By Charles Jay / Daily Kos / October 19, 2022
Back in 2016, a pessimistic Michael Moore went on Real Time with Bill Maher and defied the conventional wisdom by predicting that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election. The Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker also wrote an article titled “Five Reasons Trump Will Be President.” Unfortunately, his prediction turned out to be right.
Last month, Moore appeared on Maher’s show and again defied the conventional wisdom pushed by the mass media that Democrats will lose control of one or both chambers of Congress in the November midterms. Moore is a self-proclaimed pessimist, but he boldly declared that he’s “never felt this optimistic.”
On Maher’s Sept. 23 broadcast, Moore declared:
“I was on your show six years ago when I said that Trump was gonna win, and the audience booed me …. I think I had a pretty good sense of what was gonna happen. I think the opposite is gonna happen this time.”
“I think that there is going to be such a landslide against the traitors, especially the 147 Republicans who just, hours after the insurrection, voted to not certify the elected president of the United States, Joe Biden. I think there are going to be so many people coming out to vote. I wanna thank the Supreme Court for reminding women they are in fact second-class citizens, and taking their rights away like this . . . I think there’s gonna be such a massive turnout of women.”
“There are so many signs of this. I honestly think if we all do our work . . . we have a chance to do something.”
Let’s hope he’s right this time.
Just two days later, Moore sent out the first in a series of daily articles under the heading “Mike’s Tsunami of Truth”—where each day leading up to Nov. 8 he is offering “a brief honest daily dose of the truth” to justify his optimism that there will be an unprecedented Blue Tsunami in which “the anti-Democratic forces are going to go down in a bonfire of defeat.” He has also been suggesting specific actions that people can take to make his prediction come true.
In his first installment, Moore wrote:
The pundits and the Trumpsters are on a daily rampage to convince you we are going to lose the House, that we’ll still be stuck with a gridlocked Senate. And that Biden is a loser.
They are lying to you. And they know exactly what they are doing. They are convinced, due to our past behavior, that we are frightened of the Right, that we believe we are going to lose — and that we are filled with pessimism, cynicism and the justified doubts that the often-lame Democrats are experts at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
But the tide has turned — and it has turned massively. Much of what many in the media are telling you is patently false and just plain wrong. 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.
In his second installment, Moore wrote about the results of an obscure race last month for a seat on the Boise Board of Education in one of the reddest states in the country. Steve Schmidt, the Republican incumbent, was up for reelection in a city that Trump carried with more than 70% of the vote. But Schmidt was endorsed by a local, far-right extremist group called the Idaho Liberty Dogs. He refused requests by citizens to reject the endorsement.
As a result, the local newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, decided to endorse Schmidt’s opponent, an 18-year-old high school student and progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari. He decided to run after Idaho’s lieutenant governor created a task force to protect ”young people from the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism” in Idaho schools. With the newspaper’s endorsement and an aggressive door-to-door campaign. Rajbhandari ended up winning the election.
Moore concludes the segment by noting:
That is the kind of shellacking the Trumpster Republican Party is about to receive in November. Please take this small example of how even an 18-year-old young man of color could defeat the establishment in a place like Boise, Idaho.
Moore’s third installment declared that “the Haters, the Bigots and the Supremacists always lose in the end.” He wrote that “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.”
He noted that the Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections:
“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.”
But Moore wrote that this year Democrats can overcome these factors because the Republicans “made a mistake” by pushing too far, including on Jan. 6, 2021. And when it comes to pushing too far, Moore wrote in his fourth installment that the Republicans are helping the Democrats win in November “by running the biggest batch of nutters in American electoral history.”
He said he had compiled a list of the 10 biggest “whackadoodles” running as Republicans in statewide races—each of whom will be featured in individual segments of his Tsunami of Truth series. He called them “the ten best examples of why we are going to have a Blue Tsunami on Nov. 8 “ because the majority of Americans will find them untenable.
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