(Newswire.net — January 30, 2015) — Amid the controversy of Clint Eastwood’s block buster “American Sniper”, Michael Moore recalls a not so pleasant memory of Clint Eastwood, the famous actor and director, publicly threatening to kill him. On his Facebook profile, Moore said that Clint Eastwood confronted him ten years ago this week, when they met as winners at the National Board of Review awards dinner.
A lot of people are asking Moore if it’s true about Clint Eastwood confronting him in 2005, as the rumor has now re-surfaced and is floating around the internet the past few days. So Moore thought he should say a few words…
Moore wrote, “He announced to me and to the crowd that he would “kill” me if I ever came to his house with my camera for an interview. “I’ll kill you,” he declared.”
Though the crowd laughed considering it a joke, as for Moore, “having experienced a half-dozen assaults in the previous year from crazies upset at ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ and my anti-war Oscar speech, plus the attempt by a right wing extremist to blow up my house (he was caught in time and went to prison), I was a bit stunned to hear Eastwood, out of the blue, make such a violent statement,” he posted.
But Eastwood went on. “I mean it, I’ll shoot you,” he said to Moore. Though there was a smattering of approving applause, the audience actually grew quiet and turned around to see Moore’s reaction. “I tried to keep that fake smile on my face so as to appear as if he hadn’t gotten to me. But he had. I then mumbled to those sitting at my table. “I think Dirty Harry just said, ‘Make my day, punk’.”
Moore wrote in a post he really admired Eastwood’s work and that he had marvelous films, however, “something started to go haywire with Clint in the last decade,” he said. Moore quoted Sophia McClennen who wrote in the Salon article that she believes the “first sign of his [Eastwood’s] loopiness began that night at the awards dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park where he randomly went after me [Moore]. Then came the (IMHO) awful (and weirdly racist) “Gran Torino” where he got to cast himself as a bigoted retired autoworker in Detroit. Two years later he was on the stage at the Republican National Convention carrying on a berating and confused conversation with an invisible Obama in an empty chair.”
Moore called ‘American Sniper’, a mess of a film that rewrites history, and was the first to comment that snipers were cowards because they do not risk their lives shooting from a great distance. “The lead character becomes a victim of both the PTSD epidemic AND the violent American/Texan gun culture that eventually takes his life,” he wrote.
Moore said that “what was bothersome ten years ago when Clint issued is half-kidding/not-kidding threat,” was summed up in Glenn Beck’s show BECK when Beck said, “Hang on, let me just tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out — is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus Do band, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore’, and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore’.”
Further on Moore quoted Bill O’Reilly talking to Rudy Giuliani on his show: “Well, I want to kill Michael Moore, is that right? All right? And I don’t believe in capital punishment. That’s a joke on Moore.”
Moore is worried because of the lynch atmosphere that is building around him. Moore wrote that this hate-speech could inspire the more deranged among us, to harm him.
“This past week or so of hysterical attacks on me only proves that the American lovers of violence and the issuers of fatwas in OUR society haven’t gone away. They are our American ISIS,” Moore concluded.