Read The Entire First Chapter Of Ben Shapiro’s Upcoming Book: ‘Lions And Scavengers’

Read The Entire First Chapter Of Ben Shapiro's Upcoming Book: 'Lions And Scavengers'

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Right now, the West is in its ascendancy, not in its decline.
Over the weekend, President Trump championed a peace deal that is now cut between Congo and Rwanda, brokered by the White House to stop the bloodshed in Congo, where a militia allegedly backed by Rwanda occupies huge areas of land.
President Trump explained that he is brokering peace throughout the world, saying, “This is a tremendous breakthrough. In a few short months, we&#8217;ve now achieved peace between India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, and the DRC and Rwanda. And a couple of others also, Serbia was getting ready to go to war with a group I won&#8217;t even mention because it didn&#8217;t happen. We were able to stop it.”
He&#8217;s right about that. He also continues to maintain his strength in the face of an Iran that has pledged further nuclear development. He said to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, listen, you keep lying and saying that you won? You didn&#8217;t. You got your ass kicked.
“I&#8217;m putting out a little statement,” <a href="https://x.com/breeadail/status/1938650917127233987">he stated</a>. “I&#8217;m going to respond to the Ayatollah’s statement yesterday that ‘We won the war.’ Won the war? And I said, ‘Look, you&#8217;re a man of great faith, a man who&#8217;s highly respected in his country. You have to tell the truth, you got beat to hell … It would be great if they (Iran) didn&#8217;t have that hate. But the last thing they&#8217;re thinking about is nuclear weapons right now.”
“Would you consider bombing the country again?” <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgenq599kwo">he was asked</a>. “Sure. Without question. Absolutely. That would be unbelievable,” he answered. “But, you know, our incredible fliers; I call them the shots. These guys are unbelievable. Think. From 52,000 feet, they hit the equivalent of a refrigerator door. They actually hit it right in the center, so it&#8217;s much smaller than that.”
But at a time when the West should be resurgent and on the upswing, instead you have America&#8217;s major cities: New York City, L.A., and Chicago, being run by full-scale left-wing nutcases who are deeply ensconced with hatred for their own civilization. The same thing has happened in London in the UK. It&#8217;s been happening in France as well.
It&#8217;s a serious threat to the West. And the biggest threat to the West is not external at this point.
The biggest threat to the West is internal: the Red-Green Alliance, the communists/socialists, and the Hamasniks coming together in hatred of their own civilization.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2228?elementPosition=5&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
All of this ties into July 4. It&#8217;s going to be great. I hope you&#8217;re going to have a wonderful Independence Day, celebrating the foundation of the greatest country in the history of the world, but we should talk about a myth that has been purveyed about July 4 and about the United States in general.
This, of course, is the 1619 myth that “America was founded on slavery and that the Revolutionary War was fought for the preservation of slavery.”
There are many lies that are told about our civilization, particularly about the foundation of our civilization, in order to somehow claim that our civilization should be torn down.
If you were to poll the morons of Glastonbury in the UK who chanted “Death to the IDF” and mocked white Britons by chanting “I hear you want your country back. Well, shut the f*** up,” or the Democratic primary voters for Zohran Mamdani in New York about what they think of the United States, they would surely agree with the myth that America was founded on slavery.
It&#8217;s not true.
A huge number of the Founders overtly opposed slavery in principle. Even those who held slaves themselves did not provide significant defenses of slavery. That included George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Washington said, “There&#8217;s not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for its abolition.” Thomas Jefferson&#8217;s original draft of the Declaration of Independence called the slave trade an “execrable commerce” and “an affront against human nature itself.” John Jay said, “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished, to contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others involves an inconsistency not to be excused.” Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton spoke against slavery as well.
Why was slavery included in the Constitution of the United States originally? Because there were still slave-holding states in the United States. Many of the northern states were not slave holding states, but the southern states were. And the question was, could you get together a coalition to defeat the British, or could you not?
This was not a fight on behalf of promoting slavery. Slavery remained legal in the British Empire until 1833. So this was not a fight in which one side was pro-slavery and one side was anti-slavery. Far from it. The leaders in America ideologically were not in favor of slavery. There was a practical on-the-ground consideration, which was that many of the southern states were reliant on slave labor. 
Again, that&#8217;s an evil not to be excused, but to claim that the Revolutionary War was about slavery is to be ignorant of history. In fact, as soon as the Revolution began, there were eight states that immediately came out and started abolishing slavery: Vermont, 1777. Pennsylvania, 1780. Massachusetts and New Hampshire, 1783. Rhode Island and Connecticut, 1784. New York, 1799. New Jersey 1804.
<h3><a href="https://get.dailywire.com/freedom/">JULY 4 SALE: Get Six Months Of DW+ Free</a></h3>
As the Claremont Institute&#8217;s Arthur Milikh once <a href="https://www.heritage.org/american-history/commentary/1776-not-1619">pointed out</a>:
<blockquote>The Founders laid the constitutional ground for abolishing slavery. One example is <a href="https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/60/slave-trade">Article I, Section 9, Clause 1</a>, which states that Congress could prohibit importation of slaves starting in 1808. On the first day that this clause became operative, Congress passed, and President Thomas Jefferson signed, this prohibition into law. Congress took additional steps to restrict slavery. It passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territories. Seven years later, Congress made it illegal to build ships for the purpose of the slave trade.</blockquote>
It&#8217;s important to debunk some of these myths, because those myths become the basis for claiming that the West is uniquely evil. Slavery has indeed been an evil institution, but it has also been virtually universal. 
The question isn&#8217;t whether the Founding Fathers were hypocrites about slavery. Some were; some weren&#8217;t. The question truly is: Why did it take the West to end slavery?
In fact, slavery is still practiced in many of the areas that are favorites of the Glastonbury crowd. Many of the places that they are claiming are “havens of freedom,” that require “less of a heavy Western hand,” are places that are still practicing slavery.
A huge part of the Middle East still engages in slavery. Not Israel, but many of its opponents. That is the point.
July 4 spells a clarion call for human freedom, and it has been seen that way by right-minded people ever since.
This is why the very famous Frederick Douglass speech about what July 4 meant to the slave doesn&#8217;t say that July 4 is bad. It says that the problem with the 4th of July is that the principles that the Founding Fathers sought to instill had not yet been realized.
That is the right approach, a historically accurate and mature approach, instead of the leftist scumbag wing that simply suggests the West is uniquely evil when in reality the West is uniquely good.

President Trump Speaks On Recent Supreme Court Rulings At The White House

The Resurgent West: Why Today’s Triumphs Outweigh Our Critics

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Small Boat Migrant Crossings Are At Record Levels For Early Part Of 2024

Mass Immigration Turned Europe Unlivable. America Is Next.

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President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened that Spain would have to &#8220;pay twice as much&#8221; in a future trade deal after the NATO member refused to commit to the alliance&#8217;s new target of spending 5% of its gross domestic product on defense and security.
&#8220;You&#8217;re the only country that is not paying. I don&#8217;t know what the problem is,&#8221; Trump said at the NATO summit in The Hague when questioned about Spain&#8217;s refusal to go along.
&#8220;You know what we’re gonna do? We&#8217;re negotiating with Spain on a trade deal. We&#8217;re going to make them pay twice as much. And I&#8217;m actually serious about that,&#8221; the president added.
NATO members <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-triumphs-nato-bows-to-u-s-pressure-with-5-defense-pledge?topStoryPosition=undefined&amp;author=Nathan+Gay&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=2&amp;row=1&amp;rowHeadline=Top+Stories&amp;rowType=Top+Stories&amp;title=Trump+Triumphs%3A+NATO+Bows+To+U.S.+Pressure+With+5%25+Defense+Pledge">agreed</a> to increase defense spending from the current 2% level to 5% of their country’s gross domestic product by 2035. Spain was the only member that rejected this target, arguing that it would strain the country’s extensive welfare state.
“We fully respect the legitimate desire of other countries to increase their defense investment, but we are not going to do it,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-heads-to-nato-summit-demanding-freeloading-allies-pay-their-fair-share?author=Nathan+Gay&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Trump+Heads+To+NATO+Summit+Demanding+%E2%80%98Freeloading%E2%80%99+Allies+Pay+Their+Fair+Share">said</a> before the summit.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
President Trump rips into Spain for refusing to increase NATO spending.
&quot;I think Spain&#39;s terrible what they&#39;ve done, they are the only Country that won&#39;t pay 5%&quot; <a href="https://t.co/WD5JGnc2WU">pic.twitter.com/WD5JGnc2WU</a>
&mdash; Media Research Center (@theMRC) <a href="https://twitter.com/theMRC/status/1937881474520223900?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 25, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;They want a little bit of a free ride, but they&#8217;ll have to pay it back to us on trade, because I’m not going to let that happen. It’s unfair,” Trump said.
As a part of the European Union, Spain <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-25/trump-threatens-to-double-tariffs-on-spain-over-nato-spending">negotiates</a> trade as part of the 27-member bloc, not individually, per Bloomberg. Still, Trump emphasized his intention to bypass the European Union&#8217;s regular trade negotiation protocols.
&#8220;I&#8217;m going to negotiate directly with Spain. I&#8217;m going to do it myself,&#8221; Trump insisted. &#8220;They&#8217;re going to pay, they&#8217;ll pay more money this way.&#8221;
The threat comes ahead of the Trump administration&#8217;s July 9 deadline for the European Union to agree to a trade deal. If no agreement is reached, tariffs on EU products imported into the United States are set to increase to 50%.
NATO members condemned Spain for rejecting the 5% target.
Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, Deputy Prime Minister of Poland, whose country allocates a higher percentage of its GDP for defense than any NATO member, blasted Spain’s lack of commitment.
“We believe that any deviation from this principle by any member country is a bad example,” he said.
“It’s incredibly unfair to the alliance,” another NATO official <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-nato-canada-defense-target-spending-gdp/">said</a> to POLITICO.
At the press conference on Wednesday, Trump said his outlook on NATO had changed. Previously critical of &#8220;freeloading&#8221; nations not paying their fair share in defense, he now believes the alliance is no longer a &#8220;rip-off&#8221; given the new 5% commitment. The increase is expected to significantly boost the alliance&#8217;s collective defense capabilities at a time of heightened global tensions, as the United States has historically shouldered more than two-thirds of NATO&#8217;s collective defense spending.

NATO Summit In The Hague Final Day

Trump Says Spain Will ‘Pay Twice As Much’ On Trade After NATO Defiance

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NATO leaders on Wednesday backed increasing defense spending to 5% of their country&#8217;s gross domestic product by 2035, a major diplomatic victory for President Donald Trump, who has for years demanded “freeloading” allies pay their fair share for their own security.
According to Reuters, almost all NATO members <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/nato-leaders-set-back-trump-defence-spending-goal-hague-summit-2025-06-24/">backed</a> a statement committing to the target, excluding Spain and possibly Slovakia. An official signing is expected on Wednesday before the end of the conference.
The new defense spending goal more than doubles NATO&#8217;s current 2% target.
The spending commitment is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-heads-to-nato-summit-demanding-freeloading-allies-pay-their-fair-share?author=Nathan+Gay&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Trump+Heads+To+NATO+Summit+Demanding+%E2%80%98Freeloading%E2%80%99+Allies+Pay+Their+Fair+Share">divided</a> into two parts: 3.5% for traditional military spending, such as air defense and recruitment, while the remaining 1.5% can include infrastructure, like roads and bridges that troops could use.
&#8220;There is absolute conviction with my colleagues at the table that, given this threat from the Russians, given the international security situation, there is no alternative,&#8221; NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told reporters.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb, whose country borders Russia, described the shift as &#8220;the birth of a new NATO, which means a more balanced NATO and a NATO which has more European responsibility.&#8221;
Spain broke ranks by declaring it doesn&#8217;t need to meet the goal, claiming it can fulfill its commitments by spending much less, a sentiment that angered many at the conference, including Rutte.
“We fully respect the legitimate desire of other countries to increase their defense investment, but we are not going to do it,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said. In 2024, Spain’s defense expenditure as a share of GDP stood at 1.28%, the lowest of any NATO member.
Slovakia appears poised to follow Spain in shunning the spending increase. Slovakia&#8217;s Prime Minister Robert Fico said Tuesday that his country “has other priorities in the coming years than armament.” 
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
S T A T E M E N T of the Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic Robert Fico 23 June 2025
The Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic points out that all international political, security, and legal mechanisms intended for decision-making and mandates on the use of military force in… <a href="https://t.co/GFvnGaiuXs">pic.twitter.com/GFvnGaiuXs</a>
&mdash; Robert Fico 🇸🇰 (@RobertFicoSVK) <a href="https://twitter.com/RobertFicoSVK/status/1937149180482326655?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 23, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, Deputy Prime Minister of Poland, whose country allocates a higher percentage of its GDP for defense than any NATO member, blasted Spain’s lack of commitment.
“We believe that any deviation from this principle by any member country is a bad example,” Kosiniak-Kamysz <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-nato-canada-defense-target-spending-gdp/">said</a> before flying to the summit.
“It’s incredibly unfair to the alliance,” another NATO official said to POLITICO.
Trump, who has criticized NATO members for inadequate defense spending since his first administration, is scheduled to meet separately with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky following the summit. Zelensky attended a pre-summit dinner Tuesday evening but was not invited to Wednesday&#8217;s main session.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization Summit Day Two

Trump Triumphs: NATO Bows To U.S. Pressure With 5% Defense Pledge

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President Donald Trump departed for the annual NATO summit at The Hague on Tuesday, hoping to claim another major foreign policy victory as most NATO allies have already agreed to his demand to boost defense spending after the president called out the European nations for &#8220;freeloading&#8221; and taking advantage of American military protection.
NATO countries, except Spain, agreed in preliminary talks to increase defense spending to 5% of their gross domestic product, a significant increase from the previous 2% target that many allies struggled to meet.
The spending commitment is <a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-iran-israel-nato-e34385f9b6e2ff5d0cf60f8aaea57a40">divided</a> into two parts: 3.5% for traditional military spending, such as air defense and recruitment, while the remaining 1.5% can include infrastructure like roads and bridges that troops could use.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has resisted the spending increase, arguing that it would strain the country&#8217;s extensive welfare state.
&#8220;We fully respect the legitimate desire of other countries to increase their defence investment, but we are not going to do it,&#8221; Sanchez said. In 2024, Spain’s defense expenditure as a share of GDP stood at a measly 1.28%, the <a href="https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2024/6/pdf/240617-def-exp-2024-en.pdf">lowest</a> of any NATO country.
However, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte struck an optimistic tone early Tuesday morning when President Trump <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114738606142462442">shared</a> a private message from him that read: &#8220;You are flying into another big success in The Hague this evening. It was not easy, but we&#8217;ve got them all signed onto 5 percent!&#8221;
&#8220;You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done,&#8221; Rutte said. &#8220;Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.&#8221;
Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/us/politics/nato-trump-preview.html">told</a> reporters he doesn&#8217;t believe the United States needs to reach the 5% target itself, given that the United States is far separated from many threats NATO faces and does not have a need to invest in wartime infrastructure to the same degree.
Rutte, a Dutch politician who has served as secretary general of NATO since October 2024, has expressed strong support from NATO for recent U.S. military actions against Iran, rejecting suggestions that American strikes violated international law.
&#8220;This is a consistent position of NATO: Iran should not have its hands on a nuclear weapon,&#8221; Rutte told reporters ahead of the summit. &#8220;I would not agree that this is against international law — what the U.S. did.&#8221;
Trump is expected to meet with various world leaders at the summit. He said he would &#8220;<a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-iran-israel-nato-e34385f9b6e2ff5d0cf60f8aaea57a40">probably</a>&#8221; see Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose country continues pushing for admission into the alliance.
Trump&#8217;s meetings &#8220;will focus on issues of shared concern and reaffirm the United States&#8217; strong ties with our allies and partners,&#8221; an administration official <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-heads-nato-summit-europe-agrees-heed-his-defense-spending-demands">told</a> Fox News.
The summit was initially set to focus on the alliance&#8217;s position in the Russia-Ukraine war, but the Trump-brokered Israel-Iran ceasefire is expected to be the main topic of discussion.

Trump Departs

Trump Heads To NATO Summit Demanding ‘Freeloading’ Allies Pay Their Fair Share

Trump Heads To NATO Summit Demanding 'Freeloading' Allies Pay Their Fair Share

Israel

This September, Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro will release “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Pg18nHlVX2neyh7VlgVdIKje9EBKlWHDPzfz2hz6y3Q3oyWp8Jv4YdfQyesgs3y-.a1CzqX5hmYc9zIJ3x9S3IyReflqRxvFeP5akr1dlPB8&amp;qid=1749148351&amp;sr=1-1">Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America (and Her Critics)</a>,” his first book in four years. Shapiro calls it, “My most important book, certainly my most passionate.”
In the wake of the horrific attacks on innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, Shapiro was left shocked, not only by the barbaric acts of the terrorist group Hamas, but by the strange, disturbing response he witnessed from those in the West.
“Something deeply wrong had happened in the West,” says Shapiro. 
The host of “The Ben Shapiro Show” then spent the next year traveling the globe, visiting Auschwitz alongside Elon Musk, flying to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to meet with newly elected president Javier Milei, and speaking at Oxford University in England. It was what he saw on the streets of London that affected him most.
“Just last weekend, London saw a massive river of protesters,” writes Shapiro. “Hundreds of thousands strong, marching with their banners unfurled: the banners of terrorist groups and of communists and of transgender activists, gathered together to revolt against the civilization that has given them their rights and their prosperity and their power.”
“Lions and Scavengers” will release on September 2, 2025, and is published by Threshold Editions, the conservative publishing imprint of Simon &amp; Schuster, an imprint originally launched by Mary Matalin, the conservative wife of Democratic talking head James Carville.
The Harvard Law graduate&#8217;s new book is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Pg18nHlVX2neyh7VlgVdIKje9EBKlWHDPzfz2hz6y3Q3oyWp8Jv4YdfQyesgs3y-.a1CzqX5hmYc9zIJ3x9S3IyReflqRxvFeP5akr1dlPB8&amp;qid=1749148351&amp;sr=1-1">now available for pre-order</a>. 
Not only that, customers can also order <a href="https://store.dailywire.com/products/lions-and-scavengers">AUTOGRAPHED copies of &#8220;Lions and Scavengers&#8221; now exclusively at the Daily Wire Shop</a>!
<div id="attachment_929955" style="width: 394px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Pg18nHlVX2neyh7VlgVdIKje9EBKlWHDPzfz2hz6y3Q3oyWp8Jv4YdfQyesgs3y-.a1CzqX5hmYc9zIJ3x9S3IyReflqRxvFeP5akr1dlPB8&amp;qid=1749148351&amp;sr=1-1"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-929955" class="wp-image-929955 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/MixCollage-05-Jun-2025-01-46-PM-2807-384x576.jpg" alt="Cover Art: Threshold Editions/Simon &amp; Schuster" width="384" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/MixCollage-05-Jun-2025-01-46-PM-2807-384x576.jpg 384w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/MixCollage-05-Jun-2025-01-46-PM-2807-200x300.jpg 200w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/MixCollage-05-Jun-2025-01-46-PM-2807-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/MixCollage-05-Jun-2025-01-46-PM-2807-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/MixCollage-05-Jun-2025-01-46-PM-2807-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/MixCollage-05-Jun-2025-01-46-PM-2807-1360x2040.jpg 1360w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/MixCollage-05-Jun-2025-01-46-PM-2807-scaled.jpg 1707w" sizes="(max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px" /></a>Cover Art: Threshold Editions/Simon &amp; Schuster</div>
As leftist leaders continue to obfuscate the threats to Western civilization, Shapiro’s book could not have arrived at a better time.
Some say the West is experiencing 1930s Germany all over again, and Shapiro confirms that a new form of “Scavenger” is on the prowl. “The Scavengers have gathered, here in the beating heart of what was once the center of Western civilization, to bay for more blood, and to scream at a West that insists that defense against terror is the first right of all men.”
Shapiro also insists this is larger than the persecution of the Jews. “This is not mere anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism 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.”
As a proven author with multiple #1 New York Times bestselling titles to his credit and as the host of one of the most widely listened-to podcasts, Shapiro has earned the authority to speak on this topic in this critical hour of world history.
While Shapiro’s “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lions-Scavengers-Story-America-Critics/dp/1668097885/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Pg18nHlVX2neyh7VlgVdIKje9EBKlWHDPzfz2hz6y3Q3oyWp8Jv4YdfQyesgs3y-.a1CzqX5hmYc9zIJ3x9S3IyReflqRxvFeP5akr1dlPB8&amp;qid=1749148351&amp;sr=1-1">Lions and Scavengers</a>” will illuminate the gathering storm facing the leaders of the West, his message, however, is not only for adults. &#8220;We need to be a civilization of Lions. We need to teach our children to be Lions, and to fight the Scavengers.&#8221;
Be prepared for the days ahead — reserve your copy of “Lions and Scavengers” now.

MixCollage-05-Jun-2025-01-21-PM-2847

Ben Shapiro Announces Release Of ‘Lions And Scavengers,’ His ‘Most Important Book’

Ben Shapiro Announces Release Of His 'Most Important Book'

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Backlash to liberal immigration policies fuels yet another shift to the Right in Europe. The fallout from the Colorado terror attack continues as more details emerge about the victims and the illegal immigrant suspect. And, the Trump administration pauses most operations at the Department of Labor’s highly controversial Job Corps. 
It’s Tuesday, June 3, and this is the news you need to know to start your day.
Morning Wire is available on video! You can watch today’s episode here:
 
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If you’d rather listen to your news, today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below:
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<h2>Europe Updates</h2>
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Topline: As Ukraine and Russia meet this week for peace talks, a growing list of European countries have elected right-wing leaders amid growing anti-immigration sentiment.
In the last 24 hours, we’ve learned more about <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-ukraine-pulled-off-its-massive-drone-strike-inside-russia">Ukraine’s surprise attack</a> on Russia last weekend. The Ukrainians managed to smuggle scores of attack drones across the border, where they were launched from wooden sheds mounted on the backs of large moving trucks. Because those drones originated within Russian territory, they were able to bypass Putin’s extensive air defense systems, targeting five separate air bases and knocking out dozens of the country’s most important planes. According to some estimates, Ukraine successfully destroyed up to one-third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. 
The strikes came at a crucial time, as the two countries began meeting Monday in Istanbul for formal peace talks. Those talks concluded after just 90 minutes, and little progress had been made. Moscow finally presented its terms for peace: Ukraine must recognize all of Russia’s territorial gains, shrink the size of its military, change its official language to Russian, agree to long-term neutrality, and forfeit the right to join NATO.
Meanwhile, Poland elected right-winger Karol Narwocki to the presidency. Many have compared the 42-year-old Narwocki, who had no prior political experience, to Donald Trump, who openly supported Narwocki’s campaign. Narwocki even adopted a similar campaign slogan: “Poland First.&#8221; Among other things, he campaigned on a promise to withdraw from the European Union’s Migration Pact, which he said flooded the continent with illegal immigrants. He’s staunchly pro-life, against same-sex marriage, and has called for a return of Christian values to public life in his country. 
Narwocki has signed a pledge to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO — and like Trump, he’s accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of not showing enough gratitude for the support his country has given Ukraine for its war effort. 
In the last year, conservatives have made historic gains across the continent — largely by promising to crack down on illegal immigration from Africa and the Middle East. In Austria, the country’s right-wing Freedom Party won control of parliament — the first time a hardline Conservative Party had won since World War II. Then, conservatives made historic gains in Germany, with the right-wing AfD party surging. And last week, Portugal’s right-wing Chega party scored a number of victories to become the country’s leading opposition party. 
In Paris this week, we’ve seen mass rioting following a big soccer victory – sparking conversations about law and order and immigration policies in France.
Some left-wing politicians have even adopted a more conservative tone. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, for example, has promised to “significantly” cut down on immigration over the next four years, restrict new visas for skilled labor, and penalize companies that hire foreign labor.
“The experiment is over,” Starmer <a href="https://x.com/addicted2newz/status/1929076924392903007">said</a>. “We will deliver what you’ve asked for time and again. And we will take back control of our borders.”
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<h2>Boulder Terror Suspect Charged With Multiple Felonies</h2>
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Topline: The man suspected of attacking a Colorado demonstration in support of Israeli hostages has been hit with multiple charges, including a federal hate crime.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman is being held in Boulder County Jail on a $10 million bond.  At the state level, he’s facing felony <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/colorado-hits-egyptian-anti-israel-terror-suspect-with-charges-including-murder">charges</a> for first-degree assault and “extreme indifference” to criminal use of an incendiary device – as well as crimes against the elderly. Federal prosecutors have charged Soliman with a hate crime. The special agent in charge at the FBI’s Denver office, Mark Michalek, said the bureau is investigating the attack as an act of terrorism.
None of the people injured in the attack has died. Soliman himself was treated for burn injuries before he was booked. Police say Soliman received those injuries using a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to attack demonstrators.
Soliman is an Egyptian national. He entered the United States in 2022 on a visa that then expired the next year. He was able to obtain a temporary work permit from the Biden administration, but that, too, expired in March this year. Trump said in a social media post on Monday that Soliman “came in through Biden’s ridiculous Open Border Policy, which has hurt our Country so badly.” The president went on to say: “This is yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland.”
In an interview with the FBI, Soliman said that he wanted to kill “Zionists.” Law enforcement also says he screamed “free Palestine” during his assault. The demonstration targeted in the attack was a weekly march in support of the hostages held by terrorists in Gaza. The FBI said that Soliman had planned this attack for at least a year and targeted what he called a “Zionist group.” Colorado Democratic Governor Jared Polis called it a “targeted attack on the Jewish community.”
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<h2>Department Of Labor &#8220;Pauses&#8221; Job Corps Program</h2>
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Topline: The Department of Labor last week said it was “pausing” most operations at the Job Corps, a $1.7 billion program that trains high school dropouts on residential campuses across the country.
Job Corps was spending an average of $80,000 a year per student, training them to go on to earn an average of $16,000 a year. That’s more than Harvard charges for tuition to essentially get them minimum wage. At one campus run by ODLE Management Group LLC, the cost was $764,000 per graduate.
The Job Corps operates about 130 campuses across the country, where troubled young adults are paid $1,200, plus living expenses, to take classes towards their GED or training in the trades. Most campuses are run by companies whose staff are paid bonuses based on how many people they recruit, and how many get a job afterwards. Reports found that contractors were faking job statistics to make it look like the training worked, and were looking the other way at criminal behavior on campus, because if they expelled students, they’d get less revenue.
“The Trump administration has terminated all contracts with companies,” Daily Wire Investigative Reporter Luke Rosiak told Morning Wire. “About one-fifth of campuses are operated by the Department of Agriculture, and those will remain open. So this is really targeted towards preventing contractors from abusing the taxpayer and using at-risk youth as a cash cow.”
Other forms of exploitation were also common. Discipline data from the Job Corps campuses show that there were 500 sex assaults and 5,000 violent assaults in the last three years. That includes a 16-year old transgender runaway who was ordered to live with a 23-year-old man who was later arrested for raping her. &#8220;One-third of students are expelled, one-third abscond, and one-third graduate,” Rosiak said. “To enroll, you’re required to be on welfare, a refugee, a high school dropout, illiterate, or a victim of sex trafficking.”
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Morning Brief: Ukraine’s Major Drone Op & Charges For Colorado’s Illegal Alien Terrorist

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illegal alien

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terrorist attack

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It is amazing to be here in Budapest. I want to talk today about the battle for the heart of Western civilization. But to do that, we have to start with a definition of what Western civilization actually is.
Western civilization, rooted in Man&#8217;s individual liberty and his collective duty; in his freedom of speech and in his duty to act virtuously; in his property rights and in his familial obligations; in the right to the equal application of the law; is unique. It is the wellspring of virtually all human prosperity and all human progress.
Western civilization did not come from nowhere. It came from Biblical wisdom; the wisdom of thousands of years of Judeo-Christian tradition. It came from the Bible&#8217;s admonition that we ought to seek truth through the light of reason. When we cut ourselves off from the sources of our own civilization, our civilization decays.
And make no mistake, our civilization is now in the midst of decay.
We can see that decay in the anarchic marchers in the streets, chanting on behalf of radical Islamic terror groups by the hundreds of thousands. 
We can see it in the push by intellectual elitists for a bizarre alternative morality that suggests the fundamental, free-flowing nature of sexual identity, where boys can be girls and behavior ought to be separated utterly from the realm of morality. 
We can see it in the push for an ever growing domination of a powerful governmental infrastructure, crowding out familial bonds, crowding out church. in favor of a faceless state that offers money rather than virtue.
We can see it in that crusade against churches that refuse to jettison their values in favor of moral relativism and flying rainbow flags.
What are these forces that have mobilized against our civilization?
The key force is the force of Western post-modern leftism. Sure, we can look at the radical Islamists who have invaded Europe, who support terrorism, who use Western governments to impose effective fatwas against Westerners who speak out against them, people who target Jews and Christians, who openly chant for the downfall of the civilization that they leech upon.
But the question really isn&#8217;t radical Islamists. They, after all, are doing just what they have always done: invading and conquering.
The question is why the West allowed them in.
And the answer is that the West, thanks to that post-modern Left, bears a peculiar and self-defeating blood-guilt. A guilt that says that because the West is too successful, it owes it to the rest of the world to destroy itself.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/battling-for-the-heart-of-western-civilization-cpac-hungary-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Perhaps the most colorful champion of this philosophy was the Marxist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1961, a Francophone rebel named Frantz Fanon wrote a shockingly violent book titled “The Wretched of the Earth,” in which he posited that colonized peoples had a moral duty to kill their colonizers; that they ought to unleash, in his words, “red hot cannonballs” and “bloody knives.”
Frantz Fanon expressed that the colonized man was right to want to rape the wife of his colonizer, to murder him, to take what he had, and Sartre, a Western leftist, agreed. The West, Sartre said, was an inherent colonizer. Its very success in the world, whether through war or through markets, was a sign of its uniquely rapacious and exploitative nature.
Thus, Sartre argued, Europeans had to die at the hands of their victims. He said, “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor, and the man he oppresses at the same time. Then there remains a dead man and a free man.”
In other words, Sartre advocated civilizational suicide, and the West largely complied.
But why did the West comply? Now, part of the answer lies in the West’s pathological and religiously based adherence to the reality of sin and the necessity of repentance. Our culture, Western culture, is a guilt culture, a culture that focuses on the reality of absolute morality and says that when we fail, we are guilty. This means that we feel bad when we sin.
That&#8217;s actually one of our virtues.
<div id="attachment_927555" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/battling-for-the-heart-of-western-civilization-cpac-hungary-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-927555" class="size-large wp-image-927555" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-1024x576.jpg" alt="Screenshot: DailyWire/CPAC Hungary" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-300x169.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-768x432.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/MixCollage-30-May-2025-05-46-PM-9133-2048x1152.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>Screenshot: DailyWire/CPAC Hungary</div>
But there are many other cultures, shame cultures like, say, the Islamic cultures or the pre-World War II culture of Imperial Japan, or the modern Left, that focuses not on any absolute standard of morality or conscience, but on the evil of being humiliated.
For these folks, admitting fault is the weakness. Because we in the West reflexively look to our own sins before those of others, we fall prey to civilizational suicidal impulses.
Our enemies don&#8217;t. They&#8217;re happy to blame us for their problems and unfortunately, we&#8217;re all too happy to blame ourselves. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes, “The duty to repent forbids the Western Bloc, which is eternally guilty, to judge or combat other systems, other states, other religions. Our past crimes command us to keep our mouths closed. Our only right is to remain silent.”
But why should we feel uniquely guilty? The West seems to bear a unique amount of guilt because we have come to believe a giant lie, a great giant lie about ourselves.
And that lie is that we, the West, are uniquely evil.
We hear this lie all the time. Just a couple of days ago, for example, King Charles visited Canada, a country with a parliament, only because it was once a dominion of the British Crown, and then he read a land acknowledgment to the Algonquin Indians as though the British Empire ought to repent its establishment of the country of Canada.
The very concept is ridiculous. Watching King Charles sit there in all of his royal regalia, lamenting his own empire, is insane. And yet this kind of nonsense is imitated at nearly every college event across the West.
But that&#8217;s the lie: that the West is uniquely evil, and that lie gained an enormous amount of credibility due to the horrors of the 20th century.
We were told often by Marxists like Sartre, that imperialism was a uniquely Western phenomenon, despite the fact that human beings have conquered other people for as long as human beings have existed.
We were told that the Nazis and their allies were natural outgrowths of Western civilization, rather than perversions of it.
We were told that if we abandoned Biblical values in favor of a namby-pamby secularism, we could avoid all the terrible atrocities of the past, even though it was the pagan dogmas of the Nazis and the Soviets, their secular dogmas, not their Biblical adherence that led to their assault on humanity.
We were told that if we mitigated our cultural honor, if we discarded it, we could then expunge our sins, even though it was craven cowardice in the face of transnational Left-wing movements like Nazism and Communism that led to their domination of the European continent and proud, resurgent patriotism that stopped it.
We were told that if we abandoned our borders, we could alleviate our guilt, even though obviously the Nazis and the Soviets had no respect for borders and sought to obliterate them themselves. It was not Western civilization or Biblical values, rule of law, free speech, and private property rights that led to the tragedies and horrors of the 20th century.
It was the rejection of the West&#8217;s core values that led to those horrors.
But too many in the West believed the lie that the horrors were the result of Western civilization rather than a perversion of it. And in believing that lie, we surrendered our own civilization to people who would destroy it. We turned over our nations to consortiums of international elitists who sought to rule us from above and from without. We opened our nations to groups that sought to destroy our history and our unity.
Now it is time to reverse that process. We have to, in all humility, recognize that Western civilization, like all civilizations, has, of course, committed sordid wrongs and egregious evils.
But the truth — the real truth, something we have known for a very long time, since the Garden of Eden — is that all human beings have a capacity for evil. Human evil is a universal truth.
But the glories of Western civilization are not universal. They come from a particular philosophy, a particular history, a particular culture.
Western civilization isn&#8217;t uniquely evil. Western civilization is uniquely good.
Slavery was a human universal. It was Western civilization that ended it.
Poverty is a human universal. It was Western civilization that has exponentially mitigated it.
War is a human universal Western civilization has wildly reduced it.
And the secular, post-modern leftists who refuse to admit this are engaging in evil of their own.
This country, the very country these secular, post-modern leftists seem to despise, a country they label Nazi-esque, is the only country in Europe, perhaps, that is not currently overrun by Islamic radicals.
This supposedly Nazi country is the only country in Europe where I, an Orthodox Jew, can walk in safety and comfort down the street wearing a yarmulke.
It is a country where children don&#8217;t actually have to fear that their innocence will be robbed by a perverse, anti-Biblical Left seeking the spiritual destruction of those children.
Hungary, like the rest of the West, isn&#8217;t perfect because no country is.
But Hungarians are trying to stand up for their civilization, our shared Western heritage and civilization. And that is a thing that is worth fighting for.
And if we fight for it, we will emerge victorious against the forces that seek to destroy our civilization from outside and inside as well.

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Hungary And The Fight For Western Civilization: Shapiro’s Budapest Speech

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Marxism

There is a philosophy that has now become dominant on the Left and even parts of the center. It&#8217;s throughout the West.
The deeper roots of this philosophy bear a deadly fruit.
Let’s begin with a bizarre and hilarious spectacle. Great Britain’s King Charles III was visiting the Canadian Parliament and decided that it would be worthwhile to offer a land acknowledgment.
This is hilarious because King Charles is the King of Great Britain. The only reason the Canadian Parliament exists is because of the settlement of Canada by British citizens. That’s why he is there in the first place.
Charles doing a land acknowledgment and taking that seriously would amount to essentially disestablishing Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa and a bunch of other countries, because all of those countries were originally created as functioning polities by the British Empire.
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This bizarre idea that Charles can arrive on Canadian territory and start apologizing to the indigenous people for the presence of white people in this particular area is absurd, especially coming from King Charles, who is the greatest beneficiary on planet Earth of the imperialism of the British Empire.
There are human universals, such as migration, settlement, annexation, and conflict, and they are not unique to white people, Westerners, or Europeans; it&#8217;s just that white people, Westerners and Europeans, have been much better at it than other parts of the population on planet Earth. They&#8217;re more successful, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, but that does not mean that there is some unique sin that attends to whiteness, being Western, or being European.
Charles said, “I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. This land acknowledgement is a recognition of shared history as a nation. While continuing to deepen my own understanding, it is my great hope that in each of your communities, and collectively as a country, a path is found toward truth and reconciliation, in both word and deed.”
Of course the land is unceded, because the nature of human conflict is that when people migrate from one part of the Earth to another part of the Earth, conflict tends to arise, and then someone wins and someone loses. And it is a very good thing that the British Empire won in Canada.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2208-the-trump-2026-victory-plan?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Here’s the basic idea: The world is better off because of the British Empire. The world is better off because of American power and the spread of European ideals. That is obviously true. The spread of things like property rights, due process of law, capitalism, freedom of religion, all of which are not human universals — those are the legacy of the West.
There&#8217;s always an attempt to take human universals and then project them as West-specific problems. That is not true.
The problems of murder and raping and looting and slavery are human universals.
What is unique about the West is all the other stuff. Reversing that polarity and suggesting that the West is somehow uniquely sinful because it was better at war than others, or because Westerners were better at settlement than the Algonquin who lived on the land where Canada&#8217;s parliament now sits, and that is a human tragedy, is not, in fact, a human tragedy.
Bad things happen throughout human history. The bad things are tragedies. But overall, in the broad scope of history, it is an absolutely wonderful thing that Europeans ended up on the North American continent.
Anyone who doesn&#8217;t believe so should probably leave. If you don&#8217;t believe that, you probably should go back to your dingy apartment and cede it back to the natives from whom your ancestors took it.
All of this ties into a deeper and more deadly philosophy.
The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, visited the White House and was asked about the “Kill the Boer” chant, which has become common at some rallies, targeting the Afrikaner farmers who originally settled in the area of South Africa as early as the 17th century, fought for hundreds of years, and were responsible at one point for tremendous racism against black people.
But the solution to that is not genocidal chants. Yet there’s an idea that as long as the people who are shouting the genocidal chants are not white, European and Western, it suddenly becomes okay.
Why? Because the rules don&#8217;t equally apply in this left-wing philosophy, where the sins of the West are unique and the West is unique in its evil.
What that means is that the West has to be destroyed. This has deadly consequences. And it doesn&#8217;t matter whether you call this stuff anti-white or anti-Semitic or anti-whatever. The problem with this generalized philosophy is that it is simply evil.
When you separate the world into victims and victimizers and you suggest that anyone who&#8217;s been uniquely successful is the victimizer and anyone who is not is a victim, what you get is victimizers with the moral impetus and the moral weight to kill people.
What you end up with is actual terrorism, actual violence, actual overthrow of the institutions that made the West great in the first place.

The King And Queen Visit Canada – Day 2

Why The West Must Not Apologize For Its Success

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Earlier this month, we celebrated the 80th anniversary of V-E Day, “Victory in Europe,” which marked the end of the European Theater’s part in the Second World War. It is a date certainly worth commemorating as it closed one of the darkest chapters in European history, which was the rise and fall of Hitler’s Third Reich.
For the countries in what today we call Western Europe that languished for years under the jackboot of Nazi oppression — France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Greece — the Allied victory truly represented liberation.
<div id="attachment_925633" style="width: 875px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-925633" class="size-large wp-image-925633" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-3093644-865x576.jpg" alt="Ecstatic crowds celebrating VE Day in London's Piccadilly, at the end of World War II, 8th May 1945. Original Publication: Picture Post - 1991 - This Was VE Day in London - pub. 1945 (Photo by Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" width="865" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-3093644-865x576.jpg 865w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-3093644-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-3093644-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-3093644.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 865px) 100vw, 865px" />Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images</div>
But there was another side to V-E Day that seems to get glossed over. And that is the less happy fate of the Eastern European nations who were not liberated by the Anglo-Americans rolling in from the west, but rather the Red Army coming in from the east. And for those nations — Poland, Hungary, then-Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states — V-E Day merely meant trading one brutal oppressor for another. Indeed, as the Allies were closing in from both sides, the dark joke in Germany was “Optimists are learning English, pessimists are learning Russian.”
We have been conditioned for over 80 years to viscerally recoil at the very mention of the Führer’s name. Just say “Hitler” and the mind conjures up images of the Holocaust and mass murder of millions of innocents carried out by robotic, goose-stepping stormtroopers wearing their signature coal scuttle helmets.
Yet, when we utter the name “Stalin,” no such dark imagery materializes in the collective mind. And yet, in terms of pure numbers, it can be argued that the Soviet “Man of Steel” had more blood on his hands than even Hitler. Why the indifferent reaction?
It could perhaps be attributed to a curious media/academic tendency of apologetics towards communism. As polls consistently show, both of these institutions lean very much to the left. And Stalinism is the ultimate expression of their collective leftist ideology come to fruition in all its destructive inevitability. During the 1930s, for example, dispatches from Moscow-based New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty were shamefully obsequious towards Stalin, offering up for his readers images of a prosperous, happy communist USSR workers’ paradise.
No matter that the Soviet dictator was coldly stripping Ukraine of food and inducing a famine in 1932-1933 (called the “Holodomor”) during which anywhere from 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians died of starvation — atrocities Duranty labeled as a “big scare” and “exaggeration.”
Then there was Stalin’s 1929-1933 genocide against the Kulaks (wealthy peasants who resisted his policies) to facilitate the expropriation of farmland. In one directive, the Soviet leader declared, “We must smash the Kulaks, liquidate them as a class.” Millions died.
And what of the estimated 700,000 to 6 million who died in Stalin’s Gulag, the far-flung network of concentration camps where he sent his enemies, whom the hyper-paranoid dictator saw all around him. (Figures vary widely; the latter number comes from dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was imprisoned for eight years.)
Starting in 1936, Stalin wiped out his political and military adversaries in a series of show trials called “The Great Purge.” Stalin’s biographer Oleg V. Khlevniuk estimates that 1.6 million were arrested, with 700,000 shot; no one knows how many died of torture.
<div id="attachment_925699" style="width: 883px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-925699" class="size-large wp-image-925699" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-104408516-873x576.jpg" alt="RUSSIA - JANUARY 01: Joseph STALIN, the supreme ruler of the USSR, working in his garden around 1935 to 1936 while Lavrenti BERIA, the chief of the Soviet secret police, poses with STALIN'S daughter, SVETLANA, on his knees. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)" width="873" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-104408516-873x576.jpg 873w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-104408516-300x198.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-104408516-768x507.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-104408516.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 873px) 100vw, 873px" />Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images</div>
During the Second World War on the Eastern Front, Stalin was so profligate with the lives of his people that by the time the red banner of the USSR was flying over the Reichstag in the conquered Berlin, some 27 million Soviets lay dead. Many as a result of combat and German atrocities, of course, but also due to Stalin’s unimaginative strategies that callously offered up both his soldiers and civilians before the guns of the Wehrmacht as fodder.
Whereas Hitler’s policies were driven by twisted racial hatred, delusions of grandeur, a sense of grievance on behalf of a nation he felt was ill-treated at Versailles, and, by the end, drug-addled bona fide madness, Stalin in some ways is even more disturbing as there was a cold, calculating, and ruthless nature to his machinations.
Stalin will also go down as one of the most treacherous characters in history. It should be remembered that until Hitler turned on him and attacked Russia in June 1941, Stalin and the German dictator were allies. Hitler only felt secure enough to invade Poland and trigger the Second World War because Berlin and Moscow had just entered into a non-aggression pact the month before. In fact, people often forget that in September 1939, Poland was not just invaded by the Wehrmacht but also by the Red Army. After which, Stalin’s NKVD promptly rounded up 22,000 members of Poland’s military and intelligentsia, marched them to the Katyn Forest, and shot them all dead.
<div id="attachment_925683" style="width: 949px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-925683" class="size-large wp-image-925683" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-875641680-939x576.jpg" alt="9/28/39: Russo -German Pact Molotov signing pact directly behind is J. Von Ribbentrop on the right is Josef Stalin. (Photo by Bettmann/Corbis/Getty Images)" width="939" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-875641680-939x576.jpg 939w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-875641680-300x184.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-875641680-768x471.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-875641680.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 939px) 100vw, 939px" />Bettmann/Corbis/Getty Images</div>
Says historian Victor Davis Hanson: “Of the six major belligerents of World War II, on the Axis side, Italy, Japan, and Germany, and the United States, Russia, and Britain, Stalin made a deal with every one of them at one time or another, and he honored the ones with the Axis better than he did us.”
But, unlike Hitler, Stalin’s image during the war was softened by the Roosevelt administration and pliant media due to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. FDR, especially, was hopelessly naïve about the duplicitous nature of the man whose military he was now supplying through Lend-Lease. As far as he saw it, the Russians were now our allies after all. And, frankly, we needed the Red Army to kill as many Germans as possible before we invaded France. The mass murderer of Moscow was thus re-christened “Uncle Joe” Stalin. And as it was his Red Army more than any other that destroyed the Wehrmacht, what he did to his own people and those in Eastern Europe were swept under the rug until the Cold War commenced in the late 1940s. After all, as the saying goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
<div id="attachment_925619" style="width: 762px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-925619" class="size-large wp-image-925619" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-186649926-752x576.jpg" alt="Russian leader Marshal Josef Stalin and President Franklin Roosevelt confer in the Soviet Embassy during the Tehran Conference, Tehran, Iran, December 7, 1943. (Photo by Underwood Archives/Getty Images)" width="752" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-186649926-752x576.jpg 752w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-186649926-300x230.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-186649926-768x588.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/05/GettyImages-186649926.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 752px) 100vw, 752px" />Underwood Archives/Getty Images</div>
80 years after the war in Europe ended, modern Germany is still horrified by, and ashamed of, their Nazi past. But to this day, even in a post-Cold War Russia in which information regarding the horrific crimes carried out by the Bolsheviks is now widely accessible, Stalin is revered by the Russian people. A 2021 poll by the Levada Center found that 70% of Russians held a mostly or very favorable view of Stalin.
And that same lack of revulsion over Stalin’s decades-long reign of terror carries over into the West today as a misguided affinity for Marxism slithers its insidious way through the halls of so-called higher education. A poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that millennials, particularly younger ones, displayed a dreadful ignorance of communism and even support for it. Almost half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 20 “said they would vote for a socialist, while 21% would go so far as to back a Communist.” Even more shocking was that a “third of millennials say they believe more people were killed under George W. Bush than Joseph Stalin.” This is criminal negligence on the part of academia — and dangerous.
I have a shirt that reads “Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” Though gallows humor, the message is also a searing indictment of a left-leaning academic and media establishment that are utterly dismissive of the crimes perpetrated by the founding fathers of their own defunct and cruel ideologies. The verdict of history should have condemned Soviet communism to the ashbin of history decades ago. But a fatal attraction for this defunct ideology that invariably leads to mass murder is alive and well in the West today. This is a tragedy — and dangerous.
* * *
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id=55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id%3D55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3K_WhJtiUZw7LF1PwSIHtH">books</a>. Follow him on <a href="https://x.com/bschaeffer123" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://x.com/bschaeffer123&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0P6pRoAqcBhUQ1W0qwN5rH">X/Twitter</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
This article originally appeared on the author&#8217;s <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/p/for-eastern-europe-v-e-day-commemorates">Substack.</a>

Stalin In Moscow

From Reich To Red: Why Stalin Still Haunts Us 80 Years After V-E Day

Adolf Hitler

Communism

Germany

Josef Stalin

Leftism

Russia

World War II

President Donald Trump’s new <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/12/trump-most-favored-nations-drug-price-order-what-to-know.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">executive order</a> on prescription drug prices — which he called “one of the most consequential executive orders in our country’s history” — may well live up to the hype, but not in the way Trump intends.
Trump&#8217;s announcement of a “most favored nation” <a href="https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/global-trends/us-news-trumps-most-favored-nation-drug-pricing-policy-and-how-will-it-reduce-costs-slash-prescription-drug-prices-by-30-to-80-percent/articleshow/121109365.cms" target="_blank" rel="noopener">policy</a> means the United States government will only pay drug prices equal to the lowest paid by any developed nation. This is what Germany, France, Canada, and the United Kingdom currently do: pay less for drugs than they’re worth. In turn, the United States picks up the tab when it buys up drugs for Medicaid.
We overpay, and it’s easy to write it off as unfair freeloading by Europe, a recurring theme for the Trump administration. But this remedy will not come without its costs, and consumers will feel it down the line.
The Trump administration&#8217;s solution for drug pricing is identical to its approach to tariffs. Instead of finding leverage in a target-rich environment to coerce Europe into paying market rates, thus giving American consumers a break, they’ve decided to join the race to the bottom. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) must be quietly pleased to see his socialist dream of price controls go mainstream within the MAGA coalition, even though he has <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-warning-trump-drug-pricing-executive-order-2071155" target="_blank" rel="noopener">warned</a> that Trump’s drug pricing measure would be better served by legislation.
If it was not clear to Republicans before, it should be now that free market policymaking is on the outs in the second Trump administration.
Let’s be honest about what’s happening. The White House wants to trim federal <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AmCRxm6P4o" target="_blank" rel="noopener">spending</a> without touching politically sensitive programs like Medicaid. To square that budgetary circle, they’ve decided to force pharmaceutical companies to sell their products to American patients at the same rate they’re sold to socialized healthcare systems abroad.
This move, unthinkable for a Republican administration two decades ago, assumes that America can have the world’s most innovative pharmaceutical sector and also ask “Big Pharma” to forgo the billions in profits they reinvest back into research and development. It’s a fantasy.
The United States is the engine of pharmaceutical innovation. Over half of all new drug patents originate here specifically because America allows firms to see a return on investment. Drug development isn’t like manufacturing sneakers or soda. It’s a high-risk, capital-intensive endeavor where failure is more common than success. A single treatment can take over a decade to develop, cost billions, and then <a href="https://med.uc.edu/depart/psychiatry/research/clinical-research/crm/trial-phases-1-2-3-defined#:~:text=Subjects%20in%20a%20Phase%20II,go%20on%20to%20Phase%20III." target="_blank" rel="noopener">never make it</a> to FDA phase III trials.
Cutting-edge treatments come to market and make the impossible suddenly possible, albeit at a premium price point. It’s true, on brand-name drugs, Americans <a href="https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/comparing-prescription-drugs#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20U.S.%20prices%20across,adjustments%20for%20estimated%20U.S.%20rebates." target="_blank" rel="noopener">pay a lot</a> more.
However, like clockwork, generics get developed and costs for the consumer crater. Generic medications account for 91% of prescriptions in the United States. For those, we <a href="https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1921730579675934991" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pay far less</a> for those drugs than nearly any other country, something Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro <a href="https://youtu.be/XYBuphYtp6I?si=U5SKZ4aI99bvS70w&amp;t=2662" target="_blank" rel="noopener">explained</a> this week.
If Medicaid won’t pay a fair price, pharmaceutical companies will raise prices on private insurers to compensate. That means higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs for millions of Americans who get coverage through work or on the open market.
And that’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/6/7/22522479/medicaid-health-insurance-doctors-billing-research" target="_blank" rel="noopener">assuming</a> companies continue to sell to Medicaid at all.
Why isn’t Trump hammering European nations that want access to American-made drugs and have them negotiate fair, value-based deals for our biotech? It’s a crown jewel of America that global elites travel near and far to access. We should be twisting wrists abroad, not kneecapping our pharmaceutical industry.
<div>If we want lower drug costs, allowing drug approval reciprocity — as <a href="https://www.paul.senate.gov/dr-rand-paul-introduces-legislation-to-modernize-fda-prescription-drug-approvals-and-lower-drug-prices/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.paul.senate.gov/dr-rand-paul-introduces-legislation-to-modernize-fda-prescription-drug-approvals-and-lower-drug-prices/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1747494596378000&amp;usg=AOvVaw27BgpCiXpYt8qvN3lERP1n">suggested</a> by Sen. Rand Paul — to increase competition between drug approval regulators globally would be a great start. The FDA’s approval process could also be reformed to accelerate trials and drug approval.</div>
America leads the world in medical breakthroughs for a reason. We cannot afford to surrender that leadership by copying the failures of Europe’s socialized health systems. Europe as we know it today is a warning, not a model.
Stephen Kent is the Media Director of the Consumer Choice Center.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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