Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Robert and Cody Read Ben Shapiro's New Book About this episode Robert and Cody Johnston sit down to read Ben Shapiro's latest non-fiction book, which seems to be based entirely on him not understanding how lions work.
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Transcript 13,490 words · 9 speakers
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1:11 Robert Evans? Oh my goodness, it's Behind the Behind Bastards podcasters, Robert Evans' show that you're listening to. This was not a good introduction.
1:21 Speaker 03 Sophie Lichterman, producer, show. Is that what we're doing? Guest.
1:25 Robert Evans? You making fun of me, Sophie? You making fun of me? You laughing at me? Well, here to laugh at me more, Cody Johnston. Would never laugh at you. Thank you so much. Guest. Cody, you are the host of News, some more, a podcast about news, and also a YouTube show about news. How are you doing? I'm great.
1:49 Speaker 03 Are you?
1:50 Robert Evans? Ah, 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 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.
2:16 Speaker 04 We're all doing our best. Things are weird and happening and they're happening quickly and suddenly in many ways.
2:24 Robert Evans? They are. They're happening here, you could say, the things that are happening.
2:28 Speaker 04 I know, could do that.
2:30 Robert Evans? 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 Stoll.
2:40 Speaker 03 Hi, Katie.
2:40 Robert Evans? Ben Shapiro, our buddy, our good comrade and colleague.
2:45 Speaker 04 My bandmate, he's in my band.
2:46 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, you and Bennifer 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.
3:03 Speaker 04 Real bad.
3:04 Robert Evans? It was bad enough that Ben has not written another fiction novel since, to the best of my knowledge.
3:09 Speaker 04 Here's the thing, I'm really upset. He announced he's had this new book out, but I remember like a year or two ago, a few years ago, he said he was working on a science fiction book.
3:21 Robert Evans? Yeah, I want to read that fucker.
3:23 Speaker 04 I want that. Like, don't do that. I don't need your like weird like-
3:26 Robert Evans? That's like a year of free content for me. Ben, get it out.
3:29 Speaker 04 Give me the juice, man.
3:31 Robert Evans? I know I'm late on my novel, Ben, but come on. You don't have a real job.
3:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, just do it. Take your time off. Take time off.
3:38 Robert Evans? 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. That's in-
3:53 Speaker 04 And Her Critics, yes, of course.
3:55 Robert Evans? Parentheses at the very bottom in tiny text.
3:57 Speaker 04 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, seemed 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.
4:22 Robert Evans? 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
4:29 Speaker 04 Right, yeah.
4:30 Robert Evans? arterial wound. And you're like, yes, I just really think you need to floss more. And oh, sorry, you spurred a little bit of that arterial blood right on my neck here, but yeah.
4:37 Speaker 04 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 real history is like, how slavery didn't happen or whatever?
4:59 Robert Evans? Yeah.
4:59 Speaker 04 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.
5:06 Robert Evans? 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.
5:28 Speaker 04 Ben Shapiro?
5:29 Robert Evans? Yeah.
5:30 Speaker 04 Okay.
5:31 Robert Evans? This is him trying to like, really establish himself as a C.S. Lewis type thinker. And it's not good. That's my short. But, but we'll go through it, because I have actually quite a lot to say about most of the introduction to this book is part one. So, Cody, you and I may be back repeatedly talking more about this.
5:50 Speaker 04 Fair enough.
5:51 Robert Evans? So.
5:52 Speaker 04 So five hours on the intro.
5:53 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we haven't, we're not even getting through all of that. But I think you will also get the gist of his argument from this, because Ben being Ben, most of this book is him just kind of repeating himself. Right?
6:05 Speaker 04 Sure.
6:06 Robert Evans? Yeah. 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.
6:34 Speaker 04 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.
6:39 Robert Evans? 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.
7:01 Speaker 04 Thank you.
7:01 Robert Evans? Like, out the gate, none of this is right, because lions and scavengers aren't separate things. And I'm gonna 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.
7:33 Speaker 04 Sometimes more. I mean, you imagine he gets most of his information from The Lion King, right?
7:39 Robert Evans? 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.
7:46 Speaker 04 Yes, exactly.
7:47 Robert Evans? 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 wanna tear everything down, and they're just mooching and stealing and criti- 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?
8:23 Speaker 04 So many takers, not makers.
8:25 Robert Evans? And then taking credit for it, yeah. Interesting, interesting.
8:29 Speaker 04 He's just a bad writer.
8:31 Robert Evans? He's a bad writer, he's a bad thinker.
8:33 Speaker 04 Also, like- He couldn't stretch his analogy past the ant.
8:38 Robert Evans? No.
8:38 Speaker 04 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 being specific with the first one and then vague. Like, you're using a category for the second, and it's sloppy.
8:59 Robert Evans? It's also evidence of this thing that you see a lot with Bin 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 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.
9:44 Robert Evans? It's what almost every animal prefers to do, right?
9:47 Speaker 04 How to survive.
9:48 Robert Evans? 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.
9:56 Speaker 04 Oh, cool.
9:58 Robert Evans? 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.
10:18 Speaker 04 Lions are scavengers. The scavengers, they're specific animals you can choose.
10:22 Robert Evans? It's fine.
10:22 Speaker 04 A lion being one of them.
10:23 Robert Evans? It's actually very efficient, it's smart. Like...
10:27 Speaker 04 Also, my brain's boiling.
10:30 Robert Evans? I say that as a hunter and a scavenger. I pick up roadkill and I hunt. I also raise and slaughter animals. All of these things are ways to get calories. Beyond that, beyond him getting lion facts wrong.
10:43 Speaker 04 Beyond like the premise of the analogy he wants to use.
10:46 Robert Evans? 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 in equal measure to hunters, right? Because it's just not a great way to survive just hunting.
11:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, you get what you can.
11:19 Robert Evans? Yeah, exactly. You get what you can.
11:20 Speaker 04 Unless you're like a society.
11:23 Robert Evans? Yes, right. And then you could just go to a grocery store.
11:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly.
11:28 Robert Evans? Yeah, like Ben does, pay someone to do your shopping for you, you know? Because your soft little hands, you're not gonna go skin an animal. You're not gonna do that, Ben Shapiro.
11:35 Speaker 04 Hey, we don't know, you know, well.
11:37 Robert Evans? The cowboy hat chafes your head when you try to wear it outside.
11:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, he got a bunch of splinters when he held up that two by four outside.
11:43 Robert Evans? That two by four, you know, he's still tired from that. He's still getting the splinters out of his hands from that one day he went to Home Depot to buy a single piece of wood.
11:50 Speaker 04 Gotta go scavenge for more calories to get back to zero.
11:53 Robert Evans? 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 as scavengers?" you ask Cody theoretically.
12:06 Speaker 04 I don't ask that because I know the answer to that, but you can go ahead.
12:10 Robert Evans? Yeah. It was pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protesters who were marching through the city. Ben writes, quote, "hundreds of thousands strong, marching, their banners unfurled, the banners of terrorist groups and communists and of transgender activists, gathered together to revolt against the civilization that has given them their rights and their prosperity and their power." And, you know, he's writing 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.
12:51 Speaker 04 It's what the UN just admitted it was.
12:53 Robert Evans? It's what the UN just admitted.
12:55 Speaker 04 Like, it's just, that is so kind. Of course, he's doing that. But also, like, actually, Ben, they're not trying to rail against or like destroy the society that like built everything. They're trying to participate in that society.
13:07 Robert Evans? 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.
13:30 Speaker 04 Well, yeah, like a lion, unlike these people who are fighting for it like scavengers.
13:36 Robert Evans? 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 posts 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 starved to death. These are equivalent.
14:21 Robert Evans? 100,000 likes to a bad post? Equal to the murder of thousands of equal to fucking babies being incinerated. All equivalent." Yes.
14:29 Speaker 04 Think of the likes. I'm actually, I need to hold a moment of silence for the likes.
14:33 Robert Evans? For the likes, yeah, really. That's, thank you, Cody. We sometimes forget the real victims here.
14:39 Speaker 04 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.
14:47 Robert Evans? It's so much. It's such bad writing.
14:49 Speaker 04 Already, I'm just like, God, stop saying it.
14:51 Robert Evans? C.S. Lewis would fucking, like, pile drive him in frustration at how badly this is written.
14:57 Speaker 04 At least name the lion.
14:59 Robert Evans? Like, and I'm not particularly a C.S. Lewis stan, 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.
15:09 Speaker 04 Or, in Ben's words, "Your boiling brain."
15:11 Robert Evans? Yeah, exactly. Thank you.
15:12 Speaker 04 Boiling your brain in London.
15:13 Robert Evans? 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.
15:54 Speaker 04 They built it to themselves from somebody else.
15:57 Robert Evans? They starved 30 million people in Bengal. They wiped out entire ethnic groups, you know, to get spices. Like, it's, it...
16:04 Speaker 04 Okay, you're making it really hard for me to say this is building.
16:08 Robert Evans? Yeah.
16:09 Speaker 04 But I'm gonna try. Okay.
16:11 Robert Evans? Yes, the Abra Tzar massacre. Clear example of building.
16:14 Speaker 04 They're built, they build, okay, impossible. No, you made a good point. I mean, it's all, like, this whole framing just goes back to that fucking tweet from, like,
16:24 Robert Evans? Right.
16:24 Speaker 04 25 or 15 years ago. Israelis like to build, Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.
16:30 Robert Evans? Precisely.
16:30 Speaker 04 It's just that. Which he apologized for, by the way, and said it was stupid. He said it was a stupid tweet.
16:37 Robert Evans? We'll talk about another thing that he apologized for in a little bit here, Cody. But yes, thank you for bringing that one up.
16:41 Speaker 04 And then you write a whole book about it?
16:43 Robert Evans? So Ben expresses disbelief at the existence of groups like Queers for Palestine, 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 much doubt, nether 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." Hmm. Yeah, these Palestinians want to kill queer people, unlike Ben Shapiro and his allies at the Daily Wire, who want-
17:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, Matt Hamas Walsh.
17:21 Robert Evans? 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.
17:30 Speaker 04 They make it very clear. I mean, now it's associating with anybody.
17:34 Robert Evans? Right, right. And people who associate with them, of course, and who fund them, you know, maybe-
17:38 Speaker 04 In ways that we still don't know, we still, but surely they do.
17:42 Robert Evans? It's not important to have that all ironed out right now.
17:45 Speaker 04 There are other tweets from Matt Walsh. Obviously, that's horrific. What a horrible, fucking terrible person.
17:50 Robert Evans? He's a bad guy.
17:51 Speaker 04 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.
18:06 Robert Evans? Oh, yeah, yeah. And Charlie Kirk had talked about public executions, too, like his belief that that's something we need to bring back.
18:11 Speaker 04 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 guess a good phrase instead would be to unite the right. So-
18:25 Robert Evans? Sure, yeah.
18:25 Speaker 04 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-
18:45 Speaker 04 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 they recognize these inconsistencies or consistencies to them, who knows?
18:59 Robert Evans? And they don't care.
19:01 Speaker 04 Oh, of course not.
19:01 Robert Evans? None of that, it doesn't matter, like, to them, what matters is crushing their enemies, right? Like, the fact that they aren't logically consistent is about power.
19:09 Speaker 04 Oh, no.
19:09 Robert Evans? It always has been, you know? And there's, there is a lot that's disingenuous about this framing, though, and it's worth getting into that. One thing is that, as of May 2025, per UNICEF Regional Director Edward Bikebetter, 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-
19:30 Speaker 04 But they might one day.
19:32 Robert Evans? 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.
19:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's bad. Yeah, it's very obvious that that's the situation, but again, they don't care.
19:57 Robert Evans? If there's a mass shooting at a church that believes things I don't like, I'm not, not gonna be angry about the mass shooting because the pastor of the church said something shitty? And like, like, that doesn't make it okay that kids got shot. Do you, do you understand that? Like-
20:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, those kids were massacred, like, it's horrific.
20:16 Robert Evans? 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.
20:37 Speaker 04 You can call those things horrific crimes against humanity and not have to be like, "But also, I don't wanna do Hamas stuff here because they would, they have, like-"
20:47 Robert Evans? 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 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.
21:11 Speaker 04 Their crime was being born in a certain place at a certain time. And that's actually not a crime.
21:16 Robert Evans? 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. 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,
22:01 Robert Evans? quote, "transfer Palestinians and Israeli Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Israel proper." That's just an ethnic cleansing.
22:10 Speaker 04 Like, "Transfer is not a dirty word," I think is the title of that piece. That's ethnic cleansing.
22:15 Robert Evans? Fucking Israeli Arab, they're like citizens, you realize that, right? Like, it doesn't matter because they're not Jewish, I guess.
22:20 Speaker 04 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.
22:26 Robert Evans? Everything he does.
22:27 Speaker 04 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.
22:38 Robert Evans? Yeah, I mean, I think both of those things have happened. Now, during this rant, Ben first starts referring to, and again, going, sorry, because we've, we've gone off on a tangent. This rant is about the protests last year in London against the, 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 antisemitism. Antisemitism is an age-old hatred rooted in a conspiracy theory. It takes many forms and has countless victims. This is something different. It is a united, coalitional hatred of the West.
23:20 Robert Evans? 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 antisemitism. There, Ben and I agree. One factor at play within many people protesting against Israel's actions here is a coalitional 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.
23:49 Speaker 04 Exactly.
23:50 Robert Evans? Right? Like, the decades of support for Israel's continuing actions that have been genocidal and quasi-genocidal for quite some time.
23:58 Speaker 04 He definitely does this, I mean, with many different topics and issues, but he's conflating, I mean, basic criticism of actions. Like, it's not, it's not saying like, these values that you pretend to have are evil. It's not about like, Western values or anything like that. It's about specific actions being taken that should be able to be criticized without 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.
24:33 Robert Evans? Right. And we will continue and get to Ben talking about J.R.R. Tolkien, which I am excited to chat with you about, Cody. But first, let's have some ads.
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26:21 Robert Evans? And we're back. So, after introducing this protest and starting his scavengers and the pride, you know, 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 at the gates. The armies of war marching on ministeria. Right? Yes. Yeah. He's not like sly. It's obvious what he's doing. And he gets very direct here. He literally calls the, quote, "hordes of Mordor, stand-ins for the Nazis and their allies." Now, Tolkien himself would have rejected Ben claiming this wholeheartedly.
27:03 Robert Evans? 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, J.R.R. 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.
27:44 Robert Evans? But it's also not accurate to say the hordes of Mordor 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 like why he was an anarchist is very much like relevant to modern day anarchists.
28:29 Robert Evans? 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 Yeah, craving it. Ensorcelled into, right? Like, that's not, it'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?
29:10 Robert Evans? And so, again, this is not, like most people, J R R Tolkien's political beliefs were not entirely coherent or consistent. Ebb and flow is a little bit Yes. Contextual. However, what I can say is that J R 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 in photographs from the Tehran conference. Right? So he said basically, standing next to fucking Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill looks like a scumbag.
29:48 Robert Evans? Like, 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 Mercean. Seriously, Tolkien found Amaro cosmopolitanism terrifying. He was unsure if victory would be much better for the world as a whole.
30:30 Robert Evans? 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?
31:13 Robert Evans? He found this personally horrifying and disgusting, which is like the opposite of Ben's politics. And he was not pro the British Empire. He was in fact deeply critical of the British Empire for the reasons established in the letter above. He hated the flattening of cultures around the globe under burgeoning capitalism and was disgusted by the domination of peoples around the world by foreign powers. The beliefs he most consistently expressed throughout his adult life were 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.
31:51 Speaker 04 I mean, that's what Mordor was basically modeled after, right? Like, and like the-
31:54 Robert Evans? Yeah, like, there's Germany in there, too. Yeah.
31:57 Speaker 04 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.
32:05 Robert Evans? Yes, like, like, there's some Germany in Mordor, but there's more than a little of the United States there, too. Yeah. 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'd wind up sounding like a Californian, right? That's a little bit, I'd be a little bit... No, a little bit. 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.
32:50 Robert Evans? So 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, Ben Shapiro writes, "So it goes today in London. The lions are gone, and without the spirit of the lion, our civilization collapses. What is the spirit of the lion? The spirit of 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 like, are in charge, as a general rule, in lion 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.
33:35 Robert Evans? 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."
34:10 Speaker 04 He's really stretching this really, really, really far.
34:13 Robert Evans? Let's avoid the biological critiques here.
34:16 Speaker 04 Sure.
34:16 Robert Evans? If we're just talking about conservatives, the opposite of what you do is find new solutions
34:22 Speaker 04 I know.
34:22 Robert Evans? to problems or forge new paths. You're violently offended by the idea of forging new paths and new solutions. Novelty disgusts you, Ben Shapiro. You're a arch-conservative.
34:33 Speaker 04 Conservative. What's the, there's one bit also about like, they don't whine. I know that's not what the phrase is.
34:39 Robert Evans? Oh, my God, yes. Yeah, no, he's saying that they don't complain. The lion does not complain about the unfairness of life. That's literally your job, Ben.
34:43 Speaker 04 Buddy, that's every conservative's job.
34:47 Robert Evans? That is the only way you've ever made money.
34:49 Speaker 04 Job. He's constantly talking about how everything is unfair to him specifically.
34:54 Robert Evans? Well, it's just, you're got rich complaining, Ben. That's what you do for a living.
35:00 Speaker 04 Business model.
35:01 Robert Evans? Yeah.
35:01 Speaker 04 Complain and then sell leftist tears mugs.
35:04 Robert Evans? Right.
35:05 Speaker 04 What are you talking about, lion? It's absurd.
35:08 Robert Evans? Yeah.
35:08 Speaker 04 I think there's also Ezra Klein did an interview with Ben.
35:12 Robert Evans? Oh, eat crazy, yeah.
35:13 Speaker 04 Not, you know, whatever. But like Ben's like talking about like lions and he's like, yeah. And then, you know, they build the social fabric and all this kind of stuff. Trump's entire project is to tear down the social fabric. That's not the lion 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?
35:49 Robert Evans? Yeah, right?
35:50 Speaker 04 It's just the whole thing is just like not, it's just a mess.
35:53 Robert Evans? 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 one time in his life where Ben took a principled moral stand when he got really angry at.
36:06 Speaker 04 When he left Breitbart.
36:07 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah.
36:08 Speaker 04 For what, Lou, was it Lewandowski who?
36:10 Robert Evans? Yeah, yeah.
36:11 Speaker 04 His colleague, yeah.
36:12 Robert Evans? Was physically aggressive towards like a female employee.
36:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, he left. It was, uh, I, I've mentioned that exact thing before.
36:19 Robert Evans? 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?
36:29 Speaker 04 I mean, so it's so inconsistent. He became a political pundit when he was 17. Like, he's gotta, he's gotta 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.
36:56 Robert Evans? 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.
37:12 Speaker 04 Also like warriors, are you like, doing like, now they're like, people doing like, whatever.
37:18 Robert Evans? And lions aren't warriors. They don't have wars. They fight because they're animals.
37:22 Speaker 04 Exactly. Like, why are you saying lions are warriors? What are you talking about?
37:25 Robert Evans? It's just not, 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 he's, Ben says, describes how the lion lives. "Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste 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.
37:57 Speaker 04 It's a good sentence.
37:58 Robert Evans? 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.
38:14 Speaker 04 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, "Vote for Trump, please."
38:25 Robert Evans? 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
39:05 Robert Evans? 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."
39:41 Speaker 04 There it is. I mean, that's like, it's just like, now they're supporting a robber baron who is leading-
39:49 Robert Evans? Who is backed by theocrats.
39:51 Speaker 04 Theocrat, is backed theocratic movement. Like, he's just talking about, he's just doing both. It's so-
39:56 Robert Evans? C.S. Lewis failed to consider, you know, porcino lost dos, right?
40:00 Speaker 04 What if you get a robber baron to lead your theocratic movement? That's wild, man.
40:05 Robert Evans? There we go. Speaking of robber barons, Cody.
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40:16 Robert Evans? Hell, yeah.
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41:56 Robert Evans? And we're back.
41:57 Speaker 03 Snaps for Robert for the ad transition.
42:00 Robert Evans? Thank you, Sophie. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you. So.
42:04 Speaker 03 Cody clapped.
42:07 Speaker 04 I guess I just cared more.
42:08 Robert Evans? I crave praise. I simply crave it, you know? It's my heroine. Also heroine. No, I don't do heroin.
42:14 Speaker 03 Robert.
42:15 Robert Evans? Anymore. No. I've never done heroin.
42:17 Speaker 04 I mean, according to RFK Junior, it helps you focus in school.
42:20 Robert Evans? It does. It makes it easy to focus.
42:22 Speaker 03 Or at least the worm in his brain.
42:23 Robert Evans? Focus on being on heroin.
42:27 Speaker 04 Didn't know I was on heroin until I did it. Now it's all I can think about.
42:30 Robert Evans? To be fair, the only heroin I've ever taken, I licked off a guy's finger at a cafe in rural India.
42:35 Speaker 04 That's... ...fair.
42:38 Robert Evans? It was a nice afternoon. So, we're talking about C.S. Lewis, who Ben Shapiro just brought up.
42:44 Speaker 04 Not licking heroin off of fingers, yeah.
42:46 Robert Evans? No, we're not. Although, I'd do it again.
42:48 Speaker 03 Oh, buddy.
42:49 Robert Evans? Well, maybe not in this fentanyl 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.
43:31 Speaker 04 Propaganda.
43:32 Robert Evans? He thought that was gross, because it is.
43:35 Speaker 04 You know, to put those sort of thoughts in your work and stuff.
43:38 Robert Evans? As Orwell would say, "All art is propaganda," right? But I don't think Lewis believed that, you know?
43:43 Speaker 04 But there's a huge difference between doing your art and expressing yourself in that way, and being like, "Well, I'm gonna start an organization that does propaganda for the regime."
43:51 Robert Evans? Yeah, that gets literally paid by oil billionaires to write propaganda supporting oil billionaires, yes.
43:56 Speaker 04 Exactly.
43:56 Robert Evans? And again, Lewis would have obviously, well, not, 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 disgust 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,
44:41 Robert Evans? "sought power over nature," and the astrologer who quote, "proclaimed nature's power over man." And I want to quote from a write-up on cslewis.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 and 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
45:23 Robert Evans? 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?
45:41 Speaker 04 Right, because he's also not saying there are two types of people.
45:44 Robert Evans? No, no, he's not.
45:46 Speaker 04 One or the other.
45:47 Robert Evans? Going too far in either of these directions is bad, yeah.
45:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
45:51 Robert Evans? 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 as 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 effectively.
46:25 Speaker 04 And then sort of, like, overtaking facts and reality and sort of...
46:29 Robert Evans? Like we see, you know?
46:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
46:31 Robert Evans? 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?
46:37 Speaker 04 A lot of bad things can happen in a democracy.
46:39 Robert Evans? 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.
46:50 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
46:50 Robert Evans? Both he and Tolkien would have been on the bomb data center 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.
47:05 Speaker 04 Uh, using, I mean, even like using the AI for like fake things like dead people have said and like the ghost AI stuff they're doing, all, all of it.
47:14 Robert Evans? If you explained 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...
47:27 Speaker 04 Not even like taking into, like...
47:29 Robert Evans? What the thing is doing itself, right?
47:30 Speaker 04 Exactly, yeah. What it can create, or create in quotes, I guess, but...
47:34 Robert Evans? 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 humans power, one that makes me equally certain he'd have disliked the argument that Ben is making here about lions and scavengers. In his book Present Concerns, Lewis wrote, "I don't deserve a share in governing a hen roost, much less a nation, nor do most people who believe advertisements and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse.
48:20 Robert Evans? Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows."
48:25 Speaker 04 He would hate so much about everything.
48:27 Robert Evans? He would be so unhappy.
48:29 Speaker 04 Like, like the internet memes, meme culture, like, like, oh, God, he would hate it so much.
48:34 Robert Evans? And again, not at all woke, just absolutely not a fascist.
48:37 Speaker 04 No, yeah, just disgusted with, like...
48:39 Robert Evans? And not a theocrat, as Christian as he was, not a theocrat.
48:42 Speaker 04 Exactly, yeah. Every single AI post that the Department of Homeland Security puts up, like, every single thing they're doing.
48:48 Robert Evans? He'd be losing his fucking mind.
48:49 Speaker 04 He despises this.
48:51 Robert Evans? Oh, yeah.
48:52 Speaker 04 Grotesque. Gosh.
48:53 Robert Evans? Yeah. Now, after quoting Lewis, Ben introduces another wrinkle to his lion scavenger dichotomy. The pride of lions is split up between three sub-archetypes. The weaver, who, quote, weaves together the disparate strands of family and society, and often goes unnoticed, but, quote, are the true heroes of our civilization. And the hunters, the warriors, and the weavers form a pride together. It is kind of unclear to me what separates the hunters from the warriors.
49:20 Speaker 04 I was gonna ask, like, does he describe the hunters and the warriors?
49:23 Robert Evans? I think the weavers are like women. That's the place women have in the pride. Is there the weavers? You know?
49:28 Speaker 04 Yeah. Well, the men get two groups to choose from.
49:30 Robert Evans? That's right. They get to hunt or war.
49:33 Speaker 04 Or be a warrior.
49:34 Robert Evans? Yeah.
49:35 Speaker 04 All right.
49:35 Robert Evans? I, anyway, and again, also Ben uses warrior and hunter more or less as synonyms in this book. It's just, he's bad writer. 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.
50:03 Speaker 04 Wait a second.
50:04 Robert Evans? They're not on guard against it. It's how they survive.
50:07 Speaker 04 The pride has a spirit of scavengers?
50:09 Robert Evans? Every lion has the spirit of a scavenger in them.
50:13 Speaker 04 Ben, what are you talking about?
50:14 Robert Evans? 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?
50:32 Speaker 04 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 straight up says it.
50:46 Robert Evans? Describe Vance.
50:47 Speaker 04 Yeah. Oh, 100%. Like, he's like, yeah, the, uh, the hillbilly elegy era, he was like a lion, which, like, maybe he was a scavenger the whole time, Ben, who, you know?
50:55 Robert Evans? How is that being a lion? He's literally just, okay.
50:58 Speaker 04 I know. We don't need to talk hillbilly elegy. 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.
51:14 Robert Evans? 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 pack, and pack is capitalized too.
51:25 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
51:26 Robert Evans? To the spirit of the scavenger. The spirit of the scavenger is the spirit of envy.
51:31 Speaker 03 He's not, he's just putting word, there's just, there's, it's just ridiculous. This means nothing.
51:39 Robert Evans? It means nothing. It's so fundamentally irrational because the foundation of this, the whole life, 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.
51:56 Speaker 03 No.
51:57 Speaker 04 It's too bad and messy. You can't, because also, when you say the word pack and you capitalize, I'm thinking of wolves, which wouldn't you be able to use for your other, like, they're so interchangeable.
52:09 Robert Evans? It's like if I were to write a book called The Horse and the Ant and start it with, like, obviously, the horse soars high above all of us on its mighty wings.
52:16 Speaker 04 Right, right.
52:17 Robert Evans? Like.
52:18 Speaker 04 Meanwhile, the ant looming over the horse.
52:21 Robert Evans? Yes.
52:21 Speaker 04 Okay.
52:23 Robert Evans? 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 Wire's movie, like, is also a massive waste of money. Horrible idea, because none of them are good writers.
52:50 Speaker 04 Hey, you wait until they do the anti-woke Snow White, okay? That's gonna be really, really good.
52:55 Robert Evans? That's gonna really blow up. Audiences are craving. The children cry out, demanding anti-woke Snow fucking White.
53:02 Speaker 04 You can hear them now. They're just, "Anti-woke Snow."
53:06 Robert Evans? Was Snow White mean like the 60s? It's not woke. I don't know. Anyway.
53:11 Speaker 04 It's because they made a new one and the
53:13 Robert Evans? Yeah.
53:13 Speaker 04 wasn't white enough.
53:15 Robert Evans? I haven't been keeping up with the fucking Disney reboots. 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
53:59 Robert Evans? as a fucking professional screenwriter.
54:02 Speaker 04 Yes, about 85%.
54:03 Robert Evans? Right? Yeah, exactly.
54:05 Speaker 04 Growing up fundamentalist, religious, conservative, all that kind of stuff. Did not help, but that resentment fueled by envy is 100%. Yeah.
54:14 Robert Evans? And he can only see this as an example of Hollywood hating conservatives like him. Right? It has to be bigotry. That's because that's the only way he could not succeed. Right? And, you know, he has to ignore a lot in order to believe this. If you were to look at reality, he would see that plenty of conservatives have been very successful in Hollywood. Screenwriters like David Mamet and John Milius, right? Or Milius, I always forget, the guy who did Red Dawn, right? Actors like Kelsey Grammer and John Voight, 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. Clint fucking Eastwood. Massively successful.
54:57 Speaker 04 Talented, very conservative person.
55:00 Robert Evans? Plenty of conservative, like movies that are conservative. And I'm just think about how many during the war on terror, how many TV shows and movies had a scene where the guy has to torture someone to save lives? Right? That is conservative propaganda.
55:14 Speaker 04 Even though it's like made by a lot of like self-described libs or whatever, like it's still conservative. Ideologically.
55:22 Robert Evans? Like, yeah.
55:22 Speaker 04 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 gonna say cancel culture, because that's not what it is. It's not what'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.
55:49 Robert Evans? Right. And they're, yeah, a part of it is, if I get them out, finally, I'll get a shot and people will realize I was better.
55:54 Speaker 04 Finally, late night with Gutfeld.
55:56 Robert Evans? 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 scavengers, 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.
56:41 Speaker 04 Ben, you gotta read that again, Ben.
56:42 Robert Evans? That's like your whole life. Buddy. That's your entire, like, career, buddy.
56:49 Speaker 04 Your first book was about the conspiracy against you and you specifically and conservatives generally.
56:55 Robert Evans? 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.
57:14 Speaker 04 Sure.
57:15 Robert Evans? Right? I guess you couldn't describe other, like, pride, it doesn't go both ways.
57:18 Speaker 04 Pride is very specific.
57:19 Robert Evans? It's like a bourbon whiskey thing, right? Anyway, "The pack consists of looters, lechers, 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 Ben'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 band 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,
58:01 Robert Evans? 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.
58:32 Speaker 04 Pack of police.
58:33 Robert Evans? You can't even say, "I oppose genocide. I support this group." They'll arrest you.
58:38 Speaker 04 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.
58:48 Robert Evans? Yep.
58:49 Speaker 04 That is their political project. That is what he is supporting right now. He's guesting on all the podcasts with the vice president, who's only a podcaster now, talking about this exact things.
58:59 Robert Evans? Yes, exactly.
59:00 Speaker 04 So maybe he's a, I don't know, a wolf, a vulture. I don't, I don't, a liar.
59:05 Robert Evans? Asshole. Yes. Bad writer. Yes.
59:08 Speaker 04 Line, piece of shit, bad writer. Yeah.
59:10 Robert Evans? 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.
59:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, it needs to be barbarians at the gates were perpetual.
59:49 Robert Evans? Desperately self-defense.
59:51 Speaker 04 Victims perpetually persecuted.
59:52 Robert Evans? We have every lever of power.
59:54 Speaker 04 Exactly.
59:54 Robert Evans? And he critiques leftists in this passage for embracing Mao Zedong'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 ma- what do you go mass arrests, man?
1:00:08 Speaker 04 Premise of police. Like, what are you talking about? Like, ICE is like, do it like, that is political power.
1:00:14 Robert Evans? What do you call like Israel's actions, right? Like, I mean, it's bombs, I guess, more than the barrel of a gun, but you know, the basic idea is the same, right?
1:00:22 Speaker 04 You can use language in ways to mean many things. Yeah, he believes that.
1:00:27 Robert Evans? Yes.
1:00:27 Speaker 04 He believes that.
1:00:29 Robert Evans? 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 Rudyard 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 in a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget, lest we forget." Now, I don't really see that as a warning about not indoctrinating your kid with propaganda, but I guess I can see where he's coming from there.
1:01:11 Robert Evans? That's that. 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 embraced 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 he's making, right?
1:01:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a mandatory scavengerism, right?
1:01:38 Robert Evans? And this is classic Ben, 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 getting involved and committing to it.
1:02:19 Robert Evans? 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 join the Royal Navy, but his eyesight was bad, and so he was unable to take on a navy career. So Rudyard used his connections, being a very famous and influential person in media, to get John a commission as an officer in the Irish Guards, which is a British military
1:03:02 Robert Evans? 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 Lus. 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.
1:03:45 Robert Evans? 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 culture, 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.
1:04:07 Speaker 04 That seems maybe different from
1:04:10 Robert Evans? Yeah.
1:04:11 Speaker 04 What the topic started as.
1:04:14 Robert Evans? Right. It seems maybe, again, to go from where Ben is like, 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 kids.
1:04:22 Speaker 04 Shouldn't have done that. We shouldn't have said that. We shouldn't have told him to do that.
1:04:25 Robert Evans? Maybe this was a fuck up, right? Now, there's some context to this line, and I'm going to quote from an article for the Irish Times by Ronan McReavy, 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 is 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, but he, I think there's
1:05:08 Robert Evans? a degree of ego there. But he knew that he'd fucked up, right? That they all had.
1:05:13 Speaker 04 Lied to them to get them to fight. That's.
1:05:15 Robert Evans? 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?
1:05:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, like, sometimes expressing that sort of guilt is how you're actually saying that you were wrong without saying it.
1:05:52 Robert Evans? Right.
1:05:53 Speaker 04 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.
1:06:01 Robert Evans? 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 Bin 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?
1:06:42 Speaker 04 Go for it.
1:06:43 Robert Evans? 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 gonna read this poem and then we'll talk about it afterwards.
1:06:53 Speaker 04 If it's something really depressing and then yeah, do the nice poem.
1:06:58 Robert Evans? So this is "A Pict 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 centuries pass on, that is all. And we gather behind them in hordes, and plot to reconquer the Wall with only our tongues for our swords. We are the little folk, we, too little 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.
1:07:42 Robert Evans? Yes, and we little folk too. We are as busy as they, working our works out of you. Watch and you'll see it someday. No, indeed, we are not strong, but we know peoples that are. Yes, and we'll guide them along, to smash and destroy you in war. We shall be slaves just the same? Yes, we have always been slaves. But you, you will die of the shame, and then we shall dance on your graves."
1:08:09 Robert Evans? I like that poem. Anyway, that's all I got for part one, or for the first, we'll, 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.
1:08:21 Speaker 04 I mean, I'm convinced that maybe we're all lions and scavengers.
1:08:25 Speaker 03 Are we part of a pack?
1:08:27 Speaker 04 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.
1:08:42 Robert Evans? Right, right. Every crow contains a lion, you know?
1:08:45 Speaker 03 It is known.
1:08:46 Robert Evans? Yeah, it's known, you know?
1:08:48 Speaker 04 We all went to school. We all learned about lions and crows.
1:08:53 Robert Evans? 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 Marianas Trench.
1:09:02 Speaker 04 On the moon.
1:09:04 Robert Evans? It's as accurate as what Ben's written.
1:09:05 Speaker 04 Mm hmm. Yeah. It's good.
1:09:08 Robert Evans? Anyway, how you feeling, Brody? Have I ever done that before?
1:09:11 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:09:12 Speaker 04 I think I feel like you have to have, yeah.
1:09:15 Speaker 03 And Chody.
1:09:16 Robert Evans? Chody, sure.
1:09:18 Speaker 04 I appreciate that he at least knows he needs to get some good sentences into his books, so he quotes other writers, even if he doesn't like necessarily interpret them well, he's at least kind of.
1:09:29 Robert Evans? Got to pad this out with some Tolkien and Lewis and Kipling.
1:09:32 Speaker 04 I gotta keep people reading the book.
1:09:34 Robert Evans? That I can't write. Yeah.
1:09:36 Speaker 03 Incredible.
1:09:37 Robert Evans? Oh, good stuff.
1:09:38 Speaker 04 Job to him.
1:09:39 Speaker 03 Cody, you want to plug anything?
1:09:41 Speaker 04 Sure, why not? Check out some more news. It's our weekly show. I sit at a 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.
1:09:57 Speaker 03 Hell, yeah.
1:09:59 Robert Evans? Check out Cody's band. Check out Cody, you know, at like a bar or something. Be like, hey, how's it going?
1:10:07 Speaker 04 I'll be like, good. Yeah.
1:10:08 Robert Evans? You want a drink?
1:10:09 Speaker 04 I'll say, yeah.
1:10:10 Robert Evans? Don't do that.
1:10:11 Speaker 04 Um, yeah, don't.
1:10:13 Robert Evans? I shouldn't joke about the weird parasocial stuff because that'll happen.
1:10:15 Speaker 04 Oh, we don't want any of that.
1:10:18 Robert Evans? But check out Cody's podcasts 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 ends.
1:10:29 Robert Evans? Well, gang, this has been Behind the Podcast, a Bastards about Shapiro Ben. Good night and good luck.
1:10:38 Speaker 03 Bye.
1:10:43 Speaker 03 Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.
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