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To read more about Episode 231, visit the main episode page. 

Michael Moore [00:00:36] Hello. This is Rumble with Michael Moore. And I’m Michael Moore. Welcome. Back in the final days of the Soviet Union, around 1990, I visited there. My first film had just come out in the United States, and I was invited to bring “Roger and Me” to the Saint Petersburg Film Festival. And so I went. I had never been to Russia or the Soviet Union before. I had been to parts of Eastern Europe, East Germany, etc.. But not Russia, not the Soviet Union. And so I land there and now I’m thinking, you know, I’m from the United States and I grew up during a time where we were told that, you know, the world had these two great superpowers, the United States of America and the Soviet Union. And I was raised to be very afraid of the Soviet Union for what it could do to us with nuclear weapons, you know, they were the first in space, etc., etc.. And so I expected that when I landed there — first in St Petersburg and then in Moscow — that I was visiting, well, you know, the other great superpower of the world. I wasn’t off the plane more than 5 or 10 minutes when I wondered if I had landed in Bogota or Bulgaria or God-knows-where on Earth because this didn’t look like any superpower to me. I mean, the airport was crap, and the plane, so I’m like, “are we in the right place?” You would pass by whole sections in the airport where the lights were out, or they would flicker on and off. And it wasn’t long after we left the airport and, you know, visited very nice people in their homes and seeing how little they had — how they didn’t have any of the so-called modern conveniences that we were used to in the United States. And when we went to, what we were told was like a suburb outside of town, there was no indoor plumbing. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, people who had been to the Soviet Union before had told me, maybe you should bring like your own toilet paper because you’re not going to like, you know, what they have. I should have listened to them because again, right down to the toilet paper — I had traveled in the third world and I’m very comfortable with that. And I don’t need all these conveniences and the comfort of the United States. But I at least expected from the world’s other superpower that, you know, when you open the refrigerator, there would be food in it. And I just was surprised at the daily struggle of just getting by. But, you know, I’m at the film festival, so we’re going to go to the big theater and see my movie. And, you know, most of these film festivals, you send them the movie and then they will put subtitles on the movie for their audience. You know, sometimes there’ll be a dubbed version of the film done by professional, you know, actors and whatever. So I get to the theater and the movie starts, Roger and Me, and the first voice you hear is mine. I’m narrating the film, and I’m talking about myself as a small child growing up in Flint, Michigan. The home of General Motors. And there were no subtitles, no dubbing, and all of a sudden I hear over a loudspeaker system in the theater — while I can hear my voice talking on the screen — I hear this loud [Michael imitates loud Russian voice through a loudspeaker]. What’s going on? What’s happening here? I asked the Russian person from the film festival, “what was that?” And all of a sudden it started again. And you hear my voice on the screen, then [Michael imitates loud Russian voice through a loudspeaker] What the fuck? And she says to me, “No, that’s how we do foreign films here. Turn around — you see the guy back there?” There’s a guy at a microphone, at a little table with a light on. And he’s doing my voice. And it’s coming out through a loudspeaker somewhere in the theater. He’s translating it, and he’s translating everybody’s voice, not just mine. He does all the women’s voices. He does the head of General Motors voice. Everybody’s voice is the same voice. And it’s competing with the actual soundtrack of the film. So there’d be a woman who is a spokesperson for General Motors talking and you’d hear the same thing [Michael imitates loud Russian voice through a loudspeaker] It was surreal. And this was going to go on for like an hour and a half. And I’m looking at the Russians in the theater and they don’t seem to mind. I said to the film festival women, “are they used to this?” “Oh, yes. This is the way it is because, well, it costs a lot of money to dub or to put subtitles on the film.” “Wow. Yeah, that’s right. But you’re a superpower. You’re the second biggest superpower in the world.” And she looked at me like… She said something to the effect of, “you’re going to see that that’s the propaganda of your government and your media. And it’s also what we like to think of ourselves.” But the reality was not that we were in some advanced country. And we spent the next week there and we went down to Moscow and it was like the same thing in Moscow. It was a country that was broken. It could barely operate. It wasn’t the first outhouse, the one outside of St Petersburg that we had to use. It was just one thing after another like this and I thought, “after a week of this,” this was my main thought, “this is what I grew up being afraid of? This? I’m in the third world. This country is just not what we were told. And nothing to be afraid of. Really nice people and everything else, crap.” Oh, wow. 

Michael Moore [00:09:18] Three years later, I went back. Soviet Union was over. And now it was just Russia. And everything I had seen three years earlier was the same. In some ways worse. But they were trying capitalism now, or some version of capitalism and somebody wanted to take me to the Moscow Stock Exchange. They had a stock exchange now because they were no longer communists. They were trying to be capitalists. So we go to the Moscow Stock Exchange. I kid you not. We walk in — it’s like half-dirt floor. There’s goats. There’s other I can’t remember other farm animals like chickens. And, you know, they had on this board like a chalkboard, really, and I guess, the the price of grain or the price a chicken or whatever. And I said to one of the Russians who spoke English, I said, “you know a stock exchange, and I’m not really a big fan of and I mean, I don’t own a stock, but, you know, it’s supposed to be you’re like taking a bet on a company and your money invests in that company and then… “Oh, yeah, yeah. We have we have that, too.” And he took me to another part of this place, this large, open room with a very high ceiling, a place where you could invest in — geez I can’t remember what it was, but I just remember thinking, “wow, this is quite the scam.” And on this trip, now that the Soviet Union was gone, we were all warned to guard our money, be very careful. And we had to get from one side of Moscow to the other, from like the east side to the west side, and there was this ring road that goes around Moscow. And you get on the ring road, you know, like the Beltway in D.C. and you take that around the city to get to the other side. Once we got on this beltway, on this ring road, it was nothing but a parking lot. The cars weren’t moving. It literally took us hours to get from one side of Moscow to the other. Probably it wasn’t more than ten miles away. And we just inched along, inched along on this thing. And I thought, “what?” And they still had all these crappy little Russian cars and oh, man, I thought, “it’s just gotten worse since the three years before.” And I felt for the people, but I hated the fact that we’d been lied to, and that we had spent trillions of dollars on weapons, and war, and preparation for war against a country that, maybe yes, I guess they could fire a few missiles, and that’s all they had. They’d spent all their money on the missiles, and even later, when the Cold War was over, you know, American government officials admitted that the way they hoped to break the old Soviet Union was to get them to spend all their money in an arms race with us. And I guess maybe that worked. The people suffered and we suffered, too. And we built our military up into something that was not good for our people and wasn’t good for the world. That’s what I saw when I visited the Soviet Union in Russia. And this week. Hmm. This week… 

Michael Moore [00:13:31] I’m glad you’ve joined me today, and I want to talk about a few things. I’m not going to take a lot of your time. I’m just here to give you my impressions of what I think is going on and what I think we should do. Before we get to that, I want to just take a few minutes to thank my underwriters, the people that helped to pay the bills here with this podcast and the other things that we do. And we’re very grateful to them. And the first underwriter that I want to thank today is Stamps.com. Thank you for supporting this podcast. You know, whether you’re a small business owner or you’re sending mail to your large extended family, or maybe you’re just trying to stay safe these days because you don’t want to go to the post office, or you don’t have time to deal with the hassle of going to the post office, well, Stamps.com lets you print official postage right from your computer, right from home. No special supplies. No special equipment is needed. And it’s an approved licensed vendor of the United States Postal Service. We use Stamps.com when we’re traveling, when we’re filming, and we need to ship our stuff. And I want to encourage you to use Stamps.com, too. And if you do, you can get discounts that you can’t find anywhere else. You know, you can’t walk up to the post office counter and say, “hey, I want to get a discount on these stamps.” No. But with Stamps.com, because of the deal they worked out with the U.S. Postal Service, you can get up to 40% off United States Postal Service rates and 76% off UPS rates because, you know, UPS has a deal where they work with the post office for shipping what we need to have shipped. So save time, save money with Stamps.com. To sign up with Stamps.com, use the promo code — MOORE, my last name — and you can get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial, free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts are necessary here. Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page and enter the code MOORE. Thank you very much Stamps.com for supporting our podcast. 

Michael Moore [00:16:00] I also want to thank our other underwriter here, Truebill.com, for supporting this podcast and helping us all save a little bit of money. Now, here’s the question, you’ve heard me ask this before when they’ve been our underwriter, how many subscription services are you paying for each month? You know what I’m talking about, right? All those things, we hit ‘subscribe’ and it’s like months later, we forgot. Oh, man, they’re taking money out of me every month, every year or whatever. I mean, this all really can add up, and it’s easy to lose track of just how many things you’re subscribing to, especially how many things you’re subscribing to and not reading. Well, Truebill is the new app that helps you identify and stop paying for subscriptions that you don’t need or want or you’ve simply forgot about. Truebill’s app allows you to see all your subscriptions in one place, and you can keep the ones you want and cancel the ones you don’t. And you know how it is with a lot of subscriptions, they force you to, if you don’t want to subscribe anymore, you got to call them to cancel. Then you’re on hold forever. And then you give up, and then you’re still paying for them every month. Truebill will cut through all that. You don’t have to deal with any of that. They’ll handle it for you so that you don’t have to. And it works. On average, people are saving hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars a year with Truebill. We got this letter from a listener — she wrote us and she said, “Hands down. Truebill.com, it’s the best financial app that I discovered. In my first week, I opened it up and I saved $187 in unused recurring subscriptions that I’d forgotten that I’d had. I’m obsessed with this. I’m never going to manage anything like this again without having Truebill as my aid.” So start canceling your unused subscriptions at Truebill.com/rumble. It could save you literally thousands of dollars a year. Truebill.com/rumble.

Michael Moore [00:18:40] So this week, Vladimir Putin and his Russian army invaded the country of Ukraine. Are you like me where you thought, “okay, you know, he might want to go slice off another piece of this country that he thinks still belongs to Russia, but there’s no way he’s going to, like, literally invade the whole place and take it over.” Now, as I’m recording this, it seems like that’s exactly what he’s doing. Maybe it won’t happen. It looks like maybe he’s trying to scare them, but you know what? This guy, if you watched that hour, hour and a half rant of his announcing this war the other day… I mean, I always thought the guy was, you know, evil. But at least, you know, smart evil, like, oh, this is how he’s pulled all this off — he’s not stupid. If you could go on the Internet and find that crazy speech of his, it’s like he is totally a loon, a complete nutter. I thought, “wow, this guy is mad.” As in madman. This guy, it was just, it was so shocking. And I’m thinking, “this is the 21st century.” Have you been thinking this too this week? We’re in the 21st century. This shit doesn’t go on anymore. Certainly not in Europe. I mean, yes, the United States in the 21st century, we invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq and then, you know, then we send drones into Yemen and Somalia and other places and we bomb civilian populations. We do that. But I don’t expect others to do that. But Putin and the Russians, you know, I don’t want to say that I, in the past, have wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. But somewhere when I was growing up, I did read a book about World War II, and I had no idea — we never were taught this in school — that the Russians lost over 25-million people in World War II. Died, killed, starved to death, executed by the Nazis, by the Germans. I mean, they went through hell, and they suffered, and they paid a high price. And when they came out of World War II, they had this attitude of, okay, we have to control all these buffer countries around us so that this invasion business that’s been going on since the Mongols hundreds of years ago, and then Napoleon and then, you know, these — Russia’s just throughout history has just been constantly invaded. And I guess after losing 25 million people in World War II, they decided that’s enough. That’s enough of this crap. So we’re going to run these countries that border us. And, you know, we’re not going to be imperialists. Russians, you know, just like the Chinese, they don’t send their troops 5,000, 10,000 miles away like we do — Vietnam, Korea, Panama, Iraq. They don’t do that. They do want to control the countries that border them so the invasions will stop. Now, I’m not suggesting that that’s right that they do that. I’m just saying I understand why they might be a little paranoid because they’ve had to suffer so much. But Ukraine is not their problem. And yes, any talk of Ukraine being part of NATO — that should have been cut off a long time ago. NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Get a map out. See where Ukraine is. It’s nowhere near the North Atlantic. And I can see why… All of a sudden we’re offering to make them part of our military organization, a country that borders — not just borders Russia, but was a Soviet Republic, was part of the same country that Russia was a part of for most of the 20th century. I mean, can you imagine Russia doing a deal with Mexico, like a military pact? What would our response be? What would our government’s response be? What if Canada had been part of the Warsaw Pact? What would our response have been? Remember when the Russians, the Soviets tried to put missiles in Cuba? What was our response to that? We blockaded the whole thing, put a bunch of warships all around Cuba. We were so close to nuclear war with the Soviet Union. And it didn’t happen, thank God. Thank God for Kennedy that that didn’t happen. 

Michael Moore [00:24:38] So I understand the history of this. I understand the paranoia. It doesn’t excuse it, but why this? Why now? What did Ukraine do? Could we have prevented this just by saying, “hey, don’t worry, Ukraine’s not going to be part of NATO. They’re going to be part of Ukraine. It’s their own country.” Somebody just should have said that. Ukraine, you know, it’s… Back when we were growing up, when you heard Kyiv, when you heard Odessa, these cities, you just thought that was part of Russia because it was part of the Soviet Union. I believe it’s the second largest, landmass-wise, it’s the second largest country in Europe after Russia. I think it goes Russia, Ukraine, then France, maybe? But Ukraine is bigger than France. In fact, you could take France and a big chunk of Germany, you’d have to put them together to be the size of Ukraine. It’s got the third largest army in Europe after Russia and France. It’s also the poorest country in Europe, Ukraine. Oh, man. So they have the third largest army so so much of their money, and now our money, goes to weapons in a country that’s quite poor by European standards. It’s all so sad, isn’t it? To see people lining up there in Kyiv, whether they’re lining up at the grocery store, they’re lining up to get gas. Gas to go where? That’s a long drive if you’re going to Poland. You know, you’re not going to have enough gas, you’re going to be on the highway at a standstill trying to get out, and you won’t have enough gas. ATMs, you know, what are you trying to get? Money? For what? You know, the fear that’s in everybody there is very understandable. But it’s just so odd. And then the president of Ukraine announced that no male, no man between the age of 16 and 60 can leave the country. You have to stay in fight. You have to stay and kill these Russians that are invading. You know, generally, if you don’t want to fight in a war, you don’t want to kill anybody, you got to have the right not to be forced to do that. t was an odd order that came down yesterday about no male may leave the country. You must stay and fight, kill, and maybe die. You know, we have to find new ways to resolve things like this. And I think, you know, Biden told us for many, many, many weeks, this was exactly what was going to happen. And I think the financial sanctions are a good thing. And he added more today. You know, the oligarchs that Putin has made very, very wealthy – this is not good for business. This kind of war, this kind of takeover of another country when you have a country yourself that you can’t even run. You have such a broken country. It’s still the same piece-of-shit country — and I’m sorry to say that, it sounds harsh, but it… I mean, ask yourself, when’s the last time you bought something that was made in Russia where it says “Made in Russia” on it? When’s the last time you ever needed to use anything from Russia? Now, yes, we still are somewhat dependent on their oil and natural gas, and certainly Europe is, but Russia, it’s not like China. It’s not like other places where they actually produce things — they do things and make things that Americans want, that Germans want, that Brits want. What does Russia make? I’m serious. Instead of focusing on his own country and trying to bring it out of what I saw now some 30 years ago almost when I was there at the end of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the new Russia. 

Michael Moore [00:29:56] And they still, I mean, the average life expectancy of a Russian male, a Russian man, depending on which chart you’re using in the last decade or so, a Russian man lives somewhere until he’s like 62 to 68 years old. That’s it. Focus on that. Spend your money and your time on that. Help your people. But no. No. Seems like he likes the idea of the old Soviet Union, where he was one of the leaders of the KGB, and I don’t know, was he trying to rebuild the Soviet Union? The first thing he’d want to do is take back the Soviet republics like Ukraine, like Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania. Get those back first. But then does he want Poland? Does he want Hungary? Does he want Slovakia? Wow. Romania? What are we heading into here? And then Biden’s already gone on the record saying if he invades any of those other countries like Poland, Romania, which are part of NATO, that we’ll send our own troops in. And I’m like, “No, we’re not.” “Well, we signed a treaty that says one-for-all and all-for-one. And if any of us are attacked, that we all join in.” Yeah, well, all I know is we are invaders ourselves, and we don’t know how many hundreds of thousands or even millions of Iraqis are dead, and Afghans are dead because of us, because we don’t know what we’re doing. The way that we go in, the havoc that we cause, the things that we’ve done just since World War II, the number of countries where our CIA and our intelligence agencies and our military have helped to overthrow governments, or have just involved ourselves in their elections, their free elections, to try and make sure the candidate that we wanted was elected. I mean, just read the history on this. We, after Iraq, after we lost the Iraq war, and we lost the Afghanistan war, I have said a number of times that we need to go to the timeout room. We are not allowed to go to war anymore. We are not allowed to “help” people in other countries like this with our military. We have to stop this. When we show up with our jet fighters and our bombers and our Blackhawk helicopters and all our troops, it is not going to end up well. So we can’t even be talking about the United States sending troops anywhere. We’re in the timeout room. No war. No war. And I say that and as I sit here tonight, I have no idea what’s going to happen. The United Nations or other countries, you know, good countries, countries that care about humanity, countries that believe in peace — we need them to step up right now. We need to stop this to fix this. The Pope, you know, the Dalai Lama, the, you know, the women’s soccer team, I don’t know, just any good group of people that could get the Russians to sit down. Let’s talk this out. Let’s figure this out. We have to come up with something because war is not the answer. More death, more destruction, not the answer. I know, I know, “well, Mike, what’s the answer?” Well, you know, I don’t have the answer other than what I’ve just said. You know, there are the things I don’t know, which is a lot of things, but here’s what I do know — our involvement, never good. What was Putin demanding? Ukraine can’t be part of NATO. Okay. Say yes. There’s no loss of face there. Man, I’ll tell you… I’m not just trashing my gender here, but isn’t the world going to be a better place when more women are running it? I’m not saying just because a leader is a woman — we’ve had awful examples of that, from Margaret Thatcher to Indira Gandhi to Golda Meir to you know, you can think of a number of women that have been in charge and have been every bit as excited to go to war as men always are. But, I don’t know. I don’t know. This isn’t going to work. You know it, I know it. And I think right now, you know, as I’m recording this, we’re only probably 36 hours, 40 hours into this, so we don’t know everything right now. But the thing I do know is the United States has to stay out of it. No more loss of life and no more taking other lives. Let’s find a way, let’s get other countries and other peoples involved to help in this, to help stop any kind of slaughter going on, and to have some empathy for those paranoid Russians who in some ways have every right to be paranoid, not about Ukraine, but hundreds of years of being invaded by the West and the Mongols from the east. All of this is fixable. 

Michael Moore [00:37:03] We’re smart enough now to know that this way can’t be the way any longer. You know, we’re barely going to make it out of the 21st century anyways, if we’re lucky, because of what we’ve done to this planet. That’s what we should be focusing on. That’s the real enemy. That and poverty and the fact that a couple billion people on this planet still don’t have either clean drinking water or any kind of sewage system that keeps their people safe and healthy. Shouldn’t that be the focus? I don’t know. If I were president, I’d be calling Putin like, every hour. I don’t mean prank calling him, I mean, like, really calling him. But every time he hangs up on me, I’d just call back. Vlad. Come on, dude. Come on. This is fucked up. We’ll send you a few more Olympic gold medals. How’s that? I don’t know. I’m. I’m just… Tell me what it is you want? What do you want? I know you don’t want dead Russian soldiers. Let’s stop this. So what is it that we can do to fix whatever it is? And if what you want is just more money to get your all your oligarchs and yourself even richer, that’s not going to happen. And let me just I can give you examples of how your people eventually will rise up in the first 24 hours. 1700 — that’s the number that at least the the peace groups say there’s been 1700 Russians across Russia arrested because they participated in an anti-war demonstration here in the first day or two. Wow. Your country does not want this war. They don’t want Ukraine. And when it’s revealed to them what you’re really up to, that’s going to be it. You know, you live in a country that had one of the greatest revolutions in world history when the people rose up. Russian people are not afraid to rise up, and someday they will rise up against you. And you made a huge mistake this week of going on your TV and looking like a lunatic, because now your own people are thinking, “shit. We’ve got a lunatic for president.” Nobody wants a lunatic for president. We know that. We had that for four years. Oh, I see. I see the former president, yes. He’s been out there supporting you, cheering you on. That should be the first clue that you should stop what you’re doing — if that guy, from Mar a Lago, that guy is, like, calling you a genius for this invasion. Oh, my God. You and he are part of, sadly, a rising group of madmen, of authoritarian dictators, people that want to use their fascist powers to line their pockets, to make their friends rich, to take over their countries — so afraid of democracy, so afraid. You should be afraid because people everywhere want to be free, and they will not tolerate this from you. Maybe I should just call you up anyways. You’d pick up wouldn’t you? You and I, man, come on. We could have a great laugh or two. And then you just tell me what you want and I’ll see if I can get it for you. Just to stop this. What would it take to stop this? Come on. This won’t end well for you. 

Michael Moore [00:41:31] To all of you who are listening to this, it’s one of these moments where we’ve got to really send out something to the larger whatever the life force is in the universe, whatever the karma is, whatever you believe in, whether it’s some faith or prayer or good vibes, whatever it is, man, we all need to pull together and collectively put it out there. There should never be war in Europe ever again. I’m sorry, that’s all I’ve got for you on this issue tonight. I know that we have lost the moral high ground — if we ever had it. We’ve had it for a few moments, but now we’re a country that won’t guarantee the voting rights of our poor and our people of color. So many other things. You know, in the last year when Biden took office and all that aid that he gave to families, 40% of kids who were in poverty were no longer in poverty just last year. And now, because of Manchin, and these others, that’s stopped. They’ve stopped the aid, and now we’re rapidly getting to the point where those 40% of kids who were out of poverty are now back in poverty. How sick is that? That’s where our focus should be. We have to we have to figure out what’s wrong with us and fix that. 

Michael Moore [00:43:33] I’ve got just a few more thoughts on a couple of other things, because there were some good things that happened this week and I’d like to end on that. But before we do that, there’s just one more underwriter I need to thank today for supporting us. And that underwriter is Shopify. I want to thank them for not only underwriting my Rumble podcast, but also for helping us out with our website and our store. We do this through Shopify — the store where you can go and get a T-shirt or ball cap or whatever to support our work. And I’m sure you’ve heard of Shopify. It’s as you know, it’s like this all-in-one commerce platform that helps level the playing field, and gives you, the individual or your small business or whatever, a chance to start and run and grow your own business — right from your home, or maybe it’s a small business you have. It’s very hard to compete with the big guys. And we have a little experience with this, with Shopify, because we recently launched what we call The Moore Store, and we decided to use Shopify because of their great service and their outstanding technology and the low cost. So if you’re looking to start a business or grow a business, or do something here on your own, you’ve got to use Shopify. Go to Shopify.com/rumble. Rumble is all lowercase. So it’s Shopify.com/rumble. And if you do that, you can get a free 14-day trial and get full access to Shopify, its entire suite of features. So grow your small business with Shopify today. Go to Shopify.com/rumble right now. Shopify.com/rumble. 

Michael Moore [00:45:34] Finally today, wow, historic moment with Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court. What an incredible woman, Justice Jackson. Wow. You know, when you have a smart president, this is what you end up with. And especially when you have a president that doesn’t base his decisions on racism, and bigotry, like the last guy. We have an antidote to that right now. So congratulations, President Biden, for nominating Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court. And let’s hope that goes through without any trouble. But let’s also keep our focus on the things that we’ve still got to do to fix this court, because we’re going to have this Trump court for the rest of our lives. So, you know, whether it’s adding some seats to the court, whether it’s taking away some of their powers, term limits or impeach the ones that shouldn’t have been on there in the first place, thanks to Trump. We still need to have this discussion on how our court is going to function. Very critical, but for right now, let’s salute this incredible nominee and the upcoming appointment of what will be our new associate justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Jackson. 

Michael Moore [00:47:00] I also just want to say a couple of words about these two big verdicts down in Georgia, and the one in Minneapolis against the groups of men who participated in the slaughter of two black men, George Floyd in Minneapolis and Mr. Aubrey down in Georgia, killed by racists, for racist reasons, and convicted on civil rights charges this week for their racist killings. It’s something we haven’t really seen in the past, this kind of justice taking place. So more of that from now on. Put all racists and bigots on notice. Any acts of violence, any acts of discrimination against anyone in this country because of the color of their skin, especially and including black Americans — this is the end. We all just have to stand up declare it — this is the end. And it can’t just be a negative thing like, “Oh, yeah, we just got to stop this racism.” No, actually, we not only have to stop it, we ourselves have to make sure that we are all anti-racist, that we take care of any piece of white privilege that we’re using to make our lives better at the expense of those whose lives can’t be better, simply because their skin color is black or brown. And then we have to fix the way this economy is run that keeps black and brown people on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. This has to end. All of this has to end. We have to make this right. Black people in this country suffer still from the effects of slavery, of being brought here in chains, of being forced to build this country into the wealthy country that it quickly became. All of this has to change. It’s not just about a few convictions about men who kill because of their bigotry. It’s about every day of life in America that in its own way takes the life out of so many people who are forced to live in poverty, who go and have to go to the worst schools. All of that — we need a commitment right now from all of us. And that’s why we’ve got to get out and vote in November. We’ve got to get senators that are real senators that will stand up for these things so we can get all those things that we wanted to get passed this year that it didn’t happen, we can fix that simply by getting the right people elected. And I’ll be talking about that more in future episodes here on Rumble of what we, each of us, can physically do to have a successful November election. So that’s about it for today. Yeah, it’s really… the last couple of nights here, it’s hard to fall asleep thinking about all this. Just when we didn’t need anything else to have to deal with in this time of plague, of this time of not just the coronavirus, but also the virus that’s destroying this planet the way that we are operating and functioning on this planet. And the way that our democracies are teetering, teetering right now. All of us. All of us. I know you’re tired. I know you haven’t felt well. I know all of us are, like, going crazy, climbing the walls, and it doesn’t matter. We have no choice. This is the hand we’ve been dealt now. Previous generations have been dealt their own difficult hands. This is our hand. We have to stand up. We have to fight. We have to make this better. We can do it. We’re the majority. There’s more of us than there are of them. I will say that like a mantra on every single episode of this podcast if I have to, but you know it’s true. So let’s take advantage of that and let’s show the world that we do know how to behave. We do know what is good and righteous about having a democracy. That may do more to help save those democracies that are under the gun right now. When others see that this is the way of the world in the 21st century, not the old way. The old way is gone. And anybody who thinks they want to bring it back, whether it’s the former guy, whether it’s the shirtless guy on horseback, your days are over. Your days are over. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks to my executive producer, Basel Hamdan, our editor and sound engineer. Nick Kwas, our jack-of-all-trades and master of all-the-other-trades,Ddonald Borenstein. Thank you guys for your help here. And thank you, all of you, who listened to Rumble and who support our work. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care.