Wednesday, November 27, 2024

The America I Want to Save Is the America We’ve Never Had

 

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The America I Want to Save Is the America We’ve Never Had

A Thanksgiving Eve Message from Michael Moore

Constructing the Statue of Liberty, assembling it piece by piece, 1886

Friends,

This morning it was announced that it appears the final count may now be in — and Trump has FAILED to win a majority of the popular vote. His final total, as of now, will be under 50% — or 49.83%.

This was no landslide. It was the smallest percentage of a popular vote victory in a Presidential election since Richard Nixon in 1968.

Here’s how little we lost by:

Just 12 votes per precinct across the entire United States!

That’s it. With Harris behind by just 2.4 million votes out of the 152 million who voted, that’s an average of just 12 votes per precinct across the nearly 200,000 precincts in the U.S.

Is there anybody reading this who believes we can’t get just 12 more people out in our part of town to vote next time? Exactly! C’mon, yes, we just got a kick in the gut, it super sucks, we’ve got a real fight ahead of us — but we’re only a dozen people short per precinct! Is it really worth giving up? You’re just 12 raffle tickets short for the new band uniforms! You only need 12 more people to sell out the school play! You are just 12 pages short of finishing your first novel! Get a grip! Snap out of it! The administration Trump is currently forming — it’s like one of us wrote this script and he is unbelievably following it to the exact word! The Wrestling Lady will run our schools! The guy who beheads a whale, straps it to the top of his car and drops a dead bear he wanted to eat off in Central Park will be in charge of all our Health and Human Services! The weekend guy on Fox and Friends will be in charge of our 2 million soldiers and launching our nuclear missiles! And we actually got one of our own, an ex-Bernie campaigning Congresswoman who we all know really well, a crazed but lovely Hawaiian who looked higher than you at that Phish concert, to be in charge of all of our spy agencies! Yes!

Don’t ask me how we’ve pulled all this off. I keep pinching myself! One person who works at the White House told me this week, “Dude! How’d you guys mastermind this? With this set up, Trump’s presidency is going to crumble within 18 months!”

I didn’t like that. A lot of hurt will be enacted over 18 months. We’ll try to come up with more stuff that’ll shut him down by July.


In the meantime, about a month ago on Halloween, I posted free of charge my “How We Ended Up with Trump the First Time and How We Can Rid Ourselves of Him” movie — Fahrenheit 11/9 — on YouTube. Free to all. It was the Thursday before the Election, the last weekend before the Election, our final six days to try and get out the same vote we mobilized 4 years ago — to convince the majority that is already on our side NOT to take it for granted that Trump was going to lose and that they didn’t need to show up to the polls. Everyone had to show up! We failed to make that happen. 2.4 million of those who stood with us against Trump in 2020 decided to stay home. They felt abandoned and uninspired by a remarkable 107-day campaign led by perhaps the smartest person in our lifetime to run for President who, for those 107 days, embraced Wall Street (“I’m a Capitalist!”), hugged billionaires, toured swing states holding hands with “repentant” war-mongering Republicans, bragged about owning a Glock and spoke less and less about banning AR-15s. And in the final weeks, there were fewer labor leaders invited on stage, the campaign no longer addressed the true anger of the working class, it failed to promise a crackdown on inflation — greed-flation — with prosecutorial zeal and strict price controls by jailing corporate executives who jack up prices in order to post record profits. The campaign grew quiet about how heavily it was going to tax the rich, there was little talk about how the planet may have reached the point of no return in the climate catastrophe, or why was it that my factory worker father could afford to buy a house upon returning home from WWII, or I, with my high school education, could buy one at 24 — and yet I don’t know a single goddamn person under 40 today who owns their own home! The Democrats stopped promising old people a real increase in social security, refused to promise young people a debt-free college education, and for 30 years did nothing to give the working poor a real raise in the minimum wage — even though they had a Democrat in the Oval Office for over half of those years.

STOP PRETENDING TO BE SURPRISED THAT 2.4 MILLION WORKING CLASS DEMOCRATIC VOTERS STAYED HOME!!

Seriously, how do you lose an election to a fascist nutter when, according to every poll, the vast majority of Americans support legalizing abortion, banning assault weapons, guaranteeing paid family leave, free pre-K education, taxing the rich, term limits on the Supreme Court, ending gerrymandering and the Electoral College, removing money from politics, supporting labor unions, and demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. That’s us. The MAJORITY of Americans.

But we fell short — by a minuscule 1.6% of the total vote. We failed to convince our disappointed and depressed friends and neighbors to help us in this last-chance effort to stop a madman from returning to office.


It is now Thanksgiving. Tomorrow, millions of us will gather around the table with family and in-laws and friends. In many cases, there will be a Trump voter or several Trump voters sitting around the table with you. I know there are many, many, many of you who just can’t bear it, who can’t deal with the racism, the misogyny, the… well, the even more misogyny any longer — those of you who are boycotting the family Thanksgiving, or who’ve made other plans to enjoy the long weekend in peace and reflection, spending (charging) ridiculous sums on Black Friday, or who plan on just pulling the covers over your heads until it turns December.

All of us are still taking time to think about what exactly we can do next. What each of us can do to resist the coming storm. What each of us can do to get motivated and find hope for the fight ahead. We cannot give up, so we must find a way to resist, to stop them, to protect the vulnerable amongst us, to win in 2026 and in 2028. After our devastating loss to W. in 2004, we came back in 2006 and flipped both the House AND the Senate. And 2 years after that we elected the first African American president, the only candidate who opposed the Iraq War. We will come up with a strong and successful plan of action. I will help write that plan.

In the meantime, I will also leave Fahrenheit 11/9 up on YouTube in full for free and available indefinitely. The film will show you what we needed to do the last time Trump took office. There are good lessons we need to re-learn. You can watch it at this link on YouTube or right here:

Please watch this if only to be reminded that we must not wait for the Democratic Party to get its act together or to finally shrug off their corporate overlords and fight the right fight. We hold immense power in our hands — and we rarely act as if we know that.

This is a movie about resistance and a reminder of what is truly at stake in these “United States.”

As I say toward the end of the film, “the America I want to save is the America we’ve never had.” It’s time we take our majority and build that America.

— Mike

P.S. Again — for the third time in 8 years, by a vote of the American people, Trump lost a majority of the popular vote!


** In order to have a troll-free, hate-free comments section — and because if there’s one thing I know about my crazy haters, they would rather spend an eternity in hell with Marjorie Taylor Greene than send me $5 if forced to become a paid subscriber — my Comments section here on my Substack is limited to paid subscribers. But, not to worry — anyone can send me their comments, opinions and thoughts by writing to me at mike@michaelmoore.com. I read every one of them, though obviously I can’t respond to all. The solution here is not optimal but it has worked and my Comments section has become a great meeting place for people wanting to discuss the ideas and issues I raise here. There is debate and disagreement, but it is refreshing to have it done with respect and civility, unfettered by the stench of bigotry and Q-anon insanity.

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Not Broken

 


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Not Broken

Right now, it might feel like Donald Trump broke the rule of law. But, stop and consider for a moment: this is how Trump wants you to feel. This is how all of the people around him, the ones who envision their surge to take over government in January, want you to feel. They want you to feel defeated. They want you to feel like Project 2025 is inevitable. They want you to give up, stay at home, and slowly subside into miserably drinking wine.

That is not who we are. Democrats may have lost the last election, but that’s not the same thing as losing the Republic. Far from it. And Donald Trump has not broken the rule of law. He has tortured it and stretched it out of shape insofar as it applies to him. But he has not broken it, and he has not broken us. He cannot do that unless we let him, and I don’t intend to let him.

On Monday, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the judges overseeing the federal criminal cases against Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., and at the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss them. Judge Chutkan promptly entered an order dismissing the case the same day. The Eleventh Circuit followed suit.

The cases were dismissed “without prejudice” which means that technically, they could become live again if Trump were no longer president and there were a Justice Department willing to reinstate them. But let’s be realistic. The criminal cases are over.

Trump’s response on Truth Social was predictable:

Trump posted, “These cases, like all of the other cases I have been forced to go through, are empty and lawless, and should never have been brought.”

“It was a political hijacking, and a low point in the History of our Country that such a thing could have happened, and yet, I persevered, against all odds, and WON. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” he added.

It’s not true. Trump was indicted by a grand jury that considered actual evidence compiled by the Special Counsel’s investigation. It wasn’t conjecture or politics, which is what Trump is made of. The judges who considered the cases, including the United States Supreme Court, never dismissed them as political artifice, although Trump asked them to. Instead, they were permitted to move forward, and where there were impediments, they were legal ones involving whether presidents were entitled to immunity for criminal acts (the election interference case) or whether the Special Counsel was properly appointed (the classified documents case). The cases weren’t dismissed because they lacked merit, they were dismissed because Trump played a delay game and ran the clock out.

Since Trump raises it, the case in Manhattan that he tries to minimize resulted in a conviction before a jury of his peers. It was the only case where a trial jury was permitted to consider the evidence against Trump in a criminal case—not the politics, which they were forbidden from taking into account, and not a jury biased against Trump, as we know from what we learned about them during voir dire. So, their verdict was hardly “empty and lawless.” Nothing about any of these case was.

If anything, the courts bent over backwards to ensure defendant and convicted felon Donald Trump received the due process rights he was entitled to. That’s frustrating in some ways, but it’s also evidence that, as unsatisfying as the result in the two federal cases styled as U.S. v. Donald Trump was, our legal system is still in place. Trump walked away, which is a tragedy for the country. Defendants sometimes do, and it is always deeply disturbing when it’s on a technicality, even more so here because of what he tried to do to the country. But he has not irreperably broken our legal system, although it may feel that way right now. Yes, it needs work; it needs refinement so that someone like Trump can’t play games and escape accountability. But Trump gets that pass because of the singular foolishness of a majority of our fellow citizens in reelecting him. Had he lost, his cases would have proceeded to trial and justice would have been done. The fault, as distressing as it is, lies at least in part with the electorate.

I noted JD Vance’s tweet after the government moved to the dismiss, finding inadvertent confirmation of the view that justice would have been done had the election turned out differently—although he certainly didn’t mean it that way—when he wrote that Trump might have spent the rest of his life in prison if he’d lost the election. Vance characterizes this as “political,” but as a Yale-educated lawyer, he knows that the final decision would have turned on whether juries of Trump’s peers deliberated and found him guilty and on how independent Article III judges chose to sentence him. Those decisions, based on the facts and the law, are anything but political. But apparently, they’re too political for the crowd that was okay with “lock her up.”

We can, and likely will, debate whether the Justice Department could have gotten these cases to trial had it gotten a fast and focused start on day one of the Biden Administration. We can consider whether that kind of approach would have made it better or worse. But the reality is that Trump never faced accountability in federal court at the hands of a jury, and the question is, what are we going to do next now that he’s been reelected?

I am still a very proud American. I love this country. I love the Constitution and the rule of law. I’m grateful to live in a place where, unlike the Eastern European cities my great-grandparents escaped from, people are not hunted down and killed because of their religion. I’m grateful to live in a country where, despite the failings at the founding, we have progressed to include Black people and women as voters, and where we continue to aspire to be more inclusive and open, including action at the state and local level when a president threatens to go the other way. Our progress is not always linear, but it is still important and a sign that our country is worth fighting for, which I intend to do. Not in the January 6, attack-the-Capitol sense of the word, but intelligently and persistently, using the tools American democracy gives us to their best use.

We still have a First Amendment right to assemble, to petition our government, and to free speech and a free press. They are ours to insist upon or lose. I intend to insist.

We have a right to vote. Preparing for the upcoming midterm elections, where MAGA may try to make it difficult to vote, is essential. That means both encouraging good candidates to consider running starting now and making sure essential parts of the electorate who feel defeated by what has happened find their way to get back up again. We can’t afford to let anyone give up.

After the election, I wrote to you about my intention of creating a Democracy Index so that we have a way to focus on what the Trump Administration is doing without becoming either overwhelmed with Trump fatigue or distracted by the bright shiny object of the day. I remember what it felt like when the fresh horrors of the first Trump Administration smacked us in the face week after week and keeping everything bad that had happened straight because it was almost insurmountable unless you could devote 24 hours a day to it (which absolutely no one should have to do unless it’s their job and they’ve voluntarily agreed to it). That project is critical to me because understanding what’s happening in real-time—even if that understanding is imperfect and we need to evolve it over time as more details come to light—will be essential when, on the eve of the midterm election, someone who hasn’t been paying attention asks you, “Tell me three bad things this administration has done?”

The way to get through this? My personal North Star is Ben Franklin, who when asked about the form of government our new nation would have responded, “a Republic, if you can keep it.” I intend to keep it. That’s the work for the next four years. Can we do it? It requires resilience. We can’t quit because we lost an election.

Late October 2016, in Washington, D.C., my last trip up before the election that year.

This is, in large measure, about us and not about Donald Trump. Yes, we will have to pay attention to understand what he is doing and assess how dangerous it is, but we don’t have to give him control. We need to focus on why the Republic matters: so we can do the things we care about and spend time with the people we love, address climate change, secure the environment, improve infrastructure and wages—a path Joe Biden started us on—and, as outdated and silly as it may sound right now, live the American Dream. Isn’t that why we’re all here, so we can have good lives and so our children and grandchildren can have good lives—not so Donald Trump and his cronies can profit at our expense?

The cavalry isn’t coming. It’s just us. And I’m thankful we’re together for it. It's no surprise that people are exhausted. It's no surprise that they feel like they've given their all and been betrayed by a country that reelected the convicted felon. But history teaches us that progress is not linear and that people who want to have a democracy, who understand that it's worth fighting for, have to stay the course even at their lowest point.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C.

We have two choices: Give up or move forward.

It’s not even close. We have a Republic to keep, and we are not quitters.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

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Top News | Bernie Sanders Says 'No' to New Third Party

 

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

■ Today's Top News 


'Heartbreakingly Devastating': US Reportedly Plans to Approve $680 Million in Arms to Israel

"The Biden administration seems to be ready and willing to keep piling more and more, despite Gaza descending into what President Biden just yesterday described as 'hell,'" said Amnesty International USA.

By Jessica Corbett



As US Celebrates Thanksgiving, Israel-Imposed Starvation and Suffering in Gaza Intensifies

"There is no military necessity or justification under international law that permits the prevention of basic necessities from reaching a civilian population."

By Julia Conley



Musk Wants to Abolish Consumer Agency That Has Been a 'Model of Efficiency'

"This is systemic corruption at a grand and intolerable scale," one advocate said of the billionaire's call to "delete" the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

By Jake Johnson



'Pathetic': France Says It Will Not Enforce ICC Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu

"So they will apply this to Putin as well?" asked one political analyst.

By Julia Conley



Is Bernie Sanders Launching a Third Party? 'Not Right Now, No'

"Real change in this country will come about when an organized working class leads the fight for justice," the Vermont senator said in a new interview.

By Jake Johnson



New Biden Rule Would Rein in Medicare Advantage. Will Dr. Oz Let It Stand?

"There's every reason to expect the Trump administration to block these proposed rules from moving forward," warned Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman.

By Jake Johnson


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Your contribution supports this bold media model—free, independent, and dedicated to reporting the facts every day. Stand with us in the fight for economic equality, social justice, human rights, and a more sustainable future.

■ Opinion


The World's Biggest Liar Is Back — and How to Defeat Him

Fact-checkers will be needed more urgently and consistently than ever to hold the president and his GOP allies to account each and every day.

By Arnold R. Isaacs


No Time to Hide: We Need You!

We offer this comic-strip recalling the revolutionary promise proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Do not underestimate the power of that promise.

By Harvey J. Kaye,Matt Strackbein


A Corporate Media System Bound to Capitalism Delivers for Trump for a Second Time

The fact that Trump prevailed is a damning statement on the health of media institutions that have failed us over and over again.

By Victor Pickard


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Mike Johnson REMOVED As SPEAKER, 160 Republicans VOTE HIM OUT MOMENTS AGO?!?

  ELON MUSK & VIVEK RAMASWAMY DEFEATED BIPARTISAN CONTINUING  RESOLUTION & RISKED GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN!  THERE WAS A GOVERNMENT SHUTD...