Daily Times

Michael Moore spoke with Stephen Colbert about combating the coronavirus, the “Trump virus” and what he called “the pre-Trump virus” on The Late Show Tuesday.

While ousting Trump from office in November was first on Moore’s mind, he acknowledged that the president “didn’t fall out of the sky” and that the “pre-Trump virus” constituted the broken elements of the American political system that “we hadn’t quite fixed yet in this country, and they were causing us, still, a lot of pain and despair.” Moore said that throughout the pandemic, he’d been thinking a lot about “how we want to live” after COVID-19, and seemed hopeful that this moment would force broader structural changes.

In the second half of the interview, Moore spoke about his new documentary, Planet of the Humans, directed by long-time collaborator Jeff Gibbs; it was released for free on YouTube Tuesday. The film tackles climate change, although it offers a somewhat critical view of the environmental movement so far, with Moore saying: ‘Maybe the road we’ve been on, in trying to fix our environment, while well-intentioned, has not been the right road. Because, we’re so far gone at this point, not just with climate change but a whole bunch of other things, that we are not going to be able to solar panel and windmill our way out of this. We need a serious new direction. So the film deals with this and shows ways we need to be thinking about this’

“I think we’re going to be a different people; we’re never going to think that anybody should have to work for $7.25 an hour — I think that’s gone,” Moore said. The filmmaker then brought up Colbert’s recent interview with Bernie Sanders and noted to the host, “You said, not Bernie, when you stop and see all this, the last thing we should ever have a debate about is whether or not everybody or not should be covered, whether or not everybody has health insurance… We’re all in this together, it’s the golden rule, isn’t it?”

In the second half of the interview, Moore spoke about his new documentary, Planet of the Humans, directed by long-time collaborator Jeff Gibbs; it was released for free on YouTube Tuesday. The film tackles climate change, although it offers a somewhat critical view of the environmental movement so far, with Moore saying: “Maybe the road we’ve been on, in trying to fix our environment, while well-intentioned, has not been the right road. Because, we’re so far gone at this point, not just with climate change but a whole bunch of other things, that we are not going to be able to solar panel and windmill our way out of this. We need a serious new direction. So the film deals with this and shows ways we need to be thinking about this.”

After all that doom and gloom, however, Moore tried to inject the end of his interview with a little bit of home by singing the chorus from Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Why Shouldn’t We.”