Fear as a Business Model: Bowling for Columbine Revisited (2002) | Under the Docs 014

➡ The text discusses the documentary “Bowling for Columbine” by Michael Moore, which investigates the cause of gun violence in America, particularly focusing on the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. The author critiques Moore’s claims, such as his assertion that he’s an average American familiar with guns, and his suggestion that the easy accessibility of guns contributes to violence. The author also disputes Moore’s claim that the NRA and the KKK are somehow linked. The text suggests that Moore’s documentary is biased and some of his claims are misleading or inaccurate.
➡ The text discusses a movie that makes several claims about gun violence, white supremacy, and the NRA’s origins. The movie suggests that the NRA was founded by the KKK and that the presence of a Lockheed Martin plant, a weapons manufacturer, in a community can influence violence. The text criticizes the movie for its lack of focus and for making weak connections between different topics. It also questions the movie’s portrayal of America as the only violent country and its suggestion that guns are too easily accessible.
➡ The text discusses a documentary, “Bowling for Columbine,” which covers various topics including gun violence, climate change, and racism. The author notes that the film could be edited to focus solely on the Columbine incident or completely exclude it. They also mention a brief segment about a diary entry of Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, which eerily predicts the 9/11 attacks. The author finds this intriguing and wishes the documentary had explored it more. They also appreciate the film’s exposure of numerous CIA coups, which they believe would be eye-opening for many viewers.
➡ The text discusses a safety video about a kid with multiple guns, highlighting the fear in media and its potential influence on violent acts like school shootings. It also criticizes filmmaker Michael Moore’s approach in his documentaries, accusing him of exploiting tragedies for his narrative and contradicting his own points. The text further discusses Moore’s interaction with the NRA and Charlton Heston, and the impact of his documentary on Kmart’s corporate future. Lastly, it criticizes Heston’s controversial comment on ethnicity and gun violence.
➡ This text discusses the significant cultural impact of a politically charged documentary that led to Kmart stopping ammunition sales due to public relations issues. The documentary, which made a huge profit, sparked a trend of political documentaries. However, the text also criticizes the documentary for straying from its main topic and not providing a resolution. Despite this, the text suggests that the documentary is worth watching as it challenges preconceived notions about various issues, including gun control.

What could be the factor that caused this violent outburst in Columbine? And if you just go by the last thing that the kids did, if that was the thing that made them snap. Well, the last thing they did was they went to bowling class. Under the docks. Yeah, under the docks. Buried. People were breaking the locks. Under the ducks. Under the ducks. Yeah, under the ducks. Foreign. This is under the docks. Paranoid American. Sean Chris, Kill the Mockingbirds podcast. This is Michael Moore Month, where we’re putting ourselves through absolute torture and watching three different Michael Moore documentaries.

The second one is Bowling for Columbine. This is from 2002. Again, like all of his movies, written and directed by Michael Moore. And this one is sort of a landmark. I don’t know. I didn’t know this before watching this, but this is the number one most profitable documentary ever released. This. This thing made somewhere around $200 million, which would be impressive for even a Disney movie coming out, let alone a documentary. So it absolutely not just put Michael Moore on the map, but documentaries themselves. And the basic premise of this movie is that Michael Moore investigates the cause of gun violence in America.

And this is set against the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. And he kind of uses this particular event to explain something really unique about America, which is our fear and our view on guns. Who knew? Yeah, it’s pretty much guns are bad. That’s. That’s a. A huge premise of this movie. And that, like, pretty much not just guns are bad, but Americans plus guns equal bad. Plotting the course of this particular documentary, I actually want to jump directly into one of the key claims. Piggybacking off what you just said, The. The whole guns are bad thing.

Because one of the things that Michael Moore does in this, he’s like, look, look, look, look. I’m one of you. I grew up around guns. In fact, he shows a picture of him, and he’s holding the certificate, and he says, I even won the marksman’s award from the nra. But the way that it’s phrased in this movie, at least the way I’m watching it, he’s almost implying as though it was some kind of competitive national thing. Like, I won this national something award for marksmanship training. And really, this is a safety course that the NRA puts on specifically for new shooters or younger shooters.

And it just kind of proves that you respect gun safety, you know, and once you can do that, and once you can hit a target from certain different locations, and there’s a. There’s a couple of requirements for It. But the point being is that thousands and thousands of kids get this certificate every single year by the nra. Now, that doesn’t take away from what he was saying. It doesn’t necessarily lie or imply that it’s bigger than it is. But the way that it’s edited in here and you understand the reason, the reason is so that when you watch this, you don’t think, oh, you’re just another typical anti gun liberal.

He’s hated guns his whole life. He’s making this point that he himself grew up in this area, grew up with guns, knows at least well enough about how to use a gun that he can get Owen Award from the nra, whatever that actually means, but that he’s not an absolute outsider. He didn’t just fly in from San Francisco and his Birkenstocks and just pointing the finger everywhere. So that’s. I think that’s the reason that he brings that up. But it’s sort of a claim that’s worth poking at a little bit. Definitely. And throughout the film, he makes a lot of claims, like you said, where he kind of wants to be the average Joe.

Like, man, I’m just a Michigan guy in Flint, we go hunting, fishing. And he makes it seem like he’s just an average Joe to kind of go away from. Because at this point he’s already been in Hollywood elitist for a while. Right. Roger Ami has come out almost over. Almost 20 years to this point, about around like 15 years or whatever. And he wants to get back to like this roots. And he’s even like in his hometown constantly of Flint, trying to like show people, hey, man, I’m just an average Joe, just like you. Yeah, nothing really would make me think that he’s one of them.

He doesn’t really talk, walk or like, he doesn’t look like a duck. Right. But he’s got. I won’t take that away. He’s got the credentials that, yeah, he was familiar with guns enough to get an NRA award. The other. One of the other major claims that he makes in this movie is that he’s joking because it’s a Michael Moore and he’s sarcastic, but that the accessibility of guns is somehow part of this or are adding to the. The issue of gun violence in America. And the particular scene that he expresses this, there’s a bank that’s giving out a free shotgun or a free rifle if you open up an account with them.

And the premise, of course, is that look at how crazy Americans are. You just walk into a bank and Get a free gun and walk back out and even ask the guy that comes out to show him the catalog of all the different guns. He says, is it dangerous to be handing out guns in a bank? And the implication is what? That someone comes in, they sit down, they fill out, they give all of your qualified information. Here’s where I live, here’s where I work. And then they do a background check on you. They actually ran.

They showed him doing the background check. They hand over the gun. What’s the guy gonna pull out ammo and load it and then just start going crazy in the bag now that they’ve got all of his in. I mean, it’s sort of a silly premise. And the question itself is also silly where no, it’s. It’s not dangerous to be handing out a gun in the bank, but you could see how an anti gun person that. That would be this gotcha question. Like, you what are you gonna give out a gun in a bank? Like, I don’t know.

So that was, that was the claim. And I could see that that was him establishing bias really early on. And maybe this is my bias coming out. No, I think you’re absolutely right because it’s like one of the first scenes. It’s in the beginning of the movie and he does all that just like kind of like messing around while he’s getting it. Like, huh, what does it mean by this mental health thing? Like, well, I haven’t been locked up in a mental health facility. And they’re like, oh, then you’re fine. Kind of making it seem like, see, they’re not ch.

And then all of this is for his gotcha question at the end where he points to raffle. He’s off. Now, do you think it’s great to be handing out guns in. In a bank or some. Something along that lines. That’s not the exact quote, but you could tell that whole scene was for him to make that point so he can go to the next scene, right? Like he wanted to let it. Like, look how crazy Americans are. They just hand you a rifle right at a bank and you could go shoot anybody up. And I hear that and I think, hell yeah.

Like that. That is American exceptionalism, one of the. The few good parts of it. But again, this is very biased. And to point out in that particular scene, if you go back and watch it, Michael Moore has the worst trigger discipline that you could imagine. Because even as he’s holding this up and like posing and making his point, that finger is right on that trigger, boy, like he doesn’t have it. So to me, that almost disqualified, like, all the credit that he was like, look, I was a marksman as a kid. Here’s my NRA award that went out the window when I saw his trigger discipline.

So anyways, the next claim, this. This is where it’s going to start getting into, like, classic Michael Moore just making stuff up territory. But there’s an animated sequence that makes a cup. A lot of claims, some that we don’t even have enough time to even get into. One of them is that America got all of its wealth in the 18th and early 19th century from slavery directly. And that without. Well, I’m not going to touch that one, okay? Because that’s a whole extra issue. Maybe next year when we go back into, like, the George Floyd and Trayvon Martin stuff, we can get into that.

But he makes another one right on the back of that claim that the KKK turns into the NRA and that somehow these two different entities are one in the same or they share the same DNA. None of that really matches up whatsoever if you, if you just do the slightest amount of research into that topic. They weren’t founded around something. KKK had like two or three different resurgences. It was founded in 1865. The NRA was founded in 1871. So the. The claim that he’s alluding to, and he doesn’t bring up any dates or anything beyond this little cartoon claim, but that six years after the KKK was founded that they had to go back into hiding and they just reemerged as the NRA again.

There’s even people that hate the NRA can’t necessarily back up this particular claim. And this takes up a good portion of the movie where it just goes, hey, we’re going to talk about gun rights and gun and violent culture in America. But here, here’s a quick cartoon about how slavery created this country. And here’s another one about how the KKK founded the nra. And then it goes back into Columbine again. So if it were me, I would have just clipped this entire section out, put it in whatever other documentary he was clearly working on at the time.

That never got panned out. But that was one of the. The major claims that he. That he makes. And, and I’m with you, a false claim of it’s two different organizations. And he’s just trying to. This is where his influentialness kind of gets into play because of the slavery thing and the gun narrative and the KKK and the nra. He tied this Whole thread together of white supremacy and guns. So this kind of has been super influential in the whole left movement, right, like, of like, oh, white supremacy equal gun owner. And I think that he’s the one that planted those seeds.

He definitely didn’t do anything to prevent those from getting spread. This movie again being the most commercially successful documentary in history. I do think there’s a lot to that, that maybe Michael Moore is inadvertently behind some of like current wokeism against gun rights and claim that it’s all just a bunch of, you know, white nationalist nut jobs. But he also, he does this a few different times. Another way that he does this is he goes and he interviews someone working at a Lockheed Martin plant and he’s Michael Moore. Again, he isn’t saying this directly to the camera, but he’s implying that these kids that grew up around Columbine, Lockheed Martin is in that vicinity and they’re one of the biggest employers, kind of like GM was.

Lockheed Martin also fueled entire industries around there. And that the fact that a kid sees his dad going off to work at Lockheed Martin and knowing that Lockheed Martin is making missiles and these weapons of warfare, that now somehow that kid is like, oh well, violence is okay and you know, horrible school shootings are okay because my dad works for Lockheed Martin, he makes missiles. It’s a very weak connection, but it takes up a large portion of this movie. They keep cutting back to this Lockheed Martin plant. And then he sort of is interviewing this guy and the guy makes a point because he, he actually says that to the guy he’s interviewing and the guy says, well, we make missiles for defense and our missiles aren’t used for doing aggressive acts.

These are mainly for self defensive acts. And Michael Moore immediately just cuts to this huge montage and I’ll, I’ll go over this in our hidden treasure segment, but he goes into a whole montage of all these violent CIA overthrows and government coups. And so I mean it’s, it was a good gotcha question. He edits it well together, but it was almost non sequitur. The, the point, if the point is being made that you work close to a Lockheed Martin plant. So of course a school shooting was going to happen. I just, I couldn’t get from A to B the way that he was presenting it.

Yeah, he wanted to show that the American imperialism and the military industrial complex is the cause of like these school shootings and the violence of Americans. And like he even goes as far as to like go to Canada because obviously Michigan is right next to Canada. And like, hey, man, why do you. What do you think of these wacky Americans just shooting people all crazy, just like. And they’re like, yeah, you guys just murder people all the time. And then like goes to a small town in Canada and they, they go, well, how many people have been murdered? He’s like, wow, man, I was there.

Murder in your lifetime? He’s like, but yeah, in my lifetime, like 1 15, 20 years ago, like, you know what I mean? They trying to hammer this point that like, pretty much we’re the only violent country in the world. Like, they even go through the statistics of the. Of 11, 000 people are killed by guns in 1999 or something at that point in America. And then they’re like, Canada, like a hundred. And then it’s like the United Kingdom is 68. But then they don’t like, kind of like go into the detail of like, what do you mean by a gun death, right? But the way that he narrates it is like, either they’re shooting up, bang, bang, or it’s like just kids guns just laying around, kids picking them up and just shooting themselves or somebody else.

And that, like, almost that we have an abundance of guns that like, we just have piles of guns in our houses that is not being watched over and that anybody could just come and get them and shoot you. Like, that’s the narrative in the field that I get through this out this movie. Like I said in the previous episode, I do enjoy Michael Moore’s way of putting films together, but his bias can get pretty tough to deal with throughout the movie. And see. And I actually do think that that was one of the better outcomes of this movie.

One of the. The questions that is still worth thinking about and he never really present presents a good answer. He presents some of his examples, but the question being that if it’s not accessibility to guns, because you could get, for example, you could get guns by mail order in the 40s, 50s, 60s, you have to go into a retail store. So technically they were more accessible before the Columbine or some of the other recent events had happened. The also, if you look at the statistics, there are less gun owners in 99 than there were in 49, for example, there’s more guns, but now it’s because people went from owning like their one gun to now maybe they got two or three, maybe they got five, maybe they got 50, if you’re really cool.

But the actual number of people per capita that own guns was going down. So some of the claims that he Makes. He doesn’t mention these ones directly. I just looked these ones up because they would have kind of gone counter to the narrative. The narrative being that they’re all over the place. They’re so easy to get, they’re cheap, they’re advertised, they’re in movies now. If you look back, they’ve always been in movies. They’ve always been, you know, readily available. A lot of people, if anything, they’re harder to get now than they were at any other point in history, at least in America.

Although it’ll go back into that racist racism thing again, where you’ll claim that the NRA was formed specifically to keep black people from owning guns and that it plays. He kind of dances around and he jumps around a whole lot in this movie. So it’s not necessarily just about the Bowling for Columbine stuff. Yeah, that’s part of the thing about this movie is that he kind of has his segments. It’s almost like. I liked what you said earlier. It’s almost like he’s working on a few films at a time. And he’s like, wow, that’s a really good scene.

I really like this because at one point he even goes to Compton, California, and like, he’s just like, kind of like, oh, man, you know, the violence here. And they’re like, well, it’s not as violent, you know, because he is. Now, some of the points he makes is great. Like where he’s making the point of, like, the media fear mongering. Right. Which we all know is true. The fear. The fear mongering of the media has been a thing forever. And he points this out, but at one point he’s talking to a cop because, like, they’re like, whoa, you know, what would you go after Lo.

He’s actually, I think the news person he’s talking to, he goes, if there was a kid drowning or a shooting, which one would you go to? And he’s like, probably the shooting. And. And then he’s talking about, this is funny to me, pre climate change stuff, right? And he’s talking about, like, yeah, you know, we can’t even see the Hollywood sign because all the smog. And he goes up to a cop and he’s like, can we arrest someone for this? Can we arrest somebody for this smog? And I’m like, come on, man, what does this have to do with the film? And seems like a theme that he does in his films a lot is like, it’s supposedly about one thing, but he doesn’t focus on it.

And he’s all over. He’s almost ADHD about it, right? He’s like, oh, look at that squirrel. Oh, look at that, that quarter over there, the shiny thing. And he just gets so distracted and he. Lee leaves the point. We could do a fan edit of Bowling for Columbine and it would be like a 40 minute documentary and you could cut out anything that had anything to do with Columbine or gun violence. You would put it in. You’d watch an entire 40 minute documentary and be like, that’s weird. He talked about climate change and racism, the KKK and.

But nothing about Columbine. And inversely, if you edit it to just the Columbine stuff, this movie would go by so quickly. But so the, the le. The lasting point there though is it really is an interesting question that if there’s other places in the world that have as many people that own guns, that have the same media consumption that we do, if everything else is exactly the same, why is it that America has like 10 times the amount of violent gun crimes versus anywhere else in the world? And it’s, again, it’s not just the accessibility. It’s not just one or two different things.

He doesn’t make a really good claim as to why. I’ll put forth some of mine as we get to the end of this one. But, yeah, those are, those are some of the key claims. Is there anything else that I missed on that one? No, this, like, because he gets off in the weeds for a bit. So I don’t want to get too much into the weeds. Hidden treasures overboard moments. What are yours? What are your hidden treasures in this movie? Well, I have one major one for me and it’s actually when they are talking about Columbine, there’s a news reporter that is briefly.

It’s very brief. Right. But he’s saying, like, about Eric Harris’s diary and he talks about how Eric Harris in his diary was writing about hijacking planes and crashing them into New York City. And I thought that this was fascinating to me because it got. This is in 1999, remember, like, and for me, my conspiratorial mind and the thing that I connect stuff with is I was like, okay, if they’re talking about this at that time, and then when you see the connection that, you know, oh, on the FBI radar and. Or is this a Manchurian Candidate? It was just very brief and.

And I know that, like, you’ll miss it. Like, you can literally miss it. That’s how brief it was. It’s three to Five seconds. But for me, it stood out like a sore thumb, right? That I just seen the flag plant. I’m like, oh, my God, I forgot about this because when I originally saw it, you know, there’s so much documentaries I’m watching, like I did, it just didn’t stand out. But because I came back to it, I don’t. It jumped out the screen. I was literally doing something like, you know, walking around cleaning while I’m watching, and I’m like, what did he say? And I was like, let me rewind that.

And so when you get into their diaries and stuff, and it makes me think, like, was these some of, like, the precursors? Well, not even precursors, because we just watch A Noble Lie. It kind of reminded me of that Timothy McVeigh. It kind of reminds me of, like, all the stuff we talked about and what we’ve been getting into with of like, what is this? Like, why is that in the film? And why does he not explore that more? It was so fr. It’s like a hidden gem, but also a frustration for me. I’m like, oh, you’re just gonna throw this out here and be like, no biggie.

And when he put the movie out, it’s already 2002, right? 911 already happened. So I don’t know why he didn’t go further on it. But I. For me, that was my major hidden gem, that a hidden treasure of this whole documentary. Because for me, I was like, oh, my God, it got me down a rabbit hole. And I’ve been already researching a lot of stuff on it. Now I. I want to do an episode about that one day I Kill the Mockingbirds. Because I’m like, oh, my God. Not just that the diary specifically was about flying an airplane into a building in New York.

And then the news reporter almost prophetically, was like, of course, you know, these ideas were pure fantasy. Like, clearly this has happened before the actual 911 happened. But it was we. Yeah, that three to five second clip. I kind of stopped what I was doing and paid attention too. And it’s wild that you mentioned A noble lie too, and getting into this conspiratorial Manchurian Candidate. Because also in Boland for Columbine, Michael Moore tracks down and interviews Terry Nichols brother, James Nichols, and even gets footage of him putting a loaded.44 to his head. And, like, being completely, like, acting kind of crazy about was what I was not expecting.

And I don’t even remember after had having watched this in the past that he had an interview with Terry Nichols brother And it was this again, there could have been three other documentaries inside of this. Bowling for Columbine. It never really finds its, its perfect groove, but it has a whole lot of these wild moments. I think my number one hidden treasure of this movie though is, and it’s not for me, it’s for other people watching it. But I just imagine if this is the most commercially successful documentary of all time, you’ve got a lot of normies that are walking into this not knowing what they’re going to get into.

They don’t have no idea what. And for a good, I want to say like five to ten minutes, he just throws this collage of all these CIA and military coups. So I’m just going to mention the, the heavy hitters that he mentions. But just imagine your mom, your grandma, your aunt, whatever, like goes to see this movie because everyone’s seeing it, everyone’s recommending it. And they come out and they’re like, oh, I never heard about the 1954 Mosadc of Iran getting replaced with the shaw by the CIA. Or the 54 overthrow of the President of Guatemala where 200 civilians were killed, or the 63 assassination of the Vietnamese President.

Or the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile where they assassinate Allende and put in Pinochet. 1977, El Salvador, 1980, they’re training been Osama bin Laden. 81 he mentions the Iran Contra scandal, 1982, billions are sent to Saddam Hussein. 83 during that time, the White House then gives weapons to Iran, the people that are fighting Iraq. 89 the CIA agent Noriega, which they say disobeyed CIA orders, causing them to invade Panama and remove him. 91 Iraq war. 98, he calls out Bill Clinton for bombing aspirin facilities and calling it, you know, these, these acts of war 2000 to 2001 giving the Taliban 245 million.

And then in 2001, the CIA training bin Laden and that the Bin Laden uses this to cause 9, 11. I mean I have seen all of these claims a whole bunch of other places over. But again, your grandma, your aunt or like your piano teacher go and see this movie and they walk out and they just got an info dump about CIA coups. I, I couldn’t have been happier like that. That scored so many points with me that at least someone went into this thinking it was going to be about gun rights. And they walk around being like, man, maybe we should fight back against this tyrannical government.

No. And, and like you’re, you said it perfectly. It’s not some fringe documentary. We’re like, hey, you know, you got to go dig for it. Or your. Your uncle’s uncle’s a friend that, like, you know, smokes and stuff. Like, hey, man, you want to check it? Told by, like, major news networks. It’s being winning awards, making so much money, and being suggested by soccer moms, right? Like, oh, you should check out this, because it’s anti gun. And that he does have a lot of, like, things that we would agree with. That’s where I’m like, hey, he’s kind of.

He has some Alex Jones in him. As much as he probably can’t stand Alex Jones, he has some of it. He’s like the opposite end of the spectrum, right? Like, but Alex Jones, that’s what he does is he’s like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Here’s all this information. And they even have a similar style of how they, like, hit street interviews. And I. I would love to see them do a documentary together one day. Well, do you think that Michael Moore would be more at home infiltrating Bohemian Grove or getting invited to Bohemian Grove? Oh, man, I.

I gotta say, he’s gotta. He had to be there, right? What about. That would have been great if Alex had, like, caught on camera, Michael Moore part of the terrible in Bohemian Grove. It might be too Republican, but it does. I don’t know. It feels like a Hollywood insider kind of thing. I don’t know. It’s. It’s a good question. Good thought experiment. The other, I guess, hidden treasures. For me, aside from that list of CIA overthrows, there’s this one clip is one of my favorite video clips of all time for all the wrong reasons. Let me just be clear.

But it’s one of these safety videos they show about schools. And it’s this kid that can’t be older than 12 years old. And he pulls out like 20 different guns from his jeans. He’s got sawed offs. He’s got like an Uzi. He’s got every gun you can think of in his jeans. And he’s just walking around with a baggy shirt and baggy jeans. And the teacher or whoever is representing this, this like, security concern is talking about. And this is why our school district does not allow baggy jeans. And everyone has to has their shirts tucked in.

And it leads into the one cohesive narrative that I think that you can probably point your finger at in this entire movie. And that’s about this rise of. Of fear in the media and the Alex Jones style that Michael Moore is now get. Like he’s leaning into the same kind of style. You could even imply like some. Some inside knowledge type stuff. We’ll get into that in the next one too. But Michael Moore in particular, in this one he’s talking about maybe, and I’m going to paraphrase this because he’s Weasley. He doesn’t put his stamp on things, but that maybe it’s the media inciting fear.

And he gets into a whole nother little tangent about all these reports on black males and how black males are scary. And then there was a shooting that was nearby Flint, Michigan, that happened with like a young black kid shot this little white girl. And that was in his class, the. The youngest school shooting either of all time or maybe just at that time. And he uses that. He shoehorns in that particular story to paint this picture of that. This is what makes us unique here. Here’s the answer on why it’s happening in America, nowhere else.

Because everyone’s terrified by the news. And there’s some good clip editing. He shows one that it ends with, you know, tonight at 9, what you don’t know might kill you. And that’s just the whole segment into this news clip. And he’s talking to one of the. Either a news reporter or a cop. And they make this. This claim that, well, technically violent crime went down by 20% from last year, but the reporting of violent crime went up by 600%. So the. I guess the implication there is that everyone is just so terrified that now they’re buying up guns constantly to protect themselves from all these new perceived threats that might not even be real.

And that maybe that’s the cause for, you know, the Columbine shooting. I guess again, it’s a. It’s a hard connection. Oh, brother. So let’s. Let’s get into the overboard moments because that’s where it’s going to devolve into anyways. And that’s where I want to start at it too, is right after he gets done making this point about white people are getting riled up by the media, by these, you know, black males and that they’re violent and you need to arm yourselves. He juxtaposes this with all these Africanized killer bees. Like, even. Even the bees from Africa are more violent.

Like, that’s sort of the premise that’s getting pushed out through the media. And I mean, we live through that. I think even Wuang kind of made fun of that with like the, the. The Wuang killer bees. Right? It was like these Africanized bees that were coming in and wreaking havoc in the country. Yeah. And he leaned into it. And that’s one thing of his bias too is he’s one of these liberal guys that’s out of touch, that that’s not been around places for a long time. And yes, at that time, you know, you did see a lot of reports, you know, in the 90s, especially of like, hey, black male.

And like there was probably heavier stuff, you know, kind of going after like different races. But he literally leans in and he’s like, look there, the regular bees are fine, but these African killer bees. And he just couldn’t let it go. And this whole race baiting part that he doesn’t. All of his films, it does get a little bit annoying to me at the time. You’re like, oh my God, another thing you’re going to compare. Oh, because white people are afraid. That’s kind of like what I got out of these white supremacist nationalists are afraid and they already have a ton of guns, so they just start shooting people up.

There’s my list of things that we can criticize about this movie would keep us here for like another hour or two. So the, the other main one that really bugged me on this one is that he clearly, when he’s, when we’re talking to all the Canadians and like the, the Canadian governors and stuff, whatever the hell they call them in Canada, that oh, well, maybe it’s poverty and it’s kind of like false, you know, it’s not poverty because look, here’s this impoverished area in Canada that has roughly the same or more of gun owners. They’re consuming the same media, everything.

And that’s not it. It’s not just a poverty thing. But then later on, because you’re going to learn in every Michael Moore documentary, he’s shoehorns in Flint, Michigan, and he returns to Flint, Michigan for some reason or another. And, and it’s talking about that tragic story where that, that kid brought the gun to school and shot this girl, the youngest shooting in history. And he goes on to basically imply that it was caused by poverty, that the GM plant shutting down from his previous movie caused this economic, you know, backspin and destroyed this community. And now because that community is in shambles, that poverty led to this other school.

None of it makes sense because it directly contradicts the exact thing that he just went out of his way to say, this is not the factor. But then he leverages it once it’s convenient for the bias that he’s getting into. And even more than that is that when this shooting happens, he goes to that community and he talks to the lady that places the. The 911 call, and he’s showing the. The memorial. He goes to Charlton Heston’s house and has an interview with Charles Charlton Heston and talks about this girl that gets taken out. And he’s talking to Charlton Heston, and he’s like, you know, implying.

Aren’t you embarrassed? Or don’t you feel bad about going to these tragedies, like, going to Columbine after this tragedy occurred and using that for promotion? And it’s like, my dude, aren’t you. Didn’t you literally just show yourself inserting Michael Moore into that. That tragic story? And now you’re part of this thing, and you’re criticizing Charlton Heston for just being on the. The literal other end of that same, you know, exploiting a tragedy and exploiting these kids. And he. And he kind of takes that a step further where he goes and he finds two of the survivors from Columbine that got shot.

One of them is paralyzed. The other one still has a bullet lodged between his spine and his aorta. And he brings them to the Kmart headquarters, and he kind of, like, demands that they. They first, he’s like, we want to return these bullets. Like, they’re inside these people’s bodies. And when that doesn’t work, they go to the same Kmart in Columbine where the bullets were purchased. They buy out all the bullets and then bring those back. And this actually has a national effect. This is crazy that Michael Moore inserting himself into this documentary actually changed the course of Kmart’s entire corporate future.

Isn’t that wild? He kind of, like, threw it off, but I liked it. You brought the Charleston Heston thing up. Because this is something me and my friend have been making fun of since we saw this originally. When he’s like, has the picture. Look at her. He’s like, look at her. Like, so we used to do that all the time, like, because we thought it was so hilarious. Like, dude, are so over the top, like, theatrical. Because he makes arguments that, like, look at these people are just playing theater, and they’re just trying to get people on their side, and they’re using this to, you know, kind of change the narrative.

And you’re like, you’re doing the same exact thing, dude. The Charlton Heston interview is now somewhat infamous, not just for that scene that you talked about. And Charlton Heston did not do himself or the NRA any favors in this? Because Michael Moore asks maybe the, the most poignant question of this entire documentary and he asked Charlton Heston, why do you think it is that in other areas that have the same accessibility, the same amount of gun, like when all other things seem to be the same, America has these higher gun deaths. And after he asked Charlton Hessen enough times out of frustration and maybe just being old, Charlton Heston kind of utters.

Maybe it’s the ethnicity. Like he kind of makes this and there’s really no coming back from that. Especially in the context of this Michael Moore movie. Like he sort of reproves and almost justifies the, the false claims of the KKK and NRA and the cartoon about slavery and all this. Sean Heston not knowing about any of that just plays right into it. So this, this becomes one of the biggest gotcha interviews in the entire movie, for sure. Foreign waves of this movie. Again, this one has one of the biggest cultural impacts for so many different reasons.

The first one being that he gets 200 million profit from this movie, which makes it the most commercially successful movie of all time. It also makes it so that political documentaries kind of become in vogue for the next decade or so. Right on the tails of this is Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore, followed by the network that Al Gore put together to kind of promote political documentaries. I think that’s where Vice News originally came from. A lot of this stuff came in the wake of this particular documentary. And I think the, the biggest cultural impact is that this documentary and the events that we see happen in the movie itself actually caused Kmart to stop selling ammunition across the board because of the antics when he shows up with these Columbine kids.

It’s such a PR nightmare for Kmart. They don’t have any other option but to just stop selling ammunition because of all this. I mean, I would know of the other movies that we have seen, have ever made a global, or at least like a national conglomerate have to change their entire marketing strategy and the products they offer because of the result of this. We might get into like a Sea World 1 later in the future. But this is the only one that’s actually had this much of an impact. And as I was saying earlier, I think like politically, or at least like politically of the people where you’re hearing a lot of this narrative, not just the anti gun stuff, but a lot of like gun equal white, a nationalist that’s a white supremacist.

And they go hand in hand. And I think that all started with this film with their claim of, oh, KKK in the NRA is the same organization. So I think your point earlier was really influential to all of these movements. You’re up first. Sink or swim. I gotta sink on this one. I mean, I was showing love for the previous one because I do like his style of film, right? Like, I think he’s good at what he does. Not necessarily telling the story, but I’m talking about editing and spicing it up and making it entertaining. But again, it’s this carrot on stick thing where we’re just roaming around.

It’s like it says Bowling for Columbine. And we don’t have any resolution of what’s going on in Columbine. We’re here talking to Terry Nichols, brother. We’re in all over in Flint talking to some random kids. And some kids like, yeah, I got the Anarchist Cookbook. You know what I mean? I was number two in, in claiming that I might blow up the school or something. Right? Like, he has so much stuff. It’s entertaining and it’s, it’s still something I think people would enjoy watching. But just on the premise of, are you gonna follow the storyline of Bowling to Columbine? Are we gonna go with Columbine? And the only reason it’s called Bowling for Columbine is because at 6am before they shot up the school, they went bowling or had a bowling class.

So, yeah, I’m gonna have to give it a sink. I, I think it’s still worth watching. But he hits, he misses again where he can’t stick. On topic. I might, I might have to, to vary on this one again, man. But again, it was like a thin hair. But I’m. I think I’d give this one a swim for a few different specific reasons. A, like, the bias is absolutely there. You have to go into this. But I almost see it as an entry level litmus test. Even for yourself. If you think that you’re either pro gun or anti gun or whatever side of school shootings, I hope you’re anti school shooting.

But whatever side you are on all these topics that come up in this documentary, I feel like this would be a good way to challenge what some of your preconceived notions are. Because he does a very admiral job of saying, is it Satanism, Is it music? Is it culture? Is it movies and TV and music? Is it accessibility to guns? Is it because there’s a Lockheed Martin plant? Like, he actually does present a whole bunch of these questions and factors. Even if Michael Moore Himself contradicts those. Immediately afterwards, he’ll say, like, oh, it’s just about exploiting people and generating fear.

And then he goes and exploits people and generates fear, even though he himself partakes in the things he’s criticizing. It does open up this really fascinating question of what? What is it? What is the one thing that is somehow making us different than every other country when it comes to these, like, gun violence? So I do think that that alone, he explores it in enough angles that even if you go in with a different bias or your own bias, it’ll make you consider way more factors than maybe you do going into it. So for that reason alone, I think that it’s worth watching.

Foreign the last Michael Moore movie that we’re gonna do for this month, Fahrenheit 911. And if you don’t know what that title means, actually, we should explain too. A Bowling for Columbine means you kind of hinted at it. The premise was that what could be the factor that caused this violent outburst and Columbine? And if you just go by the last thing that the kids did, if that was the thing that made them snap, well, the last thing they did was they went bowling class and then they went on their shooting rampage. So the bowling for Columbine was this play on words or this play on a topic that.

Well, maybe it was the bowling that did it. How come we don’t try and regulate bowling? Which I actually think is a good pro Second Amendment, you know, argument where it’s like, clearly it’s. Anyways, the Next one, Fahrenheit911 is based on the name of the book Fahrenheit451 about people burning books. Even though it doesn’t really get into the censorship aspect, it is all about Bush. Yeah. And it has one of my favorite clips, I mean, of Bush of all time. The. The. Now watch this drive. Yeah, that one. Mine is the. The fool me once, fool me twice, you’re not gonna fool me again.

That’s my favorite quote of him of all time. Under the docks, yeah, under the docks. Buried deeper, we break in the locks under the docks. Under the docks, yeah, under the docks. American stickers, Cryptids, cults and killers. Killers. We got all your favorite conspiracies. All that more on a sticker sheets. There are non American stickers. They’ll make you smile and snicker false threads and secret societies. All of these and more sticker sheets. Explore the unique with paranoid American sticker sheets. Unearth tales of cryptids, cults and mysteries through each sticker these won’t last long get yours now@paranoidamerican.com American stickers Cryptids, cults and killers killers we got all your favorite conspiracies all on our sticky sheets paranor American stickers make you smile and snicker ghost flags and secret society all of these and more on a sticker sheets what the heck are you waiting for? Discover the extraordinary with paranoid American sticker sheets from cryptids in the night to cults out of sight each sticker is a unique find get yours now@paranoidamerican.com paranoid yeah I scribbled my life away driven the right to page will it enlight your brain give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hate maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cause they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated met is the apex execution of flame you out nuclear bomb distributed at war rather gruesome for eyes to see max them out that I light my trees blow it off in the face you despising me for what though calculated and rather cutthroat paranoid American must be all the blood spoke for real Lord give me your day your way vacate they wait around to hate whatever they say man it’s not in the least bit we get heavy rotate when a beat hits so thank us you’re welcome for real you’re welcome they ain’t never had a deal you’re welcome man they lacking a pill you’re welcome yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
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