Michael Moore predicts a 'tsunami' for Democrats in the midterms
Remember when everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election? No, I don't just mean win the popular vote: Win it all and win big. FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver's political projection site, had Clinton's chances of winning at 71.4 percent. Frank Luntz tweeted on Nov. 8, 2016, "Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States." One GOP insider declared that for Trump to win, "it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of 'Death to America.'" Pundit after pundit, on the left and the right, joined the chorus of mainstream news outlets to declare that the election was Clinton's.
There was, however, one lone voice of dissent: Michael Moore. In July 2016, Moore wrote "Five Reasons Trump Will Be President." That article mostly went unnoticed by mainstream media after the election, when everyone finally realized Moore was right but it was way too late to make a difference.
Fast forward to the 2022 midterms and we find ourselves in a similar scenario, but turned upside down. Now the media is basically repeating again and again that Democrats will lose in November, while Moore is suggesting the opposite. Moore isn't just echoing the widespread notion that Democrats could hold the Senate while losing the House. He is suggesting that voters "are going to descend upon the polls en masse — a literal overwhelming, unprecedented tsunami of voters — and nonviolently, legally, and without mercy remove every last stinking traitor to our Democracy."
That prediction is likely to cause hyperventilation at all points of the political spectrum. Could he really be right?
To make his point, Moore is going beyond armchair punditry and sending out what he is calling a "tsunami of truth," where each day leading up to the election he offers one specific factual reason why he is right and why it makes sense to be optimistic.
In his second installment, he covered the story of the recent election for the Boise Board of Education, in which Republican Steve Schmidt, an incumbent, was up for re-election. Considering that Trump won Idaho's capital city with 73 percent of the vote, it made sense to assume Schmidt would win again. But as Moore explains, Schmidt had been endorsed by a far-right extremist group, the Idaho Liberty Dogs, that led a campaign against the local library, calling their LGBTQ+ and sex ed materials "smut-filled pornography." According to Moore, they even showed up at local Extinction Rebellion climate strikes brandishing AR-15 assault rifles.
So in a surprising turn of events, the Idaho Statesman, Boise's daily news paper, chose not to endorse Schmidt because he refused to denounce the Idaho Liberty Dogs. Instead, the paper endorsed his opponent, an 18-year-old high school senior and progressive activist, Shiva Rajbhandari, who was also co-founder of the Boise chapter of Extinction Rebellion.
Rajbhandari won. A teenager beat a Republican incumbent in a traditionally red city in one of the reddest states. Moore's point is that if these kinds of seismic shifts are happening at the polls in Boise, there's reason to think that this election won't follow traditional patterns. Voters, he believes, have had enough of the power of right-wing extremists and the threat they pose to democratic values.
In his next "tsunami of truth," Moore reminded readers that despite all the ways that the media tends to make the American right seem massively powerful, they're really just a big bunch of losers. Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the eight last elections. As Moore explains it, "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."
That leads to the next installment: Republicans will lose because this time around they are "running the biggest batch of nutters nationwide in American electoral history." He then promises to offer a list of the top 10 "biggest whackadoodles on the Republican side of the ballot."
No. 10 on Moore's list is Mathew DePerno, Republican candidate for attorney general in Michigan. Like nine other candidates in the 30 state attorney general races this fall, DePerno is an election denier. But he's not just a common, garden-variety election denier; he was allegedly personally involved in a voting system breach. That's right: the Republican candidate who hopes to become Michigan's top law enforcement official is under investigation by the current attorney general for "unauthorized access to voting equipment."
But that isn't the half of it. DePerno also thinks that the Plan B birth control pill is a "form of murder." Moore explains that DePerno "believes that 'life' doesn't begin at conception — he insists it begins BEFORE conception and it should be against the law for anyone to interrupt a sperm on its way to do its 'job.'" As if that weren't enough to categorize DePerno as batshit extreme, he has attacked his opponent with memes that include the white supremacist symbol of Pepe the Frog while comparing his campaign to delivering Michiganders a "really big red pill." Not a Plan B pill, which he likens to fentanyl.
Confirming Moore's view that DePerno's extremism will only going to appeal to a narrow Trumper base, the twitter replies to DePerno are uniformly critical and sarcastic. Like this: "I did nazi that coming. (actually, I did.)." Or this: "I want what you are smoking." Or this post, from @NeverTrumpTexan, "You could just say you were Nazi. It is much easier than what ever that is." Surveying the 50 most recent replies to his tweet, among which include one from Keith Olbermann, every single one is critical and sarcastic.
Moore's 45-day "tsunami of truth" is a clever way to tap into the energy he has described as "Roevember." Moore coined the term back in August, when a funny thing happened in Kansas. Six weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Kansas held an election, which included proposed amendment to the state constitution that could have allowed the legislature to ban abortion. In a surprising shift from typical voting demographics, turnout for the vote was massive, 60 percent higher than in 2018 — and Kansans overwhelmingly voted to reject the anti-abortion amendment.
And that was Kansas, another consistently red state in recent years.
So if we're seeing a swing away from Trump-style Republicans in Kansas and Idaho, there is reason to believe that the combination of Trump fascist nutters on the ballot, the revelations from the Jan. 6 committee hearings, the various investigations into Trump and, last but definitely not least, the fact that the Supreme Court put abortion back on the ballot could lead to the type of voting tsunami Moore is predicting.
Which leads us to wonder why the media isn't covering that story, but is still offering the same stale script about Biden's low favorability and Republican chances of taking back both the House and the Senate. Even Jen Psaki, Biden's former White House press secretary turned MSNBC commentator, offered the downer view that the president wasn't helping his party win.
Media coverage matters. And the fact that the media is largely sticking to pre-established coverage patterns doesn't just mean that it's missing the story, as Moore claims, it also means it's likely influencing the outcome of the election — and not in a good way.
Scholars of media effects know that when news coverage focuses primarily on negative personality coverage, i.e., the "horse race," turnout is depressed. When media focuses on policy, however, including contentious issues like abortion, turnout improves. So all the attention to Biden's supposed unpopularity is not helping.
Further, if the news media tells you the results are a foregone conclusion, that also depresses turnout. I mean, if you are told over and over again that you are going to lose no matter what you do, why bother voting? Even more important, research shows that if the media suggests an election will be close, turnout increases. Some scholars have speculated✎ EditSign that the fact that right-wing news outlets reported that the election was close in 2016 elevated the Trump vote, while smug reporting from more liberal outlets, assuming Clinton would win easily, depressed her vote.
Yet almost all news media in the weeks before a major election focuses on predicting the outcome, rather than debating the issues. What's more, the flurry of attention paid to polling, and all the hand-wringing over whether the polling is accurate, only exacerbate the problem. Obsessing over whether or not a given candidate or party will win does almost nothing to help energize voter turnout and engage citizens.
But there's more. For decades, media scholars have described what they call the "protest paradigm." These are the predictable patterns journalists follow when covering protests. They include, for example, a habit of focusing on "small, inappropriate samples of individual protesters," which leads the audience to misunderstand the true nature of the larger movement. The protest paradigm also refers to the news media's habit of allowing elites to frame the story, which misses the positions of average citizens. Even worse, Indiana University professor Danielle Brown explains that this type of coverage "favors spectacle, conflict, disruption and official narratives over the substance of movements that challenge the status quo."
We can observe many of the same habits when the press covers elections. And given that this election in particular could be understood as a protest vote — protesting the assault on women's rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants' rights, democratic rights, etc. — it makes sense to think of this election more in terms of a mass movement than as an example of democracy as usual.
Framing the upcoming vote as a mass uprising of nonviolent civil resistance is exactly Moore's plan. As he explains, his goal isn't just to offer the public another version of the truth; it is also to call out the problems with media coverage. "Much of what many in the media are telling you is patently false and just plain wrong," he writes. "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."
Moore has a long history of questioning the status quo and bucking conventional thought patterns. Whether getting booed off the Academy Awards stage for opposing the war in Iraq or being the lone voice predicting that Trump would win, Moore has never shied away from disagreeing with the pundit class and political elites. But he doesn't just do it for shock value; he does it because he's paying attention to the political climate in ways the mainstream media tends not to.
Is Moore right that there will be a tsunami of voters determined to defeat the enemies of democracy? The only way to learn the answer is to stop trying to read the tea leaves and focus on making it happen.
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The right wing has a twisted logic when it comes to satire
Satire has been bothering the right more than usual lately. The catch is that it seems they can't decide if they want to defend it or attack it. First, the right-wing satirical site The Babylon Bee, a conservative version of an Onion-style comedy-news publication, made headlines when it demanded the New York Times correct a claim that the site promotes misinformation behind a guise of satire. Then we learned that Donald Trump had actually asked advisers and lawyers to investigate whether the Department of Justice could probe or mitigate sources of satirical late-night comedy, like "Saturday Night Live," that made fun of him.
What's sort of fun to watch is the whiplash performed when the right expresses outrage in both directions. For example, Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee, made a classic free speech, anti-censorship argument when he complained about Facebook possibly limiting the circulation of their posts. "It's people in positions of power protecting their interests by telling you what you can and cannot joke about. Comedians who self-censor in deference to that power are themselves a joke," he wrote.
Funny to think that that same comment could have been used to defend Stephen Colbert when he was hammered for "going over the line" in his roast of George W. Bush back in 2006.
On the one hand, the Babylon Bee argues that the left — the umbrella under which the right assumes the mainstream media and Big Tech fall — is trying to censor and police their satire. On the other hand, Trump actually did try to censor satire because he was freaked out that he was being mocked.
The buzz over the Babylon Bee stems from the debate over whether the site is — depending on who you are and how you read it — hate-speech masquerading as comedy, deliberate misinformation, or actual right-leaning satire. (Dillon says the latter.) But what's more interesting is how the arguments made in its defense are quite similar to the ones that have been made to defend satire critical of the right, and especially Donald Trump.
And yet, for the most part, conservative pundits have either sidestepped responding to Trump's desires to censor satirical comedy critical of him or have defended him. After a 2018 segment on "SNL" that riffed on "It's a Wonderful Life" and suggested that everyone would be happier if Trump weren't re-elected, there was quite the stir. Essentially, the argument was in the reverse from what is being said to support the Babylon Bee. In defending Trump, the arguments were that Trump satire needed to be reined in because it was too one-sided, too negative and possibly too successful at affecting his image.
For example, Trump himself took to Twitter to complain, "A REAL scandal is the one-sided coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like Saturday Night Live. It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem commercials. Should be tested in courts, can't be legal? Only defame & belittle! Collusion?" And his anxieties led to debates over what conservatives should do to defend themselves against liberal bias in late-night comedy.
The fact that Trump would melt down after he saw satire critical of him was news enough, but we later found out that Trump did more than complain; he actually looked into whether he could find other avenues to restrict political comedy targeting him. As Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley reported for the Daily Beast, "According to two people familiar with the matter, Trump asked advisers and lawyers in early 2019 about what the Federal Communications Commission, the court system, and—most confusingly to some Trump lieutenants—the Department of Justice could do to probe or mitigate SNL, Jimmy Kimmel, and other late-night comedy mischief-makers."
This story is all the more noteworthy for its coincidence with the Babylon Bee censorship brouhaha. Where were the defenders of the Babylon Bee when Trump was literally asking for late-night comedy shows to be restricted in their jokes about him? If the argument is that comedy should never concede to power, then surely Seth Dillon would be outraged over the story that Trump considered having the DOJ, the FCC and the courts look into ways to limit satire.
The Babylon Bee's claim of discrimination stems from a line in a New York Times article, which was subsequently edited, and the site's allegation that their content is being restricted on social media platforms like Facebook, which has had a notoriously difficult time figuring out what to do with satire anyway. Comedians on both the left and the right deal with having their posts removed because, despite attempting to create community rules, Facebook is ill-equipped to process irony and often takes satirical posts as literal.
But the Babylon Bee's complaints of censorship fit the pattern of a broader right-wing victim rhetoric that suggests their views are being silenced even when there is considerable proof this is not the case. We hear ongoing cries of conservatives being silenced on social media — often surrounding the launch of yet another social media network claiming to be a haven for "free speech" — but in reality, the right rules online. Politico tracked millions of social media posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and found that "Right-wing social media influencers, conservative media outlets and other GOP supporters dominate online discussions." Working with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonpartisan think tank that tracks extremism online, Politico found that "a small number of conservative users routinely outpace their liberal rivals and traditional news outlets in driving the online conversation."
What's even funnier (and concerning) is the fact that most of the cries that social media discriminates against the right are simply anecdotal. Stories of one tweet taken down, one post on Facebook removed, etc., don't line up with data. If anything, it's the reverse: The more that the right whines that they are being censored, the more bandwidth their whines receive on platforms. Even more disturbing is how their stories of being censored have shaped public perceptions. A 2020 Pew Research study found that most Americans believe social media sites censor political views, with 90 percent of Republicans saying that they believe that social media censors them.
The hypocrisy over the right's reaction to censoring satire reveals their consistent position that they are victims. The victim narrative is the common denominator. The right constantly argues that they are being discriminated against, whether because someone is making fun of them or someone is not letting them make fun of them. For those of us who really love satire, the irony of that twisted logic is both pretty funny and pretty disturbing.