Kinder, Gentler, Fascism

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Poster for the film

Kinder, Gentler, Fascism

By

Czar Donic

There are a lot of things going on.  Frankly, too many to really pay attention to any more.  However, here is a film, or transcript of an interview, about how it all started.

 

Farenrenheit 11/9"—That's the name of the new documentary premiering today by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, a stunning retelling of the 2016 election and its aftermath. 11/9. That's November 9, the day Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. In the film, Michael crosses the country, documenting not only the rise of Trumpism but also the teachers' strikes sweeping the nation, the "blue wave" of progressive candidates in the 2018 primaries, the rise of student activism after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the water crisis in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Moore spares no one in the wide-ranging documentary, which takes aim at the Democratic establishment, The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets, the Electoral College, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and even himself. Michael Moore joins us in our studio to talk about the film and much more.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Fahrenheit 11/9—that's the name of the new documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, a stunning retelling of the 2016 election and its aftermath. 11/9—that's November 9th, the day Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

In the film, Michael Moore crosses the country, documenting not only the rise of Trumpism but also the teachers' strikes sweeping the nation, the "blue wave" of progressive candidates in the 2018 primaries, the rise of student activism after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the water crisis in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Michael Moore spares no one in the wide-ranging documentary, which takes aim at the Democratic establishment, The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets, the Electoral College, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and even himself. Here's the trailer to Fahrenheit 11/9.

MICHAEL MOORE: How the [bleep] did this happen?

UNIDENTIFIED: I'm sick and tired of people telling me that America is the greatest country. Because we can whip your ass?

DONALD TRUMP: I hate some of these people, but I'd never kill them.

DAVID HOGG: How do you deal with this? You're never going to be able to unsee what you saw.

ROGER STONE: Try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence in this country like you've never seen.

MICHAEL MOORE: Governor Snyder, I've got some Flint water for you.

MARIO SAVIO: When the operation of the machine becomes so odious, you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, and you've got to make it stop!

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: If nobody's gonna do it, then I gotta do it!

UNIDENTIFIED: And I don't give a [bleep] who you are. I'll fight you in the damn street right now.

MICHAEL MOORE: OK, well, um—um—

How the [bleep] did this happen?

DONALD TRUMP: The American dream … is dead. Stop resisting.

STEPHEN MILLER: The president's powers here are beyond question.

MICHAEL MOORE: Ladies and gentlemen, the last president of the United States.

UNIDENTIFIED: Coming to an American city near you.

AMY GOODMAN: The trailer to Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 11/9. It opens today in 1,800 theaters across the country.

Well, earlier this week, Michael joined us in our studio. I began by asking him about the making of the film and if it's a sequel to his 2004 blockbuster, Fahrenheit 9/11, about George W. Bush.

MICHAEL MOORE: It's not a sequel. The title just sort of came to us because Trump was declared president by the Associated Press at 2:29 in the morning on 11/9/16. But it is a cousin to that film, in the sense that when Bush was installed in the White House and had us in a couple of wars fairly quickly, we were in pretty bad shape. And so, Fahrenheit 9/11 grew out of a desire to try and halt his efforts, especially the war effort.

We're in a different kind of war now. We're in a war with not just an individual who has taken over the White House—because, again, he wasn't elected, but he was appointed by the Electoral College—but Trump is the result of decades, decades of us allowing this country to go down a road that had very little to do with democracy and equal rights and what was fair, and very much toward letting the rich, letting corporate America, Wall Street run the show and call the shots.

So, when I say, for instance, that Donald Trump doesn't care much about democracy and is trying to whittle away whatever he can of what we call our democracy, that's really, to be fair to him, not really unusual. He's a CEO. He's a billionaire. Generally CEOs don't run their businesses like democracies. They don't like democracy. That's not how they live. It's not how they run their business. And as billionaires, they want to grab as much of the pie for themselves as possible. So they're not into everybody having a slice of the pie or a fair slice of the pie or a seat at the table. So, he's really just acting like most people of his class.

You know, I mean, I've got to believe if you're a billionaire, you've got to really hate a system that says it's one person, one vote. Because if we really are one person, one vote, that means there's 325 million of us and probably less than a thousand of them. Imagine if you were on the other side, if you were one of them. That doesn't look very good, because it means that 325 million can just suddenly pass laws and tell you what to do.

So the basic concept of our democracy is that, but they know that they've been able to run that show because they've bought it. They buy the politicians, they buy the elections, and they have most working people in such a box that they know that if they were to protest, if they were to speak out, if they were to whistle-blow, that would be the end of their income.

And starting with Bill Clinton, we began eliminating the safety net when you don't have an income. And so, we're now at the point where they've got those 325 million right where they want them—scared that they aren't going to be able to pay next month's bills. Best statistic I saw recently—maybe you saw it—that the majority of Americans, almost 67 percent, do not have enough money in the bank or in their pocket to, if a loved one passed away tonight, and they lived here in New York, and the loved one was in California, they don't have the money for the plane ticket to go to California. In other words, they don't have—the majority of Americans don't have $400 to $500 available in any form to them at any moment.

That's the America we live in, and boy, does the billionaire class love that, because that's when you've got them. You don't ever think about, when you're in that situation, of complaining about what's going on, starting a union or taking the day off to go to the funeral of a loved one.

In his new documentary "Fahrenheit 11/9," filmmaker Michael Moore interviews the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, Ben Ferencz, who describes President Trump's policy of family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border and the large-scale detention of immigrant children as a "crime against humanity." Moore also looks at the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany and compares it to the rise of Trump in the United States.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We return now to our conversation with Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. His new film, Fahrenheit 11/9, opens today around the country. This is a clip from the film about the recent wave of teacher strikes that began in West Virginia.

REPORTER: This was the chilly scene outside Point Harmony Elementary Friday morning: upwards of 50 teachers lining the sidewalk, all on a mission.

MICHAEL MOORE: The teachers decided on their own to go out on strike and do it by themselves, one school district at a time.

JUSTIN ENDICOTT: All of Mingo County is on the courthouse steps.

UNKNOWN: People are chanting. We're Facebook Live-streaming that. And other counties are commenting on there and saying, "I wish I was there." It escalated really quickly. So, four go out. Then seven go out. And then—

NICOLE PORTER: Fifty-five of 55 counties. The strike will go on in all of them tomorrow.

STRIKING TEACHERS: Fifty-five strong!

AMY GOODMAN: That's from Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning filmmaker. It's his latest film. These teacher strikes, Michael, and teachers in this country, what they're going through?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, there's an uprising going on right now with teachers all over the country. And it's one of the best things I've seen in a long time. These teachers in West Virginia, they're fighters. Their union, their own union, their leadership tried to discourage them from going out on strike. They wouldn't listen to them. They went out on strike. They got all 55 counties to go out on strike.

STRIKING TEACHERS: Fifty-five united! Fifty-five united! Fifty-five united!

MICHAEL MOORE: And then, when they finally got the governor to give them what they wanted—

AMY GOODMAN: Governor Justice.

MICHAEL MOORE: Governor Jim Justice—I know. You can't write this stuff, right? The bus drivers and the lunch ladies and everybody else were also on strike with the teachers. He would only give the raise to the teachers. And they said, "No, you've got to give it to the bus drivers and the cooks and the janitors and everybody else." And he wouldn't do it, so they wouldn't go back to school. They stayed out on strike until there was justice for the custodians and the people in the lunchroom and the bus drivers. That kind of solidarity, if we all ever get together and support each other, and not cross each other's picket lines, that is the scariest thing for these people, because they won't know what to do. They won't be able to run their businesses. They won't be able to run their schools. They won't be able to do anything.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of running, talk about Fitbits.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, this was the crazy thing, that this governor, they were trying to think of ways to reduce the healthcare costs. So, the first idea was, "Well, let's charge the teachers more for their healthcare. Like let's double what they've got to contribute. And then let's make them wear Fitbits," where they'd have to buy their own Fitbits, and the Fitbit would send how many steps they're taking, what physical activity they're doing—

AMY GOODMAN: This is a little watch, like a bracelet.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, it's like a little bracelet, but it records what you're doing. And in this case, in West Virginia, it would send to a central computer at the Board of Education just how active you were being. If you—by the end of the month or the end of the year or whatever, if you didn't take enough steps, if you didn't do enough physical activity, you were fined something like $500. And they knew everything you were doing from this Fitbit. So that was the other part of the negotiations: The Fitbits had to go. And they were successful in getting rid of them.

AMY GOODMAN: And teachers selling their blood?

ANDREA THOMAS: My husband, he even sells plasma, you know, his own plasma, when things get super tough. It's caused us—

AMY GOODMAN: He sells his blood?

ANDREA THOMAS: Yes.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. Well, this is—I mean, boy, this is a scene I had in Roger & Me 30 years ago, where the people of Flint were going to sell their plasma at the plasma center because either the job they had didn't earn enough money to keep them above the poverty level, or they had lost their General Motors job. And so, you would walk into this plasma center, and you'd see all of these chairs, that were like medical chairs, with everybody, you know, being tapped.

UNIDENTIFIED: I only do it with my right arm. It's not so bad. They don't track it up. They only do it in two places.

MICHAEL MOORE: I mean, it really looked like a scene from Soylent Green or some kind of weird sci-fi movie, where, in the future, everybody's blood was being sucked from them. And the fact that 30 years later I would be dealing with the same thing is just—I can't tell you how angry I am, frankly, that we're still living in this kind of society.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, that takes me to the last clip that we're going to play from your film. We're talking to Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning filmmaker, who won that Oscar for Bowling for Columbine, yet another school shooting. But this one is a clip that features 99-year-old Ben Ferencz, the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor.

DONALD TRUMP: Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.

REPORTER: Last week, ICE agents fanned out in raids like this one in every state.

SEN. JEFF MERKLEY: Ripping children away from their families under this new policy.

UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] Where are you from?

CHILD 1: El Salvador.

UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] And you?

CHILD 2: Guatemala.

UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] Don't cry.

CHILD 2: [translated] I want to go with my aunt and daddy.

UNIDENTIFIED: [translated] This lady is going to help you.

CHILD 2: Papa! Papa! Papa!

BEN FERENCZ: Taking babies away from their mother and locking up one or the other and separating them—because they did no harm to anybody, they just didn't comply with the stupid regulations—that's a crime against humanity, in my judgment.

AMY GOODMAN: Ben Ferencz, the last Nuremberg prosecutor. Explain, Michael Moore.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, I wanted to go speak to him. I didn't realize there was only one surviving Nuremberg prosecutor. He lives just outside the city here. He is 99. I think his wife is turning 100 in another month or so. And he is a witness from the past, a witness to what happens when you allow fascism to become the way of life and the law of the land. And he's very powerful, the things he says in the film. At one point he says that Donald Trump, in doing some of these things that he's done, is committing crimes against humanity. And he says, "You know, this is—I can't deal with this, because I'm thinking, you know, we hung people for doing some of these things, for behaving like this."

And one of the inspirations to make this film was a book I had read back in the 1980s by Bertram Gross called Friendly Fascism. And in the book, Gross says that the fascism of the 21st century will not come with concentration camps and swastikas; it will come with a smiley face and a TV show, that the fascism that will take hold in the 21st century, there won't be a lot of guns fired, because the population will be brainwashed enough. First they'll be dumbed down—you know, ruin their schools, reduce their press, put whistleblowers in jail. And then brand things—the smiley face. Don't use swastikas. Just make it happy. "You're going to be happier if you go my way, the Trump way."

And this is what I find most frightening when I think about, and what I hope this film does in terms of ripping the mask off, what's really going on here, that we are on—you used the word "precipice" earlier. We are on a precipice. We are on that edge. Democracy has no self-correcting mechanism. It's a piece of paper, the Constitution. I know we like to get all teary-eyed and all goo-goo about, you know, our wonderful Constitution. It's a piece of paper. And it's the human beings in each era that decide exactly what's going to go on, which part we're going to listen to and which part we're not, of this Constitution. And if we get too close to the edge, where we've given up too many of our rights, where we've allowed the democracy to be whittled down, where we've made voting a most difficult thing to do for people who have the right to vote and should be voting—if we do all of that, it could easily fall off that cliff. Before you know it, it could be gone. And you have to operate with that.

You know, you'll hear from people on other networks or other shows I'll be on, "Well, Mike, why are you making the comparisons between Hitler and Trump?" And I always say to them, "Well, that's really not the movie." The movie is more comparing us to the Germans, the "good Germans," one of the most civilized, cultured, educated, liberal democracies on the planet Earth. And they went along. There was a national emergency. The Reichstag burned down—their parliament. And, you know, Hitler said, "The Communists did it. We've got to get rid of these Communists."

And sure enough, you know, Hitler's party won 32 percent of the parliament in 1932, 32 percent, which was the most. Nineteen percent went to the Communists, and then the others were mostly—mostly liberal, left parties, Social Democrats, etc. By Hitler getting rid of those 19 Communist seats or the 19 percent of the seats, all of a sudden, he had a chance to take those. Nineteen and 32 is 51. Now you're the majority.

But he was worried. Hitler was worried that, "Eh, this is a little—I'm pushing this a little here. The people—we're a democracy. They aren't going to like this." So he holds a plebiscite, a number of months later. He holds a plebiscite and asks the people, "Yes or no? Are you OK with us, the Nazis, taking over here? And I'm going to be both president and chancellor." Hindenburg had one of those jobs. He was an old man, and then he died. Not—he just died. He was old; he just died. Not trying to pin that on Hitler, OK? But he died, and Hitler said, "I should be—I should have his job. I should be president and chancellor. Can I?"

And they went and had an election, and the majority of Germans voted "yes." And I show that, the ballot, in the movie. They voted "yes" for this. And the front-page editorial in the Jewish weekly of Frankfurt, Germany, said, "OK, everybody, fellow Jews, calm down. It's OK. Yes, he's crazy. Yes, his people are thugs. But, you know, it's not going to be as bad as a lot of you are thinking. Come on. We're Germans. This is a democracy. You know, we are not going to be rounded up and put into ghettos, because we have a Constitution." This is the editorial in the Jewish weekly.

AMY GOODMAN: You held this up during your Broadway play.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, right. And it's in the movie, because I want people—anybody who is still thinking, "Mike, Mike, calm down, Mike. I mean, Trump. I mean, yes, he's cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but come on! You know, don't be scaring the people like this!" I'm not scaring anybody. If you are not already terrified by what he is doing, by what he is up to—I'm serious, and everybody else needs to get serious, too.

I took this man seriously from the beginning, and I'm here and I'm telling you now that he has his plans for the way he'd like things to be. He has no intention of leaving the White House. He knows he cannot be indicted. He knows the Constitution won't allow Mueller to indict him. He can be an unindicted—not co-conspirator, but he'll be an unindicted criminal. But he doesn't think he's going to be impeached. He's going to call it all rigged. Even if he loses the 2020 election, he'll say it's rigged.

He has plans for calling off the election. Republicans last year were asked, "If he wanted to postpone the election because of all of these 'illegals' that are voting"—you know, if Hillary got those 3 million "illegal" votes—"would you support him postponing the election?" Fifty-two percent of Republicans said that they would support Trump postponing the 2020 election. We have to get serious about this, and we have to be real.

And if I could just tell you one last story, I tried to convince Steve Bannon to sit down in front of my camera so I could ask him some questions. He said, "Well, I'll need to talk to you first. Let me come by, and we'll see." And he came over to my production office, and I sat there with him for two hours, talking to him. And I said, "Just tell us, really, how did you pull this off? How did you and Trump outsmart maybe the smartest candidate ever to run for office—just on pure IQ alone, perhaps, one of the smartest?"

And he said, "Well, I have a very easy answer for you. Our side, we go for the head wound. Your side, you like to have pillow fights. And that's why we'll win. Even though I agree with you"—as he says to me, and as I show in the film—there's more of us than there are of them. He's not afraid of that, because they're fighters, and they will stand up, and they will fight for the things they believe in. And they know we will back down, and we will compromise, and we will say, "OK, Obamacare is OK, even though it's not really universal healthcare. Yeah, we'll go along with that. You know, we're just happy that our kids can be covered until they're 26." And we just rationalize all this stuff.

And they know that about us, and they know how to defeat us with that. They have no intention of going away. And this is the angry white man party. And they know their days are numbered, because this nation right now is almost 70 percent either female, people of color or young adults between the ages of 18 and 35, or a combination of those three things. That's America. They know it. They know their days are numbered, and they're going to try to grab whatever they can, before—

AMY GOODMAN: And suppress the vote.

MICHAEL MOORE: And suppress the vote, and gerrymander it and do whatever they can—pack the Supreme Court—whatever it is, they're going to try and do it, because they know we will not put our bodies on the line to stop them.

AMY GOODMAN: Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. His new film Fahrenheit 11/9 opens in theaters today. Tune in Monday, when we'll play more of the interview with Michael on Flint, Michigan, and the rise of progressive congressional candidates. And to hear him talk about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanuagh and the accusations against him, visit democracynow.org.

We continue our conversation with Michael Moore about his interaction with Donald Trump on Roseanne Barr's talk show in November 1998. Moore had released the film "Roger & Me" nine years earlier. Trump was upset to learn the two would be appearing together and threatened to leave, Moore says. Michael Moore negotiated with Trump, asked him not to leave, and promised not to "go after" him over real estate dealings and charges of racism—and now says he was "played."

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you go, Michael Moore, way back with Donald Trump. And in the film, you show this.

MICHAEL MOORE: You mean I personally go way back?

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's go back to 1998, when you appear on Roseanne Barr's talk show along with Donald Trump.

ROSEANNE BARR: My next guest is kind of the polar—philosophical polar opposite of Donald Trump, I think, but maybe not. We'll find out. His first film was the classic documentary Roger & Me, which was so great. Please welcome my blue-collar panelist, Michael Moore.

DONALD TRUMP: He's terrific, I tell you. I loved what he did.

ROSEANNE BARR: He is terrific.

DONALD TRUMP: If I was Roger, I wouldn't have liked it, but I enjoyed it.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well—

DONALD TRUMP: I hope he never does one on me, though. I would—

AMY GOODMAN: His nightmare begins September 21st, when your film is out, Fahrenheit 11/9. So talk about that moment, at Tavern on the Green, in 1998.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, Roseanne's sitcom was over, and, you know, it was one of the most popular shows ever. She had a very working-class, very good—her whole thing back then was really solid, good politically, everything. But the show was over, and ABCdecided to give her an afternoon show, talk show. And so she called up and said, would I come on the show? She's going to—they did it in L.A., but they were going to do a week in New York, at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. And I said, "Sure."

And I get there, and I didn't realize Trump was going to be the other guest, which I was very happy about. So, he wasn't. He didn't know I was going to be on the show. Two years earlier, we were both booked to be on the old Politically Incorrect. I think back then it was on Comedy Central, before it was on ABC.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Maher's show.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, his first show. And when I got there, on Politically Incorrect, and he saw that I was there, he split. He split. They were like now all of a sudden without a guest, a fourth guest on the show. He would not appear anywhere with me, and he did not know I was going to be on Roseanne, and now he's really upset.

AMY GOODMAN: And you had done Roger & Me already.

MICHAEL MOORE: Now, I had done—yes. This is 10 years after Roger & Me. Almost 10 years. So he knows—

AMY GOODMAN: About General Motors.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. And I've done TV Nation at that time. And I was in the process of starting The Awful Truth, which was the TV Nation when we moved it to another network. So, he decides to leave again. And they ask him to please wait. They come to me, and they say, "Oh, my god, he's going to leave because of you. We don't want you to leave. Can you just talk to him? Can you just calm him down or whatever?" And I said, "Sure, sure."

So I went over to him—and this part isn't in the movie—but I go over to him, I shake his hand. It's all clammy, and I don't know why he's all nervous about me. And I said, "They said you're thinking of leaving." "Well, I don't want to like go up there on the show—I don't want to go out and mix it up and, you know." I said, "This is an afternoon talk show. It's Roseanne. It's comedy. Just relax. Don't leave." And essentially, I kind of promised him not to go after his—by that point, his various real estate dealings, what he was—how he was treating the workers, the Central Park Five, discriminating against—I think out of the thousands of apartments they had out in their so-called middle-class housing in the boroughs, seven were rented to black families.

And to get him not to leave, I sort of promise him. And then, so he does the show. And you'll see, when you see the movie, I joke around a little, but I don't go after him.

AMY GOODMAN: So you're the reason he's president today?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, I'm just saying, I didn't realize 'til later, especially until when he was running and I was watching his performance art, I thought, "Wow, this guy is good." When he talks about the art of the deal—he was playing me. He was negotiating the moment so he would be left alone by this documentary filmmaker who goes after corporate CEOs. And I thought, "Man, like, so this is how he's gotten this far." If he was no good at this, if he was just a charlatan, he wouldn't have lasted this long in New York City. He really knew how to play it and to play people.

And so, when I look at that now, I just think, even though I'm 20 years younger there—and I know you want to say, "I couldn't tell" I just, all these years later, I'm thinking, "Wow, you know, you never back down, Mike,"—I'm saying to myself—"and you backed down." Mainly because I felt bad for Roseanne so that her show wouldn't be ruined that day.

Now, here we are in 2018. I don't feel bad about Roseanne at all. She's totally gone off the cliff. You know, when I see the two of them together on the show, they're the enemy at that point—now—and what do you call the opposite of hindsight? Present sight, future sight? Wherever we're at now, we know what the score is.

AMY GOODMAN: Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. He's out with a new one today, Fahrenheit 11/9. We'll be back with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: "Demagogue," performed by Lila Downs here in our Democracy Now! studios. To see her perform the whole song, as well as the interview, go to democracynow.org.

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In July, 2016, Michael Moore wrote a column titled "Five Reasons Why Trump Will Win." In it, Moore wrote, "Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, 'cause you'll be saying them for the next four years: 'PRESIDENT TRUMP.'" He went on to list the five reasons why Trump would be elected: Trump's focus on the Midwest, "The Last Stand of the Angry White Man," "The Hillary Problem," "The Depressed Sanders Vote" and what he called the "Jesse Ventura Effect"—people voting for Trump simply to disrupt the system. We talk to Michael Moore about his predictions and how Democrats failed to take Trump more seriously.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman, as we return to our conversation with the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. His new film, out today, Fahrenheit 11/9. I spoke to him earlier this week.

AMY GOODMAN: In your film, you start with that remarkable day, but you actually start before. And you were talking about this way before. You wrote in July 2016, again, before Trump was elected—

MICHAEL MOORE: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —"5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win." In it, you wrote, quote, "Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, 'cause you'll be saying them for the next four years: 'PRESIDENT TRUMP.'"

You went on to list the five reasons you believed Trump would be president: Trump's focus on the Midwest, "The Last Stand of the Angry White Man," "The Hillary Problem," "The Depressed Sanders Vote" and what he called the "Jesse Ventura Effect"—people voting for Trump simply to disrupt the system. You were predicting this well in advance. And you show anyone who says something otherwise in the corporate media. This moment of George Stephanopoulos and Keith Ellison is priceless.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. OK, first of all, I take no pleasure in being right. I never wanted to be more wrong when I wrote that. But I had just come back from the U.K., where my last film, Where to Invade Next, had just opened, and so I went and did press throughout the U.K., in London, in Sheffield, ending up in Belfast, and a lot of crowds and theater screenings with the working class of the United Kingdom.

This was the week before Brexit, and I saw what I see and hear a lot in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Ohio and elsewhere, where people didn't necessarily like or were in love with the idea of Brexit, but they loved being able to have the chance to go into the voting booth and throw a Molotov cocktail into the middle of a system that had left them broke and in despair.

And when we left the U.K. there just before the vote, you know, we were all saying—my crew and friends—"Wow, this just sounds like many parts of the United States, and it looks like Brexit's going to pass," even though all the polls said that it wasn't going to. We came back here, and of course all the polls—you know, Brexit did pass—and all the polls here were saying that Hillary had it in the bag.

AMY GOODMAN: And the day that Brexit passed, Donald Trump flew into Scotland to sell his—you know, to push the sale of his golf course.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And a young comedian stood up right before he spoke on this windswept precipice and said something like, "Donald Trump's balls are available in the golf shop."

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And he's showing these red golf balls—

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —with swastikas on them.

LEE NELSON: These are the new balls available from the clubhouse as part of the new Trump Turnberry range, and I forgot to hand them out before.

UNIDENTIFIED: That's that comedian, isn't it?

MICHAEL MOORE: There were people who were trying to warn everybody else to not treat this as a joke, to take Trump seriously. And so, I immediately started—I wrote that piece that you just referred to, and I went on Bill Maher, and I told the audience there that Trump was going to win, and he was going to win by winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the three states—electoral states that he won by. And I got booed. I got booed on Bill Maher. People did not want to hear it.

And I said, "Look, I'm not saying it because I want that to happen. I'm saying it that we'd better realize they're having the Democratic convention this week, and they're popping the champagne corks as if it's a done deal." Because everybody's mindset then, throughout August and September and October, was that, "How could she lose, to this guy?" And, in fact, she won. She won by 3 million votes. So that part, people had right. But I just kept telling people, "Look, you're not looking at the right picture here. You're all liberal arts majors. You suck at math and geography. This is going to come down to the Electoral College. Are you counting this?"

Yes, in those popular vote polls, she was ahead, but that's unfortunately not the way the president gets picked. And because the Democratic Party and others have led no fight to get rid of the Electoral College since President Gore won in 2000—you'd think, after that, people would go, "You know, this Electoral College, I think it's time for it to go." No.

Now, there have been good people who have got the national popular vote thing going, and they've got it passed in a lot of states. If you haven't heard of this, go on NationalPopularVote.com. We have to get enough states to pass this law. The law says—can I go into this? Can I just explain this? The law says that if you pass the—in your state, that your state's electors will go to whoever wins the popular vote. But we've got to get enough states where we get the 270 electoral votes. We've got enough states now that have passed this where we're up to 172 electoral votes. So we just need enough states that have 98 electoral votes left, and then that's that, and now the winner who actually wins the popular vote will be the president of the United States. So there's a possibility of fixing this without having to go through the machinations of changing the Constitution.

So, to get back to what happened in the summer of '16, I couldn't get anywhere, and I couldn't convince Democratic Party leadership types. I couldn't get people who vote Democratic to listen to me. I started to feel that I must have communication skill issues, because somehow I'm not getting this through to people: "You're not taking Trump seriously."

AMY GOODMAN: And you were talking about the blue states that—

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —that Obama had won, that you thought Trump was going to win.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, right, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Ohio and your home state of Michigan.

MICHAEL MOORE: And Pennsylvania, right. And I just couldn't get anybody to listen. Nobody thought it could happen, because—"Are you kidding? He's such an idiot. He's crazy." I said, "That's why he's going to win. You don't understand. He's an incredible performance artist."

People love The Apprentice. I mean, people between the Hudson River and Interstate 5 love The Apprentice. They loved him on it, because here's what he did every week. Whoever the biggest jerk was on the show that week got to hear, "You're fired." And everybody works with that jerk. Wherever you work, there's that one jerk. And the cathartic feeling you got watching The Apprentice, of hearing somebody fire that jerk—people loved that show, and they loved Trump, and they loved hearing him say, "You're fired."

But I couldn't get anybody to listen to this, because on the coasts, within the bubble, within the bubble of the Democratic Party infrastructure, they don't watch The Apprentice. They also don't watch The Bachelorette either, by the way, which is a great show. I'm just saying that I pay attention to what my fellow Americans are watching and listening to.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where does Gwen Stefani fit into this picture?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, Gwen Stefani—this is what I have known from the beginning of this, is that Trump found out—he was in negotiations for re-upping The Apprentice with NBC, and he found out that Gwen Stefani, who is one of the stars of The Voice, another show you're not watching—

AMY GOODMAN: You can't say that about me, but you're looking at the audience right now when you say that.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. I'm look—I'm actually looking at the entire audience, the people watching right now who know that they don't watch The Voice or The Apprentice. Well, you can't watch it anymore; that one's off the air. Anyways, he found out that somebody else was getting paid more than him on NBC. And not just somebody else—can I say it?—a woman. A woman was being paid more than Donald J. Trump. And that, you know, makes him go—like this.

So, he decides that he's going to show NBC. He contacts another network to put them in competition for each other for The Apprentice, and then he comes up with this idea of holding an announcement—not for real, just it's going to be a pretend thing. He's going to hold an announcement announcing he's running for president, and he's going to have a couple rallies, and he's going to show these networks just how much the American people love him, out there in that vast, wide swath of land.

And so that's the big plan. But then—so he comes down the escalator, makes the announcement and goes off the rails and starts calling Mexicans rapists and criminals and murderers and whatever else. And a few days later—

AMY GOODMAN: And the people cheering?

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. Well, the people are cheering—people are cheering—if you've seen that escalator—I think, by now, most people have seen the escalator, coming down with Melania. The people cheering down there are extras, and he has paid extras $50 apiece to be there in Trump T-shirts and holding signs and all of that. It's all fake. It's all fake. It's as fake as the gold-plated escalator he's coming down. It's gold-plated, folks; it's not real gold. He comes down, he says this about Mexicans, and within days NBC fires him.

DONALD TRUMP: They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

MICHAEL MOORE: It goes completely against what he thinks is going to happen, and now they don't want him at all, and now he's lost his job because of his racism. And he's already booked and paid for these two events. I believe one was in Phoenix and one was in Mobile, Alabama. And, you know, they're paid for. They've rented the arenas or the auditoriums or whatever. And now, this is the part that I'm not privy to his conversations with Don Jr. and Eric, although I usually am, but not this one.

AMY GOODMAN: I'm going to ask you about your relationship with Jared, but that's coming.

MICHAEL MOORE: OK, I'm ready for it. I'm here. This is full transparency. But they decide, "We've already paid for it. Let's go and do the rallies." So they go and do the rallies. And we show in the film the look on Trump's face. There's 40,000 people in that stadium in Mobile, Alabama, and he cannot believe it. I mean, he's never been in front of 40,000 people. He's never had that experience, like you and I have.

But there is something when you stand on a stage and there's a lot of people. OK, I'll—it happened to me at the University of Florida. They changed me from the auditorium into the basketball arena. It had never happened before. And they were people just coming to hear me talk, and there's 14,000 people in the arena. When you step on that stage and 14,000 people are cheering, you're like, "Wow! I'm glad I didn't listen to my guidance counselors."

And so you see the look, though. I show the look in his face in my movie. You see the epiphany taking place in his head. It's like, "Well, maybe running for president isn't such a bad idea. To hell with NBCand The Apprentice." And he decides to actually go ahead with it.

Remember early on where pundits and people were saying, "There's no campaign apparatus. There's nobody in charge. There's no place—how do you donate to the campaign?" Right? It was all that, "He's not really running. He's not really wanting to do the job. This is just some kind of stunt." I mean, it was kind of obvious to everybody. But I actually show how the stunt got launched.

And then we end up being the losers for it in the long run, because he decides he likes it. He loves these crowds, and they just keep getting bigger. And the rest is history.

AMY GOODMAN: And you have people like Les Moonves, now disgraced, who was saying things like, you know, "It's great for us. It just may not be great for America."

LES MOONVES: Who would have thought that this circus would come to town? But, you know, it may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS. That's all I've got to say.

MICHAEL MOORE: Les Moonves, who was the head of CBS, and Jeff Zucker, who is the head of CNN, both kind of copped to the fact that they were putting him on the air a lot for free. He didn't have to pay for any of this. It's why Hillary—if you look at what she spent, she spent—well, he spent about $300,000—I'm sorry, $300 million. She spent almost a billion on her campaign. He didn't have to spend a billion, because he got all this free airtime from the mainstream networks. And in the film, I show Moonves and Zucker yukking it up over how great it is that Donald Trump is running, because it was very good for business and they sold a lot more ads.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have the red carpet treatment from the networks, you know, wall-to-wall coverage of his speeches. Often, I mean, the other candidates, like, for example, Bernie Sanders, got nothing, nothing like this—

MICHAEL MOORE: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: —even though he had some of the largest crowds of any of the candidates, Republican and Democrat.

MICHAEL MOORE: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And I want to go back to that moment of George Stephanopoulos and Keith Ellison, the congressman from Minneapolis.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah. So Keith Ellison is on the Sunday morning show that George has on ABC. And Keith says, very seriously, "You know, you should take Trump seriously. He could end up leading the Republican Party ticket." And George Stephanopoulos just starts laughing hysterically, and our good friend Katrina over at The Nation, she's there on the panel. She's laughing. I mean, everybody was laughing. People watching this show were probably laughing. I mean, nobody really took it seriously, because it just—that is not—"A lot of bad things can happen in this country; That is not going to happen."

REP. KEITH ELLISON: This man has got some momentum, and we'd better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the Republican ticket.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: I know you don't believe that, but I want to go on to Maggie [inaudible]—

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Sorry to laugh.

MICHAEL MOORE: But a few people, like Keith Ellison, were trying to warn people, "You've got to take anybody seriously when they say something like this." And I think now, after all this time, we realize that Donald Trump is always lying and he's always telling the truth. And you have to be able to operate on both levels with him.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, when he says, "I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it," you know that he's not going to shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue—I hope—but you know he could get away with it. I mean, both are true. And it's always that way with him. So, I pay close attention to him when he says things that sound crazy and you think he's just being crazy. I always go, "Well, you know, he may mean that."

I mean, even in the film, when he says that about, "We're not going to arm teachers"—you know, after Parkland, Florida—"We're not going to arm teachers," and then, within two seconds, he goes, "Well, maybe 20 percent of them." And then, two seconds later, "It could be 40 percent. It could be all"—he just—it's like he says one thing that could be the truth, but he switches it up within seconds. This happens all the time. He'll switch something up the same day, or within a day or two.

Part of that process—and this is the evil genius of Trump—is that he knows how to keep, especially liberals, all scatterbrained and not knowing—"Well, what—what's he—what's going on? What? Wait a minute. He said that. But, no, he said that. No, he said that." But we take people—when people say something, we take it literally. He knows he can just say stuff, get everybody discombobulated, and he becomes the master distractor. He knows how to get people off the topic and on to something else so that we won't really be paying attention to what he's really up to.

AMY GOODMAN: Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. His new film Fahrenheit 11/9 is out today. We'll be back with more of Moore in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: "If I Was President" by Las Cafeteras, here in our Democracy Now! studio. To hear the whole song and interview, go to democracynow.org. I'm Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman, as we return now to our conversation with Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. His new film, Fahrenheit 11/9 opens today around the country. This is a clip from the film about the recent wave of teacher strikes that began in West Virginia.

REPORTER: This was the chilly scene outside Point Harmony Elementary Friday morning. Upwards of 50 teachers lining the sidewalk, all on a mission.

MICHAEL MOORE: The teachers decided on their own to go out on strike and do it by themselves, one school district at a time.

JUSTIN ENDICOTT: All of Mingo County is on the courthouse steps.

UNKNOWN: People are chanting. We're Facebook Live streaming that. And other counties are commenting on there and saying, "I wish I was there." It escalated really quickly. So four go out. Then seven go out. And then—

NICOLE PORTER: —55 of 55 counties. The strike will go on in all of them tomorrow.

CROWD: [chanting]

AMY GOODMAN: That's from Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning filmmaker—it's his latest film. These teacher strikes, Michael, and teachers in this country, what they're going through.

MICHAEL MOORE: There's an uprising going on right now with teachers all over the country, and it's one of the best things I've seen in a long time. These teachers in West Virginia, they're fighters. Their union, their own union, their leadership tried to discourage them from going out on strike. They wouldn't listen to them. They went out on strike. They got all 55 counties to go out on strike.

CROWD: [inaudible chanting]

MICHAEL MOORE: And then when they finally got the governor to give them what they wanted—

AMY GOODMAN: Governor Justice.

MICHAEL MOORE: Governor Jim Justice. [laugh]. I know. You can't write this stuff, right? The bus drivers and the lunch ladies and everybody else were also on strike with the teachers. He would only give the raise to the teachers, and they said, "No, you've got to give it to the bus drivers and the cooks and the janitors and everybody else." And he wouldn't do it, so they wouldn't go back to school. They stayed out on strike until there was justice for the custodians and the people in the lunch room and the bus drivers. That kind of solidarity, if we all ever get together and support each other, and not cross each other's picket lines, that is the scariest thing for these people, because they won't know what to do. They won't be able to run their businesses, they won't be able to run their schools, they won't be able to do anything.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of running, talk about Fitbits.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, this was the crazy thing, that this governor, they were trying to think of ways to reduce the health care costs. So The first idea was, "Well, let's charge the teachers more for their health care. Like let's double what they've got to contribute. And then let's make them wear Fitbits." Where they'd have to buy their own Fitbits, and the Fitbit would send how many steps they're taking, what physical activity they're doing—

AMY GOODMAN: This is a little watch, like a bracelet.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, it's like a little bracelet, but it records what you're doing. And in this case, in West Virginia, it would send to a central computer at the Board of Education just how active you were being. If you by the end of the month or the end of the year or whatever, if you didn't take enough steps, if you didn't do enough physical activity, you were fined something like $500. And they knew everything you were doing from this Fitbit. So that was the other part of the negotiations—the Fitbits had to go.

AMY GOODMAN: [laugh]

MICHAEL MOORE: And they were successful in getting rid of them.

AMY GOODMAN: And teachers selling their blood?

ANDREA THOMAS: My husband, he even sells plasma—you know, his own plasma—when things get super tough. It has caused us—

AMY GOODMAN: He sells his blood?

ANDREA THOMAS: Yes. [laugh]

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. Well, this is—I mean, this is a scene I had in Roger & Me 30 years ago where the people of Flint were going to sell their plasma at the plasma center because either the job they had didn't earn enough money to keep them above the poverty level, or they had lost their General Motors job. And so you would walk into this plasma center and you would see all of these chairs that were like medical chairs with everybody being tapped.

UNKNOWN: I only do it with my right arm. It's not so bad. They don't track it up. They only do it in two places.

MICHAEL MOORE: It really looked like a scene from Soylent Greenor some kind of weird Sci-Fi movie, where, in the future, everybody's blood was being sucked from them.
And the fact that 30 years later I would be dealing with the same thing is just—I can't tell you how angry I am, frankly, that we are still living in this kind of society.

A Senate hearing with Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford may not move forward, as Blasey Ford asks for the FBI to investigate her claims that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her as a teenager before she testifies. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley had invited Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh to both testify on Monday, but Blasey Ford's attorneys are declining the offer. Her lawyers wrote in a letter to Grassley, "While Dr. Ford's life was being turned upside down, you and your staff scheduled a public hearing for her to testify at the same table as Judge Kavanaugh in front of two dozen U.S. Senators on national television to relive this traumatic and harrowing incident." The letter revealed that Blasey Ford has received multiple death threats and has been forced to move out of her home. On Tuesday night, Senator Grassley said there's "no reason for any further delay" in the hearing, even if Christine Blasey Ford does not testify. We speak with Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore about Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford. His new movie, "Fahrenheit 11/9," is out in theaters this week.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her when she was 15, has asked for the the FBI to investigate her claims before she testifies to the Senate. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley had invited Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh to both testify on Monday. But in a letter to Grassley, Blasey Ford's attorneys wrote, quote, "While Dr. Ford's life was being turned upside down, you and your staff scheduled a public hearing for her to testify at the same table as Judge Kavanaugh in front of two dozen U.S. Senators on national television to relive this traumatic and harrowing incident." The letter went on to reveal Christine Blasey Ford has received multiple death threats in the past few days and has been forced to move out of her home. On Tuesday night, one of her attorneys, Lisa Banks, appeared on CNN.

LISA BANKS: Any talk of a hearing on Monday, frankly, is premature, because she just came forward with these allegations 48 hours ago. And since that time, she has been dealing with hate mail, harassment, death threats. So she has been spending her time trying to figure out how to put her life back together, how to protect herself and her family. And there hasn't been an investigation. And these are serious allegations.

AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday night, Senator Grassley said there's no reason for further delay in the hearing, even if Christine Blasey Ford doesn't testify. Meanwhile, President Trump dismissed the need for an FBI probe into her allegations.

JOHN DECKER: To that end, what would be the problem with the FBI reopening their background investigation into Judge Kavanaugh? Would you support such a thing?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It wouldn't bother me, other than the FBI, John said, that they really don't do that. That's not what they do.

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California responded on Twitter by writing, "Fact check: The FBI can investigate Dr. Blasey Ford's allegations as part of its background investigation—that is their job. To say otherwise is FALSE. It investigated Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. It should investigate this too."

President Trump also defended Kavanaugh, describing him as a "great gentleman."

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I feel so badly for him that he's going through this, to be honest with you. I feel so badly for him. This is not a man that deserves this. … And we will see what happens. But I just think he is at a level that we rarely see, not only in government, anywhere in life. And, honestly, I feel terribly for him, for his wife, who is an incredible, lovely woman, and for his beautiful, young daughters. I feel terribly for them.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump himself has been accused of sexual assault and harassment by multiple women. In that news conference, he would not refer to Dr. Blasey Ford by name, only as "the woman."

Well, on Tuesday evening, I sat down with Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, whose new film about Trump and much more is out this week. It's called Fahrenheit 11/9: Tyrant. Liar. Racist. A Hole in One. He was here in our New York studio, and I asked him to respond to Trump's comments about Kavanaugh and, as well, Kavanaugh's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.

MICHAEL MOORE: I watched the news this morning, and to hear her say, as she has described in The Washington Post article—she described the incident—that when he had thrown her on the bed—and he, at that point, is a 17-year-old junior or senior in high school, she's a 15-year-old freshman or sophomore. And she said—and I think I'm quoting accurately here—that the thought ran through her head that she could possibly die, because he was suffocating her with his hand over her mouth and nose, as it—I guess as you have to say legally here, as it is alleged.

AMY GOODMAN: Because she was attempting to scream.

MICHAEL MOORE: Because she was trying to scream. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Allegedly.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. I was never a teenage girl, but I have had to live my 64 years listening to women, both friends, family and the general public, tell me these stories. This is, I think—to any woman who hears this story, this is not an unusual or uncommon story, that when they were younger, some young boy, some young man, decided that they had the right to throw them down and to try to take their clothes off. And I think that—I hope that in this year of #MeToo, that we've come far enough now to take this very, very seriously. I don't like at all the way that they're trying to rush this through. …

I think this is a real watershed moment, frankly. And while we all still believe—I hope we believe—that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, that any woman who comes forward with an allegation like this has to be listened to. And you cannot say, "Oh, it was just high school." He was 17 years old. How many 17-year-olds do we have in prison now? Usually people of color. But they try them as adults. To just try to slough this off, to not have a real investigation—this thing has to be postponed.

Separate from that, a president who is under criminal investigation, possibly for treason, has no rights to appoint anyone or nominate anyone to the Supreme Court. Can we all just agree on that?

But now that Dr. Ford has come forward with this, to ignore her, to not listen to her, that will be its own crime. And I sincerely hope, as we sit here today, and in the coming days and weeks, that somehow this has to be tabled. There's no way they can go forward with this now.

And I don't know, I guess I just—I don't know. I feel for—I feel for everybody that has told me a story like this, that I've listened to for the last 40 years. And I got to tell you, too, as—you know, as a guy, as a guy who was a teenager, as a guy who was a tween, just so you know, guys like me have had to put up with these guys since we were in junior high school. You know, I don't know what words I can use on this show, but basically, these [bleep] holes that we've had to tolerate and who have made life miserable for us and who were the bullies when we were in school, and their belief that they have a right to use their strength for violence to get their way, this is nothing new to us as men, and the men that we have had to deal with since we were that age. So, none of this is surprising. Everyone has felt it or been affected by it, but especially the women who have had to tolerate this their entire lives.

And I've just—I know that when I walk out of here, if we were doing this at night, and it was 10:00, and we're downtown here in New York City—it's 10:00 at night, and it's dark out—I would walk out of your building here and walk to the subway and go home and really never have another thought about it, because I belong to this gender. But if you belong to the other gender, you can't just walk out of here at 10:00 at night. You have an invisible radar like those TV news vans, where a thing goes up, where you have to watch and you have to be careful, because you know what could possibly happen. I don't know if most men actually realize that they have to—that we've got to live our entire adult lives really never having to worry about who's coming at us down the street or whatever, because we belong to this gender. And if you see a woman on a dark street walking toward you at night, never once do you think, "Oh, I could be in some danger here. You know, I could be"—because that's not the gender that does that.

When you first heard that there was someone—I remember I was watching CNN, they broke in, and they said there was a man on top of that hotel in Las Vegas firing on a crowd of 20,000 people. And they said the word "man," but they said they didn't know who was up there doing it and they didn't know how many there were. But they gendered it. Of course they did, because everybody knows there's no woman up there with machine guns firing on a crowd of people, that you don't have to worry about 51 percent of the population that is not going to jump out of the bushes and mug you or commit acts of violence against you. That's just the truth. Everybody knows it's the truth. We never talk about the gender aspect of this. The CDChas wanted to study it. The NRA has kept them, in Congress, from studying the gender aspect of violence in our society. To me, it's always been—if you're watching the 11:00 news and you hear that a woman has actually shot a guy, what's your first thought? "Well, what did he do? What kind of abusive guy is that?" We know—I mean, it's like, for a woman to do that, that's the society we live in.

So, Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford now bring one of the big, central issues and way of living in our society now to the table again. And we're going to have to confront it and deal with it. And I hope we do. But either way, the criminal president doesn't have a right to be making appointments to the Supreme Court.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, commenting on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's allegations that Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her when she was 15 years old and he was 17. Michael Moore's new film about Trump and much more is out this week. It's called Fahrenheit 11/9. Michael Moore joined us here in our New York studio. We'll air more of his interview later this week.