Robert and Cody Read Ben Shapiro's New Book

Robert and Cody Johnston sit down to read Ben Shapiro's latest non-fiction book, which seems to be based entirely on him not understanding how lions work.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh my goodness, it's behind the behind bastards podcasters Robert
Evans show that you're listening to. This was not a
good introduction.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Sophie Lichtman per show.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Yeah we're doing.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
You're making fun of me, Sophie, you're making fun of me,
laughing at me. Well, here to laugh at me more.
Cody Johnstone welcome, Yes, thank you so much, guest. Cody.
You are the host of news Comma Some More, a
podcast about news and also a YouTube show about news.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
I'm great, are you? Ah?

Speaker 2 (00:46):
No, no, everyone, no one's doing great. Come on, but
you gotta be pleasant, right. I was at a friend's
wedding the other week. He's like, how you doing? I
mean right now?

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Fine in general?

Speaker 4 (01:00):
Bad open bar uh huh good yeah outside maybe I
don't know. Yeah, I'm fine. We're all doing our best.
Things are weird and happening, and they're happening quickly and suddenly.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
In many ways they are.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
They're happening here. You could say the things that are
happening I could do. And one of the people who's
happening here is a friend of VARs you and me, Cody,
a friend of the Pods, a friend of our mutual
friend who we all miss right now. Katie stole by Katie.
Ben Shapiro, our buddy, our good comrade and.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
Co my band mate.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
He's my band Yeah yeah, you and Benefit rocking out,
Katie and you and I and also Sophie did a
long series of podcast episodes. We went through the entirety
of Ben Shapiro's unbelievably shoddy fiction novel. I mean, just
some of the absolute worst pros I think either of
us has ever encountered.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Real bad.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
It was bad enough that Ben is not written another
fiction novel since the rest of my knowledge.

Speaker 4 (02:04):
Here's the thing. I'm really upset. He announced he's had
this new book out. But I remember, like a year
or two ago, a few years ago, he said he
was working on a science fiction book.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yeah, I want to read that.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
Fucker. I want that, But don't do that. I don't
need your like.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Well, that's like a year of free content for me, Ben,
get it out.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
Give me the juice. Man.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
I know I'm late on my novel, Ben, but come on,
you don't have a real job.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yeah it off. Take time off.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
Oh my god. But we are doing a Ben Shapiro
book episode because on September second of this year, he
published his latest nonfiction novel, Lions and Scavengers, The True
Story of America and her Critics. That's in her critics
is yah parentheses at the very bottom and tiny deck.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
This is a fascinating choice for him. It seems like, so,
you know, like the Abundance book, we don't need to
talk about abundance or whatever, but that book, hm hmmm,
Firestorm on the Internet seem to be sort of written
in a way that was intending for like, well, and
then Kamala Harris will be the president and then this
book will come out. That didn't happen, and so it's

(03:13):
a the reaction was different. It's a whole other conversation
sort of happening.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
It's like sitting down with a friend to like tell
them that you're worried about like dental health while they're
actively bleeding out from arterial wound and you're like, yes,
I just really think you need to floss more, and oh, sorry,
you spurred it a little bit of that arterial blood
right on my neck here.

Speaker 4 (03:31):
But yeah, maybe rip the pages out of that book
and use them to like stop depleting or something. And
this book seems very like twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen coded.
It's like, what are you doing like doing this history
stuff again? Like what did the Trump administration do the
first time with their like projects about like what the
real history is, like how slavery didn't happen or whatever.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
Yeah, this is a weird book.

Speaker 4 (03:55):
I guess to come out now in my opinion, but
I haven't read it, so maybe it's actually perfect for
this moment.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
You know what it is.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
I'll tell you right now. We'll talk about this more.
Ben Shapiro desperately wishes.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
He were C. S.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Lewis, And you know, C. S Lewis talked about politics,
but in like a broader kind of philosophical sense, and
he was like a good writer, you know, and Ben
is not. And Ben is also obsessed with like petty
culture war grievances and shit.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Ben Shapiro, Yeah, Okay.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
This is him trying to like really establish himself as
a C. S. Lewis type thinker. And it's not good.
That's by short. But but we'll go through it because
I have actually quite a lot to say about. Most
of the introduction to this book is part one, So Cody,
you and I may be back repeatedly talking more about
this fair enough, so the five Yeah, yeah, yeah, well

(04:49):
we haven't We're not even getting through all of that.
But I think you will also get the gist of
his argument from this, because Ben being Ben, most of
this book is him just kind of repeating himself, right, right, Yeah.
It opens with an inscription. This is like the dedication
to the book to the lions. The l is capitalized,
the hunter's warriors and weavers, each of those words is capitalized.

(05:11):
Who build, defend, and maintain the greatest civilization and the
history of mankind. Against the scavengers. The s is capitalized.
Who would destroy that civilization from within?

Speaker 3 (05:20):
Right?

Speaker 2 (05:21):
And that's essentially the thesis of the book, right, is
that you've got lions and scavengers. That's all of society.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yeah, that's his whole thing.

Speaker 4 (05:29):
I can't wait to find out what he thinks is
a lion, what he thinks is a scavenger.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
And what's funny here is, first off, I know this
is petty, but I can't get over it, is that
we're just this whole book, the basic premise of this
and he's trying to be kind of artistic by framing
it as lions and scavengers, you know, like he's trying
to be kind of philosophical, but his entire underpinning of
that attempt is based on a wild factual inaccuracy about lions.

(05:55):
Thank you, Like out the gate, None of this is
right because lions and scavengers aren't separate things. And I'm
going to quote very quickly from an article on Krueger Park,
which is a wildlife national park in South Africa. Another
lion fact not commonly appreciated is that lions are not
just hunters but scavengers as well, often chasing smaller predators
like cheetah off their kills. In some instances, up to

(06:17):
fifty percent of a lion's diet can come from scavenging
rather than hunting life prey. Lions are scavengers as much
as they are hunters, sometimes.

Speaker 4 (06:27):
More, sometimes more. I mean, you imagine he gets most
of his information from the lion King, right.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
Right, Yes, this is all of his knowledge about lions
is from what he remembers of the lion King and
the fact that lions look impressive.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
Yes exactly.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
But there is something deeply meaningful about the whole root
of his ideological argument here is that you've got lions,
which are conservatives, right, which are the people who build
culture and the people who like make everything good, right,
and they're creators, you know, they do the hard work
of forging civilization. And then there's scavengers who just want
to tear everything down and they're just mooching and stealing

(07:04):
and attacking from within this thing that they didn't make.
And of course the reality is that like, well, lions
not only do they scavenge, but most of their scavenging
is them stealing kills from animals that did the actual hunting,
like hyenas and cheetahs, right like, and then taking credit
for it. Yeah. Interesting, Interesting, He's just a writer. He's

(07:25):
a bad writer. He's a bad thinker.

Speaker 4 (07:28):
Also, right, he couldn't stretch his like analogy past the
and no, because if you're gonna say lions, that's a
specific animal, and then you're zooming out to say scavengers,
say vultures, Like pick a scavenger to like lay like
lions and vultures whatever. But like it's just you're you're

(07:48):
being specific with the first one and then vague like
you're using a category for the second.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
And this is sloppy, it's also evidence of like this
thing that you see a lot with Ben and with
other conservatives, where it's like, well, you've never done anything
in the world, right, Like you don't know anything about
survival in the wilderness. If you did, you'd know that, Like,
hunting is a bad way to survive. Very few animals

(08:13):
live just by hunting because it's hard and it burns
a lot of calories. Like a person who taught me
how to hunt is a great outdoors person, right, extremely skilled,
and they will admit like, if they had to survive
on their own, ninety percent of their calories would be
foraging and trapping because hunting is wildly inefficient. And if

(08:33):
you can take a killed that someone else made or
find something dead, that just works a lot better. It's
what almost every animal prefers to.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
Do, right, survive.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, it just keeps you alive better. Anyway. The introduction
chapter opens and it's just titled London, England. And this
is how it starts. A tension lies at the core
of our being. It royals us. It turns our guts,
it boils our brains. The tension lies between two opposing fours.
Those forces beat within every man's breast. They fight for

(09:02):
supremacy within every civilization. One must triumph and one must fall.
The spirit of the lion, the spirit of the scavenger. Again,
lions are scavengers.

Speaker 4 (09:12):
Lines are scavengers. The scavengers. There are specific animals you
can choose.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
It's actually very efficient, it's smart.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
Like also brain's boiling.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
I say that as a hunter and a scavenger, I
pick up roadkill and I hunt. I also raise and
slaughter animals. All of these things are ways to get calories.
Beyond that, beyond him getting lion facts.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
Beyond like the premise of the analogy wants to.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
Use right, the fundamental premise of this is just based
on a complete misunderstanding of wildlife. Beyond that, his attempt
to apply a moral line to something fundamentally immoral, which
is how different creatures take in their calories, shows a
very conservative ignorance towards basic biological reality, which is what
they're supposed to stand up for. You know, scavenging for
food is not in anywhere worse than hunting for it.
Every great predator, like the Trannosaurus Rex, paleontologists generally agree,

(10:04):
were scavengers at least an equal measure to hunters right,
because it's just not a great way to survive just hunting.
Yeah we can, yeah, exactly, you get what you can't.

Speaker 3 (10:15):
Unless you're like a society.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Yes, right, and then you could just go to a
grocery store.

Speaker 3 (10:21):
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Yeah, like Ben does pay someone to do your shopping
for you. You know, because you soft little hands, You're
not going to go skin an animal. You're not going
to do that, Ben Shapiro.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
Hey, we don't know.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
You know, the cowboy hat chafes your head when you
try to wear it outside.

Speaker 4 (10:34):
Yeah, got a bunch of splinters when he held up
that two by four outside.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
That two by four. You know, he's still tired from that.
He's still getting the splinters out of his hands from that.
One day he went to home depot to buy a
single piece of wood.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
You gotta go scavenger for more calories to get back
to zero. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
Anyway, After this, we get a dramatic opening about how
Ben is writing this introduction in London, which quote has
been conquered by the scavengers. Who is he defining as scavengers?

Speaker 4 (10:59):
You ask code? Theoretically, I don't ask that because I
know the answer to that. But you can go ahead.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, it was pro Palestine, anti genocide protesters who were
marching through the city. Ben Wright's quote, hundreds of thousand
strong marching. They're banners unfurled, the banners of terrorist groups
and communists and of transgender activists gathered together to revolt
against the civilization that has given them their rights and
their prosperity and their power. And you know, he's writing

(11:26):
about protest against the Israeli government's actions in Gaza, which
he defines as protests supporting Hamas and the October seventh attacks.
And obviously you can find people who had Hamas flags.
There were people cheering on the October seventh attacks. That's
a thing that happened, But that's not the primary reason
there were protests. The primary reason they are a protest.
And what most people is the genocide is.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
All the death, what the UN just admitted it was.
It's what the un just like.

Speaker 4 (11:50):
It's just that is so kind of course he's doing that,
but also like actually been they're not trying to like
rail against or like destroy the society that like built everything.

Speaker 3 (11:59):
If they're trying to participate in that society.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
They're participating in it by speaking and by trying to
speak to power and make their voices heard. Also, the
civilization didn't give them their rights. They had to take
their rights, or their predecessors did via protest and violence. Sometimes,
because societies don't just give people rights because they're nice,

(12:23):
those rights are fought for.

Speaker 3 (12:25):
Well, yeah, like a lion, unlike these people who are
fighting for it like scavengers right now.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Obviously, in standard Shapiro fashion, he ignores the critiques these
marchers have of the mass slaughter of civilians by a
modern first World military in favor of raging at people
who march around with flags and post on social media.
He cites one commentator from Twitter who wrote after October seventh,
what did y'all think decolonization meant? In response to those
attacks by hamas quote. Her comment received nearly one hundred

(12:54):
thousand likes. Wow, and it spoke to the very core
of the scavengers. All in humanity against the lions is justified.
And this is just classic conservatism, not just been Shapiro
of Like this person made a dumb post that's obviously
the same as tens of thousands of people getting murdered
from air strikes and starve to death. These are equivalent

(13:15):
one hundred thousand likes to a bad post, equal to
the murder of thousands of equal to fucking babies being incinerated,
all equivalent.

Speaker 3 (13:22):
Yes, I think of the likes.

Speaker 4 (13:24):
I'm I'm actually I need to hold the moment of
silence for the likes, real quick, for the likes.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, really, that's thank you, Cody. We sometimes forget the
real victims here.

Speaker 3 (13:34):
I think we do. I think we do.

Speaker 4 (13:35):
I also I am dreading how many fucking times he's
going to use the words lions and scavengers.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
It's so much, it's such bad right already, I'm just like, God,
stop saying this. C. S. Lewis would fucking like pile
drive him in frustration at how badly this is written.

Speaker 3 (13:51):
At least name the lion like.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
And I'm not particularly a C. S. Lewis stand but
the man knew how to put together a sentence right like,
and he understood how to like not make my head
hurt while reading a book repeatedly because.

Speaker 4 (14:03):
Or in Ben's words, you're boiling brain. Yeah, exactly, thank
you boiling your brain in London. But we do see
here kind of the ultimate reason for the framing of
this book is Rayleigh's are a lions, Palestinians, and people
angry at their murder are scavengers. There's a particular irony
in his horror at this scavenger gathering and quote the
beating heart of what was once the center of Western civilization,

(14:25):
because London was only the center of Western civilization due
to a vast centuries long program of what can only
be described as scavenging theft on a grand scale against
an impossibly vast chunk of the globe. They stole from
the rest of the world. That's what emperialism is. They
stole from India, they stole everywhere they could.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
They built it to themselves shut aside. They start thirty
million people in Bengal. They wiped out entire ethnic groups,
you know, to get spices.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
Like it's it, Okay, you're making a really hard for
me to say, this is building. Yeah, but I'm gonna try.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Okay, Yes, the Obritzar massacre clear example of building they're built.

Speaker 3 (15:08):
They build.

Speaker 4 (15:09):
Okay, impossible, now you're yeah, it made a good point.
I mean it's all like this whole framing just goes
back to that fucking tweet from like right twenty five
or fifteen years ago. Israelis like to build Arabs, like
to bomb crap and live in open sewage precise. It's
just that, which he apologized for, by the way, and
said it was stupid.

Speaker 3 (15:29):
He said it was a stupid tweet.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
We'll talk about another thing that he apologized for in
a little bit here, Cody.

Speaker 3 (15:34):
But yes, thank you for then you write a whole
book about it.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, so bin Express's disbelief the existence of groups like
Queers for Palestine, which he says was formed quote and
solidarity with people who would throw queers off buildings at
the first available opportunity if given half a chance. Meanwhile,
his colleague Matt Walsh, in the immediate wake of Charlie
Kirk's assassination, posted this, this was left wing LGBT terrorism.

(15:58):
There was never in much doubt, is none at all.
All left wing terror networks must be crushed. All of
the terrorists and their helpers and funders must be arrested,
prosecuted and put to death. Yeah, these Palestinians want to
kill queer people, unlike Ben Shapiro and his allies at
the Daily Wire who want.

Speaker 3 (16:13):
Matt Hamas Walsh.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Who LGBT terrorists to death, which I'm sure doesn't include
everyone who's a YVT, just you know whoever Matt Walsh
thinks is there very clear?

Speaker 3 (16:25):
I mean, now it's associating with anybody right right and.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
People who associate with them of course, and who fund them,
you know, maybe.

Speaker 3 (16:32):
In ways that we still don't know, we still but
but surely they do.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
It's not important to have that all ironed out right now.

Speaker 4 (16:39):
There are other tweets fro Matt Walsh. Obviously that's horrific.
What a horrible, fucking terrible person.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
He's a bad guy.

Speaker 4 (16:45):
He specifically has also been basically calling for unity amongst
all the factions on the right in order to carry
out what he's talking about, crushing the left and like right,
rounding up people's all the stuff he's talking about in
public executions I believe he's talking about as well.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean Charlie Kirk had talked about
public executions too, like his belief that that's something we
need to bring in.

Speaker 4 (17:06):
Age twelve I think is the appropriate age for watching that.
According to them, So he's calling for uniting all the
right wing factions in order to do this, so which
I mean, I guess a good phrase instead would be
to unite the right. So sure, maybe he's actually calling
to unite with people who actually would want to do

(17:26):
the same thing. To Ben, like, if you're calling to
unite the right in order to do this, then you're
calling to unite very very far right, sorry to say,
like neo Nazis who would want to kill the Jewish
people who are in the coalition, much like Ben is
saying that Hamas wants to do to gay people. Just

(17:46):
seems like I don't think they understand what they're saying
or recognize these inconsistencies or consistencies to them, who knows.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
And they don't care, of course, none of that. It
doesn't matter, like to them, what matters is crushing their enemies, right,
Like the fact that they aren't logically consistent is about power.
It always has been, you know. And there's a lot
that's disingenuous about this framing, though, and it's worth getting
into that. One thing is that as of May twenty
twenty five, per UNICEF Regional Director Edward Bigbetter, more than

(18:15):
fifty thousand children have been killed or injured by Israel
in the Gaza strip. These kids had no power or
frankly desire to throw anyone off of buildings.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
Right, like, but they might one day.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
You know, you can find people who are delusional in
any group. But I know a lot of queers who
are angry about what's being done in Palestine. They're not
laboring under a misapprehension that Hamas is woke. They're angry
that kids and women and children have nothing to do
with Hamas or any other arm group are being murdered.
That's what they're angry about, because it's bad.

Speaker 4 (18:46):
It's like, yeah, it's very obvious that that's the situation.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
But again, they don't.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
Care if there's a mass shooting at a church that
believes things I don't. Like, I'm not not going to
be angry about the mass shooting because the pastor of
the church said something shitty and like that doesn't make
it okay that kids got shot.

Speaker 4 (19:06):
Do you understand that, Like, yeah, those kids are massacred,
Like it's horrific.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
The Queers for Palaestinan people aren't marching in the street
because they aspire to make their civilization identical to how
the Gaza strip is run. Their marching because they're angry
that civilians are being killed, right and they understand rightfully
that the average person in the Gaza strip has absolutely
no control over what fucking Hamas does.

Speaker 4 (19:31):
You can call those things horrific crimes against humanity and
not have to be like, but also, I don't want
to do Hamas stuff here because they have.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Like It's like, are you bummed out when you read
about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Speaker 3 (19:46):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (19:46):
I can be bummed out about that. I fucking talked
to a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. She was like
seven when it happened. She's not responsible for the Empire,
like me being bummed about US nuking Japan. Doesn't mean
I'm pretending the Empire of Japan was a good society.
It wasn't like it's just bad to kill kids.

Speaker 4 (20:05):
Their crime was being born in a certain place at
a certain time, and that's actually not a crime exactly.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
It certainly shouldn't be treated like one. Right again, are
there assholes in any mass movement who try to hijack
the momentum of a larger number of people to push
their own fucked up bullshit, including like uncritical worship of
violence used by a group. Sure, and Ben Shapiro knows
full well what it's like to uncritically endorse violence against civilians.
In two thousand and two, he wrote an article stating

(20:32):
that he wasn't the least bit concerned about civilian casualties
in Afghanistan or the West Bank, and the insinuation was
that this extended generally to the War on Terror. He
expressed a belief that the life of a single American
soldier mattered more than the life of any number of
Afghan civilians, and while he apologized for this article being
badly written, later the next year, he wrote an article

(20:52):
for town Hall in which he argued in favor of
allowing Israel to quote transfer Palestinians and Israeli Arabs from
Judea Samari, yeah, Gaza and is real proper. That's just
an ethnic cleansing.

Speaker 4 (21:05):
Like transfer is not a dirty word. I think is
the title of that piece. That's ethnic cleansing.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Fuck it is raally air. They're like citizens, you realize that, right, Like,
I guess it doesn't matter because they're not Jewish.

Speaker 4 (21:14):
I guess I feel like he only really apologized for
like like you're saying it being poorly written, which Ben
apologized for everything you've.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
Ever written, everything he does, but not the actual argument.
I don't think.

Speaker 4 (21:25):
I don't think he's actually he ever actually said like
and I don't think we should be doing this, or
he did and then changed his mind back.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Yeah, I mean I think both of those things have happened.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
Now.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
During this rant, ben first starts referring to and again
going sorry because we've gone off on a tangent. This
rant is about the protests last year in London against
the Genizide and Gaza. During this rant, beIN first starts
referring to the Lions collectively as the Pride with a
capital P, in order to differentiate from the so called
Scavengers as a group. He accuses scavengers of being willing

(21:58):
to do quote anything to tear down the Pride. This
is not mere anti semitism. Anti Semitism is an age
old hatred rooted in a conspiracy theory. It takes many
forms and has countless victims. This is something different. It
is a united coalitional hatred of the West. Now, this
is actually where I come closest to agreeing with Shapiro

(22:20):
in a certain sense, because the primary motivating factor of
these protests is not anti Semitism there been, and I
agree one factor at play within many people protesting against
Israel's actions here is a coalitional hatred of what Beend
defines as the West. But while he tries to describe
this as an unreasoning hatred of Western civilization, it's very
clearly a hatred of what Western governments do to specific

(22:43):
groups of people. Yeah, exactly right, like the decades of
support for Israel's continuing actions that have been genocidal and
quasigenicidal for quite some time.

Speaker 4 (22:52):
He concently does this, I mean with many different topics
and issues, but he's conflating I mean, basic criticism of actions,
like it's not it's not saying like these values that
you pretend to have are evil. It's not about like
Western values or anything like that. It's about specific actions
being taken that should be able to be criticized without

(23:17):
you saying like, so you hate everything we've ever done
and everything we believe in. Well, if it's this, then yeah,
I guess that's not what is actually being said or claimed.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
Right, And we will continue and get to ben talking
about j. R. R. Tolkien, which I am excited to
chat with you about, Cody, But first let's have some
ads and we're back. So, after introducing this protest and
starting his Scavengers and the Pride, you know, discourse, been

(23:48):
pivots to discussing the Lord of the Rings. And it
becomes clear here that that opening sort of vignette about
hundreds of thousands strong marching their banners unfurled, this was
him pull from Tolkien describing.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
Howards barbarians at the gates at the Armies.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
Of War marching on minister is right. Yes, yeah, he's
not like fly. It's obvious what he's doing. And he
gets very direct here. He literally calls the quote Cords
of Mordor stand ins for the Nazis and their allies. Now,
Tolkien himself would have rejected been claiming this wholeheartedly. He
always rejected. He hated it when people like accused the

(24:26):
Lord of the Rings of being rooted in real history
and his World War One experiences. And I do tend
to be in the camp of like, well, obviously they
were kind of both World War One and World War
Two influenced what you were writing about, Like, I'm sorry, yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
Just have influenced your art in many ways.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Yeah, Now that said Lord of the Rings in case
you didn't know, was written mostly between nineteen thirty seven
and nineteen forty nine trilogy that was like the bulk
of the writing. It wasn't published until the fifties, but
that's when he was like doing most of his writing
and editing. And I would agree with Ben that, like,
there's clear nearly some World War Two in the Lord
of the Rings, but it's also not accurate to say

(25:05):
the Hordes of Mortar are just stand ins for the
Nazis and their allies. That's not really true. And I
think it's worth discussing J. R. R. Tolkien's personal politics
here because like most peoples, they are complex and not
entirely consistent and sometimes incoherent. For an example, Tolkien on
a number of occasions described himself as an anarchist and
describe himself as an anarchist in ways that are like

(25:27):
relatively recognizable to modern day anarchists. He talked about his
hatred of power. He expressed a disgust for industrialism that
is very much in line with how some monarcho primitivists
talk today. Right, not entirely so, but his fundamental dissection
of like why he was an anarchist is very much
like relevant to modern day anarchists. He thought people were

(25:48):
not fit to hold power over people. Right, this is
an important belief, the ring of power, right, never heard
that is effectively an object in which all of like
political power, all power of the state is craving sourcial
line to it, right like, that's it's not super subtle. Right, Yeah,
there's certainly a reading of the Lord of the Rings

(26:10):
that's very much anarchist. And at the same time, Tolkien
was for example, not an uncritical but a supporter of
the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War, largely because
he was horrified at the killings and what he saw
as the unjustified murders of nuns and priests and whatnot
by in some cases anarchists.

Speaker 3 (26:28):
Right.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
And so again this is not like most people. Jared
Tolkien's political beliefs were not entirely cohero or consistent.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
Little bit yes, contextual.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
However, what I can say is that Jared Tolkien was
not at all in alignment with Ben Shapiro's politics and
would have been disgusted by them. Tolkien was a firm
anti Nazi. He was also a very anti Stalin, but
he was regularly critical of conservative icon Winston Churchill, who
he described as looking like the biggest Ruffian and photographs
from the Tehran conference right so he he has said, basically,

(27:01):
standing next to fucking Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill looks like
a scumbag like oh, which is not something Ben Shapiro
would ever say. I found a summary of a letter
that Tolkien sent his son Christopher into Scember of nineteen
forty three that gives you an idea of how little
Tolkien's personal politics graft on the Ben's ideological schema. Tolkien

(27:21):
lamented that the globe was getting smaller, duller in flatter,
foreseeing American sanitation, moral pep feminism, and mass production introduced everywhere,
which would at least cut down travel. Colonel Knox said
that one eighth of the world spoke English, which Tolkien
called a damn shame. He called for the Curse of
Babbel to strike all tongues and considered refusing to speak
anything but Old Mercian. Seriously. Tolkien found a Merrow cosmopolitanism terrifying.

(27:45):
He was unsure if victory would be much better for
the world as a whole. This was the sentiment of
a lot of folk, but it indicated no lack of patriotism.
Tolkien loved England, but not Great Britain and certainly not
the British Commonwealth. But were he younger, Tolkien figured he
would be grousing in the military, willing to go to
the bitter end, and hoping that things might turn out
better for England again you know you can find. Tolkien

(28:06):
had some issues with like feminism, like or what he
saw his feminism, but he also he hated like American capitalism.
He was disgusted by like advertisements. He was disgusted by
the culture of consumption, and he was disgusted by the
flattening of culture by the idea that everyone would need
to speak you know, English, by the idea that American

(28:28):
culture would flatten the world right. He found this personally
horrifying and disgusting, which is like the opposite of Ben's politics.
And he was not pro the British Empire. He was
in fact deeply critical of the British Empire for the
reasons established in the letter above. He hated the flattening
of cultures around the globe under burgeoning capitalism, and was

(28:49):
disgusted by the domination of peoples around the world by
foreign powers. The beliefs he most consistently expressed throughout his
adult life. We were sort of anti capitalist, anti industrial
real sentiment based around a hatred of pollution and the
destruction of the natural world. But he was clear in
his letters to his son and others that he saw
America and Americanism as the central culprits in this I.

Speaker 4 (29:09):
Mean, that's what Mordor was basically modeled after, right, like
and like that.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yeah, like there's Germany in there too, yeah.

Speaker 4 (29:16):
Yeah, but like the orcs like sprouting up from the
ground and like destroying the planet and all that stuff
that we apparently love now.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yes, like like there's some Germany in Mordar, but there's
more than a little of the United States there too,
and quite frankly, more than a little Great Britain. You know,
he was not because he was looking at the industrialization
that had happened in his own country too. This is
something that horrified him.

Speaker 3 (29:39):
Right.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
If Tolkien were somehow to have survived to the present
day and gotten involved in like a film version of
The Lord of the Rings and had any choice in
casting a voice actor for surn I wouldn't be surprised
if he wound up sounding like a Californian.

Speaker 3 (29:54):
Right, that's a little.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
Bit, a little bit, but like he expresses in line
with that, right, like yeah, I can tell you one
thing that conservatives are on about in this country that
he would have hated is the idea that like everyone
needs to speak English. What the fuck are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Like?

Speaker 2 (30:10):
Yes, anyway, After quoting a passage from Return of the
King describing the armies of Mortal marching on Minace tireth Bin,
Shapiro writes, so it goes today in London the lions
are gone, and without the spirit of the lion, our
civilization collapses. What is the spirit of the lion? The
spirit of her success, of responsibility, of duty. Now I

(30:35):
should note here Godi lions sleep up to eighteen hours
a day. They have intensely matrilineal family group. The women
run and like are in charge as a general rule
in lion society. And of course, as I mentioned earlier,
they steal in scavenge food regularly from kills made by
better but physically weaker predators like hyenas. I know it's
probably silly for me to keep returning to the builders

(30:57):
and know a goddamn thing about lions. Well, but paragraphs
like this drive me fucking crazy, Cody. The lion is
a hunter, creative, audacious, innovative. He bens the world to
his will. He forges new paths and crafts new solutions.
When faced with a problem, the lion does not complain
about the unfairness of life. He seeks an answer. The
lion is bold and persistent. Failure does not unnerve him.

(31:17):
It teaches him. The lion knows that boldness of purpose
and willingness to undergo risk are the driving forces of
any successful civilization. He believes, in the words of Proverbs,
where there is no vision, the people perish.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
He's really stretching this really or really really far.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
Let's avoid the biological critiques here. If we're just talking
about conservatives, the opposite of what you do is find
new solutions to problems or forge new paths. You're violently
offended by the idea of forging new paths and new solutions.
Novelty disgusts you. Ben Shapiro, You're a arch conservative.

Speaker 4 (31:52):
Observatives. There's one bit also about like they don't whine.
I know that's not what Oh my.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
God, Yes, Yeah, No, he's saying that they don't complain.
The lion is complain about the unfairness of life. That's
literally your job, bit.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
Buddy, that's every conservative's job. That is the only way
you've ever made money's job.

Speaker 4 (32:08):
He's constantly talking about everything is unfair to him specifically.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Well, it's just you're got rich complaining, Ben, that's what
you do for a living business model.

Speaker 4 (32:19):
Yeah, complain and then sell leftist tears mugs. Right, what
are you talking about, lion?

Speaker 3 (32:25):
It's absurd. Yeah, I think there's also Ezra Klein did
an interview with Ben.

Speaker 4 (32:31):
Uh oh crazy, Yeah, not you know whatever, But like
Ben's like talking about like lions, and he's like yeah,
and then you know, they build the social fabric and
all this kind of stuff. Pump's entire project is to
tear down the social fabric. That's not the lion that
you're talking about. Literally, in twenty nineteen, Ben was on

(32:53):
like Bill Maher or something and he's like, yeah, I
didn't vote for Trump in twenty sixteen because I didn't
want to break the social fabric, but he did, so
now I'm going to vote for him because he's already
broken the social fabric like a scavenger maybe.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, right, it's just.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
The whole thing. It's just like not, it's just a mess.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
Yeah, it's a mess, and it's like ultimately been. I know,
you believe in things to be entirely fair. I can
think of it one time in his life where Ben
took a principal moral stand when he got really angry
at when he left.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah for uh what was it Lewandowski?

Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah yeah, yeah, was physically aggressive towards like a female employee.

Speaker 4 (33:34):
Yeah, no, he left. It was, uh, I've mentioned that
exact thing before he gets good.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Unlike a lot of these guys, Ben does believe in
some things, but his beliefs are very fluid, right, and
his morality is very fluid, you know.

Speaker 3 (33:48):
I mean it's so inconsistent.

Speaker 4 (33:50):
He became a political pundit when he's seventeen, like he's
got it, he's got to do that. He wasn't ready
for that, and he decided to do it. And he's
just constantly inconsistent. Everything he purports to like believe in
socially in the conservative sphere is not something like he lives.
He's like a theater guy with a doctor wife. He
stays home and like does podcasting and takes care of

(34:11):
the kids. Like that's not what he purports that people
should be doing now now.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
Ben goes on to describe the lion as quote a
warrior who understands the spirit of the scavenger is always
abroad and that only strength can defend against it. Then
and again, the lions are the scavengers, like his need
to defend whatever.

Speaker 4 (34:32):
Warriors are you like doing like now, they're like people
doing like whatever.

Speaker 2 (34:37):
And lions aren't warriors. They don't have wars. They fight
because they're animals.

Speaker 4 (34:41):
Exactly, Like why are you saying the lines are warriors?
What are you talking about?

Speaker 2 (34:44):
It's just not anyway.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
Whatever.

Speaker 2 (34:45):
Then he brings up another much better writer, C. S. Lewis,
claiming the lion lives by these words, and he's quoting C. S.
Lewis right that he's Ben says describes how the lion lives.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the
form of every virtue at the testing point, which means,
at the point of highest reality, a chastity or honesty
or mercy which yields to danger will be chased, or

(35:07):
honest or merciful only on conditions. Now, that's a very
good point from C.

Speaker 3 (35:13):
S Lewis.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
I don't think Ben understands what this sentence means. It's
a good sentence, yeah, because I mean his whole being
disgusted and horrified at Trump and then voting for him
and supporting him because he won and pivoting like that's
that's him yielding to danger, a danger to his career,
a danger to maybe his personal health.

Speaker 4 (35:32):
I mean, that's what the dentire GOP did. We all
saw it live in twenty fifteen to twenty sixteen.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
It happened.

Speaker 4 (35:37):
We saw Ted Cruz go out there and say vote
your conscience, and then like four weeks later he's sweaty
on the phone and being like, well for trap plays
right exactly.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
And that's I agree with this CS Lewis quote. It's
a very well written and accurate point to make, and
Ben does not understand it at all because he is
incapable of living that way. Bin's entire career has been
built on taking money from the mega rich to push
a very specific kind of propaganda. He wouldn't no courage
if it bit him in the ass, and he has
never had to stand up for what's right in a
way that meant taking on any meaningful personal risk. Lewis's

(36:09):
quotation here is excoriating men like Ben Shapiro who lack
any meaningful virtue because they've never had to stand up
to any kind of danger. I would like to introduce
Ben to another quote, one that might be more relevant
to his own stated political aims and the aims of
the party he supports. This is from a nineteen forty
six letter C. S. Lewis sent to a professor friend
of his, collected in of Other Worlds, Essays and stories.

Speaker 3 (36:31):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must
have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than
an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity
at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows
he is doing wrong, he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor,
who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and
fear for the voice of Heaven, will torment us indefinitely.

(36:51):
Because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience,
and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

Speaker 4 (37:00):
There it is I mean that's like, it's just like
now they're supporting a Robert Baron who is leading.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
Who is backed by theocrat back to theocratic movement, like
we just he's talking about he's just doing both. It's
so c. S.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
Lewis failed to continu to consider you know, Porko loss
dos right, But if.

Speaker 4 (37:19):
You get a Robert Baron to lead your theocratic movement,
that's yeah, wild man.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
There we go, speaking of Robert Barons. Cody, the sponsors
of this podcast, Yeah, get him, there we go, got
him so good, hell and we're back.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
Snaps for Robert for the ad transition.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Thank you, Sophie. Thank you Sophie, Thank you.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
So Cody clapped.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
I guess I just cared praise. I simply crave it.
You know, it's it's my heroine also Heroin. No, I
don't do it Robert anymore.

Speaker 3 (37:58):
No, I mean, according to R. F Jor, it helps
you focus in school, it does.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
It makes it great easy to focus or at least
focus on being on Heroin.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
Didn't know I was on Heroin until I did it.
Now it's all I can think about.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
To be fair, the only heroine I've ever taken. I
licked off a guy's finger at a cafe in rural India.

Speaker 3 (38:17):
That's fair.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
It was a nice afternoon. So we're talking about C. S. Lewis,
who been Shapiro just.

Speaker 3 (38:25):
Brought up not locking Heroin off of fingers.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
Yeah, no, we're not, although I'd do it again, oh buddy,
Well maybe not in this vinsical era. Anyway. It's worth
noting that in nineteen fifty one, when Winston Churchill and
his Conservative Party retook the UK government, the Prime Minister's
Office wrote Lewis a letter offering to gift him an
honorary title Commander of the British Empire, and C. S.
Lewis declined, not because he wasn't Conservative. He was, that's

(38:50):
the most accurate box to put him into, but because
he was worried that if he accepted it would turn
him into a political figure, which would diminish him as
a writer into thinker, because well, again he would talk
philosophically about things that kind of were adjacent to politics.
He was kind of disgusted at the idea of being
like what Ben Shapiro is, you know, like of being

(39:11):
a political pundit propaganda, because he thought that was gross,
because it is.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
You know, to put those sort of thoughts in your.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
Work, as or Will would say, all art is propaganda, right,
But I don't think Lewis believed that.

Speaker 4 (39:24):
You know, But there's a huge difference between doing your
art and expressing yourself in that way and being like, well,
I'm going to start an organization that does propaganda for
the regime.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, that gets literally paid by oil billionaires to write
propaganda supporting oil billionaires.

Speaker 3 (39:37):
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
And again Lewis would have obviously, maybe not obviously if
you don't know him. But Lewis would have fallen on
the more conservative acxis of politics, certainly more conservative than progressive.
But one of his most consistent stances was a sort
of disgusted political hacks and politicians. Now where Lewis would
align with Ben Shapiro is he had a strong belief
in natural law and in a sort of objective moral reality,

(39:59):
which he saw is necessary to accept in order to
be able to criticize groups like the Nazis. In other words,
Lewis wrote that if there was no right and like
a greater cosmic sense, by what standards could we judge
the Nazis as being wrong? And I don't agree with
Lewis in this I'm just describing his beliefs here. At
the same time, though, like his friend Tolkien, he expressed
horror at the two occupations that he worried were doom

(40:21):
mankind the magician, who quote sought power over nature and
the astrologer, who quote proclaimed nature's power over man. And
I want to quote from a write up on C. S.
Lewis dot com here. The former thought led many to
think man can do everything, the latter strongly suggested he
can do nothing. Lewis saw modern scientists as the sons
of the magician, who believe every ill in the world

(40:43):
can find a cure in science. From the astrologer came
the philosophical materialists, who believed man is nothing but a
slave to nature his animal instincts. And one thing we
see here is that despite having a belief in absolute morality,
Lewis tended to reject simple dichotomies like the one been
presents us with. In his Very Bad Book, he presented
readers with two archetypes in opposition, either of which would

(41:04):
doom mankind if worshiped or followed. Beyond reason, Lewis isn't
saying science is bad and he's not saying that, like
belief in the natural world is bad, or like kind
of yielding to nature's power is bad. But making either
of those like the kind of center of your being
is bad.

Speaker 4 (41:23):
Right, Because he's also not saying there are two types
of people.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
No, No, he's not saying other going too far in
either of these directions is bad. Yeah, And this is
something that Ben would never do. Ben glories in presenting
a false and limited choice to the reader and then
describing one of those choices as inherently good and the
other is inherently bad. Lewis was a believer in natural
hierarchies and a critique of democracy, which he felt was

(41:49):
the best system overall, but also was not a good system.
And he believed that, among other things, one of the
problems democracy had is that it must ultimately destroy a education.
Right that, like, because of the way democracy functions, it's
going to like fuck up the educational system.

Speaker 3 (42:07):
Effects or like overtaking back like scenes or you know, he's.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Not entirely wrong about Obviously, other democracies do better. So
I don't agree with him. This is inherent but it
can happen, right.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
A lot of bad things can happen and it's not
exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (42:23):
And Lewis was also he was deeply critical about technological
process and the worship of machines in a way that
makes me pretty certain he'd have rejected AI violently. Both
he and Tolkien would have been on the bomb data
centers side. If they would be radicals about that, Like
if you could bring both of those guys forward and
explain to them what Sam Altman is trying to do,

(42:43):
they would try to buy a gun, like like they
would be extremists.

Speaker 4 (42:47):
Using I mean even like using the AI for like
fake things like dead people have said, and like the
ghost AI stuff they're doing all all of it is.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
If you explain to him, like how much water and
pollution are created by data centers, he would, like fucking
Tolkien especially, would lose his mind, like he never imagined
anything that awful.

Speaker 3 (43:08):
It's just not even like taking a like what the.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
Thing is doing itself exactly?

Speaker 4 (43:13):
Yeah, yeah, what it can create or create in quotes,
I guess, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
Now, Lewis did believe that you could reform bad political
systems through Christian education, like that was his solution to
the problems democracy causes. For education but he was also
against mandating Christian principles in public education. Right, So we
see in Lewis as a mix of some values and
stances that could very easily be mapped to things that
Ben himself believes there are some. But mixed in with

(43:39):
this is a fundamental distrust of giving humans power, one
that makes me equally certain he'd have disliked the argument
that Ben is making here about lions and scavengers. In
his book Present Concerns, Lewis wrote, I don't deserve a
share in governing a hen roost, much less a nation,
Nor do most people who believe advertisements and think in
catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is

(44:01):
just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man
can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
He would hate so much about he be.

Speaker 4 (44:10):
So unhappy like the internet memes, meme culture, like yesh god,
he and again.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Not at all woke, just absolutely not just disgusted with,
like not a theocrat as Christian as he was not
a theocrat exactly.

Speaker 4 (44:25):
Yeah, every single AI post that the Department of Homeland
Security puts up, like every single thing.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
You're doing is fucking mind oh yeah, grotesque.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
God yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
Now, after quoting Lewis, Ben introduces another wrinkle to his
lion scavenger dichotomy. The pride of Lions is split up
between three sub archetypes. The weaver, who quote weaves together
the disparate strands of family and society and often goes unnoticed,
but quote, are the true heroes of our civilization, and
the hunters. The warriors and the weavers form a pride together.

(45:00):
It is kind of unclear to me what separates the
hunters from I think the weavers are like women. That's
the place women have in the pride is they're the weavers.
You know.

Speaker 3 (45:10):
The men get two groups to choose from.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
That's right, They get to hunt or war Yeah. I anyway,
and again also been uses warrior and hunter more or
less synonyms in this book.

Speaker 3 (45:22):
It's just.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
After establishing this the subsets of the pride, the categories
inside the pride been acknowledges that lions have to create
a system of rules, which they absolutely don't because they
each have the spirit of the scavenger in them, and
so they have to always be on guard against being
overtaken by that. And again, half of their calories they
get from scavenging. Ad they're not unguarded against it, it's

(45:47):
how they survive. The Pride has a spirit of of scaverty,
Lion has the spirit of a scavenger in them. What
he's trying to say is that, like he's describing the scavengers,
liberals and left just as like people who are lazy
and just want to steal from other people and also
tear down whether people have built. And Ben is trying
to say that, like there's that voice in all of

(46:09):
us that we have to be on guard against, right,
Like that's that's what he's trying to say, right, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (46:14):
Because also in that same interview about this book, they
bring up Vance, and Ben basically admits that, like, yeah,
the current version of Vance is a bit of a scavenger.
He's doing all these things. He like he's describe Vance, yeah,
oh one hundred percent. Like he's like, yeah, the the
Hillbilly Elogy era, he was like a lion, which like
maybe he was a scavenger the whole time. Ben, who

(46:36):
you know, how is that being a lion?

Speaker 2 (46:39):
He's literally just.

Speaker 4 (46:40):
Okay, I know we don't need to but like it's
just it's absurd, but it was interesting that he is
willing to recognize that there are scavengers amidst. I don't
even know if he thinks Trump's a lion or not,
but that whole group of people.

Speaker 3 (46:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
Next after this we get one of the least coherent
sections of the book. Thus far, A pride of lions
can accomplish nearly anything unless the pride falls to the
pack and pack is capitalized too. The spirit of the scavenger,
the spirit of the scavenger is the spirit of envy.

Speaker 3 (47:14):
He's not he's just putting work.

Speaker 1 (47:16):
There's just there's It's just ridiculous.

Speaker 3 (47:19):
It means nothing.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
It means nothing. It's so irrational because the foundation of this,
the whole light You're just wrong entirely about, Like none
of this makes sense. It's like if I were to
write a book about like fucking I don't even know
how to like make a bad enough analogy.

Speaker 3 (47:38):
No, really bad.

Speaker 4 (47:40):
You can't because also when you say the word pack
and you capitalize, I'm thinking of wolves, which wouldn't you
be able to use for your other Like they're so interchangeable.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
It's like if I were to write a book called
The Horse in the Ant and started with like Obviously,
the horse sore is high above all of us on
its mighty wings.

Speaker 4 (47:58):
And.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
Meanwhile the ant looming over the horse.

Speaker 2 (48:03):
Okay, so I debated whether or not to discuss the
fact that Ben himself is clearly motivated by a deep
spirit of envy.

Speaker 3 (48:12):
Right.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
His initial career goal, as you and I have talked
about on several podcasts Cody, was to write for Hollywood.
He wanted to be a screenwriter. He wanted to write
TV in movies. And he filled in this goal because
he's not good at it, right, And the Daily Wires
movie like is also a massive waste of money, horrible
idea because none of them are good writers.

Speaker 4 (48:32):
Hey, you wait until they do the anti woke snow White. Okay,
that's gonna be really, really good.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
That's going to really blow up. Audiences are craving, the
children cry out, demanding, and he woke snow fucking White.

Speaker 3 (48:44):
You can hear him now, they're just woke.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Snow was the Snow White Man like the sixties. It's
not woke, I don't anyway.

Speaker 3 (48:53):
It's because they made a new one and the.

Speaker 2 (48:55):
Yeah, yeah, I haven't been keeping up with the fucking
Disney don't. Yes, But I think it's important to hear
the spirit of envy is the primary that's the center
of Ben Shapiro's soul. Right, it is quite obvious reading
his angry rants against Hollywood. That's a huge amount of
his writing, and it's why he's tried to make the
Daily Wire. They wasted millions trying to create their own

(49:17):
Hollywood because his hatred of the left its origin in
a lot of ways. I'm not going to say this
is the only origin point, but a major source for
his hatred of the left is because he sees Hollywood
as a fundamentally leftist institution that refused to give him
the respect he deserves, that didn't recognize his brilliance.

Speaker 1 (49:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
That is beIN Shapiro's origin story as a villain is
that he couldn't hack it as a fucking professional screenwriter.

Speaker 3 (49:44):
Yes, about eighty five percent, right, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (49:47):
Growing up fundamentalist, religious conservative, all that kind of stuff
did not help.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
But that resentment fueled bienvy is one hundred percent of.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Yeah, and he can only see this as an example
of Hollywood hate conservatives like him, Right, it has to
be bigotry. That's because that's the only way he could
not succeed, right, And you know, he has to ignore
a lot in order to believe this. If he were
to look at reality, he would see that plenty of
conservatives have been very successful in Hollywood. Screenwriters like David

(50:16):
Mammott and John Millius right or Millius, I always forget
the guy who did Red Dawn. Right, Actors like Kelsey
Grammer and John voightd not to mention Sylvester Stallone and
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who feels more like a Democrat today but
was the literal Republican governor of California.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
Right.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
There's plenty of successful conservatives to the Hollywood as actors
and writers, massively.

Speaker 3 (50:38):
Successful and talented, very conservative.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
Persons, plenty of conservative like movies that are conservative. And
I'm just think about how many during the War on Terror,
how many TV shows and movies had a scene where
the guy has to torture someone to save lives. Right,
That is conservative propaganda.

Speaker 4 (50:55):
Even though it's like they would buy a lot of
like self described libs or whatever, or like, it's still
conservative ideologically. Like, yeah, but we're in America, so we
don't recognize that all of that is in service of
a more right wing viewpoint, and he resents it. And

(51:17):
I mean, we're seeing it now with all this like
move to like I'm not even gonna say canceled culture
because that's not what it is.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
It's not what it's going on.

Speaker 4 (51:24):
But like the firing of all these people is an
expression of that resentment because they want to do it,
they want to be doing it.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
Right and there, Yeah, part of it is if I
get them out, finally I'll get a shot and.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
People will realize that I was finally late night with Gefeld.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
Yeah right. And obviously, you know, Ben did not fail
to make it in Hollywood because people were bigoted against
his conservatism. He failed because he's not a good writer.
His only talent isn't agitating people with cheap political shots.
This is very funny because the next paragraph of the
book after that line about the spirits of the Scavenger
is the spirit of envy. The very next paragraph is
basically been describing himself. The Scavenger does not believe in

(52:01):
an understandable universe in which success is the result of
performance of duty. Instead, the Scavenger believes that any such
argument as a guise for power and power alone. The Scavenger,
in his perverse projection believes that there is a great
conspiracy against him, and that the only path to success
lies in tearing away at that great conspiracy with tooth
and claw. Oh, bell, Ben Ben, that's your life. That's

(52:28):
your entire career, buddy.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
Your first book was about the conspiracy against you, and
you specifically and conservatives generally.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
Yes, your whole life, bro Now. Ben goes on to
write that while lions form a pride, scavengers form a pack,
is it a problem from a writing standpoint that pack
and pride are passable synonyms?

Speaker 3 (52:51):
No? Yeah, I mean it should be.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
But could you describe lions as having a pack?

Speaker 3 (52:56):
Sure? Sure? Right?

Speaker 2 (52:57):
I You couldn't describe other like pride doesn't go both.
It's very like a urban whiskey thing, right. Anyway, The
pack consists of looters, lectures, and barbarians. The fall of London,
he writes, is symptomatic of the growing power of the pack,
and reading this Reading him write about the fall of
London felt particularly ridiculous in twenty twenty five, given that

(53:21):
about a month before Binn's book was published, London police
arrested four hundred and seventy four people at a Palestine
Action ban protest, per the BBC, police have arrested four
hundred seventy four people at a demonstration in London and support
of the banned group Palestine Action. The Metropolitan Police said
four hundred and sixty six protesters were arrested for supporting
the group, five for assaults on police officers, two for

(53:42):
public order offenses and one for a racially aggravated offense.
Scores of people simultaneously unveiled handwritten signs with the message
I opposed genocide, I support Palestine Action at the protest
organized by Defendar Juries at Westminster's Parliament Square. It was
the biggest protest since the government prescribed the group in
July under the Terrorism Act of two thousand, making membership
of or support for it a criminal offense punishable by

(54:03):
up to fourteen years in prison. No officers were seriously injured,
and the Met Police said that the number of arrests
was the largest made by the force on a single
day in the last ten years. London really has fallen
to the pack back of police. You can't even say
I oppose genocide, I support this group, They'll arrest you.

Speaker 4 (54:20):
I mean, you know, I feel like he loves it again,
it's just this is what they're talking about doing now,
labeling anybody as a terrorist and doing exactly what you
described but here, yep, that is their political project.

Speaker 3 (54:32):
That is what he is supporting right now.

Speaker 4 (54:34):
He's guesting on all the podcasts with the Vice President,
who's only a podcaster now talking about this exact things.

Speaker 3 (54:41):
Yes, exactly, So maybe he's a I don't know, wolf
of Vulture role yes, bad writer, yes, line piece of shit.
Bad writer. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Now, given the way book publication timetables work, there's no
way that you know these mass arrests happened. They certainly
didn't happen in time for Ben to revise his book
to account for it. Right, But the fact that this
happened puts the lie to everything he says here about
the supposedly massive and rising social power of the Pack
and the fact that they've taken London, you know, the
fact that the Pride has to constantly be back on

(55:12):
their heels, scrambling desperately to hold onto civilization. Because if
like you just acknowledge that, like no, actually they have
all the power and they're like massively abusing it and
like hurting people and like aren't in no danger whatsoever,
but are endangering huge numbers of people. That doesn't sound
as good.

Speaker 4 (55:28):
No, it needs to be Barbarians at the Gates were perpetual,
desperately symptoms, perpetually persecuted, And.

Speaker 2 (55:35):
We have every lever of power exactly, And he critiques
leftists in this passage from embracing Mauseidong's statement that political
power grows from the barrel of a gun. But that's
the only power Ben has ever recognized. What do you
call these, matt what do you call mass arrests? Man
premise of police? Like?

Speaker 4 (55:51):
What are you talking about? Like ice is like doing?
Like that is political power?

Speaker 2 (55:56):
What do you call like Israel's actions?

Speaker 3 (55:58):
Right?

Speaker 2 (55:58):
Like, I mean it's bomb I guess more than the
barrel of a gun. But you know, the basic idea
is the same.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
Right, you can use language in ways to mean many things. Yeah,
he believes that, Yes, he believes that. Yes.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
Ben continues with a warning that the children of lions
well themselves become scavengers if the lions don't pass on
their ways to their kids, and then he pivots to
talking about an eighteen ninety seven poem that Richard Kipling
wrote for The Diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria. This poem,
written at the height of the power of the British Empire,
he sees as a warning that went unheeded, the tumult

(56:33):
and the shouting dies, the captains and the kings depart,
still stands thine ancient sacrifice and humble in a contrite. Heart, Lord,
God of Hosts, be with us. Yet lest we forget,
Lest we forget now. I don't really see that as
a warning about not indoctrinating your kid with propaganda, but
I guess I can see where he's coming from there.

(56:53):
It's clear that where he goes next in this chapter.
Basically he says that the reason England fell, so to speak,
is that they embrace the welfare state. And that's why
the British Empire ended, right, That's why they're no longer
the center of the West is because they got taken
over by these socialist ideas and like the establishing of
a welfare state, all of those lions, their kids became scavengers,

(57:14):
you know, that's the argument.

Speaker 3 (57:16):
Yes, mandatory scavengerism, right.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
And this is classic been leaving out a massive and important,
inconvenient fact that does not fit in his neat ideological lines.
The British Empire didn't get sick and fail because of welfare.
It began its slow death slide during the First World War,
in which it lit its treasury on fire and annihilated
a generation of young men. Kipling himself was profoundly changed

(57:42):
by the horrors of World War One. He was a
strong imperialist his whole life. He was a very strong
imperialist prior to the outbreak of hostilities in World War One.
Kipling despised Germany and German civilization, and he was a
huge supporter at the outset of the war in England,
getting involved and admitting to it. As the war started,
he wrote something that feels very familiar to what Ben

(58:05):
writes in his book For all we have and are,
for all our children's fate, stand up and take the war.
The hun is at the gate. That's essentially what Ben's writing.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
That's what he's writing, right.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Yeah, So let's talk about Kipling. Let's talk about what
World War One did to Kipling. Because Rudyard had one son,
sixteen year old John Kipling. John was sixteen when the
war started. Now, John had intended to join the Royal Navy,
but his eyesight was bad and so he was unable
to take on a navy career. So Rudyard used his
connections being a very famous and influential person in media,

(58:39):
to get John a commission as an officer in the
Irish Guards, which is a British military unit made up
of Irish soldiers right with British officers. In nineteen fifteen,
John became a platoon commander in the Irish Guards and
was sent to fight in the Battle of Loose. He
died while assaulting the German lines. This was a profoundly
traumatizing and event for Kipling. For one thing, Prior to

(59:03):
his son becoming appletune matter, Kipling was super anti Irish
right he was a strong Unionist, so he was anti
Irish independence, but he was also just kind of bigoted
against Irish people. He had written with disgust about Irish
culture previously, and this changed, I think in part just
because he had more contact through his son and whatnot
with Irish people as a result of this, That's how

(59:26):
things like this can happen. And I'm not going to
say he ever totally turned around on the issue, but
he wrote poetry about Irish history and started expressing after
this point a considerable degree with admiration about irishchol, particularly
in comparison to what he'd written before.

Speaker 3 (59:39):
Now.

Speaker 2 (59:39):
He also wrote this about what happened to his son
in the wake of World War One. If any question
why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.

Speaker 4 (59:49):
That seems maybe different from yeah, what the topic started as, right.

Speaker 2 (59:57):
It seems maybe again to go from where Ben is
like the like no, the wars at the gate, anything
we have to do is justified, and like, oh no,
my son's dead. Up my kids, Maybe this was a
fuck up. Right now, there's some context to this line,
and I'm going to quote from an article for The
Irish Times by Ronan McGreevy explaining the context behind this line.
This has often been wrongly interpreted as Kipling believing that

(01:00:18):
his son's death was in vain. He never believed the
First World War was unnecessary, he believed it was badly prosecuted.
On a more general level, this couplet is about the
lies the older generations tell that compels the younger to fight.
It could also allude to his own lives and getting
a son a commission when he was physically unfit to fight.
So there's a lot going on here. But Kipling was
racked for the rest of his life with a tremendous
guilt because of what happened to his son, and because

(01:00:41):
even if he could never admit that World War One
was itself fully a bad idea, he knew that it
was right. He had to be like, well, it was
badly probab but he I think there's a degree of
ego there. But he knew that he'd fucked up right,
that they all had.

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
Lied to them to get them to fight.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
That's and you know, Ben Ben will know ever admit
to being wrong about anything. I don't think, no matter
what happens, he's capable of that. But Kipling was to
an extent, you know, he never fully repudiated imperialism. But
he went to his grave racked by the knowledge that
the war he'd endorsed and supported had taken not only
his son, but had shattered the British Empire, right, it

(01:01:19):
had shattered his hopes of continuing British imperial dominance. As
an imperialist. He couldn't ignore the fact that like, oh
this kind of ruined.

Speaker 4 (01:01:25):
It at all, right, Yeah, you know, like sometimes expressing that
sort of guilt is how you're actually saying that you
were wrong without saying it right, because that's human beings
are complex and it can be very hard to just
say those words.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
So you just expressed the guilt of it, right.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
And it's so telling about Ben and about what goes
on in his head that he cites approvingly this passage
of Kipling while ignoring the rest of his life, because
in reality, a figure like Rudyard Kipling ought to be
a warning to Ben Shapiro and those like him. Right,
And even again, I don't want to frame it as

(01:02:04):
like Kipling got woke after World War One, but Kipling
got increasingly critical of imperialism and of his previous stances
after World War One, and he actually wrote some stuff.
One of his poems, A pict Song, is one of
my favorite anti imperialist pieces of writing. And I was
considering just reading like a segment from it. But do
you mind if I just read the poem because I

(01:02:25):
think we all need this, right, I think this might
be handy as we all watch this fucking empire come
down to crush us and the ones we love. So
I'm gonna read this poem and then we'll talk about.

Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
It depressing, and then yeah, yeah, you're the place poem.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
So this is a picked song by Ridyard Kipling. Rome
never looks where she treads. Always her heavy hoofs fall
on our stomachs, our hearts, or our heads. And Rome
never heeds when we ball her. Centuries pass on, that
is all, and we gather behind them in hordes and
plot to reconquer the wall with only our tongues for
our swords. We are the little folk, we too little

(01:03:03):
to love or to hate. Leave us alone, and you'll
see how we can drag down the state. We are
the worm in the wood. We are the rod at
the root. We are the taint and the blood. We
are the thorn in the foot, mistletoe killing an oak,
rats gnawing cables in two moths, making holes in a coat.
How they must love what they do. Yes, and we

(01:03:24):
little folk too, We are as busy as they, working
our works.

Speaker 3 (01:03:28):
Out of you.

Speaker 2 (01:03:29):
Watch and you'll see it someday. No, indeed we are
not strong, but we know peoples that are, Yes, and
we'll guide them along to smash and destroy you in war.
We shall be slaves just the same. Yes, we have
always been slaves. But you you will die of the shame,
and then we shall dance on your graves. I like

(01:03:52):
that poem. Anyway, That's all I got for part one,
or for the first. We'll probably come back to this book,
but I think you get the idea of what beIN's
going for here and why it's full of shit.

Speaker 4 (01:04:04):
I mean, I'm convinced that maybe we're all lines and scavengers.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Are we part of a pack?

Speaker 4 (01:04:09):
We're also a part of a pack, and we are
also a colony of we can say ants or hive also,
and the hives are made of crows, and the crows
are made of lions, right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Right, Every crow contains a lion, you know. Yeah, it's known.

Speaker 4 (01:04:29):
You know, we all went to school. We all learned
about lions and crows.

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
It's like the parable of the butterfly and the Tyrannosaurus rex,
you know, both of which swim deep in the ocean
in the Marianas Trench on the moon. It's his accurate
as what Bin's written.

Speaker 3 (01:04:48):
Yeah, huh, it's good.

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
Anyway, how you feeling brody? Have I ever done that before? Yes?

Speaker 3 (01:04:54):
I think I feel like shody.

Speaker 4 (01:04:59):
Sure, I appreciate that he at least knows he needs
to get some good sentences into his books, so he
quotes other writers, even if he doesn't like necessarily interpret them.

Speaker 3 (01:05:09):
Well, he's at least.

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):
Got to pad this out with some token and Lewis
and Kipling.

Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
Because I gotta keep people.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
Notice that I can't write. Yeah, incredible good stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:05:20):
Shout to him.

Speaker 1 (01:05:21):
Co Do you want to plug anything?

Speaker 3 (01:05:23):
Sure? Why not? Check out Some More News. It's our
weekly show.

Speaker 4 (01:05:27):
I sat at a desk, I read the news and
talk about various topics. We also have a show called
even More News twice a week talks about more current
events in a more casual way.

Speaker 3 (01:05:35):
And check out my band. It's called the Hot Shapes.

Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
Hell yeah, check out Cody's band. Check out Cody, you know,
at like a bar or something. Mm hmm, be like, hey,
how's it going.

Speaker 3 (01:05:49):
I'll be like good, Yeah, you want to drink? I'll
say yeah, don't do that. Yeah don't.

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
I shouldn't joke about the weird parasocial stuff because that'll happen.

Speaker 3 (01:05:58):
Oh we don't want any of that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
But check out Cody's podcasts and the YouTube show, and
check out when we come back to Ben Shapiro's book,
which I'm sure We'll do at least one more.

Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
Time before the US.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Well Gang. This has been behind the podcast of Bastards
about Shapiro beIN, good Night, and good Luck Bay.

Speaker 1 (01:06:25):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
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Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
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(01:06:46):
at Behind the Bastards