Reclaiming the Country for Good

“The marchers march. Their numbers increase. And the scavengers cast their avaricious, ravenous eyes across the landscape and see no one to oppose them. The Lions are gone. And without the spirit of the Lions, our civilization collapses.” – Lions and Scavengers

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who build and those who tear down.  Builders innovate and create new technologies and products that make our lives easier.  Destroyers, driven by resentment, seek to settle the score by tearing the system down rather than building it up.  When the builders win, society flourishes; when the destroyers win, we all suffer. 

In Ben Shapiro’s 2025 book, “Lions and Scavengers”, Shapiro separates winners and losers by the fruits of their labor or the famine of their idleness.  While the builder acts with courage and determination, at the heart of the destroyers is envy.  The latter might have the edge in modern society, but the tide may be changing for the better.  This is a tale of a modern duel, where a growing division in ideology clearly contrasts the two political movements. 

The Lions, like our Founders, are the picture of resourcefulness.   They not only innovate and build, but they also solve problems, take risks, and aren’t afraid of failure.  When they aren’t creating, they are defending and protecting those who can't.  They are the ones who strengthen the bonds of community by adhering to the rule of law, upholding traditional values, and never making excuses for their lives.   

The Scavengers, on the other hand, are the looters and the parasites.  They opportunistically take what someone else has made, by stealing off the success of others, and have no qualms about using violence for their own ends.  They are governed by resentment while dependent on others for sustenance.  They support a crony form of capitalism that benefits the well-connected, but not necessarily the industrious.  They have actively turned a system of faux empathy into the virtue of social justice.  They rely heavily on victimhood to gain control of others, believing all disparities in life are discrimination.  They march, protest, seeking vengeance against the successful. 

While the lions build their system on merit, the scavengers try to equalize by lowering standards under a system of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  The lions need only a free system of property rights and a set of rules to play the game.   Scavengers, on the other hand, not only divide others by race, class, and gender, but also prefer a system of social engineering to create a more equitable outcome, taking from those who earn and giving to those who won't.  Through manipulation and opportunism, they will use any means necessary to achieve power, including deceit and violence. 

Lions operate under equality of rights, not talents, believing that each individual must cultivate their own gifts.  Inequality, then, is largely due to differences in skills, choices, and work ethics under a fair system.  Since scavengers believe in equality of outcomes, those who have must share equally with those who don’t, even if benefits are unearned. 

To reclaim the Lions is to return to decency, with a sense of conscience and a protection of social norms.  It is a defense of Western Civilization, featuring entrepreneurship and capitalism, over the duplicity, deviousness, and hypocrisy of the scavengers.  The state of our time is a clash between the productive against the destructive.