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To read more about Episode 291, visit the main episode page.

Michael Moore [00:00:15] Hello, this is Michael Moore and you’re listening to Rumble with Michael Moore, my weekly podcast. Thank you, everybody for tuning in today. And thank you for all of you who wrote me over the last week about last week’s podcast regarding guns, and my plan on what to do. I couldn’t give away too much of it, and I probably gave it too much already just by announcing that I was going to do something to try to help put an end to all this madness. But I just wanted to thank you — not only just the response, but the ideas that many of you had. New ideas, things we haven’t thought about doing of how we could correct the epidemic of gun violence in this country. It was heartening. I got excited about many of the ideas that you expressed. I shared them with my crew, those who are already thinking and doing regarding what we’re up to here on our end. So to Bob, my NSA guy who has the night shift, and Kenny, who usually has the day shift of listening in on me, just keep this to yourself for at least a few months, all right? All of us working on this project — we are nonviolent people. We believe in peace. We are not filled with hate. Just fill out the report with other stuff, thanks. 

[00:01:56] Okay. So I want to bring up something that’s been in the news the last week or two, and that is the record low approval rating in the polls for President Joe Biden — apparently at what is it? 38%? 39%? Whatever it is, it’s now the lowest for a first term president ever, or at least since whenever they started doing these approval rating polls. It is lower than Nixon, lower than Reagan, lower than Bush I or II, and lower than Trump. Whoa. Now, I know the president’s granddaughters are probably listening to this podcast, and I don’t know how often Grandpa tunes into this, but if you could pass this along to him, I just want to kind of interpret the meaning of this low approval rating and the rest of you can join in on this. You can drop him a note at the White House if you want, whitehouse.gov. And I know a lot of you have written to me like you’re upset and you’re worried, “Oh, my God, Is it possible that Trump is going to be back in the White House?” You know, “is it possible that Biden’s going to lose? You know, isn’t there somebody else who can run? Can we get somebody younger?” I don’t mean to laugh. I’m just… Well, yeah, he’s 80. There’s lots of people younger that could run, that are eligible. They just have to be born in the U.S., a citizen of the country and 35 years old. That’s it. And I know there’s a couple of other now Democrats that are are running, and I know a lot of you feel like why don’t we have a third party or a fourth party or whatever? And and yes, you’re right. I’ve said this since I was a teenager, and yet we don’t have it. I haven’t made it happen. You haven’t made it happen. And we can say this, but if we don’t actually work together, form an organization, make it large and make it happen, we’re not going to be able to… Well, we just can’t just dream it up like, say, “Oh, next year let’s get a third party candidate.” You know, we’re in a very dangerous time, as we all know. And so the work we probably should have done, could have done, would have done a decade or two or three ago, hasn’t been done. So therefore, we have to now deal with the hand we’ve been dealt at the table. 

[00:04:45] So having said that, the fear that a lot of you are feeling about Biden losing or Biden not making it because of this record low approval rating. Let’s start by saying a couple things. Number one, approval ratings, really? What? I don’t even know where the idea came up with. I don’t know how many decades they’ve been doing it. Isn’t it kind of a an old timey idea to begin with? Why are we even doing this? It’s the 21st century. We’re more than 1/5 of the way through the century and we still have approval ratings? You know, that should have gone out with The Newlywed Game. Right? Or Charles in Charge. Such an ancient idea. We’re beyond this, aren’t we, the popularity contest? The approval rating. The approval? How about this? We don’t approve. Period. None of us do. We don’t approve of anything we see going on right now. We’re sick and tired of it all. Approval? A pollster is going to call me and ask me. Do you approve? Approve? No. Don’t even ask. Don’t finish the sentence. I don’t approve of anything right now. It’s all so messed up. Isn’t that kind of how we… I mean, we do approve of some things. You know, you love your dog, you love your cat, you love your goldfish. You love Americone Dream. There are things you approve of, but really, it’s such a silly question, isn’t it? We’re being talked to like we’re in some kind of preschool room. “Okay, who likes the grape flavor?”. 

[00:06:41] It’s stupid. It’s a stupid question. So the first thing the pollster should just do right now immediately is stop taking approval ratings, all right? Because it doesn’t really mean anything. I’ll give you an example as to why. First of all, if a pollster calls just about anybody in the public and asks them if they approve of a particular politician, the first inclination, I think amongst the majority of the people, not everybody, but amongst the majority, is you’re wasting my time. I’m answering the phone and you’re wasting my time asking me if I approve of a politician. Why don’t I just save your time and tell you I don’t approve of any of them? I’m against politicians. Fuck them all. I mean, you know, you don’t need to drop the F bomb on the poor person who’s, you know, calling you from the Philippines to ask you your opinion on this. But, you know, seriously, the reason why these don’t mean anything — and you know, Trump’s approval rating is only a couple points above Biden’s. So they don’t like him either. And, you know, the pundits on TV say, “Well, you know, we’re now a divided country and now we’re in agreement that we don’t like anybody who’s running for president.” And it’s like, yeah, but take out Biden and Trump him, you know, put in, I don’t know, DeSantis and you know… I don’t know. There’s no Democrat I can think of right now. See that right there? I can’t even think of a Democrat, You know, I mean, obviously other than Bernie. And there are some good ones, actually, that are not just in the Senate and Congress, but are in our state governments — in Michigan and places like that, you know, we have good people. But they’re not running. They’re not going to win. And so don’t ask me about any of this. People generally are just going to say, “No, I don’t approve,” no matter what name the pollster throws at them on the phone. Okay, start with that. So right there, you’ve got probably at least half the people already disapproving. And it’s probably why Biden and Trump’s disapproval number is so close. 

[00:08:59] But there’s also this — and I’m speaking to the people who voted for Biden, who will vote for him again next year. Even people who are somewhat pleased with a lot of what he’s done. A lot that he’s gotten accomplished, what he stands for, what he stands up for —you know, you have a good feeling about a lot of who he is and what he does. Yet, if a pollster is saying, “Mike, do you approve of the job Joe Biden is doing?” To be honest, I think I’ve never gotten one of these calls, but if I got one. I think I would err on the side of of even though I do approve of much of what he’s done and I’m going to vote for him, I don’t want to say that to the pollster. I don’t want to be recorded as “approving of.” And now we list all the things that I’m upset about that he hasn’t done, that he isn’t, you know, standing up for, mistakes that I think he’s made all of that. If you put those things together and I’m not going to go through a litany of it right, now, you’ve heard me make my criticisms and my concerns and all that. But to mark me down as, “yes, I approve of how things are going” — no, actually, I don’t. I think I would probably say that I don’t approve. And so when you’re looking at that 38% approval rating or 39%, whatever it is, know that there’s a lot of people probably like me. Who because there are a number of things I don’t approve of, I’m going to err on that — only in the hopes that him seeing that number will nudge him toward doing the right thing to fixing this. 

Michael Moore [00:11:06] It’s just strategy, right? It doesn’t mean I don’t approve of him. Doesn’t mean that he won’t have my vote. I’m not going to vote for the Republican. I’m not going to not show up. So you see how just ridiculous this is right from the get go? And you know, what they do is they look at that and they think, “oh, yeah, he’s only got like a 38% approval rating. Wow. That means under 40% of the country is going to vote for him.” No, that’s not what it means. It means people are just pissed. We’re all pissed right now. We’re all in a funk. We don’t like a lot of what’s going on. And so we register that complaint when the pollster calls. 

[00:11:58] But if Republicans are thinking, “Oh, his approval rating is down in the ’30s, wow, we have a chance to win this election.” No, you don’t. You’re not winning another election. Trump was it. Trump, was it. That’s on us, too, by the way. You didn’t make that happen. That’s on the decisions that the Democratic Party made, that Hillary made. As I’ve said many times, in the state I’m from, Trump got an average of two votes per precinct more than Hillary in Michigan in 2016. That’s why he became president. The DNC and the whole apparatus, the whole political shenanigans couldn’t figure out how to get just two more people out per person to vote for Hillary. Of course, she wouldn’t come to the state to campaign. That was a little problem there. The campaign refused to allow any yard signs to be sent to Michigan. They thought the signs would remind the Trump voters that, “oh, the elections coming up, don’t forget to vote for Trump.” I mean, you know, again, if you’ve seen my work, my movies, listen to this podcast, I’ve told you everything that happened that went wrong. 

[00:13:19] So the approval rating — don’t worry about it. It means nothing. I mean, can you remember right now who was voted in your senior class in high school “Most Likely to Succeed”, “Best Dressed”? You know, I mean, nobody remembers any of that because it doesn’t matter who the most popular kid was, you know. “Best Athlete” — maybe some of us can remember that one. I was, in that election they have, I was elected — I won “Best Comic” is what it was called at my high school. “Best Comic”. Some schools call it “Class Clown”. The majority of the seniors that year voted me as that. Which reminds me, well, I’m not going to say right now, I’m not going to talk about it right now. Maybe I should just alert you that sometime very soon here I’m going to write a Substack, a written Substack about the concept of humor and satire, and the political ways to create change. Not with a hammer in your hand, but with a sense of humor. But we’ll get to that here in the next week or so. 

[00:14:44] In the meantime, if the pollster calls, don’t worry, say whatever you want to say. If the Republicans misinterpret it — what they don’t understand is that I’ll bet you a third of that 38% approval rating OR I should say, the disapproval rating for Biden, is from people who like him. People who voted for him. And they’re just upset. As they should be. So, I don’t approve, but I approve. You can carry both thoughts in your head. You already do. 

[00:15:26] All right. I want to talk about a couple other things here. I won’t keep you long. But first, let’s take a minute or two here to thank my underwriters for today’s episode. And first up, a huge thank you to Moink. Now, I know a lot of Rumble listeners don’t eat meat, but if you’re an omnivore like me, check out Moink. Moink delivers grass fed beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken and sustainable wild caught Alaskan salmon straight to your door. And the best part? All of this is sourced from small family farms all across the country. Moink farmers farm like well, like they used to back in the day. And I’m telling you, you can taste the difference. Plus, you can rest assured that in the process you’re helping rural America stay independent from Big Agriculture. And that, my friends, is a good feeling. So keep American farming going by signing up at moinkbox.com/rumble. Do it right now and listeners of this podcast get free bacon in your first box. It’s the best bacon you’ll ever taste, my friends, but it’s only for a limited time. So moinkbox.com/rumble. That’s moinkbox.com/rumble. 

[00:16:50] This episode of Rumble with Michael Moore also brought to you by BetterHelp. When we’re needed by those that we love, it’s easy to find the time to give. What can be harder, though, is finding the time to think about what you need for yourself. Talking to a therapist can help — not only help you navigate through a crisis, but also to give you the tools to help you strike a better balance in your life so that you can keep supporting those you love without leaving yourself behind. So if you’re thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It’s entirely online. You can have your sessions from the comfort of your very own couch and it’s completely flexible to fit your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and if it’s not a good fit, you can switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Find more balance my friends with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/rumble. Do it today and you get 10% off your first month. That’s betterhelp.com/rumble. Thank you, BetterHelp, for supporting this podcast and for supporting my voice. 

[00:18:04] I would like to give a huge shout out to another longtime supporter of this podcast, and that is Shopify. It’s the commerce platform that helped me launch my own online store, The Moore Store, where a portion of the proceeds from every T-shirt, hat and coffee mug go toward issues that I care about, like bringing civics classes back into our public schools and ending voter suppression. But it’s not just me. Shopify has helped millions of people all over the world set up shop online or on the ground in brick and mortar stores, covering every type of sales channel from an in-person POS system to an all-in-one e-commerce platform. It even lets you sell across social media marketplaces like Tik-tok, Facebook and Instagram. So if you have an idea for your own store, perhaps you’re looking to sell something or raise money for your nonprofit, for your school, whatever, you could start your own shop right now to support your cause, your family, your local community. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/rumble — and ‘rumble’ is all in lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/rumble — ‘rumble’ in lowercase — to take your business to the next level today. That’s Shopify.com/rumble. 

[00:19:31] Before we close up here for today, just an idea I had this week. I was reading, I didn’t understand, I never really probably thought about it too much — like, what does it take to become a state in this country? Do we all the people in this country, have to vote on letting a state in or becoming a state? I mean, how did that happen? How did Alaska and Hawaii become the 49th and 50th state? I mean, I was just a toddler, so I don’t know any of that. And then I found out this week it’s actually quite simple. In order to make something a state, you just have to get the House and the Senate. You just need a majority vote. You don’t need that 60% vote thing or all the other nonsense that we’ve allowed to take place in the Senate, especially. You just need a simple majority of the U.S. House of Representatives and a simple majority of the United States Senate. And then for the president to sign the bill — that’s it. You don’t have to ask all the states, you don’t have to have a national referendum. You don’t need a constitutional amendment. There’s nowhere in the Constitution that lists the names of all the states. It’s actually quite simple. And because, you know, we control the Senate and we did control the House and we will — my prediction by the end of this term. When we are, and we have a Democrat in the White House — did I mention how the Republicans aren’t going to win again? Of course, I have to put a caveat on that. If we don’t show up to vote, if we don’t do the organizing, if we don’t do our part, and if in this case Biden and Harris, if they don’t do their part and do the things that we elected them to do, if they hedge, if they pull their punch, if they just go all silent and not do the job over the next year — yeah. Yeah. That actually could result in a Republican victory. Yeah. So we have to do our part. People in the White House, the Democrats in Congress, they’ve got to do their part. And if that happens, the majority of Americans are already with us. So they just got to be able to look at the situation, say, “Yeah, I think I’m going to vote today. You know, they’ve done some good things here and I certainly don’t want the other people in charge of this country. 

[00:22:02] But I’m only bringing this up because I started thinking, you know, Washington, D.C., District of Columbia, should be a state. People there do not have all the same rights that the rest of us have. They are American citizens, yet they just have like an observer in Congress. They don’t have a member of Congress to represent them. There is no voice for the citizens of D.C. and there’s, I don’t know, maybe 700,000-800,000 people live in Washington, D.C. They have no voice, they get no vote. That’s wrong. That’s not a democracy. That has to be fixed. They’ve already voted. They want to be a state. They’re American citizens. They live in the continental 48, I guess. 48 plus. I mean, seriously, why don’t we start to prepare for when we have both Houses and the White House here in another, you know, almost year and a half, let’s give statehood to the District of Columbia, those American citizens full voting rights. They’ll get at least one representative in the House and they’ll get two Senators. And if you’re saying, “Ooh two Senators for that little city? That little city is somewhere just under a million people, that there’s already more people in the District of Columbia than there is in the state of Wyoming, the state of Vermont. I think there might be another state or two that D.C. outranks. If you get two Senators in Vermont, the people in the District of Columbia should have their two Senators, too. 

[00:23:46] Now, getting into the whole issue of should there even be the Senate the way it’s set up, because it’s totally not democracy — that’s for a different podcast. But between the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico — which has, what, three or 4 million people? — they’re all American citizens. If they want to be a state, and I think they’ve kind of made that clear, somewhat clear — if they do, they should be a state. Let’s make Puerto Rico a state. They are a hell of a lot closer to us than Hawaii. We did that. They’re closer than Alaska is to the lower 48. We did that. Puerto Rico should be a state. They should get two Senators. And with, I don’t know, their population, that’s — oooo — that’s at least five members of the House. We can make this happen very easily. 

Speaker 2 [00:24:54] A simple vote in the next session of the House and the Senate signed by the President. Boom. And we could start to fix this problem we have where we have a Congress that’s not truly representative democratically — and I mean small ‘d’ I’m not talking about Democratic Party. I just mean it’s not one person, one vote in this country the way we’ve got it set up. So that has to change. We should think about changing that and not wait any longer. Just like we’re going to have to fix the Supreme Court. And I’ll get into that here in also the next week or so, because, man, all the news that’s been coming out about the Supreme Court, on their shenanigans with the money, rich people buying them off — not good. And they’ve got to rue the day that they got rid of Roe v Wade last summer. “Why’d we let Alito talk us into this? Now everybody hates us. Now they’re looking into our finances. Now they’re going to impeach us. What the hell?” Well, you know, if you take away the rights of the majority of Americans, that would be women, the majority gender, if you take away the right to control their own bodies, their own reproductive organs… If you say that those rights to their bodies belong to the male dominated Supreme Court? Well, you’re going to piss off a lot of people. And that’s what’s happened. And they’ve shown up to vote last November. They’re going to show up this year. They’re going to show up next year. And yes, now investigative reporters are all over your ass. So we’ll talk about that also that upcoming podcast. 

[00:26:51] But I just want to say that, you know, one of the cool things about us taking more power away from the Republicans in next year’s election is that we could easily — actually throw the Virgin Islands in there, too. They should be a state if they want it, they should be a state. They’re American citizens, right now, that don’t have rights, don’t have votes. So they should be able to be a state. So that’d be two Senators there, two for Puerto Rico, two for the District of Columbia — so there’s six new Senators in areas that… And I would say this regardless if they were Republican areas or Democratic areas. But just so happens, it seems like we’d have close to six new Democrats in the Senate and another maybe ten or so Democrats in the House of Representatives. Of course, this is why the Republicans hate this idea, why they will fight it, but they can fight it all they want. All we need is a simple majority vote in the House and the Senate and Biden’s signature. Bingo. Done. Mic drop. Think about it. 

[00:28:06] All right, so that’s it for today. Thank you very much for tuning in to Rumble. I appreciate it. Thanks again for all your comments, especially about whatever we have up our sleeve here. So thank you for that. I read all your emails and your comments. I appreciate it very much. So don’t hesitate to write me or even leave a voicemail on the podcast page. There’s a link where you just click the link and on will come the dial tone and you can call me and leave me a voice message and I will listen to it. All right, everyone, that’s it. Thank you. Hope you’re enjoying the month of May. I’ll talk to you next week. This is Michael Moore and this is Rumble.