The Lion’s Path: Igniting American Ambition
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Last week, I was with Bernie Moreno. He's campaigning against Sherrod Brown in Ohio for the Senate. We stopped by a Republican event in the area, and I gave a speech about the differences in worldview between right and left, or as I call them at this point, lions and scavengers. Here's what it sounded like.

Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. That was a really long walk from the back of the room. A little winded, to be honest with you. So right before this, I was in the back room watching President Trump speaking. He was in Detroit. And he said something very wise to President Trump. He said, the threat to democracy, the threat to democracy is stupid people.

And the president is correct. That is indeed the threat to democracy, is indeed stupid people. Unfortunately, there are, in fact, many, many stupid people. It is time to change all of that. This is a very, very important election, one of the most important elections in the country.

So here, Bernie explained many of the practical reasons why that is true. The most obvious reason that's true is if, God forbid, God forbid, Kamala Harris were to become president of the United States, and were she to have a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House, she would then completely rewrite the way the government is done in the United States. She's pledged to do this. She says that she would move to kill the filibuster in the Senate, which means that Democrats would next move to stack the Supreme Court, meaning there would be no way to constitutionally challenge any of their predations on the Constitution.

Her party has suggested they would add a couple of states to the United States Senate, presumably Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, hoping that that would be four Democratic senators, which would permanently stack the Senate of the United States in favor of Democrats. The Democrats have proposed legislation in the last Congress where they had the minority,

They proposed legislation that would in fact allow for and indeed mandate ballot harvesting across the country, radically changing the way that voting is done in the United States. So there's just some of the systemic changes that Kamala Harris has planned. And then, of course, there's the actual policy, aside from the systemic changes. And we've seen that enacted under Joe Biden. I mean, I'm not sure that he's aware much of it's being enacted.

But, you know, whether he is or whether he isn't, Kamala Harris certainly is aware of it. And she was, as she said on The View just this week, completely responsible for all of it and disagrees with none of it. She was asked, is there anything from which you differ from Joe Biden? And she said she could think of nothing. Now, to be fair, that's what she says to pretty much everything. There's not a lot going on between the ears for Kamala, unfortunately, other than we know that she's a middle class kid or something. But...

That doesn't mean she won't enact an incredibly radical policy agenda because, of course, she will. We've seen that policy agenda already enacted under Joe Biden. It's brought about vast economic stagnation, challenges for businesses across the board. She would let President Trump's tax cuts expire, which means radically increased taxes. She has talked openly and then walked it back and then talked a little and then walked it back about the possibility of a tax on unearned capital gains, which is absolutely insane and basically destroys all business in the country, like all of it.

For all of her talk about she's suddenly pro-fracking, we know that that's not true. She is pro-fracking at the moment simply because she wishes to win votes in some of these states. But we all know what she actually believes because she says that her principles have not changed from that time when she said she wanted to completely ban fracking.

That's leaving aside foreign policy, where she will, of course, be a complete disaster area. President Trump has the best foreign policy of any president of my lifetime, and it's a really simple foreign policy. It's a foreign policy that he expressed to me in a story fairly recently at Trump Doral. We did a fundraiser for him, and he was explaining why it was that Vladimir Putin had not actually invaded Ukraine on his watch. And he said, you know, Ben, the reason that Vladimir Putin didn't invade Ukraine when I was president

is because I said to him, "Vlad, Vlad, if you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the out of you." And he goes on, he says, "And Vladimir said back to me, 'No, you won't, Mr. President.' And I said, 'Well, I might.'

That, as it turns out, is a very good foreign policy as opposed to the foreign policy of this administration, which is to throw all of our allies under the bus and surrender to all of our enemies, literally all of them. There is not one enemy of the United States that has not gotten stronger under Joe Biden that would certainly continue under Kamala Harris. But there is a deeper conflict that's brewing in the United States.

And that is a real ideological conflict. Because I was joking before, and I said that the real threat to the country is stupid people. I don't actually think that's true. I think that the real threat to the country is something else. The state of Ohio, all of America, was founded on a certain ethos. And that was what I would call the pioneer ethos. This ethos that you were going to leave a place that was much more safe for a place that was much less safe. You were going to leave a place that was much more secure for a place that was much less secure, but

The guarantee was you'd have much more opportunity. So you're going to leave a big city on the coast and you're going to cross the Appalachians and you're going to come to Ohio where there was literally nothing and then you were just going to build on a river bend somewhere and you were going to found a town. Or you were going to found a steelworks and you're going to work insanely long hours in incredibly dangerous conditions in order to build the iron and steel factories that originally powered the industry of the state.

Everyone who builds a business today is part of that. Everybody who gets up in the morning and goes to work is a part of that same ethos, that pioneer ethos, the one that says, get the hell out of my way and I will succeed.

Get the hell out of my way. I'll help build my community. Get the hell out of my way. I'll raise my kids. That is the ethos that the United States was founded on. Bernie's personal story is that ethos. Bernie's story is that his family came here from another country to take advantage of that opportunity. And then Bernie did take advantage of that opportunity. But I think that's the story for virtually everyone in the United States.

And my great grandparents came here at the beginning of the 20th century with literally nothing. They didn't speak the language. And they were able, over the course of generations, to build wealth, to build a thriving family, and all the rest. Because that's what America is all about. It's tough to prioritize health, especially if you're not sure where to start. This is why I'm excited to introduce Lumen. This is a really cool device. It's the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath.

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I call this the way of the lion. America is a country of lions. And there are a few principles that animate the lions. The first one is that there is an understandable universe that we all inhabit, one with rules. And if you follow the rules, you're going to do pretty well. And if you don't follow the rules, you're going to get clocked. Some of us might say there is a God. And because there is a God, there's an understandable universe that he made for us. And because that universe is understandable,

That means that we also understand what we're supposed to do in the morning. There are duties. There are things we are supposed to do for God, for each other, for our church, for our community, for our country. These are all things that we all wake up in the morning and we go and do them. And finally, we understand, because we're lions, that we have to have liberty in order to perfectly fulfill all of that. It wouldn't be enough for somebody to tell us what to do. We have to go out and do it ourselves. Right there.

There's an understandable universe, there are duties that we have, and we have liberty to go and do those things. That's why we have liberty. And then there's another ethos, and this is the real threat to the country, and that is the scavenger ethos. And that is an ethos that we see written across the country. You see it on America's college campuses, where the most privileged kids in literally all of human history go around and pretend that they are somehow victims of the greatest country in human history.

They pretend that there's something wrong with the country that raised them and gave them this enormous level of privilege. You see it in the mainstream media, in the legacy media, where the basic assumption is that if someone failed, it's because America was bad to them. That if someone is not a success, that that is because someone was mean to them and that person has to suffer. That all success, actually, anyone who is a success must have exploited somebody else. All of life can be broken down into victims and victimizers. This is what the scavengers believe.

They believe that if there's a failure on their own part, it's not their failure, it's everybody else's failure. In fact, it's even more than that. It's a failure of the system. And so the system has to be torn down. You wonder why you see so many people who are out in the streets yelling about how terrible the country is while flipping through their iPhones and earning $60,000 a year on average. Why are they doing that? And the answer is because they are animated by this ethos. It's a loser ethos. It's a scavenger ethos. It's

It's an ethos that says the only thing in the world that matters is what I feel on the inside of me. I don't have duties to the rest of the world. I don't have things I have to do. I don't have a church to which I owe duties or a synagogue. I don't have a community that I am called upon to do things for. I don't have obligations to build a family and create future generations. I don't have any of that stuff. It's just what I feel inside. And if I don't get what I feel inside right now, the entire system has to pay.

somebody victimized me. And if I'm unsuccessful, it's not because I'm doing something wrong, it's because everyone else is. And if you're successful, it's because you did something wrong to me. That is the battle that we see in the country right now. It's the battle between lions and scavengers. The lions are what I call hunters, people who innovate, people who go out and build.

You get up in the morning, you figure out some problem to solve and you go and solve it. You're innovative about it, you're determined, you're gritty and you work at it. They're warriors, the people who go off in battle, are firefighters, are police who actually have to defend the homestead. And they're the weavers.

The people who actually weave together the community. People like, in Florida, my wife. My wife is a family medicine doctor, but what does she spend most of her time doing? She does charity work or she's taking care of the kids. That's weaving together the community. Those are the people you go to for advice or you certainly don't get in fights with because it's a bad idea. That's what a pride of lines looks like. Scavengers are made up of people who take.

People who take from the innovators and tear down the innovators. Saboteurs, people who are trying to destroy the system from within and think it's important to do so. Destroyers, people who want to rip apart the social fabric, who say that family is actively bad. Family is an imposition on you. Church is actually bad. The only people who would go to church are terrible, bitter clingers. People who are just indoctrinated into this perversity.

perverse religion that tells you you have to do things when really you don't have to do anything. Destroyers are the people who tell you that when you build a social fabric it should be ripped away because government can do all of that better. That's the threat to the country. And I'm not saying that that's half the country. I don't think it's half the country. I think it's actually a relatively small percentage of the country. I think they lie about what they're attempting to do. I think they hide all of this in the guise of empathy.

What they do is they want to tear down the system. They want to blame everyone else for their problems. But what they say is, I care about you. I care about everyone, which is why I want to tear down the system. But that's a lie.

That's a lie. That's where President Trump is correct. There are a lot of people who believe that lie, not because they're stupid. Maybe it's because they're naive. Maybe it's because they're hopeful. Maybe it's because they're dissatisfied. But the reality is when President Trump says, make America great again, what he's talking about is reanimating the way of the lion. He's talking about reanimating the confidence of Americans that we can, in fact, succeed. If you get the hell out of our way, not only are we going to build, we're going to build something better than anything that has ever been built before.

And that's what's at risk. Because once we're on the other path, once we're on the tearing down path, and that is a path of stagnation,

It's a path of families falling apart or not being formed at all. It's a path of churches emptying out. It's a path of cities emptying out and industries emptying out. Once we're on that path, it's very, very difficult to climb off that path. So we're at an inflection point in American life right now. I'm talking about, in terms of lines and scavengers, sort of the bottom of the iceberg. But you can see it every time you turn on your TV and you see one party, for example, arguing that America doesn't deserve a border.

The only way that you would say that is if you believe that America ought to be torn down. Any country has to have a border. The only reason you would say that is because you actually don't like the thing that is and you wish to tear it down. Not because you want to build something better, but because you don't like the thing that is. When you say that you want to stop some of the most robust industries in the United States from actually being operative, you're not doing that because you're kind-hearted. You're doing that because you hate what is and you want to tear it down.

you know, the last year on a personal level. It's been kind of a rough year for me on a personal level. Obviously, I'm an Orthodox Jew. That's why I wear the funny hat and all of that. And so, you know, when October 7th happened, my family had actually just gotten back from Israel. We got back on October 6th from Israel. I woke up the next morning. I go to synagogue because obviously, as an Orthodox person, I go to synagogue all the time. So I get up in the morning. I go to synagogue. My security stops me, and they tell me what's going on. They tell me that

At first, dozens of people have been killed, then hundreds of people have been killed, then by the end of the afternoon, 1,200 people have been killed. And the Jewish community is pretty small. It's a group of people, 15 million Jews on planet Earth total. And so that means that I know people who are family members, people who have been killed, people who are serving in Gaza and Lebanon literally right now, and all of the rest of it. That was shocking, obviously. What was even more shocking was the response of the scavengers in the West.

If you want to see what the scavengers look like, take a look at the people marching on college campuses or the people marching in London in solidarity with Hamas and Hezbollah and understand they make common cause with the exact same people who want to tear away your business and your church.

They make common cause with the same people who believe that the fundamental American principles are bad and exploitative. This is all part of the same thing. So the only way to understand that is to understand that what you really have in that group is just a bunch of people who don't like the system, feel they've been marginalized, and now want to destroy the system. That's all it is. They have nothing else in common except they hate the people who they believe are in control. If they ever get in control, and the more control they gain, the worse things get for everyone.

Well, Kamala Harris is a scavenger. She is not a lion. She's a scavenger. She believes in what she calls equity. By equity, she means equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity or equality of rights. She believes that lack of success is a result of the evils of the system. She has said this. This is not in question.

She says the history of the United States is a terrible history, effectively speaking. She believes that all problems can be solved so long as she is given control. And when she says she's going to solve the problem, she doesn't mean she's actually going to solve the problems. She just means that you won't have control over your own life, which is the solution to a very different problem. Kamala Harris is a scavenger.

So is President Biden. So is Barack Obama. So is Hillary Clinton. That's why they talk about all the people who are the lions as though they are bitter clingers, or as Hillary Clinton called them, deplorables, or as Joe Biden called them, ultra-MAGA. There is a reason that they have to use these sorts of labels, because there is hatred. There is true hatred. We are lions.

Ohio is a land of lions because America is a land of lions and Ohio can lead the way. And in America, there is a philosophy of life that ought to win. That philosophy is in fact, as President Trump says, to make America great again. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be with you.