Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man - Hardcover

Someone was bound to go after Michael Moore eventually and this book holds nothing back. An immensely popular figure to political left-wingers, Michael Moore presents himself as a regular working-class guy in a baseball cap with the courage to take some rich and powerful folks to task for their corrupt and deceitful ways. David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke say this populist, muckraker image is pure whitewash. Believing that this charade has gone on for too long, and done too much damage to the U.S., they have written this book to expose Moore as narcissistic and irresponsible and his body of work "as manipulative as totalitarian propaganda." To prove their point, they pick apart Moore's books and movies to illustrate how he is consistently manipulative, dishonest, and, at times, simply absurd. They show how he altered the timeline of Roger and Me in order to unfairly blame things on General Motors that happened before their layoffs, not as a result of them. Regarding Bowling for Columbine, the authors explain how he took quotes out of context and reassembled them to give the impression that people made speeches they did not make---most famously his interview with Charlton Heston, then president of the NRA. They also illustrate how Moore manipulated statistics in his books Dude, Where’s My Country and Stupid White Men to fit his theories, making some truly outrageous claims in the process. The authors have certainly done their homework, and it's impossible to view Moore's work the same way after reading this book. "How does a man with so many contradictions manage to blind his enormous trove of followers to how hypocritical he really is? How does he get away with it?" they ask. If the authors have their way, he won't much longer. Now that Moore has joined the ranks of the rich and powerful, Hardy and Clarke have engaged in bit of muckraking of their own. --Shawn Carkonen