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To read more about Episode 223, visit the main episode page.
Michael Moore [00:00:23] This is Rumble, and I’m Michael Moore, thanks everybody for tuning in here today. We’ve got a very special episode that I’ve been trying to put together here for the last week since the slaughter of the students in Oxford, Michigan, and I will be joined today by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.
Michael Moore [00:00:43] Senator Murphy has been a leading voice when it comes to gun violence in America, and he was the Congressman at the time on December 14th, 2012, which is, by the way, the anniversary is coming up for that here in the next few days. December 14th, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut. And that is in Chris Murphy’s at the time congressional district. He’d just been elected senator. He hadn’t taken a seat yet as a senator, but he became a leading voice to stop the gun madness in this country. And he’s been on TV this week and talking a lot about Oxford, Michigan, and so we’ll talk about that too with him.
Michael Moore [00:01:22] So before we get to that, first of all, let me thank all of you for your overwhelming response to my piece about the shooting in Oxford that I posted on Michael Moore.com. And if you don’t subscribe, it’s free. Just go to MichaelMoore.com a box will come up, click the free thing and you’ll get my weekly letter. And this past Sunday, I wrote one called “A Mother’s love for Son Gun and Country”, and it’s all about the crumbling family there in Oxford, Michigan. And as the prosecutor said there, this was preventable as so many of these things are in this country. And I’ve been talking and writing and filming this issue for, I’m in my third decade with it now, and I’m sick of it. And you’ve not seen me on TV in the last week or so. I don’t go out and talk about this. And I. I remember I told Larry King or Piers Morgan after Sandy Hook, “In fact, don’t invite me on again. I’m not going to come out and talk every time there’s one of these mass shootings or whatever. I’m out, I’m done talking about it. I’m for doing. And if there’s not going to be any doing, I don’t want to be part of it.”.
Michael Moore [00:02:31] So Senator Murphy is a doer, and we’re going to talk to him about that here in just a few minutes. So but thank you for those of you who wrote to me and make comments about my piece on this shooting in Michigan. And please subscribe everybody else who’s listening. Very easy to sign up. It’s a free subscription. MichaelMoore.com. That’s it. It’ll pop right up and then it’ll ask you to subscribe. And yes, you can become a paid subscriber. And you know, there’s a couple of things you get for that. But one of them is this coming Sunday afternoon, 2:00 p.m. Eastern. I’m going to do a live Q&A with the paid members. So if you want to do that, you know, I think it’s five bucks a month or whatever helps support our work. Great. Thank you. And every, you know, couple of months or so, there’ll be a Q&A with me and every other couple of months we have this thing called Mike’s movie night. We’re going to have the second movie coming up here in the next month. So, you know, you get to participate in that for free. If you’re a paid member, but you want to be a paid member, you can get my letter every week and you get this podcast every week sent to you via email. Just go to MichaelMoore.com. Sign up for that. And if you if you decide to become a paid member, then you’ll get a notice on Sunday morning with a link where you can participate in this personal Q&A with me. Ask any question you want. Have conversation with other people here at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, 11:00 p.m. Pacific Time and sometime in the early evening in Europe and the rest of the rest of the world. I don’t know all your time zones, but hopefully you can. You can join us.
[00:04:08] Also, thanks to everybody who has been going to the Moore Store during the holidays here and buying up all the T-shirts and ball caps and hoodies and whatever from our film production team. There’s still time to do that if you want it to arrive for Christmas. Saturday, December 11th, that’s this coming Saturday. It’s the last day for guaranteed United States Postal Service first class delivery by Christmas, so go to the Moore Store and you can get some Rumble gear and other things. A portion of the proceeds, all this goes to support various causes that I support, and also one that you may not know the cause of getting civics and art back in our schools. Two things that are very much needed in a free society. And so go to the Moore Store, pick up some stuff for the holidays.
Michael Moore [00:05:09] Joining me now here on Rumble for the first time is one of the leading voices for gun reform and gun safety in America. Connecticut United States Senator Chris Murphy. Thank you, Senator Murphy, for appearing on my podcast here today. For the past week or so, it’s been, you know, this hit very close to home. The shooting at Oxford High School, as I said, that that high school is about 19 miles as the crow flies from where I went to high school. So on that level, it’s personal, but it’s been personal for me for a long time since Bowling for Columbine. After Parkland, I went down and spent a week with the kids down there a week or so after the shooting. And you, sir, have been such a force for good, especially since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Where are we at? I mean, this is, you know, you know what the average American and you know, the tens of thousands who are listening to this right now, what they’re thinking is, where are we? I mean, back when you were proposing some initial legislation right after Sandy Hook. The polls show that close to 90 percent of the American people favored some form of gun control legislation. And here we are all these years later, and I’ve met with and spoken to parents at Sandy Hook. And it’s just people are just throwing their hands up. They’ve had it. They don’t want this to happen in their school. They know it will. Now they expect it to happen. We’ve raised the generation of kids having active shooter drills on an ongoing basis, and they have to live with this fear when they go to school. Please give us some sense of hope.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:06:46] Well, I mean, listen, first of all, let me thank you, Michael. It’s great to be with you, frankly. Before the birth of the modern anti-gun violence movement, which I, you know, date to Sandy Hook. You were out there working and educating on this, this this issue, and I want to thank you for that. I am full of hope because I believe this: that the modern anti gun violence movement is a social change movement, not unlike the civil rights movement or the marriage equality movement. Those are movements that had enormous power sitting inside the status quo that had to build themselves up from scratch. And unfortunately, those movements took decades in order to achieve what they were setting out to do.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:07:34] We’re in the same position: in 2013 when Sandy Hook happened. The gun lobby was at their zenith. They basically got for 20 years beforehand anything they wanted from Congress. And we were, you know, virtually powerless. There were a couple of groups out there like Brady that had been sort of holding the torch, but we’ve had to build something almost from whole cloth and we need to continue to build because, well, we’ve had success. There’s dozens of state laws in both blue and purple states that have tightened gun laws, and we made some small progress here in Congress. We obviously still haven’t gotten that big federal law that will make our streets safer. But we will get there. I mean, I just sort of see the numbers. I see how the gun lobby is losing strength. I see, you know, how our numbers continue to increase. We are now at the point where we have a House of Representatives that will pass a background checks bill. We have a president that will sign it. We have the majority of US senators who will support it. We just don’t have a supermajority in the Senate. That’s fundamentally different than in 2013, when we couldn’t get it past either chamber or back before Sandy Hook– when a shooting happens, you barely get one single member of Congress, normally only Carolyn McCarthy from New York, who would even be booked on TV to talk about all of this. So we’re in a different place, but we’re not there yet, and I just want people to have faith that we have to continue building this movement and we will win, the cause is that righteous.
Michael Moore [00:09:00] And I think this movement has been built primarily out of Connecticut with Sandy Hook Promise and of course, there’s these other groups here that really have grown– Everytown, USA, all that, all these other these newer groups. I mean, you’re right, when in Bowling for Columbine came out in 2002, no Democrat would appear with me at any the premieres of the film because back then it was political death. The NRA would come after you. They primary you and as a Democrat, you’d be out of there. Those days are no longer with us. And the NRA has been falling apart, filing for bankruptcy, caught in various scandals of their own. It seems that –and we have the majority of people on our side, the vast majority of people on our side, including the vast majority of gun owners, and including a slight majority of those who belong to the NRA all want this gun reform. You know, and everybody you know, people especially, you know, back home in Michigan, contacted me after last week. “What are we going to do? What are we–?” And I don’t, you know, I think I just said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what new I have to say about this other than I think that we have to push this even harder, further, faster.”.
Michael Moore [00:10:19] This thing, the fact that you do have a majority of senators with you on your bills — but now, as you said, the supermajority, a new term that we didn’t grow up with in civics class, it was majority meant 51 percent or 50 percent plus one. What can we do to get rid of the filibuster? I’ve heard you speak about this recently. You’re fed up with it, too. It seems like, especially for issues like this. Why do we allow this, this archaic thing that was really mostly used in the last century to stop integration, to stop anything that would help minority people? I mean, can we just stop with this? Is there some way I know President Biden has this nostalgia for his years in the Senate and the filibuster and all the other archaic forms — but we are in the 21st century now, something has to be done.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:11:09] Well, and that’s exactly right. Remember when the assault weapons ban passed in 1994, it did not have 60 votes. Not even close. I forget the exact number, but it passes with 52, 53, or 54 votes.
Michael Moore [00:11:29] Right, correct.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:11:29] Because back in 1994, the filibuster was not used in the way that it’s used today, even for something as as hot and as controversial at the time as an assault weapons ban, the minority party, the Republicans at the time, did not apply the filibuster. Now it’s applied to everything, every single piece of legislation. Every nominee has to clear this supermajority. And so, you know, if we could go back to the days in which the filibuster was reserved for only a handful of bills a year, you know, maybe we could live with it, but not now, not when it’s used for everything.
Michael Moore [00:12:02] So what do we do?
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:12:04] So one of the things we talk about is let’s make people filibuster.
Michael Moore [00:12:07] Yeah, make them stand.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:12:09] Make them stand.
Michael Moore [00:12:10] For 14 hours.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:12:11] Right. Because so here’s what would happen. You would think really carefully about filibustering if you actually had to do it, if you had to stand on the floor for a couple days. You would do it when you thought that right was on your side. But with something like this where 90 percent of the public wants universal background checks, are you really going to filibuster something that nine out of 10 people support? Probably not. But now there’s no cost because a filibuster just means not showing up to the Senate floor. All right. That’s what a filibuster is today. Reverse the presumption, and maybe we get a change on things like universal background checks. So that’s why we think about reforming the filibuster back to what it was originally not getting rid of it, but just saying, if you want to filibuster, you actually have to get your ass down to the floor of the Senate.
Michael Moore [00:13:00] Rght? Yeah, you can’t phone it in. So what are the chances of that happening?
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:13:03] I mean, you know, it’s not slim to none. We obviously have to get 50 votes to change the rules. We are, you know, having a conversation among ourselves about how to restore the Senate back to a place in which it could it could debate big pieces of legislation. Stay tuned.
Michael Moore [00:13:20] You mentioned also recently that — I don’t know if you were on Lawrence [O’Donnell] or I saw you– you said something very powerful. You said that if the American public saw the actual carnage, if they actually saw, for instance, at Sandy Hook, where there are 20 first graders who are killed and six staff members– if people could see this in the way that Emmett Till’s mother back in 1955, had an open casket when he was murdered by the Klan down south, and she wanted the American public to see what happened to her little boy. And then when you and I were, you know, I know were a kid or I was a teenager during Vietnam, on the evening news. Every night we saw the slaughter. Yeah. Life magazine, I don’t know what year it was, ’67, ’68– they devoted the whole issue that week to the 560 American soldiers roughly who had died that past week, and they put a picture of every one of them. Page after page, after page after page. That visual, that kind of journalism did more to get white people on board with the civil rights in the 50s, I think did more than maybe anything to turn the American public against the Vietnam War in the 60s. And you said that if Americans could see this –and of course, nobody wants to put the parents through any of the hardship that they would cause– but if the parents said yes, I want America to see what happened to my child, you’ve seen the crime scene photos at Sandy Hook, is that correct?
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:14:53] I’ve seen some of them,
Michael Moore [00:14:55] But you saw enough to know what we’re talking about.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:14:58] Yeah.
Michael Moore [00:14:59] Can you just share with people what that scene looked like at Sandy Hook Elementary School that day?
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:15:06] These were first graders. They weigh, you know, 50 pounds, maybe. All of them died. All of them died. Not a single kid survived. And the reason for that is that these high powered rifles are designed to essentially liquefy your organs, right? When a bullet travels through a little body that fast? Yeah, I tell people, move your fingers through a tub full of water very slowly and then move it through 10 times as fast. And watch how the ripples, how the water just explodes as you run that finger through very quickly. That’s what happens when a bullet from an assault weapons runs through a kid’s body. And you’re right. These are the most private of images. These parents have all the reasons in the world not to want the world to see what these bodies look like. But, you know, visuals change people’s minds they have since the beginning of history. People think differently about, oh, about Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan because of the visuals from the airport. People thought differently about Syrian refugees when they saw a picture of a little dead body washed up on a beach. Visuals change people’s minds, and at some point there will be a parent who will release the image of what their child looks like after one of these shootings. And I wish that wasn’t– I wish it wasn’t true that, that might be necessary in order to change people’s minds.
Michael Moore [00:16:34] Yeah, I wish it wasn’t necessary.
Michael Moore [00:16:35] But I I think you’re right, though I think that and I’ve spoken to people in law enforcement in Connecticut who have seen the photos, and they said it that would change anyone’s mind immediately that we have to do something about this. It would be no more debate because essentially, as he explained it to me in that one closet bathroom, in one of the classrooms where there where the majority of the children actually were hiding, and he opened that door, the killer– I don’t even want to describe it, but basically, you know what I’m saying. There were, you know, they needed dental records. I mean, it was that bad at close range. And to think that this could happen to your child tomorrow, the next day, next week.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:17:18] Yeah, and Michael, it happens, you know –and let’s just talk about this for a second– it happens every night. I mean, it’s it’s you know, that’s just the thing to remember is that obviously we’re caught in this cycle where the where the country pays attention after a school shooting because that is terrifying. That does feel that there’s there’s supposed to be something sacred and safe about our schools. But this is happening virtually every night. These images of bodies destroyed by bullets. It doesn’t happen just when there’s a school shooting.
Michael Moore [00:17:52] That’s true. I mean, there, what’s the statistic I saw by the end of this month, we’ll be close to 400 mass shootings –mass shooting defined as four or more people shot– in this country in just this year. It’s almost one one a day on average.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:18:05] Yeah, and we define mass shootings as four or more shot at one time. I mean, one day there was a shooting in Texas where, you know, four people were killed and it didn’t get any publicity. It was a domestic violence crime. It was a man who shot his wife, and her child, and the child’s boyfriend or girlfriend, and then killed himself. That’s happening every single day in this country. There’s not a there’s not another country in the world, right, in which that’s happening every single day. When that happens in a European country or Asian country, it’s big news. When it happens in the United States of America, unless it’s in a school or a shopping mall, nobody’s paying attention.
Michael Moore [00:18:49] So what is it about us? Why do we have this level? Because we’re a good people. We are good people. The majority of Americans are good people. So why us? Why not the Canadians? They have virtually the same culture. I don’t want to say exactly because things are very different about Canadians, but they watch the same TV shows and American TV. Their kids play violent video games, they watch violent movies, you know, and hunting is the number one sport in Canada, more than hockey. So they have guns in their homes, they have hunting rifles and shotguns. Why don’t they do this in on the same level? What is it about us? Have you ever thought about that?
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:19:30] Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, you spent a lot of time thinking about this. I spent a lot of time writing about this. I wrote a book a year ago on this question. And you know, listen, there’s a lot of theories here, but it’s interesting to look at history. So American violence rates look a whole lot like European violence rates until about 1840. In 1840, we start moving off the chart, right? We become a violence outlier compared to other high income countries, right in the decade before the Civil War. And there’s a few things happening at that point. It’s the first big wave of immigrants in this country. It’s right after the invention of the cotton gin, so there’s an explosion of the slave population. And it’s the moment when the handgun is invented — and the moment when the United States decides not to regulate the handgun. All of those things contribute to this exceptional level of violence. But I would argue that it’s the explosion of the slave population that is probably the biggest explanation for it, because this country becomes anesthetized to systemic violence. We build an economy in the early and mid 1800s, predicated upon the use of violence to keep an entire race of people enslaved. And what you see is at that moment, violence rates go up even when it comes to white-on-white violence, because it just becomes accepted as the way that we settle arguments, the way that we deal with our anger. This country just decides to live with violence in a way that other countries don’t decide. That happens a long time ago, and we have, I don’t think, ever been able to put that genie back in the bottle. Slavery just became Jim Crow, which just became incarceration, all different forms of violence. I think the story of America’s obsession with violence and gun violence has really long roots back to the 1800s. And until you sort of sit down and have a really nuanced and open conversation about that and what to do about it, I don’t think things will change.
Michael Moore [00:21:27] Yeah, even right up until this century, we invade a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 and caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, more than 4000 of our own troops. For what? I mean this like, let’s just solve this with more violence. Let’s invade a country. Or let’s let a teenager off in Wisconsin for walking through a town with an AR-15, and you get more and more of how this seems to be OK. And the irony of Connecticut, really, I mean, the gun companies that either have been formed or are still there, I think Colt–.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:22:04] We made them all!
Michael Moore [00:22:05] Yeah. And then and then a lot of people don’t know. But in Newtown itself is the second largest, next to the NRA, the second largest what I call gun lobby group. They’re the lobby group, they call themselves the shooting sports lobby. But they are essentially the lobby for the gun manufacturers and all the money that’s gone into them over the years. And the fact that they’re just a couple of miles down the road from Sandy Hook Elementary, the fact that you and your fellow senator and others there in Connecticut have led the charge to get us to do something about this. Considering the history of Connecticut with guns and the fact that this gun lobby is in Connecticut, it’s– I’m sorry to put this on your shoulders, but I just…
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:22:46] Well, I mean, I– listen to sort of thicken the irony. My office in Connecticut is in the Colt Manufacturing building. So the old building where the Colt guns were made, an iconic building on Interstate 91 in Hartford. That’s where my office is. And that’s not by accident, but there are a lot of those companies are still there.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:23:09] And Michael can I just make one quick point. I’m so glad you brought up the use of the wars overseas because in my book, I actually wrote a chapter on the violence we export because you’re exactly right. I mean, part of the story of American violence is the way in which we have signaled through our foreign policy how acceptable violence is. And you know, all the weapons systems in the world today have roots in the United States, the guns that are being used in Central America and Mexico by the drug cartels that are all bought in the United States. I mean, the story of global violence runs through the United States as well. But it also creates this culture in the United States, by which both our domestic policy and our foreign policy creates this acceptance of violence and has obviously been elevated by Donald Trump. It’s been elevated by a Republican party who has taken the sort of feteshization of guns to a new level. But it has long–
Michael Moore [00:24:06] And now, and it’s in your very chamber. The year we’re still in, the beginning of this year, the violence that took place when they came into the Senate chamber, took it over, and now continue it just today. The level of violent talk between some members of Congress, the way that they are using threats, the way that they’re I mean, the sick member of Congress with the Post, the Christmas card with all her kids holding automatic weapons.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:24:34] It’s madness. Yeah, it is madness. And you know again that, you know, President Trump, we can pile on, but to have the commander in chief, you know, sort of egging on violence at his rallies to have him lionizing the individuals who, you know, broke into the United States Capitol, who clearly had, you know, some intent to hurt us if they found us, kill us, not kill us. I don’t know. It all leads to this legitimization of violence. And listen, we we have to understand that, you know, deep down inside us biologically is a predisposition to violence. We are a species that is historically much more violent than almost every other mammal species. And in our in our story over the long haul has been about how we have sort of suppressed those violent instincts, how we have become less violent as a race. But that’s still inside of us. It’s still a trigger. And so when people are sort of given a little bit of permission to connect back with that biology of violence, their genetic circuitry connects very easily and we just have to we have to understand that, and understand how dangerous it is when leaders give permission to violence. And when you have a guy sending out a Christmas card, a congressman sending outt a Christmas card with his family armed with assault rifles, those brains that are breaking like that child in Oxford High School, he thinks, “Well, this is a legitimate,” you know, “this is a legitimate instrument. This is a mainstream instrument.” And if a congressman has assault rifles in his Christmas card, then it’s probably OK for me to use something like that to try to exorcize the demons inside my head.
Michael Moore [00:26:29] Seriously, I when I think of Sandy Hook, I think and I’m I’m loathe to mention ever the names of these killers, but we do know that this individual who was 20 years old, his father was a vice president at General Electric. People say, “Oh, we just need to get some mental health.” That’s the other side of the aisle. Well, he had he had probably the best health insurance anyone who’s a vice president of General Electric would have for their kids. It is that we do need more mental health help in this country. But it’s not just that alone. And I just, I think the last words in Oxford High School, he wrote on his desk three hours before the murders was “Help me. I can’t make the voices stop.” And they show that to the parents. They called the parents into the school two hours before the murders. “Read this Look at this.”
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:27:20] But you know that there’s no there’s no evidence that there’s any greater level of mental illness in the United States than in other countries. The difference here? Listen, we should fix our mental health system because it’s broken because there are way too many people that don’t get treatment. But period, stop. We shouldn’t fix it because we think that our broken mental health delivery system is what’s causing the mass shootings. What’s causing the mass shootings is that in this country, if your brain is breaking and you have easy access to a weapon of mass destruction that does not exist in any other country, in the high income world, there are plenty of other broken brains. Kids, white males– but they can’t so easily get their hands on a semiautomatic handgun. The same day that Sandy Hook happened, there was a mass attack in a school in Henan province, China. The same number of people were attacked, but every single one of them survived in that school in China versus every single one of the kids being attacked dying in Sandy Hook. Why? Because it was a knife in China.
Michael Moore [00:28:25] Exactly.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:28:26] And it was an assault weapon in Sandy Hook.
Michael Moore [00:28:29] Final question. You and I are both from Irish ancestors. I think– is that a safe assumption?
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:28:35] with Murphy? (laughing) it’s safe-
Michael Moore [00:28:38] OK. It was amazing when President Clinton brokered the The Good Friday Agreement and that part of the agreement was that both sides were going to have to turn in their guns, the IRA and the the Protestant royalists. And it was the most amazing thing. I had a TV show at a time on NBC and I wanted to cover it live. And I got Bono to agree to give tickets away to the next U2 concert over there in Belfast and say, “So everybody who comes and brings your gun into me if you want to. If you’re turning your gun in, I’m going to be there. Two tickets to U2.” Yes. And it was amazing. But they were already. Everybody was turning their guns, not just people for the U2 tickets. People were turning in their guns, Irish who were fighting each other for 800 years, turning their guns in. And I thought, it was the same thought I had that they banned smoking in their pubs before we did in our bars and restaurants. If you’ve ever been to Ireland, how did that happen? Right. But it’s but they turned in their guns is do I want to believe I live in an America where if whatever needed to be done to secure the safety of our children that most people, not all, but most people would do the right thing for the right reason? Is that a crazy notion to think that I’m looking into the crystal ball of the America in the in the near future?
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:30:06] Not at all, because you are right, we are a good people and we are again, as I mentioned, you know, if you look at the rates of violence over the course of the history of the world, they go in only one direction. They go down because over time, as people are given other means beyond violence to protect themselves or to advance their interests, they grab them because in the end, violence makes people deeply uncomfortable. When permission is granted for violence, again, those base instincts sometimes can take over. But when you are given other pathways, as the Good Friday Agreement gave nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland, people reach for it. And so, yes, I think that day will come in the United States. I’m certain it will come. And I just, you know, I just want people to understand. The worst thing that can happen is for people to give up hope and give up faith. From the day that Emmett Till’s casket was opened to the American public to see to the day that the first major Civil Rights Act was passed, it was 13, 14, years. I hope that it doesn’t take 13, 14, years since Sandy Hook to be able to pass a background checks bill. But you know what? The stakes of this issue are too high to give up. I have a seventh grader and a fourth grader. I know what it’s like to grow up in the generation of school shootings. I’m not giving up in my hope. My belief is that parents of good faith and good nature are giving up either.
Michael Moore [00:31:35] Yeah, well, I’d love to hear that and thank you. The idea I didn’t know that those were the ages of your children. So they’ve been through the active shooter drills in school. And now I assume as a senator and members of Congress, have you guys had your active shooter drill yet ?
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:31:50] We have–
Michael Moore [00:31:51] –considering you had it in–
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:31:54] –we had it in January.
Michael Moore [00:31:54] You had the real deal.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:31:55] Yeah, we got the real deal. So we, you know, unfortunately, we now know what to do.
Michael Moore [00:32:00] Thank you so much for fighting for this for all these years, and please keep at it. And yes, your compromise on the filibuster sounds absolutely sensible, and please keep fighting for that because we can’t let this this thing that was used back in the sixties to keep our schools and other things segregated. We need to bring this to an answer. We can pass laws like this, right? So thank you very much.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:32:24] Thanks, Michael, for this.
Michael Moore [00:32:25] Thank you. Be well.
Sen. Chris Murphy [00:32:26] Bye bye.
Michael Moore [00:32:28] Well, it was really powerful listening to Senator Murphy today and and to hear his thinking that if only Americans saw the crime scene photos of these children now, I’m sure it’s something that most people of course don’t want to look at. But we don’t. Yeah, that’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s the point. We don’t want to look. We don’t want to look, don’t share data or show me that. Don’t show me that. Because if we were to look. How could we not act immediately to stop this gun violence?
Michael Moore [00:33:02] Anyway, don’t forget. For those of you who have a paid subscription to my weekly letter: this Sunday, the live Q&A with me, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Members only. You’ll get a thing on Sunday morning from us, where you can click in exclusively to this Q&A. If you’re a free subscriber, that’s great. If you want to help us a little more with our work, you can become a paid subscriber and and join in on the on the thing. For those of you who are free subscribers and you say to yourself, Well, why can’t we do this? You know, it’s the same thing with the comment section. You have to be a member to be to leave comments because we decided that even though it’s a little unfair that everybody can’t join in– the problem now is we live in our society, we live in a sick, sick internet world where the trolls and the haters and those calling for violence just have this easy access. I’m cutting it off, and I know the last thing those haters are going to do is have to write a check to me to become a paid subscriber. So they’re not around. If you if you are like a paid member of my website MichaelMoore.com, then you are, you don’t have to deal with all this nonsense, all the craziness, all the haters, because they don’t want to pay for that. They want it free. And I don’t give it to them and they don’t get to participate in our personal online, on the screen Q&A that we’re going to be doing. Hopefully, every month or two here.
Michael Moore [00:34:31] So my thanks today to my executive producer, Basel Hamdan, editor and sound engineer Nick Kwas, our jack of all trades, and master of all those trades, Donald Borenstein — also an unindicted co-conspirator, we’ll deal with that in a future episode. And everybody else who’s helped us here getting Rumble with Michael Moore. That’s me on the air. Much appreciation to all of you. I’m not going to let this issue drop. I know I’ve been covering it for years. These mass shootings, guns in America, but we have work to do. And less talk, more action. See you all of you Sunday for my next letter free letter on my Substack site. MichaelMoore.com. And to those of you who are going to join me for the Q&A on Sunday afternoon, looking forward to that.
Michael Moore [00:35:19] And remember, if you’re lucky, I may share with you on Sunday my pumpkin spice peppermint eggnog with extra gluten recipe. Well, I’ll see. I have to run this by my health experts first, but hopefully I’ll see and talk to a lot of you then on this coming Sunday. Thank you, everybody. I hope you’re enjoying the holiday season here as best you can. Take care.