Politics & Power Quote by Michael Moore

Moore’s line is built to land like a double indictment: not just of a single administration, but of the entire machinery that launders power through “official” stories. The repetition of “We live in a time” isn’t decoration; it’s a drumbeat that turns political critique into cultural diagnosis. He’s not asking you to debate policy. He’s daring you to notice how unreality has been normalized.

The word “fictitious” does the heavy lifting. Applied first to election results and then to war rationales, it links two civic traumas into one accusation: democratic consent is being manufactured, not earned. Moore’s subtext is that the public isn’t merely lied to; it’s conscripted into a shared performance where institutions, media, and leadership collaborate to make the fiction feel like fact. That’s why he frames it as “we live” rather than “they did.” The charge implicates the audience’s complicity and fatigue, the way a constant stream of contested narratives can dull outrage into resignation.

Contextually, this belongs to the early-2000s moment when the disputed 2000 U.S. election and the post-9/11 rush to the Iraq War collapsed trust in procedural legitimacy. Moore’s activist rhetoric thrives on that convergence. By pairing the ballot box with the battlefield, he compresses stakes: a crooked count doesn’t just offend civics class ideals; it can spill real blood. It works because it refuses the comfort of compartmentalization. In Moore’s moral universe, the lie is not an isolated scandal. It’s an operating system.