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To read more about Episode 234, visit the main episode page. 

Michael Moore [00:00:48] Welcome everyone to Rumble with Michael Moore, I’m Michael Moore, and I’m glad to have you here with me today. This past week or so, we’ve seen what I think is actually some good news, painful news, but in the end, I think it will be good news. And so I always like to highlight at the beginning here, when we’ve got some good news, so we’re playing a little Aretha this morning in honor of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who had to go through a bizarre, surreal, insulting hearing last week in front of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. And I want to start with that here today. And then we’re also going to talk about Ukraine and how I see the war, and how it’s going. And I have a couple of suggestions for fellow satirist and comedian, President Zelensky, in the Ukraine. So we’ll get into that later on here in the podcast. 

Michael Moore [00:01:56] But first, let me shout out to one of our underwriters for today, and that is Shopify. Thank you very much for supporting this podcast and my voice. It’s greatly appreciated. Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform, especially for small businesses, or people that are starting up their own business out of their own home, their garage. We’ve seen a lot of that during the pandemic, people deciding they’re going to do something different in order to survive. And the best part of Shopify, as I’ve found out, is that it really is made for everybody. This is not like some big corporate thing, this is for you. If you want to start something on your own, they’ve got the resources and tools that were once reserved for big corporations and are now accessible to all of us. I mean, I know this from personal experience. Working with them, in just a few days our little Moore Store went from an idea to shipping out ball caps and T-shirts and coffee mugs to people — with some of the proceeds of that going to bringing back civics to our public schools, and stopping voter suppression, and bringing back the Voting Rights Act. And I’m grateful to everybody who has participated in my Shopify. So Rumble listeners, if you are thinking of starting your own online business or looking to grow your existing business, I’m telling you all you got to do is go to Shopify.com/rumble for a free 14-day trial, and you’ll get full access to all of Shopify’s entire suite of features. Check it out and grow that business of yours with Shopify. You can do that, again, by going to Shopify.com/rumble. Do that right now. Shopify.com/rumble. 

Michael Moore [00:04:16] Let’s begin this section regarding Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson by playing just a little piece of the Senate hearing where she was being questioned by Republican Senator from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn. This was a question that she had in trying to figure out whether or not Judge Jackson should be on the Supreme Court. Let’s just run that…

[ The following is an audio excerpt from Day 2 of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing in front of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee]

Audio excerpt of Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) [00:04:46] Do you agree with Justice Ginsburg that there are physical differences between men and women that are enduring? 

Audio excerpt of Judge Jackson [00:04:56] Senator, respectfully, I am not familiar with that particular quote or case, so it’s hard for me to comment as to whether or not — 

Audio excerpt of Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) [00:05:08] Alright, I’d love to get your opinion on that, and you can submit that. Do you interpret Justice Ginsburg’s meaning of men and women, as male and female? 

Audio excerpt of Judge Jackson [00:05:20] Again, because I don’t know the case, I don’t know how I interpret it. I’d need to read the whole — 

Audio excerpt of Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) [00:05:25] OK. Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’? 

Audio excerpt of Judge Jackson [00:05:32] Can I provide a definition? 

Audio excerpt of Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) [00:05:34] Yeah. 

Audio excerpt of Judge Jackson [00:05:35] No. I can’t. 

Audio excerpt of Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) [00:05:37] You can’t? 

Audio excerpt of Judge Jackson [00:05:38] Not in this context. I’m not a biologist. 

Audio excerpt of Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) [00:05:42] You mean the meaning of the word ‘woman’ is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition? 

Audio excerpt of Judge Jackson [00:05:48] Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is I address disputes. If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments, and I look at the law, and I decide, so I’m not — 

Audio excerpt of Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) [00:06:03] Well, the fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about. 

[ End of audio excerpt]

Michael Moore [00:06:22] Can you believe that? “Judge Jackson, what is a woman?” I mean, you’re not watching the visual of it, but the look on the judge’s face just said it all. Like, “do I really have to answer this ding-dong question?” The obvious answer was, “Me. I’m a woman.” But of course, that’s not what Blackburn was getting at. She wanted to see if Judge Jackson believes that people have a right to determine who they are, what they are, who they want to be in life — all of that stuff. And the judge wasn’t going to have any of that, and refused to answer this ridiculous question that was really loaded to encourage more bigotry against those who don’t define themselves as strictly a man or a woman. But it would have been great, though, I think, in the hearing room had by the third time she asked the question, “What is a woman? I want you to tell me, what is a woman?” And people in the hearing room, just — you know, the great scene in Spartacus where the Roman general doesn’t know who the slave leader is. And they’ve captured all these, you know, escaped slaves in the Roman Empire, and he’s shouting out from a hilltop, “I need to know who your leader is. This guy, Spartacus,” you know, “who is Spartacus?” And he shouts it out. “Who is Spartacus?” And Kirk Douglas, the actor who is Spartacus, starts to stand up to say that he is Spartacus because he doesn’t want to get anybody else in trouble. And all of a sudden, another one of the escaped slaves shouts out, “I am Spartacus.” And right away a second one, “I am Spartacus.” The third one, “I am Spartacus!” Then they all start going, “I am Spartacus.” So I just thought, “Oh please, somebody in the room, just shout out, ‘I’m a woman!’ ‘I’m a woman.'” And then just one after the other in that room, “I’m a woman.” “What is a woman?” “I’m a woman.” “I am a woman.” “I am a woman” — making the point of the diversity of women answering that question. It was just so… It was part and parcel of the humiliating nature of what the Republicans did all week long. They spent hours and hours on how she ruled in child pornography cases, basically trying to paint her out as somebody who’s soft on child pornography, or doesn’t think it’s such a bad crime. I know a lot of you probably tried to watch it and turned it off — I don’t blame you. But I had to watch it because I had to absorb what is going on here. And it wasn’t just the question about “what is a woman?” or “why are you letting child pornographers run free in this country?” It was also questions like from Lindsey Graham, you know, “let me ask you about your faith. On a scale from one to 10 — where are you? How would you describe in terms of how deep you are into your faith? We’d like to know one to 10.” It was just a bunch of crazy questions like this. I mean, seriously, I just sat there expecting, “OK, what’s the next one going to be?” I was making a little list like ask her — “What’s the difference between a Snickers bar and a Milky Way?” Or I thought you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to get out the three card monte. You know where they put a card under three different cups and you have to decide which cup it’s under as they move them around. Or you can play that with a ball — you’ve seen this on TV and in the movies. Why didn’t they just do that with her? Just move the three cups around and then have her guess which one the card or the ball is under? That’s just how ridiculous the whole thing was. You know, it would be hard to parody this because you watch this and you think, “Oh my God, what’s next?” “Judge Jackson, we’re just wheeling in a Buick here, we’re wondering if you know how to change the oil in this car? And if you can do it in under 10 minutes, go!”. 

Michael Moore [00:11:00] Or how about this? Put a jar of jelly beans on the table and ask her to count how many jelly beans are in the jar? Take a guess. One of the things they used to do down south when they didn’t want black Americans to register to vote was that in order to register, you had to recite the preamble to the Constitution. You had to name all 10 Bill of Rights amendments. You had to count jellybeans in a jar — just by looking at the jar. Before they would register you to vote. And that was the underlying racist nature of the entire days of hearings. And one crazy question like the child pornography stuff after another and just grandstanding on this child pornography. And you know what it was, what was really going on if you hadn’t figured it out, is this was their dry run. This was their campaign ad for the November elections because they’re going to run on a QAnon agenda. That’s the QAnon stuff, right? Hillary in the porno ring out of the pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C.. All the crazy stuff that they’ve all subscribed to now because they’re all Trumpsters. They all still back Trump, and they support these crazy QAnon theories. This is the Republican Party: absolutely bonkers. And you got to have a peek at how they’re going to run against the Democrats in the midterms this November. Throwing crazy, crazy shit at Democratic candidates for Congress and for Senate. They are desperate to win back the House, to get better control of the Senate, even though the Democrats are legally in control unfortunately, as we know, we have a couple of Democratic senators who tend to go Republican. So we got sort of a preview, a trailer for the November elections. 

Michael Moore [00:13:09] The other thing, though we were witnessing was our continuing series called —Thank You to Public Enemy — Fear of a Black Planet. Because here was this strong black woman sitting in front of them, and they didn’t know what to do. How could they bring her down? They were so flummoxed,and she was so good, and so smart, and so kind to these racists as they tried to pummel her unsuccessfully. They know what she represents, and that’s what scares them. They know that black women were the only demographic that voted, essentially 100% — it was actually 98% back in 2016. They voted against Trump by 98%. You know, other ethnic groups, of course, were very strong for Democrats, as were young people but black women — 98% against Trump. That’s a pretty high number to hit considering, you know, everybody is their own individual person. You know, we don’t want to treat any group with some monolithic attitude here. But you know,  they just went after on this critical race theory thing, and they wanted her and did their best to get her to say that it’s wrong to teach our young people that there was slavery, that there has been racism and discrimination and bigotry and laws that have been passed in our 200-plus-year history that were essentially aimed against black people and other people of color, immigrants, et cetera. They wanted her to say that it’s wrong to teach our young people about this critical race theory. All I want to do now is teach critical race theory. We should just do throughout the year, podcasts here on critical race theory — I’ll get my 1619 hat on. Because I can’t think, really, of few things — I mean, there are other things that are as important, maybe a little more important — but few are more important now to me than making sure our young people understand that this country was built on racism, it was built on the backs of enslaved human beings, and the country was taken through a method of genocide. And that’s who we are. We’ll never get better at being who we are unless we’re willing to acknowledge who we are. And to make amends, to fix it. To cleanse the American conscience — all of that. Clarence Thomas was in the hospital for about 10 days this past week or so. Then he finally got out. They wouldn’t really tell us what was wrong. We heard the word ‘infection’ over and over again. Not good at that age. And then I started thinking, “Oh, this is what’s really got them worried?” See, we on our side of things we’re like, ” oh, even if she gets on, it’s still a six to three vote. We’re never going to win on the Supreme Court now for years now.” The 10-day stay in the hospital with the infection is a reminder that, you know, none of us live forever, and he is the oldest person on the Supreme Court. And should he resign or anything, you know, happen and which of course, I hope does not, I wish no ill or harm or death on anyone, no matter how much I oppose them. That’s not the right way to think, but the reality is is that there will be another vacancy on the Supreme Court at some point — some point relatively soon, maybe. And what if that happens during the Biden administration? That’s what they’re afraid of, because then it goes from being a 6-3 court to a 5 to 4. Five conservatives, four liberals. And we’ve seen one of those conservatives now, Chief Justice John Roberts, vote a number of times, most notably to save Obamacare, with the liberals. So that means in a number of cases, even with the conservatives in charge, they’re going to lose. That’s how close we are to that happening. I know everybody’s depressed about how one third of the court now is Trump appointees. How can you even call that a court? I mean, but we’ve had our say about that. But that’s what they’re afraid of. And don’t be surprised in this next week or so before they have the vote how many Republicans, essentially nearly all of them, are going to come out and try and stop her appointment to the Supreme Court — because it’s then going to be a 5-4 court eventually. Soon, maybe? Who knows? And when that happens, they know they’ve got a traitor on the five conservatives. 

Michael Moore [00:18:10] So I say that also to pick your spirits up because we are going to keep winning, even though it will be a struggle, and we will lose sometimes because the other side is very good at lying, and very good at using fear in order to win elections. And they’re very good at trying to fix the elections in their favor in a number of states where they are getting secretary of states and voter election heads in the states to be their people who will do what Mike Pence should have done for them in this last election. And of course, underlying all this, we know what the elephant in the room is, and that’s Roe v. Wade. And we’re going to get a decision on that, probably this June, just a few months away, maybe just 12-weeks away. And what are we doing to get ready for that? What are we going to do if our Supreme Court rules that women do not have control over their own bodies? They don’t get to decide. The court will decide, the government will force you to give birth. Forced birth. That you may not want to participate in. In a real-life version of A Handmaid’s Tale, women will be forced to give birth whether they like it or not. That’s what we’re facing. We may be just 12-weeks away from that. What are we going to do about it? I’m going to put some links on the podcast platform page here of various groups that are organizing right now. There’s the big ones, you know, like Planned Parenthood and the Abortion Rights League and everything. But there’s also a number of really good local groups and other things that have formed. Younger people have formed groups to fight this. We all are going to have to get up and out there if they attempt to do this. We cannot be silent about this, my friends. You know this, we have to have a response that is massive. And then we have to enact and do things — maybe state by state or whatever we’re going to have to do — but we can’t let this drop. It’s going to be one of the worst marks on our history the day, this year in 2022, when our Supreme Court declares that women do not have a say in how they want to run their own bodies. The government will determine that. So please check out these links of organizations, start to get involved now, and we’ll be doing podcasts on this here in the near future so we can get ready for something awful that’s going to happen. Joe Manchin came out in support of Judge Jackson to be on the Supreme Court, so I guess that’s a big relief. Thank you. Thank you. Not thank you. Thank you, Senator Manchin holding our breath to find out if we’re going to have the votes. It looks like it’s going to happen. And I personally want to celebrate and congratulate our upcoming new Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson. We have a ways to go, my friends. This is one more step in that direction.  

Michael Moore [00:21:29] OK, before we move on to Ukraine, I want to just take a moment, give a shout out to another one of our great underwriters — Truebill. I love this thing Truebill, because it helps save you a little bit of money that you and I — we’ve all experienced this where we sign up for things and then we forget that we signed up for it and they still are deducting every month something out of our credit card or whatever. And then you don’t see it. You don’t catch it each month, but they’re dinging you for $9 here. $20 there. And it’s like, Whoa, wait a minute. I know some of you are very disciplined and you don’t have this problem, but I think I speak for the majority. Well, Truebill, if you have this app, you can see all of your subscriptions in one place. You keep the ones you want, you cancel the ones you don’t right off the app. And you know those places where you have to call to cancel? Or you got to go through all this rigmarole to cancel something? Not with Truebill. Truebill will just handle this for you. You’ll have your own what they call a concierge assigned to you to handle all of this, to cover every month to make sure you really want these subscriptions. And over two million Truebill users have saved over a hundred million dollars doing this. So start canceling your unused subscriptions at Truebill.com/rumble. Just do this right now. Go to Truebill.com/rumble. It could save you thousands of dollars a year. Truebill.com/rumble. 

Michael Moore [00:22:56] And finally, today I want to thank our other underwriter, Stamps.com. Look, the last thing anybody wants to do on a beautiful spring day like today — hopefully, it’s beautiful where you’re at — is to have to stand in line at the post office. “No, please!” Stamps.com is an official vendor, though, of the United States Postal Service, and that gives you access to all the Post Office and UPS shipping services that you need, right now, from your computer. It’s easy, it’s quick, and within minutes you’re printing official postage for any letter, any package, anywhere you want to send it. We use this when we’re out shooting or traveling around the country, around the world. We use Stamps.com because we don’t have time to deal with whatever local post office that we can’t find or deal with or whatever. We just go on the computer, print it out — boom! We’re shipping stuff with our film that we need to ship right away. Done. Easy. So I want to encourage you to check this out. You’ll get discounts that you can’t find anywhere else. Up to 40% off on U.S. Postal Service rates and 76% off UPS. So stop overpaying for your shipping and go to Stamps.com. Sign up with the promo code ‘moore.’ That’s my last name — moore. Sign up for the promo code ‘moore’ and you’ll get a special offer that includes a four-week trial, free postage and a digital scale. Please use this for legal reasons only. No long term commitments are required with stamps.com. You don’t have to sign a contract. None of this stuff. Just go to Stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the page. Enter the code ‘moore,’ my name, and you’re on your way. Thank you to Stamps.com for supporting this podcast. It means a great deal to me.  

Michael Moore [00:25:21] And we’re back here on Rumble with Michael Moore. So, there’s this large power that decided to invade another country. A country that had nothing to do with violating or threatening the security of that larger country. That larger country just decided that whatever this other smaller country had, they wanted to go in and take it, control it, whatever, and that’s what they did. Sending in thousands and thousands of troops, shooting missiles, you name it, all aimed essentially at a civilian population. And killing them, killing children indiscriminately. We don’t have the numbers of how many have died. But it’s quite a few, and it’s very tragic and it’s immoral. And it is a war crime. And to watch the people fight back, and try to stop these troops from coming in their country – and they have fought back in all sorts of ways — it’s a real resistance guerilla movement. That’s how they did it. Sound familiar? Because that’s what happened with Vietnam, right? We invaded a country that had nothing to do with us, was no threat to the United States, and we with all of our might went in there and indiscriminately bombed civilian populations, killed them. Again, the numbers are everywhere, from at least in Vietnam, from a million to two million dead on our account. And we didn’t like it when the Viet Cong formed and fought back and killed our soldiers, nearly 60,000 of them. We didn’t like that. Of course not. But isn’t that what you do when somebody invades your country? You try to stop them? And unless you’re a pacifist, which I think there’s a lot to be said for that, I don’t think anybody denies your right to defend yourself, your family, your country, all of that. And that’s what the Vietnamese did. And then we, years later, did it again. We, like Russia, went into — well first, like Russia, we went into Afghanistan. Russians didn’t learn their lesson doing that. And then we went into Iraq. We invaded Iraq for what? George W. Bush said it was because of their connection to 9/11, but there was no connection, it was completely made up. A complete lie, just like Putin lying about the what the Ukrainians are doing, that they’re Nazis — all his lies, all his lies. That’s how we did it in Vietnam, baby. We lied about Vietnamese attacking one of our ships off the Vietnamese coast. And then we just use those lies over and over to send more and more troops, killing a million to two million of their people, mostly civilians. And then losing 60,000 of our own troops. And then being defeated by the Vietnamese, who did not have fighter jets, didn’t have warships, didn’t have any of the tools that we had to conduct war, and yet they beat us down, beat us back and we left in defeat. So it’s, well, I’ve been part of the same group of the majority of Americans wanting to see them defeat Putin. I’m well aware, as I’m feeling that way, that I am part of a country that didn’t like it when the resistance movement fought back against our invasion, didn’t like it when guerillas planted IEDs on the roadside to blow up and kill our young men and women. But we were there in their country. Going down their road into their neighborhood that we had already bombed. How do we square this when we are cheering on the Ukrainians for doing what we didn’t like the Vietnamese and the Iraqis doing to us when we invaded their country? Maybe we should leave the cheering to the rest of the world. And just do our part to help the refugees provide humanitarian aid. We’ve provided a couple of billion dollars worth of armaments to them. To fight back. 

Michael Moore [00:30:45] But historians are going to look at the irony of this. That so soon after we were the invaders, and after we didn’t like it when they fought back and they defeated us — the Vietnamese defeated us, then the Iraqis defeated us. And killed us, killed our troops. We didn’t like that. But we like it when the Ukrainians are fighting back, resisting, using their armaments that we gave them, and any guerrilla activities to get rid of the Russians. Yay! It should always be ‘Yay!’ whenever anybody is being bullied or invaded. And they stand up for themselves and they fight back and they win. If we were honest, each year we would celebrate a day of our defeat in Vietnam, and our defeat in Iraq and use those days as teaching moments to remember our mistakes. Our acting like Putin. And our, us, being defeated, rightly so. You cannot be hypocritical about this, you cannot say that we can go down into somebody else’s neighborhood and blow it up. But boy, they better not try that with us. Because what would we do? Of course, we’d defend ourselves. We’d fight back. We’d stop it. We’d win. 

Michael Moore [00:32:25] I mean, the Ukrainians, the way they pitched this to us a month or so ago before the war started — the media I’m talking about and the politicians — “oh, the poor Ukrainians,” right? Remember all those stories, you know, “the Russians, the Russians are going to take Kiev in three days. The capital will fall in two days.” Remember that? And I’m thinking, and I said this at the time here and in my Substack, the Ukraine army is the third largest army in Europe. We trained it, we funded it. We provide it, we and NATO, provide it with all this stuff. Why were we saying this? That the capital was going to fall in a couple of days? And then, you know, the pundits get breathless on the cable news, “oh, they’re not going to stop there with Ukraine. They’re going to go into Poland. They’re going to go into Hungary and Slovakia and Romania. They’re going to want the whole Eastern Bloc back — they’re on their way to Berlin!” And I’m like, “are you frigging crazy?” And as I said at the time, you know, the Russians, come on! I mean, the Russian Army, first of all, is 90% — 90% — smaller than the old Soviet Army. So they don’t have the large army that they used to have. They have a lot of tanks and equipment that doesn’t work, that’s been around forever. And you saw that as they were just even trying to get down the road in Russia to get into Ukraine, they couldn’t get there because they had so many tanks and and jeeps and everything that just broke down. Then they ran out of gas. Couldn’t even get to the border. And as I said over a month ago, I mean, I visited Russia when it was the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and then I visited it since it was now just Russia. And the Soviet Republics are their own countries. And each time I have been there, I’ve just been so unimpressed. They should never be called a superpower — other than the fact that they still have nuclear missiles, and we’ll get to that in a second. That’s it, folks. It’s a broken country, it’s a poor country, it’s a third world country. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. I saw it firsthand in the late 80s, early 90s, mid-90s, and it’s still that. I mean, they have done things to improve the life expectancy rate — Russian men used to be around 52 years old. Now it’s like 64 to 68 years old, still lower than the rest of the industrialized world. But they have a rough go of it there, and continue to have a rough go of it. And they don’t make anything that the world needs, or uses. They have gas — natural gas — and oil, and Europe needs that because Europe hasn’t spent the time, I guess, to figure out how not to be dependent on Russian. It’s kind of a precarious position to be in. But you’ve got nothing in your house that says “Made in Russia.” I’ll tell you that right now. Go ahead. You can take a minute here. Pause the podcast, look around. See if you can find something that says ‘Made in Russia.’ I’m not talking to you vodka-heads here. As you look around your house, you see “Made in China,” you see “Made in India,” you see “Made in Bangladesh,” you see, you know, “Made in Japan” on and on and on. But nothing from Russia, because it’s sadly a very broken country. And it’s not what we were always told that it was because they needed Russia as the boogeyman to scare us. And yes, we should be scared of nuclear weapons. But other than that? To call them a superpower never made any sense. 

Michael Moore [00:36:43] So in the four weeks, four plus weeks now of this war, the Ukrainians have killed more Russians in just these four weeks, than all the U.S. troops that were lost in 20 years of the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars. The numbers are, you know, kind of all over the map also like there is early on here — they try to get a real count, but it seems like most independent observers believe that there’s somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 Russian dead in Ukraine. Wow. And counting all casualties, that’s dead and wounded and missing, it goes up to 40,000 Russians — in four weeks. Twenty years, we never got anywhere near that number in Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s how successful the Ukrainians have been yet, again, they were portrayed a month ago as, “oh, the poor Ukrainians, they have nothing. They’re like peasants. All they have are their rakes and their hoes. How will they ever win? They can’t win. They can’t win this. There goes Ukraine.” Mm hmm. Right. Again, the numbers vary depending on what sources you quote, but they’ve lost somewhere over 500 tanks and other military vehicles. And if you count all the vehicles, the number is over a thousand. They’ve killed six Russian generals already — generals — the Ukraine’s have. They have shot out of the sky close to 60 or so Russian planes, but also another 70 or so Russian helicopters. Again, these numbers will vary and we’ll learn the actual ones soon. That’s shooting a lot of stuff out of the air with the various anti-aircraft and other missiles that we’ve given them. And they’re doing the fighting. And, you know, I’m so grateful that President Biden has held firm and not listened to our generals, our former generals, our pundits, our politicians, the Republican Party and anybody else saying, “we got to go to war, we have to stop Putin!” We? No, not ‘we.’ The Ukrainians have to stop Putin and anybody who lives in that neighborhood has to stop Putin, and they are. But we know Biden has held firm on starting World War III. He knows that if we get involved in this, and Putin, in his craziness, decides to use nuclear weapons, all because, you know, he got pushed and bullied by our own media, our own, you know, people that just love war… And he’s not listening to them. It’s so good. I know it’s hard for him. He goes off-script every now and then and says things people are saying like how we need to remove Putin, and starting to talk about regime change. But he’s having none of it. He’s doing everything he can on the humanitarian level. He personally went there to the refugee camps on the border and taking selfies with the kids and playing with them. It’s not a safe place to be. You’re the president, United States. You’re just a few miles away from the border. And yet, there he was. 

Michael Moore [00:40:42] I have to say I live in a country that’s never seen a war that they didn’t like, and we’re always ready to just hop to it. “Let’s get there. Let’s go bomb them. Let’s go fight. Let’s go.” “What did they do to us?” “It doesn’t matter. They’re bad people.” And Biden has said no. Because he knows what the consequences would be. There’s other ways to win this. We don’t have to be the ones to do it because we don’t win wars, we lose wars. That’s what we’ve been doing since World War II, and our participation would be a greater threat to the world. He knows that, and I congratulate him for hanging tough against all the cries for us getting involved. “No fly zone. We need to go up there and have a no fly zone!” Hang in there, Joe Biden. We don’t need a war,and we don’t need a nuclear war, and we don’t need World War III. I was watching Sean Penn on CNN last night. Of course, Sean Penn is there. He’s on the border with his relief group, helping the refugees, and he himself personally involved doing it. And he just said, right out from what he’s witnessing, the Ukrainian people are going to win this war. They’re going to beat back the Russians. And I believe that. You know, we may be wrong, but it doesn’t look that way, does it? Unless Putin does go crazy and pushes a button. That would alter things. When they do win the war, they and the world community has to insist that Russia rebuild these cities, that they just bombed. Civilian populations, apartment buildings, schools, etc. — that all has to be rebuilt by Russia. And if they won’t do it, then we take that frozen money of theirs. The money that all these countries have frozen, take that money and use it to rebuild Ukraine. And as they pushed the Russians back to the border, they’ve already taken back a city or two that the Russians had held, and now the Russians have been pushed out. And now they are moving back to the border, especially from the north in the south. They want to still try and keep some of the eastern part of Ukraine, but it’s not going to happen. The Ukrainian people are never going to stop. They’re going to be now in their second Afghanistan, their first Vietnam, and learn what happens when you do this, when you invade people, and you kill their families — they will be relentless in killing you and moving you out of their country, just like we were moved out of Vietnam, and we were moved out of Iraq. And finally, Afghanistan. 20 years, 20 years to fight the Taliban, to remove the Taliban, only to give the Taliban back running the country. That’s  the genius of when you are someplace you have no business being. And Putin is learning that right now. So as they’re pushed back to the border, and as they push the Russians back across the border, of course, they’re going to have to give them some gas because those damn Russian vehicles, they suck up the gas and they die along the road and you don’t want them staying in Ukraine so you are going to have to fill up their tank for free — free gas so you can go home. 

Michael Moore [00:44:15] But I want to propose an idea to President Zelensky, you know, of Ukraine here. And again, I proposed this idea as a fellow satirist because I just think this would be not only so right, but also so funny. And, you know, Zelensky — he was a comedian. He had his own hit sitcom on Ukrainian television. By the way, if you haven’t had a chance to see it, Netflix has it now. The series “Servant of the People” is the name of it. I’ll put a link to it here so you can watch it if you have Netflix, and if you don’t, I’ll put up a clip or something so you can get an idea of Zelinsky as the sitcom president of Ukraine. It’s very funny. And so my comedian idea to him, as a comedian, is the way that he should do this is as he pushes them back across the border, just keep going. Invade Russia. Let the headlines read “Ukraine Invades Russia!” Putin will go crazy. Well, we don’t want him to go crazy. Maybe this is a bad idea, but I just… just go five miles, five or 10 miles into Russia and just show him who you are, who anybody is if you kill my family, this is what’s going to happen to you, and suffer the humiliation of being invaded by a country called Ukraine Mighty Mighty Russia, Mighty Mighty Putin. I’m just saying, pause for a second and just imagine that. Just a little whack on the nose. He needs and deserves, I’m talking about Putin, much worse than that. And I hope he has to pay for his crimes someday. 

Michael Moore [00:46:11] But right now I’m, all kidding aside, I just want to before I finish this with Ukraine, say that it is a legitimate fear that Putin, in his state of mind right now, might fire those nuclear missiles. I would never suggest this or say this before about anything during most of my life, both in the Cold War and after, but I think if you’re worried about that right now, it’s a legitimate worry. And so we really need Biden and we need NATO — they’ve got to have, yes, the Iron Fist to defend the Ukrainian people, but they’ve got to have the velvet glove too because we cannot, and we will not survive a nuclear war. So all attention and focus on that, and then all hopes and prayers and everything else that the generals in Russia and the oligarchs, both groups who are pissed off at Putin for starting this war. The generals do not like being humiliated because those generals, they’re being humiliated right now by this little country, and they don’t like it. And the oligarchs have had their money frozen, their yachts taken from them, and the good life that they were living is now going to come to an end and they don’t like that. And I’m guessing/hoping, I mean, I’m not an analyst here, I’m not a pundit, but you got to believe if you got your generals against you, and if you’ve got your oligarchs, you’re rich, you’re wealthy Russians against you, Putin, you’re not going to last here. Time to give up. Surrender. Go home. If you got to save face in some nonviolent way, do that. But you got to get the hell out of there because you’re not long for the presidency in Russia. And ultimately, this may be what really does stop this war. So we can all agree on that, right? No nuclear war, no World War III. Biden has to be the leader in this initiative. Yes, help the Ukrainian people with everything we can do to help them. They will do their job in pushing Russia out of there, and then the Russian people will take care of Mr. Putin. 

Michael Moore [00:48:49] I just want to close by saying it’s very hard for me to speak as an American, or to claim any high moral ground when we’ve ceded that in my lifetime, and in ways before my lifetime. We’ve lost that moral ground because we have acted like Putin, we’ve invaded. And we don’t invade the countries next door to us because of historical fears that Russians have, because they have been invaded over and over and over again and have lost millions of people, especially during World War II. More than any other country, Russians lost 20 to 25 million people fighting the Nazis and really winning the war — you know, obviously with our help and the Allies and everything but man, the Russians are the ones who took it the hardest. And so they’ve had this paranoid — understandable, sometimes paranoia is legitimate — that they need this buffer zone. This is how they behaved during the Cold War — they need a buffer zone to protect themselves from the West. But that’s not an excuse for what’s happened here. Not at all. Those are the old days. These are the new days. Putin, if you’re in the old days, sorry about that. You’re done. But we, as Americans, we’re still in the old days. It’s not just Vietnam with us invading a country we had no business invading and killing its people, or Iraq. Same thing — no business doing that. But we’re still doing it, we’re still doing it. There is a country that we support with billions of dollars every year. We prop it up with our money, and we fund the military, and they use that military to bomb civilian apartment buildings, civilian areas and this country has created refugees of these people in the hundreds of thousands — and we fund it. The victims in this case, the current ones, they’re called Palestinians. And thousands and thousands of them have been killed. Civilian populations have been bombed. And refugee camps, I don’t know how many — it’s probably in the millions both within the occupied territories of Palestine and also in neighboring countries. It’s disgraceful. We have to stop doing that. We have to support the people in Israel who are for human rights democracy, Palestinian independence — all of that. Or if not Palestinian independence, then just be a real democracy and let all people have all the equal rights within that area. But that hasn’t worked. We haven’t created any situation there. And I don’t want to get off into this today, but I just want to remind you as I close that we still, we still aren’t acknowledging our own b.s. We still can’t claim this high moral ground that I wish we would be on. We have to fix this. Thank you, President Biden, for what you’ve been doing here to keep this thing from exploding beyond what it is right now, and for supporting the Ukrainian people in what I believe will be their successful efforts in beating Mr. Putin. And then let’s focus on also being our better selves here in this country and stopping any support, any support that we give to any nation that is harming it’s people or other people. We can do this. I got to believe it. 

Michael Moore [00:52:52] Thanks, everybody, for listening to Rumble today. This is Rumble. I’m Michael Moore. My thanks to our executive producer, Basil Hamdan, our producer and editor of this episode, Angela Vargos. And all of you for listening. Much appreciated. We’re going to close out here. I’m recording this on Oscar Sunday — some of you will hear this before the Oscars, some will hear it after. I want to do a podcast about the movies and where we’re at now. A lot of great movies got made in and released during the pandemic, but you haven’t seen them, you haven’t heard of them. And I want to give them some recognition. The 10 nominated films for Best Picture — they’re all good movies. Try to check them out if you can, some of them are great. I wish I had the time to talk about it some more because some of these films I really liked. So my hats off to everybody who made a movie in the last year or two and pulled it off — you’ve done some great work. So I thought we close today with a little movie music. It is the closing song of one of my favorite films of all time, A Clockwork Orange, by Stanley Kubrick. But it is also the title song of a film that opened 70 years ago today. Take care everyone.