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Michael Moore [00:00:55]  I’m Michael Moore, and this is an emergency podcast system episode of Rumble. Unbelievable. I could not honest to God, I did not expect this to happen today. Not that I’m a cynic, or at least not a card carrying cynic, but rarely is there justice. True and complete justice. And yet today, guilty, guilty, guilty on all three charges of second degree murder, third degree murder and second degree manslaughter. A jury that was half and half, six white and six Black people. I thought for certain, all they needed was just one of those white jurors and they’d have a hung jury and they’d have to declare a mistrial. That is not what happened. In fact, the jury yesterday at the end of the day, was sent off to start deliberating into the night. They got up early and went at it again today.

Michael Moore [00:02:31] So they were done by 2:00 – 2:30 PM Minnesota time. They were done talking about it. They never asked to see a single piece of evidence. They didn’t send a note to the judge. They saw with their own eyes. They believed the evidence. It didn’t take much, my friends. Did any of us think it would be over this quick? Even if there were people on the jury who maybe had some questions or maybe some of the defense sounded like something they would believe in. They could not say to their eyes, I don’t believe you. It’s an old Richard Pryor joke. Who are you going to believe: me or your own lying eyes? Because our eyes don’t lie. Sometimes you hear things wrong. But when you watch for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, a police officer digging his knee into the windpipe of a Black man, who was handcuffed. It’s kind of hard to misread that, isn’t it? No matter how supportive of the police you are, no matter how white you are. No matter nothing. 

Michael Moore [00:04:10] The truth is the truth. The trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered George Floyd on May 25th of last year came to an end when the judge asked the jurors: had they reached a verdict? And they had reached a unanimous verdict. On all three charges. And it was, I mean, the cameras cut out to the protesters and the people in the street in tears and cheering, showing the sort of disbelief that I had. One of my friends texted me and said, Can you believe, like, how often in our lifetime have we seen justice like this? I mean, real justice where the police would be held responsible? For their actions. For their brutality. For their racism. For their white supremacy. When have we seen this? And I wrote back and I said, honest to God, I don’t have time really to count the number of times I feel like we had a victory, a real true victory in this country. 

Michael Moore [00:05:47] And yet it happened today. This is not the kind of victory, meaning, Oh hey, everybody, job done. Work’s over now. Far from it. And that’s really only one part of it. Because the police are only one part of our criminal justice system and of our mass incarceration system, of our prison industrial complex. Just one part of it. So we’re talking about only one murder by the police of one man. And yet before we discuss the larger implications of this, let’s just talk to those police here for a minute. No, no of course, we have to say with our usual disclaimer, not the good police. Although that more and more seems like an oxymoron, but there are good police. I’ve called the police, I would say one or two times in my lifetime and they have saved my life. So don’t get me wrong on this. Do we need police? Do we need the kind of policing that we have now? Maybe that’s the better question. You know, we didn’t have police in this country until 1845. 

Michael Moore [00:07:23] So, the Revolutionary War began in 1775. The very first police force was in 1845, and that was in New York City. You’re thinking, Oh, wait a minute, what do you mean we had no police? You mean there were no police? Well, right. There were no police departments. Cities hadn’t paid for them through tax dollars yet. That didn’t exist until seven years after this country was founded, 70 years after we declared our independence. Now they had these things called constables, they didn’t know they were following British law. The constables weren’t armed, you know, they were there to help. And then after constables, they had these night watchman, like the neighborhood watch. They’d volunteer and walk the streets. Nothing really was going on. And then in the early 1800s, as more immigrants started to come to the country, now other Europeans are coming from poor countries. And this made these original white people concerned about the newer white people. 

Michael Moore [00:09:01] So they started to have a little bit more of the nightwatchman and a little bit more of the constables. They were still a more organized police force. Now because there were so many millions of slaves who were not here on their own well, but brought either in chains, in ships, or kidnaped, they were in the south and in slave states. A number of what they didn’t call police, but they were armed forces, essentially guaranteeing that the slaves would not be able to run away and if they were, if they did run away, they’d capture them. Because, you know, you don’t want to kill them, they were property. They were worth money. But sometimes they did have to kill them, because they couldn’t catch them. So that existed. We’ll call them the slave cops. And of course, you had our calvary participating in a centuries long effort to commit the genocide of our native peoples. But not till 1845 did New York City become the first in the U.S. to form a police force. So do we need police? Well, we need something, we need our safety, and we need to be protected from those who would harm others. 

Michael Moore [00:10:37] But we most of all need prevention. So the crime doesn’t happen. Police really exist as a crime scene cleanup force, that’s what they do. They show up after we call 9-1-1, after there’s been a robbery, after there’s been a rape, after there’s been a murder and then we call the police. They don’t do much to prevent that from happening in the first place. So go about our business with our system where we try to capture the criminal, maybe put the criminal on trial, maybe just lock them up for a long time without a trial and then if they’re found guilty, we lock them up in a very sad and sick place. We think that we’re safe again. So, police, I want to talk to you for a minute. Because something happened today that’s never happened before, and it happened in a trial where the police testified against the police. It happened when witnesses standing on the curb, including a city firefighter for the city of Minneapolis, called, as she put it, the police. I called the police to report the police because they were killing this man on this curb. 

Michael Moore [00:12:11] Even the 9-1-1 operator went and tried to see if there was a police camera on that corner and there was. She was watching it herself at 9-1-1 headquarters and while she couldn’t see George Floyd’s face, she saw that the police were doing something really weird and wrong. And she called the head of that precinct of these cops to say there’s something bad going on. So the police didn’t have their back up, not from their 9-1-1 officers, not from the fire department. And not from the children who stood there on the curb. A couple of older Black men. And one of those teenage girls, Darnella Frazier, took out her phone and hit record. That one action changed everything. Had she not done that, had the others not started to do their own filming of this incident, well, what happened today may not have happened. But once there was actual uncut, unedited footage of this incident, America and the world couldn’t turn away. 

Michael Moore [00:14:00] And Darnella Frazier stood there. She held her hand so steady on that camera. Chauvin kept looking up at her with his knee on George Floyd’s neck in the process of killing him. She just kept walking right into her lens, looking straight at her like your next. And she would not put the camera down. Brave. And it would doom him and those other cops who are not on trial yet, but they will be on trial. They’re not only forced to wear their own body cams. They are now being filmed by all the rest of us because we are all documentary filmmakers now. We all have a camera in our pocket. I think Steve Jobs thought it would be cool to put a camera on the phone. And that decision has doomed every racist. Because now and I’m talking to you police officers of America, you can’t get away with shit. You can’t get away with murder any longer. I’m sure you think you probably still can. I’m sure you will try. I’m sure you’ll be more aware of the camera from now on. You’ll try to take your victim into a dark alley or into the back of a police car, someplace where there would be no camera. 

Michael Moore [00:15:57] But Big Brother in 1984 warned us that all these cameras were going to be bad for the rest of us, and frankly, they probably will be at some point, just to put a fine point on this. But for right now, Big Brother is going to do something to the law enforcement officers and the police force that has so abused the Black and brown community of this country. Now their time is up. And so if you are one of these officers, one of these white supremacists, who have abused Black and brown people for decades, the fact that this little camera is your undoing, oh, thank God for that. I know you’re mad at me, and again, for those of you who have really helped us, thank you. Keep doing that, please. You’re not paid enough. And by the way, you aren’t just one or two bad apples. Those days are gone. 

Michael Moore [00:17:44] We no longer think that or believe that. If I were the mayor of any city, I would want to fix this very quickly. You know, kind of like they do when they turn a nice public school into a charter school. And the charter school gets to essentially ask for the resignation of every teacher. Well, that’s what we need to do with the police. You all need to turn in your resignation. The good ones we will rehire you, probably pretty quickly after you go through a committee. A vetting force, a group of psychologists, will determine just how racist you are. Just how smart you are. What kind of anger belligerency is in you. Any woman in a cop’s life needs to be contacted. Because we’ll start right there with acts of personal violence to women from men. 

Michael Moore [00:19:28] And if some of those men want to be cops, I think we need to know just who they’ve hit. They need to go through that and look into if they are a good cop and if they are not a violent cop. If it means that a minority of the police force is white, so be it. Because the racists can’t carry a gun. That’s our role in the new America. You’re racist, you don’t get a badge. You don’t get a gun. You have to go work out your racism someplace else. And the rest of us, collectively, as your peer group will hopefully take care and help you with your sickness. But you can’t be a cop and you can’t be in the army. Sorry, you can’t be in any position where you hold violence in your hands and have the ability to end a human life. It cannot be biased by your hatred of people whose skin color isn’t yours, whose religion isn’t yours. I’m sorry, that’s just going to be the bottom line. Rule number one. 

Michael Moore [00:21:14] And then we need to go out and recruit police officers who aren’t this way. You cannot be a police officer unless you have a college education. How about we start with that? You have to tell us the last 10 books you’ve read. If you’re not educated and if you’re not smart, if you don’t have an open mind, if you haven’t had experience with what is called the liberal arts (I don’t mean liberal, as you know, when I say liberal versus conservative), I just mean, you need to have some exposure to the world. And to critical thinking, to civics, to democracy, to human rights, all those things. 

Michael Moore [00:22:06] We’re coming for you. I’m not kidding around. The people in the streets tonight, tomorrow night, next month, next year, the people at the voting booth. A year from this November. We’re voting on this issue. And we’re going to vote to get rid of you. Hopefully the smarter cities and the smarter states, hopefully our Congress with the George Floyd Police Act, that sits there in front of them already passed by the House, waiting for Mitch McConnell in the Senate to do the right thing. We’re going to take care of a lot of this because we have to completely undo what we call policing. It’s not that we need a police force anymore. We need to take care of our public safety. And part of public safety has to do with mental health, caring about the mental health of the people in our neighborhoods. Public safety has to do with making sure children are being fed, that nobody is starving, that everybody has a roof over their head. That’s public safety. 

Michael Moore [00:23:21] No woman needs to be afraid to walk outside the house or apartment at night and go for a walk anywhere she well pleases. And not have to worry about anything happening to her. That’s public safety. And when she seeks help from the public safety department in every city, because the person that she is with or used to be with is friggin crazy and threatening her, she has a right to live. And the man threatening her, the public safety officials will deal with him. That’s what we need. We need a whole rethinking of what we call public safety, and that’s what we need to call it. It needs to have anger management people, I mean, in the, you know, the list of all the things cops are called for that they’re not really able to deal with, they’re not alcoholism experts, they’re not drug counseling experts. Let’s not put that on them. 

[00:25:18] But part of the new Public Safety Department will have those people and we’ll know which ones to call for assistance. That’s how it’s got to change. But those of you, the Derek Chauvins out there, God, how many of you have hurt Black people in your career? Have falsely held them, arrested them, beaten them, shoved them to the ground, humiliated them in front of their friends and neighbors. Followed them around, stalked them, hunted them. You know who you are. Let me tell you, there’s thousands of you, all of you are going to be stopped. When I heard the story on MSNBC last week saying that upwards to 20 percent of the terrorists who attacked our Capitol on January 6th were either former cops, current cops on duty, off duty officers in that mob attacking the Capitol…20 percent of what we saw, the people we pay to protect us, trying to bring down our democracy on a day when they were trying to count the votes from the November election, they wanted to stop that. Is there a greater crime, obviously, other than maybe the crime of murder, is there a greater crime than police officers with weapons attacking our Capitol to stop our votes from being counted and to stop our democracy? 

Michael Moore [00:27:43] If you were to commit an act of murder against essentially one of your own that were fighting the British, you should read the history of our revolution. Let’s just say there were no trials. You were taken and they didn’t have video tapes then, but they had their own eyeballs and if they saw you do this, you were taken and shot. Yes. By George Washington’s generals, colonels, whatever. You would be executed by a firing squad or they’d put a rope around your neck and hang you over a tree. Well, wait a minute, you’re fighting the revolution. You can’t do this to me. I’m fighting the British. Yeah, but you just killed one of our own. But he was Black! Yeah, but he was actually in the army fighting the British with us and you killed them. And now you have about a half a minute to live, and that’s how we’re going to deal with you. Whoah, OK, I’m not in favor of that. I’m just saying that you have lots of cops around the country supporting you. And that’s how it should be. You are innocent until proven guilty. Even if the guilt is so obvious and on a half a dozen teenagers phones. 

Michael Moore [00:29:36] You still have your right to a day in court. And the verdict came in. But I want to say this, my friends, this is not for me a night to celebrate. I know why some people are celebrating. And I’m saying that because obviously I’m white and I have not had to suffer through what the black community has had to suffer through. And so this moment of joy… there was justice in this case, yet there’s three other cops to go…I guess they want to say what everybody else is saying. That this is just the beginning. And I don’t mean, let’s get as many cops as we can arrested who’ve done harmful things to Black people, brown people. I’m for that, by the way, but this was a murder of a man that we dealt with today, a man by the name of George Floyd. And seeing his family today and hearing them speak afterwards was so powerful. 

[00:31:06] Seeing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris get on the phone with the family out in the quarter of the hallway. They weren’t holding some speech or whatever. They just got a little speakerphone and wanted to just speak to the Floyd family. There are no cameras and, you know, the president doing this…So there’s footage of this and there’s audio of it. And it was so powerful. To hear Biden share his feelings with him. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life, even from the best politicians. To call the family of a dead Black man killed by the government’s police and to offer not just their condolences, but to offer their joy at this verdict. Wow. If you have a chance, listen, I’ll put it on this page here. That was just a moment, my friends. And yes, Biden spoke later to the cameras in the White House, and so did Vice President Harris. 

Michael Moore [00:32:46] But we saw them speak to the Floyd family in a way, I don’t know if it was intended for us to see. And the family said to him, Mr. President, we have to pass that law in the Senate. This is what’s on their minds. They’ve lost their family members. Yes, they’ve had this great victory today. But they were moving forward. And that’s what we all need to do. This was not just about the murder of this one man. Because we have to talk about the other murders that take place in the name of the state. In the name of each of us. There’s a constant murder of Black people in this country, of poor people in this country. What about the economic murder that takes place every single day by keeping millions of Americans in poverty? The stats show that the poorer you are and the Blacker and browner you are, the better chance of dying you have than white people. You will not live as long as white people. You will die as a result of an economic system that is unjust. 

Michael Moore [00:34:13] It’s unfair and it’s not democratic. It is set up to use the poorest of the people to do the shittiest work. And then have them die before we do. Are we going to address that? Our educational system creates the murder of Black and brown people, because their schools are so crappy, they don’t get to grow up and get good jobs, health care, all that stuff that goes along when you have a better education. Every single statistic shows the better the education, the longer you live. So by forcing people to die before their time, that is a version of murder. And we are killing Black and brown and poor white people through our education system, in rural areas or whatever, where it sucks so bad they are doomed to a life of poverty. Of poor health care. 

Michael Moore [00:35:33] How about the murder of not having a roof over your head? I mean, just curious? What do you think the life expectancy is of homeless people, you know, versus those of us who have that roof and have a little heat in the winter and the ability to cool down in the summer? What do you think the chances are that those of us who have that roof are going to live longer? That’s a form of murder too. In fact, I would say that this entire way that we have structured the economy, where we allow a few people, the top one percent to get 80 to 90 percent of the food, the wealth, whatever and the other 10 to 20 percent are left to fight for the crumbs. And we call that democracy. 

Michael Moore [00:36:45] It’s never been a democracy. It’s not fair. Democracy is about us all getting a say in this. And it doesn’t mean just who gets to be president. We don’t even have democracy with that, as we know, because of the Electoral College and all this other stuff that goes on. This is the fight. If we want to honor George Floyd and all the other African-Americans who had to suffer, of all the Latino people who’ve had to suffer trying to come into this country and being met with such abuse. If we want to honor them, if we want to apologize to them, if we want to create some form of reparation for them, maybe we could start by having a real democracy where everyone is treated the same. 

Michael Moore [00:37:45] Everybody gets a seat at the table. Everybody has a slice of the pie. How about that? If all this becomes is just we get to throw Derek Chauvin in prison and his three buddies who participated in the murder, are you going to feel that we’ve accomplished something? I mean, yes, we have accomplished something. Justice was done in regards to this murder. But if we want real justice, we’re going to have to work even harder for it. Those of you who are in the streets tonight, I’m so glad you’re there. Yes, nonviolence, of course. Don’t hurt anybody. But boy, over these last few days, to watch America have to put plywood all over itself city, upon city, upon city boarding up every window, starting with every police station in America. 

Michael Moore [00:38:57] They boarded up all the police stations, all the criminal justice buildings in America that were within blocks or miles of Black people. That’s how afraid they were. That’s how wrong they knew this country was and has been. That we would even allow anybody resembling a Derek Chauvin to wear a badge, to have the authority to arrest people, to carry a gun. We knew we’d done wrong. 

Michael Moore [00:40:12] There’s the admission of guilt. I watched them putting up the plywood on TV and on the building of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The daily paper of Minneapolis had to put plywood over the windows of their building. What does that say? One white person holding up the whole thing. We knew what was going to happen. And yet to think that it won’t still happen is such a misreading of the moment. The poor of this country have had it. The people that have had to occupy the lowest rungs of the economic ladder have had it. Black people have had it, brown people have had it. Asian Americans have had it. You’ve all had it. And they’re not going to take it anymore. So what do we do? White folks just leave the plywood up. 

Michael Moore [00:41:30] Because it’s coming. Because they want justice, not just justice for George Floyd. They want true justice in this country. They want a seat at the table. We have a decision to make. We either need to hire more Derek Chauvins to keep them all in their place. And I’m assuming most people listening to this podcast are not in favor of that idea, but we know how many millions of Americans probably are. We can do that or we can go another route. And we can stop all the killing. And we can stop all the killing that not having a home gives you, not having food gives you. We can do all that, we can just decide to do it right now. We can make sure we have universal health care for everyone. Just like when you all are getting your shots right now or if you’ve already got your COVID shot. You never whipped out a wallet. You didn’t have to show a Blue Cross card. 

Michael Moore [00:42:51] If you just had to give them your name and your birthday and you got a free shot. Why? Because we’re trying to save the country. Because over half a million people are dead. That’s why we want to live. So, yeah, all of a sudden, we want to live, let’s do socialism. Everybody gets a socialist needle in their arm, so they can survive. Free, free health care. Free health care should be every day of every year. For every American. Because it’s a human right and it’s necessary to protect and to serve. Darnella Frazier, as one documentary filmmaker to another, I thank you and I bless you. You have made the most important film of our time. 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Thank you. It took true courage to do that. I hope you know that you are loved by millions around the world for having the courage to film that. Thank you. 

Michael Moore [00:44:12] I hope I get the honor of working with you someday. You kept good and evil in the same frame with a steady hand. We the world got to see the face of evil. Right there on the face of Derek Chauvin. And we have to see the face of good. The good man who wasn’t supposed to die that day. And sadly, we got to see his good life snuffed out of him. We watched him take his last breath and even after he was dead, the cop kept the knee pressing down into the neck for another three plus minutes. Even after the ambulance arrived and the EMT and people got out to take the body into the ambulance, he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t let up. You could see his knee going deeper into the neck of a dead man. The sickness and the depravity of that action. It’s like somebody who shoots somebody. After killing them, they walk over to the body. And they pump another 30 bullets into the dead body. That’s what Derek Chauvin did. 

Michael Moore [00:45:53] That’s what he was found guilty of today. And that is our call, our call to action to end this. Not just the police shootings. Not just the disgusting and immoral incarceration system that we have. The so-called criminal justice system. It’s about taking our white knee off the neck of Black and brown America. So that they can go to the same good schools that we went to, so that they can live in a nice home with heat in the winter. So they can see a doctor any damn time they feel sick. It’s our responsibility to act now. That is the only way we can honor George Floyd now because we can’t bring him back to life. All of us must get active. If you’re already active, stay active. Everybody else joins them. 

Michael Moore [00:47:13] Do whatever we need to do to get these laws passed to protest in the streets. My friends, everybody, who went out into the streets after last May and stayed in the streets, everything you did that made this happen. Today would not have happened had you not done that. You made them afraid that the whole damn system could come crashing down if they didn’t do something about this horrific murder. You are to be honored. And you and all of us have to keep doing that. If we do that, my friends, we will have a better country. We will live in a better world. We’ll think about the murders that we do, how we invade other countries and kill their people, how we the industrial world have caused the destruction of this planet, because we want more and more and more. Gimme, gimme, gimme, make it, make it, build it. We have done this to the Earth. 

Michael Moore [00:48:25] And we are murdering people by doing that. This is on us. This day for the last 22 years for me, April 20th, has meant the day that those kids and that teacher were killed at Columbine High School. On this day. For a moment today, I felt maybe even their deaths weren’t in vain. 

Michael Moore [00:49:07] That’s our commitment. We are a nonviolent people. We will stop you with nonviolence. We will stop you at the ballot box. We are the vast majority now of this country. This is good news, my friends. Now we have to use it. Now we have to make this what we think it could be and should be. I’m sorry, Mr. Floyd. I’m sorry. You should be celebrating this with us today. It’s not right. It wasn’t right. I’m sorry, I never got to meet you. Someday, maybe. I’ll never forget you, though. And I’ll never forget all the people who stood for you in this last year. 

Michael Moore [00:52:15] We will continue this work. And we will see to it that there are no more deaths of the wonderful and beautiful George Floyds in this country. Take care, everyone. This has been an emergency podcast system episode of Rumble. And I’m Michael Moore. Much love to you all.