16 December 2016

Trump's election as "the biggest fuck you ever recorded"


The words accompanying this Alex Jones-sponsored video are taken from a speech given back in October by filmmaker Michael Moore, who was born and raised in Flint, Michigan.  Long viewed as a spokesperson for liberal progressive views ("Moore's written and cinematic works criticize topics such as globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, President-elect Donald Trump, the Iraq War, the American health care system, and capitalism...), Moore was roundly panned for his public predictions that Trump would win the election.

Here are some excerpts from the text accompanying this brief (four and a half minute) video:
MICHAEL MOORE: I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don't necessarily like him that much, and they don't necessarily agree with him. They're not racist or rednecks, they're actually pretty decent people, and so after talking to a number of them I wanted to write this:

'Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said, "if you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them."

It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- the "Brexit" states.

You live here in Ohio, you know what I'm talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is kind of irrelevant because he's saying the things to people who are hurting, and that's why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human Molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for. The human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them...

So on November 8, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, and take that lever or felt pen or touchscreen and put a big fucking X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump.

They see that the elite who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump, after they loved him and created him, and now hate.

Thank you media: the enemy of my enemy is who I'm voting for on November 8.
The fulltext is at the YouTube link.  For liberal Democrats, these are painful words to read or to hear in the video.  Moore does qualify his comments with "whether Trump means it or not," to acknowledge the possibility probability that the entire campaign is a con job, but as an explanation for why the election swung the way it did, this is as good a brief summary as I've found.  If you are a progressive who has put their head in the sand since November, it's time to put on your big boy pants and listed to this short diatribe.

I've closed comments for this post.  Please don't append them to other posts.

Related: Why rural voters no longer vote Democratic in Minnesota, and Trump launches war on unions.