Transcript of Lions & Scavengers: Ben Shapiro’s Warning to the West

A tension lies at the core of our being. It roils us. It churns our guts. It boils our brains. That 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.

That was best-selling author and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro discussing his new book, Lion and Scavengers: The True Story of America and her critics. In his book, Shapiro seeks to hold a mirror up to the modern West to expose the reality about two competing forces, those who want to build and protect and those who want to tear down and destroy. In this episode, we sit down with Shapiro to discuss the events that inspired the book and why he believes it's crucial for Americans to understand the forces that are working to fray the American fabric. I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, September sixth, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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Joining us now to discuss his new book, Lion's and Scavengers: The True Story of America, is the co-founder and Editor Emeritus of The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, who's my boss, not my boss. Ben Shapiro, thanks for coming on, man. This is fun.

Hey, good to see you. How are you doing?

It's good to have you in person. We've been talking remotely sometimes. It's fun to be here in person. Look, I've read a lot of your books, and this book struck me from the first second of it as different, actually, than a lot of your works. It is an intellectual pursuit, but it feels like something that was born out of passion, frustration, anger. I think that's right. And it is. And I wanted the audience to hear a little bit about the background of the beginning of writing this book. I think it's really compelling. Can you talk to that?

So unlike a lot of my other books, where I sit down and I come up with the idea first and then I outline it and I figure out what I want to write and structure it, that's not how this book started. The way this book started is I started journaling, essentially, a few years ago because I realized I was doing interesting things that I might want to think about later. And so I started keeping track of what I was doing. And after I visited, particularly Oxford University, to debate about the October seventh attacks and the subsequent war in the Middle East, and this would have been in November of 2023, I sat down and I started to write this essay that was about just the insanity that I was witnessing, which is I flew into London. There had been a protest with tens of thousands of people in the streets just a week before, two weeks before And the security team had to assess whether or not I actually should go to London, given all of the wild emotional outbursts and violence that were actually being threatened. And then when I actually went and I did this debate at Oxford, my security team told me that it was one of the most fraught situations that they'd seen because it was a very small room.

You can watch a video of it online. It was a very small room. I have people who hate my guts. We're sitting maybe two feet behind me in very close proximity. You could feel the seething rage in the room. And I thought to myself, this is crazy because all I'm doing is saying that Israel has right to defend itself against terrorists who just slaughter 1,200 people and kidnapped 250, including women and children. And the comeback that I'm getting is the West is awful, America is awful, Israel is awful. Terrorism is probably justified based on the fact that the West is such a terrible place. And I thought to myself, this is happening in the heart of Western civilization. I mean, if you're thinking of the iconic places of the West, Oxford University is really high on the list. When you walk around that area, you're looking at places where Kings work around or where there was a summer palace of a king. And meanwhile, 10 minutes down the road, you're seeing people who were imported essentially from the third world to hate the West en masse, protesting, screaming, shouting about how much the West is terrible.

And something fundamentally bad has happened here. And that's what set me off on the journey of this book. And this book is significantly more personal. I've told you before, I have an allergy to writing in first person. I just don't like doing it. I I've learned my middle school lessons well.

One of the rare writers now that has that allergy.

Exactly. Unfortunately. And so if you read all of my other books, there's very little, except maybe in the conclusion portion of Right Side of History, where I'm talking about myself, my family, or my feelings about things, because I'm not a feelings guy. This book is a lot more about what it's like to wander through a world where the scavengers feel like they have the upper hand. And by the scavengers, I mean people who just want to tear down the fundamental basis of Western civilization. They hate the civilization. They believe for a variety of reasons that the civilization has wronged them and that it's out there to harm them. They come in a wide variety of types. They have certain characteristics. But the thing they all have in common, what brings them together, is that root desire to destroy rather than to build. And that's how lions, the people who build, who feel there's a duty in the world, that the world is generally an intelligible place filled with things that are important that you should do for yourself and for others and for your civilization, where those people are fighting off a group of scavengers who wish to tear it all down.

And that goes to a battle that I think is in every human heart between the lion scavenger. I don't think people are just born a lion or born a scavenger. I think that that's an ongoing battle that we're all fighting pretty much every single day, whether it be a person who builds or a person who sees the world, is out to get them, and then seeks to destroy it.

I found that really compelling that you talked about that this is an internal battle. It isn't like us and them. The other is the scavenger. It's not that. We all have the potential to be scavengers. Our kids have the potential to become scavengers if we fail them as parents. And this is, again, very personal. You and I, as fathers, we see this every day. You have to work all the time at this. It's exhausting. It's actually easy to give in to despair. And I wanted to talk about that. So the premise of the book is there are lions, there are scavengers. The lions, like you said, they build, they protect. They do have a code of conduct, and I wanted to ask you to unpack that for us. Then there's the scavengers who want to tear this stuff down. They live in resentment, et cetera. When you looked at Oxford and you saw the protests and everything, this is just weeks after October seventh. That was one of the things that was so striking to me. This is all fresh. We all saw the horrors. Yet we have thousands of people protesting on behalf of actual terrorists.

With the scavenger concept, can you explain how that plays out in a situation like that?

I think what you see is a bizarre medley of people who you wouldn't necessarily think of as allies, but who ally themselves for purposes of tearing down the system. So in the book, I talk about the barbarians the looters and the leaches, I think is the terminology that I use. The barbarians would be people who are coming from the third world who think that the first world has wronged them in some way, that the reason that their country has been impoverished or that systems don't work or the reason that they're suffering in their country is not because of choices that are being made by their governments or by their system. It's because the West has fundamentally abused them. And now the West must itself be abused. The West must be made to atone, it must be brought to heal, and it must be destroyed from within. And this is the Frantz Fanon phenomenon He's an Algerian philosopher who was part of the Algerian Revolution. And his basic idea was that colonized peoples have a right to uprise and destroy everything. And it was really about destroying everything, the wretched of the Earth. And then you have the looters who are people who are essentially Marxist in orientation.

They see the world as a battle between the financially oppressor and the financially oppressed. The people who are successful are by nature exploiters. The people who are unsuccessful are by nature the exploited. And so the entire system has to be torn down for that reason in order to achieve a overall leveling. And then you have essentially the libertines, the lechers, people who believe that the traditional institutions of society, like church and family, particularly, which are bulwarks against anarchy, that those are actually bad because they impose rules on marginalized peoples, and thus those have to be brought low. And so if you're going to look at a practical manifestation of that, the most famous, obviously, is queers for Palestine. I think most people look at that and they laugh. It's an absurdity. The idea of people in a parade marching with a trans flag in one hand and a Hamas flag in the other, and you're thinking this is insane. I mean, the Hamas people would literally kill you. The minute you stepped into the Gaza Strip, you would be dead. You would not last 10 minutes in there. But here you are marching with the Hamas flag and also with the Pride Progress flag.

And the answer is because it's not about whether Hamas agrees with Pride Progress. It's about whether both of them agree that the West needs to be destroyed. And that's what you're seeing on the college campuses. It's why you see... It's something I think that puzzles so many people of good heart in the West. Why on college campuses, the most progressive places, are they backing some the most regressive people? And the answer is, it's not about progressive or regressive. It's about destroying the system that is.

As somebody that came from academia, spent too many years in grad school, while working on my PhD, I remember the theme of the center continually brought up by not just the professors, but the grad students. These are all people that mostly lean left. And there's a real resentment for what they termed the center. It's the center of the culture, the thing that has led us through and is the continuity from generation to generation. And the idea was, look, we need to feature the voices of and the perspectives of the fringes. But if you follow this, logically, what happens is, what you mean is you want to tear apart the center. You don't want to get into the center. You want to actually permanently focus on the fringes. And that means devouring the center. But what is left in the end, right? And this is something that you talk about with the lions. They have some principles, they have some things that are not only that guide them in terms of their perspective on the world, but then actually some pretty practical things that they carry out. Can you speak to that something? Sure.

I think the basic philosophy of the lions, and I say in the book, it really isn't a philosophy because most people aren't philosophers. We don't sit around thinking about what do we think and then we do. We just act in the world. But the basic principles that undergird most of our action are things like the world is a place of duty. You have actual moral duties in the world. And those duties actually matter because you live in a relatively, not totally, but relatively intelligible universe which cause is linked to a fact. So if you do the right things, most of the time good things will happen for you and for the society in which you live. And you owe duties to the creator who made that or to the society that surrounds you or both. And that is your motivating factor in life. And so you build. You get up in the morning, you think, how do I build? And that comes in a variety of forms, just the same way that scavengers come as barbarians or looters or lechers. The lions come in what I term hunters, weavers, and warriors. Hunters would be people who the innovators, the people who are the risk-takers, the Elon Musk, the people who go out and in the days before civilization would be the guys who go out and go for the kill, go hunt, bring home the bacon, make life better for everybody through innovation.

And so this is obviously the book is a pretty, I think, robust defense of things like free market economics and private property, because you need the incentive structure of a free market economy and private property in order to allow innovators to actually innovate. So you have the innovators who make life better for everybody because they're out there on the front lines taking the risk. Then you have the warriors, who are the people who are actually defending against the people who would destroy your civilization. Those are obviously soldiers. Those are the people who are the police, the people who stand between us in the darkness every single day. And then you have the weavers, who are the most under appreciated portion of our society. Disproportionately women, because in the caring industries and in mothering and in family, women are disproportionately important. And their job is to build, it's not just women, it's all of our job, to build social fabric. And that social fabric is what binds us to to one another. And so when we talk about building, we're not just talking about building a monument, we're talking about building a family or building a community, the prudence and care that you have to take in preserving that civilization and handing it on to the next generation.

One of the questions becomes, when you have all of these dutiful, ambitious people, how do you hold all that together? And so then you have to build a system that holds all that together. It's a private property is one of those elements. Things like free speech is one of those elements. A healthy respect for the other lions. One of the lions isn't trying to dominate the other And so we've built entire systems, America being the best, in order to protect the ability of a pride to be governed by a certain set of rules so we can move forward together without tearing each other apart. And again, if you go back to the scavengers, the goal of the scavengers is to tear apart that entire system because that system creates a meritocracy. And meritocracies are the things that scavengers hate the most. Scavengers look at the meritocracy and it's a living rebuke to their entire philosophy because a meritocracy says the meritorius got ahead. And they look at that and they have a reverse logic. If you got ahead, it's not because you're meritorious, it's because you're an exploiter and an oppressor. And so the entire system is guilty.

What I think is scary is from the scavenger's perspective, this is like every critic. You have to find one little in road and you can start to destroy the whole thing. Like you said, with the weaving, I love the mental image of that because it is like you have all these threads, and all those threads matter. And if you can find one of them that you can pull at and tear away, it starts to fray super fast. And I do think the internal battle was, again, striking to me, where we are constantly having to be vigilant against falling into the scavenger mentality. That part of it, like the, morally speaking, in terms of worldview, what is it that we have to maintain to not fall for that. I'm thinking of like nihilism, et cetera.

I think gratitude, respect for the systems that we've been handed, an acknowledgement that those systems pre-existe to us and that we actually are a chain of transmission. We have to pass it on to somebody in the future. I think that the in road that is possible for scavengers is the difference between healthy criticism and a belief that the entire system needs to be abolished and destroyed. And I think that scavengers always speak one point of truth and then wrap an entire lie around it. They'll say there's a flaw in the system. The flaw in the system is that there aren't enough people taking care of the poor. Okay, we can always take care of the poor better. We can always do better with that. And then it turns into, and thus the entire system is corrupt for not properly taking care of the poor and need to abolish private property. And so you're taking something that's fundamentally true and you're wrapping it in a broader critique of the entire thing. And so that makes it very difficult to fight back against. And the only way to fight back against that is to actually look into motivation, which is a thing that, again, I don't actually like to do.

I don't like to look into people's motivations, typically speaking. I like to argue with their arguments, but it's very difficult to argue with a dishonest argument. And sometimes these arguments are just covered or they're a facade for something much deeper. The argument about Israel and Hamas and Middle East is Almost never about Israel and Hamas in the Middle East. It usually is a broader argument about the value of Western civilization, about colonialism, about whether Western Western ways of life are better than, quote unquote, indigenous ways of life, which, of course, is a mischaracterization, but that's how the left would characterize it. And so I think that for every human being, how do you criticize a system without turning into a person who believes that all of your failings are the system's failings is the great battle, because obviously there are failings of the system, and we all work to correct those failings. I think we all agree with that. But I think that, as you say, that in-row, you start pulling that thread. And if you connect that thread to literally all the other threads, then the thing just falls apart. Right.

And you're famous for debates, but you can't debate with bad faith debaters.

No. And you'll see this tactically. Really, like when you debate some people, and a good debate involves clarification of position. I know more about your position after the debate than I knew before the debate, and you know more about my position after the debate than you knew before the debate. Bad faith debates are ones where you are simply You shift your tactics in order to score a point without actually attempting to get to the root of the conflict or being honest about what it is that you want. And there's really no way to debate that particular position. If the position is that terrorism is good, but also the position is that the West is disproportionately violent, right? Or the West is responsible for violence, how can you hold those two thoughts simultaneously? And the answer is there's no search for consistency. Consistency is the hob goblin of moral minds. And I think that for people who wish to tear things down, whatever is at their disposal is the tactic that they will use. And that makes it very difficult to have a open, robust discussion.

And this takes nuance, right? And so we live in an era where there is no nuance. We live on a social media-based argument platform. This is where the arguments are happening. It's really hard to have a nuanced discussion. And it's a question like with the book industry, you just published a new book, and a lot of people have said, Hey, look, the book industry is dying. This is why you have to have books. You have to have prolonged nuance arguments somewhere. And this is the way to do it. And the people that are willing to invest in it and take the time to go through those things, can actually understand these arguments. It takes some effort. It takes a will, a desire to know, really, and an honesty in terms of search of truth. And I I appreciate that about you. The other thing I wanted to say about this book is it's just infused with quotes from the greatest minds and greatest works in history. And it's really, for me, it's very gratifying to read a lot of this. This is from literature. It's from political works, philosophical works, and how you can see there is a thread.

There is a thread to Western civilization. I wanted to hear you talk about that a little bit because I know that your previous book had done that, looked at Greco-Roman culture and Judeo-Christian culture and how these things actually have fused together into this pretty beautiful new creation.

Yeah, I think that Right Side of history, which is in some ways a precursor to this book, which discusses the history of Western philosophy in this quick tour, about 250 pages. That book is how the tapestry of Western civilization came to be, what were all the various threats. And this is almost a snapshot of the tapestry. And so it's a lot a lot more narrative in form. It's more anecdotal. I think one of the things I wanted to do with this is I think that people need to understand at a heart level, which again, this is a different thing for me. It's a different thing than I usually do. I try to argue at a head level. And there's a lot that's heady in the book. There's a lot that's philosophical and logical in the book. But I was also trying to evoke certain emotions in people when they read a story, which is just the way that people tend to engage with the world is through story. And so there are a lot of quotations from famous novels and quotations of poetry and evocative images and stories from the past. And I think that that's in some ways much more effective because that's stuff that you're going to remember.

You may remember the gestalt of the argument, but you'll certainly remember a story from Dostoevsky Or on a personal level, you'll certainly remember a story in the book where I'm talking about what it's like to sit next to a kid who's had two legs and an arm blown off in the Gaza War and him wheeling up to me and literally saying, what more can I do to help? I mean, Those sorts of stories have a bit of a different impact. When you say that's what a lion looks like, sometimes that has more of an impact than me spelling out all the principles and philosophies of what a lion is. That's what it looks like right there.

And the left is really good at that part of the argument. They tell stories, false stories, but they tell stories and they're compelling. We have to tell stories on our side for sure. So there's a little nugget in this book that has to do with the Daily Wire that I wanted to highlight before I let you go. Okay, so you talked about the founding of that, but it's actually interesting because I do I think it's... It is an illustration of this is how the lion mentality works versus the scavenger mentality. And it is the founding of the company. I wanted you to talk about that.

It's a failure story, right?

It's failure and success.

Right. So I believe it's in the section where I'm talking about innovation and the mentality of being a hunter. And the basic idea is you have to take risks. And a lot of the time you're going to fail. Every big business owner I know, every very rich person that I know, failed about 10 times before they found the thing that actually they got really good at and that made them very wealthy. And so I tell this story about the founding of the Daily Wire from before we were at the Daily Wire. You remember because you were there. I remember. So we were at a company called TruthRevolt that we had founded inside the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which is a 501(C)(3). David was an amazing person. He just died. But and his work is totally worth looking at. And there is a... In the latter days of our employment at Truth Revolved, there's a board meeting. And at this board meeting, Jeremy Boring, who is the co founder of this company, along with me and Caleb Robinson, he and I were at Truth Revolved. Caleb was not there yet. We'd not met Caleb at that point.

So at this board meeting, Jeremy had this idea that basically if you market through Facebook, you will be able to drive traffic, which will drive earnings for a company, which you can just put back into marketing. And so he's trying to describe this because the website that we had created, we were saying, if you give us basically a million dollars, then we will be able to create a revenue machine for the 501(C)(3). And Jeremy tried to explain this over and over and over, and he just couldn't explain it or they couldn't hear it. And Jeremy is a much more soft-spoken Texan than I am. I speak quickly and I'm annoying. And Jeremy is famous for being able to talk to people in this way and just was not clicking. So finally, the board, which is disproportionately elderly, one of the people in frustration turns to me and says, Can you explain what's going on? And I was so irritated. I was like, yes. So I took a piece of paper and I wrote on the piece of paper, Facebook, arrow, website, arrow, dollar sign, arrow back to Facebook. I said, this is our business plan.

It's right here. We're going to spend money on Facebook. It's going to drive traffic to the website. And then that's going to drive money. And the money is going to go right back into Facebook. And it's just going to be a cycle. And then it's going to generate revenue. And the next day they fired Jeremy. And the day after that, I quit the company. And then we took that exact business plan. We walked across the street, got the angel funding that began Daily Wire. And that was the business plan effectively for Daily Wire. And the purpose of the story is to say, we failed. We could have complained about the system, which I'm sure we did. But then the question is, what do you do next? Do you try again? Do you believe in the idea enough? Are you willing to go to and take those risks. And honestly, I mean, financially, we should have taken even bigger risks. And I think what you'll find with many of the people who, again, are very successful is that many of their regrets are risks they actually didn't take. I should have mortgaged my house to pay for Daily Wire as it turns out.

Rather than going getting angel investment, a smarter financial decision would have been to take a second mortgage on my home and fund it that way because it turns out to be successful. But I think that that's why that story appears in the book. It's a funny story. And you got to see what the paper looked like that birthed Daily Wire.

It's pretty fun to see that founding document. One sneaky last question. You started off in a place of a shock and anger over the last few years. Do you feel like you've seen signs that give you more hope, less hope?

There are a lot of green shoes. I mean, I think that the re-election of President Trump is a big one. It felt back in October of 2023, as though the left was on the march. They were dominant in a lot of ways, not just the political left, but just this gigantic, conspiracy-minded mentality that had been dominating the West. And I think that President Trump, as I've said, whatever disagreements I have with him, he's a person who lives in the world of reality. He's responsive to reality. And so his re-elect, I think, was an attempt by the American people to say, let's get back to something that resembles normalcy. Please, let's just get back to normalcy. I want to be left alone to take care of my family and be a weaver. I want to be left alone to be able to innovate and take risk. And you're seeing this from business people. I want to have the ability to defend my civilization, which is why recruitment in the military is up. So it does feel like there are a bunch of shoots in the direction of the lions. But it has to be maintained, as Ronald Reagan said, every generation or you lose it.

So true. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Book is terrific and best of luck with it. Thanks, John. That was Daily Wire co founder and editor, Emeritus, Ben Shapiro, talking about his new book, Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America, available at dailywire. Com/ben. This has been a special edition of Morning Wire. Wire.