Passengers on a Delta Air Lines flight from New York to Ghana had a scare and an unexpected overnight stay in New York late Monday.

The takeoff of Delta Flight 420 from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Kotoka International Airport in Accra, Ghana, was aborted due to an “airspeed indication issue,” according to Delta spokesman Adrian Gee.

Upon landing, the brakes on the Boeing 767 overheated and the plane was met by fire and rescue officials, Gee said.  Flames can be seen in video posted on social media. The 205 passengers evacuated via stairs. 

 

The airline provided hotel accommodations and meal vouchers, and travelers are expected to fly out Tuesday night.

“Delta apologizes to our customers onboard Flight 420 for delaying their travel,” Gee said in a statement. “We are working to get customers to their destination as soon as possible.”

 

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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump should renominate Brett Kavanaugh if the Senate fails to confirm him for the Supreme Court this year, Sen. Lindsey Graham declared Tuesday.

The South Carolina Republican said he still believes Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the high court soon. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has vowed that the Senate will vote on Kavanaugh this week.

But Graham offered Trump a contingency plan in case the nominee is narrowly defeated.

“If his nomination were to fall short, I would encourage President Trump to re-nominate Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” Graham said in a statement. “It would – in effect – be appealing the Senate’s verdict directly to the American people.”

Graham discussed the strategy in more detail on Fox News, saying that Trump could use the issue in the midterm elections to go after Democratic Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Claire McCaskill of Missouri. The four Democrats represent Republican-leaning states that Trump won in 2016.

Trump could announce to voters in those states that he would nominate Kavanaugh again in 2019, after a new Senate convenes, Graham said.

“The midterm elections are only 35 days away and a new group of senators may view Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination very differently after hearing from the voters in their states,” Graham said in his statement.

Asked about Graham’s idea, Trump told reporters Tuesday that “certainly it’s interesting.”

If Democrats win the Senate, Kavanaugh would be a non-starter. However, there are more vulnerable Democrats than Republicans in this year’s midterm elections.

Graham, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been a fierce defender of Kavanaugh despite allegations that Kavanaugh engaged in sexual misconduct while he was drunk in high school and college. The FBI has reopened its background investigation of Kavanaugh to conduct a week-long probe that is expected to conclude by Friday.

“I can only imagine how awful this entire process has been for Judge Kavanaugh and his family,” Graham said Tuesday. “I truly admire Judge Kavanaugh’s determination –along with that of his family – to not quit in the face of the outrageous accusations that have been leveled against him.”

Graham urged senators who support Kavanaugh “not to give up on him.”

Chistine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high school house party in the early 1980s when she was 15 and he was 17.

Ford said Kavanaugh pinned her down on the bed of an upstairs room and tried to remove her clothes while holding his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming. She said she broke free when Kavanaugh’s friend, Mark Judge, jumped on them and sent them tumbling off the bed.

Kavanaugh and Judge have denied the accusations.

More: Even if Kavanaugh confirmed to Supreme Court, fight over sex assault allegations unlikely to end

More: Who has FBI contacted in its investigation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh?

More: Report: Brett Kavanaugh was once questioned over bar brawl in 1985

 

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Bernstein clients can’t stop asking about a bubble in tech.

That’s according to analysts at the firm who cover the sector — the same folks who have embarked upon a quest of sorts to figure out if tech stocks are, in fact, trading at dangerous levels.

It’s a fair question. Some experts across Wall Street have been sounding the alarm for months about overextended valuations throughout the entire stock market. And some of the charts they’ve put forth are scary. By multiple measures, equities are historically overinflated.

Bernstein sought to dig a little deeper in a recent note titled “Tech is Partying like it’s 1999 — Are we in another bubble?” What the firm found throws a bit of cold water on the thesis that tech specifically is overvalued.

The focal point of Bernstein’s argument is summarized in the charts below. They show that, when compared to forward earnings, current tech valuations have been kept far more in check than in 1999 — or the period preceding the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

Bernstein

How is this possible? Bernstein says that valuations have stayed largely in line with history because profits have grown quick enough to keep pace with ever-expanding stock prices.

This leads to another key point made by Bernstein: that tech companies on the whole are both more mature and larger than they were two decades ago. The average firm now generates more than three times the revenue and five times the free cash flow it did back in 1999, according to Bernstein data.

Bernstein also highlights some key differences between today’s tech conglomerates and other types of companies that have recently fallen on hard times.

“While industrial companies such as GE provide a sobering example of how large companies can fall into decline, we believe the situation is different with today’s tech companies,” analyst Zane Chrane wrote in the note to clients.

He continued: “In contrast to many large industrials and conglomerates, today’s largest tech companies tend to 1) be the biggest drivers of innovation and value creation such as automation and machine learning, and 2) they benefit from much stronger network effects than traditional companies.”

With all of that established, are there any stocks that jump out to Bernstein as particularly cheap, even considering all that’s going on?

To answer this, the firm turns an eye to the software sector. According to Chrane, this area is unique in that it’s actually a bit pricier than it was in 1999. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities.

He highlights two stocks in particular — Micron Technology and Western Digital— which he says look attractively priced. As you can see below, they’re cheap according to five out of 10 measures assessed by the firm.

Bernstein

This is Ode To…, a weekly column where we share the stuff we’re really into in hopes that you’ll be really into it, too.

It always warms my heart to see a fiercely fearless kid. Take, for example, Staten Harry, an incredible lip-sync assassin in-the-making and Lady Gaga super fan who loves to upload videos of himself lip syncing to Mother Monster.

Staten Harry became an internet sensation after he started uploading his performances to Twitter, and his amazing lip-sync skills and positive aura have earned him thousands of fans.

Take a look at his stellar lip sync of Gaga’s “Born This Way.”

And here he is singing “Hair.”

And of course there’s a video of him lip-syncing to “Bad Romance.”

This child literally radiates positivity, and I can’t help but smile whenever I watch his videos. 

Staten Harry currently has a follower count of more than 15,000 on his Twitter page, so he’s doing pretty well for himself so far. He’ll often tag icons like RuPaul, Gaga, and tons of Gaga fan accounts in the tweets accompanying his videos. This child is driven, and we could all take a lesson from him on personal branding.

His most popular upload is a video of his lip-sync to “Alejandro,” which incidentally inspired a kind of meme. There’s a point in the video where he says, “Everyone better be jumping,” while waving his hand in the air, and it’s somehow become pure meme gold.

Is there anything Staten Harry can’t do?

Staten Harry’s videos serve as a sweet reminder that we should all let our inner lip-sync queen out once in a while. I 1,000 percent stan.

Syrian refugee Hassan Al Kontar was arrested on Monday by Malaysian police for remaining in a “forbidden area” of Kuala Lumpur International Airport’s terminal two.

Al Kontar, 37, had been living inside KLIA’s domestic transfer lounge since March, after being denied entry to Cambodia and sent back to Malaysia.

The Syrian refused to seek asylum in Malaysia and decided to remain at the airport. Many view this move as a protest against Malaysia’s arbitrary detention of refugees and it not being a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention.

Al Kontar turned to social media to share his story of a life in limbo. 

He first arrived in Malaysia in October 2017 after being deported from the United Arab Emirates, where he had lived for 11 years, avoiding Syria’s devastating war and compulsory military service.

Al Kontar pleaded with UAE authorities to be sent to Malaysia, one of the few countries that allow Syrians to obtain visas on arrival.

Six months in an airport

He overstayed his Malaysian tourist visa last March and paid a penalty fee before attempting to depart. Then Al Kontar ended up at KLIA terminal two domestic transfer lounge, where he spent the last six months looking for options.

A group of Canadian volunteers filed a refugee sponsorship application to Canada on Al Kontar’s behalf on April 25, 2018. The processing time for a refugee application to Canada is 23 months and there is no guarantee he will be accepted.

Canada Caring Society started an online petition to call on Canadian Minister of Immigration Ahmed Hussen to allow Al Kontar to go to Canada on humanitarian grounds until his refugee application can be processed.

Al Kontar has family in Canada and friends and supporters there have found him a job. His Syrian passport expires in January 2019.

Malaysian police transferred Al Kontar to the immigration department. It stated it would contact the Syria embassy to facilitate his deportation from Malaysia.

The UN refugee agency’s Malaysia office is aware of Al Kontar’s arrest but has been unable to comment on specific cases.

Supporters inside Malaysia fear he will be placed in immigration detention until deportation, where conditions have been referred to as “torture-like” by SUHAKAM, Malaysia’s human rights commission.

Al Kontar’s Canadian lawyer Andrew Brouwer was unavailable for comment.

WASHINGTON – Five weeks before Election Day, the primaries for the midterms have proven this: Donald Trump is the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party.

And no one is the leader of the Democratic Party.

The leading edge of the Democratic Party – thenon-incumbents who won congressional and gubernatorial primaries – are more likely than ever before to be younger, female, and diverse in race and sexual orientation. Progressive challengers scored the most surprising upsets. That said, the emerging Democratic nominees are typically newcomers but not necessarily outsiders; many have elective experience and an establishment cast.

The leading edge of the Republican Party is distinctly Trumpian, overwhelmingly white and mostly male. President Trump’s endorsement propelled some long-shot contenders to win nominations, and almost no successful new GOP congressional candidate criticized the president. They seemed to follow a mother’s maxim: If they didn’t have something nice to say about Trump – which a third of them did – they said nothing at all about him.

Both parties find themselves in a state of some flux as they approach a November election that is likely to have big consequences. A redefined GOP is at risk of losing control of at least one house of Congress, and an energized Democratic Party is setting the stage for a wide-open brawl for the presidential nomination in 2020.

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Trump defines the Republicans – and the Democrats, at least for now. 

“Regardless of where you are on the spectrum in the Democratic Party, you oppose Trump; it’s a unifying theme,” said Jennifer Duffy of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “But get down to the nitty-gritty of the party and what it stands for and what it wants to do, there are some very big divisions there.”

In the primaries that ended in September, the ideological divide between the two parties continued to widen, according to an analysis by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica.

Based on a study of the ideological bent of their donors, he concluded that Democratic congressional candidates are moving left; Republican candidates are moving right. “Both parties are feeding off each other,” Bonica said.

The number in the middle continues to decline, signaling more of the polarization that has made everything from overhauling immigration laws to confirming a Supreme Court justice an increasingly difficult endeavor in Washington.

Trump’s takeover

Less than two years after winning the White House in his first bid at elective office, Trump is the face of the GOP. A 54 percent majority of Republicans in a new Ipsos Public Affairs Poll identified him as the leader of the party – an especially impressive number given that the person ranked second, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is not seeking re-election, was named by just 3 percent. Twenty-three percent said they didn’t know.

The online Ipsos survey was taken on Sept. 19 of 360 Republicans and 345 Democrats, with a credibility interval of plus or minus 5.9 and 6 percentage points for the respective partisan samples.

Trump interjected himself in the 2018 Republican primaries in a way previous presidents generally haven’t, and the overwhelming majority of candidates he endorsed ended up winning. He helped propel primary upsets in House races (including in Alabama, New York, South Carolina), Senate races (including Arizona) and gubernatorial races (including Georgia, Minnesota, Kansas).

In Kansas, Trump’s support helped Secretary of State Kris Kobach defeat incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer for the gubernatorial nomination. In Minnesota, former two-term governor Tim Pawlenty outspent his opponent by about 3-1 but still lost the Republican primary to Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson, who had embraced the president.

“The Republican Party has shifted,” Pawlenty told reporters after the vote. “It is the era of Trump, and I’m just not a Trump-like politician.”

In 2016, Pawlenty had called Trump “unhinged and unfit” after the “Access Hollywood” tape showed him bragging about sexually assaulting women. “Tim Pawlenty stuck his finger in the wind” by criticizing Trump then, Johnson said in his closing TV ad, with the final message he wanted voters to remember when they went to the polls. “I won’t panic when it matters.”

An analysis of congressional contenders by The Brookings Institution concluded that a third of the non-incumbent Republicans who won nominations praised Trump in their ads or on their websites. Just over half didn’t mention the president’s name. But virtually none of them made clearly critical comments.

Republican orthodoxy – once defined by policies including fiscal discipline, free trade and internationalism – increasingly reflects Trump’s brand of politics, including an appetite for tariffs as an economic weapon, a desire for tighter borders and less immigration, and wariness toward the multinational frameworks that have been built since World War II.

“There are very few remnants of the party that the Tea Party railed against,” Duffy of The Cook Political Report said. “That sort of fiscal conservative, social moderate really doesn’t exist, perhaps outside of (Maine Sen.) Susan Collins, and I don’t think you can be a party of one.”

Trump’s shadow is likely to be more of a mixed blessing in the general election than it was in the GOP primaries, especially in states and districts that aren’t deep red. In Florida, Rep. Ron DeSantis unexpectedly won the Republican nomination for governor with Trump’s support, defeating establishment favorite Adam Putnam. In July, DeSantis aired a TV ad that showed him urging his toddler daughter to “build the wall” with her blocks as his infant son sported a “Make America Great Again” onesie.

But in September, DeSantis distanced himself from Trump when the president asserted that the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria had been inflated – an especially sensitive issue in Florida, where many Puerto Ricans have fled, and can vote. DeSantis’ campaign released a statement saying, “He doesn’t believe any loss of life has been inflated.”

Trump was enraged, Politico reported.

Democrats: Undefined

And the leader of the Democratic Party?

Don’t ask Democrats. One in three Democrats replied “don’t know” when asked to name the party’s leader, the most frequent response given in the new Ipsos poll, and another 13 percent said the party didn’t have a leader.

That’s not unusual for the party that doesn’t hold the White House. It does underscore the wide-open landscape for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. As a result, dozens of prominent Democrats – senators and governors and mayors and business executives and a former vice president, among others – are considering presidential bids. Even the biggest names scored only in single digits as the party’s current leader: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at 5 percent, former vice president Joe Biden at 3 percent, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 1 percent.

In the poll, former president Barack Obama fared best, albeit cited by just 14 percent. The 2016 presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, was named by 6 percent. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was cited by 9 percent and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer by 4 percent. Democratic National Chairman Tom Perez – who actually is the leader of the party, technically speaking – was named by just 1 percent.

That adds up to a party that’s up for grabs, and trending left.

There were shock waves when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 28 years old and a Democratic socialist, ousted 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley for the Democratic nomination in the New York primary. That was followed in short order by a similar upset in the Massachusetts primary, when Ayanna Pressley, 44, defeated another 10-term incumbent, Michael Capuano.

Both victories over long-established congressmen with liberal voting records reflected Democratic urgency and a desire to shake things up. With Trump as president, Pressley told voters, “change can’t wait.” A campaign video for Ocasio-Cortez that went viral was titled, “The Courage to Change.”

Both women were part of a wave of more diverse Democratic contenders.

Ocasio-Cortez is Puerto Rican and Ayanna Pressley is African American; both defeated Anglo men. In Florida, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum unexpectedly won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination over two better-funded white candidates; he is the first African-American nominated for governor by a major party in Florida. Christina Hallquist became the first openly transgender person to win a gubernatorial nomination, in Vermont. Two Muslim women, Ilan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, won primaries in solidly Democratic districts and are poised to be elected to the House next month.

Women won nominations everywhere, mostly as Democrats. Reuters’ Center for American Women and Politics reports that a record 235 women were nominated for the House, a record 22 for the Senate; a record 16 for governor.

In Michigan, Democrats nominated female candidates for governor, secretary of State and attorney general as well as for the U.S. Senate and in two contested House races. Gretchen Whitmer, a former leader in the state Senate, won the gubernatorial nomination over a candidate who had been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.

While progressive challengers scored the biggest upsets, establishment Democrats like Whitmer actually fared a bit better in Democratic primaries overall. In swing congressional districts, the Democratic nominee was more likely to be an establishment or moderate Democrat, the Brookings analysis found. A relatively large number of progressive candidates were nominated in solidly Republican districts where winning will be difficult.

Even so, the Democratic primaries signaled a more liberal party ahead.

“The vote share of progressive candidates provably went way up,” Stanford’s Adam Bonica said. “If you have this group of candidates run for office and they’re energized, it’s much more likely that they’re going to try again. It’s very common for politicians really serious about a career in politics to lose their first race before going on to winning.”

That includes Barack Obama, he noted. And George W. Bush.

 

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Amazon just signaled that it’s preparing for retail’s so-called “war for talent.”

The retailer announced on Tuesday that it would be raising its minimum wage for all employees to $15 an hour effective November 1.

While CEO Jeff Bezos implied in a statement about the wage hike that the change is coming in response to recent attacks from politicians and activists over the company’s treatment of workers, analysts say that there is likely some economic motivation behind the decision.

“Amazon’s superior growth necessitates a lot of recruitment which is becoming increasingly difficult in a tight labor market. This is especially so over the holiday season,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, said in a note to clients on Tuesday.

Amazon’s new wage increase will impact not only the company’s more than 250,000 full- and part-time employees, but also the more than 100,000 seasonal staff members who work for Amazon over the holiday shopping season.

“Without a rise in wages, Amazon would be placing itself at a disadvantage in the labor market,” Saunders added.

The retail sector is currently being hit by a labor shortage crisis driven by high demand for workers and low unemployment rates in the United States.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by The Wall Street Journal, there were 757,000 retail-job openings across the United States in July, which is about 100,000 more than a year ago. Meanwhile, unemployment is low, at 3.9% in August.

As a result, stores have been scrambling to figure out how to win over workers.

Kohl’s announced 15% discounts and “associate shopping days” for seasonal workers. JCPenney is offering some workers paid training and paid time off, and it is even making some eligible for 401(k) benefits. Macy’s, which is looking to hire 80,000 workers for this holiday season, said its part-time workers would be eligible for its “Path to Growth Incentive Plan,” which awards employees a quarterly bonus based on performance.

“With so many companies looking to hire tens of thousands of seasonal employees, employee engagement needs to be put first,” David Mallon, the chief analyst at Bersin by Deloitte Consulting, told Business Insider in September.

For Amazon, this means making a big statement to attract talent.

While the wage hike will impact its bottom line, analysts believe that the returns will outweigh the costs.

“Attracting, and then retaining, quality employees is critical for the ultimate success of any retailer,” Moody’s lead retail analyst Charlie O’Shea wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday morning, adding that improved worker morale ultimately leads to better service for the customer.

From Gwen Stefani to the West Virginia teacher’s strike, the Parkland students to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, Michael Moore spends two hours threading together a web of events to explain the rise of Donald Trump from reality television star to the 45th president of the United States in his latest documentary, Fahrenheit 11/9.

There’s a lot to unpack in the fast-paced doc, so EW spoke to Moore about key takeaways from the documentary and what message he hopes audiences might leave with, ahead of the Nov. 6 midterm elections.

On Trump’s decision to run for president apparently involving Gwen Stefani:
“The odd thing was that he was upset at the performance fee that she was being paid [on NBC’s The Voice] that was more than his [on NBC’s The Apprentice]. He was an executive producer on his show, she wasn’t on The Voice, so he already made great money as an executive …  I guess I don’t know, he won’t talk to me so I don’t understand his reasons, but it seems like his line in the sand was Gwen Stefani. While there’s a bit of humor and tongue-in-cheekiness to this, if you remember back when he first announced, everyone was saying it doesn’t seem like he really wants the job. There’s no infrastructure set up to run a presidential campaign, there’s no way for you to get involved or to donate, he even said at that time ‘I’m not doing this for donations, I’m doing this with my own money,’ so you could see something was wrong, something was up, something wasn’t quite right, and I’m surprised nobody’s figured this out or has discussed this.

The fact that he might actually be our president because of an accident, because of his own ego, but the whole thing backfired on him because when he made the announcement, he went off the rails there and got himself fired there. The opposite happened there, instead of getting [NBC’s] money, or instead of pitting one network against another if he was threatening to move the show, that he ends up with nothing and just decides to go ahead and do those first couple of rallies and then boom, he saw certainly by August or September, he was number one in the polls for any primaries amongst Republican voters. I think that took him by surprise and then totally fueled his ego and his thought of ‘hell, I might as well go ahead and do this.’”

On including his business dealings with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, but not delving into their involvement in the Trump White House:
“Probably because I’m afraid. I just learned while making this movie that Bannon was behind the home video company that released [Moore’s 2007 documentary] Sicko. I did not know that at the time, and I thought ‘wow, that’s how power works.’ That even me, who you would think is completely on top of everything that involves my work, that I would know that, and now it makes me question everything in terms of who is putting up the money for everything. And nobody told me that, and maybe they knew it’s best not to tell me or whatever.

I just thought about when Jared at the time had the New York Observer, and he was wanting to be part of the scene, and it brought me back to thinking about the first time I actually met Trump. It was after Roger & Me, I had moved to New York somewhere in the early 1990s and I first saw Trump at a Planned Parenthood benefit. I and others who lived or worked in New York, if you were in the entertainment industry, you were constantly crossing paths with Trump. Usually in my case, it was at some liberal thing like Planned Parenthood, or some Democratic Party thing in the city — he blew whichever way the wind was blowing. If it benefited him at that moment to support Planned Parenthood, then he did, and if it benefited him to support his daughter and her support of making gay marriage legal, he did.

He’s very adept at reading a room, he’s an incredible performance artist, he knows how to play dump and stupid and crazy — he does it so real that you actually do believe this guy is so dumb, and he’s the furthest thing from dumb. He completely outsmarted the Democratic party, the Clintons, the media, he got the media to give him so much free airtime that his campaign only spent a third of what Hilary spent. He’s a very good example of ‘How do the rich get rich?’ Well, they don’t get rich by spending a lot of money on things. If he could find a way to get the media to give him free press, that’s what he did. He did that for decades, he was always one of biggest leakers in town, he was always feeding Page Six or gossip columnists stuff about himself. When the whole Stormy Daniels thing happened earlier this year, my first thought was that he leaked that. He leaked it because he knew it would benefit him. How? Just look at the 60 Minutes piece with Stormy Daniels when she appeared with Anderson Cooper, and then look at his approval ratings a week or two before that. He was at his lowest and then Stormy Daniels happened and his approval ratings started going up and that’s because he knows something about his base. Sixty-four percent of all white men voted for him and he knew that those white guys, hearing that he had sex would a porn star, knowing he had sex with a porn star would never be a negative. It would only be positive. It would allow his male base to cathartically live through him.”

On the ways the Democratic Party contributed to the rise of Trump:
“I didn’t realize just how insidious the infrastructure and the power is and how the old school and old guard politics and politicians of the Democratic party are probably our No. 1 obstacle to getting our country back in our hands, the way it should be. It’s painful to say that but I do not shy away from it because you have to remove that which is standing in the way of progress, standing in the way of justice.

It is unjust that we’re living in a country where — as I show in all those polls and I cite all my sources — the majority of Americans believe that climate change is real, believe in equal rights for women, believe in labor unions, that just came in at 62 percent from Gallup support labor unions … on and on and on, every issue, whether it’s gun control, the American people take the liberal position. In six of the last seven presidential elections, the Democrat has won the popular vote. The American people only wanted the Republicans once in 30 years: between George H.W. Bush in 1988 and this election 2 years ago, only once — George W. Bush in 2004 — have the majority of Americans voted for the Republican. They do not want Republicans running the country, and yet they run everything — the White House, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court. In 50 of our state capitals, Democrats control eight of them. This is insanity. How could this happen? I put it right at the feet of the leaders of the so-called people’s party, the Democrats. They have done nothing but made sure the Republicans win time after time and in large part, by running the wrong candidates but also, not pursuing the things that the American people want. They all need to be tossed out, as far as I’m concerned, and we have so many Democratic candidates running in November, what I call the insurgent candidates, and many of them are women. There’s a tsunami of women that are going to be voting and a tsunami of women on the ballot.”

On once again returning to his birthplace of Flint, Michigan, and using the ongoing water crisis to demonstrate political and policy failings:
“It’s not something that a documentary filmmaker would normally think of structuring a film that way but it’s where I was born, I’m raised there and still live in Michigan, so we saw a coming attraction for Trump with Gov. Rick Snyder, this Republican that was elected a few years before Trump and he did all the things that Trump wants to do — reduce the democracy, be a strongman, be in charge, take over those cities, then get a big tax break for the rich, remove services from the people, especially from the poor. There’s a racial element to it in the sense that Governor Snyder could never have done this in Ann Arbor or Bloomfield Hills, and then get away with it. It also showed that Trump really admired him, they had a falling out later but he was really like ‘wow, you can do this?’ and he was always sending little verbal love notes the governor’s way, and this was even before he announced he was running for government.

My point with Flint is, I ask all the viewers of this film to pay attention to things — they were constantly being given signposts from these people. It’s why I tell people Trump is always lying but he’s always telling the truth. So when he’s saying, ‘I could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Ave and get away with it,’ he’s actually telling the truth. Not just because he believes it but because we’ve seen him do so many things he’s gotten away with. Like I said, he did not fall out of the sky.”

On putting Fahrenheit 11/9 in movie theaters rather than on streaming platforms or exploring the issues in a series:
I made it so people could experience it together in movie theaters. This is not a movie you should watch alone — I noticed that Time Out in its fall movie preview had Fahrenheit 11/9 listed under horror movies opening this fall. I liked that. This is not a movie you should see home alone, this is something you should experience in a movie theater with a hundred, 200 people, most of them strangers, you will have such a cathartic experience watching this movie with others. The film was constructed with that in mind, on the big screen with a couple hundred strangers, fellow Americans who are going to be joining you throughout the film, whether you’re coming apart at the seams, whether you’re enraged, or laughing your head off or starting to cry.