‘I don’t agree with its message and I don’t like the misleading use of facts in its narrative…’
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Liberal firebrand Michael Moore got a taste of YouTube censorship on Monday when his latest film project was taken down because it exposed the renewable-energy industry.
Moore has a long history of cashing in on left-wing anti-American documentaries, but this time his activism upset Silicon Valley and Wall Street progressives.
In the past, Moore blamed traditional America and law-abiding gun owners for a horrific school shooting in Bowling for Columbine (2002). He used the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to slander President George W. Bush prior to his reelection in Fahrenheit 911 (2004), and he praised Fidel Castro’s communist Cuban regime for its socialized health care system in his film Sicko (2007).
His latest film, called Planet of the Humans, was banished from the world’s largest video website—which is owned by Google, the world’s largest internet search engine—after a complaint from a photographer who claimed his work was featured in the film without his permission.
“I don’t agree with its message and I don’t like the misleading use of facts in its narrative,” photographer Toby Smith told The Guardian.
A few seconds of Smith’s video, Rare Earthenware, was reportedly used.
But director Jeff Gibbs says the copyright violation is just a ruse to bury Planet of the Humans because it runs afoul of corporate and political climate change interests. By Monday, the film had gained more than 8 million views.
“This attempt to take down our film and prevent the public from seeing it is a blatant act of censorship by political critics of Planet of the Humans,” Gibbs said in a statement.
“It is a misuse of copyright law to shut down a film that has opened a serious conversation about how parts of the environmental movement have gotten into bed with Wall Street,” he said.
In one instance, the film depicts the Shiguai coal mine in Inner Mongolia, China, and shows how coal and rare earth mining are used to destroy the environment and place workers in unsafe conditions while making solar panels and wind turbines.
Moore is facing a firestorm of criticism from his usual media and environmentalist allies.
Among the chief complaints are his assertions that solar and wind power are as harmful to the environment as fossil fuels and that many environmentalist organizations are in the pockets of politically-connected, taxpayer-supported renewable energy companies.
Conservatives and free-market leaning groups have long substantiated such claims and endured the censorship and abuse that Moore is now subjected.
A Harvard study has debunked many of the proposed benefits renewable energy is supposed to offer, and evidence that government-subsidized renewable programs cause more pollution than fossil fuels has long been understood.