Moore on the “Joker"

By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Insight@theBFD 10/10/19]
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Michael Moore has written an essay/review of the film Joker, which struck me as a disturbing tell on Moore’s own psychology: 

“[…]if you look away from the genius of this work of art, you will miss the gift of the mirror it is offering us. Yes, there’s a disturbed clown in that mirror, but he’s not alone — we’re standing right there beside him.”

What’s with the royal “we” in sympathy for the devil?

I haven’t seen the film – and what follows is not about the film, it’s about Moore projecting his own political propaganda onto it. 

I still harbour a weird preference for paying to see films that have an actual hero leading a plot with something close to a noble theme. Yet another roll-around in the dark muck of a person’s descent into insanity and evil doesn’t hold much appeal, but Moore is waxing about as lyrically as a mendacious, swollen slob can about the greatness of it – and unsurprisingly, he instructs us that thematically Joker is a piece of art about Trump’s America.

“But this movie is not about Trump. It’s about the America that gave us Trump — the America which feels no need to help the outcast, the destitute. The America where the filthy rich just get richer and filthier.”

Moore, who just happens to be a filthy rich, multi-millionaire with a property empire, tells us that the film is set in the fictional Gotham City, which the filmmakers take no pains to disguise as really New York City, “the headquarters of all evil: the rich who rule us, the banks and corporations for whom we serve, the media which feeds us a daily diet “news” they think we should absorb.”

It is in this dark city where Arthur Fleck, a poor, lonely victim of a greedy society, who also suffers from mental health issues, decides he cannot take it anymore and violently lashes out. “His crime is that he can’t get help,” states Moore, “His crime is that he is the butt of a joke played on HIM by the rich and famous.”

Moore indulges in quite the diatribe about President Trump acting like Joker, then somewhere along the line inserts this little beauty into his piece: 

“You’re in debt for the next 30 years because you committed the crime of wanting an education. You have actually thought about not having children because you don’t have the heart to bring them onto a dying planet where they are given a 20-year death-by-climate-change sentence at birth.”

The only thing dying is free-thought since the far-Left gained control of a now contaminated educational curriculum, thanks to liberal activists like Moore, who indoctrinate the young into believing climate change hysteria. As a Bernie Sanders endorser, Moore would salivate over said contaminated curriculum and wants more of it to be given out to America’s youth free of charge. Moore himself transmits the very contagion that causes folks to think twice about bringing children into the world.

Joker, the film, is said to be set somewhere in the 80s when unemployment and crime have left large segments of the city impoverished. If it’s the poverty of others that makes Moore squeeze out fat, crocodile tears, then he should be at this moment kissing President Trump’s feet with gratitude. 

Blue-collar America voted for Trump precisely because rampant globalism, encouraged by both the Left and the Right, was the cause of their jobs being xeroxed overseas, thus increasing poverty and unemployment in the decades preceding the 2016 election.

It is Trump who finally took up the cause of “the forgotten men and women” of America and began to fight successfully for their individual prosperity. Last week, unemployment hit the almost all-time low of 3.7 percent, the lowest rate since 1969. That feat was achieved through the practical combination of tax cuts, deregulation and a heroic push to bring manufacturing back to the United States.
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To read Moore using the ruse of a film-review to rag on the president as if Trump were the great villain of our time shows how hollowed-out with hate, and what a fact-free zone, Moore’s uncomely head is.

Moore gives us this dark little anecdote:

“When the Joker decides he can no longer take it — yes, you will feel awful. Not because of the (minimal) blood on the screen, but because deep down, you were cheering him on…”

Moore cites violent atrocities committed in America, the Sandy Hook Elementary school-massacre, committed by 21-year-old Adam Lanza, being among them. Moore asks:

“What if one day the dispossessed decide to fight back?[…]
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Who would dare ask why the son of a vice-president of General Electric would go into Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT and blow the tiny bodies apart of 20 first-graders.”

The New Yorker dared to do exactly that in an exceptional piece of long-form journalism titled The Reckoning – the father of the Sandy Hook killer searches for answers. Andrew Solomon interviewed Lanza’s father, Peter, in 2014, but obviously Moore failed to notice.  

There were no clear answers for Peter Lanza in this tragic interview. His deeply depressed son, who had long been diagnosed with Aspergers, which probably masked something else, was on-and-off psychotropic drugs, but he was not “dispossessed.” If anything, he was coddled by a mother obsessed more with his education and his isolated comfort than with his chronically sociopathic and controlling demands – and his father admits to not seeing him for over two years, though they were living in the same state.

In his review, Moore takes a swipe at “active shooter” drills that kids now have to go through in schools. His point is that those who object to the violence in Joker, ought not to when the reality of these drills on the psychology of children is a far worse spectacle.  

I admit that these new lengths parents and teachers now go to in order to protect those in their care tell a despairing tale of dystopia, but what ideology now thoroughly infects the culture and education in schools? Moore’s.

What ideology overturned regular, decent values in society? Moore’s.

What ideology teaches children to fret in their beds every night because their planet is going to die during their lifetimes? Moore’s.

What ideology taught women to sniff at the full-time role of motherhood and homemaking? Moore’s.

What ideology teaches men and women that pride and masculinity in males is a flaw? Moore’s.

What ideology teaches men and women that strong standards of authority in schools and in homes are tantamount to tyranny? Moore’s.

What ideology teaches men and women that sensitive boys don’t need the patriarchal world of men to induct them through their important rites of passage? Moore’s.

Leftist ideology, in all of its Cultural Marxist lowliness, has undone what used to be the healthier norms of a time before mass murders and mental ill-health became the common spectres which loom large now. But the Left lays the blame squarely on a lack of “gun-control,” when it’s not blaming capitalism, conveniently forgetting that during the 50s, 60s, and 70s, American families still owned guns yet mass murders were rare. 

Those on the far-Left, like Moore, have absolutely no right to bitch about what their value-slaying system has delivered to our present culture. The double-dealing sanctimoniousness of their hypocrisy just beggars belief, especially when Moore feverishly writes his film review as though he were recalling his favourite, fetishistic fantasy.  

For those wishing to read a proper review of the actual film, read John Black’s take on the BFD: Joker: The Case for Nihilism.
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If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​​​​​​​​​​