women).

A country where, according to a 2021 report by Duke University:

“The typical Black household’s wealth is $24,100; but for White households, it is $188,200. This translates into the typical Black household holding about 12 cents for every dollar of wealth held by the typical White family– a disparity that has remained largely unchanged [for over 30 years].”

A country where the #1 cause of home foreclosures and bankruptcy is medical debt (and how sick is it that this is the only Western Democracy where a sentence like that can be written?). Last year, not a single family in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Estonia, Slovenia, Vietnam — do I have to name every country on this list from the UN where no one is thrown out of their home because they can’t pay a doctor or hospital bill? Nowhere in the developed world. No place. Except US.

Who am I? I am not a Democrat. I belong to no Party. I was born in Flint, Michigan. I was raised in the working class, my father was an assembly line worker at General Motors and my mother a secretary and clerk. My uncle was in the Great Flint Sit Down Strike of 1936-37 that founded the United Auto Workers union. Another uncle was killed in the South Pacific in WWII. My father, also in the South Pacific as a Marine private in that war, cast his first ballot ever as a 23-year-old for FDR during the Battle of Peleliu in 1944. My mother — remember, the “secretary” — was the valedictorian of her high school class. Her employment opportunities, no matter how smart she was, were severely limited because she possessed two ovaries which, it was understood in those days, would not help her if she wanted to invent the electric typewriter or find a cure for the common flu. Like all women in the prequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (otherwise known as the 1950s), she was expected to have babies by the time she was 20. She held out until she was 33(!) — what courage! I would’ve loved to have known her then.

I do know from our very observant and smart older cousins she was thoroughly thrilled to have me and my two sisters. The three of us were the smallest family at our Catholic school. Our mother had already taught each of us to read when we turned 4.

At the end of 9th grade, the head priest at the Catholic seminary school I attended asked that I not return the following year. “You ask too many questions,” he said to me.“We (the Catholic Church) are an institution of answers, not questions.”

My eighth great-grandfather on my mother’s side was a Scottish rebel captured by Oliver Cromwell’s forces and shipped in chains with 300 other POWs to the Massachusetts colony in 1651 to work as forced laborers, just 30 years after the Mayflower landed. My 4th great-grandfather was a Minuteman hero in the Revolutionary War. My third great-grandfather on my father’s side was a Quaker war resister who was convicted for refusing to be drafted into the War of 1812. My fourth cousin twice-removed was the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover.

Just weeks after turning 18, I became (with a few scattered others) the youngest elected official in the history of the country. I founded a newspaper called The Flint Voice. The police raided us, seized our printing plates off the presses while they were literally printing that week’s edition. And that brought the national media in, made our little paper famous, and a year later President Carter signed a bill that Congress passed after the police raids on my paper and on a Boise TV station. The new law prohibited, nationwide, any police from raiding, searching or doing any seizing at a newspaper office or an electronic media outlet.

I went on to write 8 books which have been translated into over 30 languages around the world. I’ve made a dozen-plus movies and have been handed an Oscar, an Emmy, a French Oscar, the San Diego Film Critics prize AND the Oklahoma Film Critics Award. I was presented with The John Steinbeck Prize by the Steinbeck Library. I have been banned from speaking, at various times, from George Mason University, the University of Miami, and Cal State-San Marcos, amongst many others. I’ve been given an honorary doctorate degree from Michigan State University, but my high school in Michigan banned me from speaking there after graduation in 1973 and I’ve not been let back in there since. Though I would come now, if invited, and fed.

I’ve survived six attempts on my life, not counting Matt Lauer trashing me on the Today Show on the morning of my only divorce.

In 1993, the French government made my first film, “Roger & Me”, part of their national school curriculum in which all 12 to 14-year-olds would watch my film in their intro to economics class. Here in the US, the ratings board slapped an “R” rating on the same movie (as they have for all but two of my films), meaning no one under the age of 18 could see my films without a parent or guardian. Numerous schools forbade teachers from showing it in class. And while the French, British, Canadians and three dozen other countries have shown my movies on their main “free” networks (i.e., the BBC, CBC, France 1, etc), “Roger & Me” is the only one of all my movies that has been shown in my own country on one of our five “free” national networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and FOX). That was just one screening of one movie in all these 33 years — on PBS, in 1992.

So who am I to tell you to believe that better days are ahead? That we will own Roevember? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I listen. I learn. I participate. I know who my fellow Americans are and I know the loudest and most hateful ones are not the majority. We are. I’m not a cynic. If I were, I couldn’t have written those last two sentences. All I ask is that you not give in to the cynicism. You have a right to be angry and to feel the utter despair over what has become of us. How often we’ve been let down — betrayed — especially by Democrats. How those with the big bucks control what seems like every friggin’ aspect of our lives.

But they also know how we intend to one day rule over them and make them pay for their crimes against us and this planet because we intend to live and enjoy that pursuit of happiness we were promised. They know that day is coming — that’s how smart they actually are. And they know it’s not a matter of “if” but when — when we will finally have our nonviolent hands around their corporate/military/greedy “throats“ and we won’t let go until the chains are cut and we are free, starting with women, the descendants of enslaved humans, and the people whose land our ancestors stole.

So that’s who I am.

Who are you?

I’d love for us all to get to know each other in line on the early voting days this month or on November 8th itself. Don’t miss out on this! It’s gonna be the biggest cold weather party we’ve ever attended.

After all, it’s not every day you get to save your own country. 

"We Will Hold The House" - Speaker Pelosi's Prediction For The Midterm Elections.


Stephen's interview with Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues with her confident assertion
that Democrats will retain their majority and pick up House seats in the upcoming
midterm elections.


Published Oct 4, 2022

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Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth #14
If the Mainstream Media Thinks There’s a Chance We May Be Right about Roevember, Watch Out.

Michael Moore
Oct 11




SAVE


(A daily series to counter the myth that the Republicans are going to win the House and Senate)

Just 24 hours ago, the award-winning online magazine Salon, became the first nationwide media outlet to tell the world about our Midterm Tsunami of Truth.

The result? Soon the stale, tired media narrative about how “the party in power always loses miserably in the Midterms!” will be put out to pasture in OK Boomerville.

All it takes is one little crack in the journalism dam that blocks fresh thinking…

Read the Salon analysis below, and get ready —

Four weeks from TODAY, MAGA is about to get the whoopin’ of their lives.


By Sophia A. McClennen
October 10, 2022
Remember when everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election? No, I don't just mean win the popular vote: Win it all and win big. FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's political projection site, had Clinton's chances of winning at 71.4 percent. Frank Luntz tweeted on Election Day, Nov. 8, 2016, "Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States." One GOP insider declared that for Trump to win, "it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of 'Death to America.'" Pundit after pundit, on the left and the right, joined the chorus of mainstream news outlets to declare that the election was Clinton's.

There was, however, one lone voice of dissent: Michael Moore. In July 2016, Moore wrote "Five Reasons Trump Will Be President." That article mostly went unnoticed by mainstream media after the election, when everyone finally realized Moore was right but it was way too late to make a difference.

Fast forward to the 2022 midterms and we find ourselves in a similar scenario, but turned upside down. Now the media is basically repeating again and again that Democrats will lose in November, while Moore is suggesting the opposite. Moore isn't just echoing the widespread notion that Democrats could hold the Senate while losing the House. He is suggesting that voters "are going to descend upon the polls en masse — a literal overwhelming, unprecedented tsunami of voters — and nonviolently, legally, and without mercy remove every last stinking traitor to our Democracy."

That prediction is likely to cause hyperventilation at all points of the political spectrum. Could he really be right?

To make his point, Moore is going beyond armchair punditry and sending out what he is calling a "tsunami of truth," where each day leading up to the election he offers one specific factual reason why he is right and why it makes sense to be optimistic.


In his second installment, he covered the story of the recent election for the Boise Board of Education, in which Republican Steve Schmidt, an incumbent, was up for re-election. Considering that Trump won Idaho's capital city with 73 percent of the vote, it made sense to assume Schmidt would win again. But as Moore explains, Schmidt had been endorsed by a far-right extremist group, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, that led a campaign against the local library, calling their LGBTQ+ and sex ed materials "smut-filled pornography." According to Moore, they even showed up at local Extinction Rebellion climate strikes brandishing AR-15 assault rifles.

So in a surprising turn of events, the Idaho Statesman, Boise's daily news paper, chose not to endorse Schmidt because he refused to denounce the Idaho Liberty Dogs. Instead, the paper endorsed his opponent, an 18-year-old high school senior and progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who was also co-founder of the Boise chapter of Extinction Rebellion.

Rajbhandari won. A teenager beat a Republican incumbent in a traditionally red city in one of the reddest states. Moore's point is that if these kinds of seismic shifts are happening at the polls in Boise, there's reason to think that this election won't follow traditional patterns. Voters, he believes, have had enough of the power of right-wing extremists and the threat they pose to democratic values.

In his next "tsunami of truth," Moore reminded readers that despite all the ways that the media tends to make the American right seem massively powerful, they're really just a big bunch of losers. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the eight last presidential elections. As Moore explains it, "Only because of the slave states' demand for the Electoral College — and the Republicans' #1 job of gerrymandering and voter suppression — do we even have to still deal with their misogyny, their destruction of Planet Earth, their love of guns and greed, and their laser-focused mission to bury our Democracy."

That leads to the next installment: Republicans will lose because this time around they are "running the biggest batch of nutters nationwide in American electoral history." He then promises to offer a list of the top 10 "biggest whackadoodles on the Republican side of the ballot."

No. 10 on Moore's list is Mathew DePerno, Republican candidate for attorney general in Michigan. Like nine other candidates in the 30 state attorney general races this fall, DePerno is an election denier. But he's not just a common, garden-variety election denier; he was allegedly personally involved in a voting system breach. That's right: the Republican candidate who hopes to become Michigan's top law enforcement official is under investigation by the current attorney general for "unauthorized access to voting equipment."

But that isn't the half of it. DePerno also thinks that the Plan B birth control pill is a "form of murder." Moore explains that DePerno "believes that 'life' doesn't begin at conception — he insists it begins BEFORE conception and it should be against the law for anyone to interrupt a sperm on its way to do its 'job.'" As if that weren't enough to categorize DePerno as batshit extreme, he has attacked his opponent with memes that include the white supremacist symbol of Pepe the Frog while comparing his campaign to delivering Michiganders a "really big red pill." Not a Plan B pill, which he likens to fentanyl.

Confirming Moore's view that DePerno's extremism will only going to appeal to a narrow Trumper base, the twitter replies to DePerno are uniformly critical and sarcastic. Like this: "I did nazi that coming. (actually, I did.)." Or this: "I want what you are smoking." Or this post, from @NeverTrumpTexan, "You could just say you were Nazi. It is much easier than what ever that is." Surveying the 50 most recent replies to his tweet, among which include one from Keith Olbermann, every single one is critical and sarcastic.

Moore's 45-day "tsunami of truth" is a clever way to tap into the energy he has described as "Roevember." Moore coined the term back in August, when a funny thing happened in Kansas. Six weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Kansas held an election, which included proposed amendment to the state constitution that could have allowed the legislature to ban abortion. In a surprising shift from typical voting demographics, turnout for the vote was massive, 60 percent higher than in 2018 — and Kansans overwhelmingly voted to reject the anti-abortion amendment.

And that was Kansas, another consistently red state in recent years.

So if we're seeing a swing away from Trump-style Republicans in Kansas and Idaho, there is reason to believe that the combination of Trump fascist nutters on the ballot, the revelations from the Jan. 6 committee hearings, the various investigations into Trump and, last but definitely not least, the fact that the Supreme Court put abortion back on the ballot could lead to the type of voting tsunami Moore is predicting.

Which leads us to wonder why the media isn't covering that story, but is still offering the same stale script about Biden's low favorability and Republican chances of taking back both the House and the Senate. Even Jen Psaki, Biden's former White House press secretary turned MSNBC commentator, offered the downer view that the president wasn't helping his party win.

Media coverage matters. And the fact that the media is largely sticking to pre-established coverage patterns doesn't just mean that it's missing the story, as Moore claims, it also means it's likely influencing the outcome of the election — and not in a good way.

Scholars of media effects know that when news coverage focuses primarily on negative personality coverage, i.e., the "horse race," turnout is depressed. When media focuses on policy, however, including contentious issues like abortion, turnout improves. So all the attention to Biden's supposed unpopularity is not helping.

Further, if the news media tells you the results are a foregone conclusion, that also depresses turnout. I mean, if you are told over and over again that you are going to lose no matter what you do, why bother voting? Even more important, research shows that if the media suggests an election will be close, turnout increases. Some scholars have speculated that the fact that right-wing news outlets reported that the election was close in 2016 elevated the Trump vote, while smug reporting from more liberal outlets, assuming Clinton would win easily, depressed her vote.

Yet almost all news media in the weeks before a major election focuses on predicting the outcome, rather than debating the issues. What's more, the flurry of attention paid to polling, and all the hand-wringing over whether the polling is accurate, only exacerbate the problem. Obsessing over whether or not a given candidate or party will win does almost nothing to help energize voter turnout and engage citizens.


But there's more. For decades, media scholars have described what they call the "protest paradigm." These are the predictable patterns journalists follow when covering protests. They include, for example, a habit of focusing on "small, inappropriate samples of individual protesters," which leads the audience to misunderstand the true nature of the larger movement. The protest paradigm also refers to the news media's habit of allowing elites to frame the story, which misses the positions of average citizens. Even worse, Indiana University professor Danielle Brown explains that this type of coverage "favors spectacle, conflict, disruption and official narratives over the substance of movements that challenge the status quo."

We can observe many of the same habits when the press covers elections. And given that this election in particular could be understood as a protest vote — protesting the assault on women's rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants' rights, democratic rights, etc. — it makes sense to think of this election more in terms of a mass movement than as an example of democracy as usual.

Framing the upcoming vote as a mass uprising of nonviolent civil resistance is exactly Moore's plan. As he explains, his goal isn't just to offer the public another version of the truth; it is also to call out the problems with media coverage. "Much of what many in the media are telling you is patently false and just plain wrong," he writes. "They are simply regurgitating old narratives and stale scripts. They are either too overworked or too lazy or too white and too male to open their eyes and see the liberal/ left/progressive/working class and female uprising that is right now underway."

Moore has a long history of questioning the status quo and bucking conventional thought patterns. Whether getting booed off the Academy Awards stage for opposing the war in Iraq or being the lone voice predicting that Trump would win, Moore has never shied away from disagreeing with the pundit class and political elites. But he doesn't just do it for shock value; he does it because he's paying attention to the political climate in ways the mainstream media tends not to.

Is Moore right that there will be a tsunami of voters determined to defeat the enemies of democracy? The only way to learn the answer is to stop trying to read the tea leaves and focus on making it happen.

Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth #42
Can you bring yourself to say we will win the House?
MICHAEL MOORE
NOV 14





SAVE


It’s hard, isn’t it, to believe in ourselves? Especially when you’ve spent the past few months feeling politically hopeless and trying not to believe the “predictions” shoved down our throats that we are all going to drown in a Trumpian Red Wave of election deniers and right wing nutters. And so millions of you — good people, liberals, lefties, Democrats, Montessori parents — sink into a despair, knowing in your heart of hearts we are doomed. Between Biden’s low approval ratings, the “record high“ inflation, and the media telling us over and over how the first midterm election of a new president is usually a slaughter (Obama lost 63 House seats in his first midterm), most liberal voters simply gave in to the inevitable.

So I stepped in to help turn that around. Every day for six weeks I wrote to you, my Substack subscribers and social media followers. I sent you a daily email to give you hard data and facts (plus my own Midwestern common sense) as to why there would be no Republican landslide and that Trump would never rule America again. I asked only that you get five others to vote with you — and that you start believing in yourselves, in us, and in our wonderful, crazy country where there are millions more of us than there are of the haters and the Democracy destroyers. A country still unfinished, and my insistence that we do just that: Finish it. Make it right. And guarantee that everyone has a seat at the table and a slice of the pie.

Many of you wrote me with gratitude, telling me of the hard work you were doing to get out the vote. It lifted my spirits (which was much appreciated as I had come down with Covid on the fourth day of these “Midterm Tsunamis of Truth”, half of them written while lying in bed and trying to remember my middle name).

And then came our unexpected success on Tuesday — unexpected only by those who promoted the false narrative of a Republican landslide — but, sadly, unexpected also by all those who bought into that false narrative, namely depressed Democrats.

Many of you wrote me this week to apologize for not believing me because I saw instead a Blue Tsunami Wall that would protect us. Well, no apologies are necessary. I know how it is to be swamped by what the Times and NPR and the Wall Street Journal and a hundred pundits are throwing at you. And, without thinking, how people start repeating what David Brooks is saying! What FiveThirtyEight is saying! What their smart friend is saying. You hand your critical thinking mind over to them without even thinking about it.

And yet you never think to ask, “Why am I not hearing the opposing side to this narrative? Is there not a single person who believes the Democrats are going to resist history, make history, that the polling is wrong, that “approval ratings” are anachronistic and irrelevant… and wrong? That we live in a very new America where the younger generation is on fire, where women have had it up to here, where the calendar is screaming at us that we are just 20 years away from the U.S. no longer being a “white” country. A country where white people will be the minority by 2042. Those knucklehead white supremacists know it! What do you think the January 6th insurrection was really about? I mean if Herschel Walker is now their only hope, jeez they gotta be feeling just awful. What would great-great-Confederate grandpappy say about all this?

So, yes, I have been howling these facts out to the wind, and yet I could not find a single commentator on TV or in journalism who would break from the herd and agree with me that the whole stinking media has it all wrong and that the Democrats are going to do better than fine, and that the Republicans are about to have their ass handed to them.

During the six weeks leading up to the election, no newspaper, no magazine, no TV network or armed forces wire service sought either to report on my facts and data about “no red wave is coming” — or do their own reporting to tell the public that a fantasy narrative has been concocted to depress the Democratic vote. I’m on TV a lot. I’m always being asked to come on TV to join the discussion. But not during the midterms. They didn’t want to even consider what I was saying. Other than Bill Maher (who didn’t agree with my analysis but thought I should be heard), Salon, and The Guardian newspaper would let me put forth the possibility that the red wave was in fact a red herring.

Is it the ball cap? The Supercuts haircut? The wardrobe I loaned to John Fetterman?

In the final days before November 8th, three decent, brave non-primetime souls on MSNBC — the longtime pro Alex Witt, the rapper/lawyer Ari Melber and the indefatigable Joy Reid — gave me a voice. Viewers were shocked to hear someone say we on the left were not only going to keep the Senate, we were going to pick up a seat or two. That not only were the Republicans not going to clobber us in the House with 30 to 50 new seats, they might be in for an upset because it’s gonna be so dang close. And Trump’s mob of election-denying candidates were going to go down in flames. There would be record numbers of young voters, and women were on a rampage over the abolishment of Roe. The sword of vengeance would be theirs.

Of all of the above glorious victories we attained on Tuesday, my favorite was this:

In nearly every state, women voters outnumbered the men. And young voters delivered another record turnout — second highest in nearly three decades.

Women and youth made Democrats the real winners.

As I came out of the voting booth on Tuesday, an elderly woman came up to me. The color of her eyes was steel.

“Women,” she said to me, “we are ruthless. And when we are ruthless, men who cause harm to us, to our children, never see us coming. And then it’s too late. This, this what the Court did, now you will see what I mean by ruthless.” Chills. Because she meant it. Thrilled, because I believed her.

In most states, women voters on Tuesday vastly outnumbered the men (in a few of them by 55% to 45%!). Guys — what did you think was going to happen after women were once again reminded that they can just go f**k themselves as they were told to do by the Supreme priests in black robes on June 24th of this year? If you’re afraid of 2042 when it comes to race, get your male lug head ready to wrap itself around this fact: By 2028-2032, women will make up half of Congress; good luck finding a male doctor or male lawyer under 45 (the majority of all medical and law students today are women); and there will be a woman in the White House — and she won’t invade Iraq, won’t impose cruelty and suffering on the poor, the immigrant or the single mother; a president who will embrace the oppressed and welcome all who do the **** work none of us would ever do. From them she will find America’s next new leaders and geniuses.

So I need to close by asking all of you a favor. After the election on Wednesday, as I had for weeks, I tried to assure you that we not only are going to win the Senate seats in Nevada, Arizona and the Georgia runoff on December 6th, I think we are going to hold the House! Yet even after I shared with you 40 Tsunami Truths, still, until even this very moment that you’re reading this, you are sick to your stomach with the belief that of course we will lose the House.

So let me make this simple observation — when in your American lifetime have they not called who has won the House SIX FRIGGIN’ DAYS AFTER THE POLLS HAVE CLOSED? Never! So what do you think is taking so long? I’ll tell you what I think: It’s because the count is very, very, very close — so close that the Democrats have smoked this election, and now they are just a seat or two away from owning the whole damn show in DC!

Can you handle that? Can you finally please stop always thinking the worst and that the forces of evil will triumph? Even if we don’t win, can you reach into yourself and at least “believe” we are going to win the House? Because our next victory starts there, inside of you. That’s one thing I admire about the other side — they believe so deeply in everything they believe in. They believe the earth was made in just 6 days. They believe Jesus walked on water. It doesn’t matter that it makes no sense or that there was no need for him to do that because he was a perfectly good swimmer. They believe Trump is a prophet sent to us from God to get rid of the IRS.

They win so much because they’ve got God.

We have Noam Chomsky. That’s not a fair fight.

So will you take a moment and say these 10 words out loud for me, right now:

There are more of us than there are of them.

And…

We will Hold the House!

Sure, it may not happen by a vote or two — but that’s not the point! The point is we’ve brought the Republicans trembling to their knees tonight. They can’t believe this has happened to them. They will not be able to collect themselves into a fighting force. They will fight each other. We will peel away a few of them at a time when we need their votes. Which Republican representative who won by only 40 votes is going to dare vote NO on the Violence Against Women Act? Or expanding Medicare for their parents?

Here’s a fact the pundits don’t quote:

In this current session of Congress, elected in 2020, 9 Republicans and 7 Democrats never even lasted until the end of this term! Some died. Some quit. Usually one or two are indicted. Some went out for a pack of smokes and never came back. Special elections had to be held to fill their seats. How do we now have a Democrat representing Alaska in the House? Because Republican Congressman Don Young died this year, and in the special election to replace him, Democrat Mary Peltola was elected. When the first two Republicans in this new session are gone, we’ll be ready to fly into action and clean up. One way or the other, the House will be ours.

But what do I know?

Spirits up everyone! Ride the wave!

P.S. Here’s a song for the end of this Veteran’s Day weekend. It’s from P!nk and her dad. He wrote it after he returned from the Vietnam War. It’s the first song she learned to sing. Enjoy.