Dave Rubin hosts Elijah Schaffer and Amala Ekpunobi to dissect the BLM riots, with Schaffer predicting imminent violence after the Derek Chauvin trial and alleging police restraint in Brooklyn Center and Los Angeles. Ekpunobi labels BLM a terrorist organization responsible for black deaths, accusing progressive leaders of fueling racial tensions to dismantle law enforcement and the judiciary. Both guests assert that mainstream media and elites manipulate events to promote defunding police and socialism, citing the Chicago shooting and Kyle Rittenhouse trial as evidence of deliberate chaos designed to maintain power through division. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm the PragerU personality, so PragerU sort of put out a casting call to find people who were giving conservative takes online, and I ended up being the winner of that casting call, so I'm coming at you from the PragerU office in L.A.
Like we know, we have pre-warning of riots, even though we're in the midst of riots right now.
Amala, what would you say is sort of the general temperature right now?
It's sort of, you know, if you looked on Twitter, and I know that's not the greatest place to figure out the temperature of anything, half the people sort of think, oh, this is just the usual stuff.
And then the other half are like, oh, the revolution is here.
I'd say compared to where we were last year, we're sort of at a simmering point in comparison, but I think when that Chauvin trial ends, we're going to head over to a boiling point and we're going to see more of those peaceful protests that we got last year.
Yeah, it actually does make a lot of sense because it's all about narrative and spinning, you know, whatever you want the populace to perceive these events as.
And that's really important because, you know, unfortunately, I feel kind of bad for myself and a lot of reporters who risk their lives to expose the events last year, because when we were talking about Basically, all the danger that we went through, all the injuries that we underwent, and we go, it didn't really do anything.
I mean, it red-pilled some people, but unfortunately the corporate media decided that those riots are going to go back into some, I don't know, they're going to delete them or something like that.
It's as if it never happened.
And that's what they're trying to do with this.
I mean, you look at all of the great video clips that are out there online right now, showing what's actually happening in Minneapolis.
They're not coming out of CNN.
They're not coming out of MSNBC.
These are coming out of independent reporters with 600 followers on Twitter.
Those are the people actually showing you the truth of what's really going on.
Meanwhile, even CNN got called out.
One of the protesters interrupted and was like, why aren't you in the front lines?
Why are you over here reporting?
Like, what are you doing?
And we know why, because they're intentionally trying to downplay what's actually happening.
I think we were just delusional for a while there and I think it's a really easy narrative to fall into.
I was told from a very young age that by virtue of being born a black woman that I was somehow a victim in this country and life was gonna be harder for me and it's a very easy narrative to fall for because you don't have to take accountability for your actions and I think that's what a lot of people are falling for right now in this country and that's what makes Black Lives Matter such a powerful organization.
Yeah, what do you think when you see the big story this week that apparently is being censored on Facebook?
The head of Black Lives Matter, she's bought something like $4 million worth of houses, I think five different houses in a couple of different states in the last couple of years.
And she was just on an interview that's been going around on Twitter where she basically was like, well, I have no problem with it because I'm using that money and those houses for my family.
And it's like, yeah, that's what we all do with money.
Yeah, Elijah, since you are often out there, do you, can you kind of pinpoint when these things are happening, when it goes over the edge, like that it starts seemingly somewhat peaceful and correct me if I'm wrong, that usually it seems to me there's like a moment where it's sort of peaceful at the beginning and then, but every time it goes over either by design or just entropy or whatever you want to call it.
So we've actually created several stages of a protest and how it develops into a riot.
And it's kind of interesting, and I'm sure a lot of your viewers would like to realize that most of these events start out pretty innocuous, and that's stage one, which is the gathering point.
And this is what the media tends to focus on.
This is the point when you'll see HuffPost, you'll see Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, Vox out there covering stage one, interviewing people that are dressed kind of bizarrely.
And it ends up just being an amalgamation of mentally ill people, usually angry people, and often disadvantaged people with IQ, it appears, by their later behavior that come together.
And, you know, diverse group of people, very diverse.
Then stage two, what happens, that's when the chanting starts happening.
They end up coming together with their Black Lives Matter chants.
You feel the energy rising.
This might also be them marching, kind of becoming coordinated.
Stage three is what's really dangerous.
Stage three is the first time that a law is broken.
And this is a very pivotal point in any protest.
So after stage two is usually when the mainstream media stops recording or they get back in their vans and they leave.
And that's what you see on the Internet.
Stage three is where I like to have my fun.
That could be a brick thrown.
It could be them calling an unlawful assembly and people deciding to stay past the curfew.
And at stage four is when after that first law is broken, it encourages people to start committing more crimes.
So people, this is a groupthink in the left.
They're enabled by other people's actions, just like you get a donut for getting your little vaccine shot and you have to have some sort of childhood reward to get something.
They feel enabled.
And at stage four is when it becomes and it spreads to where it becomes dangerous to even report on it.
And stage five is the actual riot.
So once Once the chaos spreads, it becomes the standard of the event, and that's usually when police lose control.
If police can't stop it at stage four, then they lose control of the city.
Yeah, Elijah, you do realize that the Media Matters trolls watch this show, and you just said stage three, that's where I have my fun when they throw a brick through the window.
You see what you've done to all of us, the headache that we're gonna have for the rest of the day?
I have my fun doing the job that journalists are supposed to be doing, but they're not.
I think it's fun to say to billion-dollar corporations that with a cell phone in my hand or, you know, $1,500 camera, that I and many, many other people that are awesome that are out there are doing a much better job than these corporations.
Amala, I have to ask you the stupid sort of identity politics question, because I feel like there's gonna be a certain amount of people watching this going, wait a minute, how can a black woman not think that BLM and Antifa are right or the rest of it?
Like, what kind of blowback do you get in terms of that?
Yeah, that's actually a really important factor there.
So, the media starts to gaslight for violence in advance, right?
Reuters says that the summation of the greatest police misconduct trial we've ever seen in decades, that's a key phrase, in decades, aka The reaction to this should be monumental to something that we haven't seen in decades, right?
And what happens in these areas is the police actually stand down.
And I always wondered that, too.
This is on a personal level.
When you're seeing Brooklyn Center and it's like, on day three, they're like, we're sending in more National Guard.
You go, why were the National Guard not deployed en masse the first night?
Why as the most powerful country in the world do we not have the ability and the capability to police our own cities when we can spend millions of dollars bombing Middle Eastern countries and coordinating global wars, can we not somehow have coordinated law enforcement At a local level.
And, you know, a lot of this comes down to the fact that the police there get their hands tied by city officials who want this, what's called non-interventional or non-intervention, non-interaction to de-escalate by not getting involved.
Just last night at a BLM protest in Los Angeles, a video reporter named Kaylin Dalmeda for Scriber News was badly assaulted in front of 40 police officers I counted on the live stream.
They gave him a concussion, they tried to steal his phone, they beat him up into the
side of a wall, and all the police stood by and watched.
And why is that?
That's not because the officers themselves are bad men and women.
It's because the cities themselves somehow allow narrative to get in the way of what
they were meant to do, which is to serve and protect the people.
And I believe that the officers are frustrated.
In these cities like Seattle and in Minneapolis, they have a shortage of officers.
They are not being allowed to do their jobs, and we have to hold those politicians accountable that are stopping them.
And I spend a lot of time on social media, and you can see how all these platforms are sort of propagating these stories and shoving them down people's throat.
They're ready for the rage, and they're ready to push this false narrative so that when this trial ends, we see the riots.
And I know that people on social media are ready for this to happen.
They released a report on Twitter today talking about how there were several police officers in the U.S.
and sheriff's departments who had donated to the Kyle Rittenhouse trial in his defense.
And why all of a sudden, during all this talk of Black Lives Matter and police brutality, is this report now coming out?
So I know that they're fueling up the American people for these protests and for these riots.
And it's crazy how high it goes, because I'm sure you guys saw the statement that Obama issued on Twitter, you know, talking about Dante Wright, you know, another young black man being killed.
Now, nobody wants Dante Wright to be dead, but the simple fact is we showed the video several times this week.
I mean, he did resist arrest.
Now that's not excusing what that 26 year veteran female police officer did, whether she made a mistake or it was negligent or intentional or whatever it is, but he did resist arrest.
But Obama doesn't even put that in the statement, like as if he's trying to instigate this stuff too.
It's insane to me that we spin these narratives as if these people were simply killed for their skin color or that there was no prior altercation with the police or that they weren't trying to resist or evade arrest.
We were looking at reports from 2019 Where 19 unarmed black men were shot and killed by police officers.
If you go through those reports and look at each of those individual crimes, nearly all of them were trying to evade or resist arrest.
And that is a common factor in a lot of these situations.
Nobody wants to address it because if they address that elephant in the room, they have to speak to a larger truth about the black community.
Right, and speaking of things that we're not allowed to address, you know, last night they released this video of this 13-year-old kid being shot in Chicago, and they were like teasing it out, like, the video's coming, everybody, so let's get ready to go crazy.
I mean, that's literally what Twitter was basically doing in their moment section, like, we know something bad's coming.
But then I even saw something like, I saw Andrew Yang, who I've had on the show, who I think is a decent person, but he even tweeted out, you know, basically cops killing another unarmed young black man, And it's like, if you look at the video, he's got a gun.
He had a gun at one point.
He's not, that's not unarmed.
He may not have had at that moment, but again, it's just this like muddled truth.
I mean, the question in that, in that case of Toledo, the 13 year old boy who was, who was shot is, you know, nobody's asking the question, why did a 13 year old have a handgun?
And that's the question we should be asking ourselves.
These issues, not just systemic based off of race, but also based off of socioeconomic class.
which can be tied to race. And also the problem is, this is in Chicago, Dave, Chicago, where kids
are killed by gang members all the time. Now, this doesn't mean that we can't look at each
individual situation or try to understand this case, but it's like for the mayor to pretend like
she somehow suddenly cares about the death of a young black man when in these neighborhoods,
this is happening sometimes in the dozens per weekend.
And the point is, is that this is like what we saw last year, where they had the Ahmaud Arbery case, where they were trying to stoke racial tensions.
It didn't really pick up what they needed for the election.
Then the George Floyd was the golden ticket.
And the question that people always ask is, why do they want riots?
And it's a simple answer.
These people, the left, the elites, will allow anything or use any method that allows them to grab power and to push their agenda.
And they've used these to do a lot to demonize the right.
I mean, the Capitol riots, they called me a propagandist for saying that looked like police let people in.
And then the New York Times releases an article just two days ago saying, The Capitol Police were told to stand down and not use their riot procedures.
Why did that happen?
And you go, well, we saw why people might have wanted, I can't prove this, but some people might have wanted violence at the Capitol because they got the President de-platformed.
They could, you know, demonize all the right-wingers, QAnon crazy insurrectionists.
These people will allow people to die if it means pushing their agenda, and it's sick.
So 30 people were shot in Chicago this past weekend alone.
Three were fatally shot.
You're not gonna hear Lori Lightfoot talk about any of those people.
Nobody's gonna talk about that on CNN or MSNBC, because obviously it doesn't fit the narrative.
But speaking of the narrative, Amala, when...
Again, this is the stupid identity politics version of this, but I truly believe that Trump was making incredible inroads in the black community for whatever worth that phrase has.
And we know that black male support, I think doubled.
I think female support almost doubled.
Do you sense that, like the feeling right now is kind of maybe that's going backwards because of all the rioting and everything else that people are kind of getting sucked back into this, what I would say is a blue and on conspiracy theory.
I think there was a lot of good things happening in this past administration for black people.
You can look at the prison reform.
You can look at the funding of historically black colleges.
You could look at the black unemployment rate.
And now suddenly we want to push this narrative that somehow black people are systemically oppressed in this country, which is a narrative of which I don't agree on.
And I agree with you when you say that it's just to garner support for the left and they will push whatever narrative it takes.
They will harm these communities in whatever way, shape or form that they see fit.
in order to garner their support without actually looking at the real issues.
We're not looking at the gang violence that you mentioned.
We're not looking at the regressive Black culture.
And we're not looking at the lack of parental advisement in Black communities.
And especially when we talk about that 13-year-old boy, Toledo, I read today that he was missing for two days from his
household.
And his parents had not reported a single thing.
And that speaks to a larger issue.
So the left wants to talk about police brutality, but they don't want to talk about the real issues facing
the Black community.
And we were making strides in that before, and it has completely stopped.
I try to be optimistic about what we can do, but we are sort of in a deep, dark hole when it comes to being a conservative on this issue.
The left has built this sort of structural idea of oppression that is so deeply embedded in the black community and people of color that it is very hard to use facts and logics and reason to talk them out of it.
And I think we just need to see examples of black people who are going against the culture.
And the left wants to act like they are the revolution, they are the counterculture.
Right, they're the counterculture while they have every corporation and every institution behind them.
It's, it's quite amazing.
Um, Elijah, have you ever gone back to some of the cities after the destruction and talk to business owners, you know, people, community leaders, things like that about what it's like after, you know, the three day, three days of destruction and then people, you know, media just forgets about it.
In fact, I'm actually going to be going back to Kenosha, uh, this, this Saturday.
Which is where the Kyle Rittenhouse situation unfolded.
And I want to bring that up as an example.
And I've actually been in the area twice already and I'm going back to talk to some people.
And I've been discussing with some of the shop owners and whatnot what life's like.
Is that from Kenosha, what people remember is Kyle Rittenhouse and not the fact that Black Lives Matter burned down several city blocks and destroyed a city.
And that's what is the problem with the aftermath.
Is when you look at a city like Kenosha, a small city, a working class city, mixed race, pretty diverse between white and black.
You go there, it looks like your middle of America town.
And you see that people, I mean, the city got overrun.
They were burning down apartment buildings with kids inside.
I'm not joking.
People were pushing kids out of windows and stuff.
They beat up an old man inside of his own shop and then burned his shop down, almost killing him.
I mean, this is the brutality.
It's terrorism.
When you wake up the next morning and you see that the media is focused on an alleged white supremacist that there's no ties to, he has no ties to these things, and they've turned this whole media narrative about white supremacy, I think that's what hurts these towns the most.
And then when they realize that they don't get the support from the state, they don't get the support from the government, and they're left with the damage, with the brokenness, with the lives lost, the livelihoods lost.
I held a man, a grown man in his 50s, Who just was weeping because he lost, he had a family business that was lost in a night that he was around for 50 years.
And so it's like, these are real people that are being affected by this.
These are real lives.
These are Americans.
And the media is so sickly bent on narrative and so bent on doing this.
And I'm going to tell you the reason why they're gaslighting a lot of this, like people ask why they push the black victim card and then also attack white people is because They're trying to get us to react.
They want all white right wing people to be like, hey, white people aren't bad.
And they want to get us to keep defending white people.
So we're obsessed with race and identity politics.
And they're trying to bait us into their reactionary message so that when the time comes and they do their next riot, they can dismiss all of us because they're like, oh, don't listen to those guys.
Those are racist white supremacists.
They're always defending white people.
So they're trying to bait white people into this, like defending their race card so they can keep manipulating the narrative on these riots and using them.
It's un-American, it's unpatriotic, it's inhumane, and it's diabolically evil.
And the people that are doing this are beyond corrupt.
I would say that they are acting as enemies of the people, not in a violent way, but they are actively working against our country.
This isn't a racial issue.
This isn't whites or blacks.
These evil people are all sexual orientations, race, and gender.
And you know what, they need to be taken out of office.
We need term limits in Congress.
And that's how I think we could solve a lot of these issues.
Okay, so to go off that though, Amala, when you see Your former side, my former side, but really, they've completely gone off the deep end, so it's hard for me to even remember that they were my former side.
But when you see Rashida Tlaib and AOC and the rest of them talk about how, it's not that we should just defund the police, we should basically destroy, there should be no police force, there should be no incarceration.
It is a fundamental, I mean, they fundamentally, they wanna pack the courts, I mean, they fundamentally wanna destroy this thing, At some point, it seems to me they're in a violation of their oath of office.
They're virtually trying to deconstruct the American governance and how it was created and what we've been founded on.
And funny enough, when I was working on the left, which was not too long ago, probably three or so years ago, we were working on campaigns and doing community organizing around defunding the police and sort of instating what they call community policing, which obviously bears no logic and would never work.
But they are essentially trying to tear down all these American institutions of which have served us for centuries.
So I don't know where we're going to go from here.
But like you said before, the goalpost continues to move, especially for white people.
Now it's not enough to just not commit racist acts or to say, hey, I'm not racist.
I view everybody equally and I judge you based on your merit and character.
Now you have unconscious bias or racism that you're not aware of.
And even as I try to speak out and challenge this narrative, I get told that I've internalized racism and that I am somehow supporting these racist institutions.
So the goalpost moves and there's really no way to dig yourself out of the hole that we are in.
I was just driving through downtown Dallas, which was a victim of a bad victim of the George Floyd riots immediately after the video came out last year.
What I noticed is something that I didn't see last year is that at the main entrances into the downtown area, there's sometimes up to like 15 to 17 police units.
And there's standby vans.
I mean, cities are on alert.
And, you know, we should take this stuff very seriously.
And I went to actually I actually did go to a protest.
I did go to a protest in Dallas over the weekend where they were kicking over tables, you know, in the name of peace and justice and just yelling at people eating dinner.
And there's one thing that I noticed that this small protest,
there was like two police helicopters tracking the unit.
So I mean, when a city like Dallas, one of the largest cities in America,
is taking something small very seriously, this means that the intelligence community
and law enforcement knows something that I think we all know,
is that planned and sustained violence is very possible and probable in our near future.
These could be the worst riots we've seen in history.
I'm not gaslighting to then say it will happen.
God forbid it.
I hope that it that it does not happen.
I hope that cities do take control.
But when this deliberation happens, if we do not have National Guard deployed in our in every major city in the United States, that's going to be a red flag.
And then secondly, when we've seen things like in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Rochester, it is not violence is not sustained just in large cities.
Middle, mid-cities, mid-towns around America.
Brace yourselves.
Call your city council members.
Call your congressmen.
Ask them.
Make sure that they know what potentially could happen and protect your community.
Let them know the importance of preparing and bracing for what may be in our near future and play your part.
Don't just let your city burn.
Don't just let your town fall.
Make sure that your people in office are aware because they may not be getting the same sources you have.
They may be also Democrat and they may be listening to the mainstream media.
Let your politicians know to prepare your cities for the possibility of very, very bad chaotic violence after the deliberations of the Chauvin trial.
Yeah, man, listen, as alarmist as that sounds, it actually doesn't sound that alarmist to me.
It's like we all know this really bad thing is about to happen, and it got ramped up by the Dante Wright situation, it got ramped up by the situation in Chicago, and now it's like we've got the big one just sitting there, and it seems like nobody's going to do anything.
So, Amal, I'll give you last word.
Do you think there's anything we can do?
I mean, literally in the next couple of days, is there anything that calmer, cooler head people can do to ease some of this stuff?
Unfortunately, I sort of agree with what you said earlier.
I think we're gonna have to gear up for what's about to come.
We have a lot of large forces against us, and as much as we can hop online and say, this is not the true narrative, this is falsehood, and they are selling this to you in an effort to make you violent, in an effort to throw gasoline on these fires, We just have to get ready for what's to come and keep challenging the narratives in our own lives, in our own communities, and hope that that somehow makes a difference.
And I have a feeling we'll have you both back because this conversation obviously isn't going anywhere.
So thank you, you guys.
We'll link to all your stuff right down below.
We're going to let you go.
I'm going to finish up for a minute or two with the good people of YouTube.
All right, guys.
So this is kind of where we're at.
You know, Elijah's warning there at the end.
It feels alarmist at some level, and then it's like, well, we know that this stuff is happening.
Like, why are we letting cities burn?
And why are we letting politicians say things that are so counter to the American experience?
I don't want to throw a gajillion people in jail.
I don't want cops to abuse people.
Or to kill people or any of those things, but we're not having the honest conversations about any of this.
We're not having the honest conversations about the amount of black people killed by cops versus white people killed by cops versus what behaviors lead to those things and resisting arrest and drug use and family and all of those things.
We're not really talking about any of that.
They have done an incredibly good job, and I think Elijah was hitting on this, the media, the progressives, the machine, the Twitter thing, all of that has done this incredible job at keeping the focus on that America is somehow fundamentally racist and that it is run by white supremacists and must be disassembled.
That's what they are trying to do.
That is what Rashida Tlaib wants to do.
That's what AOC wants to do.
My word for it, take their word for it.
As I keep calling back to, remember back to the primaries when our gay transportation secretary, now that that's what he is, just former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, little Barack Obama wannabe, sounds just like him.
There's a great video of Buttigieg and Obama side by side.
You can see they completely, like an acting class, got him to speak with his affect.
But anyway, he turns to Bernie and he says, you want to burn it all down.
I don't.
Well, Bernie sort of unleashed all of this stuff that America is evil, that socialism is better.
And by the way, I kept saying, I mean, you can find videos of mine from three, four years ago saying that the democratic socialists, they're gonna drop the Democrat part the second they can.
And in essence, they've completely unmasked themselves.
And they're basically saying, we are here, we are socialists, we are Marxists.
And we're also buying $1.4 million houses in Topanga Canyon with a 98.6% of the population that's white.
So anyway, how do I do it?
How do I get you guys to a decent place on a Friday for the weekend?
Well, I do it with this, which is just don't add fuel to the fire.
However you can, just don't add fuel to the fire.
But perhaps more importantly...
You know, know how to protect your family and your friends and your local community.
Maybe know your neighbors and try, perhaps, to get involved at the local level so that your community leaders are, you know, in charge of a police force that's gonna do the right thing.
Because, you know, as Elijah said, I actually feel a lot of sympathy for the cops that stand there and they don't know exactly what to do or they don't want to do anything because they don't want to get called racist.
And then what we have is all of these places burning and you can just go, I've traveled this country enough to know that we have tons of just boarded up things and it's half COVID and half this.
And it's really odd.
Where are the Trump people burning down buildings and everything else?
I'm not even gonna address the thing on the six for a second.
And Elijah made a point that now there's all of this evidence coming out that they told all the Capitol Hill police to stand down so people were just wandering in.
Doesn't excuse anyone that was doing anything violent, obviously.
But they were literally just ushering people in.
I mean, you can see videos of it, but okay.
But like, where are the Trump people burning cities down?
Like, know what this is and don't listen to the mainstream media anymore.
Just don't listen.
Jordan Peterson actually, he made a point on another podcast a few days ago that it's like, if you're under 30, no one's listening to the mainstream media anyway.