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To read more about Episode 286, visit the main episode page.

Michael Moore [00:00:15] Hello, this is Rumble with Michael Moore, and I’m Michael Moore. 

[00:00:42] It’s now been seven days since I read one of the most shocking stories of the year on the front page of the New York Times last Sunday. Seven days. And I literally couldn’t recover from reading this for the rest of the day. And I spent the rest of the week telling anybody who would listen — family, friends, people I work with — “did you read that story in the front page of The Times on Sunday?” “Oh, which one?” And then I tell them and they were like, “No, that was in the Times on Sunday?” “I know, right?”. 

[00:01:32] And I have to tell you, I’m not saying nobody has covered it in the rest of the media, but I pay a lot of attention to what’s online, what’s on TV, what’s in the papers. I’ve seen nothing. There’s been very little discussion of it on social media. I’m stunned. And maybe you haven’t heard of it. And I want to tell you about it. And I’m going to post the link here on my podcast page so you can read it. It’s something a lot of us have thought about or known about, heard about for — whoa, really 43 years. 43 years — is that right? Jeez, what was I, a toddler? No, I’m older than that. 

[00:02:23] But before I actually get into it, let me just sidestep a little bit here, because it has something to do with something else I read this week, a wonderful column by the great Left commentator Thom Hartmann. If you don’t listen to his radio show, his podcast, or read his columns, I encourage you to do so. And he had a piece this week that essentially began with this thought: that we really haven’t had a Republican president since Dwight D. Eisenhower who was not a traitor. Now, I know that’s strong language. I know maybe you’re trying to go through who are these Republicans? Not that many of them, but after Eisenhower, and listen, you know, we could do a whole show on Eisenhower and the, you know, great things he did, but a lot of the awful things he did in those early years of the Cold War, of the attempts to desegregate our schools. He was a, I think, both a person of conscience, but also someone who was afraid to leave the middle of the road. And of course, if your parents or grandparents were in World War II, they thought very highly of him. He was essentially charged by President Roosevelt to win the war. And he carried a lot of guilt with him in terms of decisions he made that maybe had he made a different battlefield decision, a different decision about the actual morning of D-Day, maybe we wouldn’t have lost so many troops. And he took it personally because ultimately the buck did stop with him. He had to make the decision. So I’ve read what he’s written about it and always found it kind of interesting. He was not a gung ho warrior — “Let’s just go kill everything in sight.” He was not that way. And the Allies defeated the Axis powers — the Nazis in Germany, Japanese, the Italians, Mussolini. And so a grateful nation elected him president in 1952. 

[00:04:44] And so throughout the fifties, even though, again, people of our political ilk maybe disagreed with him and disagreed strongly with him on many things, nobody would ever, I think, refer to him as a traitor, as a person who committed treason. But after him, for whatever reason. Republicans, the Republican Party, a lot of people who supported Republicans and who voted for the politicians who became president, Republican politicians who became president, once in office did some heinous, horrendous things that maybe it could not be construed legally, maybe they couldn’t be arrested and tried as traitors, that it wasn’t “legal” treason in the way it would normally be seen in the courts, but I think to any of us civilians, what we would consider an act against the people of the United States of America. Actions done in our name were immoral, were probably illegal. Actions that hurt us, that set us back, that never allowed us to become the America I think a lot of people had hoped we would be. And Republican president, after Republican president did things that were not in the best interest of the American people. And I’m not saying that because I disagree with them politically. I’m saying these individuals committed heinous acts against the people of the United States of America and were never held to account for it, never faced an indictment, a trial, or a prison cell. 

[00:06:31] So let’s just quickly review this so I can get back to what happened this particular week and what may happen this coming week. But I’m going to be talking about two different Republican presidents here in that case. 

[00:06:47] So before we do that, let me just thank our podcast underwriters for today. First up, a huge thank you to Rocket Money. Over 80% of people have subscriptions that they’ve forgotten about. It happens to me. It happens to you. It actually happens to me more often than I’d like to admit. And usually for me, it’s like a local newspaper or magazine I’ve subscribed to — sometimes just to get the access for the article I needed for this podcast. And then I’ve forgotten that I’ve subscribed to it. And now all of a sudden I went from a free trial and then suddenly, boom, right? You realize, Oh my God, I’ve been dinged here on something you’d never intended to do that. Well, my friends, that is where Rocket Money comes in. Rocket Money, formerly known as True Bill, is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, it monitors your spending, it helps you lower your bills, and it’s all in one place. Simply find the subscription that you don’t want and all you got to do is press “cancel” and Rocket Money will cancel it for you. There’s no more waiting on hold or the tedious, you know, emailing back and forth with customer service. With a click of a button, boom, it’s gone. It’s done. Easy peasy. So, my friends, stop throwing your money away. Cancel unwanted subscriptions and streaming services or whatever it is, manage your expenses the easiest way possible by going to RocketMoney.com/rumble. That’s RocketMoney.com/rumble. Rocketmoney.com/rumble. 

[00:08:23] Next up, I also want to thank as another wonderful underwriter for this podcast, Big shout out to Mike. Now, I know that a lot of Rumble listeners don’t eat meat, but I’m an omnivore, as are most humans, and it’s important to me to know exactly where the meat has come from. But as I and the rest of my fellow omnivores out there know, that info is not always easy to find at the supermarket. That’s why I love Moink, and I know you will too. With Moink, you know exactly where your food is coming from, and it’s not Big Agriculture. All their meat at Moink is sourced from small family farms all across the country. Moink is a meat subscription service that delivers grass fed and grass finished beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken and sustainable wild caught Alaskan salmon straight to your door. Moink farmers, they farm like our grandparents did, and as a result, frankly, Moink meat tastes better — like it should taste — because the family farm does it better. You choose the meat that’s delivered in every box. Plus, you can cancel anytime. So keep American farming going by signing up at Moinkbox.com/rumble right now, and listeners of this podcast get free bacon in your first box. It’s the best bacon you’ll ever taste but for a limited time. So Moinkbox.com/rumble. That’s Moinkbox.com/rumble. 

[00:10:04] Okay, we’re back. So Richard Nixon ran in 1960 and lost to John F Kennedy. In 1968 he runs again. And it’s looking like it may be a fairly close race because Lyndon Johnson has decided not to run for reelection. He was elected in a landslide in 1964, about a year after President Kennedy was assassinated. And then he escalated the Vietnam War, and caused the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops who died for God knows what. Certainly not to defend or protect you or I. And of course, he oversaw the deaths of a million, 2 million South East Asians — Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, etc.. That’s what Lyndon Johnson did. And his particular — he a Democrat — his particular what I will refer to as treason was that in August of 1964, just a couple of months before his election, he announced to the nation that an American ship had been attacked by a North Vietnamese gunboat in the Gulf of Tonkin, which is right off the coast of North Vietnam. And as a result, he wanted Congress to approve him sending troops to Vietnam to essentially invade the country and really kick the war into full gear. A day or two later, all but two members of the United States Senate who voted, voted in favor of sending us to Vietnam. But it was a lie. We later found out that no such incident as was described to the nation took place in the Gulf of Tonkin. The resolution in the Senate is referred to as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. And so from the get go, what would eventually be over half a million troops were sent to Vietnam — and that’s a half a million at one time, so there’s many more troops that went to Vietnam — and engaged in a vicious, brutal war with the Vietnamese people. Again, a people who had not attacked us and who posed no threat to any citizen of the United States of America. But from 1964, until the Vietnamese finally won and defeated us on April 29th and 30th of 1975, when we had to go running, scurrying out of the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon. Nearly 60,000 American troops were killed in that war. And between the years of Johnson and Nixon, who was elected in ’68, we ended up slaughtering — well, they’ll never have an exact count. I’ve read all sorts of numbers, and they vary between 2 million and 4 million South East Asians, which includes the Vietnamese people, Cambodians, Laotians, etc.. 

[00:13:25] So what was the treason that Richard Nixon committed? Lyndon Johnson was desperate to get out of Vietnam and end the war that he essentially started. Even though we had troops in Vietnam from Truman through Eisenhower and Kennedy, the war itself, the war that we know as “the war” — that was Lyndon Johnson’s. And by 1968, some four years later, he realized this colossal mistake he’d made, and this is how he would be remembered. He would not be remembered primarily for the incredible civil rights legislation that he got passed in Congress and signed into law. He would be remembered for 60,000 American deaths that were senseless and without purpose. So in the months leading up to the 1968 election, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was running on the Democratic side of the ballot, Johnson wanted to help him by ending the war. Nixon was hoping that Johnson would not pull off such a feat and that the war would continue because Nixon ran on a platform of he had a secret plan to end the war and he would get us out of Vietnam if elected. Of course, he did no such thing. He served a full term of four years and ran again in ’72, having not ended the war. The first peace treaty that was signed did not take place until after he was inaugurated for a second term in January of 1973. And then we were still in there and the war was still going on for another two years, until ’75. 

[00:15:11] So what Nixon did in the months leading up to the election in 1968, he had his people convince the South Vietnamese, the dictatorship, that we supported the southern part of Vietnam to not join in any peace talks to end the war. And Johnson had convinced the North Vietnamese to come and sit at the table. They were going to have all these peace talks, I think, in Paris. And the North Vietnamese agreed to come to the peace table. I believe the Chinese were involved in some ways, perhaps the Soviet Union, even the parties on the other side, our so-called “enemies” were willing to talk peace. And if they succeeded in ending the war, which is what Johnson wanted them to come to the table to do, that would be the end of that. Well, that would also cook Nixon’s goose, and he would probably — the election was going to be very close. It ended up being very close. And so Nixon was successful in convincing the South Vietnamese dictator and generals not to go to the peace talks. And by them not being at the peace talks, there could be no peace talks. And in pulling that off clandestinely, American people knew none of this was going on, didn’t learn about it till years and years later, he got what he wanted. And the American people, by an extremely slim margin, voted him into office on the promise that he would end the Vietnam War. To hold conversations and talks and to make a secret plan like that behind the backs of the American people, behind the backs of Lyndon Johnson and the government — and Johnson, he had already been told by the CIA and the FBI because they spy on everybody and they were spying on Nixon, they said, “You know, Nixon and his people, they’re secretly talking to the South Vietnamese government to make sure they don’t participate in any peace talks, so that the war will continue because that’s how he’s going to get elected.” Johnson knew this. The FBI and the CIA played him the tapes of Nixon and Nixon staff phone calls. Johnson called up Everett Dirksen, the senator from Illinois, Republican senator, saying, “You know, this is treason, right? They’re doing this.” And Dirksen said, “Yes, that’s exactly what it is.” But, you know, he is a Republican, and couldn’t do anything about it. The election was probably just days or weeks away. And Nixon wins. Nixon wins, and of course he does. This is 1968. The war doesn’t finally end until 1975. 

[00:18:04] So that’s the first Republican president after Eisenhower that commits what I would and I think a lot of people would consider an act of treason. Doing something not in the best interests of the American people, in fact, causing the war to continue longer, causing the deaths of Americans in Vietnam, just so he can get elected. Of course, they began impeachment proceedings against him for Watergate after he was inaugurated beginning in the summer of ’73. And by the summer of ’74, he saw the writing on the wall. He saw that they had the votes to impeach him, remove him from office, and he resigned in August of 1974. And the person who replaced him was a vice president he had just appointed to fill the shoes of his first vice president who was indicted for corrupt criminal activities, Spiro Agnew. Gerald Ford became vice president, a congressman from Michigan. And he wasn’t in office for maybe a month in 1974 after Nixon’s resignation, when Ford went ahead and pardoned Richard Nixon, not just for the crimes that we knew about from the Watergate hearings, but for any and all crimes he might have committed in office. Just a blanket pardon. Was this in the best interest of the American people? They tried to play it like that, “Oh, yes. We’ve been through so much — Vietnam, Watergate. Ford just wanted the country to be at peace and to forget about all the nasty stuff that Nixon did, that Johnson did whatever.” And so he pardons him. Well, as we learned, Nixon was up to a lot of other criminal activities, having a unit of his men in the White House break into the psychiatrist’s office of Daniel Ellsberg, who had released the Pentagon Papers that exposed the truth of how Johnson and the U.S. government got us into Vietnam and kept us there. And they wanted his psychiatric files so they could smear him, so that people wouldn’t believe the truth about how we got into Vietnam. It was the WikiLeaks papers case of that era. And just like they have smeared and now have viciously harassed Julian Assange, who along with Chelsea Manning, released the papers to let us know the truth of what Bush and Cheney did to get us in the Iraq war and the crimes that we committed during the Iraq war. We would not know any of that if it weren’t for them — and again, what did they do to Chelsea Manning? To Julian Assange? Smear them. And in the case of Chelsea Manning, arrest her and send her to prison. She’s now out. But it send a good message to anybody else who wants to tell the truth if they ever find out the truth or they have documents to prove what our government has done, you’ll think twice before doing that, after you see what they’ve done to these people. 

[00:21:07] So anyways, Ford pardons Nixon. And to me, again, that was an act of treason. I know legally it will never be, ever, in a court of law. They would never say that Gerald Ford was a traitor, but he left off a criminal that was responsible for the deaths of our soldiers in Vietnam, for millions of South East Asians. I’m sorry. Call me a law and order guy, but I just think that’s wrong. So Republican president, number two, a traitor to his country, a traitor to his people. He didn’t make that decision based on what was best for us. 

[00:21:57] George H.W. Bush. You know, he only served one term, so he wasn’t around very long to do a lot of damage. But he did invade another country that had not invaded us or not threatened us or not killed our people or threatening to do horrible things to Americans. He invaded Panama. Under what legal grounds? Again, invading a country that is not a threat to you and that is not attacked you, it’s an international crime. It’s a crime against humanity. He invaded Panama and had the president of Panama, not anybody’s friend here, taken away. Noriega. President Noriega. General Noriega — who had been on the payroll of the CIA for a period of time. And I guess he decided to make some money by playing both ends of it. But they basically invaded the country, deposed him, installed our own president until they had a, quote, “election”. But, you know, again, that’s not allowed. It was wrong when Lyndon Johnson did it. It was wrong when George H.W. Bush did it. You act against the American people, you are a traitor against the American people and yet never has to pay a price for it. 

[00:23:29] And the next Republican president after him, his son, W. George W Bush. We’ve covered a number of times his crimes — invading Iraq based on a lie 20 years ago this past week because they said that that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were involved in 9/11. That was a complete lie. They had nothing to do with 9/11. You don’t have to take my word for it. It’s been well covered. And they said he was building or had weapons of mass destruction, and that’s why we had to go in there and seize those weapons. He hadn’t threatened the United States. He hadn’t attacked the United States. He hadn’t killed Americans. Nobody here in the U.S. was killed by Saddam Hussein or his henchmen. Saddam Hussein — not a good guy. But there are a lot of not good guys in this world, and we don’t go and invade all their countries. Not that we don’t want to. Not that we haven’t tried, but basically, right? We don’t have really — well, by now we have the manpower and the money and the bombs, the guns and everything else to do that if we wanted to, I guess. Our defense budget, so-called defense budget, our war budget, our Pentagon budget, if you combine the next nine or ten countries after us who have the next nine largest defense budgets, put all their budgets together — I’m talking about China, Russia, France, the UK, put them all together — the next ten countries together do not equal what we spend on the military, what we spend on war and the preparation for war. George W Bush. What he did was a war crime. And the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were slaughtered, civilians, in that invasion and the nearly 5000 American troops who came back in a casket, who died for what? No weapons of mass destruction found. No connection to 9/11. A war that went on officially for eight years. A traitor of this country, George W Bush. 

[00:26:01] And then this guy that we had as president from 2017 to 2021. All of his activities to try to overturn the election, to call up the secretary of state of the state of Georgia and tell him to find him 11,780 votes so that he could win Georgia and thus win reelection to the presidency. The things that he did, the hush money that he paid, because again, he was worried about the election if the real story got out about the porn star he was seeing. I mean, my friends, I know. I know some of you are worried that Trump could be president again. That’s not going to happen. But these people who believe in him, they are true believers, and they will fight like hell for the things that they believe in. Their misogyny either bigotry, their racism, their white supremacy, their greed, all of those things that they believe in. They are true fighters. They held an insurrection, poorly planned, so it wasn’t successful and it was put down by the end of the day on January 6, 2021. But that’s a treasonous act. It seems like he’s very close to becoming the first president ever to be indicted and arrested after he was president. And we’ll talk about that in a little bit because I want to go back to I skipped a Republican president on purpose because he is the subject of that front page New York Times article last Sunday, and that is Ronald Reagan. 

[00:27:54] In 1979, President Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah of Iran to come to the United States for medical treatment. The Shah was the right-wing dictator of Iran, and their revolution was about to happen. And sure enough, once he left the country, the people revolted and the Ayatollah Khomeini came in and became the leader of the country. And then a group of Iranians stormed the American embassy and took a number of hostages, American hostages, and put them in jail, essentially. They weren’t really arrested by any legitimate police. They were taken and blindfolded and taken away because they were Americans, and they ransacked the embassy and that was the end of that. And for a year, Jimmy Carter tried to negotiate with the Iranians to get these hostages released — these are mostly embassy workers in Tehran, the capital of Iran. And he was not successful. 

[00:29:07] What we learned last Sunday, though, is that Carter was actually very involved, and had already convinced the prime minister of Iran to release the hostages. Now, it was just a matter of trying to convince the spiritual leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. So they were working very hard at this because Carter, of course, being up for reelection, this was definitely going to hurt his chances of getting reelected. But if you know anything about Jimmy Carter by now, who sadly is in hospice and probably in his final weeks of life, he was the kind of person that would probably do anything to release anybody who was unjustly accused or unjustly imprisoned. His attempts to get them out of there, while he knew it would certainly help his reelection chances, that was not his primary motivation. We all know who Jimmy Carter is by now. 

[00:30:05] Well, Ronald Reagan and his people were running against Carter. And in the months leading up to the election, Reagan was very afraid that Carter would succeed and get the American hostages released. And here is what we learned — and I’m not going to read the article. I’m just gonna give you the basic headlines of it. But I’d love for you to go to the link here on my podcast page and read this horrific story. 

[00:30:35] The Times reported last Sunday that John Connally, the former governor of Texas who was in the motorcade when President Kennedy was assassinated and he himself was shot but not killed by the assassin, he lived and he went on — he was a Democratic governor of Texas — but he decided to become a Republican a few years after the assassination and was a big supporter of Ronald Reagan, and he and Ben Barnes, who was the lieutenant governor, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Texas, but who also was very close to Connally and loved Reagan, decided they needed to help Reagan get elected. If Carter was successful in getting these hostages released before the election, that could guarantee a victory for Jimmy Carter. They wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. So in the summer of 1980, before the election, Connolly and Barnes take a trip to the Middle East and they visit a half a dozen Arab countries and meet with the leaders of these Arab nations, the kings, the presidents, whoever they were, they met with them. And their one request was this: “Please do your best to convince the Iranians, do not release the hostages before the election. Keep holding them in prison. And if you do that, and if Ronald Reagan wins, you’re going to get a sweet deal from him.” And we’re talking about weapons, other sorts of help that they needed, Reagan would be there for them. That was the deal. And sure enough, the hostages were not released. They were held until one minute after Reagan took the oath of office. Exactly one minute. On January 20th, 1981, Inauguration Day, as soon as he is sworn in, the Iranians release the hostages. The deal was cut. The weapons were delivered over the coming years secretly to the Iranians which led to the whole Iran-Contra affair, which you can look that up and read about it. This is Ronald Reagan, this Republican, giving weapons to a sworn enemy of the United States simply to get elected, to hurt Carter’s chances, to sabotage Jimmy Carter’s election chances. As I read this, and I thought, first of all, “Oh, my God. So Reagan —” and it also wasn’t just Connally. There was a story that did come out in 2013 about William Casey, who was Reagan’s campaign manager, and after he was elected, Reagan named Casey the director of the CIA. Reagan sent Casey to Madrid also in the summer of 1980 before the election to meet with high level Iranian officials to do the same thing: “convince them to keep the hostages imprisoned until we’re inaugurated and you’re going to get a good deal from us. Mainly in the form of these weapons.” So there’s other evidence of this. It’s not really the first time that this story came out, but the detail that’s in this Times’ story is so so… Sick. 

[00:34:34] And The Times is very careful in the story to point out that because Reagan’s dead, they couldn’t verify this with him. And because Connally’s dead, they couldn’t verify this with him. But Ben Barnes is alive. He’s 85 years old, former lieutenant governor of Texas, who was on the trip with Connally to meet with these Arab leaders to convince them to convince the Iranians to keep the hostages in prison. And he also provided the names of people he did tell the truth to right when this was happening after he got back from this trip. And The Times called each of the four people he gave this information to about what they were up to, having these meetings to keep the hostages in prison, and all four of them verified that is the story that Barnes told them in the months or years after the trip. That is the story he told them and swore them to secrecy.

[00:35:32] And ben Barnes is also known for being the man — the well-connected Texas politician — who got George Bush out of having to go to Vietnam. He was able to convince the Texas Air National Guard to accept Bush so that he could stay in Texas and not be drafted, not have to go to Vietnam. That’s Ben Barnes. And the reason Ben Barnes has come forward to tell the truth about what happened on that trip he took with Connally to the Middle East is because when he heard that Jimmy Carter was dying, that he was in hospice, he did not want President Carter to go to his grave not knowing the truth about what was done to him. The sabotage that Reagan and his people did to his campaign, his chance to be reelected in November of 1980. And so just for the purposes of his own conscience, Ben Barnes, although Carter had written about it and talked about it and long suspected that he was the victim of what Reagan called his October surprise, which was Reagan doing his best and succeeding in keeping the hostages in prison in Iran, he didn’t really have the proof that he had hoped would come to him during his lifetime. And now in his final days, I guess, you know, the decent thing is maybe that he gets to leave this world with the person who participated in sabotaging his campaign coming forward and admitting it. And so… 

[00:37:21] I know. I don’t want you to be sick here on this weekend and having to read this, but I can’t believe this story really wasn’t picked up this week and nobody talked about it. And here it is. And a lot of people have suspected this over the years, but here, right here, here’s the story. What American — what American — would do anything to make sure that dozens and dozens of American citizens who are unjustly imprisoned be kept in prison? These hostages were kept in prison, another, what, seven months? Their freedom not given to them, a freedom that Jimmy Carter was negotiating their release and already had the prime minister of Iran on his side to release the hostages. Who would do that to a fellow American? Who would scheme to keep people who should not be imprisoned in this foreign country, imprisoned? Who do that? Well, somebody who wanted to get elected president — Ronald Reagan. It was a treasonous act. I mean, just step back from it and look at this. 

[00:38:40] And again, I am not making a partisan statement here. I’ve already explained that it was a Democrat that got us into Vietnam. I will call out the Democrats every single time. And you know that, you know, if you know me, if you know my history, if you’ve seen my films. I am relentless about the people that are supposed to be on our side. In some ways, it’s worse. When they act like the Republicans, like the fascists, like the, you know, racist. But this. This. This activity by Reagan and his campaign workers to keep the hostages in prison in Iran because it will help his chances of getting elected — anybody who’s listening to me right now tell me that that is not a treasonous act. Tell me that is not the act in the work of a traitor. A traitor who didn’t act in our behalf, to our benefit to protect us. He acted to not protect the hostages, to keep them in harm’s way so that he could get elected. Someday this story will be in every history book. It ain’t going to happen now, not the times that we’re living in.

[00:40:05] You know, I just had an idea here. Actually, we should — some of these hostages have to be alive still, right? So this was… This is 43 years ago. Yeah. There had to have been some in their 20s and 30s. They’re still alive. Certainly their family members are. Their kids who had to not have their father or mother there while they were being held in Iran. Spouses maybe are still alive. You know what we should do? We should contact — let’s find a couple of the hostages and see now that they’ve learned the truth, that they were held longer in prison than they should have been there, how they feel about that. How they feel about Ronald Reagan colluding with the Iranians to keep them locked up for an extra at least seven months. We should do a podcast with them live, right here. Just okay, we’re writing this down. 

[00:41:09] But as Thom Hartmann said this week, just think about that. Every Republican president has committed what we civilians would call an act against the people of the United States of America, has acted as a traitor against us, the people. Every Republican president after Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s. Oh, man. I’ll tell you, I read that story and I’ve been wanting to talk to all of you about it this week, and I’m asking you again to please read the story and think about when are we going to stop them? I mean, stop them. We see Trump this weekend threatening violence against the New York, the Manhattan D.A.. If the D.A. arrests him, Alvin Bragg, he’s calling for violence again, calling for another uprising. Posting a picture of himself, Trump, holding a baseball bat and pointing, it’s like he’s swinging it at a picture beside him of D.A. Alvin Bragg. How is anyone allowed in this country to issue a direct threat of violence against a law enforcement officer — in this case, the district attorney? The district attorney is essentially like the top cop. He’s the guy that’s supposed to put the bad guys away. Of course, we know the system we have. They’ve essentially been the puppet masters of a mass incarceration system that is horribly racist and classist and needs to be undone, but that’s for another podcast on another day. But you’ve seen this over the weekend here since Thursday. Trump’s tirades on his social media platform. Why hasn’t he been arrested this weekend? Would I be able to threaten the D.A. with violence? Would I be able to threaten the cop on the beat here in New York City? Would I be able to just walk up to a cop and threaten violence against him or her? I don’t think so, right? Do you think if I did that, if I actually did a call for violence against the D.A., the attorney general, the chief of police, how soon before the knock on my door? How soon? It won’t be long, right? I mean, how is it that Trump is allowed to make these kinds of threats and not have to pay the price for it? How is he above the law? Why would I or you be treated differently if you said and did the same things? That you were trying to organize people to get their guns out, to get ready, “The arrest is imminent.” We wouldn’t get away with it, would we? Of course we wouldn’t do it in the first place because we’re nonviolent people and we  believe that our ability to organize and persuade the majority of our fellow Americans to vote the way we’re voting, that that’s all we really need to do. And of course, that is what worked in 2020. That’s how we got rid of Trump. That’s how we ended the Vietnam War. 

[00:44:44] But when certain people, and in the case of these Republicans I’m referring to, get in the way and try to upend the system quietly, secretly, sabotage an election. Nixon sabotaging the election of 1968. Reagan sabotaging the election of 1980. Ford sabotaging any future prosecution of Richard Nixon, which should have happened. And then Trump trying to overturn the election by getting on the phone. I mean, can you imagine, you’re the secretary of state in Georgia and you’ve got the commander in chief, not his minions, him, Trump, on the phone telling you to stuff the ballot box. “I need 11,780 votes. Make it happen.” Wow. How is he still free? How is he still walking around? Or driving around in his golf cart? How is that possible and how is it possible in these last three or four days since he started making these violent threats that he hasn’t been arrested? I know some people are thinking, “Mike. No, no, no. If you do that, that’s going to create more violence. People are really going to rise up.” You can’t make your decision not to do the right thing because you’re afraid of the bully. The bully’s got all these guns. The bully’s got all these right-wingers, these crazies. We saw what they did on January 6th. No, no, Mike, don’t upset them.” Don’t upset them? My friends, have we not learned anything from history? That if you placate the evildoers, they’ll just do more evil. This is madness. I can’t wait for Trump to be arrested. I’m sorry that Nixon wasn’t. I’m sorry that Ford wasn’t. I’m sorry that Reagan wasn’t. One traitor after another. Yes, we have to take care of Trump this week, but we have to really take care of this Republican Party. Now they’re even worse. Now they’ve even forgotten some of the good things that they might have stood for way in the past. They like to call themselves still the party of Lincoln. Yeah, the Republicans of the 1800s were against slavery. Of the early 1900s fought to get women the right to vote. But that’s the old — that Republican Party doesn’t exist anymore. The worst of this really started with Reagan, certainly Nixon and his war crimes against the people of Southeast Asia. And then what Reagan did. What Reagan really did to really hurt this country economically, his attempt to destroy the unions, working people, etc.. We’re not going to get into all that today, but I just thought that I was glad that Thom Hartmann pointed this out, that since Dwight Eisenhower, every Republican president we’ve had has committed these acts of what in any other civil society would be called acts of treason. Acts against the people of his own country. Acts to benefit himself. 

[00:48:22] We have a presidential election next year. Every member of Congress is up for reelection next year. I know it’s stunning to think about. It’s that soon again. But that’s why we have work ahead of us, my friends. They haven’t gone away. They haven’t succeeded on the mission they’ve been on for the last 60 plus years. But there are more of us than there are of them. Never forget that. We know the work that we have to do. Please read this story of what Reagan and his people did to Jimmy Carter to sabotage his chances for reelection. Please read — the the link on the podcast page, in the show notes — the front page of the New York Times last Sunday on the 19th of March, 2023. And then, let’s do the work that we need to do. The bullies must not win. 

[00:49:27] I want to thank a couple of other underwriters here before I leave you today, and then I’ll be back with a closing comment here. And first up, that is Shopify. If this isn’t your first time listening to Rumble with Michael Moore, you’ve likely heard me talk about Shopify because they are a long time supporter of this podcast. Shopify is the commerce platform that has helped millions of online and brick and mortar shops worldwide, including mine. Mine, of course, being The Moore Store, which is an online shop that I started a couple of years ago to raise money for causes I care about. Shopify was instrumental in helping me launch The Moore Store where you can, you know, get your T-shirts and ball caps and all the Rumble gear. And now part of the proceeds of that, for every one of those coffee mugs and hoodies and whatever that are sold, goes toward groups I support, like one that is helping to bring civics classes back into our public schools and another group that is helping to end voter suppression. So if you have an idea for your own shop, maybe you want to raise money for your nonprofit or sell merchandise for your brand, just check out Shopify. With access to industry leading tools, 24/7 help, and a business course library, Shopify provides lots of resources to help you succeed. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/rumble. Go to Shopify.com/rumble to take your business to the next level today. Shopify.com/rumble. 

[00:50:57] And finally, let me remind you that this episode of Rumble is also brought to you by BetterHelp. Our mental health is just as important as our physical health, and it’s no secret that when life gets overwhelming or you’re feeling depressed that it’s helpful to talk to someone about it. Unfortunately, therapy can also be very expensive or feel inaccessible when your life is already overwhelming. That’s what’s great about BetterHelp. It’s entirely online, so you don’t have to leave your house. It’s flexible and affordable. You fill out a brief questionnaire, they match you with the licensed therapist, and if it’s not a great fit, you can switch therapists any time for no additional charge. So if you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/rumble today to get 10% off your first month. That’s BetterHelp.com/rumble. And thank you, BetterHelp, for supporting this podcast and for supporting my voice. 

[00:52:01] So before we go, I just want to say that — actually, I just want to share with you some of the things I’ve seen on TV here in the first few months of this year. And maybe you’re watching some of these same shows, but if you’re not, I’d like to just tell you what I’ve found myself and what I like about them and encourage you to give it a shot, to check out some of the good stuff that’s on TV. I just started watching this show on Apple TV+. It’s called Extrapolations. I know, it’s like maybe not the best title to bring people in, “Well, what do you want to do tonight, honey?” “I want to watch Extrapolations.” “Oh, okay.” No, but what it is, it’s an anthology series that’s set in the very near future, in the time of the extinction event that we’re in the middle of, the destruction of our planet. It’s in week four. So I’ve seen the first four weeks, and the first episode takes place in like 2037, 13-14 years from now. And already the planet is for shit. All this stuff they were hoping, “No, we must do this by the year 2050.” And as this episode shows us — Now, this is not a documentary. This is drama. This is fiction. It’s not science fiction so much. It’s soon-to-be. It’s the soon to be era that we’re starting to live in already. And it’s one of the more, I think, honest depictions. You know, it’s not what I would do, but that’s okay. I don’t look at things that way. I’m for anybody who’s attempting to do something to deal with one of the most important issues, which is the survival of this planet. And nobody has done it right. Nobody’s really gone after it the way that we need to go after it. There’s been a couple of good satires. I know Adam McKay and others have been done. Good stuff. Everybody’s trying to do their thing to wake people up. But boy, this series, my friends. This is how powerful this thing is. So like the first one four weeks ago, was set in 2037. The second week was set in 2046. So like almost another ten years later. And then 2047, the next one was just a year later. And then this last one I watched here this weekend was set in 2057 and they each deal with different things that are going on on the planet Earth. And, you know, these are actors in it. Meryl Streep’s in it. David Schwimmer is in it. Sienna Miller, Edward Norton — I mean, it’s a great cast. But in episode three… Episode three is set in Miami and of course, Miami is on its way to being underwater. And the sort of thread through it is this 13-year-old girl is preparing for her bat mitzvah. And it’s Passover time. And so she’s at the family Seder, you know, where they ask the four questions and they get done with the four questions and she just stands up at the table. This 13-year-old girl says, “I have a fifth question.” “Oh, no, no. There’s only four questions.” “I have a fifth question.” And she said something to the effect of, “I demand an answer.” And they don’t know what to do with her, you know. And so she asks the question, I’m not going to tell you what the question is, because I think you should watch this episode. But I have to tell you, this Miami episode, it’s been a long time… I know I talk about how I tear up a lot. I think a lot of us have especially I think maybe the pandemic did it to us. Maybe this sort of you know, we were thrown into a kind of a death spiral, so to speak, of more than a million Americans killed by something that may probably have something a lot to do with how we’ve treated the planet and won’t be the first disease, the first whatever we’re going to have to deal with because of how we’ve treated the planet. But boy, I have to tell you these are pretty close to hour long episodes. And again, it’s a different story, different decade, usually each week, different cast. But you feel the thread through it. And last week’s Miami episode, I swear to God, I think I cried or teared up through most of the hour. I don’t know when watching TV, especially a work of fiction, that has reduced me to tears that intensely. Maybe I had just had a bad day and it was not the right night to watch it. Or maybe, maybe, Scott Burns, the creator and writer director of this — look up his work, he’s done great work before — maybe they’ve found a way to tell the story that we should all be talking about and all of us considering. One of the great things they do in all these episodes is point out the billionaires, the new billionaires, the quote, “environmentalist” billionaires who have invented new technologies or whatever, and their technologies are going to stop the destruction of Earth. But of course, they’re really just hustling and scamming the public to make $1,000,000,000. They don’t pull punches here with this. I don’t know. Check it out. It’s called Extrapolations. It’s on Apple Plus TV. If you have that or can afford it, or you can get one of those free trial subscriptions. But, boy, I really encourage you to watch this. 

[00:57:51] Also on Apple Plus TV, by the way, they’re not underwriting this episode or whatever, but they do have good series and good movies they’ve made or distributed. If you want something a little lighter, they have a half hour comedy, not har har comedy with a laugh track, but like smart, a smart comedy called Shrinking. And it’s about this shrink practice, these three psychologists. I won’t tell you anything more about it other than it’s just really, really good. It’s smart, it’s got heart. It’s got the right kind of hope. Not the drug hope that we call hopium. They ended their first season. There’s ten episodes. It’s absolutely incredible. 

[00:58:37] Another series that just ended their first season, The Last of US on HBO. Wow. I really want to encourage you to watch this. It is a little bit of science fiction. It assumes that a fungus has taken over Earth and kills most of its people, but not all of them. And the particular storyline of this first season is there’s a 14-year-old girl who seems to be immune to the fungus and they want to figure out what can they find in her blood or whatever that could help them create a vaccine to protect the public or whatever. And she has to go on a journey across the country from Boston to Wyoming, where they’re going to secretly try to figure out how she can help them with her immunity. It’s so powerful. Now, if you watched just the first episode or two, it’s going to look like an HBO version of The Walking Dead. It is not that. I love The Walking Dead, but I know a lot of you are not going to want to tune into a zombie series, but the fungus does make a lot of the humans, especially the dead ones, go a little crazy. So you see a lot of that in the first episode or two. But I think the writers and the producers of this must have decided that we have a much smarter show than that, and we have a show about humanity. If you want to even skip the first two and maybe just read about the story of the fungus and how it took over the earth. Go to episode three. I’ve seen critics write it’s one of the best episodes of any show ever that’s been on television. I mean, that might be a little bit of hyperbole there. But if you just start with episode three and the story of these two guys and their relationship in this town where everybody else had escaped. Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. The show will have you then. And there’s very little of the fungus, the zombie thing after that. I mean, it’s there. It’s a threat. But the rest of what the show is saying and the fact that this actress who plays this 14-year-old girl, this girl is like a one woman army fighting off the scary and corrupt humans who oftentimes would like to see her dead. If you have teenager tween girls, they should watch this series. The girl power nature of this is so incredible and a great a great thing to watch. It’s called The Last of US. It’s on HBO. 

[01:01:05] All right, enough about TV. I know what you’re thinking, “Mike, you gave us all this heavy stuff, and then you end on TV.” I know. I know. I need to… I should probably close — how about this? Tonight, if you’re listening to me here on Saturday. This is the Earth Hour day around the world. You know this? Every year for one hour, we’re supposed to turn our lights off to show that we believe that climate change is real. We’re so beyond that, my friends. We all know it’s real. Those who don’t know it’s real, you’re never going to convince them. But it’s so beyond that. That’s just a symptom now of a much greater problem of what we’ve done to the planet, what we continue to do to the planet. And the problem is us. And that is what we need to correct. You know, I executive produced a film called Planet of the Humans made by the great Jeff Gibbs. If you have a chance, if you haven’t seen it, find it online. Watch it. You know, I believe that we are not on the right path, that a good-hearted people believe they’re on the right path, but it’s a path that was maybe the right path to be on in 1970. It was the right path to be on when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House roof. And if we’d all done what we needed to do back then more than 50 years ago, maybe we wouldn’t be in the middle of an extinction event. But we didn’t do that. And now we do a lot of symbolic things like tonight at 8:30, whatever your time zone is around the world, at 8:30, you’re supposed to turn off all your lights. There’s supposed to be a big blackout. What would it be like to live in a world without lights? Okay, I sound like I’m mocking. I’m not mocking. I’m — look, I’m for anything anybody will do to acknowledge what’s going on. But ultimately, we have so little time that’s left, if we even have half a chance — we don’t even have half a chance to turn this around. You know it and I know it. And certainly anybody under the age of 30 knows it. They know it all too well. They know the future that you and I are not going to have to live through. The horror that they are going to have to live through. And we need to keep talking about this. And I need to keep — I need to do more podcasts about this. I know Jeff is working on his next project. So more to come, my friends. But we don’t have a lot of time here and you know it. Come up with your own ideas, come up with what can you do? What could you invent? If you’re an artist, what could you create to inspire other people? We don’t have a lot of time. So there. I end it with something (laughs) that we should all be scared shitless of. We already are. We know we are. So we’ll keep talking about the work that we need to do. 

[01:03:54] Thanks for tuning in to my podcast today. Thanks for supporting the good works that lots of people are doing out there. The fight is still with us. The fight is ahead of us. We have work to do. 

[01:04:09] And one final thing before we go today. This weekend is the 20th anniversary of us receiving the Academy Award for Bowling for Columbine. So I thought what I’d do to celebrate this moment is to make the film available this weekend, this week, for all of you or anybody you know, that maybe hasn’t seen it. Make it available for free. So the link is on my podcast page here, or you can just go to MichaelMoore.com and you’ll see in my Substack column for today the link to watch the movie for free at home. We’re very grateful for all the support over the years from all of you. Sadly, we still have this problem of violence in America. And the film proposes some ideas of maybe what we can do to fix it. It’s going to take more than just the laws. We do need gun control laws. We also need to do something about our American heart. So Bowling for Columbine, free this week, for those of you who go to the link on this page or at MichaelMoore.com. 

[01:05:25] Be well, my friends. Be happy. Be good to each other. Be kind. Be kind to yourselves, please. This is Michael Moore and this is Rumble.