Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness, it's behind the behind bastards podcasters Robert
Speaker 2: Evans show that you're listening to. This was not a
Speaker 2: good introduction.
Speaker 3: Sophie Lichtman per show.
Speaker 1: Yeah we're doing.
Speaker 2: You're making fun of me, Sophie, you're making fun of me,
Speaker 2: laughing at me. Well, here to laugh at me more.
Speaker 2: Cody Johnstone welcome, Yes, thank you so much, guest. Cody.
Speaker 2: You are the host of news Comma Some More, a
Speaker 2: podcast about news and also a YouTube show about news.
Speaker 3: I'm great, are you? Ah?
Speaker 2: No, no, everyone, no one's doing great. Come on, but
Speaker 2: you gotta be pleasant, right. I was at a friend's
Speaker 2: wedding the other week. He's like, how you doing? I
Speaker 2: mean right now?
Speaker 3: Fine in general?
Speaker 4: Bad open bar uh huh good yeah outside maybe I
Speaker 4: don't know. Yeah, I'm fine. We're all doing our best.
Speaker 4: Things are weird and happening, and they're happening quickly and suddenly.
Speaker 3: In many ways they are.
Speaker 2: They're happening here. You could say the things that are
Speaker 2: happening I could do. And one of the people who's
Speaker 2: happening here is a friend of VARs you and me, Cody,
Speaker 2: a friend of the Pods, a friend of our mutual
Speaker 2: friend who we all miss right now. Katie stole by Katie.
Speaker 2: Ben Shapiro, our buddy, our good comrade and.
Speaker 3: Co my band mate.
Speaker 2: He's my band Yeah yeah, you and Benefit rocking out,
Speaker 2: Katie and you and I and also Sophie did a
Speaker 2: long series of podcast episodes. We went through the entirety
Speaker 2: of Ben Shapiro's unbelievably shoddy fiction novel. I mean, just
Speaker 2: some of the absolute worst pros I think either of
Speaker 2: us has ever encountered.
Speaker 3: Real bad.
Speaker 2: It was bad enough that Ben is not written another
Speaker 2: fiction novel since the rest of my knowledge.
Speaker 4: Here's the thing. I'm really upset. He announced he's had
Speaker 4: this new book out. But I remember, like a year
Speaker 4: or two ago, a few years ago, he said he
Speaker 4: was working on a science fiction book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to read that.
Speaker 3: Fucker. I want that, But don't do that. I don't
Speaker 3: need your like.
Speaker 2: Well, that's like a year of free content for me, Ben,
Speaker 2: get it out.
Speaker 3: Give me the juice. Man.
Speaker 2: I know I'm late on my novel, Ben, but come on,
Speaker 2: you don't have a real job.
Speaker 3: Yeah it off. Take time off.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. But we are doing a Ben Shapiro
Speaker 2: book episode because on September second of this year, he
Speaker 2: published his latest nonfiction novel, Lions and Scavengers, The True
Speaker 2: Story of America and her Critics. That's in her critics
Speaker 2: is yah parentheses at the very bottom and tiny deck.
Speaker 4: This is a fascinating choice for him. It seems like, so,
Speaker 4: you know, like the Abundance book, we don't need to
Speaker 4: talk about abundance or whatever, but that book, hm hmmm,
Speaker 4: Firestorm on the Internet seem to be sort of written
Speaker 4: in a way that was intending for like, well, and
Speaker 4: then Kamala Harris will be the president and then this
Speaker 4: book will come out. That didn't happen, and so it's
Speaker 4: a the reaction was different. It's a whole other conversation
Speaker 4: sort of happening.
Speaker 2: It's like sitting down with a friend to like tell
Speaker 2: them that you're worried about like dental health while they're
Speaker 2: actively bleeding out from arterial wound and you're like, yes,
Speaker 2: I just really think you need to floss more, and oh, sorry,
Speaker 2: you spurred it a little bit of that arterial blood
Speaker 2: right on my neck here.
Speaker 4: But yeah, maybe rip the pages out of that book
Speaker 4: and use them to like stop depleting or something. And
Speaker 4: this book seems very like twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen coded.
Speaker 4: It's like, what are you doing like doing this history
Speaker 4: stuff again? Like what did the Trump administration do the
Speaker 4: first time with their like projects about like what the
Speaker 4: real history is, like how slavery didn't happen or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a weird book.
Speaker 4: I guess to come out now in my opinion, but
Speaker 4: I haven't read it, so maybe it's actually perfect for
Speaker 4: this moment.
Speaker 3: You know what it is.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you right now. We'll talk about this more.
Speaker 2: Ben Shapiro desperately wishes.
Speaker 3: He were C. S.
Speaker 2: Lewis, And you know, C. S Lewis talked about politics,
Speaker 2: but in like a broader kind of philosophical sense, and
Speaker 2: he was like a good writer, you know, and Ben
Speaker 2: is not. And Ben is also obsessed with like petty
Speaker 2: culture war grievances and shit.
Speaker 3: Ben Shapiro, Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2: This is him trying to like really establish himself as
Speaker 2: a C. S. Lewis type thinker. And it's not good.
Speaker 2: That's by short. But but we'll go through it because
Speaker 2: I have actually quite a lot to say about. Most
Speaker 2: of the introduction to this book is part one, So Cody,
Speaker 2: you and I may be back repeatedly talking more about
Speaker 2: this fair enough, so the five Yeah, yeah, yeah, well
Speaker 2: we haven't We're not even getting through all of that.
Speaker 2: But I think you will also get the gist of
Speaker 2: his argument from this, because Ben being Ben, most of
Speaker 2: this book is him just kind of repeating himself, right, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: It opens with an inscription. This is like the dedication
Speaker 2: to the book to the lions. The l is capitalized,
Speaker 2: the hunter's warriors and weavers, each of those words is capitalized.
Speaker 2: Who build, defend, and maintain the greatest civilization and the
Speaker 2: history of mankind. Against the scavengers. The s is capitalized.
Speaker 2: Who would destroy that civilization from within?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And that's essentially the thesis of the book, right, is
Speaker 2: that you've got lions and scavengers. That's all of society.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's his whole thing.
Speaker 4: I can't wait to find out what he thinks is
Speaker 4: a lion, what he thinks is a scavenger.
Speaker 2: And what's funny here is, first off, I know this
Speaker 2: is petty, but I can't get over it, is that
Speaker 2: we're just this whole book, the basic premise of this
Speaker 2: and he's trying to be kind of artistic by framing
Speaker 2: it as lions and scavengers, you know, like he's trying
Speaker 2: to be kind of philosophical, but his entire underpinning of
Speaker 2: that attempt is based on a wild factual inaccuracy about lions.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Like out the gate, None of this is
Speaker 2: right because lions and scavengers aren't separate things. And I'm
Speaker 2: going to quote very quickly from an article on Krueger Park,
Speaker 2: which is a wildlife national park in South Africa. Another
Speaker 2: lion fact not commonly appreciated is that lions are not
Speaker 2: just hunters but scavengers as well, often chasing smaller predators
Speaker 2: like cheetah off their kills. In some instances, up to
Speaker 2: fifty percent of a lion's diet can come from scavenging
Speaker 2: rather than hunting life prey. Lions are scavengers as much
Speaker 2: as they are hunters, sometimes.
Speaker 4: More, sometimes more. I mean, you imagine he gets most
Speaker 4: of his information from the lion King, right.
Speaker 2: Right, Yes, this is all of his knowledge about lions
Speaker 2: is from what he remembers of the lion King and
Speaker 2: the fact that lions look impressive.
Speaker 3: Yes exactly.
Speaker 2: But there is something deeply meaningful about the whole root
Speaker 2: of his ideological argument here is that you've got lions,
Speaker 2: which are conservatives, right, which are the people who build
Speaker 2: culture and the people who like make everything good, right,
Speaker 2: and they're creators, you know, they do the hard work
Speaker 2: of forging civilization. And then there's scavengers who just want
Speaker 2: to tear everything down and they're just mooching and stealing
Speaker 2: and attacking from within this thing that they didn't make.
Speaker 2: And of course the reality is that like, well, lions
Speaker 2: not only do they scavenge, but most of their scavenging
Speaker 2: is them stealing kills from animals that did the actual hunting,
Speaker 2: like hyenas and cheetahs, right like, and then taking credit
Speaker 2: for it. Yeah. Interesting, Interesting, He's just a writer. He's
Speaker 2: a bad writer. He's a bad thinker.
Speaker 4: Also, right, he couldn't stretch his like analogy past the
Speaker 4: and no, because if you're gonna say lions, that's a
Speaker 4: specific animal, and then you're zooming out to say scavengers,
Speaker 4: say vultures, Like pick a scavenger to like lay like
Speaker 4: lions and vultures whatever. But like it's just you're you're
Speaker 4: being specific with the first one and then vague like
Speaker 4: you're using a category for the second.
Speaker 2: And this is sloppy, it's also evidence of like this
Speaker 2: thing that you see a lot with Ben and with
Speaker 2: other conservatives, where it's like, well, you've never done anything
Speaker 2: in the world, right, Like you don't know anything about
Speaker 2: survival in the wilderness. If you did, you'd know that, Like,
Speaker 2: hunting is a bad way to survive. Very few animals
Speaker 2: live just by hunting because it's hard and it burns
Speaker 2: a lot of calories. Like a person who taught me
Speaker 2: how to hunt is a great outdoors person, right, extremely skilled,
Speaker 2: and they will admit like, if they had to survive
Speaker 2: on their own, ninety percent of their calories would be
Speaker 2: foraging and trapping because hunting is wildly inefficient. And if
Speaker 2: you can take a killed that someone else made or
Speaker 2: find something dead, that just works a lot better. It's
Speaker 2: what almost every animal prefers to.
Speaker 3: Do, right, survive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it just keeps you alive better. Anyway. The introduction
Speaker 2: chapter opens and it's just titled London, England. And this
Speaker 2: is how it starts. A tension lies at the core
Speaker 2: of our being. It royals us. It turns our guts,
Speaker 2: it boils our brains. The tension lies between two opposing fours.
Speaker 2: Those forces beat within every man's breast. They fight for
Speaker 2: supremacy within every civilization. One must triumph and one must fall.
Speaker 2: The spirit of the lion, the spirit of the scavenger. Again,
Speaker 2: lions are scavengers.
Speaker 4: Lines are scavengers. The scavengers. There are specific animals you
Speaker 4: can choose.
Speaker 2: It's actually very efficient, it's smart.
Speaker 3: Like also brain's boiling.
Speaker 2: I say that as a hunter and a scavenger, I
Speaker 2: pick up roadkill and I hunt. I also raise and
Speaker 2: slaughter animals. All of these things are ways to get calories.
Speaker 2: Beyond that, beyond him getting lion facts.
Speaker 3: Beyond like the premise of the analogy wants to.
Speaker 2: Use right, the fundamental premise of this is just based
Speaker 2: on a complete misunderstanding of wildlife. Beyond that, his attempt
Speaker 2: to apply a moral line to something fundamentally immoral, which
Speaker 2: is how different creatures take in their calories, shows a
Speaker 2: very conservative ignorance towards basic biological reality, which is what
Speaker 2: they're supposed to stand up for. You know, scavenging for
Speaker 2: food is not in anywhere worse than hunting for it.
Speaker 2: Every great predator, like the Trannosaurus Rex, paleontologists generally agree,
Speaker 2: were scavengers at least an equal measure to hunters right,
Speaker 2: because it's just not a great way to survive just hunting.
Speaker 2: Yeah we can, yeah, exactly, you get what you can't.
Speaker 3: Unless you're like a society.
Speaker 2: Yes, right, and then you could just go to a
Speaker 2: grocery store.
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like Ben does pay someone to do your shopping
Speaker 2: for you. You know, because you soft little hands, You're
Speaker 2: not going to go skin an animal. You're not going
Speaker 2: to do that, Ben Shapiro.
Speaker 3: Hey, we don't know.
Speaker 2: You know, the cowboy hat chafes your head when you
Speaker 2: try to wear it outside.
Speaker 4: Yeah, got a bunch of splinters when he held up
Speaker 4: that two by four outside.
Speaker 2: That two by four. You know, he's still tired from that.
Speaker 2: He's still getting the splinters out of his hands from that.
Speaker 2: One day he went to home depot to buy a
Speaker 2: single piece of wood.
Speaker 3: You gotta go scavenger for more calories to get back
Speaker 3: to zero. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, After this, we get a dramatic opening about how
Speaker 2: Ben is writing this introduction in London, which quote has
Speaker 2: been conquered by the scavengers. Who is he defining as scavengers?
Speaker 4: You ask code? Theoretically, I don't ask that because I
Speaker 4: know the answer to that. But you can go ahead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was pro Palestine, anti genocide protesters who were
Speaker 2: marching through the city. Ben Wright's quote, hundreds of thousand
Speaker 2: strong marching. They're banners unfurled, the banners of terrorist groups
Speaker 2: and communists and of transgender activists gathered together to revolt
Speaker 2: against the civilization that has given them their rights and
Speaker 2: their prosperity and their power. And you know, he's writing
Speaker 2: about protest against the Israeli government's actions in Gaza, which
Speaker 2: he defines as protests supporting Hamas and the October seventh attacks.
Speaker 2: And obviously you can find people who had Hamas flags.
Speaker 2: There were people cheering on the October seventh attacks. That's
Speaker 2: a thing that happened, But that's not the primary reason
Speaker 2: there were protests. The primary reason they are a protest.
Speaker 2: And what most people is the genocide is.
Speaker 3: All the death, what the UN just admitted it was.
Speaker 3: It's what the un just like.
Speaker 4: It's just that is so kind of course he's doing that,
Speaker 4: but also like actually been they're not trying to like
Speaker 4: rail against or like destroy the society that like built everything.
Speaker 3: If they're trying to participate in that society.
Speaker 2: They're participating in it by speaking and by trying to
Speaker 2: speak to power and make their voices heard. Also, the
Speaker 2: civilization didn't give them their rights. They had to take
Speaker 2: their rights, or their predecessors did via protest and violence. Sometimes,
Speaker 2: because societies don't just give people rights because they're nice,
Speaker 2: those rights are fought for.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, like a lion, unlike these people who are
Speaker 3: fighting for it like scavengers right now.
Speaker 2: Obviously, in standard Shapiro fashion, he ignores the critiques these
Speaker 2: marchers have of the mass slaughter of civilians by a
Speaker 2: modern first World military in favor of raging at people
Speaker 2: who march around with flags and post on social media.
Speaker 2: He cites one commentator from Twitter who wrote after October seventh,
Speaker 2: what did y'all think decolonization meant? In response to those
Speaker 2: attacks by hamas quote. Her comment received nearly one hundred
Speaker 2: thousand likes. Wow, and it spoke to the very core
Speaker 2: of the scavengers. All in humanity against the lions is justified.
Speaker 2: And this is just classic conservatism, not just been Shapiro
Speaker 2: of Like this person made a dumb post that's obviously
Speaker 2: the same as tens of thousands of people getting murdered
Speaker 2: from air strikes and starve to death. These are equivalent
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand likes to a bad post, equal to
Speaker 2: the murder of thousands of equal to fucking babies being incinerated,
Speaker 2: all equivalent.
Speaker 3: Yes, I think of the likes.
Speaker 4: I'm I'm actually I need to hold the moment of
Speaker 4: silence for the likes, real quick, for the likes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, really, that's thank you, Cody. We sometimes forget the
Speaker 2: real victims here.
Speaker 3: I think we do. I think we do.
Speaker 4: I also I am dreading how many fucking times he's
Speaker 4: going to use the words lions and scavengers.
Speaker 2: It's so much, it's such bad right already, I'm just like, God,
Speaker 2: stop saying this. C. S. Lewis would fucking like pile
Speaker 2: drive him in frustration at how badly this is written.
Speaker 3: At least name the lion like.
Speaker 2: And I'm not particularly a C. S. Lewis stand but
Speaker 2: the man knew how to put together a sentence right like,
Speaker 2: and he understood how to like not make my head
Speaker 2: hurt while reading a book repeatedly because.
Speaker 4: Or in Ben's words, you're boiling brain. Yeah, exactly, thank
Speaker 4: you boiling your brain in London. But we do see
Speaker 4: here kind of the ultimate reason for the framing of
Speaker 4: this book is Rayleigh's are a lions, Palestinians, and people
Speaker 4: angry at their murder are scavengers. There's a particular irony
Speaker 4: in his horror at this scavenger gathering and quote the
Speaker 4: beating heart of what was once the center of Western civilization,
Speaker 4: because London was only the center of Western civilization due
Speaker 4: to a vast centuries long program of what can only
Speaker 4: be described as scavenging theft on a grand scale against
Speaker 4: an impossibly vast chunk of the globe. They stole from
Speaker 4: the rest of the world. That's what emperialism is. They
Speaker 4: stole from India, they stole everywhere they could.
Speaker 2: They built it to themselves shut aside. They start thirty
Speaker 2: million people in Bengal. They wiped out entire ethnic groups,
Speaker 2: you know, to get spices.
Speaker 3: Like it's it, Okay, you're making a really hard for
Speaker 3: me to say, this is building. Yeah, but I'm gonna try.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yes, the Obritzar massacre clear example of building they're built.
Speaker 3: They build.
Speaker 4: Okay, impossible, now you're yeah, it made a good point.
Speaker 4: I mean it's all like this whole framing just goes
Speaker 4: back to that fucking tweet from like right twenty five
Speaker 4: or fifteen years ago. Israelis like to build Arabs, like
Speaker 4: to bomb crap and live in open sewage precise. It's
Speaker 4: just that, which he apologized for, by the way, and
Speaker 4: said it was stupid.
Speaker 3: He said it was a stupid tweet.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about another thing that he apologized for in
Speaker 2: a little bit here, Cody.
Speaker 3: But yes, thank you for then you write a whole
Speaker 3: book about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so bin Express's disbelief the existence of groups like
Speaker 2: Queers for Palestine, which he says was formed quote and
Speaker 2: solidarity with people who would throw queers off buildings at
Speaker 2: the first available opportunity if given half a chance. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: his colleague Matt Walsh, in the immediate wake of Charlie
Speaker 2: Kirk's assassination, posted this, this was left wing LGBT terrorism.
Speaker 2: There was never in much doubt, is none at all.
Speaker 2: All left wing terror networks must be crushed. All of
Speaker 2: the terrorists and their helpers and funders must be arrested,
Speaker 2: prosecuted and put to death. Yeah, these Palestinians want to
Speaker 2: kill queer people, unlike Ben Shapiro and his allies at
Speaker 2: the Daily Wire who want.
Speaker 3: Matt Hamas Walsh.
Speaker 2: Who LGBT terrorists to death, which I'm sure doesn't include
Speaker 2: everyone who's a YVT, just you know whoever Matt Walsh
Speaker 2: thinks is there very clear?
Speaker 3: I mean, now it's associating with anybody right right and.
Speaker 2: People who associate with them of course, and who fund them,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe.
Speaker 3: In ways that we still don't know, we still but
Speaker 3: but surely they do.
Speaker 2: It's not important to have that all ironed out right now.
Speaker 4: There are other tweets fro Matt Walsh. Obviously that's horrific.
Speaker 4: What a horrible, fucking terrible person.
Speaker 2: He's a bad guy.
Speaker 4: He specifically has also been basically calling for unity amongst
Speaker 4: all the factions on the right in order to carry
Speaker 4: out what he's talking about, crushing the left and like right,
Speaker 4: rounding up people's all the stuff he's talking about in
Speaker 4: public executions I believe he's talking about as well.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean Charlie Kirk had talked about
Speaker 2: public executions too, like his belief that that's something we
Speaker 2: need to bring in.
Speaker 4: Age twelve I think is the appropriate age for watching that.
Speaker 4: According to them, So he's calling for uniting all the
Speaker 4: right wing factions in order to do this, so which
Speaker 4: I mean, I guess a good phrase instead would be
Speaker 4: to unite the right. So sure, maybe he's actually calling
Speaker 4: to unite with people who actually would want to do
Speaker 4: the same thing. To Ben, like, if you're calling to
Speaker 4: unite the right in order to do this, then you're
Speaker 4: calling to unite very very far right, sorry to say,
Speaker 4: like neo Nazis who would want to kill the Jewish
Speaker 4: people who are in the coalition, much like Ben is
Speaker 4: saying that Hamas wants to do to gay people. Just
Speaker 4: seems like I don't think they understand what they're saying
Speaker 4: or recognize these inconsistencies or consistencies to them, who knows.
Speaker 2: And they don't care, of course, none of that. It
Speaker 2: doesn't matter, like to them, what matters is crushing their enemies, right,
Speaker 2: Like the fact that they aren't logically consistent is about power.
Speaker 2: It always has been, you know. And there's a lot
Speaker 2: that's disingenuous about this framing, though, and it's worth getting
Speaker 2: into that. One thing is that as of May twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five, per UNICEF Regional Director Edward Bigbetter, more than
Speaker 2: fifty thousand children have been killed or injured by Israel
Speaker 2: in the Gaza strip. These kids had no power or
Speaker 2: frankly desire to throw anyone off of buildings.
Speaker 3: Right, like, but they might one day.
Speaker 2: You know, you can find people who are delusional in
Speaker 2: any group. But I know a lot of queers who
Speaker 2: are angry about what's being done in Palestine. They're not
Speaker 2: laboring under a misapprehension that Hamas is woke. They're angry
Speaker 2: that kids and women and children have nothing to do
Speaker 2: with Hamas or any other arm group are being murdered.
Speaker 2: That's what they're angry about, because it's bad.
Speaker 4: It's like, yeah, it's very obvious that that's the situation.
Speaker 3: But again, they don't.
Speaker 2: Care if there's a mass shooting at a church that
Speaker 2: believes things I don't. Like, I'm not not going to
Speaker 2: be angry about the mass shooting because the pastor of
Speaker 2: the church said something shitty and like that doesn't make
Speaker 2: it okay that kids got shot.
Speaker 4: Do you understand that, Like, yeah, those kids are massacred,
Speaker 4: Like it's horrific.
Speaker 2: The Queers for Palaestinan people aren't marching in the street
Speaker 2: because they aspire to make their civilization identical to how
Speaker 2: the Gaza strip is run. Their marching because they're angry
Speaker 2: that civilians are being killed, right and they understand rightfully
Speaker 2: that the average person in the Gaza strip has absolutely
Speaker 2: no control over what fucking Hamas does.
Speaker 4: You can call those things horrific crimes against humanity and
Speaker 4: not have to be like, but also, I don't want
Speaker 4: to do Hamas stuff here because they have.
Speaker 2: Like It's like, are you bummed out when you read
Speaker 2: about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 2: I can be bummed out about that. I fucking talked
Speaker 2: to a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. She was like
Speaker 2: seven when it happened. She's not responsible for the Empire,
Speaker 2: like me being bummed about US nuking Japan. Doesn't mean
Speaker 2: I'm pretending the Empire of Japan was a good society.
Speaker 2: It wasn't like it's just bad to kill kids.
Speaker 4: Their crime was being born in a certain place at
Speaker 4: a certain time, and that's actually not a crime exactly.
Speaker 2: It certainly shouldn't be treated like one. Right again, are
Speaker 2: there assholes in any mass movement who try to hijack
Speaker 2: the momentum of a larger number of people to push
Speaker 2: their own fucked up bullshit, including like uncritical worship of
Speaker 2: violence used by a group. Sure, and Ben Shapiro knows
Speaker 2: full well what it's like to uncritically endorse violence against civilians.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and two, he wrote an article stating
Speaker 2: that he wasn't the least bit concerned about civilian casualties
Speaker 2: in Afghanistan or the West Bank, and the insinuation was
Speaker 2: that this extended generally to the War on Terror. He
Speaker 2: expressed a belief that the life of a single American
Speaker 2: soldier mattered more than the life of any number of
Speaker 2: Afghan civilians, and while he apologized for this article being
Speaker 2: badly written, later the next year, he wrote an article
Speaker 2: for town Hall in which he argued in favor of
Speaker 2: allowing Israel to quote transfer Palestinians and Israeli Arabs from
Speaker 2: Judea Samari, yeah, Gaza and is real proper. That's just
Speaker 2: an ethnic cleansing.
Speaker 4: Like transfer is not a dirty word. I think is
Speaker 4: the title of that piece. That's ethnic cleansing.
Speaker 2: Fuck it is raally air. They're like citizens, you realize that, right, Like,
Speaker 2: I guess it doesn't matter because they're not Jewish.
Speaker 4: I guess I feel like he only really apologized for
Speaker 4: like like you're saying it being poorly written, which Ben
Speaker 4: apologized for everything you've.
Speaker 3: Ever written, everything he does, but not the actual argument.
Speaker 3: I don't think.
Speaker 4: I don't think he's actually he ever actually said like
Speaker 4: and I don't think we should be doing this, or
Speaker 4: he did and then changed his mind back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think both of those things have happened.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: During this rant, ben first starts referring to and again
Speaker 2: going sorry because we've gone off on a tangent. This
Speaker 2: rant is about the protests last year in London against
Speaker 2: the Genizide and Gaza. During this rant, beIN first starts
Speaker 2: referring to the Lions collectively as the Pride with a
Speaker 2: capital P, in order to differentiate from the so called
Speaker 2: Scavengers as a group. He accuses scavengers of being willing
Speaker 2: to do quote anything to tear down the Pride. This
Speaker 2: is not mere anti semitism. Anti Semitism is an age
Speaker 2: old hatred rooted in a conspiracy theory. It takes many
Speaker 2: forms and has countless victims. This is something different. It
Speaker 2: is a united coalitional hatred of the West. Now, this
Speaker 2: is actually where I come closest to agreeing with Shapiro
Speaker 2: in a certain sense, because the primary motivating factor of
Speaker 2: these protests is not anti Semitism there been, and I
Speaker 2: agree one factor at play within many people protesting against
Speaker 2: Israel's actions here is a coalitional hatred of what Beend
Speaker 2: defines as the West. But while he tries to describe
Speaker 2: this as an unreasoning hatred of Western civilization, it's very
Speaker 2: clearly a hatred of what Western governments do to specific
Speaker 2: groups of people. Yeah, exactly right, like the decades of
Speaker 2: support for Israel's continuing actions that have been genocidal and
Speaker 2: quasigenicidal for quite some time.
Speaker 4: He concently does this, I mean with many different topics
Speaker 4: and issues, but he's conflating I mean, basic criticism of actions,
Speaker 4: like it's not it's not saying like these values that
Speaker 4: you pretend to have are evil. It's not about like
Speaker 4: Western values or anything like that. It's about specific actions
Speaker 4: being taken that should be able to be criticized without
Speaker 4: you saying like, so you hate everything we've ever done
Speaker 4: and everything we believe in. Well, if it's this, then yeah,
Speaker 4: I guess that's not what is actually being said or claimed.
Speaker 2: Right, And we will continue and get to ben talking
Speaker 2: about j. R. R. Tolkien, which I am excited to
Speaker 2: chat with you about, Cody, But first let's have some
Speaker 2: ads and we're back. So, after introducing this protest and
Speaker 2: starting his Scavengers and the Pride, you know, discourse, been
Speaker 2: pivots to discussing the Lord of the Rings. And it
Speaker 2: becomes clear here that that opening sort of vignette about
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands strong marching their banners unfurled, this was
Speaker 2: him pull from Tolkien describing.
Speaker 3: Howards barbarians at the gates at the Armies.
Speaker 2: Of War marching on minister is right. Yes, yeah, he's
Speaker 2: not like fly. It's obvious what he's doing. And he
Speaker 2: gets very direct here. He literally calls the quote Cords
Speaker 2: of Mordor stand ins for the Nazis and their allies. Now,
Speaker 2: Tolkien himself would have rejected been claiming this wholeheartedly. He
Speaker 2: always rejected. He hated it when people like accused the
Speaker 2: Lord of the Rings of being rooted in real history
Speaker 2: and his World War One experiences. And I do tend
Speaker 2: to be in the camp of like, well, obviously they
Speaker 2: were kind of both World War One and World War
Speaker 2: Two influenced what you were writing about, Like, I'm sorry, yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Just have influenced your art in many ways.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Now that said Lord of the Rings in case
Speaker 2: you didn't know, was written mostly between nineteen thirty seven
Speaker 2: and nineteen forty nine trilogy that was like the bulk
Speaker 2: of the writing. It wasn't published until the fifties, but
Speaker 2: that's when he was like doing most of his writing
Speaker 2: and editing. And I would agree with Ben that, like,
Speaker 2: there's clear nearly some World War Two in the Lord
Speaker 2: of the Rings, but it's also not accurate to say
Speaker 2: the Hordes of Mortar are just stand ins for the
Speaker 2: Nazis and their allies. That's not really true. And I
Speaker 2: think it's worth discussing J. R. R. Tolkien's personal politics
Speaker 2: here because like most peoples, they are complex and not
Speaker 2: entirely consistent and sometimes incoherent. For an example, Tolkien on
Speaker 2: a number of occasions described himself as an anarchist and
Speaker 2: describe himself as an anarchist in ways that are like
Speaker 2: relatively recognizable to modern day anarchists. He talked about his
Speaker 2: hatred of power. He expressed a disgust for industrialism that
Speaker 2: is very much in line with how some monarcho primitivists
Speaker 2: talk today. Right, not entirely so, but his fundamental dissection
Speaker 2: of like why he was an anarchist is very much
Speaker 2: like relevant to modern day anarchists. He thought people were
Speaker 2: not fit to hold power over people. Right, this is
Speaker 2: an important belief, the ring of power, right, never heard
Speaker 2: that is effectively an object in which all of like
Speaker 2: political power, all power of the state is craving sourcial
Speaker 2: line to it, right like, that's it's not super subtle. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's certainly a reading of the Lord of the Rings
Speaker 2: that's very much anarchist. And at the same time, Tolkien
Speaker 2: was for example, not an uncritical but a supporter of
Speaker 2: the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War, largely because
Speaker 2: he was horrified at the killings and what he saw
Speaker 2: as the unjustified murders of nuns and priests and whatnot
Speaker 2: by in some cases anarchists.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And so again this is not like most people. Jared
Speaker 2: Tolkien's political beliefs were not entirely cohero or consistent.
Speaker 3: Little bit yes, contextual.
Speaker 2: However, what I can say is that Jared Tolkien was
Speaker 2: not at all in alignment with Ben Shapiro's politics and
Speaker 2: would have been disgusted by them. Tolkien was a firm
Speaker 2: anti Nazi. He was also a very anti Stalin, but
Speaker 2: he was regularly critical of conservative icon Winston Churchill, who
Speaker 2: he described as looking like the biggest Ruffian and photographs
Speaker 2: from the Tehran conference right so he he has said, basically,
Speaker 2: standing next to fucking Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill looks like
Speaker 2: a scumbag like oh, which is not something Ben Shapiro
Speaker 2: would ever say. I found a summary of a letter
Speaker 2: that Tolkien sent his son Christopher into Scember of nineteen
Speaker 2: forty three that gives you an idea of how little
Speaker 2: Tolkien's personal politics graft on the Ben's ideological schema. Tolkien
Speaker 2: lamented that the globe was getting smaller, duller in flatter,
Speaker 2: foreseeing American sanitation, moral pep feminism, and mass production introduced everywhere,
Speaker 2: which would at least cut down travel. Colonel Knox said
Speaker 2: that one eighth of the world spoke English, which Tolkien
Speaker 2: called a damn shame. He called for the Curse of
Speaker 2: Babbel to strike all tongues and considered refusing to speak
Speaker 2: anything but Old Mercian. Seriously. Tolkien found a Merrow cosmopolitanism terrifying.
Speaker 2: He was unsure if victory would be much better for
Speaker 2: the world as a whole. This was the sentiment of
Speaker 2: a lot of folk, but it indicated no lack of patriotism.
Speaker 2: Tolkien loved England, but not Great Britain and certainly not
Speaker 2: the British Commonwealth. But were he younger, Tolkien figured he
Speaker 2: would be grousing in the military, willing to go to
Speaker 2: the bitter end, and hoping that things might turn out
Speaker 2: better for England again you know you can find. Tolkien
Speaker 2: had some issues with like feminism, like or what he
Speaker 2: saw his feminism, but he also he hated like American capitalism.
Speaker 2: He was disgusted by like advertisements. He was disgusted by
Speaker 2: the culture of consumption, and he was disgusted by the
Speaker 2: flattening of culture by the idea that everyone would need
Speaker 2: to speak you know, English, by the idea that American
Speaker 2: culture would flatten the world right. He found this personally
Speaker 2: horrifying and disgusting, which is like the opposite of Ben's politics.
Speaker 2: And he was not pro the British Empire. He was
Speaker 2: in fact deeply critical of the British Empire for the
Speaker 2: reasons established in the letter above. He hated the flattening
Speaker 2: of cultures around the globe under burgeoning capitalism, and was
Speaker 2: disgusted by the domination of peoples around the world by
Speaker 2: foreign powers. The beliefs he most consistently expressed throughout his
Speaker 2: adult life. We were sort of anti capitalist, anti industrial
Speaker 2: real sentiment based around a hatred of pollution and the
Speaker 2: destruction of the natural world. But he was clear in
Speaker 2: his letters to his son and others that he saw
Speaker 2: America and Americanism as the central culprits in this I.
Speaker 4: Mean, that's what Mordor was basically modeled after, right, like
Speaker 4: and like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like there's Germany in there too, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but like the orcs like sprouting up from the
Speaker 4: ground and like destroying the planet and all that stuff
Speaker 4: that we apparently love now.
Speaker 2: Yes, like like there's some Germany in Mordar, but there's
Speaker 2: more than a little of the United States there too,
Speaker 2: and quite frankly, more than a little Great Britain. You know,
Speaker 2: he was not because he was looking at the industrialization
Speaker 2: that had happened in his own country too. This is
Speaker 2: something that horrified him.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: If Tolkien were somehow to have survived to the present
Speaker 2: day and gotten involved in like a film version of
Speaker 2: The Lord of the Rings and had any choice in
Speaker 2: casting a voice actor for surn I wouldn't be surprised
Speaker 2: if he wound up sounding like a Californian.
Speaker 3: Right, that's a little.
Speaker 2: Bit, a little bit, but like he expresses in line
Speaker 2: with that, right, like yeah, I can tell you one
Speaker 2: thing that conservatives are on about in this country that
Speaker 2: he would have hated is the idea that like everyone
Speaker 2: needs to speak English. What the fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: Yes, anyway, After quoting a passage from Return of the
Speaker 2: King describing the armies of Mortal marching on Minace tireth Bin,
Speaker 2: Shapiro writes, so it goes today in London the lions
Speaker 2: are gone, and without the spirit of the lion, our
Speaker 2: civilization collapses. What is the spirit of the lion? The
Speaker 2: spirit of her success, of responsibility, of duty. Now I
Speaker 2: should note here Godi lions sleep up to eighteen hours
Speaker 2: a day. They have intensely matrilineal family group. The women
Speaker 2: run and like are in charge as a general rule
Speaker 2: in lion society. And of course, as I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 2: they steal in scavenge food regularly from kills made by
Speaker 2: better but physically weaker predators like hyenas. I know it's
Speaker 2: probably silly for me to keep returning to the builders
Speaker 2: and know a goddamn thing about lions. Well, but paragraphs
Speaker 2: like this drive me fucking crazy, Cody. The lion is
Speaker 2: a hunter, creative, audacious, innovative. He bens the world to
Speaker 2: his will. He forges new paths and crafts new solutions.
Speaker 2: When faced with a problem, the lion does not complain
Speaker 2: about the unfairness of life. He seeks an answer. The
Speaker 2: lion is bold and persistent. Failure does not unnerve him.
Speaker 2: It teaches him. The lion knows that boldness of purpose
Speaker 2: and willingness to undergo risk are the driving forces of
Speaker 2: any successful civilization. He believes, in the words of Proverbs,
Speaker 2: where there is no vision, the people perish.
Speaker 3: He's really stretching this really or really really far.
Speaker 2: Let's avoid the biological critiques here. If we're just talking
Speaker 2: about conservatives, the opposite of what you do is find
Speaker 2: new solutions to problems or forge new paths. You're violently
Speaker 2: offended by the idea of forging new paths and new solutions.
Speaker 2: Novelty disgusts you. Ben Shapiro, You're a arch conservative.
Speaker 4: Observatives. There's one bit also about like they don't whine.
Speaker 4: I know that's not what Oh my.
Speaker 2: God, Yes, Yeah, No, he's saying that they don't complain.
Speaker 2: The lion is complain about the unfairness of life. That's
Speaker 2: literally your job, bit.
Speaker 3: Buddy, that's every conservative's job. That is the only way
Speaker 3: you've ever made money's job.
Speaker 4: He's constantly talking about everything is unfair to him specifically.
Speaker 2: Well, it's just you're got rich complaining, Ben, that's what
Speaker 2: you do for a living business model.
Speaker 4: Yeah, complain and then sell leftist tears mugs. Right, what
Speaker 4: are you talking about, lion?
Speaker 3: It's absurd. Yeah, I think there's also Ezra Klein did
Speaker 3: an interview with Ben.
Speaker 4: Uh oh crazy, Yeah, not you know whatever, But like
Speaker 4: Ben's like talking about like lions, and he's like yeah,
Speaker 4: and then you know, they build the social fabric and
Speaker 4: all this kind of stuff. Pump's entire project is to
Speaker 4: tear down the social fabric. That's not the lion that
Speaker 4: you're talking about. Literally, in twenty nineteen, Ben was on
Speaker 4: like Bill Maher or something and he's like, yeah, I
Speaker 4: didn't vote for Trump in twenty sixteen because I didn't
Speaker 4: want to break the social fabric, but he did, so
Speaker 4: now I'm going to vote for him because he's already
Speaker 4: broken the social fabric like a scavenger maybe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, it's just.
Speaker 3: The whole thing. It's just like not, it's just a mess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a mess, and it's like ultimately been. I know,
Speaker 2: you believe in things to be entirely fair. I can
Speaker 2: think of it one time in his life where Ben
Speaker 2: took a principal moral stand when he got really angry
Speaker 2: at when he left.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah for uh what was it Lewandowski?
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, was physically aggressive towards like a female employee.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, he left. It was, uh, I've mentioned that
Speaker 4: exact thing before he gets good.
Speaker 2: Unlike a lot of these guys, Ben does believe in
Speaker 2: some things, but his beliefs are very fluid, right, and
Speaker 2: his morality is very fluid, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean it's so inconsistent.
Speaker 4: He became a political pundit when he's seventeen, like he's
Speaker 4: got it, he's got to do that. He wasn't ready
Speaker 4: for that, and he decided to do it. And he's
Speaker 4: just constantly inconsistent. Everything he purports to like believe in
Speaker 4: socially in the conservative sphere is not something like he lives.
Speaker 4: He's like a theater guy with a doctor wife. He
Speaker 4: stays home and like does podcasting and takes care of
Speaker 4: the kids. Like that's not what he purports that people
Speaker 4: should be doing now now.
Speaker 2: Ben goes on to describe the lion as quote a
Speaker 2: warrior who understands the spirit of the scavenger is always
Speaker 2: abroad and that only strength can defend against it. Then
Speaker 2: and again, the lions are the scavengers, like his need
Speaker 2: to defend whatever.
Speaker 4: Warriors are you like doing like now, they're like people
Speaker 4: doing like whatever.
Speaker 2: And lions aren't warriors. They don't have wars. They fight
Speaker 2: because they're animals.
Speaker 4: Exactly, Like why are you saying the lines are warriors?
Speaker 4: What are you talking about?
Speaker 2: It's just not anyway.
Speaker 3: Whatever.
Speaker 2: Then he brings up another much better writer, C. S. Lewis,
Speaker 2: claiming the lion lives by these words, and he's quoting C. S.
Speaker 2: Lewis right that he's Ben says describes how the lion lives.
Speaker 2: Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the
Speaker 2: form of every virtue at the testing point, which means,
Speaker 2: at the point of highest reality, a chastity or honesty
Speaker 2: or mercy which yields to danger will be chased, or
Speaker 2: honest or merciful only on conditions. Now, that's a very
Speaker 2: good point from C.
Speaker 3: S Lewis.
Speaker 2: I don't think Ben understands what this sentence means. It's
Speaker 2: a good sentence, yeah, because I mean his whole being
Speaker 2: disgusted and horrified at Trump and then voting for him
Speaker 2: and supporting him because he won and pivoting like that's
Speaker 2: that's him yielding to danger, a danger to his career,
Speaker 2: a danger to maybe his personal health.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's what the dentire GOP did. We all
Speaker 4: saw it live in twenty fifteen to twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3: It happened.
Speaker 4: We saw Ted Cruz go out there and say vote
Speaker 4: your conscience, and then like four weeks later he's sweaty
Speaker 4: on the phone and being like, well for trap plays
Speaker 4: right exactly.
Speaker 2: And that's I agree with this CS Lewis quote. It's
Speaker 2: a very well written and accurate point to make, and
Speaker 2: Ben does not understand it at all because he is
Speaker 2: incapable of living that way. Bin's entire career has been
Speaker 2: built on taking money from the mega rich to push
Speaker 2: a very specific kind of propaganda. He wouldn't no courage
Speaker 2: if it bit him in the ass, and he has
Speaker 2: never had to stand up for what's right in a
Speaker 2: way that meant taking on any meaningful personal risk. Lewis's
Speaker 2: quotation here is excoriating men like Ben Shapiro who lack
Speaker 2: any meaningful virtue because they've never had to stand up
Speaker 2: to any kind of danger. I would like to introduce
Speaker 2: Ben to another quote, one that might be more relevant
Speaker 2: to his own stated political aims and the aims of
Speaker 2: the party he supports. This is from a nineteen forty
Speaker 2: six letter C. S. Lewis sent to a professor friend
Speaker 2: of his, collected in of Other Worlds, Essays and stories.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must
Speaker 2: have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than
Speaker 2: an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity
Speaker 2: at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows
Speaker 2: he is doing wrong, he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor,
Speaker 2: who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and
Speaker 2: fear for the voice of Heaven, will torment us indefinitely.
Speaker 2: Because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience,
Speaker 2: and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.
Speaker 4: There it is I mean that's like, it's just like
Speaker 4: now they're supporting a Robert Baron who is leading.
Speaker 3: Who is backed by theocrat back to theocratic movement, like
Speaker 3: we just he's talking about he's just doing both. It's
Speaker 3: so c. S.
Speaker 2: Lewis failed to continu to consider you know, Porko loss
Speaker 2: dos right, But if.
Speaker 4: You get a Robert Baron to lead your theocratic movement,
Speaker 4: that's yeah, wild man.
Speaker 2: There we go, speaking of Robert Barons. Cody, the sponsors
Speaker 2: of this podcast, Yeah, get him, there we go, got
Speaker 2: him so good, hell and we're back.
Speaker 1: Snaps for Robert for the ad transition.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Sophie. Thank you Sophie, Thank you.
Speaker 3: So Cody clapped.
Speaker 2: I guess I just cared praise. I simply crave it.
Speaker 2: You know, it's it's my heroine also Heroin. No, I
Speaker 2: don't do it Robert anymore.
Speaker 3: No, I mean, according to R. F Jor, it helps
Speaker 3: you focus in school, it does.
Speaker 2: It makes it great easy to focus or at least
Speaker 2: focus on being on Heroin.
Speaker 3: Didn't know I was on Heroin until I did it.
Speaker 3: Now it's all I can think about.
Speaker 2: To be fair, the only heroine I've ever taken. I
Speaker 2: licked off a guy's finger at a cafe in rural India.
Speaker 3: That's fair.
Speaker 2: It was a nice afternoon. So we're talking about C. S. Lewis,
Speaker 2: who been Shapiro just.
Speaker 3: Brought up not locking Heroin off of fingers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, we're not, although I'd do it again, oh buddy,
Speaker 2: Well maybe not in this vinsical era. Anyway. It's worth
Speaker 2: noting that in nineteen fifty one, when Winston Churchill and
Speaker 2: his Conservative Party retook the UK government, the Prime Minister's
Speaker 2: Office wrote Lewis a letter offering to gift him an
Speaker 2: honorary title Commander of the British Empire, and C. S.
Speaker 2: Lewis declined, not because he wasn't Conservative. He was, that's
Speaker 2: the most accurate box to put him into, but because
Speaker 2: he was worried that if he accepted it would turn
Speaker 2: him into a political figure, which would diminish him as
Speaker 2: a writer into thinker, because well, again he would talk
Speaker 2: philosophically about things that kind of were adjacent to politics.
Speaker 2: He was kind of disgusted at the idea of being
Speaker 2: like what Ben Shapiro is, you know, like of being
Speaker 2: a political pundit propaganda, because he thought that was gross,
Speaker 2: because it is.
Speaker 3: You know, to put those sort of thoughts in your.
Speaker 2: Work, as or Will would say, all art is propaganda, right,
Speaker 2: But I don't think Lewis believed that.
Speaker 4: You know, But there's a huge difference between doing your
Speaker 4: art and expressing yourself in that way and being like, well,
Speaker 4: I'm going to start an organization that does propaganda for
Speaker 4: the regime.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that gets literally paid by oil billionaires to write
Speaker 2: propaganda supporting oil billionaires.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: And again Lewis would have obviously, maybe not obviously if
Speaker 2: you don't know him. But Lewis would have fallen on
Speaker 2: the more conservative acxis of politics, certainly more conservative than progressive.
Speaker 2: But one of his most consistent stances was a sort
Speaker 2: of disgusted political hacks and politicians. Now where Lewis would
Speaker 2: align with Ben Shapiro is he had a strong belief
Speaker 2: in natural law and in a sort of objective moral reality,
Speaker 2: which he saw is necessary to accept in order to
Speaker 2: be able to criticize groups like the Nazis. In other words,
Speaker 2: Lewis wrote that if there was no right and like
Speaker 2: a greater cosmic sense, by what standards could we judge
Speaker 2: the Nazis as being wrong? And I don't agree with
Speaker 2: Lewis in this I'm just describing his beliefs here. At
Speaker 2: the same time, though, like his friend Tolkien, he expressed
Speaker 2: horror at the two occupations that he worried were doom
Speaker 2: mankind the magician, who quote sought power over nature and
Speaker 2: the astrologer, who quote proclaimed nature's power over man. And
Speaker 2: I want to quote from a write up on C. S.
Speaker 2: Lewis dot com here. The former thought led many to
Speaker 2: think man can do everything, the latter strongly suggested he
Speaker 2: can do nothing. Lewis saw modern scientists as the sons
Speaker 2: of the magician, who believe every ill in the world
Speaker 2: can find a cure in science. From the astrologer came
Speaker 2: the philosophical materialists, who believed man is nothing but a
Speaker 2: slave to nature his animal instincts. And one thing we
Speaker 2: see here is that despite having a belief in absolute morality,
Speaker 2: Lewis tended to reject simple dichotomies like the one been
Speaker 2: presents us with. In his Very Bad Book, he presented
Speaker 2: readers with two archetypes in opposition, either of which would
Speaker 2: doom mankind if worshiped or followed. Beyond reason, Lewis isn't
Speaker 2: saying science is bad and he's not saying that, like
Speaker 2: belief in the natural world is bad, or like kind
Speaker 2: of yielding to nature's power is bad. But making either
Speaker 2: of those like the kind of center of your being
Speaker 2: is bad.
Speaker 4: Right, Because he's also not saying there are two types
Speaker 4: of people.
Speaker 2: No, No, he's not saying other going too far in
Speaker 2: either of these directions is bad. Yeah, And this is
Speaker 2: something that Ben would never do. Ben glories in presenting
Speaker 2: a false and limited choice to the reader and then
Speaker 2: describing one of those choices as inherently good and the
Speaker 2: other is inherently bad. Lewis was a believer in natural
Speaker 2: hierarchies and a critique of democracy, which he felt was
Speaker 2: the best system overall, but also was not a good system.
Speaker 2: And he believed that, among other things, one of the
Speaker 2: problems democracy had is that it must ultimately destroy a education.
Speaker 2: Right that, like, because of the way democracy functions, it's
Speaker 2: going to like fuck up the educational system.
Speaker 3: Effects or like overtaking back like scenes or you know, he's.
Speaker 2: Not entirely wrong about Obviously, other democracies do better. So
Speaker 2: I don't agree with him. This is inherent but it
Speaker 2: can happen, right.
Speaker 3: A lot of bad things can happen and it's not
Speaker 3: exactly exactly.
Speaker 2: And Lewis was also he was deeply critical about technological
Speaker 2: process and the worship of machines in a way that
Speaker 2: makes me pretty certain he'd have rejected AI violently. Both
Speaker 2: he and Tolkien would have been on the bomb data
Speaker 2: centers side. If they would be radicals about that, Like
Speaker 2: if you could bring both of those guys forward and
Speaker 2: explain to them what Sam Altman is trying to do,
Speaker 2: they would try to buy a gun, like like they
Speaker 2: would be extremists.
Speaker 4: Using I mean even like using the AI for like
Speaker 4: fake things like dead people have said, and like the
Speaker 4: ghost AI stuff they're doing all all of it is.
Speaker 2: If you explain to him, like how much water and
Speaker 2: pollution are created by data centers, he would, like fucking
Speaker 2: Tolkien especially, would lose his mind, like he never imagined
Speaker 2: anything that awful.
Speaker 3: It's just not even like taking a like what the.
Speaker 2: Thing is doing itself exactly?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, what it can create or create in quotes,
Speaker 4: I guess, but yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, Lewis did believe that you could reform bad political
Speaker 2: systems through Christian education, like that was his solution to
Speaker 2: the problems democracy causes. For education but he was also
Speaker 2: against mandating Christian principles in public education. Right, So we
Speaker 2: see in Lewis as a mix of some values and
Speaker 2: stances that could very easily be mapped to things that
Speaker 2: Ben himself believes there are some. But mixed in with
Speaker 2: this is a fundamental distrust of giving humans power, one
Speaker 2: that makes me equally certain he'd have disliked the argument
Speaker 2: that Ben is making here about lions and scavengers. In
Speaker 2: his book Present Concerns, Lewis wrote, I don't deserve a
Speaker 2: share in governing a hen roost, much less a nation,
Speaker 2: Nor do most people who believe advertisements and think in
Speaker 2: catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is
Speaker 2: just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man
Speaker 2: can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.
Speaker 3: He would hate so much about he be.
Speaker 4: So unhappy like the internet memes, meme culture, like yesh god,
Speaker 4: he and again.
Speaker 2: Not at all woke, just absolutely not just disgusted with,
Speaker 2: like not a theocrat as Christian as he was not
Speaker 2: a theocrat exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, every single AI post that the Department of Homeland
Speaker 4: Security puts up, like every single thing.
Speaker 2: You're doing is fucking mind oh yeah, grotesque.
Speaker 3: God yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, after quoting Lewis, Ben introduces another wrinkle to his
Speaker 2: lion scavenger dichotomy. The pride of Lions is split up
Speaker 2: between three sub archetypes. The weaver, who quote weaves together
Speaker 2: the disparate strands of family and society and often goes unnoticed,
Speaker 2: but quote, are the true heroes of our civilization, and
Speaker 2: the hunters. The warriors and the weavers form a pride together.
Speaker 2: It is kind of unclear to me what separates the
Speaker 2: hunters from I think the weavers are like women. That's
Speaker 2: the place women have in the pride is they're the weavers.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: The men get two groups to choose from.
Speaker 2: That's right, They get to hunt or war Yeah. I anyway,
Speaker 2: and again also been uses warrior and hunter more or
Speaker 2: less synonyms in this book.
Speaker 3: It's just.
Speaker 2: After establishing this the subsets of the pride, the categories
Speaker 2: inside the pride been acknowledges that lions have to create
Speaker 2: a system of rules, which they absolutely don't because they
Speaker 2: each have the spirit of the scavenger in them, and
Speaker 2: so they have to always be on guard against being
Speaker 2: overtaken by that. And again, half of their calories they
Speaker 2: get from scavenging. Ad they're not unguarded against it, it's
Speaker 2: how they survive. The Pride has a spirit of of scaverty,
Speaker 2: Lion has the spirit of a scavenger in them. What
Speaker 2: he's trying to say is that, like he's describing the scavengers,
Speaker 2: liberals and left just as like people who are lazy
Speaker 2: and just want to steal from other people and also
Speaker 2: tear down whether people have built. And Ben is trying
Speaker 2: to say that, like there's that voice in all of
Speaker 2: us that we have to be on guard against, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's that's what he's trying to say, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Because also in that same interview about this book, they
Speaker 4: bring up Vance, and Ben basically admits that, like, yeah,
Speaker 4: the current version of Vance is a bit of a scavenger.
Speaker 4: He's doing all these things. He like he's describe Vance, yeah,
Speaker 4: oh one hundred percent. Like he's like, yeah, the the
Speaker 4: Hillbilly Elogy era, he was like a lion, which like
Speaker 4: maybe he was a scavenger the whole time. Ben, who
Speaker 4: you know, how is that being a lion?
Speaker 2: He's literally just.
Speaker 4: Okay, I know we don't need to but like it's
Speaker 4: just it's absurd, but it was interesting that he is
Speaker 4: willing to recognize that there are scavengers amidst. I don't
Speaker 4: even know if he thinks Trump's a lion or not,
Speaker 4: but that whole group of people.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Next after this we get one of the least coherent
Speaker 2: sections of the book. Thus far, A pride of lions
Speaker 2: can accomplish nearly anything unless the pride falls to the
Speaker 2: pack and pack is capitalized too. The spirit of the scavenger,
Speaker 2: the spirit of the scavenger is the spirit of envy.
Speaker 3: He's not he's just putting work.
Speaker 1: There's just there's It's just ridiculous.
Speaker 3: It means nothing.
Speaker 2: It means nothing. It's so irrational because the foundation of this,
Speaker 2: the whole light You're just wrong entirely about, Like none
Speaker 2: of this makes sense. It's like if I were to
Speaker 2: write a book about like fucking I don't even know
Speaker 2: how to like make a bad enough analogy.
Speaker 3: No, really bad.
Speaker 4: You can't because also when you say the word pack
Speaker 4: and you capitalize, I'm thinking of wolves, which wouldn't you
Speaker 4: be able to use for your other Like they're so interchangeable.
Speaker 2: It's like if I were to write a book called
Speaker 2: The Horse in the Ant and started with like Obviously,
Speaker 2: the horse sore is high above all of us on
Speaker 2: its mighty wings.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile the ant looming over the horse.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I debated whether or not to discuss the
Speaker 2: fact that Ben himself is clearly motivated by a deep
Speaker 2: spirit of envy.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: His initial career goal, as you and I have talked
Speaker 2: about on several podcasts Cody, was to write for Hollywood.
Speaker 2: He wanted to be a screenwriter. He wanted to write
Speaker 2: TV in movies. And he filled in this goal because
Speaker 2: he's not good at it, right, And the Daily Wires
Speaker 2: movie like is also a massive waste of money, horrible
Speaker 2: idea because none of them are good writers.
Speaker 4: Hey, you wait until they do the anti woke snow White. Okay,
Speaker 4: that's gonna be really, really good.
Speaker 2: That's going to really blow up. Audiences are craving, the
Speaker 2: children cry out, demanding, and he woke snow fucking White.
Speaker 3: You can hear him now, they're just woke.
Speaker 2: Snow was the Snow White Man like the sixties. It's
Speaker 2: not woke, I don't anyway.
Speaker 3: It's because they made a new one and the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I haven't been keeping up with the fucking
Speaker 2: Disney don't. Yes, But I think it's important to hear
Speaker 2: the spirit of envy is the primary that's the center
Speaker 2: of Ben Shapiro's soul. Right, it is quite obvious reading
Speaker 2: his angry rants against Hollywood. That's a huge amount of
Speaker 2: his writing, and it's why he's tried to make the
Speaker 2: Daily Wire. They wasted millions trying to create their own
Speaker 2: Hollywood because his hatred of the left its origin in
Speaker 2: a lot of ways. I'm not going to say this
Speaker 2: is the only origin point, but a major source for
Speaker 2: his hatred of the left is because he sees Hollywood
Speaker 2: as a fundamentally leftist institution that refused to give him
Speaker 2: the respect he deserves, that didn't recognize his brilliance.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: That is beIN Shapiro's origin story as a villain is
Speaker 2: that he couldn't hack it as a fucking professional screenwriter.
Speaker 3: Yes, about eighty five percent, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: Growing up fundamentalist, religious conservative, all that kind of stuff
Speaker 4: did not help.
Speaker 3: But that resentment fueled bienvy is one hundred percent of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he can only see this as an example
Speaker 2: of Hollywood hate conservatives like him, Right, it has to
Speaker 2: be bigotry. That's because that's the only way he could
Speaker 2: not succeed, right, And you know, he has to ignore
Speaker 2: a lot in order to believe this. If he were
Speaker 2: to look at reality, he would see that plenty of
Speaker 2: conservatives have been very successful in Hollywood. Screenwriters like David
Speaker 2: Mammott and John Millius right or Millius, I always forget
Speaker 2: the guy who did Red Dawn. Right, Actors like Kelsey
Speaker 2: Grammer and John voightd not to mention Sylvester Stallone and
Speaker 2: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who feels more like a Democrat today but
Speaker 2: was the literal Republican governor of California.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: There's plenty of successful conservatives to the Hollywood as actors
Speaker 2: and writers, massively.
Speaker 3: Successful and talented, very conservative.
Speaker 2: Persons, plenty of conservative like movies that are conservative. And
Speaker 2: I'm just think about how many during the War on Terror,
Speaker 2: how many TV shows and movies had a scene where
Speaker 2: the guy has to torture someone to save lives. Right,
Speaker 2: That is conservative propaganda.
Speaker 4: Even though it's like they would buy a lot of
Speaker 4: like self described libs or whatever, or like, it's still
Speaker 4: conservative ideologically. Like, yeah, but we're in America, so we
Speaker 4: don't recognize that all of that is in service of
Speaker 4: a more right wing viewpoint, and he resents it. And
Speaker 4: I mean, we're seeing it now with all this like
Speaker 4: move to like I'm not even gonna say canceled culture
Speaker 4: because that's not what it is.
Speaker 3: It's not what it's going on.
Speaker 4: But like the firing of all these people is an
Speaker 4: expression of that resentment because they want to do it,
Speaker 4: they want to be doing it.
Speaker 2: Right and there, Yeah, part of it is if I
Speaker 2: get them out, finally I'll get a shot and.
Speaker 3: People will realize that I was finally late night with Gefeld.
Speaker 2: Yeah right. And obviously, you know, Ben did not fail
Speaker 2: to make it in Hollywood because people were bigoted against
Speaker 2: his conservatism. He failed because he's not a good writer.
Speaker 2: His only talent isn't agitating people with cheap political shots.
Speaker 2: This is very funny because the next paragraph of the
Speaker 2: book after that line about the spirits of the Scavenger
Speaker 2: is the spirit of envy. The very next paragraph is
Speaker 2: basically been describing himself. The Scavenger does not believe in
Speaker 2: an understandable universe in which success is the result of
Speaker 2: performance of duty. Instead, the Scavenger believes that any such
Speaker 2: argument as a guise for power and power alone. The Scavenger,
Speaker 2: in his perverse projection believes that there is a great
Speaker 2: conspiracy against him, and that the only path to success
Speaker 2: lies in tearing away at that great conspiracy with tooth
Speaker 2: and claw. Oh, bell, Ben Ben, that's your life. That's
Speaker 2: your entire career, buddy.
Speaker 3: Your first book was about the conspiracy against you, and
Speaker 3: you specifically and conservatives generally.
Speaker 2: Yes, your whole life, bro Now. Ben goes on to
Speaker 2: write that while lions form a pride, scavengers form a pack,
Speaker 2: is it a problem from a writing standpoint that pack
Speaker 2: and pride are passable synonyms?
Speaker 3: No? Yeah, I mean it should be.
Speaker 2: But could you describe lions as having a pack?
Speaker 3: Sure? Sure? Right?
Speaker 2: I You couldn't describe other like pride doesn't go both.
Speaker 2: It's very like a urban whiskey thing, right. Anyway, The
Speaker 2: pack consists of looters, lectures, and barbarians. The fall of London,
Speaker 2: he writes, is symptomatic of the growing power of the pack,
Speaker 2: and reading this Reading him write about the fall of
Speaker 2: London felt particularly ridiculous in twenty twenty five, given that
Speaker 2: about a month before Binn's book was published, London police
Speaker 2: arrested four hundred and seventy four people at a Palestine
Speaker 2: Action ban protest, per the BBC, police have arrested four
Speaker 2: hundred seventy four people at a demonstration in London and support
Speaker 2: of the banned group Palestine Action. The Metropolitan Police said
Speaker 2: four hundred and sixty six protesters were arrested for supporting
Speaker 2: the group, five for assaults on police officers, two for
Speaker 2: public order offenses and one for a racially aggravated offense.
Speaker 2: Scores of people simultaneously unveiled handwritten signs with the message
Speaker 2: I opposed genocide, I support Palestine Action at the protest
Speaker 2: organized by Defendar Juries at Westminster's Parliament Square. It was
Speaker 2: the biggest protest since the government prescribed the group in
Speaker 2: July under the Terrorism Act of two thousand, making membership
Speaker 2: of or support for it a criminal offense punishable by
Speaker 2: up to fourteen years in prison. No officers were seriously injured,
Speaker 2: and the Met Police said that the number of arrests
Speaker 2: was the largest made by the force on a single
Speaker 2: day in the last ten years. London really has fallen
Speaker 2: to the pack back of police. You can't even say
Speaker 2: I oppose genocide, I support this group, They'll arrest you.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, I feel like he loves it again,
Speaker 4: it's just this is what they're talking about doing now,
Speaker 4: labeling anybody as a terrorist and doing exactly what you
Speaker 4: described but here, yep, that is their political project.
Speaker 3: That is what he is supporting right now.
Speaker 4: He's guesting on all the podcasts with the Vice President,
Speaker 4: who's only a podcaster now talking about this exact things.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, So maybe he's a I don't know, wolf
Speaker 3: of Vulture role yes, bad writer, yes, line piece of shit.
Speaker 3: Bad writer. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, given the way book publication timetables work, there's no
Speaker 2: way that you know these mass arrests happened. They certainly
Speaker 2: didn't happen in time for Ben to revise his book
Speaker 2: to account for it. Right, But the fact that this
Speaker 2: happened puts the lie to everything he says here about
Speaker 2: the supposedly massive and rising social power of the Pack
Speaker 2: and the fact that they've taken London, you know, the
Speaker 2: fact that the Pride has to constantly be back on
Speaker 2: their heels, scrambling desperately to hold onto civilization. Because if
Speaker 2: like you just acknowledge that, like no, actually they have
Speaker 2: all the power and they're like massively abusing it and
Speaker 2: like hurting people and like aren't in no danger whatsoever,
Speaker 2: but are endangering huge numbers of people. That doesn't sound
Speaker 2: as good.
Speaker 4: No, it needs to be Barbarians at the Gates were perpetual,
Speaker 4: desperately symptoms, perpetually persecuted, And.
Speaker 2: We have every lever of power exactly, And he critiques
Speaker 2: leftists in this passage from embracing Mauseidong's statement that political
Speaker 2: power grows from the barrel of a gun. But that's
Speaker 2: the only power Ben has ever recognized. What do you
Speaker 2: call these, matt what do you call mass arrests? Man
Speaker 2: premise of police? Like?
Speaker 4: What are you talking about? Like ice is like doing?
Speaker 4: Like that is political power?
Speaker 2: What do you call like Israel's actions?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Like, I mean it's bomb I guess more than the
Speaker 2: barrel of a gun. But you know, the basic idea
Speaker 2: is the same.
Speaker 3: Right, you can use language in ways to mean many things. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he believes that, Yes, he believes that. Yes.
Speaker 2: Ben continues with a warning that the children of lions
Speaker 2: well themselves become scavengers if the lions don't pass on
Speaker 2: their ways to their kids, and then he pivots to
Speaker 2: talking about an eighteen ninety seven poem that Richard Kipling
Speaker 2: wrote for The Diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria. This poem,
Speaker 2: written at the height of the power of the British Empire,
Speaker 2: he sees as a warning that went unheeded, the tumult
Speaker 2: and the shouting dies, the captains and the kings depart,
Speaker 2: still stands thine ancient sacrifice and humble in a contrite. Heart, Lord,
Speaker 2: God of Hosts, be with us. Yet lest we forget,
Speaker 2: Lest we forget now. I don't really see that as
Speaker 2: a warning about not indoctrinating your kid with propaganda, but
Speaker 2: I guess I can see where he's coming from there.
Speaker 2: It's clear that where he goes next in this chapter.
Speaker 2: Basically he says that the reason England fell, so to speak,
Speaker 2: is that they embrace the welfare state. And that's why
Speaker 2: the British Empire ended, right, That's why they're no longer
Speaker 2: the center of the West is because they got taken
Speaker 2: over by these socialist ideas and like the establishing of
Speaker 2: a welfare state, all of those lions, their kids became scavengers,
Speaker 2: you know, that's the argument.
Speaker 3: Yes, mandatory scavengerism, right.
Speaker 2: And this is classic been leaving out a massive and important,
Speaker 2: inconvenient fact that does not fit in his neat ideological lines.
Speaker 2: The British Empire didn't get sick and fail because of welfare.
Speaker 2: It began its slow death slide during the First World War,
Speaker 2: in which it lit its treasury on fire and annihilated
Speaker 2: a generation of young men. Kipling himself was profoundly changed
Speaker 2: by the horrors of World War One. He was a
Speaker 2: strong imperialist his whole life. He was a very strong
Speaker 2: imperialist prior to the outbreak of hostilities in World War One.
Speaker 2: Kipling despised Germany and German civilization, and he was a
Speaker 2: huge supporter at the outset of the war in England,
Speaker 2: getting involved and admitting to it. As the war started,
Speaker 2: he wrote something that feels very familiar to what Ben
Speaker 2: writes in his book For all we have and are,
Speaker 2: for all our children's fate, stand up and take the war.
Speaker 2: The hun is at the gate. That's essentially what Ben's writing.
Speaker 3: That's what he's writing, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So let's talk about Kipling. Let's talk about what
Speaker 2: World War One did to Kipling. Because Rudyard had one son,
Speaker 2: sixteen year old John Kipling. John was sixteen when the
Speaker 2: war started. Now, John had intended to join the Royal Navy,
Speaker 2: but his eyesight was bad and so he was unable
Speaker 2: to take on a navy career. So Rudyard used his
Speaker 2: connections being a very famous and influential person in media,
Speaker 2: to get John a commission as an officer in the
Speaker 2: Irish Guards, which is a British military unit made up
Speaker 2: of Irish soldiers right with British officers. In nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 2: John became a platoon commander in the Irish Guards and
Speaker 2: was sent to fight in the Battle of Loose. He
Speaker 2: died while assaulting the German lines. This was a profoundly
Speaker 2: traumatizing and event for Kipling. For one thing, Prior to
Speaker 2: his son becoming appletune matter, Kipling was super anti Irish
Speaker 2: right he was a strong Unionist, so he was anti
Speaker 2: Irish independence, but he was also just kind of bigoted
Speaker 2: against Irish people. He had written with disgust about Irish
Speaker 2: culture previously, and this changed, I think in part just
Speaker 2: because he had more contact through his son and whatnot
Speaker 2: with Irish people as a result of this, That's how
Speaker 2: things like this can happen. And I'm not going to
Speaker 2: say he ever totally turned around on the issue, but
Speaker 2: he wrote poetry about Irish history and started expressing after
Speaker 2: this point a considerable degree with admiration about irishchol, particularly
Speaker 2: in comparison to what he'd written before.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: He also wrote this about what happened to his son
Speaker 2: in the wake of World War One. If any question
Speaker 2: why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.
Speaker 4: That seems maybe different from yeah, what the topic started as, right.
Speaker 2: It seems maybe again to go from where Ben is
Speaker 2: like the like no, the wars at the gate, anything
Speaker 2: we have to do is justified, and like, oh no,
Speaker 2: my son's dead. Up my kids, Maybe this was a
Speaker 2: fuck up. Right now, there's some context to this line,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to quote from an article for The
Speaker 2: Irish Times by Ronan McGreevy explaining the context behind this line.
Speaker 2: This has often been wrongly interpreted as Kipling believing that
Speaker 2: his son's death was in vain. He never believed the
Speaker 2: First World War was unnecessary, he believed it was badly prosecuted.
Speaker 2: On a more general level, this couplet is about the
Speaker 2: lies the older generations tell that compels the younger to fight.
Speaker 2: It could also allude to his own lives and getting
Speaker 2: a son a commission when he was physically unfit to fight.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot going on here. But Kipling was
Speaker 2: racked for the rest of his life with a tremendous
Speaker 2: guilt because of what happened to his son, and because
Speaker 2: even if he could never admit that World War One
Speaker 2: was itself fully a bad idea, he knew that it
Speaker 2: was right. He had to be like, well, it was
Speaker 2: badly probab but he I think there's a degree of
Speaker 2: ego there. But he knew that he'd fucked up right,
Speaker 2: that they all had.
Speaker 3: Lied to them to get them to fight.
Speaker 2: That's and you know, Ben Ben will know ever admit
Speaker 2: to being wrong about anything. I don't think, no matter
Speaker 2: what happens, he's capable of that. But Kipling was to
Speaker 2: an extent, you know, he never fully repudiated imperialism. But
Speaker 2: he went to his grave racked by the knowledge that
Speaker 2: the war he'd endorsed and supported had taken not only
Speaker 2: his son, but had shattered the British Empire, right, it
Speaker 2: had shattered his hopes of continuing British imperial dominance. As
Speaker 2: an imperialist. He couldn't ignore the fact that like, oh
Speaker 2: this kind of ruined.
Speaker 4: It at all, right, Yeah, you know, like sometimes expressing that
Speaker 4: sort of guilt is how you're actually saying that you
Speaker 4: were wrong without saying it right, because that's human beings
Speaker 4: are complex and it can be very hard to just
Speaker 4: say those words.
Speaker 3: So you just expressed the guilt of it, right.
Speaker 2: And it's so telling about Ben and about what goes
Speaker 2: on in his head that he cites approvingly this passage
Speaker 2: of Kipling while ignoring the rest of his life, because
Speaker 2: in reality, a figure like Rudyard Kipling ought to be
Speaker 2: a warning to Ben Shapiro and those like him. Right,
Speaker 2: And even again, I don't want to frame it as
Speaker 2: like Kipling got woke after World War One, but Kipling
Speaker 2: got increasingly critical of imperialism and of his previous stances
Speaker 2: after World War One, and he actually wrote some stuff.
Speaker 2: One of his poems, A pict Song, is one of
Speaker 2: my favorite anti imperialist pieces of writing. And I was
Speaker 2: considering just reading like a segment from it. But do
Speaker 2: you mind if I just read the poem because I
Speaker 2: think we all need this, right, I think this might
Speaker 2: be handy as we all watch this fucking empire come
Speaker 2: down to crush us and the ones we love. So
Speaker 2: I'm gonna read this poem and then we'll talk about.
Speaker 3: It depressing, and then yeah, yeah, you're the place poem.
Speaker 2: So this is a picked song by Ridyard Kipling. Rome
Speaker 2: never looks where she treads. Always her heavy hoofs fall
Speaker 2: on our stomachs, our hearts, or our heads. And Rome
Speaker 2: never heeds when we ball her. Centuries pass on, that
Speaker 2: is all, and we gather behind them in hordes and
Speaker 2: plot to reconquer the wall with only our tongues for
Speaker 2: our swords. We are the little folk, we too little
Speaker 2: to love or to hate. Leave us alone, and you'll
Speaker 2: see how we can drag down the state. We are
Speaker 2: the worm in the wood. We are the rod at
Speaker 2: the root. We are the taint and the blood. We
Speaker 2: are the thorn in the foot, mistletoe killing an oak,
Speaker 2: rats gnawing cables in two moths, making holes in a coat.
Speaker 2: How they must love what they do. Yes, and we
Speaker 2: little folk too, We are as busy as they, working
Speaker 2: our works.
Speaker 3: Out of you.
Speaker 2: Watch and you'll see it someday. No, indeed we are
Speaker 2: not strong, but we know peoples that are, Yes, and
Speaker 2: we'll guide them along to smash and destroy you in war.
Speaker 2: We shall be slaves just the same. Yes, we have
Speaker 2: always been slaves. But you you will die of the shame,
Speaker 2: and then we shall dance on your graves. I like
Speaker 2: that poem. Anyway, That's all I got for part one,
Speaker 2: or for the first. We'll probably come back to this book,
Speaker 2: but I think you get the idea of what beIN's
Speaker 2: going for here and why it's full of shit.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm convinced that maybe we're all lines and scavengers.
Speaker 3: Are we part of a pack?
Speaker 4: We're also a part of a pack, and we are
Speaker 4: also a colony of we can say ants or hive also,
Speaker 4: and the hives are made of crows, and the crows
Speaker 4: are made of lions, right.
Speaker 2: Right, Every crow contains a lion, you know. Yeah, it's known.
Speaker 4: You know, we all went to school. We all learned
Speaker 4: about lions and crows.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's like the parable of the butterfly and the Tyrannosaurus rex,
Speaker 2: you know, both of which swim deep in the ocean
Speaker 2: in the Marianas Trench on the moon. It's his accurate
Speaker 2: as what Bin's written.
Speaker 3: Yeah, huh, it's good.
Speaker 2: Anyway, how you feeling brody? Have I ever done that before? Yes?
Speaker 3: I think I feel like shody.
Speaker 4: Sure, I appreciate that he at least knows he needs
Speaker 4: to get some good sentences into his books, so he
Speaker 4: quotes other writers, even if he doesn't like necessarily interpret them.
Speaker 3: Well, he's at least.
Speaker 2: Got to pad this out with some token and Lewis
Speaker 2: and Kipling.
Speaker 3: Because I gotta keep people.
Speaker 2: Notice that I can't write. Yeah, incredible good stuff.
Speaker 3: Shout to him.
Speaker 1: Co Do you want to plug anything?
Speaker 3: Sure? Why not? Check out Some More News. It's our
Speaker 3: weekly show.
Speaker 4: I sat at a desk, I read the news and
Speaker 4: talk about various topics. We also have a show called
Speaker 4: even More News twice a week talks about more current
Speaker 4: events in a more casual way.
Speaker 3: And check out my band. It's called the Hot Shapes.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, check out Cody's band. Check out Cody, you know,
Speaker 2: at like a bar or something. Mm hmm, be like, hey,
Speaker 2: how's it going.
Speaker 3: I'll be like good, Yeah, you want to drink? I'll
Speaker 3: say yeah, don't do that. Yeah don't.
Speaker 2: I shouldn't joke about the weird parasocial stuff because that'll happen.
Speaker 3: Oh we don't want any of that.
Speaker 2: But check out Cody's podcasts and the YouTube show, and
Speaker 2: check out when we come back to Ben Shapiro's book,
Speaker 2: which I'm sure We'll do at least one more.
Speaker 3: Time before the US.
Speaker 2: Well Gang. This has been behind the podcast of Bastards
Speaker 2: about Shapiro beIN, good Night, and good Luck Bay.
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