Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of the Chicks on the Right podcast.
So excited to have Ben Shapiro with us, who barely
needs introduction as an enormously popular podcaster of The Ben
Shapiro Show, co founder of one of our favorite organizations,
The Daily Wire, and best selling author many times over.
And he's got a new book, Lions and Scavengers. It's
available now, and that describes the two sides of the
battle for America's future. Spoiler alert, The lions are the
good guys. So the conclusion of this book, Ben, thank
you for being with us. Was written right after Trump
had been inaugurated, and you had written at the end
that the lions are awake. And so now that some
time has passed, I wanted to check in and see
if you still feel that way today.
Speaker 4: I do.
Speaker 2: I think that the American people are done with the
sort of grievance mentality they characterized America for a fairly
period of time. I don't think that it's completely gone.
I mean, I think that there's always the possibility that
it will come back. And that's the danger of politics,
is that these sort of grievance based politics, in which
people believe that all the problems in their life are
the fault of shadowy systems, and thus we have to
wreck the actual systems that matter, things like private property
or free speech, or rule of law or traditional virtue
that those people are still there. And this is why
one of the things that I've said for months and
months and months that the biggest danger to the rise
of the Lions is a sinking economy. If the economy
starts to go the wrong way, then you're going to
see a revival of grievance culture that's going to be
extremely strong. And so I'm very kind of worried about
where the economy goes. But I will say that that
obviously President Trump's victory represents not just obviously his singular
domination of American politics, but also the fact that the
American people were just tired of what it was that
the scavengers were offering, which is this never ending litany
of complaints about how horrible the United States is and
the belief that you're not responsible for the decisions in
your own life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the victim mentality is really it's been huge.
We've been doing, like we were saying before we went on,
We've been doing this for sixteen seventeen years, and you've
been around for a while too, and you understand that
ebbs and flows, and you have children like we do.
And I think that we're seeing, at least we talk
about a lot on our show, we're seeing a trend
towards conservatism, and you know, like I think the values
that we hold, like the conservative values with gen Z
and the Alphas, I think is.
Speaker 5: What they call them.
Speaker 3: Do you think that there are a lot of lions
in those the new generation, like the younger generation.
Speaker 4: I do.
Speaker 2: I think that there are a lot of people who
would have been quote unquote moderate in prior years, and
I think that, let's put it this way, people who
are sort of center or right leaning are significantly harder
right than they otherwise would have been. I won't say
that's the majority of young people, because that's not what
the poles tend to show, but I will say that
is certainly where a lot of the energy is, and
that the kind of trend toward more religious behavior, toward marriage,
toward kids is extremely strong, particularly with gen Z men.
Speaker 4: I think that that gen Z women are some of
them are doing that.
Speaker 2: But I think that among men, particularly who feel like
they've been cut out of the loop, who feel as
though they've been sort of robbed of their initiative. There
is a move back toward traditionalism that is pretty astounding
to watch.
Speaker 5: Actually, that's good news for my fifteen year old daughter.
Speaker 1: Well and you, I mean, in the book you talk
about like the connection between lions and that mentality and meritocracy.
Do you think that the reason that some of that
shift for especially young men to lean more conservative now
is because there has been this pull away from meritocracy
as an ideology amongst I mean, there's been the pendulum
swung so far. So do you think that some of
the reason that there are men coming back to or
just you know, newly becoming engaged in conservatism is because
that pendulum went so frickin woke?
Speaker 2: Yes, for sure. I mean I think that that's really enervating.
I mean it really makes people feel horrible about themselves
when you feel like, no matter what you do, the
system is telling you you can't say seed. And when
people instead say, hey, actually you can succeed. It's a
free country, Get off your ass and do something useful today,
that is a much better and more inspiring message. And
I think that young men are actually picking up on
that in fairly large numbers. I do think that the
woke left wents so extreme in its pursuit of wiping
away masculinity in particular, that you can certainly say that
the movement toward conservatism, particularly among young people and toward Trump,
is led by men.
Speaker 4: I mean that there are more young women who are
voting for Trump.
Speaker 2: That did happen between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four,
but the shift among young men was pretty astounding, and
I think a large part of that was a direct
response to the idea that there's no place for men
in society, that masculinity is dead. That basically what we
need is for men to stop being quite so aggressive
and so masculine. And I think a lot of guys said,
you know, I'm not in for this. I would much
rather be able to make the most of my God
given abilities.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Whenever we see like one side do one thing, I
feel like the other side does that thing too. So
like we're seeing the woke left, and I know, the
pendulum swinging, but we're also seeing the woke right, which
is so disturbing and weird to us. So we're seeing
a lot of anti Israel sentiment on our side. We
talk about that a lot on our show. We feel
very alone sometimes.
Speaker 4: Talking about that.
Speaker 5: It's I don't we don't get it. We just don't
get it, Ben. So we want to know what.
Speaker 3: Your thoughts are on all this this anti Israel sentiment,
because I saw a stat the other day.
Speaker 5: I want to make sure you get this right.
Speaker 3: There's been an almost nine hundred percent increase in anti
Semitic incidents over the past decade alone. And I just
I mean, we see it from people that we used
to really love and respect. What the hell is going on? Like,
what what's going on?
Speaker 2: So I do think that there is a grievance culture
that has arisen on the right. So I think that
the grievance culture, that the kind of woke culture that
arose on the left was this idea that America is
a white supremacist structure and that people who are suffering
under that structure are the victims of a shadowy system.
That shadowy system, you know, is being run by the
people who are disproportionately well educated and rich. And hey,
look's overrepresented among people who are well educated and rich.
It tends to there are a lot of Jews in
that group, and so it must be that the Jews
are manipulating the system. I think a lot of the
anti Semitism of the left comes from there. I think
you're seeing a sort of mirror image of that on
the right, where people who start with a premise, which
is that much public policy was directed against particularly white
Christian males, which is true during the Obama administration and
the Biden administration, they then take that and they say, Okay, well,
we are also a sort of discrete, insular group that
is being attacked. The system won't allow us to succeed.
And the solution for that isn't meritocracy. The solution is
to say that America is in and of itself bad,
the systems are out to get us, and who are
the beneficiaries of the system, And you end up in
almost exactly the same place.
Speaker 4: And so I think there are some of that.
Speaker 2: I also think that there are influencers who have basically
decided that there's a lot of clickability to this particular issue,
to Jews, to Israel on X in particular, and a
lot of the floodgates have been open. It's a great
way to go viral like a really great way to
go viral. And there's no question that there are bot
farms that are exacerbating all of that.
Speaker 4: But it's not all fake. But I do that it
can be.
Speaker 2: It can move from the virtual world to the real
world fairly quickly. I also think that one of the
things that's happened is that because the Right for so
long was told you can't say X. The Overton window
is really really small, that basically the Right responded by
blowing up the Overton window entirely and said, Okay, well,
now everything is on the table, and so if everything
is on the table, then whatever is the most transgressive
thing must be the most true thing. So that the
Right kind of combined a couple of propositions. One was
that if you're taking flat, it's because you're over the target,
which used to be more true and is not necessarily
true now. And so if I say something and I
get a lot of blowback, it must be because what
I'm saying is super true. And so if I say
something that actually is kind of disgusting and a lot
of people are criticizing me for it, well it's not
because what I'm saying is disgusting. It's because what I'm
saying is actually true. And also the right then over
read sort of what cancel culture is into. You're not
allowed to even condemn bad speech, and anybody who condemns
things that are bad is in fact a sensor. So
if you combine the idea that criticizing Nazis is a
form of censorship, and also that the more flack you take,
the more over the target you are, you end up with,
Nazis might be the good guys, right, because Nazis take
a lot of flak. And also if you criticize a Nazi,
this makes you a sensor, right, And so there is
a sort of thrill of transgression in a lot of that,
and anybody who criticizes that is then seen as sort
of a school marm who's not allowing you to quote
unquote ask the questions. Now, as I've said before, you
can ask whatever question you want, but honest people ask
questions to elicit answers. They don't ask questions in order
to avoid answers or deposit specious theories about how you
can't control your own life. And there's a shadowy force
that's behind the scenes manipulating all events.
Speaker 1: It's got to be really really, I mean personally disappointing
to you, I would think, because you know, we watch
sort of this new woke right from a distance, where
these are people we've long admired, but these are people
that were your friends, and so how do you reconcile
their huge transformations because they have transformed? I mean, there
are people we deeply respected who we don't even recognize anymore.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's certainly disappointing, and I don't think that
it's happened over the course the last couple of years.
There are people with whom I was friends ten years
ago who were doing some of this sort of stuff.
But you know, again, I think that all you can
do is hold to your values and then just recognize
that that some people have strayed from what you at
least thought their values were, or maybe you got them
wrong all along. It's very difficult to tell. But obviously
the ground is moving, particularly online space. That the thing
I keep reminding myself and that I remind all my
listeners is that if you actually go out and touch grass,
it's significantly less prevalent when you actually speak to normal
human beings than it is in the online world, that
the problem is that when I talk about the bleedover,
that is particularly among young men who spend a lot
of time online. So like fifteen year old boys who
spend a lot of time online can get drawn into
this stuff, and then it bleeds over into your actual
real life and you start finding common cause with people
who are also saying the rebellious transgressive thing, and you know,
then it becomes like a real problem. But I think
that overall, and this is what the polls show, that
the American people are overwhelmingly not anti Semitic, they're quite
philo Semitic. That the American people are overwhelmingly pro Israel.
That the right wing, particularly Republicans, are overwhelmingly pro Israel.
We kept being told by the media and by the
online influencer crowd that the same brigade you're talking about,
and when President Trump bombed the Iranian nuclear facilities, this
is going to rip apart the conservative movement. It was
going to lead to a complete collapse in in Trump's
support base. And it turns out that Republicans actually supported
the strike on the nuclear facilities like ninety three to four,
And so that's a very very small minority of Republicans
who are very, very loud in the online space, and
then the media also have an interest in sort of
ginning up that conflict as a way of attacking President Trump.
Speaker 3: And is a general yeah, I do think there are
a lot of complacent and then also a lot of
dumb people out there, like a lot of Like I
live in Texas, and I think there are people that
just think, Okay, this stuff can't happen here. And then
I look at Houston, I look at Dallas. I look
at a lot of you know, people that are coming
into communities like that that are you know, demanding that
you can't sell certain things in convenience stores.
Speaker 5: And you're just like, wait, this is Texas. What's going on?
You know?
Speaker 3: And then I look at New York and I see
what's happening with mom Donnie, and I'm like, okay, how
is this even happening? Like how are they going to
possibly elect you know, this Muslim guy that is a commie?
Speaker 2: Like what I mean again, I think the most most
people just don't pay close attention to politics, right, you
guys spend a lot of time paying attention to politics.
Speaker 4: I obviously do. The vast majority of the American people
do not.
Speaker 2: They spend about five seconds on these issues, and particularly
issues that are far away. So if you're talking about
Middle Eastern politics, I think most the vast majority of
Americans could not find this place on a map. If
you gave them a globe and you said to like,
point to the general region where this stuff is happening,
they couldn't do it. And yet they have very strong
opinions on the left and on some parts of the
right about this stuff, knowing none of the history, knowing
very little about it, just having kind of a general
gestalt feel for it. And this is where the influencer
brigade really makes a big difference, because you know, people
tend to queue to the people who they've trusted in
the past.
Speaker 4: And so if you have people who.
Speaker 2: Have built a big following by saying traditionally conservative things
basically over the course of the last ten twenty years,
and then suddenly they flip, then you can't be totally
shocked when their audience that's trusted them for ten or
twenty years continues to kind of follow them down that road.
And that's why I think what's happening was with some
of these folks is both dishonest and moral, because I
think that many of them know better than what they're saying.
But they again seem to be garnering high levels of
reality and also a sort of bizarre left wing respect,
a strange respect for some of this stuff.
Speaker 5: It's like Dick Cheney.
Speaker 3: It's like the left level Dick Cheney all this exactly
do you.
Speaker 1: Think that there's any I mean, if you were, say,
working pr for Israel right now, how would you advise
them to shift or adapt their messaging? Because isn't that
part of the problem that they're not there's not enough
of the right narrative to counteract the huge level of
in fluence right now that the Tucker and Candace and
others have. What would you tell them to do differently
if anything?
Speaker 2: So obviously not my job, and despite Tucker and Candace's
accusations to the contrary, that's actually not what I do.
Speaker 4: For a living.
Speaker 2: But you know, the sort of what I've said before
is that the problem for the Israelis, and obviously have
family and friends who are Israeli, and I do know
a lot of people in the government over there, is
that they fundamentally do not understand how politics works in
the United States of America. And so contrary to the
sort of popular opinion that Israel is sort of ignoring
what Americans are thinking, they're completely misapprehunting what Americans are thinking.
So they think, if we move slowly, and if we
are more meticulous, and if we warn people, and if
we get lots of humanitarian aid in there, then the
American people are more likely to think that we're doing
the right thing and give us more time. And if
we go slow but steady and more meticulous, then we'll
get more leeway for doing all those things. And what
they don't understand is that that's how Americans operate. We
do not operate this way. The reality is that, well
America like to talk a good game about human rights
being our number one priority, the reality is the longer
things last, the worse they are for any conflict. And
so Americans will tire of the Ukraine conflict, We'll tire
of the Afghanistan conflict, We'll tire of rock. We do
not have the attention span that it actually kind of
requires to win long term wars or to let our
allies win long term wars. And so the best thing
that Israel could have done early on, and this I
have said publicly many times, would be moved faster actually,
and in the speed actually makes an enormous difference. The
fact the war has been going on for two years.
That's an enormous amount of material for people to be
able to pick and choose.
Speaker 4: You know, things that are bad that happen in any war.
Speaker 2: Right there's an accidental bombing of a church and suddenly
we get several months of the LAE that Israel is
targeting Christians in Gaza, which is just an overt lie.
But you know, the longer you're in the middle of
the war, there are going to be bad things that
happen because war is bad and ugly, and bad things
happen in wars. And so you know the thing that
I think the Israelis are constantly trying to say, you know,
what if we post it this way, what if we
message it. I don't think it's a messaging issue. I
think it's a time issue. And so I think the
biggest mistake the Israel government has made, and this is
on the Prime Minister and his government over there, is
they should have moved much faster.
Speaker 4: They should have moved more aggressively.
Speaker 2: Actually, this war should have been wrapped up a year
ago in my opinion.
Speaker 1: So this attack today on Doha, I'm assuming that you
think that this is long overdue.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, I mean I think first of all, the
idea that the Katar was ever an honest broker is ridiculous.
I mean, I know the players, and that's insane. Katar
has acted as an adjunct of Hamas for years, I
mean so much so that they almost went to war
with Saudi Arabia over their support for the Muslim Brotherhood
back in twenty seventeen, and they founded literally billions of
dollars to the leaders of Hamas. And I've talked with
people in the Qatari government early on in the war,
and I was actually asked by somebody, well, what should
we do to end the war? And I said, take
all of the Kamas leaders into exiles and exile and
tell them to free the hostages. And they said, we
don't want to do that, and I said, well why not.
You already have all the Kamas leaders in Katar, Like,
why not just add a few more And they said, well,
we really don't want to know. The bottom line is
that the Kutsar really likes to play both sides an
awful lot, and the President said, there's an offer on
the table. The offer is taken, or leave it. It's
the last offer. This is your final warning. Hamas turned
it down, and then they pretended they didn't turn it down,
but they didn't turn it down. And then they proceeded
to endorse a massive terrorist attack in Jerusalem yesterday, and
then Israel decided that they were going to not wait
anymore and blow up the leaders of Hamas in Katsar,
basically saying, listen, it's gloves off completely.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: You can either surrender the hostages, go into exile, give
up your weapons and move into whatever the next stage
of rebuilding Gaza is, or you will be dead. And
there weren't a lot of other options on the table
for the Israelis. What were they supposed to do just
continue to allow the Kamas leadership to live at five
star hotels in Katar, well continuing to order terrorist attacks
just because they happen to be in Katar, which again
is a client state of It's our places both sides right.
They host an American air base, for sure, but they
also are in very very close cahoots with the Iranians,
and so I will also say that, just as a
matter of geopolitics, the idea that Israel would have had
the capacity to perform this strike without either advanced American
permission and knowledge or even the Kataris knowing kind of
what was happening beggars the imagination a little bit. I
would I would not be completely shocked if if the
Kataris were aware, at least.
Speaker 4: In the moments leading up to this, that this is
the thing that was about to happen.
Speaker 3: I just I kind of believe that there are people
that look at all of this and are like, oh, yeah,
Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Hamas is just political organization.
Like it just blows myth. They have hostages, you know
what I mean.
Speaker 2: Like they literally released a video yesterday of how you
should shoot up a bus, right literally yesterday. This is
why I don't actually believe that many of the people
who are articulating this stuff. I think many of them
are being dishonest about what they actually believe. Right, And
it's a tactic because it's too inconsistent. It's not though
there's a through line here, except for the through line
just being kind of a rote anti American anti Western
isolationism that suggests that whatever America does abroad is bad,
that everything that's bad that happens in terms of terrorism
is blowback against us. That if we respond to terrorism,
or if any of our allies like Israel, respond to terrorism,
that is itself terrorism, and that's indistinguishable in terms of
its foreign policy from Howard's Inn or Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 4: Indistinguishable.
Speaker 5: Freaking nuts is what it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: By the way, speaking of Bernie Sanders, there's a line
from your book that is going to go down as
one of my favorite lines of all time. When you
called him and I quote this is why you need
to read the book everybody. It calls Bernie Sanders a
putrescant Marxist pimple on the posterior of the body politic.
Speaker 5: It was just so perfect.
Speaker 1: And then you also talked about how Tucker and Bernie,
which are not people that you normally associate together, how
they agree about their hatred almost for free markets, even
though it's indifferent ways. And so that to me reminded
me of like this whole horseshoe effect that you have
with the woke left and the woke right.
Speaker 5: Talk about that a little bit more.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it's quite bizarre.
Speaker 2: But but Tucker has not been particularly free market oriented
for quite a while. In fact, he's made, you know,
very long monologues about how markets are merely a tool
of the people, and the people should be able to
manipulate markets to their own benefit. And obviously he's ripped
on venture capital for being sort of, in his view,
sort of a vulture on the people. And he has endorsed,
you know, Elizabeth Warren's economic plans in the past. I mean,
he said all this publicly, These are all these are
all quotations that you can look up from Tucker. But
then he'll say, but I'm not in favor of socialism. Okay,
that's fine. I would all I care about is that
your economic proposals very often mirror the economic proposals of again,
Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. I don't care what you
call it or what label you're going to use for
that that happens to be the positions that are being held.
And again, I think that that is rooted in this
sort of grievance about the American system. There's an idea
that that Tucker has in retailing for quite a while
that America has basically gone wrong. The entire West has
gone wrong since World War Two. And he's made this clear.
I mean, this is not me assuming on his part.
He said this in an interview with Piers Morgan about
Great Britain. He's also said it with regard to the
United States. He said, basically, the use of the atomic
bomb rob the United States of our soul. He has
been speculating about, you know, whether he's had guests on
recently to speculator about whether we took the right side
of World War Two. All of this is part of
a sort of broader take on how America went wrong,
and that take on how America went wrong is just wrong.
Speaker 4: America didn't go wrong.
Speaker 2: That doesn't mean that America hasn't made a mistakes so
that I agree with every policy that's been pursued since
nineteen forty five. Of course, he'd be an idiot to believe,
you know, everything that has happened in the United States
since has been wonderful. I'm probably America's greatest critic of
much of what happened during the nineteen sixties, during the
Sexual Revolution and the massive upsurgeon in government involvement but
you know, the sort of baseline idea that America has
gone wild awry, that is, that is, in fact a
position that's been held by on the one side, sort
of the what's been termed the wolk right. I usually
you say horseshoe right, because I don't want to attribute
motive as much as positional similarity, and the and the
wolk left right, though the wolk left will will claim
that America was founded in sin at the sixteen, that
we were found in sixty nineteen on slavery, that the
foundational ideas of America are just wrong. And usually the
horseshoe right tends to label the place where America went
wrong as World War two seems to be the common
denominator lately.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, so she'll probably get mad at me. But
I have to ask you this question because we're consummate professionals.
You're a husband and a father of four, right, a
father of four, and I assume that you have vast
free time. And you know, because you've written what like
sixteen books. Now it's sixteen bucks, right, Am I wrong
about that?
Speaker 2: I think it's twelve under my own name. And then
I used to go right for a living. So it's
probably if if you titled them, it's probably more like
twenty five.
Speaker 3: She's he's an underachiever. Been like seriously, okay, So when
you do have your best free time, what are some
of the hobbies of Ben Shapiro?
Speaker 2: What do you do in your free time? I mean,
the truth is that most of my time is taken
up by my kids. I've really struck, Yes, I've really
structured my day so that my kids don't know I
have a job. So basically I get up in the
morning with them, and then I take care of them
until they leave for school, and then I leave about
the same time to go to work. I'm at work
and you're doing meetings and getting everything and including a workout.
I hope before they get home their school day. Now
that the oldest ones in middle school, so their school
day ends usually four four thirty is when they get home.
By that point, I try to get as much as
I can done, and then I'm with them, you know,
no phone. I hope between like four thirty and seven
thirty when they go to bed, and then I start
working again.
Speaker 5: So fantastic.
Speaker 2: So like it is, so you know, in my hobbies
are my kids basically, you know, the time that I
have to myself. Obviously, I'm you know, I watch a
lot of movies. I watch a lot of TV because
I'm reviewing a lot of those things. Writing kind of
is one of my hobbies. Actually, it's the thing I
enjoyed doing the most in terms of sort of monetary return.
It is the least lucrative of the things that that
I do. Not say that I don't make money off
my writing. I do, but but obviously the podcast and
the company are much larger enterprises. But I do. I
do love writing. I think that that writing helps me
organize my thoughts. It puts me in a creative headspace.
It kind of allows flow to happen, and so that's
that's really nice. And then that's the side obviously for
my biggest hobby, which is the five minutes a day
I get to actually hang out with my wife and create.
Speaker 5: More hip hop.
Speaker 1: I'm assuming you've got another rap song in the works.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know. I think I think my rap
career was like it was.
Speaker 2: It was like a shining star that that soared across
the landscape for a brief moment in time, and we
were all a little privileged to be there, but I
think that that moment is are going to love that
bad sadly they do. And yeah, my niece at Herbot
Mitzvah made me get up and do a revised lyrical
version of that.
Speaker 5: My gosh, I love it. Is fantastic. Well, I love it. Pleasure.
Speaker 1: Know you've got a heartbreak. We want to be respect
of your time, but just know that we have like
seven billion more questions for you and would love to
come back. In the meantime, everybody needs to pick up
a copy of Lions and Scavengers.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Appreciate it.