Full Comment - August 10, 2026


Canada’s ‘suicidal empathy’ hits its terminal stage


Episode Stats


Length

41 minutes

Words per minute

149.69

Word count

6,144

Sentence count

294


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 empathy it's a necessary part of life we needed to be able to understand each other but what
00:00:08.080 happens when it goes too far not on a personal level but on a societal level in his new book
00:00:13.820 suicidal empathy dr gad sad says that we've already gone too far hello and welcome to the
00:00:19.440 full comment podcast i'm brian lily your host and today we explore suicidal empathy with dr sad an
00:00:25.360 academic who has applied evolutionary psychology to issues such as marketing and consumer
00:00:31.300 behavior. In the past, he studied things such as why men buy fast cars and what drives consumer
00:00:36.920 behavior. His work in the past few years, such as his book, The Parasitic Mind, has looked at
00:00:42.120 wider societal issues and why we are facing decline. After years of living in Montreal as
00:00:47.940 a professor at Concordia University, he recently announced that he was joining the University of
00:00:52.600 Mississippi, where he will serve as a scholar at the university's Declaration of Independence Center
00:00:57.860 for the Study of American Freedom. I reached Dr. Saad at his home in Montreal.
00:01:03.880 So, Professor Saad, Gad, what is suicidal empathy? Define it for me. I mean, empathy,
00:01:10.400 we all need to be empathetic towards other people, but how do you get to suicidal empathy?
00:01:16.820 Right. Well, first, so good to be with you again, Brian. Thank you for having me on.
00:01:19.980 uh empathy as you said is a evolutionarily selected virtue we are a social species with a
00:01:27.180 big prefrontal cortex so it makes perfect evolutionary sense that we evolve the capacity
00:01:32.140 to empathize uh for you and i to have a meaningful conversation i need to put myself in your mind and
00:01:37.660 vice versa that's called cognitive empathy or theory of mind we want our spouses to be empathetic
00:01:44.620 our best friends, our veterinarians, our therapists, our physicians. So there is nothing
00:01:49.840 wrong with well-calibrated empathy. But as Aristotle explained to us several thousand years
00:01:56.600 ago via his theory of the golden mean, too little of something is not good. Too much of something is
00:02:02.420 not good. And much of life is about finding that sweet spot. And that exactly applies to empathy.
00:02:08.140 If I have no empathy, I'm likely to be a psychopath.
00:02:12.400 If I have too much empathy, so if it hyperfires in the wrong situations towards the wrong
00:02:19.140 targets of my empathy, I end up with suicidal empathy.
00:02:23.800 And really, in the book, you're talking about this on a civilizational scale, that Western
00:02:28.840 civilization specifically is putting itself on a path to extinguishing itself in some
00:02:35.740 ways by being too open, too empathetic, too filled with too much kindness and understanding.
00:02:43.140 Exactly. So Arnold Toynbee is a famed British historian who, I mean, he's no longer with us,
00:02:50.340 but his probably most famous work was a 12-volume set where he did an analysis of
00:02:58.500 civilizations and their trajectories and how they eventually get extinguished. And the maxim that
00:03:06.900 comes out of this mammoth historical study was that, quote, civilizations do not die by murder,
00:03:13.880 they die by suicide. And so what I'm doing in the book is I'm saying, yes, he's exactly right.
00:03:20.160 And in the current zeitgeist, the way we are committing suicide is via suicidal empathy.
00:03:26.240 And here I'd like to introduce another term that I've coined in the book,
00:03:30.840 civilizational seppuku.
00:03:33.060 Seppuku is an ancient Japanese suicide ritual,
00:03:38.060 which these types of rituals occur in cultures of honor and shame,
00:03:43.440 where the worst thing that could happen to you is for you to lose face and to lose honor.
00:03:48.240 So in the samurai class, if you had engaged in an action that brought you
00:03:53.080 or your group, your samurai cohorts, great shame,
00:03:58.220 the only way to expiate this shameful reality
00:04:02.460 would be to commit seppuku,
00:04:04.920 which is you commit self-disembowelment.
00:04:08.960 And that hopefully is a small measure to you
00:04:12.260 getting redemption and penance for your shameful acts.
00:04:15.860 Well, that's what we're doing in the West.
00:04:18.040 We're committing civilizational seppuku
00:04:20.020 via suicidal empathy.
00:04:21.960 Now, here the question would then be, but why?
00:04:24.580 What are you committing civilizational seppuku for?
00:04:27.080 Well, if I internalize the message that we are an irredeemably evil society that is built
00:04:34.980 on stolen land, that has committed genocide, that is built on slavery, that's transphobic,
00:04:40.940 that's Islamophobic, that is patriarchal and misogynistic, and therefore I am inherently
00:04:49.180 existentially evil as a western person then the only way to resolve this problem is to commit
00:04:57.000 civilizational sepoux it does seem like our many in our society like to um um sit in the town square
00:05:05.740 wearing a hair shirt talking about how awful we are um how did we get to this point where
00:05:12.540 you know we used to all talk about uh you know you you and i are sitting in canada right now
00:05:18.900 You're in Montreal. I'm in Toronto. We grew up with politicians, with leaders, with, you know, community pillars who would say, oh, we live in the greatest country on earth. And now we're a, you know, the best hotel on earth and a multicultural society that is still racist and xenophobic and not welcoming enough, despite welcoming everyone from around the world. And by the way, as you said, genocide and stolen land.
00:05:42.500 How did we get here? Because some of this was in the academic world years ago. And, you know, I remember seeing it at places like McMaster University or when I moved to Montreal, Concordia, where you have taught for many years. And you think, well, this is just crazy. But it morphed. It grew. It was like the blob that kept getting bigger.
00:06:04.920 Yes. So your question is actually a nice prompt to explain how Suicidal Empathy, my current book, is linked to one of my previous books, The Parasitic Mind, because it's going to answer your question.
00:06:21.960 We are both a thinking and a feeling species.
00:06:26.820 The old tension between reason and emotion is actually a false and a moot dichotomy.
00:06:32.920 in many cases having our affective system invoked makes perfect evolutionary sense
00:06:39.560 if i'm walking down a dark alley to take a shortcut to get home and i notice that there
00:06:45.440 are these young men loitering around in the dark alley i will get an emotional and affective
00:06:51.460 response that makes perfect evolutionary sense my blood pressure will go up my breathing will
00:06:56.500 become more shallow my heart will race more and that makes perfect evolutionary sense so it's not
00:07:02.220 that we are a thinking or feeling animal. We're both. The issue is to know when to invoke which.
00:07:07.220 Now, why am I saying all this? In order for me to completely hijack your capacity to reason
00:07:13.800 and to be wedded and tethered to reality, I need to do two things. I need to parasitize your
00:07:19.800 cognitive system, your thought processes, and I also need to parasitize your emotional system.
00:07:26.820 The parasitic mind, my previous book,
00:07:29.040 talked about how do we parasitize our cognitive system
00:07:33.560 and suicidal empathy talks about the affective system.
00:07:36.880 Now, why am I saying all this?
00:07:38.080 Because all of the ideas that led to us merrily swimming
00:07:44.680 in the infinity pool of suicidal empathy
00:07:46.860 come from academia.
00:07:49.540 You said some of those ideas,
00:07:51.500 I think you maybe used the qualifier.
00:07:52.980 No, no, no, not some.
00:07:53.880 every single parasitic idea that I discuss in the parasitic mind that then opened the doors
00:08:00.560 for suicidal empathy come from academia. What are these? Postmodernism, cultural relativism,
00:08:07.260 social constructivism, identity politics, biophobia, the fear of using biology to
00:08:14.460 explain human affairs, radical feminism. All of these ideas slowly but surely were, you know,
00:08:22.540 knocking on the edifices of reason to try to bring them down.
00:08:26.440 And then once you had enough inertia
00:08:28.680 with all of these parasitic ideas festering
00:08:32.640 and then breaking out of the metaphorical lab,
00:08:36.460 it starts off in the humanities departments
00:08:38.740 and in the social sciences,
00:08:40.320 but then it becomes a walking manifestation
00:08:42.840 of these parasitic ideas called Justin Trudeau
00:08:45.640 because he was imbibed with all of this nonsense.
00:08:48.980 So it's not surprising that when he then becomes prime minister,
00:08:52.120 he creates a feminist foreign policy. He talks about she-cession instead of recession. He talks
00:09:01.100 about she-covery rather than economic recovery. So that's how we got to where we are. We took
00:09:08.000 these dreadful ideas, every single one of which was spawned on university campuses,
00:09:13.060 not just at Concordia, but also at Harvard and my alma mater of Cornell. And then those folks
00:09:19.400 that were trained in that nonsense
00:09:21.080 become our journalists,
00:09:22.620 our filmmakers,
00:09:23.840 our cultural shapers,
00:09:25.380 our politicians,
00:09:26.660 and voila, here we are.
00:09:28.760 And we end up with,
00:09:30.020 as you said,
00:09:30.680 Justin Trudeau is prime minister,
00:09:32.300 and we do a gender-based analysis
00:09:34.240 plus lens
00:09:35.920 applied to issues like defense
00:09:38.220 and what kind of assistance
00:09:40.160 we're going to give to Ukraine
00:09:41.880 to fight their war against Russia.
00:09:44.280 We send gender-based analysis
00:09:46.000 um people to do gender-based analysis to ukraine i don't know how that how that helps them with
00:09:53.600 the drones but that's how far um this parasitic mind and this suicidal empathy have you know
00:09:59.700 extended themselves within canada uh you mentioned biology and i know earlier in your career you did
00:10:07.820 well throughout your career but earlier in your career you did studies like you know
00:10:11.460 why do men buy fast cars and things like that and what it does um you know so i'm thinking of
00:10:17.420 the jaguar ad suddenly the one that took a car brand that was iconic that men bought so that
00:10:26.020 they would get a hot date or to impress a woman and they made it androgynous they didn't show the
00:10:33.140 car um there were no men there were no women there was there was nothing i mean how do you go
00:10:39.660 from yes hot cars get hot women to nothing really exists right a beautiful question and i actually
00:10:47.900 addressed this in suicidal empathy specifically the example of the jaguar campaign which uh
00:10:55.340 beautifully retorted by elon musk where he said hey jaguar do you still sell cars or something to
00:11:01.560 that effect because he was exactly speaking to your point so let me hear if you don't mind for
00:11:06.240 second, put on my business school professorial hat and explain the evolution of how we got to
00:11:12.280 Jaguar. So in this past, say, 100 years of the relationship between the firm and the consumer,
00:11:21.540 we've had, I argue, four stages. The first stage, 100 plus years ago, it was called a production
00:11:28.800 centric stage. Meaning that my responsibility as a corporation was to meet consumer demands
00:11:36.660 for the product. Now, how is that captured best? By the famous adage of Henry Ford, where he said
00:11:43.000 the consumer can have the car in any color that he or she wishes as long as it's black. Meaning
00:11:50.600 that he doesn't care about your consumer preference. His responsibility is that there is a demand for
00:11:56.820 cars, he's going to have a production line that meets those demands. The next stage, stage two,
00:12:02.760 came along and said, no, no, no. We also have to take into account consumer heterogeneity of
00:12:09.020 preferences. Brian likes his car blue. Gad likes his car black. And therefore, we need to be a
00:12:16.400 marketing-centric production unit. And therefore, now we're incorporating consumer preferences.
00:12:23.600 Stage three came along, say, by about the 70s, where, yes, we have to meet consumer demands.
00:12:30.160 So we have to be production centric.
00:12:32.220 We have to do so while ensuring that we recognize that there is consumer heterogeneity of preferences.
00:12:38.220 But we also have to do those two things while not harming any third party, like the environment.
00:12:44.520 So now we come to the green movement.
00:12:47.580 You know, be kind to the environment through your production process.
00:12:50.820 And then the fourth stage that leads us to the Jaguar campaign is no, that's not enough. We need to do stages one, two, and three, but we also have to be proactive in combating social justice issues wherever we can uncover them.
00:13:09.540 So my job as Jaguar is no longer the fiduciary responsibility to maximize short-term profits
00:13:19.220 for the shareholders.
00:13:20.520 That's old stuff.
00:13:22.160 I now have to be proactive in recognizing that there is trans invisibility.
00:13:28.820 And by then putting them in the ad campaign, I'm actually doing the most important thing
00:13:33.980 that I can do, which is fight social justice issues.
00:13:36.840 so back to elon musk's question do you still sell cars
00:13:42.380 but i don't think they do anymore they plummeted well they would answer brian if if i can put
00:13:50.000 myself in the the wokesters who came up with that ad campaign that's a dumb question that's
00:13:57.460 an antiquated view of what businesses should be doing i don't have to be selling cars because
00:14:04.720 that is secondary to the most important mission statement of a truly enlightened company and that
00:14:12.340 is to fight injustice so i will not answer your idiotic question we we do a lot more than just
00:14:18.580 sell cars this society um it's not just in canada it's not just in the united states throughout
00:14:27.120 europe issues such as immigration and assimilation have become massive um in some ways the fact that
00:14:35.340 you are planning on leaving canada is in part because how we have failed to assimilate how we
00:14:41.100 have failed to bring people along or bring in the right people whichever view you want to have you
00:14:48.980 are facing an awful lot of anti-semitism how does our tolerance our desire to be open to be empathetic
00:14:56.940 work into how our society is not functioning properly now in terms of assimilating new
00:15:05.060 cultures? Yes, a great question. So of all of the endless cases of suicidal empathy that I discuss
00:15:12.980 in the book, so trans activism is a form of suicidal empathy. The notion of forbidden knowledge
00:15:18.920 is an example of suicidal empathy. Soft on crime policies is an example of suicidal empathy. How
00:15:24.260 we deal with the homelessness crisis is a manifestation of suicidal empathy. Of all of
00:15:29.360 those manifestations that I cover extensively in the book, none is more civilizationally ending
00:15:36.040 than the open border immigration policy, which is the ultimate form of suicidal empathy. And let me
00:15:42.200 explain why. The old adage that demography is destiny couldn't be more apt, right? What makes
00:15:49.940 Canada, Canada, or the U.S., the U.S. is not just that there's this thing called the Rocky Mountains
00:15:55.560 or that there are these beautiful lakes, you know, on the shores of Lake Ontario. What makes
00:16:02.820 Canada, Canada, old Canada, the one that you and I knew, is that there were a set of Canadian values
00:16:10.120 that were clearly distinct from Waziristan values, then Afghani values. That doesn't mean that human
00:16:19.380 beings don't share a common ancestry in terms of a shared biological heritage, but cultures exist
00:16:26.800 as distinct units precisely because while they may share many features, they also don't share
00:16:33.360 many other important features. Okay, so having said that, let's now take one of the parasitic
00:16:38.520 ideas from the parasitic mind that I discussed and then demonstrate how the downstream effects
00:16:44.120 of that leads to open border policies. Cultural relativism is the notion that it is inappropriate
00:16:52.660 for us, and by us, I mean Western people, Canada, US, whomever it is, to judge the cultural values
00:17:02.000 and practices of another society. If another society decides that it is perfectly reasonable
00:17:07.560 to cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls because that's their religious imperative to do so,
00:17:13.000 shut up racist. If they wish to stone women, if they dishonor them, shut up racist. If they have
00:17:19.300 child brides, that's how they organize their mating system, shut up racist. Well, if I internalize
00:17:26.840 that idea pathogen called cultural relativism, it then renders me impotent to ever say things like,
00:17:36.180 wait a minute, we can't have as many people coming from Waziristan as those coming from
00:17:43.140 Denmark, because that feels icky. That feels gauche. That feels racist. All immigrants
00:17:50.160 deserve the right to live out their life fully in Canada. I recently came, well, recently,
00:18:00.060 A year ago, I was invited to speak in Iceland.
00:18:04.700 And Iceland is bathing in suicidal empathy.
00:18:07.900 I mean, in Reykjavik, you thought that maybe you were in Gaza
00:18:11.880 because there was free Palestine, Hamas, everywhere.
00:18:15.760 And I warned, I did several media, I did a media tour,
00:18:20.000 I answered questions, they wrote articles about me.
00:18:23.260 And I warned them a year ago, what was going to happen?
00:18:26.840 Well, I just received a private DM,
00:18:29.240 although he did also post the sentiments publicly from my host in Reykjavik who said oops everything
00:18:37.020 that you said and predicted would come true we've now seen it a year later so when I stood Brian
00:18:43.160 25 years ago screaming from top of the mountains into the wilderness saying Canada you're going to
00:18:50.420 regret your largesse well now people write to me privately and say oops I guess you were right so
00:18:56.800 this is why I'm leaving now, because it doesn't take much for you to predict that if you let
00:19:03.220 in millions of people into a whole society, and those people typically come from societies that
00:19:09.820 have endemic Jew hatred as their definitional feature. I mean, literally, there are nonpartisan
00:19:16.320 surveys that have been done from those societies, where of all of the polled people, 95 to 99%
00:19:23.600 exhibit really problematic views of the Jews,
00:19:27.060 then do you need the fancy professor to tell you
00:19:29.540 that you're going to have an increase in Jew hatred in Canada?
00:19:32.640 It's unbelievable, Brian.
00:19:34.020 We need to take a break.
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00:20:34.960 This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?
00:20:38.480 where we unpack the biggest, weirdest, and wildest political moments
00:20:41.880 in Canadian history you thought you knew
00:20:43.740 and tell you what really happened.
00:20:46.020 Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample
00:20:48.380 of one of our favorite episodes from season two.
00:20:51.320 And if you missed it,
00:20:52.380 there are even more episodes from last season.
00:20:54.860 So make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What
00:20:57.460 everywhere you get podcasts.
00:21:00.000 I remember back to when the Harper government was in power
00:21:03.180 and they stated clearly that they believed
00:21:08.320 that as we bring new immigrants into the country,
00:21:12.060 that we need to assimilate them
00:21:13.940 and they need to adopt Canadian values.
00:21:17.180 And the response from the progressive side of the political spectrum was, that's racist.
00:21:24.520 That's awful.
00:21:25.740 But what were they talking about?
00:21:28.060 Respect for men and women.
00:21:29.960 Ending barbaric cultural practices like cutting off of clitorises.
00:21:37.640 Respect for the rule of law and democracy.
00:21:40.660 Respect for each other.
00:21:42.700 I know, you know, people from all parts of the world who absolutely embody that.
00:21:49.320 But that's because they chose to.
00:21:51.300 We don't preach that anymore.
00:21:53.320 And we say, come to Canada, we're a great country.
00:21:55.760 And then we bring people in and they say, but whatever you're doing is just fine or better.
00:22:00.100 And so, you know, instead of telling people to, as Mark Carney recently did, I'm not sure he believes it,
00:22:07.280 But he said, when you come to Canada, leave your old hatreds and fights at home.
00:22:12.680 We encourage people to hang on to that.
00:22:16.020 My parents came here.
00:22:17.440 They did not want to carry the sectarian troubles of Glasgow and Northern Ireland into Canada with them.
00:22:25.360 And they did not.
00:22:26.800 Some people want to continue that.
00:22:28.420 Look at the whole Calistani movement.
00:22:30.300 an indian separatist movement has more support in canada which engenders violence in both canada
00:22:36.820 and india and it has more support here than in india and we tolerate it indeed although regarding
00:22:44.280 mark carney from this side of his mouth he said what you mentioned from this side of his mouth
00:22:49.100 he said that islamic values are canadian values so you know i'm not sure how much i uh place a
00:22:54.900 lot of weight onto anything that he says now regarding your earlier point about harper and
00:23:00.360 you know barbaric practices and so on you might remember the uh substitute drama teacher
00:23:06.700 justin trudeau at the time he was a mp and i don't know if you remember how he flipped his hair
00:23:13.100 and really put on the full thespian power of his uh drama training where he exhibited just
00:23:22.040 revulsion. I mean, he had a visceral reaction that you would be describing those practices
00:23:30.380 as barbaric. He wasn't concerned about the barbaric practices. He was concerned that the
00:23:37.700 Harper government called them barbaric. That is exactly what happens when you have all of the
00:23:44.160 internalized parasitic ideas defining your personhood. Look, I hate to say this, Brian,
00:23:51.240 And because I always want to leave the viewers and listeners to feel empowered and optimistic,
00:23:57.720 I'm not sure that Canada will recover.
00:24:01.440 Now, a lot of imbeciles will listen to this thing and say, what are you talking about?
00:24:06.460 I live in a gorgeous neighborhood in Toronto and Moncton and Chilliwack and, you know,
00:24:12.620 on the Cabot Trail.
00:24:14.720 What is this idiot professor talking about?
00:24:17.080 Well, it's because they don't have the courage and the vision to extrapolate from current trends to future trends, right?
00:24:25.840 That's what makes someone seem as though they're being prophetic.
00:24:28.720 They're not being prophetic.
00:24:29.880 They're just reading the writing on the wall.
00:24:32.520 So all of the things that I have predicted and have come out true, it's not because I have a direct line to God that allows me to see the things that other people don't see.
00:24:42.740 It's because my eyes are wide open.
00:24:44.880 So right now, I've repeatedly said that there are very few countries that have entered the pantheon of the very laudable elite status, stage five suicidal empathy. That's even higher than the most highest form of stage four suicidal empathy. Well, I regrettably and with great chagrin tell you that Canada is stage five suicidal empathy. Britain is stage five suicidal empathy.
00:25:12.320 Now, I want to leave this answer with some positivity. There is some optimism, namely that there is an actual set of autocorrective policies that we could implement to reverse the ship. So that's the optimistic part.
00:25:29.920 I want to get to the end of your book. You talk about how to inoculate yourself. But before that, I do want to ask. So many people have said, oh, Trump got elected and woke is over everywhere. And you address that in the book and say, no, absolutely not. So let me just finish the other point. I'll address that one and then we'll talk about the inoculation.
00:25:49.760 The bad part, the positive part
00:25:51.840 is that there is a solution.
00:25:53.040 The negative part is that I see no evidence
00:25:55.920 that the West has remotely the testicular fortitude
00:26:00.460 to implement one millimeter
00:26:02.080 of the autocorrective policies.
00:26:03.880 If anything, they're doubling and tripling down
00:26:05.700 on the bad stuff.
00:26:06.740 Regarding Trump eradicating all the woke stuff,
00:26:10.020 exactly as you said correctly,
00:26:13.260 I right away killed that canard
00:26:16.900 because people think, well, hey,
00:26:18.760 Trump came along, he signed an executive order ending, you know, trans competition in female sports and the NCAA, the problem is gone.
00:26:30.600 No, he's just a doorstop. For you to truly eradicate all of these parasitic ideas that have led to suicidal empathy, the ideas themselves have to become vanquished.
00:26:43.880 Now, most of the parasitic ideas, all of the parasitic ideas that I talk about in my books, they took about 50 to 100 years to fully be spawned and flourish in academia and then break out of academia.
00:26:59.340 I'd like to think that it won't take 50 to 100 years to vanquish them.
00:27:03.180 I'm not sure we have the luxury of that much time, but it's not going to start and end with Trump, to your point.
00:27:08.740 so let's talk about uh some of the ways in your book that you say we can inoculate ourselves um
00:27:16.440 do not succumb to the false equality bias okay let's do that one yeah give me a quick answer
00:27:24.300 on what that is okay so all immigrants are equally likely to assimilate i'm imposing a false equality
00:27:32.620 to a place where that's simply not true.
00:27:36.260 All other things equal,
00:27:38.100 notwithstanding that there are millions of Muslims
00:27:40.600 that are perfectly lovely and kind,
00:27:42.560 just like that's true in any other grouping,
00:27:45.180 there are mean Jews and nice Jews.
00:27:47.160 There are Jewish pedophiles
00:27:48.960 and Jews who fight against pedophilia.
00:27:51.840 So we're not talking about individual people,
00:27:54.280 but if you bring in people from Islamic societies,
00:27:58.320 can we predict whether the host society
00:28:00.700 will yield an increase
00:28:02.320 or a decrease in Jew hatred.
00:28:04.100 We know the answer to that.
00:28:05.780 You are from Lebanon.
00:28:08.020 Now, originally,
00:28:09.440 you came in the 70s
00:28:10.600 when Lebanon was much different.
00:28:13.320 But bringing in you
00:28:15.500 is very different
00:28:16.480 than bringing in
00:28:17.200 a hardcore supporter of Hezbollah
00:28:19.060 and saying,
00:28:20.300 integrate into Canada.
00:28:22.320 But the suicidally empathetic
00:28:24.060 don't go by that premise
00:28:26.020 because they'd like to impose
00:28:27.380 that false equality.
00:28:29.060 They'll say to me,
00:28:29.880 One of the most common attacks that I get is you are such a hypocrite, Gadsad.
00:28:36.420 You're an immigrant.
00:28:38.020 Your buddy, Elon Musk, is an immigrant.
00:28:40.620 Why do you rail against immigration?
00:28:42.640 Well, that has about as much intelligence as the following analogy.
00:28:47.900 Ready?
00:28:49.580 Fido the cat is a feline.
00:28:52.340 The wild lion in the African savanna is a feline.
00:28:57.420 They're both called feline.
00:28:59.180 that's why I think that I am equally likely
00:29:02.940 to cuddle successfully with either.
00:29:06.000 So that's why when I go to Tanzania
00:29:07.900 on my safari thing,
00:29:11.380 as soon as I see a pride of lions,
00:29:15.280 I will merrily jump out of the Jeep
00:29:17.720 so I can cuddle them
00:29:18.840 because look, they're called felines
00:29:20.880 just like my cat Fido is called feline.
00:29:24.140 So I'm an immigrant who has spent his career
00:29:27.700 fighting for actual real canadian values and american values that's why the canadian yours
00:29:35.700 truly is going to be the distinguished professor at the declaration of independence center for the
00:29:42.320 study of american freedom i'm not american and yet i embody those american principles so i'm an
00:29:49.660 immigrant who is fully aligned with the host societies that have uh generously allowed me to
00:29:57.420 come in. Ahmad Muhammad Hussein is also an immigrant who just returned from a summer camp
00:30:04.260 with Al-Qaeda in Waziristan. We're not equally likely to contribute meaningfully to Canadian
00:30:10.260 society. You are going to have to contribute to Canadian society even as you leave. You've been
00:30:17.700 writing about this. Tell us a little bit about that before we part ways here. You're absolutely
00:30:25.700 despondent at how much your accountant told you you'll have to pay in an exit tax to leave the
00:30:31.620 country you don't have to give a dollar figure but can you give a percentage or you know give us
00:30:37.700 a sense uh i thought we were friends asking me that question will forevermore create anger in
00:30:44.340 my heart towards you because nothing nothing i'm not being hyperbolic i went through the lebanese
00:30:50.640 civil war and faced imminent execution my parents were kidnapped and tortured by fatah that was
00:30:57.020 less painful to me existentially than how i've been treated by the parasitic taxation in canada
00:31:03.820 why because notwithstanding that everybody hates taxes there is something uniquely painful about
00:31:13.820 taxes taking the labor the fruits of my mind right so when i i already pay huge taxes on my
00:31:23.200 professorial salary but if i now go out and write a book of which that most of the royalties of that
00:31:29.880 book i mean literally 99 of the royalties do not come from canada canada says hey hey hey 58 of
00:31:38.240 your personhood asshole belongs to me, right? Because remember, uh, at the highest progressive
00:31:45.080 tax, the highest federal tax rate is 33%. The highest Quebec tax rate is 25.75%. Add those up
00:31:53.860 and then add all of the other taxes at the end of which you're left probably with about 30 cents
00:31:59.940 to the dollar. Or as I like to also explain roughly from January 1st to end of August,
00:32:06.360 I work free for the government.
00:32:08.060 And then starting in September,
00:32:09.860 you allow me to keep my book royalty proceeds.
00:32:14.500 Okay, fine.
00:32:15.160 That's good.
00:32:15.960 I've accepted that.
00:32:17.240 That happened a few years ago.
00:32:18.900 I walked around like a rape victim
00:32:21.760 in complete stupor for months.
00:32:23.960 But then that's great.
00:32:24.940 This is after the parasitic mind did so well.
00:32:27.280 Exactly, exactly.
00:32:28.240 So now I'm like, okay, now I incorporated,
00:32:33.020 I'm going to pay my 20% corporate tax
00:32:36.360 which I dutefully paid because I need to fund all of the noble Gazans who will come to Canada
00:32:43.120 to ensure that I now have to flee Canada. It's important for me to contribute through my taxes
00:32:49.220 to my own demise and that of my children, because I'm a good and kind person. So now once that's
00:32:55.440 done and I'm like, okay, guys, I've tried to contribute for 50 plus years to Canada. I'm out
00:33:01.320 of here. Then my accountant says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean you're out of here?
00:33:05.960 What do you mean you're out of here?
00:33:07.400 You got to pay the departure tax.
00:33:09.200 What do you mean departure tax?
00:33:10.520 I paid all my taxes.
00:33:11.720 No, no, no.
00:33:12.540 We're going to look at all of your investments, which you haven't sold.
00:33:19.040 So they're unrealized.
00:33:20.180 And the government's going to say, it's not fair if you now move to the United States
00:33:25.520 for us not to get the cut that we would have gotten had you stayed in Canada and eventually
00:33:30.980 sold those investments.
00:33:32.620 so if you bought something for a dollar
00:33:35.180 and it's now worth $5
00:33:36.500 but you haven't sold it yet
00:33:38.120 so you've made $4
00:33:39.140 just in the books
00:33:40.580 we're going to tax you on those $4
00:33:42.600 and by the way
00:33:44.200 if later
00:33:45.080 when you do want to sell it
00:33:47.400 it's at a loss
00:33:48.700 the governments don't come back and say
00:33:50.800 oh shit we taxed you when it wasn't gained
00:33:53.040 but now you ended up losing all your money
00:33:55.260 we don't give a shit
00:33:56.600 but that's not even what bothered me the most
00:33:59.120 because I knew about that unrealized capital gains
00:34:01.720 and I was emotionally ready for it.
00:34:04.440 I was told that, hey, you have now a company,
00:34:08.040 you've already paid all your corporate taxes,
00:34:10.440 but if you now leave
00:34:12.140 with whatever you've amassed in that company,
00:34:15.280 we need to tax you on that.
00:34:17.380 I said, but I've already paid my tax on that.
00:34:19.160 Well, no, because if you decide later in life
00:34:22.360 to take out money from that company,
00:34:24.940 had you been in Canada, we would have taxed you.
00:34:27.560 You're no longer in Canada,
00:34:29.000 So pay up front all the money, even though you didn't liquidate your company.
00:34:34.740 That seems like a really fair system.
00:34:37.260 And as I was told by many Canadians who sent me endless hate, I am a truly terrible person
00:34:45.560 for not having given 50, 60, 70% of my worth and daring to complain about it on X.
00:34:55.180 What a terrible Jewish ingrate I am.
00:34:59.000 More like a sensible person who's invoked what you say we all need to the survival instinct. You're not going to survive. You're not going to thrive by constantly giving all your money over to the government. And the thing I didn't realize, and perhaps Ontario has it as well, is that Quebec has their own exit tax. So you've got two.
00:35:18.660 Yes. It's it's utterly unreal. I understand why you've decided to go. Maybe you could comment on this last. We heard about the doctor leaving the Montreal Jewish general and going to Alabama. You're going to Mississippi. I've been talking to Michael Sachs, who was involved in Jewish affairs in Vancouver. He's moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. All these places that Canadians would sneer at as not being as sophisticated.
00:35:47.800 and here we've got Jews from Canada saying,
00:35:50.940 you know what, I feel safer in Mississippi.
00:35:53.080 I feel safer in Alabama.
00:35:55.160 I'm going to do better with my family in these places.
00:35:58.720 What do you say to those Canadians sneering,
00:36:01.400 believing that they're so sophisticated
00:36:03.400 and where you're moving, well, yeah, it's Mississippi.
00:36:08.700 I'm so glad you asked this question
00:36:10.600 because the number of people
00:36:12.520 in my progressive liberal neighborhood in Montreal
00:36:16.660 who really with astounding disdain could not believe that someone like me, you know, a
00:36:24.440 sophisticated intellectual, number one, would move to the United States, which is just a hotbed
00:36:31.280 of genocide. I mean, Jews are being lynched in every city of the United States. How would you
00:36:36.980 even move to the United States? Nevermind that Trump is in power, number one, but you're moving
00:36:43.280 to Mississippi, right? So the level of imbecilic arrogance by the progressive Canadians might be
00:36:54.380 even worse than the parasitic taxation, because you talk about you shouldn't stereotype, right?
00:37:00.020 The same progressives would come down hard on you for wrongly stereotyping a group, but it is
00:37:06.880 perfectly fine for them to stereotype others because, you know, they have the progressive
00:37:12.040 of calculus on their side. Let me be very clear. One of the main reasons I decided to move to Ole
00:37:19.400 Miss, despite the fact that I had many other universities that were courting me, is I got
00:37:25.220 there and the love that I felt, the hospitality that I felt was so great that at an actual event,
00:37:33.820 I jokingly said, I hereby declare everybody in the audience as honorary Lebanese because I'm
00:37:40.960 invoking there the fact that the Lebanese are very well known for their over-the-top
00:37:45.520 generosity. So all of those Canadians that are scoffing at your neighbors down south who are,
00:37:52.560 you know, toothless hicks who sleep with their sisters, maybe look at the mirror before you
00:37:58.820 start stereotyping others. It's been great talking to you. Thanks so much for being generous with
00:38:04.720 your time. Thank you for the book. And I do encourage everyone to order a copy, pick one
00:38:09.900 up wherever you can we'll talk soon thank you sir cheers full comment is a post media podcast my
00:38:16.220 name is brian lily your host this episode was produced by andre prue theme music by bryce hall
00:38:20.860 kevin liban is the executive producer make sure that you hit the subscribe button share this on
00:38:26.180 social media and let your friends know about us thanks so much for listening until next time i'm
00:38:30.920 brian lily here's that clip from canada did what season two that we promised for you let me take
00:38:39.700 you back to the night of October 30, 1995, to the hours right after that likely fatal bullet was
00:38:47.140 dodged. We're awaiting the reaction from the Quebec Premier at the time, Jacques Barizeau,
00:38:52.360 who was championing separatism and had just narrowly lost the vote he had held to try and
00:38:57.660 get it. Did I say narrowly? It was a razor-thin loss. 49.42% of voters said yes to Quebec
00:39:07.260 independents, 50.58% said no. The difference was just above half a percent, less than 55,000 votes
00:39:16.780 out of nearly 5 million. Now, there's a generally accepted protocol for what a politician is
00:39:23.020 supposed to do when they lose a vote. You come out, concede defeat, congratulate the victor,
00:39:29.040 kiss your spouse, and thank your supporters. But every once in a while, a politician comes out and
00:39:34.940 says what they really think. They just let it all out in front of news cameras. The bitterness,
00:39:40.860 the disappointment, the recriminations, a no-filter tirade about how the voters are idiots
00:39:46.920 and vowing revenge. That's what happened on the night that Parizeau lost the referendum
00:39:52.020 for Quebec independence. If you don't speak French, that's Parizeau saying that although
00:40:02.680 they lost the referendum, Quebec's French speakers voted 60% for independence. The implication being
00:40:09.960 that if they simply ignored the non-French Quebecers, those who weren't real Quebecers,
00:40:15.560 that is immigrants, Jews, Indigenous people, McGill University students, they would have won
00:40:19.860 this referendum in a walk. If you want to hear the rest of the story, make sure you subscribe
00:40:25.700 to Canada Did What? Everywhere you get your podcasts.
00:40:32.680 Thank you.