Today, I talk about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, and ask the question: Were our great-great-grandparents better at fighting that pandemic than we are at fighting this virus today?
00:17:07.080I wonder if those folks back in 1918 would have at least given it a shot, try to save some lives.
00:17:15.060Now, obviously, the 1918 virus killed many more Canadians than did the 2020 Chinese virus, almost 100 times more proportionally, as it showed.
00:17:23.680Well, obviously, the virus back then was deadly, or obviously we have better health care now, not only to deal with acute crises, but I think in general.
00:17:42.620To be candid, I think that the relatively low death toll today isn't a function of anything that public health care bureaucrats did or politicians did, and certainly not police telling people they can't walk their dogs in the park.
00:17:58.120Our great-great-grandparents didn't use the excuse of the virus to send the country into a Great Depression or to arrest people for leaving their houses.
00:18:08.340See, did you find those photos and handbills from 1918, 1919 interesting?
00:18:19.460Well, tomorrow, unless some urgent news breaks, I'm going to tell you the most incredible story that I think we can learn from of when the Black Death came to the French port of Marseille in 1720, the last city in Western Europe to have the plague.
00:18:40.760It's a terrifying story, but also some interesting lessons about quarantines and borders that we can learn from, too.
00:20:16.820You might ask yourself, how could men destroy what remains of nature to enrich themselves?
00:20:22.600Well, that's why they're billionaires, and you're not.
00:20:31.420The takeover of the environmental movement by capitalism is now complete.
00:20:36.700Environmentalists are no longer resisting those with a profit motive, but collaborating with them.
00:20:41.480Your take on that, about $100 million pre-tax from a country that bases its wealth on fossil fuels, isn't there a bit of hypocrisy in that?
00:21:07.560The only reason we've been force-fed the story climate change plus renewables equals worse saved is because billionaires, bankers, and corporations profit from it.
00:21:55.320Yeah, the problem with all of these materials is that it takes an incredible amount of energy to mine and process all of the materials that go into building something like this.
00:22:05.860You use more fossil fuels to do this, then you're getting benefit from it.
00:22:11.220You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels in the first place instead of playing pretend.
00:22:15.320Now, I think there are obviously still flaws with this film, but it says things that were unsayable, and maybe that's Michael Moore's strength.
00:22:24.480He's the only one who could call out the left on this because of his impeccable left-wing bona fides.
00:22:32.560He's a hero on the left, the hard left, the progressive left, the Bernie Sanders left.
00:22:39.400Well, you can imagine the reaction to this film, Planet of the Humans, has been outrage on the left.
00:22:45.800Here is a lengthy rant by the leader of Canada's tiny green party, Michael Moore's dreadful, ill-informed, unhelpful film.
00:22:58.880Oh, you know, he's on the right track.
00:23:01.520Well, joining us now to talk about this and what it means and the strengths of this movie and its weaknesses is our friend Mark Morano.
00:23:08.140He's the boss of ClimateDepot.com, and he joins us for a escape.
00:24:02.400To me, that encapsulates what Michael Moore was able to uncover.
00:24:08.220He goes through people like Bill McKibben, the hero of the climate movement, personal friend of Al Gore, is shown grappling, hemming, hawing.
00:24:39.920However, and I think you alluded to this, the issues are he believes in climate alarmism severely, and his solution is essentially overpopulation, less people.
00:24:49.640And I think that's where the movie fails, but if you just take that out of the equation, which isn't that big of a part, and focus on the fact that this is, quote, friendly fire from someone on the progressive left aimed at the progressive left, this is an amazing aha moment for many on the progressive left, particularly Michael Moore and his producer, Jeff Gibbs, who is the voice you hear in the movie.
00:25:12.500Yeah, you know, that Branson moment, you're so right on that, because he poses as this organic, woke hero.
00:25:22.120The guy's got an international airline.
00:25:24.260I mean, I admire him for his capitalism, but I admire him for his chutzpah, for him to pose as a friend of the environment.
00:25:33.400First, take a quick look at that clip that you're referring to.
00:27:24.860First of all, Michael Moore went to Cuba and all he could talk about was how great Castro's literacy rates were and how great the health care system was.
00:27:33.800That gives you an idea of his bona fides on the left.
00:27:37.260I mean, this guy, you can't get more respect.
00:27:39.700He also, by the way, and this is interesting because I think there's an honest part.
00:27:43.500He honestly believes what he presents, meaning he, in 2016, was one of the few on the progressive left.
00:27:49.380I mean, the progressive left and the mainstream were convinced Donald Trump would never win.
00:27:53.060And Michael Moore called it early on and said that everything he sees, Trump's going to win.
00:27:59.860Now, I think it's exactly what you say, Ezra.
00:28:03.060He realized early on, and if you watch even up to the first like 10 minutes of the movie, he talks about the Obama stimulus, the $90 billion, the things that led to Solandra and the other debacles.
00:28:14.540But he has all the clips and interviews and Richard Branson and others at the time, Al Gore and President Obama bragging about all the money that's going to come and all the all the energy and how fossil fuels are finished.
00:28:26.960And this is they're going to just take over.
00:28:28.860And this is all they've ever waited for.
00:28:35.940So what happened was, and I think this is exactly what you say, he doesn't like big corporations, concentrations of wealth.
00:28:43.000And so he sees the green energy scam for exactly what it is.
00:28:46.580The Soros, the Bransons, the Al Gores, all of these into this, the so-called renewable fields.
00:28:53.020And he sees all the con that they're doing and who's profiting and who's making money and who's not delivering on their promises.
00:29:00.040And for his troubles, Ezra, Josh Fox of Gaslin, Michael Mann of the Climategate, United Nations hockey stick fame, infamous, signed petitions, pressured the distributor.
00:29:12.200For a brief time, there was the distributor had agreed to pull the movie.
00:29:15.960And then because of pressure against censorship from many conservatives, they decided not to pull the movie.
00:29:22.100You have the left going bonkers right now trying to censor Michael Moore's message.
00:29:27.340Yeah, now, I think that, I mean, I remember that clip you're talking about when Michael Moore early on called Trump a winner.
00:29:38.440I want to play a very quick clip of a speech he gave in Michigan in 2016 before the election.
00:29:49.780But what it showed me is that for all his partisanship, and I remember when Michael Moore had a pride of place at the Democrat nomination, I think it was in 2000, I forget what year it was.
00:30:00.440But he was a real Democrat Party hero, but he was not so blinded by partisanship.
00:30:05.100He, there's this little anecdote he told about Trump going right in to talk to the CEOs in Detroit, saying that if they'd better bring their manufacturing back to America, and if they didn't, he'd punish them, or they should be punished.
00:30:22.780He could get past any aesthetic differences he had with Trump to realize, oh, my God, maybe this guy's right.
00:30:30.480And he, let me just play the clip for you, because I thought it was so telling.
00:31:03.460I dislike Michael Moore in about five different ways, but I think he has a grain of intellectual honesty.
00:31:10.480Even though I think he's wrong, I think his stats are often wrong.
00:31:14.460Any guy who could say, you know, Trump is talking to the working man in a way the Democrats aren't, that's honesty.
00:31:19.220And I think when he looks at that oleaginous Al Gore, who took all the money from Qatar to buy his TV network, when he sees that, I think there's enough authenticity deep, deep, deep hidden within him that he said, I am not a sucker.
00:31:38.980I am not going to be suckered by these guys.
00:31:41.360That's my theory, that he has a scrap of honesty, and he said, I'm going to call out these swindlers.
00:31:49.700In fact, where I think this is very consistent with Michael Moore, he doesn't like that sort of nexus of government, corporate, basically aligning to what he sees as screwing the little guy, crushing the little guy.
00:32:04.560So what happened here, he followed the money.
00:32:07.960And if you go back, I remember CBS News even reported, you know, the Obama stimulus package went to nine out of 10 or some high number, 80 percent Democratic donors to Obama.
00:32:18.240He could see a financial scheme when one was presented, and he saw it with green energy.
00:32:25.220And then to have his producer go out, and some of the most just powerful scenes of the movie aren't with these big political figures.
00:32:32.020They're with the low-level activists at these demonstration events with solar panels and windmills out in the desert, you know, and even in parking lots and other places where they do all the flashy stuff, and they mention all this great stuff about renewable.
00:32:46.780They start asking in Michael Moore's film inconvenient questions, and then the advocates, the salesmen for solar and wind are admitting on camera, well, you know, this would only be enough to power a few houses, even though we're taking up all these football fields, et cetera.
00:32:59.420And then they talk about how much it is to make the solar panel.
00:33:03.280At one point in the film, they refer to the green energy as a pretend energy, you know, kind of like we can pretend to get energy from these compared to fossil fuels.
00:33:12.980So it is just phenomenal that someone on that side – he joined someone by the name of Michael Schellenberger, who actually was one of the architects of the Green New Deal and was all excited with Obama's stimulus package.
00:33:27.260He is now – he's still much – not as much as Moore, but still believes in a climate, you know, that we have to deal with climate, that it's a problem.
00:33:34.880But he is now against the entire green energy movement.
00:33:37.380And he's actually spoken very highly of this movie, Michael Schellenberger.
00:33:41.260So he's a major figure on the left, Time Magazine's hero of the environment.
00:33:44.960So Michael Moore is not alone in this transition.
00:33:47.660So I would tell my fellow climate skeptics out there, support Michael Moore.
00:33:52.860I know a lot of people are still attacking him for his overpopulation, for his climate alarmism.
00:33:57.520Let's look past that and let's embrace him because he's not going to have many friends on the left after this.
00:35:01.980Because although he has a following and he has an authenticity, he is so small compared to the various forces he's going up against who have billions, billions of dollars.
00:35:16.880And filmmaker, well, Al Gore is the one who got the Nobel Prize and the Oscar.
00:35:20.940And so he's going up against an army of propagandists.
00:35:27.940He's going to be unpersoned, much like the co-founder of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore, has been erased from Greenpeace's history because he's a skeptic of them.
00:36:19.840I mean, I spent a lot of time in my book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, focusing on politically left-wing scientists and commentators who reverse themselves and are now skeptical of global warming.
00:36:31.880I don't think it's a very far stretch once man realizes the con of the Bill McKibben's, of the Al Gore's, of the Richard Branson's, of the George Soros and all these, the funding, this stuff.
00:36:42.080Once you realize that, you start looking into the science and you realize, hey, wait a minute.
00:36:46.360The same people pushing climate alarmism are the same people pushing solar and wind to replace fossil fuels.
00:36:52.800And it ain't going to happen in any technologically feasible way at any time in the future that we can foresee.
00:36:58.920So, once he starts unraveling it, I don't know how he can hold on to his other views.
00:37:03.460And you mentioned, Ezra, overpopulation.
00:37:05.280I mean, the new problem is underpopulation.
00:37:08.120Many of the same people who were worried in the 70s and 80s of overpopulation have now reversed themselves and are looking at it as population stabilizes.
00:37:16.660We're going to be facing a decline in population later this century based on latest projections.
00:37:21.240So, the key to population, by the way, if you're worried, wealthier.
00:37:25.680The wealthier the country and the societies are, the less the population stabilize and actually end up declining, especially if you take out immigration.
00:37:43.120Well, you know, I'm amazed by this turn of events.
00:37:48.360I think that maybe Michael Moore, at the end of the day, is a gadfly, a leader of the opposition, so to speak, who, you know, always wants to be on the outside.
00:37:59.740And I think society needs people like that.