The Michael Moore PodcastTRANSCRIPT
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To read more about Episode 200, visit the main episode page.
Michael Moore [00:00:29] This is Rumble with Michael Moore and I am Michael Moore. Welcome everyone to Episode 200 of Rumble. 200 episodes in this year and a half. Wow, I’ve had one of the best years and a half of my life, and it was awful, obviously, in so many ways because of the pandemic, because I was in my own lockdown here just to protect myself and others. But the fact that I got to have this time with all of you and now in episode 200, we speak again, I feel very blessed and very grateful that so many of you, and now we’ve crossed the 28 million mark of downloads, 28 million downloads of Rumble by all of you, thank you for that, thank you for sharing this podcast with others.
Michael Moore [00:02:22] Today, we are going to hear from a thoughtful and forceful author, thinker and activist by the name of Desmond Cole. He and I are going to discuss policing, prisons and how we must deconstruct these institutions and rethink our priorities, not only our priorities, but our values and where we actually put our public money. In Episode 194 of Rumble, I shared my idea with all of you for the creation of the Department of Public Safety and Compassion as an alternative to what we now know as the police. And in Episode 197, I then described my idea for the Department of Restorative Justice and Redemption. I spoke with scholar Dan Berger, and he and I put forth to you an idea for an alternative to incarceration, prisons.
Michael Moore [00:03:26] These are two ideas I care very deeply about, and as I announced on these episodes in the past month, this is going to be a focus of mine here this year that we deal with this problem, that we not just hold an annual anniversary remembering the murder of George Floyd, but that we all do something about this. We have to do this. And so I’m going to keep talking about this. And today I’m going to explore the intellectual underpinnings of both police and prison abolition with Desmond Cole. Do not be afraid, my friends. A lot of people do not want us talking about this. And I am talking about a lot of so-called liberals or Democrats who are afraid that if we discuss this issue, we will somehow scare away our fellow Americans into the loving arms of the Republican Party. That is not our problem.
Michael Moore [00:04:38] Our problem is if we do nothing about this. So once again, today in my third episode in my endeavor to have us not turn away from this, but to face it head on, I invite you to join me in what I think is going to be a very important discussion…And now my friends, it’s time to Rumble. My guest today is Desmond Cole. He is an award-winning journalist and activist who lives in Toronto, Canada. Desmond recently published his first book, it’s called “The Skin,” where in a year of black resistance and power, it was the winner of the 2020 Toronto Book Award and a national bestseller. He’s just launched a new publication that’s called Yes Everything. And I hope I did the right inflection in how this is to be pronounced. But we’re going to find out what this means. And you can find this online and just type in Yes Everything or yeseverything.ca. The Movement for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter, et cetera, has emerged in the United States over the past several years, Desmond has watched and documented it while confronting his own systems of white supremacy closer to home in Canada. And as you know, if you’ve been a fan for a while, if you’ve seen my movies, you’ve listened to this podcast at an early age, to Canadians sometimes to get the truth about us.
Michael Moore [00:11:29] And it’s sort of like, you know, like any, you know, the neighbor that lives, that abuts your backyard or lives on the edge or, you know, the people that live on the other side of the fence. You know a lot more about them than they realize, in part because you have to listen to their arguments and the screaming over the fence and everything else. And you also see the garbage. And, you know, Canada and the United States have been, you know, if I could personify these entities that are governmental units, friends, we’ve been friends for a long time. And I think, you know, if you have any friends that it’s often only your best friends who can tell you the brutal and awful truths that you need to hear. They’re the only ones that can just say, honestly, listen to me, you’re fucking up. So I decided to ask Desmond Cole here on Rumble today because I have been talking about this since last summer. And now I’ve decided one of my goals this year is to not defund the police, that’s way too limiting for me. I want to talk about abolishing the police and abolishing our criminal justice system, as it’s called and our prisons, our prison industrial complex.
Michael Moore [00:12:55] But I don’t really know how to do this. And I have called 911 when I’ve needed help. So I say, well, you do want some of the police there, right, to do something if you’re in trouble or, you know, I mean, I’ve had a half a dozen attempts on my life or people with weapons trying to harm me like that. I’ve talked about this, as you know, it’s no secret. But I am not an expert on this. I’m not a criminologist. I have read and listened and watched Desmond speak about this in a very profound way. And I thought you would like to hear a perspective from our neighbor and to see what we can learn from his thinking about this. So welcome to Rumble, Desmond Cole.
Desmond Cole [00:13:47] Thank you very much, Michael.
Michael Moore [00:13:48] Explain to the listeners where you stand on this, because whatever it is that we need, when we say we need police, we don’t need a man with a gun and a badge in my mind. We need a Department of Public Safety and Compassion. And when we say public safety, I mean, we need to redefine that term, because to me, the fact that we have millions of children that are hungry every day in this country, that’s a public safety issue as far as I’m concerned. So, you know, I’m just going to turn this over to you. And I’m just because I’d love to hear your take on this particular issue and understand that you don’t, you don’t live here with this. But as you say in your book and in your writings, you do live within your skin, as you say, and that is not just an American problem, but I think we need some help right now. And I’m so afraid that now that Derrick Chauvin is sent away to prison that we’re just going to move on to the next thing and our attention span is gone. And I don’t want it to go away. I want to fix this and I want you to help us.
Desmond Cole [00:14:59] Well, it’s nice to be with you. I don’t know how much I can do in the time that we’ve got, but…
Michael Moore [00:15:06] I’m sorry to put all this on you. But, you know…
Desmond Cole [00:15:09] It’s OK. I’m going to set low expectations for myself, as I often do. And then if things turn out great it’ll be a bonus. No, very seriously, what we’re experiencing, whether it be in Canada or the United States, is our relationship with our governments and the people who run them, that is based on dominance, I think. First and foremost, people can’t live in a good relationship with each other through mutual respect, listening, cooperation, negotiation. That is actually not possible in Canada or the United States. The only thing that’s possible is that we dominate people who are not doing what we want and that we be allowed to dominate them, really doing anything that we want, including taking their lives. That’s the relationship that the government has decided is the appropriate one between itself and its people and what that means is that you have to have police. Police are an imperative. Because you assume that people are not rational, that they are not acting in your best interest, that they are violent, that they’re dangerous, and that that’s the way of the world. So you would be crazy not to have police and to protect yourself.
Desmond Cole [00:16:38] But of course, we know that the police are not here to serve and protect as they like to brand themselves. By the way, the police have the best branding of any organization, maybe in human history. You ask people, what do the police do, and they say, oh, they serve and protect. Do they? Who do they serve and protect? The police’s job has always been from the time of the enslavement of Black people in both Canada and the United States, their job has been to police some people. And, you know, move, control, surveille and dominate them. So that the ruling class feels safe and comfortable and satisfied. That’s just what policing is. Mariame Kaba, the police abolitionist and prison abolitionist in the United States, incredible activist and writer. She says that she considers the police to be a death making institution, right, and she says this about prisons as well, that the prison is also a death making institution. And I think this is the ideological conflict, Michael, is that some people think that the police define safety and some of us know that the police equals death, surveillance, control, dominance, suffering.
Desmond Cole [00:18:06] You’re not going to abolish the police if you think that they contribute to your safety. But being a Black person, I don’t have to worry about that because I’ve had a lifetime of understanding that the police don’t contribute to my safety. So for me, this is not some kind of really big intellectual exercise. I have to live it. And so do all the Black people in the United States of America, but we should also talk about the policing and extermination of indigenous peoples in this part of the world, which, again, that was policing for the benefit of the elite and the ruling class, at the expense of the first peoples of these lands who are here for millennia before we were. So policing is always tilted and liberals fail because liberals want to say, well, let’s just make it equal. Let’s have a fantasy where the police aren’t really here to dominate. They’re here to help. So we’ll train them not to kill people and we’ll give them weapons that don’t kill you the minute that they shoot you and we’ll put body cameras on them so that if they kill you, we can watch and after your dead decide whether it was fair or not.
Desmond Cole [00:19:18] And none of these things are really intended to change policing. And of course, they don’t work, but they’re not meant to work. So if you agree with Mariame Kaba that the police is a death making institution, you would want to abolish it. But it is the fight to define and understand policing is such that I think we’re on right now. The fight to take away all that branding of serve and protect and expose what the police are really doing in our communities.
Michael Moore [00:19:47] And what is that? What is that? What is it when she says and when you talk about abolishing the police, what do you mean by that? And I guess I’m asking you to address white people that are listening to this and maybe some Black people live in neighborhoods that have what we call high crime. But I think that the lens here is always the white lens that we’re forced to kind of look at through this white lens. So for the people listening to this and they hear, wow, these two guys who just skipped over defunding the police to abolishing, what does this really mean? Because I’ve read what you’ve written and you have such an advanced and progressive way of thinking about how we could live in a better world, how we could be kinder and more compassionate people if we rethought this.
Desmond Cole [00:20:50] I think, first of all, you only want to completely get rid of something if you agree that it is harmful. So that’s the point that I’m trying to start from when I say: is this really a death making institution or is it a neutral institution that could go either way and we should have an endless debate about it? The police kill a lot of people, but that’s not really the argument for abolishing the police. The argument for abolishing the police is that it isn’t right for some human beings in our society to be able to have a legal right to dominate, surveil, control, detain, assault and kill other people. That actually giving other people, other human beings the right to do that is itself wrong. And I’m interested because I see that in the United States, one of the only countries in the world that is still executing so many people the way that it does, that it is starting to fall out of favor in America. And I think it’s the same principle: that you shouldn’t have the right to take somebody else’s life.
Desmond Cole [00:22:04] And when people do take life in our communities, we’re appalled, right, we are outraged. We don’t think it’s right, then we create a whole system that does the exact same thing as a punishment for taking life. So it’s like, how much do we really believe that? But I see how people are trying to eliminate, abolish capital punishment because they have decided that under no circumstances should anyone have that power over another human being. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about abolishing the police, because the police don’t have to kill you to dominate you. They don’t have to take your life in order to make your life hell and make you live in constant fear, control the things that you do without laying a hand on you because they have the ability to harm you and get away with it in law. It’s that that we’re trying to address. I think we have to start there. And again, if you think that there are circumstances where a person needs to be able to dominate another person to the extent of taking their life, you are not ready for the abolition conversation. Right?
Desmond Cole [00:23:15] But it starts from a place of wanting human relationships that aren’t based on dominance. Well, we always get the question. What about the murderers? What about the rapists? What about the serial killers? And I think the appropriate answer is that many of them are police. The problem with a police serial killer or murderer or rapist, though, is that they’re never going to be held accountable by society. Ever. Because that’s the nature of policing, because if the guys who have the ultimate authority over the rest of us can be treated just like us, they’re not really the police anymore now, are they? If police can be fired the minute they abuse their authority, then they’re not really the police anymore. And that’s exactly what I want. But that’s exactly what makes so many people afraid, is like, you know, you have to be able to have that hammer in order to protect yourself. But that’s the mentality of the slave master who’s always paranoid that the slaves are going to revolt.
Desmond Cole [00:24:24] That is where this mentality of policing comes from. That’s the mentality of the settler who wants to clear indigenous peoples off of their land without consequence and take over that land, paranoia, fear and a need to dominate. So I think we have to start there in our thinking. And as far as, well, what would we do otherwise? This is not a mystery in the way that people want to pretend that it is, because every single day in this world we actually figure out ways to have a relationship with each other that don’t involve killing each other. And even when people are violent or out of line, or harmful, we figure out ways to deal with it that are not dominance, killing, surveillance. So the model that everybody is looking for, imagining, has to replace the police is not really as complicated, I would say, as people want to make it out to be. Most of the policing activity just needs to stop. It doesn’t need to be replaced with something.
Desmond Cole [00:25:35] If on your walk to work every day there’s a man who has the legal authority to punch you in the face. And after a while, you’re like man, you know what, that government employee who punches me in my face every day, we should really do something about him. What would you think of somebody who is like, well, what do we replace them with, though? You don’t need to replace that person. They’re just they’re extra, they are unnecessary, they’re harmful, and they don’t need to be replaced by anything. And that’s what we say about the vast majority of policing activity. It doesn’t need to be replaced by anything. Having a person with a gun go to a noise complaint in a community is foolish and dangerous, and it doesn’t need to be replaced by anything.
Desmond Cole [00:26:20] However, I would argue that if you want to, for example, respond to somebody in a mental health crisis, you don’t send the police, you don’t send somebody with a gun and a taser and pepper spray. You send somebody else. And we’re not replacing – we’re actually like shifting focus of the response because the police only do one thing. They enforce the law and use as much dominating ability as they have to enforce the law or to enforce whatever they believe to be the law. Because just like the Judge Dredd movie, the police kind of really are the law once they get involved in a situation. They do whatever they want. And so we’re not really trying to replace that completely over-the-top power for things like kids having a tantrum in school. Oh, my God, if we can’t call the police, who do we call? Deal with it differently, have a different mentality about what’s needed in that circumstance and move from there. And then, not that I have a problem with defunding, because defunding is fine as long as it’s a mechanism towards abolition. Take the funding away from the guys who solve every problem, showing up with weapons and dominance and invest in health, invest in education, invest in trauma therapy and counseling for all the people who have been harmed by the police, invest in housing. What keeps people in a society safe housing or men with guns? Healthcare or men with guns? It’s not even a question. But when you live in a white settler, paranoid society, Canada or the United States, this is the fight. This is what we’re fighting back against.
Michael Moore [00:28:00] And where do prisons fall into this in terms of the abolitionist movement here? Because it seems to be, you know, the policing is the first link in this chain, but then they need these large buildings with bars on them to send these people to and to create this false sense of security that now that they’ve been removed, you’re protected. Even though there’s so many other ways you’re not protected in your day to day lives. It has nothing to do with crime on the streets. It has to do with, you know, Covid appears and you lose your job. And suddenly in the United States, you have no healthcare. Just like that.
Desmond Cole [00:28:47] Well, I believe that holding people in any form of captivity is always about how you benefit from that. So Black people have been in captivity for some form or another on these territories for hundreds of years, and it’s not because we’re dangerous, it’s because somebody’s profits from us being in captivity. So there are people in the United States and Canada who have been doing things like sewing masks during Covid. And what do you have to pay a prisoner to sew masks all day? Do you have to pay them anything? You don’t owe them anything. You can pay them a nominal fee. You could probably get away with not doing it, though, because who’s going to fight for prisoners if you say I’ll pay you and then don’t do it. So we’ve had prisoners in Canada and the United States doing things like making PPE for the public while they sit in a jail cell. And I don’t know about different regions of the United States, but I could tell you here in Ontario a shocking amount of the people who are in jail are on remand, meaning they haven’t actually been convicted of anything, so they are awaiting trial.
Michael Moore [00:29:55] Yeah, we don’t have that word here. What is remand?
Desmond Cole [00:29:59] Remand means that you have been charged, but you haven’t been convicted. You haven’t had your day in court, as they say.
Michael Moore [00:30:06] So but you’re still held behind bars. You’re imprisoned even though you’re still an innocent person.
Desmond Cole [00:30:11] Yeah, technically. I mean, innocence is that’s why we have to challenge the whole concept of innocence, because how can you be innocent sitting in a jail cell?
Michael Moore [00:30:18] Right. Right, exactly.
Desmond Cole [00:30:20] But yeah, in those circumstances, you haven’t had an opportunity under the law to have your case tried, but you’re in jail. And what we see right now, Michael, is like things like Covid-19 finds a home in a jail because a jail on purpose is filthy, is cramped, there’s no physical distancing possible. There’s no sanitary conditions inside of a jail. It’s not easy to wash your hands. It’s not easy to do the things that would protect you. But because we’ve created this horror place where anything is, again, it’s like policing. Policing is about anything goes. We can do whatever we want to you. Jail is the same way. But then people go, whoa, wait a minute. Wait a minute though. People have to staff the jail, people have to clean the jail. People have to go serve food in the jail. What if they get Covid-19?
Desmond Cole [00:31:20] So they don’t care that the people in the prison will get Covid-19 and die. They’re like, well, what if this affects the general population who isn’t in jail? Maybe we should do something about it. Now, of course, what I’ve been seeing in Canada and the United States is that those are very lackluster, half hearted efforts because there is a political taboo against showing sympathy to prisoners. And so prisoners can make your Covid-19 masks and then they themselves can’t get protection from Covid-19 and they can contract it, and many people have died in our prisons and jails during this pandemic and there’s been very little thought given to protecting them. So people make money off of the bail program. I wrote recently for Yes Everything, the first, it’s a new publication that me and my friends have begun. And my colleague Al Jones, the first piece that we wrote is an investigation into a Canadian business tycoon, and he is named Prem Watsa and he is the largest investor in the United States’s for profit jail system.
Desmond Cole [00:32:25] So jail isn’t just about keeping you safe. It’s about somebody making money at people in captivity at their expense. And if those people are mostly disproportionately Black, indigenous, other racialized groups, disabled people, women who have been abused, well, too bad. Their safety is irrelevant. That’s why I criticized the notion of public safety, because public safety, just like policing, is not a universal, it’s public safety for some at other people’s expense. So the prison is just a sight to disappear people so that we can pretend we’ve done something about problems in society when we’ve really just disappeared them and we have to abolish that too, and again, just like the police, people will say, well, how will we be safe? How will we be safe?
Desmond Cole [00:33:15] And you have police officers who murder people and no one even knows their name and they continue to work. You have police officers sexually assaulting people. The police in your country engage in domestic violence at a rate 4 to 5x, I believe, of the general public. Who will be surprised? You give somebody a gun and a badge and you tell them that they can do whatever they want. So are you surprised that they have a huge rate of intimate partner violence, but those people are walking around in the street every day and in fact, they’re walking around with more protection than anybody else. So I just think it’s about getting real, about what we mean when we say safety in the name of prisons and police. Whose safety?
Michael Moore [00:34:00] If we were to maybe start to redefine some of these terms: guilt, innocence, public safety, police…where would you start? If you were creating a new, it’s not just a dictionary of a new set of definitions, but actual actions that would redefine what we mean by public safety, what we mean by policing and preventing crime or all these things that we’re told that they’re supposed to do and when generally the police come after the crime has been committed, you call 911. And I’ve always referred to them as crime scene cleanup is what a lot, and then they go out and try and catch the bad guy. But I think most people, if they were thinking about their own safety, real safety is all the preventive things that you’d want to do so that you wouldn’t even have to get to the point of needing somebody with a badge and a gun. I’m just curious how you would redefine the way that we talk about this and the way that we look at it.
Desmond Cole [00:35:11] The first thing I think we need to define is the notion of crime itself. What’s a crime? What is crime? So, again, if I’m walking through a park and I have a disagreement with a white woman and she feels offended at our disagreement. Am I a criminal? No, but that white woman can call the police and start crying and saying that I’ve done something horrible to her and there’s a Black man near me in the park. And of course, I’m talking about Amy Cooper. And then the men with the guns are dispatched and whatever they see fit to do when they get there is their choice. There’s no real law governing what they do. There’s a notion that there’s a law out there, but it doesn’t protect Black people. So, I mean, we have to redefine what crime really even means. And I think that maybe it’s not the most useful word because it has taken on a racial connotation. It’s like people who commit crime are thugs. And we have specific names.
Desmond Cole [00:36:19] Some people get to be heroes when they commit crimes and police officers fall into that category. Police officers who do the most cowardly things handcuff children, mace children, lie to get people convicted of crimes, so-called crimes, they’re cowardly, but they’re celebrated for their antisocial behavior. And they’re rewarded with, you know, promotions and awards, you know, the police officers who shot Amadou Diallo on his porch in New York City all those years ago. One of the police officers involved in that shooting was later given the New York Cop of the Year kind of award.
Michael Moore [00:37:01] Right.
Desmond Cole [00:37:02] We do the same thing here in Ontario. Somebody who is engaged in a racial profiling incident becomes the lead of a racial profiling police team. Somebody who harms somebody on a mental health call then goes and joins a mental health liaison unit. This is exactly what we do. We reward certain kinds of crime. So if you can’t see what the police do as being criminal, then there’s a problem with that word. And we maybe need to redefine and reexamine that. But what I really think that needs doing is rethinking safety for real, rethinking what care means for real, you talked about prevention, and I don’t even know if I like that idea. Only because, again, if you have this notion that there is this kind of like inevitable crime that is going to take place and that you have to act to prevent it, you’re not really focused on just being good to people. You’re focused on preventing something terrible and scary and bad from happening, and you’re going towards that white paranoia that we’ve already seen.
Michael Moore [00:38:13] I think if we were just, if we were good to people, that when I hear people say they’re afraid of, you know, crime or whatever, saying, you know, the chances, like, you know, the person living next door to you, if they’re making fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year, what’s the chance of them breaking into your house, stealing your TV? None is the answer. I mean, I guess there is a psychological or there’s some kind of you know, if you’re a kleptomaniac, I guess maybe. But seriously, if we divided the economic pie differently, if people had health care, real health care that included mental health, where they could get help, all these other things that whatever you’re worried about somebody on your street doing. And I don’t even think you’re worried about somebody on your street doing it. I think you’re worried about somebody coming from some other street.
Desmond Cole [00:39:08] You’re worried about the outside faceless stranger.
Michael Moore [00:39:12] Yes.
Desmond Cole [00:39:15] Exactly.
Michael Moore [00:39:15] You’re not worried about little freckle faced Jimmy down the street. You’re worried about something else, right?
Desmond Cole [00:39:21] If you have money and you’re walking late at night, you’re worried about somebody who doesn’t have any money coming and taking your money, taking your wallet. That’s what people are paranoid about. But I think it’s very short sighted to ask people, well, just think about helping those people and then you won’t have to worry anymore. I don’t think that works. And the reason that doesn’t work is because that’s not centering people’s humanity. People deserve healthcare, not so that they won’t go and hurt somebody. People deserve a home, not so they won’t go and hurt somebody. Because they deserve a home, because they deserve healthcare, because they deserve to go to school.
Michael Moore [00:40:03] Those basic things, just on their face. Not not because, oh, I’m going to do this because it’ll protect me from being hurt by them someday. It should just be done because we’re friggin human beings and it’s the human right thing to do. It is a human right to be able to have those things that in and of itself should be enough.
Desmond Cole [00:40:26] Well, it should be a human responsibility to care for one another.
Michael Moore [00:40:30] That’s what I mean. Right.
Desmond Cole [00:40:32] But rights and responsibilities are not the same. And I think that’s another answer to part of your question here is that we need to move away from a framework of saying we will codify under law that you must not do this and that if you do do it, there will be harsh, serious consequences of punishment and hope that people behave when we tell them that. We’ve got to move away from that to moving towards a system that says like a great society is one where we’re all responsible for what happens to one another. We take that responsibility seriously and we live our lives that way. And so, you know, this is probably happening in the United States as well, but in all of our major cities in Canada, Michael, we’re seeing encampments in parks. People are just setting up shop in the local park because there is no housing, because Covid-19 has really made the austerity that we’ve all been engaging in our countries, it’s made it much more visible all of a sudden. You can’t hide it anymore. People are losing their jobs. People are losing their homes. People are losing their apartments. They’re losing work benefits. And they’re ending up in these really visible situations in places like our public parks. Camping out because there is nowhere else for them to go.
Desmond Cole [00:41:57] Now, some people see that in and of itself as a criminal act. And certainly there are bylaws in our cities that say you’re not allowed to pitch a tent in a park, you’re not allowed to start a fire in a park to keep yourself warm. So technically, being poor is still a crime. And what we see from some people is like, I’m not going to take that approach, I’m actually going to take an approach that says if somebody is camping in a park, it’s my responsibility to go over and be like, hey, are you OK? What do you need? And so, as we’ve seen this devastation, we’ve also seen unprecedented organizing and mutual aid of people spending their money to make sure that people who live in a local park have food, have clean water, have a sleeping bag, have a tent, have access to health services, have access to getting a vaccination because they don’t have an address or sometimes identification. And they’re not doing it because they think, well, if I make sure the people in the park get vaccinated, I won’t get Covid because that’s not a one to one.
Desmond Cole [00:43:07] They’re just doing it because they feel a responsibility. How do we foster a greater sense of responsibility to counteract all of the people who are only acting defensively and out of self-interest? I think that’s really what we want to ask ourselves. How do we foster that? And I believe, you know, I read a lot of folks, including I mentioned Mariame Kaba earlier, Andrea Ritchie, there’s so many people doing amazing work talking about these things and talking about what we could do with all the money, the billions and billions of dollars that we’re giving to the police, not giving it to ordinary people, we’re giving it to the police and we don’t give it to the police because we think they’ll keep things safe, Michael. We give it to the police because we think that they morally deserve it. And not people sleeping in the park because they morally don’t. But defundpolice.org is an amazing website that people can go to and start reading about, well, what would happen if we started shifting our resources?
Desmond Cole [00:44:23] What would happen if we did things differently? And this coalition of Black, mainly Black-led groups in the United States at defundpolice.org, you know what they’re doing? They’re doing things like the police have military grade weapons in our cities. You’re talking about these kinds of things in Bowling for Columbine, like you, this idea that you can just, you know, defend yourself in your city by like, do you need a tank? Do you need a nuke? What do you need? But the police literally have tanks. They have chemical weapons, they have military grade weapons. So people who are doing a defund movement are like, take that away and let’s spend it on something that’s actually going to help people. Let’s think about our responsibilities to people. Instead of protecting ourselves from a boogeyman. Let’s take money and divest it from the police and spend it on the things that we truly, truly value and care about. Spend it on care, spend it on support for people. And I just think this is the attitude that we really need to continue to foster because defunding is great as long as it’s a means toward never having these kinds of human relationships again.
Michael Moore [00:45:37] Why do you think the white liberal pundits have been just railing against this concept of defund the police and warning other liberals or lefties, do not use this term or we’re going to lose the next election? I mean, they’ve been very forceful and have, it’s really gotten their backs up, because they think this is the way that the Republicans are going to rally white people out to the polls next year.
Desmond Cole [00:46:14] Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve answered your own question. This is about politics. It’s defund is a losing message to white liberals, and they don’t care about the ethical underpinning of defund, they just think white people aren’t going to listen to that, so don’t do it. The politics of expediency and the politics of not having to give a fuck because it doesn’t affect you in the same way that it affects other people. So I don’t really care if white people here defund and get scared. You hear that society has been pointing a gun on Black and indigenous people for hundreds of years, and we’re thinking that maybe we’re going to take that gun away and that makes you scared, that’s your problem. That’s not my problem. I don’t have to sit around and waste my life convincing you that I deserve to live without society’s gun pointed at me every day, without society watching and surveilling me every day.
Desmond Cole [00:47:16] I have a right to live without all of that. And if you’re not sure that’s your problem. But what do white liberals care if this isn’t their world, if it’s not their family members in jail, if it is not their children being followed around by the police officer in their schools walking the halls, what do they care? If they feel like they’re safe because certain people need to be followed around? Certain people are scary. Certain people are antisocial, of course, that they’re not going to go for this as a political message. But this is not a political slogan. You know, this is not about expediency or winning a political argument or winning through incrementalism. Again, if Mariame Kaba is correct and policing is actually in and of itself a death making institution, well, you don’t try to reduce a death making institution incrementally and hope that 40 or 50 years from now things are different.
Desmond Cole [00:48:16] But I’ll tell you what, Michael, I study these things – in the 1980s and 1990s in Toronto, we were talking about hiring more police officers of Black heritage to change the way that policing looks. We’re talking about that 30 and 40 years ago. Liberal ideology about reforming police incrementally is completely bankrupt. And I would add insincere. Liberals don’t want to address this problem. They want us to shut the hell up about it. That’s all they want. So who the fuck cares what they say? We’re on a mission. If they come on board, they come on board. But how many miles are we really going to gain begging liberal people to acknowledge our humanity as Black people?
Desmond Cole [00:49:07] It doesn’t make me feel good to wake up in the morning and be like that’s what I’m going to do today. So they can argue that they’re the majority and we need them. And I say, like, you know, go to church and get over your damn self. Really, like we’re being told that we need white people in order to change the world because it’s just this equivalent of like, you know when one kid owns the soccer ball or the basketball and says, I’m going to take my ball and go home. We’ll play a different game then. We don’t need to play your game if you have so much authority and control, but you want to delay for the next 30 years and have an intellectual argument, an ideological or argument about like do Black people deserve this kind of safety or will it put me in safety? We don’t have time for that. We just don’t have time.
Desmond Cole [00:50:05] White liberalism is a bankrupt ideology that doesn’t have any answers. You’re telling us things that people tried 30 and 40 years ago, not caring or being invested in whether it really works or not. So if more Black cops on the force works or not white liberals don’t really care either way. Because that’s not their bag. If releasing more people from prison helps or not, what do they care? They’d rather feel more comfortable so that there’s no liabilities on them in case we let out a bad person. So you have all kinds of control over people’s lives and you’re just like, you know what, keep them under subjection, because I don’t want to have to take a risk of them being bad and harmful. That’s how much power people have and they want us to negotiate with them. And I’m done with that. So if white liberals are not on board, they’d better get the hell out of the way.
Michael Moore [00:50:56] That is exactly how I feel. And I just turn the TV off now. I don’t want to listen to this. I don’t want to. It sounds like a bunch of whiners and it’s usually white men. And frankly, I know the demographics. I know the statistics of this country. I know that somewhere before 2044, just a little over 20 years from now, the majority of this country is not going to be white. So get with the program is what I try to tell white people, because you’re living in an old world and that world was racist, that world was a colonial world that believed in genocide. This is a country that was founded in it, founded in genocide and built on the backs of slaves. And if you can’t just admit that simple fact, I don’t know what to do with you – other than to say, well, you know what, about 32 percent of the U.S. right now are people of color and their and white women make up maybe 35 percent of the population. And if a majority of them, not all of them, because we know Trump got a lot of their votes, but just enough to add on to that, that 32, when you have 32 percent of the country who are people of color, it seems like, what is that..now you’re at 50 percent. So can we get just a few good white men and maybe a close to a majority of the white women, and then we build our policies and we get our elections around that instead of…I have to listen to this every day about well we have to reach out to the Republicans. No, we don’t.
Desmond Cole [00:52:50] Well, OK, I want to I want to think through this a little bit because, I mean, you know, for me I don’t really see the battle ground, the major battleground being electoral politics…like we need to get to 50 plus one and then we get all the policies that we want. Barack Obama had a supermajority, right, in 2008. He, well, maybe didn’t have 60 votes in the Senate, I guess, but…
Michael Moore [00:53:22] No, but he had enough. He had enough. But it was squandered.
Desmond Cole [00:53:26] Well, but he was afraid of people in his own party who were loyal to the police, loyal to insurance companies and banks, loyal to the healthcare lobby. And so I think this is a cautionary thing for us to think about in a lot of different ways. America is not going to demographic itself out of these issues. America is a country who is, as a legal entity, founded upon white supremacy and settler colonialism, as you just mentioned. Canada is exactly the same. You don’t change that by changing the demographics of the country, but leaving in place the ideological foundations and legal system of that entity. You can’t. Barack Obama presided over thousands of Black people being murdered by the police and was too scared to do anything about it. Right. Barack Obama said, I’m going to close Guantanamo Bay and then was like, oh, man, you know, you build this like site of complete human suffering, and it’s really, really hard to undo it. So I guess I have an excuse that it was really a lot harder than I thought. And I’m sorry, but, you know, I couldn’t get this done.
Desmond Cole [00:54:43] Everybody thought the Black man…I didn’t think the Black man was gonna’ come in and make magic and make it rain, but some people did and some people actually expect that of us as Black people. They expect the Black people to come out every election because they’re Black and have an ideological bent that saves their own lives and votes in their own so-called interests. But there are also Black billionaires. There are also Black CEOs. There are also Black judges and police officers and prison wardens that don’t actually want the system to change because they’re also benefiting from it. So I don’t think the answer here is to hope that in 20 or 30 years there’s enough Black and brown people that we don’t have these policies anymore. White supremacy is an ideology. It doesn’t reside inside of the individual. It’s more akin to like the air we’re breathing.
Michael Moore [00:55:35] And so how do we eliminate that?
Desmond Cole [00:55:39] I think this is why I wrote a whole book, and I think this is why I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life fighting against white supremacy, settler colonialism, fighting against notions of patriarchy. Trying to understand the harm that they are causing and how malleable they are, right, and how transferable that they are, that it doesn’t have to be a white person sitting at the top of these entities and reinforcing everything at all. And sometimes it works better because when you have Barack Obama, then everybody can’t say he’s racist now because Barack Obama. We have a lot of Black police chiefs here in Ontario recently. That’s the new thing is you want to get the Black demonstrators to shut up. Well you start putting in Black police chiefs because then if the Black police chief does something, it can’t be racist. None of these things are true. The Black police chief, though, knows that it is his job to reinforce the white supremacist settler culture and that if he doesn’t do that, he can’t get the respect of his officers.
Michael Moore [00:56:47] Right. Well, even in the Derek Chauvin trial, the prosecutor, there’s a white prosecutor, there’s a Black prosecutor that stood there on day one and said, we’re not putting the police on trial or the police system on trial, we’re putting one individual here on trial. That’s all that this means. And this and this sort of they didn’t say it. They didn’t say it. But it’s sort of, look friends, you see, it’s just this one bad apple. And the rest of the batch of apples are good, but we, the criminal justice system, we’re going to get rid of this bad apple for you and then things will be OK.
Desmond Cole [00:57:31] I think the problem is that a lot of people, even those who wanted to see Derek Chauvin convicted believe that. They believe, you know, how many people did we see after that decision, saying, I hope, I hope, that this is a step toward change. Why would it be? If you needed the Derek Chauvin trial to have some kind of epiphany about policing, I think you’re probably still part of the problem, right? And that is what I think is wrong with the attention that gets paid to each of these individual cases. They are so few and far between anyway, Michael, I mean, the Derek Chauvin trial is exceptional because it even happened. That’s not going to happen to most police officers who take a Black person’s life. An independent person who is Black and scared, having the courage to stand by and film that incident independent of a police body camera. Yeah, right. And handing that information over so that it can be seen and used by other people. Like I’m talking, of course, about Darnella Frazier, who stood there and filmed what Derrick Chauvin did to George Floyd. That’s not going to happen in most cases where a police officer murders a Black person.
Desmond Cole [00:59:02] But this is all, again, if this is an ideological exercise for people, then they haven’t decided that the police are the killing institution that Mariame Kaba says. They still want to be proven yes or no on a case by case basis, and they want to go home and think about it while the police continue to take our lives, which is why we can’t wait for them.
Michael Moore [00:59:26] So what do we do? Because I don’t want to wait. I don’t want to wait another minute. And I want the institution, not the individual officer, and I want white people to own certain things. I want fellow men to own certain things. And maybe we begin to change our attitudes as human beings.
Desmond Cole [00:59:49] I believe that the most effective organizing happens in the places where we exist and spend a lot of our time. Derek Chauvin’s trial is an abstraction that makes it seem like whether he is found innocent or guilty is going to determine what happens for you and your town near or far from there. And it’s just not true. The cops in your town aren’t waiting for the Derek Chauvin verdict to decide how they want to treat Black people. They already know how they’re going to treat them. And so it’s about organizing where we live. One of the things that I’ve been so inspired by where I live is that all across Canada in the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve begun to have armed police officers in our schools. Americans think that Canada is so different from their country and they don’t understand that Canada, in a cultural sense, worships the United States and is jealous and covetous of the United States and wants to be like our neighbors to the south. Wants to be the big, bad, strong one that everybody is afraid of. And we emulate a lot of practices, we’ve emulated all of the austerity.
Desmond Cole [01:01:01] I mean, I won’t even say emulate. Canada has its own reasons for wanting to starve and impoverish Black and indigenous people, so that they can drive your cab instead of being a doctor or, you know, like, there are reasons for this that are not about following the United States’s lead, but anyway what we’ve seen in where I live is that, like people in their local communities have seen these cops in our schools and been like, I don’t want cops in my schools, and I’m not going to wait to, like, see if another city or region gets rid of them. My kids go to this school and there’s a cop there and we’re going to get them out. And across the last several years in Toronto, where I live in Hamilton, just down the road in Peel region, which is just west of us and contains a huge Black and brown population.
Desmond Cole [01:01:55] But as far as west is Vancouver on the West Coast. People are getting police officers out of their schools and they’re doing that by organizing locally because you’re not going to get police officers in another city’s schools out by organizing from far away. You’re going to do that by appealing to local schools, local school board officials. Right? Having a local confrontation that says this is bad for our kids. And by the way, we don’t have public health nurses in our schools. We don’t have meal programs in our schools. Again, what keeps people safe and well and what do people deserve? Not give Black people a meal program instead of police, so that they don’t hurt or threaten you. Give it to them because they need it and that’s a local thing that’s happening. The local organizing about defunding police is happening city by city.
Desmond Cole [01:02:51] So when a group like defund police, dot org says that they’ve secured like almost 850 million dollars of divestment from police departments, that wasn’t everybody watching one decision or city council on TV and being like, wow, we should maybe do that. It was people in their local communities being like, yeah, fuck the police. We need money for schools. We need money for roads. We need money for healthcare. We need money to fix buildings that are falling down. We need money for housing. The local fight, the place where you spend the most time, people who live in cities and towns, the biggest part of the economy is a prison, and thinking, you know what, we don’t want to live in a prison economy. It’s the people who are living there who are like, we need to change this. We need actually a way for us to live here. And it has to be that way, Michael, because no one’s going to let outsiders come in and tell them things like this that are so central to their lives.
Michael Moore [01:03:49] Right. This is an important point, very important point.
Desmond Cole [01:03:53] The way and again, the sensationalism of things like a murder trial that is broadcast on TV, and I grew up during the O.J. era. So O.J.’s trial set the standard for like this idea that we’re all going to participate by proxy by watching and that we’re all going to be changed forever by the system. What utter Hollywood nonsense. It’s the local fight in your community around the things that are affecting people for you. And that’s why I brought up the example of people helping people in their local park. No one’s going to do that work, but the people who live near the park and see somebody out there in the elements being like, that person needs a hat, that person needs a coat, that person needs access to water. I’m going to make sure that it happens. And then when I see my local public official isn’t helping, I’m going to get on their back and say, why aren’t you doing this work instead of neighbors in your community? We all pay taxes to you. Why aren’t you doing this work?
Desmond Cole [01:04:52] It’s to stop…I got so many calls the day that…Remember, I live in Canada and I got so many calls from media because of the work that I do the day that Derek Chauvin’s trial ended asking me, how do you feel? How do you feel? And I turn most of those down because I just don’t want to pretend like the fight to abolish the police turns on these sensational moments. It turns on people doing the work every day and organizing in communities that are oppressed, that people don’t really give the spotlight to. Sex workers fighting against the police, queer and trans people fighting against the police, homeless people, drug users fighting against the police.
Desmond Cole [01:05:41] You really want to build a strong coalition, Michael? You align yourself with the people who are facing the most hardship from the current system. And you ask them, what do you need? And then you just keep doing that for years and years and years and you build some power. That’s what I see working. And that’s what I want to be a part of. I don’t want to have to, like Twitter react as a way of hoping that things get better. Yo, I’m out there on Twitter. People know that about me, but that’s not where I do my most important work. My most important work is the things that people don’t see. It’s the calls and the late night communications and the organizing of things with people and the sharing of information with people and building community to community. And reinforcing that by being like, hey, look, they did it over here and they won, and hey look, these guys got a win on the cops out of schools thing today, isn’t that awesome? We can do it, too. Hey, look, they divested 3 million dollars from the police budget this year when they were going to actually increase it. Is that what we want? Ultimately, no. We want the whole enchilada. But we’re going to celebrate our wins, too, and we’re going to show what’s possible when we organize locally.
Michael Moore [01:06:57] Wow, this is so powerful, what you’re saying and the importance of doing this in our daily lives, in our own personal lives, where we live, where our kids go to school, where we can have the most impact. I’m so glad you’ve said this. It rarely gets said. And, you know, we’re all good about calling for large demonstrations and let’s all get out in the street tonight and whatever. And that’s important, too. And I’m not dismissing that. But the local part of this and taking responsibility for our brothers and our sisters, our neighbors, it’s, I don’t know. I thank you for saying that. It rarely gets said.
Desmond Cole [01:07:38] And I just want to add one thing, which is the great irony of white liberal society is that it is Black people going out into the street every day for months after George Floyd was lynched. That made the Chauvin trial something that white people even paid attention to.
Michael Moore [01:07:56] Right.
Desmond Cole [01:07:57] If Black people hadn’t done that, white people wouldn’t have even paid attention to the trial as maybe there will be change, maybe there won’t be. Like Black people did that because they were so horrified that this continues to happen and that we have to see the videos of it. Liberal society’s like, oh, the police are killing people, I’d kind of like to see that so that I can decide for myself if the killing is good or bad. So put a camera. That’s that’s their only…That’s what I mean. They for 30 or 40 years just did the exact same thing. So meanwhile, Black people are out there in the streets willing to sacrifice their lives against those very same police forces to say enough. And one minute they’re told that they’re thugs and criminals and looters and the next minute everybody’s covering the Derek children trial. I wonder why that happened because of the leadership and the tenacity of Black organizing.
Desmond Cole [01:08:57] And so that’s why I say I don’t care what white liberals think. We’re leading the way anyway, aren’t we? We’re showing the light. We’re showing what needs to be done and what’s necessary. And sometimes even if they don’t want to pay attention to us, the struggle is so compelling that even they are forced to. So we as Black people have to know that we’re on the right path. We have to trust our ancestors and the people who have written about these things and studied these things and organized around these things before us. And we just have to have the conviction to keep going and to do anything it takes to fight for Black life, because the police, the prison system and corporate America and corporate Canada has demonstrated that it will do anything by any means necessary to maintain its control and dominance. So we have to be just as committed on the other side.
Michael Moore [01:09:52] Right. Wow. This has been amazing. And we’ve gone over a full hour here. I just I, I could go on even longer. And I hope that you could come back because this is going to be a series every month. I’m not going to stop talking about it and I’m not going to certainly not be afraid to say certain words and redefine certain terms. And I’m asking people to come with me and listen to this and go to as Desmond said, websites like defundpolice.org. And you will see it laid out there and you will read this and you’ll go, oh, that’s a good idea. Why don’t we do that? I know you will. If you have a good heart, you will. But I want to thank Desmond Cole, our guest here today on Rumble for helping us all turn our heads a bit and rethink this.
Michael Moore [01:10:54] We’re capable of doing that, my friends. And Desmond, I can’t thank you enough for the work you’re doing and keep doing it. And we’ll stay in touch with you and we’ll celebrate those victories. Like you said, it’s so important, even if they’re small victories, sometimes it’s important to do that because when one parent hears in one school district that another group of parents in another school district were successful or in one town was able to take away the tank and the military armament from the police, oh that wasn’t necessary because we don’t want to live in a police state, we already sort of know that. We do. We do. So please, can we please take the visual away just to make us feel better? No, I don’t want people to feel better. I want us to do the full monty here with this. And we’re going to do it. But I thank you for the job you’ve done and are doing just and thank you.
Desmond Cole [01:11:58] Thank you very much for the opportunity, Michael. And the change is happening. It’s not going to happen. It is happening.
Michael Moore [01:12:04] It is happening.
Desmond Cole [01:12:05] And we need to expand on it.
Michael Moore [01:12:08] And thank you. And we’ll stay in touch. Wow, that was an incredible conversation with Desmond, please share with others. This is such an important subject, my friends, and we all have to get busy and do something about it. There’s a lot of good people working on this issue. Probably people locally, find the people in your town, your city and get active. Please do something about this. I want to give one sort of sad but important update on something that was mentioned in the conversation, something that happened here in the last 24 to 48 hours.
Michael Moore [01:14:39] Well, as you know, I have spoken since the week of George Floyd’s murder over a year ago about the brave young woman who stood on the curb and filmed his execution. Her name, as you know, is Darnell Frazier. And through this year, you know, we’ve been in touch with her family offering our support in any way that we can. I suggested back at the time that we as academy members should recognize her for making the most important piece of nonfiction film of the last year, maybe of the last decade. It galvanized the world. She showed us what happened and she did it with such courage. She has been recognized by others. PEN America gave her a special award. She got a shout out at the Oscars. But then when it came time for the Pulitzer Prizes last month, they actually gave her a Pulitzer Prize citation for her work of journalism, informing the rest of us. About the truth. About what’s going on.
Michael Moore [01:15:59] When she took the stand during the Derek Chauvin trial and she spoke about how every night it’s hard for her to sleep, she says a prayer to George Floyd, begging for his forgiveness, as if she still feels that there’s something else she could have done, should have done to stop the killer cop and how it still is so destructive to her because she has to think every day about not just that this could happen to George Floyd as it did, but she said, you remember on the stand, she said, I don’t have the quote right in front of me, but she said, that could have been my father. That could have been my uncle, that could have been any of the Black men in my life. It was so powerful and then sadly, stunningly, on Tuesday night of this week, just a day or so ago, her uncle was killed by the Minneapolis Police Department.
Michael Moore [01:17:09] No need to the neck this time, no lynching, just a out of control, reckless police department doing one of those crazy police chases that they do all across this country trying to chase down some bad guy that they’ve got to catch. And of course, the cop’s reckless out of control, drive their car right into Darnella Frazier’s uncle and kill him. An innocent bystander on his way home. Dead. Tonight. Dead. Because the police and the way they police hasn’t changed, they won’t change unless we make them change. Now, you know, if some of you are saying, well, Mike, you know, I mean, this must have been a bad guy. Cops chase them. So obviously, that guy was guilty. They had to catch him. I’ll tell you something, I’ve never understood the police chase. I mean, I guess it makes for good TV. But why are all the rest of us put in danger and I mean in danger of our lives because they’re trying to catch somebody who was speeding, made a wrong turn, or they suspected he had marijuana on him. I mean, just go down the whole damn list of why they chase people in a car. A deadly weapon. I have said for some time, and maybe a lot of you won’t agree with this, but I’m sorry, I don’t believe the police should ever be chasing somebody at 70, 80, 90 miles an hour through a city. Ever. What is it that they’ve got to get that’s that valuable, where it would be OK to kill another innocent human being on the street or driving their car because they had to get their man? We don’t live in that world anymore.
Michael Moore [01:19:25] We have devices, we have drones, we have things, we have license plates, they can just find out where he lives, where he’s going. Remember when the police in Atlanta shot the guy who ran away in the Wendy’s drive thru. Why? They already had his license there, they already had him pull over. They knew where he was going. Go get them. What’s the point of shooting them in the back? What’s the point of running them down, whoever is trying to get away, they’re not going to get away. We have so many surveillance cameras and so much you can call ahead to other officers, you can put up roadblocks. Tell me one reason why we need to conduct these crazy chases, or what if he kidnaped a child? That’s even worse? You’re making that person, that person, the kidnapper drive 80 miles through the street because you’re chasing a child in the backseat of the car, you’re not saving the child. You’re putting the child in danger of dying as an individual.
Michael Moore [01:20:36] I was saying to Basel before, what is one good reason to justify the police driving like maniacs like that to catch somebody? The only reason I can think of why the police should be on a chase to catch somebody is if the person they’re chasing has won the Heisman Trophy and appeared in the Naked Gun movies. That’s it. No, I’m sorry, I’m being friggin facetious here. Not even then, I said actually, I said the only reason is if the radio dispatch said the man in the white Ford has stolen the cure for cancer. He just drove out of the Mayo Clinic, where they just discovered the cure for cancer and he has stolen the cure for cancer. You must go get him, OK, because that’s going to save millions of lives and the guy’s just stolen it.
Michael Moore [01:21:38] You still shouldn’t try to drive in such a way that you’re going to kill another human. Well, you know what, at least we killed the grandmother on the corner of Pine and Oak Street. That was said. 89 years old. She lived a long life. She’s dead now, but we got the cure for cancer. I don’t know if you, I can even just to justify that, that it’s OK to essentially murder somebody with your cop car accidentally. Because even that guy, you’re going to catch that guy, you’re going to find the car, a drone in the sky is going to find this guy and we’ll have the cure for cancer. There’s no reason, my friends, I’m sorry to be just messing around with this, but I’m so upset.
Michael Moore [01:22:22] I’m so upset that Darnella had to lose the very uncle that she talked about on the witness stand at the Derek Chauvin trial. Lost him. Because the police had to drive like crazed maniacs in the streets of Minneapolis to get their man. Not worth it, my friends, never worth it. We have to start rethinking this. We have to start doing this differently. This is a small example. I’m sorry, I sound upset because I am upset and, you know, and I thank all of you and everybody in this country and around the world for the recognition and the support that you’ve given, Darnella. I mean, it’s been great. But we have to get to the root causes of these issues. All of these issues. The ones Desmond and I were discussing on this episode. If you want to support Darnella Frazier, some good people, a number of months ago set up a GoFundMe in her honor and I will have a link in the description to this podcast to that GoFundMe page for Darnella. There’s already over 700,000 dollars has been raised for her. It’s called the Peace and Healing for Darnella. The scars and the pain and the suffering that she may have to carry with her the rest of her life because she had the courage to stand there with her camera and her phone and tell the rest of us in the world just how evil and how evil in such a common in daily way the people that are supposed to be protecting us have either a knee to the neck, or their foot on the pedal driving fast through the city and killing her uncle.
Michael Moore [01:24:32] So sad and so wrong. That’s about all I can deal with today. I’m so grateful that you listen to this podcast, please share it with others. Send me your feedback. Any ideas, things you’d like me to cover. Just write me at mike@michaelmoore.com. That’s my email address. I read all the emails. Please send me an email. You can send me a voicemail. There’s a link on the description page also for that. And let’s get busy, my friends. So much to do. All my love and appreciation to every one of you listening to this and who share with me the intense commitment to create a better world. This is Michael Moore. And this has been Rumble.