Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [9]
But one night in 2004, he accidentally fired off a round inside his home from one of his AK-47s. A neighbor heard the shot and called the police. The cops arrived and found the treasure trove of weapons, ammo, and bomb-making materials. And his hit list. And off to jail he went.
I got the call some days later from the security agency.
“We need to tell you that the police have in custody a man who was planning to blow up your house. You’re in no danger now.”
I got very quiet. I tried to process what I just heard: I’m… in… no… danger… now.
For me, it was the final straw. I broke down. I just couldn’t take it anymore. My wife was already in her own state of despair over the loss of the life we used to have. I asked myself again, What had I done to deserve this? Made a movie? A movie led someone to want to blow up my home? What happened to writing a letter to the editor?
It seemed that my crime was bringing questions and ideas to a mass audience (the kind of thing you do from time to time in a democracy). It wasn’t that my ideas were dangerous; it was the fact that millions suddenly were eager to be exposed to them. And not just in the theater, and not just at lefty gatherings. I was invited to talk about these ideas on… The View! On The Martha Stewart Show. On Oprah—four times! Then there’s Vanna White, turning the letters of my name on Wheel of Fortune. I was allowed to spread the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, of I. F. Stone and the Berrigan brothers, everywhere. This drove the Right totally batshit crazy. I didn’t mean for that to happen. It just did.
And so the constant drumbeat against me grew louder, with conservative talk radio and TV describing me as something that was subhuman, a “thing” that hated the troops and the flag and everything about America. These vile epithets were being spoon fed to a poorly-educated public that thrived on a diet of hate and ignorance and had no idea what the word epithet meant. Here’s Bill O’Reilly making a crack to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, live on his Fox News TV show, in February of 2004:
“Well, I want to kill Michael Moore. Is that all right? All right. And I don’t believe in capital punishment—that’s just a joke on Moore.” Ha ha.
As the months wore on, even after Bush’s reelection, the campaign to stop me only intensified. When Glenn Beck said over the airwaves that he was thinking of killing me, he was neither fined by the FCC nor arrested by the NYPD. He was, essentially, making a call to have me killed, and no one in the media at that time reported it. No FCC commissioner condemned it. It was simply OK to speak of me in this manner over the public airwaves.
And then a man trespassed on our property and left something outside our bedroom window when I wasn’t home. It terrorized my wife. He even videotaped himself doing this. When the police investigated, he said he was making a “documentary.” He called it Shooting Michael Moore. And when you went to his website, and the words Shooting Michael Moore came on the screen, the sound of a gunshot went off. The media ate it up, and he was asked to be on many TV shows (like Sean Hannity’s). “Coming up next—He’s giving Michael Moore a taste of his own medicine! Moore now has somebody after him!” (Cue sfx: KA-BOOM!) He then provided video and maps of how to not only get to our house, but how to illegally get onto the property. He failed to mention, though, what the ex-SEALs would do to you when they caught you.3
And now a man from Ohio had drawn up plans and gathered the necessary materials to do to our house what Timothy McVeigh did in Oklahoma City.
“He’ll be going away to prison for a long time, Mike,” the security chief reassured me. “The reason that he and others always fail is because of the systems you have in place.”
“And because he had a nosy neighbor who called the cops,” I added.
“Yes, that too.”
I will not share with you the impact this had, at that time, on my personal life, but suffice it to say I would