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To read more about Episode 208, visit the main episode page.
Michael Moore [00:00:47] And welcome to Rumble with Michael Moore. And I’m Michael Moore. Today’s episode is entitled The Miracle of Kabul or How One Man Saved Tens Of Thousands Of Lives.
That may seem like a very positive title for an episode on a day when such a tragedy occurred at the Kabul airport. But the fact of the matter is, is that while there were those who created this terror, the mission continues. The mission being led by Joe Biden continues. And yes, he has already saved over 104,000 lives. And there are more to be saved in the final hours of this effort to evacuate people from Kabul. And the eyes must be kept on that prize while we remember and grieve the dead. They were willing to give their lives and I’m referring especially to our Marines and the one Navy medic. They were willing to give their lives, so that the 104,000 could live. And we’ll never forget that.
But we have to talk about the importance of these last 2 weeks and how it happened. And who’s responsible for the saving of all of these lives and why nobody is standing up and saying that? I’m going to say it and I’m going to say things that run counter to the narrative of the last two weeks. And I hope you stick around here to listen to what I have to say, because I got a feeling there are thousands of you that agree with me. And we must not be afraid to speak the truth. Because it is a miracle what’s happening right now. It is a miracle. It needs to be acknowledged and we’re going to do that today on Rumble.
Michael Moore: Before we get to that, let me offer a massive thank you to all of you who have signed up here on my new site. It’s a Substack site. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Substack. It’s a free platform for writers and readers and readers who write and also for podcasts and others who want a different forum, a different place to post our thoughts, our ideas, our ratings, our podcast. And so I have decided to make use of this incredible new platform, so if you are already on my mailing list and getting emails from me on this new Substack, thank you. Congratulations. Stay there. You’re automatically signed up here, automatically subscribed. It costs nothing. All of my work will continue to be free on this podcast.
Obviously, it’ll always be free, and my writing. So I’m going to be writing each week a letter to you, perhaps an occasional essay, random thought, and it’ll come to you via email. You don’t have to go to my website. You don’t have to try and find it online. It’ll just be in your inbox because you are a free subscriber to michaelmoore.com.
And there is a way for those of you who want to be supporters and members of our little endeavor and endeavors we do, whether it’s the films we make or the series that we produce, this podcasts and other things, you’re welcome to do that. And you can contribute if you would like, but you don’t have to because as I said, the podcast and my essays, things I post, it’s all for free. So thank you for that. Thank you for the incredible response that we received here in the last week to 10 days.
Now, for those of you who are my podcast audience, thank you so much. We’ve been doing this now for almost 20 months and it’s been great being able to bring these podcasts to you, these episodes. But I want you to get on my mailing list because this way I will just email you the episode every time it’s there. You don’t have to wait till the next day or whatever. I’ll just email you the episode and you’ll get all this other stuff that I’m writing now about what’s going on and various things.
I’m not going to flood your inbox, but I think you’ll enjoy being a part of michaelmoore.com here on Substack. So please sign up. Go look here, right here on the podcast platform page, there’s a link to michaelmoore.com, where you just go to michaelmoore.com. It’ll pop right up. Just type in your email. I don’t want any other information from you.
In just this past week, I’ve written things I’d love for you to read, everything from the day that we lost the war in Afghanistan, some 12 days ago, to all the way to a posting I did on my dad’s 100th birthday, what would have been his one 100th birthday this past week. So you’ll want to check this out.
Michael Moore [00:06:16] And before we get started, I just want to point out that we’re posting this on August 26. August 26 every year is officially Women’s Equality Day. Now, that’s not an official like holiday. It’s not like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July.
It should be one holiday to acknowledge the rights of women, even though our U.S. Constitution doesn’t acknowledge those rights. But the good news here is that last year, on January of 2020, the 38th state, you need 38 states to get an amendment to the United States Constitution. The thirty eighth state passed the Equal Rights Amendment, equal rights for women. The ERA. Virginia was that state. And then it became the law of the land — that you cannot discriminate against women, that rights are the same regardless of gender.
Oh, what’s that you say? Oh, it’s not the law of the land yet. How can that be? 38 states have passed the amendment. Yes, exactly, my friends, when it passes, just like when we got the right to vote in 1920 after Tennessee became the final state to pass, it still had to be signed by somebody in the executive branch.
It’s like an authorization, like a little certificate, little signing ceremony. It already would pass the Congress. It’s already passed 38 states. But no official from the White House has signed the certification to make it the law that was supposed to have happened last year. Of course, we had a different kind of president then. He’s gone. And so we’ve just been waiting for President Biden, or actually the archivist of the United States can sign it. So can the secretary of state sign it.
Anyway, it’s got to get signed, but it’s not signed. We’ve been so busy, I know, with so many other things, President Biden has to get to this. And just nudge him toward it. But you can also contact the White House and let them know they’d really be happy if President Biden would sign this, even like, how about on Women’s Equality Day? So all you have to do is just contact the White House. Is the phone number still down? I think Trump cut the wires or something when he left and they haven’t replaced that, but you can, you can write the president online. Oh, the number’s back up and working.
Basel Hamdan [00:08:33] 202-456-1111
Michael Moore [00:08:36] Okay, great. Let me try that number, see if they hooked up to the lines that Trump had cut. 202-456-1111. That’s the number to the White House. Here we go.
White House [00:08:53] Thank you for calling the White House comment line. The office is temporarily closed. If you would like to send a message, please visit our website at www.whitehouse.gov/contact. Thank you for contacting the White House.
Michael Moore [00:09:09] Okay, bummer. So it sounds like the lines hooked back up, but maybe not. Maybe they just don’t want to do phones anymore, you know, 21st century, everything now. So you’re just to write. Okay, so write them. Let’s all write them. It’s easy.
Let’s just go online and send the president an email saying here on Women’s Equality Day, sign the certificate now that we’ve got our 38 states that have ratified the Equal Rights amendment. Let’s get this part of the Constitution. So people listening to this: they just have to do whitehouse.gov/contact. So what did you write in the box?
Basel Hamdan [00:09:45] My message is to the president, to tell the president, to tell the archivist to sign the ERA. We’re a signature away. We’re right there.
Michael Moore [00:09:55] Yeah, a number of states have already passed it. It passed Congress back in the day. So let’s just get this done on Women’s Equality Day. Simple. Ask everybody, Okay, I’m typing up mine right now. And this is nothing. Okay boom, I should have said, please, I’m sorry. We’re just, we’ve got a podcast to do. All right, everybody listening, please do that today immediately: whitehouse.gov/contact.
Michael Moore [00:10:25] All right, so we’re going to get started now and I have a few things to say about what’s going on in Kabul, what’s going on with Joe Biden, and what’s going on with the press and the public and Joe Biden. And I really want you to hear what I have to say about this, because nobody else is saying it and it’s driving me crazy.
Michael Moore [00:14:10] Okay, we’re back to Rumble here, my friends, and I just have been going bananas this last week and a half, almost 2 weeks since we lost the Afghanistan war and the Taliban swept into Kabul, not firing guns. Not shooting American soldiers, they had already come across the rest of Afghanistan and over 18 months actually negotiated various deals with the Afghan leaders of the various provinces and regions in Afghanistan to when the day comes, when the Americans leave, we need a peaceful transfer of power and that’s exactly what happened. And the Afghan army took off their uniforms, laid them down on the ground and put down their weapons. And that was the end of that. And there were no battles, no firefights. No bombings. Just everybody wanting to end this 20 year long war. And then Kabul is the last city, and it came earlier than what the intelligence community had told Biden it would happen.
So the Taliban showed up early, I mean, we’ve all had this happen to us. I mean, not the Taliban coming to us. But, you know, you’ve announced to your friends and whatever you’re having a party Saturday night, 9 o’clock, and somebody shows up at 8. Right. I’m not ready, first of all, I haven’t taken a shower. I gotta’ put some decent clothes on? I mean, decent for me. Who hasn’t had this happen or making plans, have dinner and somebody you’re still making the dinner and they show up an hour early. You’re completely thrown off. And so essentially, this is what happened. Biden and his people were expecting the Taliban to roll in to Kabul for Christmas.
Yes, I know bad intelligence, bad everything. Let’s remember, it’s run by humans, we never quite get this kind of stuff right and we never understand just how smart the other side often is. How do the Vietnamese defeat us? Without them owning a single helicopter or a single battleship or any of that. That’s yeah, because, we’re not really too hip to just how smart and how dedicated they are to their freedom and to get rid of the invading force. Today, one of the people that came back from the bombing there, you know, wanted to get on the plane, didn’t make it to the gate, didn’t get hurt. And so the reporter said, so are you going to go back tomorrow? And the Afghan said, no, no, I think I’m better off taking my chances, just staying here in Afghanistan with the Taliban, then going back into that craziness. And of course, he understood the difference that that was ISIS. Sworn enemy of the Taliban that did that today.
Michael Moore: Haven’t we learned our lesson by now? The days of this sort of aggressive invasion of countries. Of massive bombings. We’re done, right, we’re done with it. What happened earlier today in Kabul with the suicide bombers, I’m done with it. We shouldn’t be there, we shouldn’t have been there, we almost made it out without anything happening. And still to this moment, the Taliban have not turned their weapons on any U.S. service people or any U.S. citizens or any Afghan collaborators, who helped us.
And if you didn’t see the press conference this afternoon, and I’m talking about now, this afternoon, of Thursday, August 26, with the CENTCOM commander where he laid it all out, what happened there with the suicide bombers, he said, look, to get onto the grounds of the Kabul airport, you first have to go through a Taliban checkpoint. And you know how we’ve listened to the last couple of weeks, all the pundits and everybody complaining about how these Taliban, these Taliban checkpoints.
Yeah, well, what they were doing was they were frisking and they were taking care of it, making sure nobody got near the American checkpoint at the airport first. So the general today admits that the Taliban has already prevented in these first two weeks people from getting closer to the air base, they caught people that were trying to get close. They haven’t given the specifics of this yet.
But I’ll use the general’s words, he said they had thwarted a number of people who are on their way to do damage to the airport and the Taliban stopped them at their checkpoint. All we’ve heard about is, oh, they were so harsh with Afghans and others who were trying to get close to the airport. Well, now we know why. Well, now we know why.
Because President Biden and his team had negotiated a system with the Taliban. And, you know, as the general was asked today, so you trusted the Taliban…he says, well, you’re using the wrong word. We have a mutual interest. They want us gone by August 31st and we want to be gone by August 31st.
So they worked very hard to stop any harm from coming to any American or any of their fellow Afghans, who worked with the enemy, the United States, wanted to leave now, helping them leave, checking their papers, making sure they weren’t carrying any weapons, and then they got to go to the the next checkpoint is staffed by the United States Marine Corps and they are the ones then who then put themselves, their lives, on the line to make sure nobody gets on those airport grounds who could blow up a plane.
And they have successfully done that, as the general said, the Taliban, they let through 104,000 people that we have now flown out of there already. 104,000 as of this day, Thursday morning. They checked all of them and the Marines checked all of them and 104,000 were put on planes. No bombs went off, nobody was killed. The planes took off, no plane was shot down. Amazing. And there’s no prep for this because they didn’t think the Taliban were going to take over this quickly.
Michael Moore: How did we get 104,000 out of there safely? It’s amazing. The pundits on TV are already, oh, they’re the ones that want the war to continue, the ones who got us into the war trying to justify the 20 year war existence all day today, you know, blaming the Taliban for their poor security, even though they successfully screened 104,000 evacuees. And missed two. Wow, some people, they will not stop, I’M talking about these Americans on TV, you’ve got to turn the TV, don’t watch this stuff.
These are the same people that got us into Iraq, got us into Afghanistan, refused to take precautions knowing that bin Laden was going to attack the United States and they did nothing. So there’s no credibility on their part, I don’t even know why they still let them on TV. This [H.R.] McMaster, this General McMaster, I mean, I have never seen a modern day Dr. Strangelove until earlier today on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell. And he went full throttle Strangelove on her.
So this is this is just all the same thing that it’s for, like the last couple of weeks, I’ve just been going bananas on how this is being reported and what’s happening and how the real truth isn’t being told about the success of this incredible mission that is being carried out in the middle of chaos. Chaos and catastrophe.
It’s not our country and we had to end this. And Biden said he would end it when he ran for office and dammit, if that is not exactly what he did do, and everybody can be an armchair strategist, everybody can appoint themselves to the Joint Chiefs of Staff if they want. He should have done this. The Army should have done that, the CIA should have done this, whatever. Here’s what he’s done.
Michael Moore: Here’s what Biden has done: ended an immoral war. He wouldn’t say it’s immoral, I think he liked the first few months. Al-Qaeda skedaddled. Bin Laden got away and then Bush lost interest in looking for him and it took Obama and his people to find him. But Biden has not been a fan of this war, certainly up until the time that bin Laden was found, since that point and that was 10 years ago, my friends. 10 years. Biden has been against this. And he said he would stop this. And he did. He stopped it and he said, we’re pulling out first.
He said we’re going to pull out by 9/11. And then he figured we needed to speed that up. And so he said August 31st. And right away, the shit rained down on him. Oh, my God, how could he do this? He can’t do this. We just can’t leave like that. We have to leave some behind. Why? It’s not our country. We have no right to be there. Well, what about the embassy? What about it? Leave. Leave. They don’t want us there. The army that we trained and armed, they don’t want us there, they don’t even want to be part of the army. Biden’s smart enough to know that. And the day after this announcement, I mean, I actually by that night, people were all over. The press were over him, Democrats, Republicans, everybody saying this is a bad idea.
Michael Moore: Yeah, let’s continue the war for another year, another two years, another 20 years. No, Biden would have none of it. He said, no, we’re leaving, we’re leaving, and that’s that. And he would not walk it back. And as things got volatile and everybody started talking, oh, my God, the Taliban, they’re on there, they’re encircling, that was the first thing that came up on your on your phone from The New York Times, the headline in the middle of the night there on that Sunday a couple of weeks ago, almost a couple of weeks ago. Taliban have encircled Kabul. Oh, my God, The beast, the beast was at the gates.
And all that Sunday, the morning shows, everybody was like, oh, my God, the beheadings are going to start. They’re going to they’re going to be kidnaping young girls, selling them as sex slaves, and there’s going to be rape and there’s going to be this and that and everything. And what about all the people, all the Afghan people that helped us, the interpreters, Oh, my God. People, remember this?
And this has been going on now for almost two weeks, people going nuts about this. Biden has abandoned them. On and on and on. Then something funny happened. Taliban came into the city with their pickup trucks. You know, a couple of guys up front driving, four or five guys in the back with their guns, firing a few of them into the air in celebration. It’s not everyday you defeat the number one superpower, only real superpower, military superpower in the world. There wasn’t going to be like a surrender ceremony. You know, we’re like we, you know, with the Japanese and the ship at the end of World War II, Versailles with the Germans at the end of World War I. No, no, no, no, American in general, I guess, was going to sign the surrender papers, but that’s what we did.
That’s what you have to do when you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and when you’re so your stated mission has been over for a decade or longer. Why are you still there? And so the Taliban come into the city and they’re not beheading anybody. They’re not pulling people out of their homes and putting a bullet in their head. They’re not doing any of the things that the American media was telling us that they’re going to start doing at any minute now. None of that. None of that happened.
They just had a parade of pickup trucks driving around the city, shooting off guns in the air. They were being waved and cheered on by the civilian population, by the Afghan army, and then people started running to the airport thinking, wait, there’s got to be a way out.
Of course, the people that have papers that were given to them by the American military had to get out because they had helped the military, even though they were Afghan citizens. They helped the invading force, fight their own Afghan citizens because they were Taliban and these people obviously knew what the Taliban was about and didn’t want anything to do with it, and so they wanted to help the Americans. And people started making their way to the airport and the first ones, you know, got through and Americans were making, there was a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion.
Michael Moore: You know, the media was calling it a catastrophe. Well, yes, it was a big cluster fuck, I guess they can’t write that in a headline, but that’s what it was, a cluster fuck at the airport. And some people actually, I think, did die from being crushed. A rumor got around Kabul that a bunch of American planes were coming in and they were going to fly anybody out that wanted to get out of there. And so the sense was, wow, if you go to the airport, you can get a trip to America.
So thousands, thousands descended on the airport. But somewhere in that first 24 hours, our commander in chief and the military were communicating with the Taliban. We will learn someday, shortly, exactly how this happened. But they negotiated a deal with the Taliban to not kill American service people, to not kill Americans who are in Afghanistan, and to not kill Afghan people. Especially those who had helped us. Nobody in the press was pointing this out. Any kind of killing, any kind of maiming, raping, et cetera, and the fact was, well, there’s always going to be rogue elements we can just look at our own military.
Michael Moore: There are those rogue elements that rape and kill. We have a couple of mass murderers from our military, more than one, either while they’re in the military, Fort Hood, or after they get out. How many of our mass slayings have been by, sadly, veterans who clearly lost their minds? But none of that was going on. And more and more people going to the airport, still a cluster fuck. But it was getting unfucked, unclustered.
And as of a number of days ago, flights started going out, day after day, after day after day, taking out Americans and Afghan refugees and Afghans who helped the U.S. military. 19,000, 19,000 people were flown out by the Americans out of the Kabul airport. Not a single plane has been shot down.
Whatever Joe Biden and his people did, they have protected thousands of Americans. And tens of thousands of Afghan people. We have a real commander in chief right now and my friends, I don’t understand the vitriol toward President Biden from all sides about how he messed this up and this could have been done differently and should have been.
How differently, how much more differently could it be like differently? Like there should be 100 Americans dead now. There should be a thousand dead. How? How many of the Taliban killed? How many Americans? None. How many Afghans who worked with Americans are lining up there to leave? None, none killed by the Taliban. The evil, vicious Taliban, none. We were warned.
Michael Moore: And everyone was warned there in Kabul, ISIS was up to something, something bad was gonna’ happen, it was not a surprise. That kind of terrorism, the suicide bomber, almost impossible to prevent at some point when they can’t get any further, they detonate the vest and they blow themselves and a whole bunch of other people up. That could happen again tomorrow. And the next day. That’s why the sooner the better to get out of there.
Clearly, a truce got worked out. And is being enforced by both sides. And this is the result of a real commander in chief. Who as the history books will write about this, this isn’t Dunkirk, my friends, this isn’t where thousands are slaughtered on the beach. And yet history remembers the great Winston Churchill and all the brave people of Britain who rode their boats across the English Channel to save people. And they did. And it was amazing. But still a horrible, horrible mess that resulted in so much loss of life. Not here, this is in our Dunkirk.
No matter how crappy the conditions, you know, I’ve seen all the stories there, not enough Porta John facilities there at the airport, nobody’s hungry, though. Our troops have handed over their MRE’s, batches and batches of them to all the Afghan people at the airport so that they could eat. Water for everyone, everyone’s being fed, everyone’s drinking water. The conditions suck.
Michael Moore: I mean, it’s not like it’s Six Flags over New Jersey, friends, I mean, this is a mess. But nonetheless, you understand how this amazing thing that is in such disarray that Biden and his military were able to pivot very quickly and get this thing rolling, get this thing on the road. And as I’m talking to you, there are almost a 100,000 people that have been evacuated by the United States of America. 100,000 was 88,000 during the day on Wednesday. And they were predicting by Thursday morning here on August 26, they’d be at least 100,000 and they were doing more. They did 19,000. They’re going to try and do more than 20,000 a day. They have over 90 aircraft.
Biden exercise his right as commander in chief to commandeer. In this case, 18 commercial airliners he has under the Homeland Security Act, he can say to Delta Airlines, United Airlines, give me your planes, we need them. We got to get Americans out. And he did. He just signed a piece of paper. And all of a sudden there’s like six airlines, three planes each so far. Boom. That’s how you do it. That’s your commander in chief. That’s your troops doing that.
And yes, it’s risky and yes, shit could blow up at any moment, the truce and the peace could end. It’s very volatile. I know the armchair people: no, if he’d only done it right…There’s no right way to do a thing like this. You know why? Because there was no right way coming into it. We were wrong to invade their country. Yes, we were right to go after the people that killed 3,000 people on 9/11. But they weren’t there and Osama bin Laden had escaped. And al-Qaeda, they weren’t Afghans, I mean, there were a few Afghans, but they weren’t Afghans. Al Qaeda were Saudis. They’re from Yemen. They’re from a few of the Gulf states. So, yeah, that’s your, best that’s your best card you’ve got against Joe Biden.
You know, you guys, you know me, right? You listen to my podcast, I’m a friend of Bernie Sanders. I was at one of his first campaign rallies when he ran for Congress many, many years ago, back in 1990, when he won, I was there in Burlington, Vermont. I have been a friend of his all these years as a supporter. And I and my family and friends, we were on the campaign trail with him in the early primaries, the ones he won. And we were not for Joe Biden. Let’s just say that right up front.
Michael Moore: So this is a Bernie supporter saying these words. This man who, believe me, he wasn’t always this way, he didn’t always feel this way. But you know what? He is one of the very, very few representatives in our government…Remember in Fahrenheit 9/11, where I sit there in the corner of Capitol Hill asking one member of Congress after another, you know, do you have a son or daughter in the military? Are they in Iraq one after the other? No, no, no. Turned out there was only one senator. A Democrat who had a kid that was in the Army in Iraq.
Of course, the people…the politicians that start these wars, they’re not going to sacrifice their own. For this war, they want other children to die in, to die for. Except for Joe Biden. Joe Biden had a son who went, was there. Very rare. But he’s from the working class, Biden, you know, he talks like it and he thinks like it. He butchers a lot of his language the way we do. Those of us who grew up in the working class, you know, we know what it’s like to be looked down on because we didn’t go to Miss Manners and we didn’t learn the proper, the king’s English. But that’s Joe Biden. That’s how we grew up. That’s how I grew up. That’s who he is. Of course, he had a son that was in the military.
When he was a senator, you know, hmm, not so much. He’s of the Vietnam-era in terms of his age, never protested the war, I don’t know if he ever said or did anything about Vietnam. Sort of sat it out. But here he is. Nearing 80. And like a lot of people that age and older who’ve seen war know that it’s wrong. And it’s awful and you don’t want anybody to be put through it. So he comes in as a man of peace. He does what he said he was gonna’ do, he ends the war. And then he takes all this grief for it. And I’m just thinking, thank Good for you, Joe Biden.
Michael Moore: Never walked it back, didn’t cower to these critics. Just stayed right with it, we’re getting out by the 31st. We are going to get everyone out alive, hopefully. There are no guarantees as we’ve seen. But that’s the mission. And over 100,000, we’ve already done that in less than 2 weeks. 104,000 out alive. There’s only, there’s less than 72 hours to go. I think anybody who’s followed these things knows when they say August 31, they don’t mean that. They planned to end this before then.
From what I’ve heard, they’re going to hit all the civilians out by Saturday or Sunday and then use the last day or two to get all the military personnel out. But even that doesn’t satisfy the pundits on cable news. I’m not talking about Fox News, my friends, I’m talking about CNN and MSNBC and others, they put up a screenshot last night of how many weapons were leaving behind. There are like 980,000 guns. I’m like, yeah, and your point is: it’s Cleveland.
Presidents essentially are known, at least American presidents, for starting wars. Especially since World War II. We’re often the people who start the war who do the invading, it’s rare that we get a president who ends wars. Who comes into office saying that’s the end of this? That’s what we have here, and that’s what he’s done, and I am so amazed and grateful for his actions here in the last couple of weeks and every single headline in every single news report on the hour should begin with. 104,000 are alive. 104,000 have been saved by President Biden and our troops. Why are we looking at it this way, because that’s the truth.
Michael Moore: Yet these pundits, these people, who it’s like war porn to them, they want to bring back the porn of war. More killing, more fight the Taliban, fight the ISIS, fight the Al-Qaeda, fight, fight, fight. No, we’re done, we’re done fighting, we’re going home. We’re going home.
And we’ve done an incredible thing in these 12 days, we’ve saved 104,000 people, put them up on planes, plane after plane, even today, which is at about 7:30 at night in Afghanistan and they’re doing a report on the suicide bombing. And planes were still taking off in the near dark, taking off and landing, taking off full of people. Right in the middle of the suicide bombing. They didn’t stop. That is Biden’s attitude. We don’t stop. I’ve made my decision. This is what we’re doing.
This war is over and these people are going to live and we’re going to get them up in the air and we’re going to take them to Germany, to Italy, to Spain, to Dubai, to Dulles Airport, some flights have gone just straight to Dulles in Washington, D.C. We’re taking them to Fort Bliss, we’re taking them to these other bases in the United States where they’re already setting up refugee housing.
Why isn’t that leading the news? Yeah, you send your suicide bomber in. You’re not stopping us. We don’t respond to threats and the terror, here goes the next plane up in the air. That’s the story of this commander in chief. Of this man of peace.
Shame, shame on the media and the politicians. And those who still want more war. Well, he can’t leave by August 31st, he’s gonna’ have to stay a lot longer. Are you kidding? That’s what’s going to get people killed. We have to get people out in the next 24 to 48 hours quick. And they’ve got everybody on high alert looking for any potential suicide bomber now. And the Taliban, they’re the first line to take out any suicide bomber that they run across. Yeah, [Biden] he’s done such a shitty job, he’s made sure that the Taliban haven’t killed a single American during this entire evacuation of Kabul. How’d that happen? We’re talking about the evil Taliban.
Michael Moore: And somehow he [Biden] and his team have convinced them it’s in their best interest to help us leave safely. And so far, with this one instance, which is hugely tragic, they have had nearly 12 days of nothing tragic other than it’s just a horrible mess. Isn’t that the story?
Remember when the administration said that a week ago and they worked it out with the Taliban, there’ll be safe passage? How come we haven’t been told this? It took until yesterday for a general to stand in front of the microphone and just try to clear up all the nonsensical propaganda that our media has been putting out there. He said, no, we’re not just flying people to Qatar, the nation of Qatar, they’re a Gulf state. No, no, he said. We are flying them to Kuwait, we’re flying to the United Arab Emirates. And we have flown Afghans to our bases in Germany. Italy, Spain, and we’ve had a number of flights that had just gone directly to Washington, Dulles Airport in the U.S. I didn’t know any of this has been going on now for days.
And Biden then yesterday said that he would guarantee that we’ll make sure that 70,000 Afghan refugees have a home outside of Afghanistan. That is an amazing commitment. There are four bases in the U.S. Fort Bliss was one of them, there’s three others, one in New Jersey, one in Wisconsin. I think the other ones in Virginia that are taking in Afghan refugees right now as we speak. Four bases here in the US. Our bases in Spain and Italy and Germany. What’s been abandoned? Can you guys, anybody listening to this, tell me why? Not why Republicans. That’s their job, to just be assholes and not tell the truth.
Michael Moore: But why is everybody else ganged up on Biden? And while he’s been doing this and while he’s been preparing for the end of the war over the last couple of months, but even just in these couple of weeks here, look at the things that he’s done.
He’s raised the amount of food stamps that the poor get. The first real raise since 1962. 42 million people this month are gonna’ start getting more food so they can have 3 meals a day. The millions who are going to no longer be on the hunger list. He did that in the middle of this.
He and the House, yesterday, got the 3.5 trillion dollar human infrastructure bill passed in the House. That’s amazing in the middle of this. He forgave the college loans of disabled people who have a college loan. Their debt has been wiped clean.
And people in his administration are proposing that any of you who are carrying a college debt, that we work this out. So right away we get 50,000 dollars of your student loan forgiven right now.
He announced that they’re eliminating this deadly pesticide that Trump allowed to be back, being used on farms. Gone in the middle of the end of this war and the evacuation. Child poverty has been cut in half. With a stroke of the pen, the child tax credit.
That’s Joe Biden, that’s what he’s doing every day while he’s ending this war and getting everybody home safely. Where is the gratitude, where is the news telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what he’s been doing and the miracle of Kabul, the miracle? Of getting everybody out of their. And nobody dying and no planes being shot down. How do you convince the Taliban? To not do that. The saint of Scranton. Too far for some of you, my fellow Bernie friends.
You gotta’ call like you see it. And this has been an amazing couple of weeks and he pulled this off, he pulled it off at a time when he wasn’t expecting it to happen so quickly and yet got people together, pivoted, boom, and took 18 planes from Delta, United, the other airlines. I need your planes. Shut the fuck up.
Look, things could fall apart. Shit can happen any time anywhere. This is not a safe place to be. Well, the media, the pundits, the Republicans, the sell-out Democrats, as they’ve sat around privately hoping they can continue their narrative of just how awful this is and how it’s so scary and so, so, you know, waiting for this whole thing to collapse. I pray to God it doesn’t.
I want people in this country, my country, to see what a real commander in chief could do if he was for peace, not for expanding the war like they all want him to do: get the guns out, expand the perimeter. Drive around Kabul and look for Americans. Don’t buy any of this bullshit, my friends.
Michael Moore: Take a moment when you write to Biden about the other things we need to write to him about, including the ERA, Women’s Equality Day, to thank him. Thank him for what he’s doing. He’s pulling this off with seems like everybody against him, nobody’s standing up for him. And he doesn’t care. Just like a 78 year old wouldn’t care what you think. God bless them. God bless you, Joe Biden. You’ve pulled something off here and it’s just a few days of it left, so fingers are crossed, prayers are being said that your success so far will continue, even though it seems like the American media wants to write a different kind of story, and even though, as the polls have shown, your approval rating has taken a dive.
I’m talking about you, my fellow Americans, who have felt the need to join into the chorus of criticism, but I have a theory, my friends, as to why we’re witnessing anger and disrespect toward Joe Biden. The reason so much of the political and media and military establishment are behaving so stunned and so angry at this Afghanistan pullout, it’s because by doing this, Joe Biden, it was one of their own, a card carrying member of the moderate Democrats of the go-along-with-whatever-the-Pentagon-wants-guy, that’s who he was in the U.S. Senate. That they are so stunned that he is the one who has just revealed so many of their lies and their myths that they’ve placed upon us the American people, and he’s done it in one fell swoop in just these 12 days.
Michael Moore: We have been bombarded over time here with so much propaganda about the War on Terror, about Islam, about who Muslims are, about the need for we must have more surveillance and spying. We must protect our police and give them as many military armaments as possible and turn them into robo cops. We have been bombarded about how noble we are and how virtuous our intentions were by invading Afghanistan and Iraq.
But not only that, we are constantly bombarded from these same people with lies…Lies that were told about how true free universal health care is not realistic. Nonstop propaganda. Oh, we can’t afford that, we can’t, we can’t afford paid parental leave, we can’t, we can’t give more money to the schools. We can’t fix our shitty infrastructure. Too expensive. How are we going to pay for that? This is all been another key chapter in this book of lies called The War on Terror, and it is being undone, undone by the actions of someone who was one of their own, Joe Biden.
Yes, it’s natural for people who have been telling these false stories for the past 20 years to not like the fact that the rug is being pulled out from underneath them. Especially by a guy who used to tell those stories along with them. And right now, he’s not doing that. He’s saving Americans, he’s saving Afghans. He’s saving maybe, just maybe what shred of dignity we have left because of the way we’ve behaved for decades.
I want the world to see that part of us. I want us to behave like that from now on. And I want whoever sits in the Oval Office to give a damn about peace. We’ve got that right now. What a blessing it is. What a miracle these two weeks have been. Tell your friends and your neighbors and your family members and anybody you talk to, you run into, people you communicate with online, social media, tell them: how happy and proud you are of the job this guy is doing. Let’s keep it that way. Thank you, President Biden.
These past 12 days, God bless you. And let’s all in whatever way that you pray or send out the good karma or whatever it is that you do: to protect those who are trying to protect lives and trying to save their own lives. So just before I thank you, Joe, for bringing them home, our condolences to the families of those who lost their lives today, Americans and Afghans. Thank you to our Marines for giving your lives, so that others could be free. Thank you, Joe, for bringing them home.
Michael Moore [00:58:50] I hope this podcast today lifted your spirits a bit. We are in a dark time. The Delta variant is exploding, the environment is literally on fire, and so much damage has been done. It may lead to even further complications in terms of how it affects humans.
And we still have the Republican Party. Who, when it came up for a vote this week to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, not one single Republican would vote for it. Not one. We’re talking about protecting people’s rights and halting any discrimination on the basis of race. And not one Republican could find their way to vote for that.
146 of them who were insurrectionists that night on January 6 after their colleagues had stormed the Capitol building when they went back into session late at night. 146 of them voted to not accept the results of the United States election. Voted to say that the election was fake and that Trump had won. Hours after, Trump’s people assaulted, killed, ransacked our capital.
We know what we have to do here. We’ve got an election year coming up next year. And we not only have to maintain control of the House, we have to get the Senate in our hands so we’re not having to deal with this filibuster. But when the infrastructure bill goes before the Senate here in the next month or so and voting rights, we’ve got to insist that the Democrats in the Senate go back to the old filibuster that did not require one side or the other to have 60 votes to be a majority when a majority is 50 plus 1.
So we’ve got a fight ahead of us here. It’s coming up very shortly. We’re in the middle of it right now, in fact. So let’s take the good news of what we’ve seen from President Biden, who will not back down to any of these people who don’t like what he’s doing ending this war in Afghanistan and bringing everyone home alive. I know, I know what you’re saying. Yes, I know we’ve had the kind of the crap knocked out of us after four years of the other guy, the former guy. Does it matter?
The work isn’t done. But let me thank you for everything that you’ve done over these years and we’re all still together here, and I want you to hang in there, hang tough, stay with me. If you can, sign up on my mailing list, I’m going to send you free stuff, you know, a podcast every week, an essay every week. And other important things that we need to do to work together. To save the America we’ve never had. I think that’s worth our time in our effort.
So thank you for being part of this. Thank you if you’re a new subscriber to my Substack. Or just go to michaelmoore.com. My thanks to all of you. My thanks to our executive producer, Basel Hamdan, our editor and sound engineer Nick Kwas, and to everybody else who’s been helping with this podcast, including a new researcher here with us, Harrison Malkin. Thank you. Welcome to Rumble and welcome to all of you who are new listeners because you’ve signed up and subscribed for the free podcast here. Rumble with Michael Moore. I’m Michael Moore. And I’ll talk to you soon.
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