I listened to the entire podcast that Michael Moore made attacking Elizabeth Warren. It is an appalling mess, well below Moore’s usual standards. There are numerous factual errors in it, and all of these accusations of her lying have been debunked. There’s no research backing it up at all, just paraphrases of other very dubious sources that have been floating around the Internet for sometime. I'd already checked on all of these before I listened, and confirmed they are all either complete fabrications or preposterous inferences from insignificant facts. They have the same level of legitimacy as the Pizzagate and Swiftboat scandals, and were created by the same kind of right wing operatives. Here are a couple examples.
He ignores the fact that "Janitor" and "Maintenance Man" are synonyms.
The claim that she was not fired for pregnancy because there was no piece of paper saying so, was refuted by hundreds of women who said they had been fired for pregnancy even though there was no official record of it.
She did not vote for Nixon or either Bush. The only Republican presidential candidate she ever voted for was Gerald Ford.
He says she took jobs from minorities by claiming to be Indian, even though The Boston Globe has a thoroughly researched article that proves she never once benefited financially from claiming to be Native American. (The Globe broke the Catholic pedophile scandal, and are very tough and responsible investigative journalists.)
Regardless of how anyone feels about Warren‘s former self-identification as Native American, it was not a lie. A lie is making a factual claim that you know to be false. At the time she said she was Native American, she believed that she was, just as anyone with Irish ancestry would believe that they were Irish. she was mistaken about this, but that does not make her a liar.
Some people have claimed there is something dishonest about not claiming to be Native American on some documents, and saying it on others. But this is nonsense. If I were of Irish ancestry, and somebody asked me on St. Patrick’s Day if I were Irish, I would say yes. However, If I were visiting Ireland, and the customs officials asked me if I were Irish, I would say no, and show them my American passport. Would that prove that I’m a liar?
Warren’s daughter spent all twelve years in public school. Her son spent 5 years in public school. It is NOT a lie to say that her children went to public school. I saw the video where she said that, and her accusers are putting a tremendous amount of weight on the half muttered word “no“, said once in an informal encounter. The woman she responded to said something like “ you don’t know what it’s like, because your children are in private school.“ Her response was “no, my children went to public school.” The “no” was a response to the false assertion that she didn’t know what it was like to have children in public school, and to the false assertion that she had “children“ in private school, when only one of her children went to private school.
That Moore would repeat these lies right now, at this vulnerable time, and then accuse Warren of lying,is far more of a knife in the back then Warrens statement. And then he says we should all forget about this, and put it behind us. Rather like the guy in the Monty Python movie who kills some people and says “ let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who.”
The irony here is that Michael Moore has often been attacked for getting his facts wrong by conservative columnists, and the attacks are almost always completely bogus. In his movies, he is always very careful about checking his facts with multiple sources. I think he did this podcast in one take, without doing any research at all. One more indication that his pain and anger is making him behave in ways that are not typical of him. I think his problem is that he can’t bear the idea that Bernie one said something in conversation that could be taken as sexist by some people. Consequently he feels a great need to prove that Warren is a liar, so he doesn’t have to believe what she is saying about this.