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Michael Moore [00:00:14] This is Rumble with Michael Moore. And we are at the end of February here. What do we have about a day left? A day left and I’m recording this in New York City. And there has not been a stitch of snow. I mean, not a smidgen of snow. It was a year ago this, I believe, a year ago this week was the last time it snowed. What is that? 360 days of no snow. And now they’re saying that tonight here on Monday night, we’re going to get maybe — maybe — an inch of snow. Now, a lot of people here in New York, which, you know, unlike where I’m from in Michigan, they don’t like the snow that much. It’s a big pain in the butt, I guess, getting around. I don’t know why, because they have the most incredible mass transit system here. Well, incredible as in incredibly great and also incredibly not great. But that’s for another show. Maybe I just need a New York edition for Rumble here. Anyway, so we’re going to get some snow. But I just… You know, it’s been cold here. We’ve had a couple of really bad cold snaps where it’s gotten down to zero and below zero. The wind chill’s been ten below zero. But no snow. No snow. And, yeah, people don’t want to have to sludge through the snow and all of this. But I just you know, every time somebody says to me, “It’s kind of cool, though, that we haven’t had to deal with snow this winter.” I said, “Yeah, really? What would you say if all of a sudden at two in the morning, the sun rose and it was bright and sunny outside? What would you do if that just suddenly happened in the middle of the night one of these nights and the sun was up in the sky? You’d freak out. I’d freak out. I’ve never stopped to wonder about like actually if an end of the world type event is going to be happening, what exactly would we do? Where would we go? You know, would you just make your peace with whoever and, you know, have one more pint of Ben and Jerry’s and then just call it a life? I don’t know. I don’t know what the plan is when that happens, but I know that it is supposed to snow in the Great Lakes. And New York is a Great Lakes state. It shares a lake with Michigan even though most New Yorkers have no idea that that exists. We both sit on Lake Erie. And we should be freaking out that there has been no snow here in New York City for a full year. None. Just like you’d freak out if the sun was up at two in the morning. But there’s no freak out. There was a day a couple of weeks ago, I think it was almost… Maybe it did hit 70 degrees. 70 degrees in February! It’s not supposed to be 70 degrees in February. Everybody’s like, “Oh, I’m so happy!” Really? What if you woke up and suddenly there was no water in the Hudson River? “Oh, hey, we can walk to New Jersey now!” No, you wouldn’t be happy. There’s supposed to be water in that river.
[00:03:26] California had a blizzard warning this past week. They had a blizzard warning in L.A. County up in the higher elevations. “Oh they’re so happy to see snow.” No, you’re not. That’s why you moved to California. So you wouldn’t have to look at snow. None of it. It’s not supposed to snow. Then there’s all, “Oh, this is good. This is good. We you got snow now it’ll melt. Our reservoirs will be only one eighth full now instead of empty.” When do we actually hit the freak out buzzer here? I don’t know. I know. I know. If you tune into this because I am the man of answers, a lot of this stuff I have no answer. I’m only laughing because I don’t want to cry. And, you know…
[00:04:22] I wrote a letter, kind of an open letter, to Jimmy Carter here yesterday. And I’m going to post here on my Substack. If you get a chance to read that, I wanted to share it with you. And I want encourage others to join in and before he leaves us, maybe let him know how we feel about him. He has been much maligned over the years. But I write about a day and a night I actually spent with him in Boston back in 2004. I first met him — like meet him as like a citizen — back in 1976. It was the night before he was elected, and he decided to make Flint, Michigan his last stop on his campaign. So on Monday night, November 1st, 1976, my sister and I and a few others, we all went down to the I.M.A. Auditorium. Got there early. I don’t think he got there till like 10 p.m.. And he happened to come in right where we were and we got to shake his hand and thank him.
[00:05:23] I mean, we were all sort of looking forward… You have to understand that in 1976 we’d just lived through about 13 years from the assassination of John F Kennedy in November of ’63, to the next year, in August of ’64, Lyndon Johnson essentially declares war on Vietnam, which we’ve talked about here before on the podcast. So we’re in Vietnam. The Vietnam War kind of really takes off, sadly, there in ’64, the year after Kennedy’s assassination. And then it just — just life just starts to get awful. The artistic response to it amongst citizens, and the political response amongst young people was impressive and incredible. But during the late ’60s and of course, early ’70s, we had to live through then Lyndon Johnson, who no matter whatever good he did, he’ll always be remembered for invading Vietnam with our troops and costing the lives of 60,000 Americans and anywhere from 2 to 4 million South East Asians — they never have been able to get a true count when you count all of Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos. And then we had to get through Nixon. We had to get through two terms of Nixon. The second term was shortened because they were going to impeach him. So he decided to cut and run before they held the vote. And he was gone in the summer of ’74 and then the last two years of his term was filled out by the vice president he appointed, Gerry Ford, from Michigan. So now that takes us up to 1976. And then it’s an election between Gerry Ford, not the incumbent because he was never elected to the presidency, and Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, who nobody knew. And it was going to be a close, close election and we wanted to meet them. And I think there was a real hope amongst us at that time, especially young people and those of us who were young, this was going to be the end of the horror show of Johnson and Nixon, Vietnam, assassinations, Civil Rights trying to get things passed. And Carter represented a fresh way of looking at things and doing things. He wasn’t us. I mean, he wasn’t, you know, as far out on the left as we were, but he was a good soul. And so I write in this Substack how the next time I got to meet him and spend time with him was at the Democratic convention. He asked me to sit in his presidential box. I thought I would just write something up about it and send it. I’m sending it, but I don’t want to bother him or his family. They’ve asked for privacy and private time here in his final days, and I guess I really wanted to share it with all of you. And if you wanted to make comments on it, you can on the comments section and we’ll pass that on to the people in the Carter family — especially with a chance of, if they want to share it with him or show him or whatever that he is surrounded by a lot of love and support.
[00:08:25] Anyway, look for that on my Substack on Monday. But for right now, I want to just talk to you about a few things — a couple of things that are going on, things that a lot of you’ve been writing me about. But maybe, first what we’ll do is we’ll take just a minute here to thank our underwriters for today’s episode.
[00:08:43] First up here, a huge thank you to Netflix and they’re very powerful, poignant and now Oscar nominated film Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. I don’t know if you’ve seen this yet, this is an amazing film. Guillermo del Toro, who’s already an Oscar winner, is, of course, the visionary writer and director behind Pan’s Labyrinth and also the Oscar winner, The Shape of Water, from a couple of years ago. So Pinocchio now this new one, co-written by Del Toro and Patrick McHale, this emotional retelling of the classic tale is set in Italy during World War II, where Geppetto is grieving the loss of his son when Pinocchio is brought to life. The film explores the relationships between fathers and sons, coping with grief and loss through love and, above all, acceptance — touching on the importance of remaining an individual in the face of fascism. This is what makes this movie just leaps and bounds above anything in the way that this story has been told in the past. In fact, Guillermo del Toro has said that “to me it was important to show a world where everybody behaves like a puppet and obeys, and the puppet is the only disobedient one.” This film is deeply moving. It’s visually stunning. Variety called it, “an exquisite masterpiece.” It has already won the Golden Globe and the Critics Choice Award for Best Animated Film this year and is now in the running for Best Animated Feature at this coming month’s Oscars. Do yourself a favor and watch Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio on Netflix now. And thank you Netflix once again for supporting this podcast, supporting my voice and bringing the world this incredible film, Pinocchio, a film of acceptance and love.
[00:10:37] I’d also like to thank a longtime supporter of Rumble with Michael Moore and that is Moink. Did you know that four companies in this country control 80% of the U.S. meat industry? Four big food conglomerates monopolizing and crushing the little guy — capitalism at its finest. Well, for all those Rumble listeners who eat meat, like me, you can help change that with Moink. Moink delivers delicious grass fed beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken and wild caught Alaskan salmon direct to your door and all of it sourced from independent family farms. I’m telling you, it is really a relief to know exactly where our food is coming from. Oftentimes, we don’t know. But with Moink, you know their animals are raised outdoors, their fish swim wild in the ocean, and the meat is free of antibiotics, hormones, sugar and all the other junk that you find in prepackaged meat in the supermarket aisle. So join the Moink movement today. Go to moinkbox.com/rumble right now and listeneners to this podcast get free filet mignon for a year. That’s one year of the best filet mignon you’ll ever taste, but it’s only for a limited time. So moinkbox.com/rumble. Go there. Sign up. These are good people. Moinkbox.com/rumble.
[00:12:13] And finally, for this week’s episode, I would like to thank Shopify, once again. Rumble listeners have heard me thank Shopify many times before, because they are another longtime supporter of this podcast. Shopify is the commerce platform that helped me create The Moore Store. That’s my online shop where I raise money for the causes I care about by selling ball caps and T-shirts and hoodies and whatever. And it’s not just me. Shopify has helped millions of people around the world do this very thing. They’ve got all the tools you need to make selling online and in-person simple and straightforward. More than that, they offer 24/7 help and an extensive business course library to empower you to succeed. So if you’ve got an idea to start your own shop, your own online store, or perhaps you’re looking to grow an existing one, check out Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/rumble — and make sure “rumble” is in all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/rumble to take your business to the next level today. Shopify.com/rumble and “rumble” is in all lowercase. Thank you Shopify for supporting this podcast and for supporting my voice.
[00:13:40] Well, the crazy continues, doesn’t it, on so many levels here in the news? The foreperson, the forewomen of the grand jury down in Atlanta investigating Donald Trump trying to overthrow the 2020 election, she went on TV this week to basically let people know that the news is coming. And actually, according to her, there’s not going to be a lot of surprises because we already know. If you have the president of the United States on tape, which we do, in a call where he didn’t know he was being taped, with the secretary of state, Republican secretary of state in Georgia — and remember, after the election Trump lost Georgia by 11,780 votes — and he is on the phone telling the secretary of state to come up with 11,780 votes. I don’t know what more proof you need than to actually have the criminal tell you what he’s trying to do and trying to coerce the secretary of state in Georgia to stuff the ballot box, to pad the numbers. The news on this should come out any time. And obviously it seems like Donald Trump, finally, is going to get his comeuppance. It doesn’t mean anything will ever happen to him — I’m never going to promise that. But he committed a huge felony. He violated his oath of office to the Constitution. And it sounded like, according to the chairwoman of the grand jury, heads are going to roll.
[00:15:20] You know, a lot of people and comedians, whatever, made fun of her this week because she was kind of just a down-home southern Georgia girl type. And, you know, she didn’t look very old — she might be a Gen Z-er for all I know. But, you know, it was so not what you were expecting because we’re so used to old, white, crusty men as the grand jury or the jury spokesman or whatever. And this was just like a normal person. Did you guys see her on TV? And, you know, people that just made fun of her? Like she just seemed like, you know, she just smoked a doobie and wanted to hold a press conference or something, or talk to a reporter. It just seemed to me like just a normal person got put on a grand jury, and like with all the other people who essentially, it sounds like, have voted unanimously to indict up to, if not more than a dozen people. This is very good news. So that was one of the highlights of the week.
[00:16:23] In other news from Georgia, you have Marjorie Taylor Greene again on one of her rampages where she was suggesting an American divorce, that the red states divorce from the blue states and we just each go our own ways. Now, as wonderful as that may sound, because my friends, right? I mean, we’ve all sort of made up our minds by now that we are never going to live in Florida, or Texas, or Alabama, or Mississippi, or Tennessee, you know? But, as I’ve warned you here in the past and as we spent all this time with our Blue Dots in a Red Sea podcast series, changes are afoot in these red states. Lots of Democratic candidates are getting elected. Ballot proposals are being put on the ballots. And we’ve seen some amazing things happen in places like Kentucky, and Kansas, and Texas even. So you don’t really want to write everybody off in those places. But her idea of us having some divorce, it’s going to get harder and harder because there’s so many growing blue towns and cities and areas in these red states and they’re really becoming purple and they’re on their way to becoming blue. And that’s what’s ahead of us here in the 2020s.
[00:17:49] But isn’t it? I mean, she took an oath, again, to be in Congress, to follow the Constitution, and she’s calling for essentially dissolving the government of the United States of America. And I’m sure she has a lot of support for that. Thousands, if not millions like that idea. That’s why we always have to be on guard. That this kind of crap could happen at any time before we even know it’s happening. I mean, just look at what Texas is trying to do with the abortion pill this week. They are hoping, and they’ve got this in front of a very conservative Trump judge, to make the abortion pill illegal. I’m talking about the two step pill that you know, women have had the right to take since it was invented and approved by the FDA. So it’s about 23 years old. And it’s actually become the #1 abortion method. The #1 abortion method now is not an operation. It’s not going in to a clinic to have them, you know, insert things in you and all this. It’s just simply taking a pill or two. And what they’re trying to do down in Texas is not only make that illegal for Texans, but to make it illegal for the whole country. Because, you see, there’s no way to stop pills like that from crossing state lines. And they know that. And they are hell bent on making things as hard as possible for women to have control over their own bodies. So this is what’s in front of us now. Another Texas jurisdiction that’s going to try and control what all the rest of us think, do, whatever — just like they do with their textbooks down there with the Texas Board of Education. They get all the major publishers of textbooks in the country to follow them, because obviously they’ve got probably the third largest school system statewide in the country, probably, I’m guessing after California, New York, or maybe even Florida. They’re able to censor history books, other textbooks. And the textbook publishers have to write the book the way they want it written. And they’re hoping to do this with this abortion pill. If you haven’t paid attention to this or haven’t heard about this, go online to Planned Parenthood or other reproductive rights organizations, check this out and let’s all figure out what we’ve got to do to support these organizations, to stop this, to fight it.
[00:20:21] The last poll they took this week, 64% of the American public believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. 64%. That’s almost two thirds. That’s what the country wants. It’s a democracy. It’s a free country. How can we be having to follow rules and legislation that the majority doesn’t want? See to stop this, this won’t happen on its own. The other side, they’re clever, they’re funded, and they believe they’re on a mission from God. And I’m telling you, I don’t know if you ever been on a mission from God, but if you have, you know, that’s a pretty powerful force, right? I mean, those of us who are not on a mission from God, you know, we’re on a mission from Amy Goodman. I mean, that’s a fine person to be on a mission from, but I mean, it doesn’t have the same wallop that if God is talking to you. If Amy Goodman talking to you, I’m sorry, God bless her, but she’s not God. For the people that believe that God sends these messages out telling you what you have to do in order to get into heaven. You know? You may say you’re on a mission from Rachel Maddow. Great. Again, not the force of God. Great person, Rachel. Not God. So what do we have to fire ourselves up and to get us into being believers in what we know the truth is regarding science, regarding the equal rights for women and all that? What are we going to do and what is going to motivate us to do it? Because the other side, they got the big guy upstairs who’s talking directly to them.
[00:22:23] In one of the states, I forgot which one this week, they actually do want to, some of the legislator people, they want to make it a law that if you do perform an abortion or have an abortion, you are going to get the death penalty. Because nothing, nothing says the way to stop killing babies is to kill the adults who are going to kill the babies first. See, it’s a preemptive strike. I’m not laughing. It’s really crazy.
[00:22:57] Oh, February, February. I’m not going to miss you. March, not really looking forward to you either. But people have suggested I start bingeing TV shows. I’m not much of a binger on this, but I have looked around. I started watching a couple things here, and I do understand the way they hook you at the end of one of these episodes where you’ve got to stay up and watch the next half hour, or hour of the next one, because you don’t know what, but some God awful things going to happen here. So. What did I start watching last week? Oh, there’s a Netflix show called You. Just “You”. And it centers around this guy, kind of a Dexter-like character, where he just ends up killing people, but, you know, always for good reason. It’s quite compelling. It basically it satirizes this sort of “good guy” defense. You know, “he’s such a good guy. He’s a good guy. That guy’s a good guy.” And so the “good guy” in this series — if you haven’t seen it it’s like in its third or fourth season now but I had that watched it — the good guy, who’s always looking out for women, trying to protect women, and, frankly, probably half the people he kills are people that are doing bad things either to women or children or whatever, and so he sets himself up as the protector. And it satirizes this too — this is not a show that is not aware of the time in which we live. You know, it does not base itself on the fact that women are “weak” and “defenseless” and therefore they need this crazy guy who is trying to protect them. So I’m already a season or so into this one.
[00:24:49] There’s also a very funny, kind of smart, sweet comedy. One of the executive producers of it is Brett – is it Brett Goldstein? You know, the actor that’s in Ted Lasso, the guy that’s always dropping the F-bombs and swearing at kids. He’s one of the executive producers of this — it’s called Shrinking. And it looks like some of the other Ted Lasso people are involved in it. It’s on Apple TV. It stars Harrison Ford and Jason Segel, and they are shrinks. Thus the title Shrinking. And I don’t want to tell you too much about it. It’s just a half hour show. It’s on every Friday night and they’re already, I think, five or six episodes into this first season right now. But if you have Apple TV, or if you can get it somewhere, it’s smart, it’s well done. It has a good message and a good, strong kind of emotional point to it. And it’s very funny. It’s Jason Segel — you know, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, right? Harrison Ford. Whenever Harrison Ford does comedy, I love it. In this last episode I saw, Harrison Ford is getting stoned and he’s known as, of course, as one of the most famous stoners in Hollywood. But here he plays kind of a straitlaced, a little uptight doctor, psychologist. And so somebody gives him a couple of gummies and you get to see the actor Harrison Ford, who is a stoner, playing a stoner, and you sit there wondering, “did he get stoned to do the scene?” But, you know, the really great actors don’t want to do that. They want to be in control of what the acting is, so they don’t usually — the ones I know, at least the ones who are stoners, don’t like to get stoned while they’re acting. It’s pretty funny. You know, I’ve shown this clip before and I played it, of when I won the Oscar back for Bowling for Columbine. And they’re cutting away to audience members as, you know, and I’m speaking. It’s the fifth night of the Iraq war, so I’m speaking out against the war in the 45 seconds I have on the stage for my acceptance speech for winning the Oscar. And so some people start to boo me, some start to cheer — you see Martin Scorsese applauding me and you see Meryl Streep applauding me and a few others — and then you see Harrison Ford has got the biggest smile on his face, like he is so friggin high and enjoying the cacophony of sounds all around him, of people cheering, people booing, whatever.
[00:27:36] But anyway, I like this show Shrinking. You know, I mention here one of the underwriters for this episode is Netflix and their Pinocchio movie made by… You know, there’s these three great Mexican directors that we’ve seen a lot of their films from Gravity to Birdman and Pinocchio here this year. Del Toro, Iñárritu — they make such great movies. I love these guys. They’re really, really incredible filmmakers. And this year, too, so many films made by women. I have a theater that I run, a nonprofit, in Michigan, and we’re showing Women Talking this week. Women Talking is a film by Sarah Polley, and it’s up for Best Picture this year, actually. And again, a very powerful film — stories that don’t get told if they’re just told by the same old white guys. I mean, not the white guys can’t tell a good story, but I’m just saying you only get a certain amount, a certain kind of stories. But if we get to hear from our Mexican friends and if we get to hear from women and gay and lesbian and trans and other people, we get other stories. And if you like stories, if you like to read stories, if you like to go to movies or whatever, you’re always looking for something fresh and new. We’re tired of the same old stuff. Maybe in the next week or two we’ll talk about the Oscars that are coming up on March 12th. There are some good movies that got made this past year, and I’m going to encourage you to to see some of them any way that you can. Sometimes it’s hard these days. A lot of movie theaters are closing or they don’t want to show the kind of movie that is a little challenging because it’s so good. So I want to encourage you to accept the challenge and watch some of these movies.
[00:29:32] Anyways, if you have any ideas of TV stuff that’s streaming or things that you think I would enjoy or maybe even binge on when I’ve got a Saturday afternoon and I really don’t want to think about Marjorie Taylor Greene. You know, send that along to me. I’m open to trying some new stuff.
[00:29:56] So that’s it for what I wanted to say today and to encourage you to get involved with any reproductive rights stuff that’s going on in your town, in your state. People on the other side of this, they are not going to give up. They are going to shut women down as hard and as much as they can. So that requires all of us. That would be the majority, the 64% that support abortion being legal. We are the majority. This is a democracy. Majority rule. And minority, the ones who don’t like abortion, you have your rights, too. You have the right to never have an abortion. Nobody, no government, nobody will ever force you to have an abortion — how about that? Pretty nice country, huh? That’s where it should be, right? No religion will ever force you to have an abortion. But now we’ve got six Catholics on the Supreme Court that want to force you to have a baby. If you get pregnant, accident or no accident, you now are going to have that baby. You’re going to be forced into childbirth. That is crazy. That is really — even saying in those words it’s like, what century am I in? So get involved in this. Find out who the local people are that are fighting the good fight on this and get involved. And let’s see if we get some snow tonight. That’d be nice.
[00:31:31] Okay, my friends, thanks for tuning in to Rumble today. Thanks to my producer and editor Angela Vargos, and to all of you. There’s work ahead. In the meantime, let’s find something we can all binge on. I’m Michael Moore, and this is Rumble.
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