I don’t think that there’s any question that Michael Moore should be considered a traitor. When Hezbollah (or a Hezbollah-affiliated group) is offering to help distribute your film, you’re miles past the hard-to-see line that divides “dissent” and treason.

I have a hard time imagining what the Second World War would have been like if the subversive brigades had been in action then. Frankly, I often think that the only reasons they weren’t was that we were allied with the Soviet Union and, therefore, World War Two was the only sort of war that their kind could support.

Seriously, can you imagine a Michael Moore running around during that war? His films would probably mock President Roosevelt for his paralysis and intimate that he has conspired to get the United States into the war with the purpose of inflating the profits of his Jew financier friends. They’d explain the connections between the Roosevelt family and Adolf Hitler.

You’d have to be crazy not to see the effects of Moore’s films. Not only do they turn otherwise sane people against the United States and its policies, but they also provide a great deal of material and support for the enemies of American abroad. For all that Moore’s books and films have sold in the United States, I’d bet that they’ve sold another five copies overseas. If a poll were to be taken of the world, I’d bet that you’d find that Michael Moore is one of the five most popular Americans.

It would be simple to dismiss Moore was the idol of the stupid and ignorant. But that isn’t entirely true. Moore manages to suck in millions of people all across the world with his clever and emotionally deceptive propaganda. It spreads like a disease, with individuals being inducted into the cult of Moore through their friends. To the politically uninitiated, the arguments of a clever down-market demagogue like Moore have great resonance. It turns individuals into evangelists, with the strong-willed bowling over the weak.

Moore reaches people who otherwise would never be reached. He’s the only person releasing political documentaries which are designed to appeal to a mass audience. In all likelihood, that’s because he’s being funded by people more interested in political effect than profit. Frankly his new films ought to be regulated by the FEC.

Of course, we should do more than that. I have no doubt that someone behaving the same way he did during America’s earlier major wars (the World Wars, the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War) would have rapidly found themselves in serious trouble. Someone making movies so anti-American that the Germans were trying to distribute them in occupied Europe would have, at the very least, found themselves in jail for the duration. At the worst, well, you figure it out.

The real problem is that the suggestion that someone should be jailed (or perhaps even executed) for treasonous behavior is so shocking that most people would find it laughable. Why, punish treason? It’s unthinkable these days. John Walker Lindh signed up with al-Qaeda and fought against the United States, including in actions where an American was killed, and all he got for his crimes was twenty years. Another American citizen plotted to detonate a radioactive device in an American city and the thing most people seem to be concerned about is if he’s been given adequate access to counsel. What nonsense!

People view patriotism and treason as simply political positions, rather than viewing one as the default position of any good American and the other as a crime. To far too many people, believing in American victory and calling for American defeat is no different than favoring tax cuts or opposing them.

As much as I fanaticize about watching Michael Moore do a perp walk, I don’t harbor much hope that it’ll come to pass soon or, well, ever.

The only solution, then, is to fight back against them in the realm of ideas. Michael Wilson, a documentary filmmaker, is hard at work on a movie entitled Michael Moore Hates America. We need to support him and those like him. We need to fight our way back into the popular culture, clawing through blood-filled trench after blood-filled trench. It’s a lousy option, but it’s the only one open to us.

For now.