Dave Rubin hosts a remote roundtable with Elijah Schaffer, Karlyn Borysenko, and Michael Malice to dissect the January 6 Capitol events and the ensuing backlash. Schaffer details chaotic scenes where police cordon strategies varied, noting most attackers were Trump supporters while alleging big tech censorship based on left-wing accusations. Borysenko confirms her "WalkAway" group's ban despite peaceful protests, and Malice argues the Constitution is weaponized against conservatives in a Maoist "soft war." The guests detail severe personal costs like no-fly lists and doxxing, concluding that intellectual self-segregation from major platforms is now necessary as the situation worsens before improving. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, that a lot of us are getting put on no fly lists that were, I would say just present at this event.
And I'd like to reiterate the fact that I was not somehow involved in these activities.
I was there reporting.
But unfortunately, you know, this has become such a serious reaction.
And in some ways, rightfully so, you would expect the government to lay a heavy hand on people who breach a federal building.
But we're seeing them even, you know, not the government come down on reporters, but big tech has taken a step outside of the government.
And they've essentially taken it further than what the law wants to take.
And they are now deleting, censoring, and blocking journalists, even my own personal profiles that just had pictures of my dog, my wife, and my recently deceased mother.
You know, nothing political of nature.
They've just removed all of the traces of me off their platforms based off of false accusations by very far-left bloggers that work for Mashable, BuzzFeed, the Daily Beast.
So, unfortunately, while I would expect this to be the government crackdown, we're seeing the alignment of the state and the media together into like a state media run technocracy.
And they are using this as a catalyst to destroy every single person they possibly can, including
the president.
And I don't think anyone's safe, including the fact that they're using this to get a
lot of us not to be able to fly ever again, treating reporters, journalists and those
documenting as terrorists.
It's a really sad day in our country.
I'm not scared.
I'm overwhelmed, though, not just for my own future, but for the future of the country.
I also didn't touch any federal property besides my feet on the floor.
I did not meddle with anything.
I did not tamper with any evidence.
And in fact, Nancy Pelosi's offices are a very large swath, I want to clarify, of like
10 different chambers.
I never entered in her personal area.
And ultimately speaking, this is where the police pushed us back into.
And to bring this up, I have a federal congressional press credential.
And so I literally have the legal authority to operate inside of Congress, though I know they broke in.
I believe the newsworthiness under the, uh, you know, the act that was meant to protect journalists was very important to let America know what was happening.
The police inside the Congressional building were understanding of my credentials and they worked with me.
When they arrested the people around me, they did not arrest me and they let me leave because they knew I was documenting the news.
And it's really scary to see that just because my personal political affiliations and opinions are against the mainstream of what's considered tolerable, meaning I still believe in the Constitution and freedom of speech, somehow now I'm getting scapegoated as some procurer of this violence.
When in reality, if I wasn't there, a lot of the world probably wouldn't have known at least as quickly what was actually happening.
Well, I guess so, and I didn't even go in the building.
I showed up significantly after Elijah did.
When I came up to the Capitol, first off, I want to emphasize, there was supposed to be a scheduled rally at the Capitol after Trump's speech, which is why I went, and which is why a lot of other people went.
And when I approached the Capitol, it was already a giant mass of people with tens of thousands.
It looked like a normal rally.
It did not actually click for me that something was going on until I was way, way into the crowd and I saw tear gas being shot at them, but I did not go into the building.
I looked around outside of the building.
I recorded what I could outside of the building, but I guess I won't be flying anytime soon.
All right, Malice, I know that you'd rather that I say mean things about you and troll you and the rest of it, but I'm going to say something nice about you, which is that you usually are ahead of the schedule on a lot of this stuff.
And you wrote a book called The New Right, which I've read and I had you on the show to discuss.
You've basically predicted kind of all of Everything that's happened over the last couple of years.
How are you feeling about life right now?
And I should note that you are in lockdown Brooklyn, because I'm in lockdown LA.
It's like, at least my weather's nice, but you chose Brooklyn.
I'm just curious, what's it going to take for conservatives to realize that the Constitution is a joke, that the constitutional protections are going to do nothing to help you, that they are going to come for your guns regardless of the Second Amendment.
They're going to ban peaceful assembly regardless of the First Amendment.
And you're protecting a document which is empowering this state to do things like what you're seeing.
It's really ridiculous to me that conservatives still uphold this document when it's just being used as a tool of oppression nationwide.
Now to their point earlier, the cathedral wasn't going down without a fight, and by cathedral I mean the arbiters of what is acceptable establishment discourse in America.
They are going to have to.
Do everything in their power to suppress and marginalize these alternative perspectives because the only way they can maintain any sort of control is effectively as a near monopoly.
So this is an enormous existential threat to their hegemony over our culture.
And I'm trying to think of it from their perspective.
How would I try to marginalize or silence 70 million Trump voters,
and let's suppose other people who are sympathetic to that or think they're just good from both sides,
and I don't see how you do it.
Because historically, I'm just gonna finish my last point.
Historically, the left has said somewhat correctly that rioting is the voice of the unheard.
Well, when you silence tens of million people from social media and tell them to sit down
and shut up and go home, and you make it a felony for them to leave their house
or to earn a living, this is not a recipe for uniting and heal the nation.
All right, so as a guy that's been to North Korea, you know a little something about authoritarian states.
Sure.
Are these the pieces?
Without being crazy alarmist and the rest of it, I try not to whip everybody up into a frenzy, but the pieces that we're seeing fall right now and the level of censorship and now no fly lists and the rest of it, are we headed there?
The thing is that people had this veneer of democracy Thinking that, oh, it's if I hate Joe Biden and I think he's a Chinese owned buffoon, if I hate Donald Trump and thinks he's a white supremacist Russian agent, why would I need to be governed by someone I despise?
This is the democratic model that people have been bought into since kindergarten.
And now people are starting to realize since 2020, especially with hashtag not my president, that the system does not make sense on any level.
And the difference between an insurrection and a resistance is whether there's corporate sponsorship.
And thankfully, conservatives have the scales taken from their eyes and have realized that corporate America is not their friend, and corporate America has been much more effective at imposing Maoism in America than the Chinese Communist Party ever dreamed of.
You mean when I open up Hulu and it only recommends Black Lives Matter things, or I open up YouTube and it recommends Black Lives Matter things, or pretty much every PlayStation and everywhere else?
I mean struggle sessions when you have to get together with, like that law school, I think it was Northwestern, And declare that I am a racist.
This is a cultural artifact of Mao, and North Korea has it as well.
And people need to realize this isn't a joke, that this has been a soft war, and now this war is hardening, as especially the weakness of the empire has been exposed.
When you have someone who's cast from Burning Man able to storm the Capitol and slap his member on Pelosi's desk with no pushback, This is not the sign of an empire at the height of its powers.
And if you think someone who craps his pants at the vice president's desk for eight years is going to be the one who's going to be able to resolve this, I think you're completely delusional.
Elijah, since you were there at the Capitol, and there's all sorts of weird video coming out.
I played a video yesterday on the show where it appeared there were literally thousands of Trump supporters at one point chanting to stop a guy who they were saying was Antifa from breaking into a window.
Now we know plenty of Trump supporters went into the building.
Nobody's denying that and that, you know, offices were ransacked and whatever else.
But can you just talk a little bit about like the general temperature that was there?
And was there a moment that you saw things go crazy?
And it almost looked at times like police were actually welcoming people into the building and moving barricades out of the way and waving people on and the rest of it.
Can you just clean it up a little bit from what you saw?
And this is going to probably piss off anybody who's watching this, whether you're on the left or the right.
I think the truth of what happened that day makes anybody who wants a narrative to fit their perfect agenda probably angry, and I'm okay doing that.
So let's take a couple people off.
You know, number one, I want to say that the original altercation of tearing down barriers, people like to say that that was due to a man having a heart attack.
I can't confirm that.
And police not getting involved and people getting angry.
What I saw was a large group of very buff, aggressive young Caucasian men, and they looked
like your normal Trump supporters.
They did not have the physique that you would experience from anarchists.
These were people I was marching with up to the Capitol for a planned rally, not for some
sort of sedition or insurrection like Lindsey Graham is referring to.
I did notice that they were angry.
They were saying, "This is our house.
We live here.
We own this."
And they started ripping down the exterior barrier, which I believe was the fourth outer
barrier that there were no police actively guarding.
They made it to a second barrier as they went inside.
It's not like, it's like, whatever, going in.
Uh, and they, police basically thought the people would just stop, but they started pushing the barriers of which one of the gates, I, I, from my footage, I believe hit one of the officers in the head, a female officer, almost knocking her unconscious.
This was the first major injury I saw of a police officer.
She was stunned and couldn't get up.
Police began to fight with the Trump supporters.
This is when there was about a few dozen already, people carrying Trump flags.
I know people say these are Antifa.
I will say this, while I don't have confirmation of who these individuals were, I do remember on Parler, Proud Boys were saying they would dress up incognito like Antifa from Taylor Hanson and some other journalists.
And I will say that there was at least two people that were confirmed from BLM and Antifa But of the 12 people have sent me have been able to debunk 10 out of 12 of them As not being from those groups and to kind of speed this up Police were so firmly and fully unprepared for what was about to occur that essentially Essentially what happened was is that they began to fight the police up front it turned into serious altercations and police were cordoned in the middle of Uh, and the Trump supporters essentially broke through the sides of the front line of the police, breaking through, uh, actually maneuvering through the rafters that were meant for the inauguration on the upper balcony, and then pushed their way past police, breaking open quite a few windows, and it appeared to be like breaking open doors.
When I actually arrived at the front of the Capitol building, there were still aides.
In their offices evacuating, people holding fire extinguishers at the door, having their doors barricaded.
I mean, it was a complete emergency.
The people inside were extremely terrified.
And my only point is, is that it seemed like once the people got inside, the area I went to, they literally beat through the cops to get through.
People don't like me saying that.
They beat up the cops.
But in another area that I went to, another door, as I was documenting the groups, Police were actually letting people in.
So there was both of that going on.
In some entrances, police just like welcomed the people in and took selfies with them.
And some of them pulled out guns, live ammunition, batons, were beating them up.
And I saw a lot of Trump supporters get into serious melees, some of which I've seen at other events before.
So these were not Antifa, these are people's faces I've recognized from right-wing events.
And I think, you know, to put the blame on anybody, I would say, To try to blame this all on Antifa is intellectually dishonest.
And a lot of the people pushing those lies are just grifters.
I mean, the entire job of the corporate press is to train blue-pilled people on how to perceive and emotionally respond to various events that they see.
On their screens and so forth.
So I'm not surprised in the slightest.
This is their role.
And I disagree a little bit with Carlin.
It's like she makes the point that for five years they were called every name in the book, you know, Nazi, white supremacists, whatever.
And I think there's still a little bit of expectation on some people on the right that, well, I didn't go in the building so I could expect to be treated fairly.
Why?
Why would you expect a group of people who want you dead but will settle for your submission to treat you with any kind of decency where your existence is a threat to their domination and control.
They will do everything in their power to marginalize you and ruin you.
And you have to start with that as the point.
And any expectation to the contrary, I don't think ports to reality.
I mean, I think everyone's looking at people like us going, okay, you guys are sort of the public face of what we're dealing with privately, right?
Like, they're either stopping posting or a lot of people are deleting their accounts.
I mean, literally in the last two days, I've lost 10,000 Twitter followers.
It's not that suddenly people don't like me.
It's accounts that are being banned or just nuked, whatever it is.
But do you have any plans?
Like, what do you think about this idea that Michael's thrown out there of this sort of intellectual segregation and we just got to take care of ourselves and maybe just get off all of these things, these big platforms?
You know, I think that we all just stay on as long as we can.
And I agree with with Michael and the fact that, you know, I want to reiterate two sides of this.
The Trump supporters that are denying that Trump supporters could do this, I mean, have you not heard the sentiments from people who follow Trump?
I mean, they are pissed!
They are upset!
I mean, they have been absolutely berated and dehumanized, de-personed, de-platformed.
The people they love have been completely obliterated off of any ability for them to access information.
They've been ostracized, oftentimes lost their jobs.
They've been alienated from families.
I mean, you know, we talk about all this and everyone agrees, yeah, that's how Trump supporters feel.
And then it's like, you don't believe that that could end badly?
That people could revolt?
How did the revolution happen?
How did these things occur?
Which is where people gave criticisms to me that, oh, you use the term revolutionaries, you were supporting a revolution or a coup.
I said, no.
When you're in a group of people that are chanting revolution, And many of which were calling for the termination of life of some Congress members.
That's not a popular thing to say.
I voted for Trump.
I don't want to believe that people are, you know, around me or try to make anyone look bad.
I don't do that on the left either.
I don't go to a left-wing rally and try to make BLM look bad.
I just take people what they say and I put it out there and I'm saying, people are angry.
And when they look at us being taken down, it's not just the figureheads, they're being taken down too.
And I think that the tech companies are not realizing the damage this is going to do because, you know, I do have to watch a lot of things that I might say because I have to follow tech guidelines.
But if you push people like they did to Alex Jones into Band.Video, where he's on his own servers, well, I think his rhetoric actually gets more extreme.
It gets more unhinged and it gets more out of control.
And I think what they're doing is creating They're creating a greater enemy than they're actually preventing and they're taking normal people who have traditional right-wing views like myself who work a normal job reporting that are out there and they make us seem to be like we're complicit in some terroristic activities that we are evil people.
But Michael, I'm not, I'm not saying that Alex is more extreme than these people.
I'm saying that they're saying, oh, we need to hold these people accountable.
So the best way we can hold them accountable is to then boot them off of the public forum.
Oh, I and then I'm saying that I'm saying that.
Actually, the people they're booting saying we're too extreme are actually very respectful of their guidelines and of their rules, which makes you question why are we still even respectful?
Why are we operating in these platforms?
Because, realistically speaking, they operate in these platforms with complete immunity.
Yeah, believe me, the amount of people that have wrote me, even public people, saying they want to kill my wife, they want to kill me, pee on our graves, terrible things.
Are their accounts down?
No.
You shut down DC, called for violence in DC in the Capitol.
Is their count?
That's a Black Lives Matter group.
Are they shut down?
No.
I'm just saying that my point is, is not that they're not under different rules, but it's just that as they push people offline, then they complain, oh, now everybody's talking unhinged on Parler.
And it's like, well, why is everyone on Parler?
It's because you've pushed people off your platforms and then you're complaining that you don't have control of them anymore.
Well, now you realize you're just tyrants.
You're not looking for peace on your platform.
You're looking to control all conversation in all of society.
I'm an anarchist, which means I'm for peace and for freedom of association.
And I agree that you have to fight where you can, but you should expect that they are going to ratchet up the blocking and banning of people as much as possible.
And it's the same thing if you have a fire extinguisher.
You know, if I get kicked off of Facebook, if I get kicked off of YouTube, this is why I do have my locals and other kind of outlets, because you have to expect that they're not going to go down without a fight.
And anyone who is a threat to their monopoly control of discourse Carlin, what are you hearing just from regular people?
And I will say that Ravelry, I actually had a knitting group that I recently created on Ravelry called Crafting Rebels.
And my knitting group has been banned on Ravelry as of yesterday with no explanation.
So the knitters are still at it.
But no, I have been inundated with emails and messages from people basically saying that they had the same experience at the Capitol that I did, that they did not realize that there was violence.
They did not realize what was going on.
They were sitting around having a good time.
and peacefully expressing their first amendment rights and they are floored at what's happening.
No, I'm not surprised at all actually because I firmly believe that if BLM
or if anybody had been in this situation, right, if it had been a white cop
shooting an unarmed black woman inside, even if she was invading,
this would have been the idea of, look, the state from the highest level down
is destroying our lives.
The narrative, I don't understand it fully, but the narrative would have been different.
The reason why even after condemning this, what's shocking to me about the reaction to this
is that this is not really any less severe.
Than anything I've experienced over the last nine months across the entire year almost of 2020.
I've seen much worse than this.
That's all I'll say.
I've seen much worse than this.
And I've seen much less condemnation.
The best example is Kenosha.
Kenosha was a terrorist attack on domestic soil.
They burned down and destroyed over 36 buildings.
They destroyed tens of millions of dollars of personal property.
They were pulling out guns, they were destroying so much public property you can't even fathom, and they were burning down apartment buildings with children inside.
This is how intense it was.
And what did the final narrative come from Kenosha?
It's the debate about whether Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist or not.
Nobody debates about the terrorist attack that happened on domestic soil.
Nobody cares.
The argument is just about the narrative of this one kid and these shootings that took place on, you know, a few days after all the violence began.
And so I don't want to hear it from people.
You know, they don't care that we condemn the violence.
That's what the right wing or the conservatives don't understand.
You can't remedy your position on this.
You can't be right, because it's not a game set up to where you can ever win.
They will always be right because they control the institutions.
We will always be wrong.
And as we cow-toe back and try to pretend like we try to, you know, create these, you know, press releases and try to explain our stance, in the end, we just end up looking weak to our base.
Well, at the same time showing the left, they actually have more power to weaken and destroy our stance.
And if you condemned or you condoned this event, you're gonna be persecuted either way.
Malice, I couldn't see you because we had the camera just on Elijah, but I have a feeling you were like praising God as he was talking right there, because that's your whole point, right?
The whole point of protesting, this is AOC, I agree with everything Elijah just said, and I'm delighted that so many people on the right are realizing stop apologizing, stop trying to fight on a turf that you cannot possibly win.
support often starts small and grows. To folks who complain, protest demands, make
others uncomfortable, that's the point. I agree with everything Elijah just said
and I'm delighted that so many people on the right are realizing stop apologizing,
stop trying to fight on a turf that you cannot possibly win.
These people are not playing fair. They just want your submission if they can
have that.
If not, they will just do everything they can to destroy your life as being a threat to their power.
And I'm shocked by how many conservatives who I'd written off as almost entirely delusional have become aware of this new reality.
And I'm sure these lockdowns certainly helped open their eyes to a large extent.
Yeah, I mean, I have been denounced by every single one of my former friends in the last 24 hours.
And you know what?
I kind of reached a breaking point with all of this.
When I was at a, like, when I was peacefully expressing my First Amendment rights to be denounced by every single person who used to call me a friend, I just started responding with, I got chased by a mob of Black Lives Matter in Dallas several months ago.
Where were you then?
If you don't show me the receipts of you denouncing that, then I do not care what you have to say.
Yeah, and Greta Thunberg always says, how dare you?
But I honestly love that quote, because it's like, how dare you to the media to talk about me being Sympathetic with people being, you know, violent in cases where, you know, people don't want violence to occur.
I mean, I'm a victim of constant political violence.
I'm in the midst of every single one of these things and the media has never come to my aid, never cared when I've been attacked, never written anything about when I've had guns pointed at my head or I've been jumped, I've gotten a concussion, I've gotten my leg broken by the Department of Homeland Security in Portland last year.
And the most important part about all of this is that The media has been completely silent and they haven't cared.
I mean, the amount of death threats that are in my life right now and the FBI, speaking of that, probably will be contacting me soon, maybe, but they already have been contacting me because there's been, you know, active assassination attempts in Washington D.C.
Where were the politicians talking about In condemning the political violence of people trying to kill right-wing journalists or conservative journalists.
They didn't care, because they actually want me dead, I believe that.
They're happy when I get beat up.
If they can't hurt me into submission, then they will be happy if someone else kills me into submission.
Because ultimately speaking, right now they are messaging my family, they're messaging my friends, my church.
It is so disgusting to the extent that these professionals have gone to, to completely destroy and defame my life.
They should be ashamed of themselves, and I'm glad I believe in God, unlike Michael, because hell needs to exist for people like this.
Malice, I'm gonna let you close it out, but I'll just say on my front, beyond like the personal stuff and losing friends and even family members that are angry at me, I mean, I've got cameras in every freaking room in my house.
We've got huge fences outside of my house that we just expanded.
Like, I've been doxed and all of that crazy stuff.
If I can use this word, I'm the biggest pussy of us four.
I've been choosing my battles.
I have not been in the front lines.
Thank you to you guys for taking the shots, but coming from being born in Russia, being raised in a Russian household, I'm very aware of what people are capable of, what people with a little bit of power will be willing to do with those who threaten them in the slightest.
And it's very unfortunate that people like Elijah and Carlin, as Americans, are starting to learn the consequences of what it means when power has no restrictions.
I think that there's hope when we reach rock bottom because that gives people a chance to build back up again.
I think that if there's blessings in everything, right, you can always look at things negatively or you can look at them positively.
And I think that we can look at this situation and see that a giant light has been shown for a lot of people to reflect the things that Michael's been talking about for a very long time.