Michael Moore responded to President Donald Trump’s tweets about “liberating Michigan” when he appeared on Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
Following a number of small protests of stay-at-home orders across the country, the president tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” calling for the same for Virginia and Minnesota.
“We’ve been planning our liberation for the last four years,” said Moore, who was born in Michigan and still resides in his home state. “Sadly, Michigan voted for Trump, so it was a huge embarrassment.”
The documentary director joked that he and his friends already have “Liberation Day all set,” which he said falls on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020. “The party starts around 8 p.m. that night. We’ll have a parade,” he added.
He also questioned why Trump tweeted that he wanted to liberate Minnesota. “Who wants to liberate Minnesota? Why are they in on this?” he asked.
Moore and Colbert also spoke about the essential workers that are keeping everyone safe during the coronavirus pandemic.
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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his plan to have a ticker-tape parade for health care workers, though Moore shared that he believes essential workers should “have the time off that we’ve had.”
“Whatever we pay them, we don’t pay them enough. Whatever time off they need, they get it,” he continued. “I’m talking about the people that have stocked the shelves of the grocery stores, people who have picked up your garbage, the bus driver who’s taking the health care workers to the hospital.”
He added that the thinks “we’re going to be different people” following the pandemic and “we’re never going to think that anybody should have to work for $7.25 an hour.”
Moore also said that there are three viruses in the United States. “The obvious one, the coronavirus, that we’re all trying to survive,” he said. “The second virus is the Trump virus that needs to be eradicated non-violently and legally at the polls.”
“The third virus is what I call the ‘pre-Trump virus.’ The one that we had for many years, long before Trump,” he continued. “We had a number of things that we hadn’t quite fixed yet in this country and they were causing us, still, a lot of pain and despair and whatever.”
The director noted that the country should focus on the coronavirus and getting Trump out of office before we try to fix the third “virus.”
The Planet of the Humans executive producer later compared the climate crisis to the coronavirus pandemic. After explaining that the doc dissects the climate crisis, he said that it’s “not depressing.” Moore added that the film makes viewers look at the coronavirus pandemic as “a trailer given to us from mother nature that if we were shocked by this, and our bodies don’t even know what this is yet, we don’t know how we’re going to eradicate it.”
Moore also wants the doc’s viewers to look at how they are treating nature.
Colbert added, “The same people who deny that the coronavirus is actually a crisis for so long, leading up till the moment when it was actually undeniable, are the same people who are denying that the climate crisis exists.”
The director concluded the segment by sharing an a cappella performance of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Why Shouldn’t We?”
“It’s a song and it’s a prayer and because I’ve sort of painted some bleak views of where we’re at and the future we’re going to have to correct and deal with,” he said before singing the chorus of the song.
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