Behind the Bastards - Robert and Cody Read Ben Shapiro's New Book

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Sophie Lichtenen, producer, show. Is that what we're doing? You making fun of me, Sophie? You're making fun of me? You're laughing at me? Well, here to laugh at me more, Cody Johnston. I would never laugh at you. 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 how are you doing I'm great are you

oh 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 was like how are you doing I mean right now fine in general bad open bar so 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 in many ways. They are. They're happening here, you could say, the things that are happening. I don't know.

I could do that. And one of the people who's happening here is a friend of ours, you and me, Cody, a friend of the pods, a friend of our mutual friend, who we all miss right now. Katie stole. Hi, Katie. Ben Shapiro. Our buddy, our good comrade and colleague.

Yeah, my bandmate. He's in my band. Yeah, yeah. You and Benefer 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 prose I think either of us has ever encountered. Real bad.

It was bad enough that Ben has not written another fiction novel since, to the best of my knowledge. 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. Yeah, I want to read that, fucker. I want that. Like, don't do that. I don't need your like weird.

That's like a year of free content for me, Ben. Get it out. Give me the juice, man. I know I'm late on my novel, Ben, but come on. You don't have a real job. Yeah. Just do it. Take time off.

Take time off. Oh, my God. But we are doing a Ben Shapiro book episode because on September 2nd of this year, he published his latest nonfiction novel, Lions and Scavengers, the true story of America and her critics. And her critics, yes, of course. Yeah, parentheses at the very bottom and tiny. 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, 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 a, the reaction was different. It's a whole other conversation sort of happening. 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 an 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. But yeah, maybe rip the pages out of that book and use them to like stop the bleeding or something. And this book seems very like 2019, 2018 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? Yeah. This is a weird book, I guess, to come out now, in my opinion. But I haven't read it. So maybe it's actually perfect for this exact moment. You know what it is? I'll tell you right now. We'll talk about this more.

Ben Shapiro desperately wishes he were C.S. 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. Ben Shapiro? Yeah. Okay.

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 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 five hours on the intro. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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? it opens with an inscription this is like the dedication to the book to the lions the l is capitalized the hunters warriors and weavers each of those words is capitalized who build defend and maintain the greatest civilization in the history of mankind against the scavengers the s is capitalized who would destroy that civilization from within right and that's essentially the thesis of the book right is that you've got lions and scavengers that's all of society yeah that's his whole thing I can't wait to find out what he thinks is a lion, what he thinks is a scavenger.

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. 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 Kruger 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 50% of a lion's diet

can come from scavenging rather than hunting live prey. Lions are scavengers, as much as they are hunters, sometimes more. Or sometimes more. I mean, you imagine he gets most of his information from the Lion King, right? 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. Yes, exactly.

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 and quitting 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 they're robbing them and then taking credit for it.

Yeah. Interesting. interesting he's just a bad writer he's a bad writer he's a bad thinker he couldn't stretch

his like analogy past the and 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 lions and vultures whatever but like it's just you're you're being specific with the first one and then vague

like you're using a category for the and it's just 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 live just by hunting because it's hard and it burns a lot of calories.

Like the 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, 90% of their calories would be foraging and trapping because hunting is wildly inefficient. And if you can take a kill that someone else made or find something dead, that just works a lot better. It's what almost every animal prefers to do, right? I survive. 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. Attention lies at the core of our being

It roils us It churns our guts It boils our brains The tension lies between two opposing forces Those forces beat within every man's breast They fight for 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 Lions are scavengers The scavengers There are specific animals you can choose A lion being one of them It's actually very efficient

It's smart like also brains boiling i say that as a hunter and a scavenger i pick up roadkill and i hunt i also raisin slaughter animals all of these things are ways to get calories beyond that beyond him getting lion facts beyond like the premise of the analogy wants to 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 any way worse than hunting for it. And every great predator, like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, paleontologists generally agree, were scavengers at least an equal measure to hunters, right? Because it's not a great way to survive, just hunting. Yeah, you get what you can. Yeah, exactly. You get what you can. Unless you're like a society.

yes right and then you could just go to a grocery store yeah exactly yeah like bin 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 hey we don't know yeah well the cowboy hat chafes your head when you try to wear it outside yeah got a bunch of splinters when he held up that two by four outside 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 what got to go scavenge for more calories to get back to zero. Yeah.

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 a scavengers, you ask, Cody, theoretically. I don't ask that because I know the answer to that, but you can go ahead. Yeah. It was pro-Palestine anti-genocide protesters

who were marching through the city. Ben writes, quote, hundreds of thousand strong, marching, their banners unfurled, the banners of terrorist groups and communes. 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 about protests against the Israeli government's actions in Gaza, which he defines as protests supporting Hamas and the October 7th attacks.

And obviously, you can find people who had Hamas flags. There were people cheering on the October 7th attacks. That's a thing that happened. But that's not the primary reason there are protests. The primary reason there are protests. And what most people is the genocide is all the deaths. It's what the UN just admitted it was doing. Like, it's just that is so, God, of course he's doing that.

But also, like, actually, Penn, they're not trying to, like, rail against or, like, destroy the society that, like, built everything. They're trying to participate in that society. 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. Those rights are fought for. Well, yeah, like a lion, unlike these people who are fighting

for it like scavengers. Right. Now, 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 7th, what did y'all think decolonization meant in response to those attacks by Hamas? Quote, her comment received nearly 100,000 likes.

Wow. And it spoke to the very core of the scavengers. All inhumanity against the lions is justified. And this is just classic conservatism, not just Ben Shapiro, of like, this person made a dumb post. That's obviously the same as tens of thousands of people getting murdered from airstrikes

and starve to death. These are equivalent. 100,000 likes to a bad post equal to the murderer of thousands of equal to fucking babies being incinerated all equivalent, yes. I think of the likes. I'm actually, I need to hold a moment of silence for the likes real quick.

For the likes, yeah, really. That's, thank you, Cody. We sometimes forget the real victims here. I think we do. I think we do. I also, I am dreading how many fucking times he's going to use the words

lions and scavengers. It's so much. It's such bad writing. Already, I'm just like, God, stop saying it. C.S. Lewis would fucking, like, pile drive him in frustration at how badly this is written. At least name the lion. Like, 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. Or in Ben's words, your 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, Israelis are 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. 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 imperialism is. They stole from India. They stole from everywhere. They could. They built it to themselves. They did genocides. They started 30 million people in Bengal. They wiped out entire ethnic groups, you know, to get spices. Like it's it. Okay. You're making it really hard for me to say this is building. Yeah. But I'm going to try. Okay. Yes, the Abra Tsar massacre. Clear example of building. They build. Okay. Impossible. No, you're made a good point. I mean, it's all like, this whole framing just goes back to that fucking tweet from like

25 or 15 years ago. Israelis like to build, Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. Precisely. It's just that, which he apologized for, by the way, and said it was stupid. He said it was a stupid tweet. We'll talk about another thing that he apologized for in a little bit here, Cody. But yes, thank you for bringing out. And then you write a whole book about it. Yeah. So Ben expresses disbelief, the existence of groups like queers for palisces. which he says was formed, quote, in 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. There was never in much doubt. Now there 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 bin Shapiro and his allies at the Daily Wire.

Yeah, Matt Hamas, Walsh. Who LGBT terrorists to death, which I'm sure doesn't include everyone who's LGBT. Just, you know, whoever Matt Walsh thinks is a terrorist. They make very clear. I mean, now it's associating with anybody. Right, right. And people who associate with them, of course, and who fund them, you know, maybe. In ways that we still don't know.

We still, but surely they do. It's not important to have that all ironed out right now. There are other tweets from Matt Walsh. Obviously, that's horrific. What a horrible, fucking terrible person. He's a bad guy. 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 rounding

up people and all the stuff he's talking about and public executions, I believe he's talking about as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, Charlie Kirk had talked about public executions too, like his belief that that's something we need to bring back. Age 12, 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 of be to unite the right. So maybe he's actually calling to unite with people who actually would want to do 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 seems like I don't think they understand what they're saying or recognize these inconsistencies or consistencies to them, who knows? And they don't care. Of course not. None of that. It doesn't matter to them. What matters is crushing their enemies, right? Like the fact that they aren't logically consistent, it's about power.

It always has been. And there's a lot that's disingenuous about this. though, and it's worth getting into that. One thing is that, as of May 2025, per UNICEF regional director, Edward Beigbetter, more than 50,000 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, right? Like, but they might one day. 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 armed group are being murdered. That's what they're angry about because it's bad. Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, it's very obvious that that's the situation. But again, they don't 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. Do you understand that? Like, yeah, those kids were massacred. Like, it's horrific.

The queers for Palestinian people aren't marching in the street because they, they aspire to make their civilization identical to how the Gaza Strip is run. They're 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. 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 would, they have like, it's like, are you bummed out when you read about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Yes, I can be bummed out about that. I've 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. Their crime was being born in a certain place at a certain time. And that's actually not a crime. Exactly. 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. And In 2002, he wrote an article stating 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 for Town Hall in which he argued in favor of allowing Israel to, quote, transfer Palestinians and Israeli Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. That's just an ethnic cleansing. Like, transfer is not a dirty word, I think is the title of that piece. That's ethnic cleansing. Fucking Israeli Arab, they're like citizens. You realize that, right?

Like, it doesn't matter because they're not Jewish, 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 ever written. Everything he does. But not the actual argument, I don't think. 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.

Yeah, I mean, I think both of those things have happened. Now, during this rant, Ben first starts referring to, and again, sorry, because we've gone off on a tangent. This rant is about the protests last year in London against the genocide in Gaza. During this rant, Ben 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 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, co-o-litional hatred of the West. Now, this is actually where I come closest to agreeing with Shapiro

in a certain sense, because the primary motivating factor of these protests is not anti-Semitism. There Ben and I agree. One factor at play within many people protest against Israel's actions here is a co-oitional hatred of what Ben 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 groups of people. Yeah, exactly. Right? Like the decades of support for Israel's continuing actions that have been genocidal

and quasi-genocidal for quite some time. He doesn't this, I mean, with many different topics and issues, but he's conflating I mean, basic criticism of actions. 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 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. Right. And we will continue and get to Ben talking about J.R. Tolkien, which I am excited to chat with you about Cody. But first, let's have some ads. Hey, it's Karen and Georgia, and we just celebrated our 500th episode of My Favorite Murder. That's 500 podcasts filled with true crime, comedy, and some light girl math. We're about to podcast for you. Watch this. We have to think of something to say after Welcome Every Week.

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and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her, or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

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On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads. Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.

The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcasts we were doing. Nick Kroll.

I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, after introducing this protest and starting his scavengers and the pride discourse,

Ben 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 pulling from Tolkien, describing... It's hordes, barbarians of the gates.

The armies of war are marching. marching on ministerial. Right? Yes. Yeah. He's not like slide. It's obvious what he's doing. And he gets very direct here.

He literally calls the quote, Quards of Mordor stand-ins for the Nazis and their allies. Now, Tolkien himself would have rejected Ben's claiming this wholeheartedly. He always rejected. He hated it when people like accused the Lord of the Rings of being rooted in real history and his World War I experiences. And I do tend to be in the camp of like, well, obviously they were kind of. both World War I and World War II influenced what you were writing about.

Like, I'm sorry, JRR. Your experiences have influenced your art in many ways, yeah. Now, that said, Lord of the Rings, in case you didn't know, was written mostly between 1937 and 1949 trilogy. That was like the bulk of the writing. It wasn't published until the 50s, but that's when he was like doing most of his writing and editing. And I would agree with Ben that, like,

there's clearly some World War II in the Lord of the Rings, but it's also not accurate to say the Hordor 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 described himself as an anarchist in ways that are like relatively like 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 anarcho-primitivists talk today, right? Not entirely so, but his fundamental dissection of why he was an anarchist is very much, like, relevant to modern-day anarchists. He thought people were not fit to hold power over people, right?

This is an important belief. The ring of power, right? Never heard of it. That is effectively an object in which all of like political power, all power of the state is ensorcelled into, right? Like, that's not super subtle, right?

Yeah. There's certainly a reading of the Lord of the Rings 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, right? And so, again, this is not a – like most people, J.R. Tolkien's political beliefs were not entirely coherent or consistent, you know. Ebbin flows a little bit. Yes. Contextual. However, what I can say is that J.R. 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 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 said basically standing next to fucking Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill looks like a scumbag, which is not something Ben Shapiro would ever say. I found a summary of a letter that Tolkien sent his son Christopher in December of 1943 that gives you an idea of how little Tolkien's personal politics graph on the Ben's ideological schema. Tolkien lamented that the globe was getting smaller, duller, and 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 Babel to strike all tongues and considered refusing to speak anything but old Mercyon. Seriously, Tolkien found a marrow cosmopolitanism terrifying. 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 had some issues with, like, feminism, like, or what he saw as 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 culture would flatten the world, right? He found this personally horrifying and disgusting, which is like the opposite of Bin'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 disgusted by the domination of peoples around the world by foreign powers. The beliefs he most

consistently expressed throughout his adult life where a sort of anti-capitalist, anti-industrial 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 mean, that's what Mordor was basically modeled after, right? Like, and like... Yeah, like, there's Germany in there, too. Yeah. 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. Yes.

Like there's some Germany in Mordor, 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, right? 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 Sauron, I wouldn't be surprised if he wound up sounding like a Californian. Right? That's a little bit. I'd be it a little bit of a dick. But like, he expresses feelings 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? Like, yes. Anyway, after quoting a passage from Return of the King, describing the armies of Mordor marching on Minas Tirith, bin Shapiro writes, so it goes today in London. The lions are gone. And without the spirit of the lion, are. Our civilization collapses. What is the spirit of the lion? The spirit of success, of responsibility, of duty.

Now, I should note here, Cody, lions sleep up to 18 hours a day. They have intensely matrilineal family group. The women run and are in charge as a general rule in lion's society. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, they steal and 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 bill doesn't 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 bends 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. 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. He's really stretching this really, really, really far. 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. Uric Arch Conservative.

conservative what's the there's one bit also about like they don't whine i know that's not what the oh my god yes yeah no he's saying that they don't complain the line does not complain about the unfairness of life that's literally your job buddy that's every conservative's job that is the only way you've ever made money he's constantly talking about everything is unfair to him specifically well it's just you're got rich complaining ben that's what you do for a living business model yeah complain and then sell leftist tears mugs right what are you talking about lion it's absurd yeah i think there's also esra klein did an interview with ben uh oh eat crazy yeah not yeah 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 trump's entire project is to tear down the social fabric that's not the line that you're talking about literally in 2019 Ben was on like Bill Maher or something and he's like yeah I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 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 yeah right it's just the whole thing it's just like not it's just a mess yeah it's a mess and it's like ultimately Ben 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 Breitbart? Yeah, yeah, yeah. For, uh, what, Lou, it was it Lewandowski who grabbed his colleague? Yeah, he was physically aggressive

towards like a female employee. Yeah, no, he left. It was, uh, I've mentioned that exact thing before. So he does, 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? I mean, it's so inconsistent.

He became a political pundit when he's 17. Like, he's got to. 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 the kids. Like that's not what he purports that people should be doing.

No. Now, 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 he, and again, the lions are the scavengers that like hyenas need to defend anyway, whatever. Warriors? Are you like doing like now they're like people doing like whatever. And lions aren't warriors. They don't have wars. They fight because they're animals. Exactly. Like why are you saying the lions are warriors? What are you talking about? It's just anyway, whatever. 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 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 honest or merciful only on conditions. Now, that's a very good point from C.S. Lewis. 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.

I mean, that's what the entire GOP did. We all saw it live in 2015, 2016, it happened. We saw Ted Cruz go out there and say, vote your conscience. And then, like, four weeks later, he's sweaty on the phone, being like, well, for Trump, please. Right. Exactly. And that's, I agree with this C.S. 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. Ben's entire career has been built on taking money from the mega-rich to push a very specific kind of propaganda. He wouldn't know 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 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 1946 letter C.S. Lewis sent to a professor friend of his, collected in of other worlds, essays and stories. Quote, 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 because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

There it is. I mean, that's like, it's just like, they're supporting a robber baron who is leading. Who is backed by theocrats. Yeah. He's backed theocratic movement. Like, It's just, he's talking about, he's just doing both. C.S. Lewis failed to consider, you know, Porchino Las Dost, right? What if you get a robber baron to lead your theocratic movement? That's wild, man. There we go. Speaking of robber barons, Cody.

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afternoon. So we're talking about C.S. Lewis, who Ben Shapiro just brought up. Not looking hair or went off of fingers. Yeah. No, we're not. Although, I'd do it again. Oh, buddy. Well, maybe not in this Finsettel era. Anyway, it's worth noting that in 1951, 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 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 and a 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 a political pundit. Propagantist. He thought that was gross, because it is. you know, to put those sort of thoughts and in your work and stuff. As Orwell would say, all art is propaganda, right? But I don't think Lewis believed that, 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. Yeah, that gets literally paid by oil billionaires to write propaganda supporting oil billionaires.

Yes. Exactly. And again, Lewis would have obviously, maybe not obviously, if you don't know him, but Lewis would have fallen on the more conservative axis of politics, certainly more conservative than progressive, but one of his most consistent stances was a sort of discussed at 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, which he saw as 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 in 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 mankind, the magician who, quote, sought power over nature, and the astrologer who proclaimed nature's power over man. And I want to quote from a write-up on c.s.luis.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 can find a cure in science. From the astrologer came the philosophical

materialist 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 Ben presents us with in his very bad book. He presented readers with two

archetypes, in opposition, either of which would doom mankind if worshipped 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, right? Because he's also not saying there are two types of people. No, no. He's not. He's not 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 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 education, right? That like because of the way democracy functions, it's going to like fuck up the educational system. Like sort of like overtaking facts and reality and sort of, you know. He's not entirely wrong about, obviously, other democracies do better. So I don't agree with him that this is inherent, but it can happen, right? A lot of bad things can happen in a democracy.

Exactly, exactly. 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. Oh, yeah. Both he and Tolkien would have been on the bomb data center's 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, they would try to buy a gun. Like, they would be extremists.

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 of it is just. 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. Like, it's just not even, like, taking into, like, what the thing is doing. itself. Exactly. Yeah. What it can create, or create in quotes, I guess. Yeah. 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 what we see in Lewis is 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 this is a fundamental distrust of giving human's 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 just the

reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. He would hate so much about everything. He would be so unhappy. Like the internet memes, meme culture, like, oh, God, he would hate it so much. And again, not at all woke, just absolutely not a fascist. No, yeah, just disgusted with, like. And not a theocrat. As Christian as he was, not a theeocrat. Exactly, yeah.

Every single AI post that the Department of Homeland Security puts up, like every single thing they're doing. He was in his fucking mind. This is this. Oh, yeah. Dretesque. Gosh. Yeah. Now, after quoting Lewis, Ben introduces another wrinkle to his lion scavenger dichotomy.

The pride of lions is split up between three sub-arch types. 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. It is kind of unclear to me what separates the hunters from the warriors of the deception. I was going to describe the hunters and the warriors. I think the weavers are like women. That's the place women have in the pride.

Is they're the weavers, you know? Yeah, well, the men get two groups to choose from. That's right. They get to hunt or war. Or be a warrior. Yeah. Anyway, and again, also, Ben uses warrior and hunter more or less as synonyms in this book. It's just, he's bad.

After establishing this, the subsets of the pride, the categories inside the pride, Ben 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 wait a second they're not on guard against it it's how they survive the pride has a spirit of of scavengers every lion has the spirit of a scavenger in them then what are you talking about what he's trying to say is that like he's describing the scavengers liberals and leftists as like people who are lazy and just want to steal from other people and also

tear down what other people have built and ben is trying to say that like there's that voice in all of us that we have to be on guard against, right? Like, that's, that's what he's trying to say, right? Yeah. 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 straightway to describe Vance. Yeah, oh, 100%. Like, he's like, yeah, the, the hillbilly elegy era, he was like a lion, which like maybe he was a scavenger the whole time, Ben, who, you know. How was that being a lion? He's literally just, okay.

I know. We don't need to talk about it, 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. Yeah. 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 PAC, and PAC is capitalized, too, to the spirit of the same.

scavenger the spirit of the scavenger is the spirit of envy he's not he's just putting word there's just there's it's it's just ridiculous this means nothing it means nothing it's so fundamentally 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 no it's It's too bad and messy. You can't. Because also when you say the word pack and you capitalize it, I'm thinking of wolves,

which wouldn't you be able to use for your other? Like, they're so interchangeable. It's like if I were to write a book called The Horse and the Ant and started with like, obviously the horse soars high above all of us on its mighty wings. Right. Meanwhile, the Ant looming over the horse. Yes. Okay.

So I debated whether or not to discuss the fact that Ben himself is clearly motivated by a deep spirit of envy, right? 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 and movies. And he failed in this goal because he's not good at it, right? And the Daily Wires movie is also a massive waste of money, horrible idea, because none of them

are good writers. Hey, you wait until they do the anti-woke Snow White, okay? That's going to be really, really good. That's going to really blow up. Audiences are craving. The children cry out demanding anti-woke snow fucking white. You can hear him now. They're just anti-woke snow.

Was the snow white mean like the 60s? It's not woke. I don't know. Anyway. It's because they made a new one and the actress wasn't white enough. I haven't been keeping up with the fucking Disney movies. 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've wasted millions trying to create their own 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, right? That is Ben Shapiro's origin story as a villain, is that he couldn't hack it as a fucking professional screenwriter. Yes, about 85%. Right. Yeah, exactly. Growing up, fundamentalist, religious, conservative, all that kind of stuff. Didn't help.

But that resentment fueled by enemy is 100%. And he can only see this as an example of Hollywood hating conservatives like him, right? It has to be bigotry. 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 Mamet and John Millius, right? Or Millius, I always forget, the guy who did Red Dawn, right?

Actors like Kelsey Grammer and John Void, not to mention Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who feels more like a Democrat today but was the literal Republican governor of California, right? There's plenty of successful conservatives in Hollywood as actors and writers. Right, Clinton Eastwood. Right, and director, massively successful. Incredibly talented, very conservative person. And plenty of conservative, like, movies that are conservative. And I mean, 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. Even though it's, like, made by a lot of, like, you know, self-described libs or whatever, 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, I mean, we're seeing it now with all this, like, move to, like, I'm not even going to say cancel culture because that's not what it is.

It's not what it's going on. 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. Right. And, yeah, part of it is if I get them out. Finally, I'll get a shot, and people will realize I was back all along, right? 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 is an agitating people with cheap political shots. This is very funny because the next paragraph of the book after that line about the spirit of the scavenger is the spirit of envy, the very next paragraph, is basically Ben describing himself. Quote, The scavenger does not believe in an understandable universe in which success is the result of performance of duty. Instead, the scavenger believes that any such argument has 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, Ben. Ben, you got to read that again, Ben. That's like your whole life. Buddy. That's your entire, like, career, buddy. Your first book was about the conspiracy against you. you and you specifically in conservatives generally.

Yes. With tooth and with claw. 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 basically synonyms? No. Yeah, I mean, it should be, but could you describe lions as having a pack? Sure. Sure.

Right? I guess you couldn't describe other, like pride doesn't go both ways. Pride is like a bourbon whiskey thing, right? Anyway, the pack. consists of looters, letchers, 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 2025, given that about a month before Bin's book was published, London police arrested

474 people at a Palestine action ban protest. Per the BBC, police have arrested 474 people at a demonstration in London in support of the banned group Palestine Action. The Metropolitan Police said 466 protesters were arrested for supporting the group, five for assaults on police officers, two for public order offenses and one for a racially aggravated offense. Scores of people simultaneously unveiled handwritten signs with the message, I oppose genocide, I support Palestine action at the protest, organized by defend our juries at Westminster's Parliament Square. It was the biggest protest since the government prescribed the group in July under the Terrorism Act of 2000, making membership of or

support for it a criminal offense, punishable by up to 14, 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 10 years. London really has fallen to the pack. A pack of police. You can't even say, I oppose genocide. I support this group. They'll arrest you. 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. That is their political project. That is what he is supporting. right now. He's guesting on all the podcast with the vice president who's only a podcaster now

talking about this exact things. Yes, exactly. So maybe he's a, I don't know, a wolf, a vulture. I don't know, a liar. Bad writer. Yes. Bad writer. Yeah. Now, given the way book publication timetables work, there's no way that, you know, these mass arrests happen. 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 their heels, scrambling desperately to hold on to 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 are in no danger whatsoever, but are endangering huge numbers of people. That doesn't sound as good. Yeah, no, it needs to be barbarians at the gates were perpetual desperately self-defense perpetually persecuted. Rather than we have every lever of power. Exactly. And he critiques leftists in this passage

for embracing Mousy Dong'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, what do you call mass arrests, man? That's the premise of police. Like, what are you talking about?

Like, that is political power. What do you call, like, Israel's actions, right? Like, I mean, it's bomb. I guess, more than the barrel of a gun, but, you know, the basic idea is the same, right? You can use language in ways to mean many things. Yeah, he believes that. Yes. He believes that.

Yes. Ben continues with a warning that the children of lions will themselves become scavengers if the lions don't pass on their ways to their kids. And then he pivots to talking about an 1897 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 and the shouting dies.

The captains and the kings depart. Still stands thine ancient sacrifice and humble and 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.

That said, 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.

You know, that's the argument is made. Yeah, it's a mandatory scavengerism, right? Right. And this is classic bin, 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 by the horrors of World War I. He was a strong imperialist, his whole life, he was a very strong imperialist prior to the outbreak of hostilities in World War I. Kipling despised Germany and German civilization, and he was a huge supporter at the outset of the war in England, involved and committing to it.

As the war started, he wrote something that feels very familiar to what Ben 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.

That is what he's writing. Right? Yeah. So let's talk about Kipling. Let's talk about what World War I did to Kipling because Rudyard had one son, 16-year-old John Kipling. John was 16 when the war started.

Now, John had intended to joined 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 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 1915, John became a platoon commander in the Irish Guards and was sent to fight in the Battle of Luce. He died while assaulting the German lines. This was a profoundly traumatizing and changing event for Kipling. For one thing, prior to his son becoming a platoon commander, 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 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 of admiration about Irish school, particularly in comparison to what he'd written before. Now, he also wrote this about what happened to his son in the wake of World War I. If any questioned why we died, tell them because our fathers lied. That seems maybe different from... Yeah. what the topic started as.

Right. It seems maybe, again, to go from where Ben is like that, like, no, the war is at the gate. Anything we have to do is justified. And like, oh, no, my son's dead. Oh, my kid's dead. We shouldn't have done that. We shouldn't have said that. We shouldn't have told me to do that.

Maybe this was a fuck up, right? Now, there's some context of this line. And I'm going to quote from an article for the Irish Times by Ronan McCreevy, explaining the context behind this line. This has often been wrongly interpreted as Kipling, believing that 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 lies in 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 even if he could never admit that World War I was itself fully a bad idea, he knew that it was, right? He had to be like, well, it was badly probably probably, but he, I think there's a degree of ego there. But he knew that he'd fucked up, right? that they all had. Lied to them to get them to fight.

That's... And, you know, Ben, Ben will never 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 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 it 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 so you just express the guilt of it right and it's so telling about bin 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 like Kipling got woke after World War I, but Kipling got increasingly critical of imperialism and of his previous stances after World War I. 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

go for it because I 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 going to read this poem and then we'll talk about it afterwards it with something really depressing and then yeah do the nice poem so this is a picked song by Rudyard Kipling

Rome never looks where she treads always her heavy hooves fall on our stomachs our hearts or our heads and Rome never heeds when we bawl. Her sentries 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 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 in 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 little folk too we are as busy as they working our works out of you watch and you'll see it some day no indeed we are not strong but we know peoples that are yes and will 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 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 Ben's going for here And why it's full of shit I mean, I'm convinced that maybe We're all lines and scavengers Are we part of a pack? We're also a part of a pack And we are also a colony of We can say ants

We're a hive also And the hives are made of crows and the crows are made of lions right right every crow contains a lion you know it is known yeah it's known you know we all went to school we all learned about lions and crows yeah it's like the parable of the butterfly and the tyrannosaurus rex you know both of which swim deep in the ocean in the marianus trench on the moon it's as accurate as what bin's written yeah uh-huh It's good. Anyway, how you feeling Brody?

Have I ever done that before? Yes. I feel like you have to have, yeah. And Shoddy. Shoddy, sure. I appreciate that he at least knows he needs to get some good sentences into his book, so he quotes other writers. Even if he doesn't, like, necessarily interpret them well, he's at least kind of. Got to pad this out with some Tolkien and Lewis and Kipling.

I got to keep people reading the book. Otherwise, people might notice that I can't write. Yeah. Incredible. Oh, good stuff. Good job to him. Cody, you want to plug anything? Sure, why not?

Check out some more news. It's our weekly show. I sit at the desk. I read the news and talk about various topics. We also have a show called Even More News twice a week. It talks about more current events in a more casual way. And check out my band. It's called The Hot Shapes.

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? I'll be like good, yeah You want to drink? I'll say yeah

Don't do that Probably yeah I shouldn't joke about the weird parisocial stuff because that'll happen Oh, we don't want any of that But check out Cody's

podcast and 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 time before the year

Well gang this has been behind the podcast A Bastards about Shapiro Ben good night and good luck. Bye.

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