After last week’s tweetstorm where Michael Moore referred to snipers as “cowards,” the anti-gun filmmaker really wants you to know that he hires veterans (we assume to somehow explain the context of what he wrote.)
He first re-tweeted this on January 19:
RT @jeffgibbstc: "People attacking Michael Moore don't know him. He seeks out and hires vets and they never have to pay at his theater."
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) January 20, 2015
Followed by this re-tweet which directs to a 2008 piece on Moore’s hiring practices:
And this information is nothing new. Here’s Moore in 2013 writing in the Huffington Post:
(There is something I’ve done to support the troops — other than help lead the effort to stop these senseless wars. At the movie theater I run in Michigan, I became the first person in town to institute an affirmative action plan for hiring returning Iraq/Afghanistan vets. I am working to get more businesses in town to join with me in this effort to find jobs for these returning soldiers. I also let all service members in to the movies for free, every day.)
Kudos to Michael Moore for this, and we’re sincere about that.
But Michael Moore also hires veterans for more positions than just in the film industry. Specifically, he really likes veterans and their guns on his personal security detail.
This is from a 2011 piece where he writes about the Navy SEAL raid that resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden:
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Here’s my take: I know a number of Navy SEALs. In fact (and this is something I don’t like to talk about publicly, for all the obvious reasons), I hire only ex-SEALs and ex-Special Forces guys to handle my own security (I’ll let you pause a moment to appreciate that irony). These SEALs are trained to follow orders. I don’t know what their orders were that night in Abbottabad, but it certainly looks like a job (and this is backed up in a piece in The Atlantic) where they were told to not bring bin Laden back alive. The SEALs are pros at what they do and they instantly took out every adult male (every potential threat) within a few minutes – but they also took care to not harm a single one of the nine children who were present. Pretty amazing. This wasn’t some Rambo-style operation where they just went in guns blazing, spraying bullets. They acted swiftly and with expert precision. I’m telling you, these guys are so smart and so lethal, they could take you out with a piece of dental floss. (And in fact, one of my ex-SEAL guys showed me how to do that one night. Whoa.)
What Moore calls “irony,” however, we call hypocrisy. Just because he can afford to hire “ex-SEALs and ex-Special Forces guys” for security, the rest of American should be disarmed to protect themselves from threats?
One final note on all of this. Moore took to Facebook to defend the original tweet that caused the outrage, concluding:
I think most Americans don’t think snipers are heroes.
Hopefully not on this weekend when we remember that man in Memphis, Tennessee, who was killed by a sniper’s bullet.
Moore really needs to stop conflating the word “sniper,” which is a specific roll of a soldier in war with what an assassin did to Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The two aren’t even close to being the same thing.
And if Moore doesn’t see the difference, maybe he can ask one of his SEAL guys to explain it to him.
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Related:
Twitchy coverage of Michael Moore
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