Thread by @SusanBordo

Thread on Why don’t want to see Michael Moore’s face on TV any more. From my 2017 book on the election:

In the early hours of Wednesday, November 9, 2016, the postmortems began...
“What was missing in Hillary?” MSNBC’s Chris Mathews put it to his panel of guests that night. 1/

During the next few weeks, we got a variety of answers to that question:
“She didn’t speak to the working class and their concerns.”
“She had no economic message.”
“She should have gone to Wisconsin.”
“She should have gone to Michigan.”
“She should have gone to Ohio.” 2/

Michael Moore, the filmmaker and activist who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary and came out late in the day for Hillary in the general, declared decisively that she would have won the election if only she had told the press “I feel like crap” when she had pneumonia. 3/

Bernie would have done that, he said. The other panelists nodded and smiled. Mathews attempted an incompetent Brooklynese rendition of “I feel like crap,” and the guys cracked up.
“If only they would have shown her more human side,” Moore says, shaking his head. 4/

A few weeks later, Moore would intensify his diagnosis and attribute Hillary’s loss to her “disgraceful” campaign, which ignored the cries of “people like me” to visit the rust belt states.5/

Bernie Sanders himself, without mentioning her name, implied that Hillary had botched the election by running a campaign on “identity politics.” “It’s not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ 6/

“What we need,” he said on a book tour shortly after the election, “is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.” 7/

A week later, he attributed Trump’s win to the fact that the Democrats “didn’t offer candidates & politicians with the guts to stand up to the billionaire class & start representing the middle class and working families of America.” Hmm...What “gutless” candidate did he mean? 8/

In fact, since the election, Sanders has done everything short of saying outright that had he been the nominee, the Democrats would have prevailed over Trump...
As for GOP responses to the election results, it was as if there had never been a “Never Trump” movement. 9/

Between November 2016 and January 2017, the president-elect was forgiven everything by the party—his many lies, his failure to produce his taxes or deal with conflicts of interests, even the Access Hollywood tapes that so offended other Republican. 10/

Trump himself attributed Hillary’s nearly three-million-vote margin to election fraud via illegal immigrants (none of whom, apparently, were casting their fraudulent ballots in the states that would have given Hillary an electoral win). 11/

In short, the two months in between the election and the inauguration were a festival of Hillary blaming, in which the Democrats participated as enthusiastically as the Republicans. And the media, almost without exception, went right along with it....12/

[2020: If you’re interested in more, you might consider reading the rest of the book. In 2017, The mainstream media ignored it. They preferred “Shattered” and other Hillary-blaming tomes. I think its time has come, don’t you?]
amazon.com/Destruction-Hi…