Michael Moore annoys me. Not so much because of his tired, old progressive political beliefs stuck in the 1980s, but because his sardonic persona so often turns to serious moralizing.
This inconsistency in Moore was recently on display as he ruffled feathers on the immigration issue on his Substack. Moore never seems to let truth—nevermind ideological principle—guide his hand, preferring to chase the “current thing” that captures his progressive audience.
Moore argues for unfettered illegal immigration in his recent piece, “Our Muslim Boy Wonder.” It’s festooned with accusations of racism by Trump’s “MAGA-nation,” but the piece is a gushing love letter to Steve Jobs—extolling the virtues of a multicultural nation that allowed an obscure Muslim from Syria to meet a Wisconsin farm girl and have a child that would become the billionaire founder of Apple.
It’s a little weird for a guy who built a career out of mocking millionaire and billionaire leaders of industry for mistreating workers to wax poetic for possibly the most famous tech industrialist of all time with a professional (and personal) history of treating people like absolute shit.
Hypocrisy is literally the code of the road for public figures of all stripes. Nobody cares. But for a documentary filmmaker, authenticity should be the standard by which he is judged, and Moore’s hypocrisy flows like a river.
Moore has been influential as a public figure, promoting a working-class populist brand of progressive politics as far back as I can remember. Hard to believe he’s been at this game for almost 50 years, but half-assed internet history indicates Moore landed on the scene in late 1970s and really got cooking as a journalist in the early 1980s.
His film “Roger & Me,” filmed between 1987 and 1988, detailed the shuttering of General Motors plants in Flint and was probably the first documentary to hit the American mainstream in the late 1980s. It made him a pseudo-star. In Michigan, the film was a phenomenon embraced by the deep-blue union workers in the UAW and the building trades. To them, it felt like a love letter.
If it is, he’s the recipient. Moore is a narcissist. He spends the bulk of the film chasing Roger Smith, the chairman of General Motors, with considerable comedic flare. Smith is largely forgotten today but was one of the most powerful men in America at the time. Moore offers respite from his chase by intercutting the film with vignettes of Flint residents. In these scenes, his angle becomes dark.
Moore seems intent on depicting the most cartoonish and bizarre people as normal everyday residents of Flint, telling the rest of the nation that Michiganders are mentally unstable rubes. Even worse, Moore chooses the class-warfare angle by seeking out country club types and entrapping them into brief statements of detached and emotionless sympathy. The film is a personal vendetta against the free market, and downtrodden Flint residents are merely the hammer he uses to smash it.
To be fair, Moore offers one moment of realism. The only Flint resident depicted with any depth is a brief interview with a former GM employee, a personal friend of Moore’s. He introduces him as such and has him detail the day he was laid off and drove home listening to the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t it be Nice,” while suffering a nervous breakdown. But this one emotional moment is ripped away from the viewer, as Moore returns us to his cat-and-mouse chase after Smith.
Moore also makes some odd politically motivated omissions.
A well-known Democrat and prominent leftist, it’s not all that surprising that he fails to mention that Flint was, and had been for well over a decade prior to the film, a Democrat-run city, inside a state with a Democrat power column led by Gov. James Blanchard. These were all pro-union forces presiding over a state and city in steady decline.
It all makes sense in hindsight. Why would Moore depict failing politicians with whom he is ideologically aligned when he can take aim at big business and easily lay all the blame on a single person? It’s an easier film to make and a better enemy for his audience. But is it honest?
Interestingly, “Roger & Me” was not well received by Flint Democrats, specifically the young mayor, Matthew Collier, who lamented the film. In a 2014 interview, Collier criticized the film for being unfair to Flint, depicting untrue events such as rising crime and unemployment—which he said were actually going down at the time it was filmed—and the destruction of Fisher 1 GM Body Plant (which was actually being renovated and repurposed as a tech center). He argued the film did more harm than good, demoralizing and crippling the city.
Moore has revisited Michigan in his subsequent films, always with a taste for mocking the state and its inhabitants. His 2002 film, “Bowling for Columbine,” made in response to the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, was another platform for him to take aim at his home state. In the film, Moore blames the tragedy on gun culture, which he links to the state of Michigan in nefarious tropes that suggest connections to the Michigan Militia by interviewing James Nichols, the brother of Terry Nichols and friend to Timothy McVeighl, co-conspirators behind the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing and early members of the militia.
To prove this, he makes a visit to North Country Bank in Traverse City, with camera crew in tow. Moore claims this bank gives a free rifle to anyone who opens an account, and he depicts this by seemingly opening an account for which he receives a long-barreled shotgun from the bank manager. The farce depicts Michigan as a bizarre land of freakish rubes.
But hold on a minute, Moore again omits key facts. Yes, it’s true that North Country Bank (at that time) was offering a free gun to anyone opening an account. But the account had to be a credit deposit of several thousands of dollars. The gun promotion was done with the intent of enticing wealthy out-of-state game hunters to choose Michigan as their hunting vacation destination.
The average person opening an account at North Country with a couple hundred dollars and a driver’s license was not handed a gun, but that didn’t serve Moore’s ideological interests.
Perhaps there really are two Michael Moores. Moore 1.0 was hamfisted progressive populist filmmaker of yesteryear, intent on chasing and harassing rich corporate titans. Moore 2.0 is an affluent wine-track limousine liberal praising the very first Tech-bro billionaire.
Did Michael Moore ease his fiery class warfare radicalism or did the progressive movement he clings to shift from the vanguard of the “Little Man” to the elite defenders of corporate America?
Perhaps Moore never changed. Perhaps his incessant, thinly veiled ridiculing of working-class Michigan residents is the real Michael Moore after all.
Jay Murray is a writer for Michigan Enjoyer and has been a Metro Detroit-based professional investigator for 22 years. Follow him on X @Stainless31.
