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To read more about Episode 254, visit the main episode page.

Michael Moore [00:00:52] Welcome to Rumble with Michael Moore. I’m Michael Moore. And let’s just get right to it here. My friends, the November election, the midterms, they were held on June 24th. No. Don’t worry. You didn’t miss the election. I’m just saying. Yeah, no, I know, I know. Don’t worry. What I’ve been saying for the last year I still believe is true — we’re going to hold the House, we’re going to pick up a few seats in the Senate. I’m absolutely convinced of this. And now you’re hearing it on the mainstream media. They’re all saying now this is what’s going to happen. And thank you, Supreme Court. Because you made this happen. That’s why I say the election was really on June 24th because when they, this Trump packed Supreme Court, they were going to do whatever they could to stop abortion and they threw out the Supreme Court decision that had made it legal. And they had no idea what the response would be — from all sorts of people, and of course, mostly women. In some of these states, in these ten weeks since that decision, the new registration of women voters in so many states, it’s 8, 10, 20 percentage points ahead of men. In Kansas, it was 40% new voters, women. They screwed up so badly they don’t even know it. And in that same week, as you remember, they gutted a big part of the Environmental Protection Agency, they got rid of New York State’s strict gun control laws — they were just out on a vengeance run. And they thought we wouldn’t notice? They thought we’d just take it? Well, I guess, yeah, because they’re used to us taking it. And so they thought, nothing’s really — we’re on a roll! We’re going to get rid of gay marriage, same sex marriage, we’re going to get rid of birth control. Yeah, that’s what they said. Clarence Thomas. They want to get rid of birth control. Some of them want to make homosexuality illegal again. They’re not kidding. 

[00:03:22] This is backfiring on them in a way they never expected. And now the mainstream media has caught on. The Democrats have found a new resolve. No, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to show up and vote on November 8th. Yes, you do. And whatever you can do to help the various campaigns, you’ve got to do that, too. If it’s the Senate races, we would actually have to work at trying to lose some of these races. We’re going to elect a Democrat in Wisconsin to the Senate. We’re going to elect a Democrat in Pennsylvania to the Senate. We’re going to elect a Democrat from North Carolina to the Senate. And Ohio and yeah, Florida. There’s five more Democrats in the Senate giving us 55 votes and not having to depend on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. That’s the good news. And again, I know some of you are thinking, “Mike, don’t tell people we’re going to win these. We don’t win them until we vote. We can’t do a victory dance here on the two yard line.” No, I’m not doing that. This isn’t news to you if you listen to this podcast. If you read what I’ve been writing — that we are the majority of this country. We are the vast majority of this country. Anywhere from 60 to 70 to 80 to 90% of our fellow Americans agree with us. They believe that climate change and the catastrophe that’s happening is happening. They’re with us. They want strict gun control laws. They’re with us. The vast majority believe that the minimum wage should not be $5.75 an hour. The vast majority believe that women have a right to choose. I mean, you just go down the whole damn list. Pick a topic and the American people are with us — not the white nationalists, not the Republicans, not the Trumpster. They’re with us. So why would we lose? I know, I know. I hear you. Because it’s the Democratic Party. They’re pros at losing when they should win. What’s that old saying? “They always find a way to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.” Yes. But we live in a new time now. And we’ve been through the ringer. And Trump and the Republicans have put us there. And now the anger is so profound throughout the country. The distrust, the dissatisfaction, the repulsion at the way Trump and the Trump sisters have behaved and continue to behave — people want nothing to do with it. Nothing. That’s why it’ll be a Democratic House after November 8th. It’ll be a Democratic Senate. And hopefully we will win a number of these state legislatures and governor chairs in these states. That’s up to all of you to make that happen locally. I’ll post some links on my site here. So if you want to get involved in one of these campaigns, you can work from your home, on your computer, on your cell phone. There are groups and organizations set up so that you can do campaigning from your living room. They’re right here on my podcast site. Click on them. Go to them. Participate with them. 

Michael Moore [00:07:06] But that’s not good enough for me. Getting five more seats in the Senate, few more in the House? No. Not after what we’ve all been through. I’m sorry. That is not enough. I want more. Am I being greedy to say something like that? No, I don’t think so. I think it sounds like justice. Don’t you want more? We all want more. We want more out of this nightmare that we’ve been put through. We have been pulverized by Trump and his gang and the people that still support him. Unbelievable. And just electing a few more to the House and the Senate? I’m sorry. For me, that’s not enough payback. And it is no way to protect the future. We can’t just depend now on making sure “Ooo we got a couple of extra seats there!” Not enough. Not enough, my friends. We got to clean house. They’ve got to go — all of these traitorous Republicans. And look, I don’t believe that we should live in a one party country. We should have five or six parties if we really wanted to, you know, most people to feel that they have something that represents their political beliefs. But that’s for another show. I’m saying they’ve got to go. Every single one of them. “Well, Mike, come on now. What kind of fantasy are you trying to drum up here? That’s never going to happen.” Oh, really? ‘Cause it’s happened before. It’s happened in this country and it’s happened in other countries, other democracies, when they reach the breaking point, when enough people say, that’s it. 

[00:09:10] And remember, that doesn’t mean everybody has to go along with us. It just means that in each of these congressional districts, our candidate wins by 50% plus one. That means in these Senate races, you know, you could have 10 million voters in a state and all you need are 5 million plus one to vote for our woman or our man who’s running for Senate. And boom. That’s the end of it. It doesn’t matter that their candidate gets 4,999,999 votes. That’s a lot of Trumpsters, that’s a lot of right-wingers I know. We’re never going to get 100% of the country to ever agree on any one candidate or party. We don’t need that. We need 50% plus one. And with that strategy, we literally could wipe out every single Republican in the Senate and every single Republican in the House. Okay. I know you’re still saying to yourself, “What’s he taking here? Didn’t we all agree no edibles for Mike? What’s going on here tonight?” Well, let me help you out here. In 1993, our good neighbors to the north, the people of Canada, they reached their breaking point. They had had enough. For a number of years they had a Reagan clone as their prime minister, Brian Mulroney. In fact, he was so proud of his friendship with Reagan, calling him his twin brother, and he was hell bent on trying to make Canada more like the United States — make things more about profit, take away the social safety net. And I think people had just had enough of it. And so the Conservative Party up there — they have, like all democracies should have, multiple political parties. They have five. And the two that get the most votes usually are the Liberals and the Conservatives. And the Conservatives had held the power, but the Canadians were sick of it. I mean, sick of it. And so in that election in 1993, at that point, there were 156 Conservatives in the Canadian parliament up for election or reelection. And the Canadians voted out 154 of them. You can look this up. There were 156 seats in the Canadian parliament held by the Conservatives. They voted out 154 of them. The whole country only elected two members of the Conservative Party. Why? How could that have happened? Because human beings reach their breaking point, and the Canadians had had enough of trying to turn Canada into the United States of America. Don’t get me wrong. Most Canadians do love us. But they had had enough of Mulroney. And poof, gone. 1993. 

[00:12:43] Four years later in Great Britain, the United Kingdom — I always get a kick out of their names for their country. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That’s their legal official name. But where do they get off calling themselves a “kingdom”? Or “great”? They’re just a little friggin’ island. Okay. Don’t get mad at me, British people. I’m just saying. And I’ll probably I’ll… I’ll cut this out after I’m done saying what I’m going to say because I love you for what you did in 1997. Oh, my God. So. Okay, so in Britain, they have a liberal party, the Labour Party. Right? And they have a conservative party who are referred to as the Tories. You’ve heard this right? Somewhere. Okay. So that year in their 1997 elections — remember they not only had to put up with us and Reagan and the first Bush, they had Thatcher for all those years throughout the ’80s. So this is what they did, if you can just imagine this. So Great Britain is made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. All right? In this election in 1997, up for election or reelection were 178 conservatives in parliament. 178. In Scotland, they showed up to vote. The people who showed up to vote, they voted every conservative out from Scotland. And at the the end of the election day, there was not a single conservative from Scotland in parliament. Boom. Gone. Same thing in Wales. No conservatives. Entire nation state of Wales — conservatives, zero. Scotland. Zero. Northern Ireland. Zero conservatives. England. Yeah. They kept a lot of their conservatives, but not the majority. Labour won. Labour won in England while booting out more conservatives. But the fact that there would not be a single conservative elected in all of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was historic. 

Michael Moore [00:15:13] But it’s not just the Canadians and the Brits. If you know the history of this country, it hasn’t always been the Democrats and the Republicans and that’s it. We have had other major parties where many members of Congress have been elected. Maybe you heard of the Whigs? The Federalist Party. There was something back with Jefferson called the Democratic Republican Party. Not what we know of today of those words, but it was called the Democratic Republican Party. There’s been the Free Soil Party, the Know-Nothing Party — literally, it was called the Know-Nothing. They were proud of that. There’s at least a dozen or so parties that were significant political parties that elected Senators and members of Congress, especially to local offices. And eventually those ones I’ve just mentioned were all booted out. Were all just destroyed by the electorate. The American people just one day said, “We don’t want the Whigs anymore.” That was the end of the Whigs. “We don’t want the Federalist.” That’s the end of the Federalist. It does happen. It has happened. It’s happened here. It’s happened in other democracies. 

Michael Moore [00:16:32] So history is on our side, and I think this is our moment. And I want to tell you what I think we’ve got to do, but first, I need to thank our underwriter for this episode today. So grateful to have them. They’ve been with us for a long time, Shopify. Without our underwriters, you know, we wouldn’t be able to afford the things that we can afford to do this podcast. But stay with me here because I’m going to propose something that some of you may think is quite radical. But I don’t think we have another choice. I think our backs are up against the wall. We are the majority. We have no right to have our back against the wall, and I’m going to suggest a different future. Let me just thank our underwriter Shopify for supporting this podcast and supporting my voice. Shopify, as you know, is a long time supporter of Rumble. They were instrumental in helping me start our Moore Store last November. As you may know, all the stuff in that store that we sell goes to help raising money to bring civics classes back into our public schools and things that I believe in. So every hat and coffee mug or sweatshirt that is sold there, a portion of the proceeds goes to helping these causes that I care so very much about. So let me thank Shopify for being here with us today. As I’ve told you many times, they are the all-in-one e-commerce platform that not only powers The Moore Store, but it does the same for millions of other online shops. Everyday people set up their own business and work it through Shopify and it’s such a great service to have. Shopify, they make the tools that were once reserved for big business — now they’ve made it available to all of us so that anyone, anywhere can start, run, grow their own online store. So if you’ve got an idea, you want to own your own online shop, or maybe it’s your school or maybe it’s your scout troop or whatever it is — Shopify can do this for you. So go to Shopify.com/rumble and make sure rumble is in all lowercase letters, Shopify.com/rumble for a free 14-day trial, you get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. You can grow your own business with Shopify, you can start doing it today by going to Shopify.com/rumble. Do it right now. Shopify.com/rumble Thank you so much Shopify for helping me make my voice heard. It’s much appreciated. 

Michael Moore [00:18:52] Okay. So let’s get back to what I want to propose here. And I think you probably can kind of see where I’m going with this, but I’m I feel very strongly about this. This is not some game I’m playing. This is not some prank I want to pull. This is for the life of our democracy in this country. Something that we at least have to set as a goal to do in these next 9+ weeks. So, our real job in November is to crush the Republican Party. You know, I’m not a dues-paying member of the Democratic Party. I’m not saying just, “Uhh, I’m a Democrat and I hate the Republicans.” You know, I’ve lived with Republicans all my life — down the street, up the block, the apartment above me, whatever. And I don’t like what they believe in. I try to organize and get as many people out to vote so they lose. If they think the minimum wage should be $3.75 an hour and I don’t, well, then I have to work to make sure what I believe in wins. And you go down a whole list of issues like that where there are these political differences between us as Americans. But my friends, we’re not talking about a political difference here. We’re talking about on January 6, 2020, after an uprising of right-wing nutcases stormed the Capitol, injured over 100 police officers, a few of whom lost their lives over the next day or two, because they wanted to stop the legal counting of the electoral votes in a free and fair election. That was their goal — to stop it. They failed. And 67 hours after the riot was over, Congress went back into session to finish the job and yet there were 147 Republicans who voted against certifying this legal election. In other words, stopping Joe Biden from entering the Oval Office, even though the American people had voted by over 7 million votes, that they wanted Joe Biden in the White House. And that night, 147 Republicans said, “We don’t care if the people voted for him. We’re not letting him take office.” And they did this just hours after this insurrection. Did anybody stay up and watch it because they were doing this late into the night? I was in such stunned disbelief. I guess I thought I’d seen everything, but I’d never seen that many people of what is considered one of the two main political parties in this country actually try to stop the elected president from taking his seat in the White House. And that’s exactly what they did. And the rage — I’m not the only one, am I? You saw this, too. The rage that we felt. And because we’re a nonviolent people, we’re not going to do anything to these traitors. And fortunately, the majority won out that night and Biden was given his oath of office and took his place in the White House. And yet we were left with a crowd that had tried to violate the United States Constitution. And now they’re still at it. They still won’t say the Biden’s the president. They won’t state a basic fact. And they are running and saying that they still support Trump and they would back him in 2024 for the presidency again. They fought having this investigative committee. Only two of them would serve on it — Kinzinger from Illinois, and Lynne Cheney from Wyoming. And in that vote that night with 147 who voted to stop Biden from entering the White House, there were a few other Republicans that did the right and decent and legal thing. But how many was it? Ten? Ten of them. But 147, as far as I’m concerned, they broke the law. They violated their oath of office. They violated the Constitution. And how can we even think of allowing them to spend one more day in our United States Congress? We need to remove them from office. We need to end their reign of terror. 

Michael Moore [00:23:54] Now for many years, many of you been with me for a long time now — through all my movies and all the different political things that we’ve all worked on — and we’ve been having the same discussion because we operate in basic truths. And we operate in the various truths that the media, the political elites, the parties, sometimes in both parties, they don’t want the people to know these truths. And I’m not talking about things like who has all the money in the country, how they buy their politicians — we all know all that. There’s nothing to learn anymore about any of that, right? Do you agree with this? I’m not talking about your conservative brother-in-law who is a Trumpster. He’s never going to change. Don’t waste your breath on him. The majority are us. We are the majority in this country. We don’t have to convince the majority any longer that women are not second-class citizens. They should be paid the same as men. And the government has no right dealing with anything to do with their bodies. The government has no right being in the bedroom with anybody. We don’t have to convince people that we’re in some form of extinction event with this planet. We are in deep, deep shit. No, we know those truths. And the majority of our fellow Americans know it, too. Just like they know everything else. They know all about the corrupt and racist police. They know how those in power keep the working class down in their place making sure that people don’t get any real raise in over 40 years. What’s that one we saw last week where the average weekly teacher salary, when adjusted for inflation, has only gone up in the last 30 years by $29/week. $29. But again, you don’t need me telling you that. You already know it. You already know that the American dream is for the few and it’s not for you. And that you’re going to be given just enough, maybe, maybe to scrape by. And how do you know all this? Because you’re living it. You and the vast majority of Americans who live from paycheck to paycheck, who don’t have more than $500 in cash available to them, whether it’s in the bank or their pocket or whatever. Those are the statistical facts. And you know it because you’re living it. 

[00:26:33] And the way those in power try to pull this off so that you don’t revolt, so that you don’t go crazy, is to throw you just enough crumbs so that you won’t turn the whole ruse that they’re operating on you upside down and overthrow their power and control. They know that the way to get away with it is let’s just forgive a small portion of your student debt. Why do we even charge people to go to school? That should be free. 66% of all developed nations have free or nearly free college for the young people of their countries. Why not do that? “Well, let’s give the people Medicare.” No. Why don’t we give them everything they need when they need help, when they’re sick like they do in virtually every other developed democracy on this planet? All they’d really have to do if they really cared about us is just say, you know what, you are the United States, it’s called We the People. Those are the first words of the Constitution. So because it’s “we the people,” you the people, are going to collectively take care of each other. And when you have to see a doctor or you have to go into the hospital, it’s paid for, period. But you see, they don’t want to go that far. And they don’t want to tell you the truth. The real truth, not the truth about Medicare or minimum wage or women’s rights. They’re just trying to keep things at bay, meaning us, so they don’t lose power. And it’s worked by throwing those crumbs. It works. That’s why we haven’t stopped them. They haven’t stopped me. They haven’t stopped you. They do stop some people — especially if they’re not white and male and of a certain age. But they know that they can get away with this because you, me, everybody else, we haven’t risen up to stop them. There’s no revolt. Now, I’m not talking about a January 6th style revolt. I’m just talking about showing up and voting. Even though we’ve been having record turnouts at the polls, even though young people now vote at such a higher rate than they ever have throughout history, in the last midterm we had in Michigan, the turnout of young adult voters, 18 to 29 doubled over the previous midterm just four years earlier. The youth vote doubled. That’s getting a little scary because that’s not supposed to happen — or organizing unions. And we’ve had more places of work file for a union election or actually have one and vote the union in here in the last year or two then we’ve had in — geez, what was the number? What did we read the other day? 60 years? See it’s happening. It’s starting to have — that’s the real revolt. Show up to vote. Organize a union. And then, at that point, we become a threat. A real threat. 

[00:30:18] Think about these poor Democrats. Lame. Oh, my God. Obviously, I need everybody out there voting, and we need to vote for everybody that’s got a D by their name. But, if you’re one of these candidates, the lame ones I mean, you do know that we know who you are, what you are, who funds you, what your real values are, and we’re going to be all over you in a way you can’t even imagine. You had 50 years — I’m talking to you, the Democratic lawmakers — 50 years to simply pass a law to make abortion legal. There were many times in these last 50 years you massively controlled the Senate and the House and you didn’t do it. Since John Lennon was murdered in New York over 40 years ago, over 1 million Americans have been killed with guns. That’s 1 million John Lennons — gone. And in these last 20 years or so, we haven’t even been able to ban just assault rifles. But you don’t need to hear this. You already know. But here’s the thing that those in power truly don’t want you to know. I mean, truly. The one central truth. And it’s this: It’s that you, all of you, you hold all the power. Again, as we have discussed, ad infinitum forever, we are the majority. We who believe that you have a right to have an abortion. We who believe that we should not be going to war. We who believe that you should be paid a living wage. We who believe that we have a race problem in this country still and unless we address it, we will never be who we claim to be. We know all this, and we’re the majority who believe that. So if we are the majority, then why aren’t we in power? Because we hold all the power. It’s still a democracy. It’s still one person, one vote. And yes, there’s massive amounts of money thrown into these elections so that we lose. There is a lot of voter suppression going on, gerrymandering, all of this. Yes. It has a big effect, but still. Still. We hold the power. What are we going to do with it? Because once you and I loudly and proudly state that truth: we are America. We are the majority. — and then we act on it, well, my friends at that moment they, the haters, the misogynists, the bigots, the supremacists, the believers in a economic system of greed, they, at that point, will be friggin finished. 

Michael Moore [00:33:54] So, yes, our real job on November 8th is to crush them nonviolently. You know, the way you would stop a bully. Just make this the goal whether we attain it entirely or not. Maybe we’re not as good as the Canadians or the Scots, or the Welsh or the Irish in Northern Ireland. But I’ll bet you we could get close if we really wanted to. Remember, we don’t have to convince everybody. We just need 50% plus one in every congressional district and 50% +1, 1 vote in all of these states where we can put a Democrat in the Senate. Just think about it. Just think about it and then for a few moments, think about making it become true. Throwing every Republican out of office. Throwing every Republican who voted to block Joe Biden from taking the office that millions and millions of Americans voted him to. Imagine being like the Canadians just for a moment. Or the people of Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland throwing all these conservatives out of office. Think about our ancestors — what they did to the Whig Party, what they did to the Federalist Party, what they did to the Democratic Republican Party. You can go on and on and on. It’s been done before, my friends, many times. And it’s time we did it again. 

[00:35:41] So let me make in these closing moments my final appeal to you here on this podcast. And that appeal is, again, not to tell you to vote. I already know you’re going to vote. Every single one of you is going to vote. And everyone you know is going to vote. Maybe you don’t need to remind the conservative brother-in-law, but you know what I’m saying. We already know what our job is on November 8th, and we’ve already committed to doing it. So this isn’t about me reminding you you have to vote. It’s not what I’m talking about. I will not be satisfied with us winning by a few seats. I am talking about a total removal of a treasonous party. I’m talking about voting out of office all who participated in stopping the legal counting of the 2020 vote. I’m talking about shutting down and removing all power from the hands of those who believe Trump is president. From those who believe women must be forced to give birth against their will. I’m talking about all who believe that guns must not be regulated, those who believe that the government can stop you from marrying the person you love, and all of those Republicans who believe that we must be forced to follow their religious doctrine instead of our Constitution, and our conscience. Every single one of these men — virtually all men — every single one of them must have the reins of power removed from their hands. And, my friends, we can do this right now. The election is nine weeks from this next Tuesday. I’m talking about a complete and utter repudiation, a full scale removal from office. And a clean sweep to save our democracy. Who’s with me? Come on. Who’s with me? It’s time to stop being depressed about all of this that we’ve had to go through. Lift our spirits. Bury your cynicism for just a few weeks. Of course, it isn’t exactly the way we’d like it to be. No, Biden is not Bernie. But we’ve got much bigger fish to fry here, my friends. We’re in deep, deep trouble. And if this party is what Biden refers to them this past week as semi fascist, if this party of semi fascist were to take over —Wow. If you don’t get a chill down your spine just hearing me say those words… This is not the time to mess around. This is the time to get up. Get active, be strong. Act. Move fast. All gas, no brakes. That’s the car we need to be in between now and November 8th. Let’s do this. 

Michael Moore [00:39:50] I have to tell you before we leave here, I don’t know, I’m feeling pretty good. I’m feeling pretty good. Canada did it. The Scots and the Welsh did it. We can do it. We can do it. We can do it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. When they read about us in the history books, they’ll see that after years of being treated this way by our own people, we rose up democratically, nonviolently, and with the stroke of a pen on our ballots, we removed the greatest threat that this country had ever seen. Wow. And we did it. You and I. And tens of millions of others. I’ll talk to you soon. Let’s go.