The Other McCain

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Michael Moore Releases Sayoc Video, Ruins It With Idiotic Anti-Trump Sermon

Posted on | October 29, 2018 | Comments Off on Michael Moore Releases Sayoc Video, Ruins It With Idiotic Anti-Trump Sermon

 

In February 2017, the crew of Michael Moore’s latest documentary captured about three minutes of video showing Cesar Sayoc as part of the crowd at a Trump rally in Florida. Now that Sayoc has been arrested for mailing more than a dozen pipe bombs to Trump’s enemies, this video is very interesting. However, Moore accompanied the release with 800 words of his own commentary, which deserves a thorough fisking:

My crew first encountered Cesar Sayoc, the mail bomber/terrorist, 20 months ago when we went down to Melbourne, Florida, to film Trump’s first “Trump 2020 Re-election Rally” — just one month after his inauguration. My direction to my producer Basel Hamdan and our longtime collaborator Eric Weinrib was to NOT film Trump, but rather only film the people who came out to see him. My feeling was, after one month in office, we didn’t need to hear anything more from Trump’s mouth — we already knew everything we needed to know about him.
Who we needed to understand were our fellow Americans, lost souls full of anger and possible violence, easily fed a pile of lies so large and toxic that we wondered if there would ever be a chance that we could bring them back from the Dark Side.
Our footage of Mr. Sayoc would never make it into the final cut of what would be the film that is now in its last week in cinemas across America. But I’d like to share it with you, if only to give you a momentary glimpse of him in action (all are free to use this video and share it).
You’ve seen the photos of him on the news over the past couple days — a slight, normal, everyday American. But those are from before. Here with our footage I can show you what he had actually become — overdosed on steroids in what looks like some desperate attempt to hang on to what was left of his manhood. Men, people like Cesar have been led to believe, were and are under attack by the likes of Hillary and Michelle and all those “feminazis” who’ve had but one mission: political castration. The theft of power from the patriarchy that had been in place for 10,000 years. The end of men.

(Question: Who appointed Michael Moore, a wealthy film director who whose ex-wife accused him of cheating her out of her fair share of their compnay’s profits, as a feminist spokesman?)

Here in this outtake from “Fahrenheit 11/9” is 3 minutes and 38 seconds of raw, unedited footage — and you can see what Sayoc had become by early 2017, his body grossly deformed into what he thought a man should be, muscles the size of basketballs, he’s wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt, holding a big anti-CNN sign and, along with his fellow Trumpsters, is yelling at the journalists who had gathered in the media pen. You’ll see him two or three times, each for a few seconds, but if you pause on him you will also see something profound. Underneath his threatening Hulk-like exterior, there is fear in his eyes and, for a quick moment, you can see he is already gone, a lost dog with no direction home.
What do we do with the thousands of other Cesar Sayocs? They have been told by Trump that they are at war — WAR! — against the rest of us, the vast, vast majority who believe climate change is real, who state without equivocation that women are equal citizens with an absolute right to control their own reproductive organs, who have seen how the free enterprise system is a hoax designed to destroy the middle class, and who demand that all people have a right to easily cast their votes without any interference. Cesar and his bros ARE at war, against all these things, against us, the majority, and they are at war inside of and against themselves. This is why they will lose, but not before they take a few of us with them.

(Notice the sloppy guilt-by-association smear. Everyone who voted for Trump — about 63 million people — is complicit in his crime. If you generalized that way about any other group, you would be fairly be accused of fomenting prejudice. Are all black people complicit in the murders committed by black gang-bangers in Chicago? Furthermore, how is it that free enterprise, without which there wouldn’t even be a middle class, “is a hoax to destroy the middle class,” according to Moore? But never mind . . .)

Needless to say I was a bit shaken to see that Sayoc had placed a photo of me with a crosshairs target over my face on the side of his van. Over the past 15 years I have encountered men like him many times. I stopped counting the death threats long ago. I’ve been assaulted more than a half-dozen times (men with knives, clubs, hot scalding coffee thrown at my face) — and then there was the man who was making a fertilizer bomb (a la Oklahoma City) to blow up my house, only to be thwarted by his AK-47 which went off accidentally. A neighbor heard it, called the cops, and off to prison he went.
So none of this week’s abhorrence surprises me in the least — except for the fact that it is the President himself who is the “what-me?” instigator of it.

(Again, Moore uses a guilt-by-association smear to blame Trump as the “instigator” of political violence in a way that any liberal would reject as false were it done with, say, “Black Lives Matter” maniac Micah Xavier Johnson, who shot five police officers in Dallas, or James Hodgkinson, the gunman who shot Rep. Steve Scalise and targeted other Republican congressmen. Violent extremists are usually aligned, however remotely, with either the Left or the Right, but no one in the mainstream media ever acknowledges that Democrats are at least as guilty of inciting left-wing violence as any Republican is of inciting violence on the Right.)

Maybe someday I’ll get a chance to sit down with Mr. Sayoc and break bread and ask him “why me?” on his van? Because of this target he put on me, the police and security people were looking on Friday to see if a package had been sent to me and, if so, is it still somewhere in the postal delivery system. So far, so good!

(In other words: “It’s all about me! Pay attention to me! Me! Me!”)

Today we grieve over the latest loss of life this weekend in Pittsburgh. As it was when fascism started to spread in the last century, it begins with just a few thugs committing random acts of violence against the people whom their leader has told them to hate. Yet no matter what awful events await us in the coming days or weeks, we will not be deterred from our singular mission: The electoral tsunami of voters we are bringing to the polls on November 6th to end this madness.
— Michael Moore

Michael Moore’s history of 20th-century fascism is false. It did not begin “with just a few thugs,” but with an ex-Communist, Benito Mussolini, leading a march on Rome and staging a coup d’etat in 1922. Inspired by Mussolini’s example, Hitler attempted a similar coup in Munich (the “Beer Hall Putsch“) in 1923. So it wasn’t “a few thugs committing random acts of violence,”  but rather organized mass movements, which signaled the spread of fascism in Europe. Whenever I hear a dimwit reciting the kind of false history Moore peddles here, it makes me angry because, of course, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

The rise of fascism in the 20th century was a result of particular historical circumstances, and happened in a certain way, and it is wrong to ignore the details of this history in order to make possible a partisan propaganda claim (which is what Moore’s misleading characterization is). What is generally neglected by such tendentious myth-makers, is the role played in the rise of European fascism by (a) the four-year nightmare of World War I, and (b) the Bolshevik Revolution. When the war ended, the millions of demobilized troops returned to civilian life provided leaders like Mussolini and Hitler the source of manpower for their paramilitary gangs, the “Blackshirts” in Italy and the “Brownshirts” in Germany. The success of Lenin’s Bolsheviks in seizing power in Russia showed how easily a disciplined revolutionary party could overthrow a democratic government. The widespread political disillusionment and economic problems of Europe after the First World War, combined with technological advancements (e.g., telephone, radio, automobiles, airplanes), helped make possible the totalitarian horrors of the Third Reich. It certainly did not begin with “just a few thugs committing random acts of violence,” and it is an astonishing falsehood to compare a lone kook like Cesar Sayoc to the followers of totalitarian leaders like Hitler and Mussolini. Whatever you might say about Ernst Rohm and Heinrich Himmler, the violence they ordered was never “random.”

Trying to imply, as Moore does, that there is some kind of analogy between Trump and Hitler is not only false, but dangerous. The lone kook — an irresponsible fool using violence as as means of obtaining his 15 minutes of fame — is obviously a different creature than the brownshirt, a member of a paramilitary unit following explicit orders. Only a phenomenally stupid person could look at a deranged loner and imagine such a person to be analogous to one of Hitler’s stormtroopers. To assert such an analogy is to endorse the kook’s delusion, since what the loner believes is that he can achieve extraordinary significance by his crime.

Michael Moore lacks the self-awareness to see what’s wrong with his theory. He posts video of Cesar Sayoc in a crowd of Trump supporters chanting “CNN sucks!” If all of these Trump supporters were macho guys pumped up on steroids, or if other members of the crowd had also engaged in political terrorism, maybe Moore would have a point. But there are all kinds of people in that crowd, including pro-Trump women, yet so far as we know, Sayoc is the only one to have committed any crime. If all Trump’s supporters are “lost souls full of anger,” as Moore implies, why haven’t all 63 million of them resorted to violent terrorism?

Something else Michael Moore won’t mention: The copycat factor. I’m willing to bet $20 that one of the things that provoked the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter was the news coverage of Sayoc’s spree and subsequent arrest. Was it a coincidence that the synagogue was attacked after four days of non-stop mail-bomb coverage on cable news? I don’t think so, just like it’s not a coincidence that school shootings tend to happen in clusters, with news coverage of each massacre inspiring the next. Whenever the cable-news channels go into saturation-coverage mode of a politically-charged story, it will tend to provoke strong reactions on both sides. Think about the August 2014 riot in Ferguson, Missouri — basically a made-for-TV performance with CNN as the producer. Three months later, Republicans won a majority in the Senate. Not a coincidence. More and more Americans are becoming wise to how media bias works, and understand that CNN is Democrat propaganda, which is why (a) CNN’s anti-Trump agenda didn’t stop him in 2016, and (b) that 2017 crowd in Florida was chanting “CNN sucks!”

 

Just watch the video and ask yourself, “Whose fault is it that Republican voters hate the media?” Michael Moore would have you believe that CNN is completely innocent of any accusation of bias, and that the only reason for that crowd’s hatred of CNN is Donald Trump.

By the way, did I mention that Michael Moore is an idiot? Because that’s really the only point I was trying to make, you know.



 

 

Category: Media Bias

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