In this episode, Professor Gad Saad joins us to talk about his new book, "Suicidal Empathy: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense," and why we can't seem to shake the Woke Mind Virus.
00:08:14.980they didn't say the term evolutionary but these evolutionary imperatives we rise above it we're a
00:08:21.260global village we love everybody equally all immigrants are equally likely to assimilate
00:08:26.620well the average three-day-old pigeon knows that to not be true to be false but yet it is much
00:08:33.760kinder and more empathetic of us to argue that every immigrant is equally likely to live out
00:08:41.280the Canadian experience, you know, and fully flourish. Well, that can't be right, because0.99
00:08:46.740when immigrants come, some come with values that are consistent with those of Canada. Others come1.00
00:08:54.660with values that couldn't be more antithetical and incongruent with Canadian values. And the
00:09:00.580inability to make that distinction is precisely what suicidal empathy looks like.
00:09:05.520Well, it's interesting because you mentioned that Mark Carney said that Muslim values are Canadian values. And, you know, here we have in the city of Toronto, like a huge social problem where Jewish Canadians don't really feel safe in their own community.
00:09:21.020We have synagogues being shot up. We have the U.S. consulate being shot up. We have these mobs of Islamists, basically threatening Jews.
00:09:31.100Christians in Canada are also feeling under attack. As Juneau News has reported, some 120 churches have been vandalized or burnt down after the false discovery of unmarked graves in Kamloops at a residential school.
00:09:44.900there's no remains that have ever been found. But you see these sort of like tensions playing out
00:09:50.360in Canadian society. I know you've been a harsh critic of migration from the Muslim world,
00:09:56.900particularly unvetted, right? Like people, like to sort of use an example of perhaps suicidal1.00
00:10:03.180empathy, you know, in 2015, we saw the Syrian civil war pour out and the Syrian refugee crisis
00:10:09.600happened and Canadians really were empathetic and they wanted to help these Syrians. At the time,
00:10:14.020was writing the Toronto Sun and I tried to point out that most Syrians have views and values that1.00
00:10:19.160are very counter to Canadian values. A full third of Syrians were supportive of ISIS, right? And I0.99
00:10:25.160think most Canadians would say, you know, ISIS values aren't Canadian values, right? And yet we
00:10:29.420had so much empathy for this idea of these poor refugees fleeing war that we wanted to help them.
00:10:34.740And it seemed to me that, you know, the past decade of having a lot of Muslim migration into
00:10:40.240Canada has not served the population well, particularly to bring it back to the Toronto
00:10:44.520Jewish population. I have a lot of Jewish friends who have fled Toronto, left Toronto, moved to
00:10:48.400Florida, moved to Israel, moved to New York, anywhere to get out of that area because they
00:10:52.820don't feel safe in their own community anymore. And it does seem like Canada is really being
00:10:59.480strained and there's real problems, but it doesn't seem like we're paying enough attention to it.
00:11:04.680So what do you recommend on that front? Well, I mean, and what I try to do, of
00:11:09.920course, is to contribute to the battle in the informational landscape, right? That's why I write
00:11:15.580the books that I do. That's why I give the lectures that I do. But ultimately, of course, you need to
00:11:20.680have the people who hold the reins of power in terms of enacting policies to be able to
00:11:27.840internalize the message that I'm suggesting, right? But again, what is baffling, even to the
00:11:33.560one who wrote The Parasitic Mind and Suicidal Empathy, is the extent to which Canadians are
00:11:38.840willing to be perfectly apathetic in their unwillingness to auto correct what again should
00:11:47.020be clearly obvious to to a tree right I mean it really it now by the way I should mention because
00:11:52.860I never like to sort of always have a pessimistic outlook there is some evidence that people are
00:12:01.560waking up but the rate at which they are waking up is so much slower than the rate at which the
00:12:08.620monsters coming for you. So let's take, for example, what you referred to a few minutes ago
00:12:13.640about, you know, Islamic immigration and some of the problems in Toronto. By the way, you should
00:12:17.720try to come to Montreal or go to Concordia and be a high profile Jewish professor and see how that
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00:13:26.220this episode. It shouldn't have taken a lot of insight or ability to extrapolate or forecast
00:13:34.600that if you let in millions of people that come from cultures where there is endemic
00:13:42.140Jew hatred that is woven into the fabric of those societies. I mean, there are non-partisan
00:13:48.780surveys, for example, Pew surveys, that demonstrate that the people that are pulled
00:13:54.720from those societies exhibit anywhere from 95% to 99% hatred towards the Jew. So, I mean, if it
00:14:03.360were 10%, that would be considered a problem. One out of 10 people hate the Jew, that would be a
00:14:08.040problem. But if you're getting 90%, 95%, 98% that are saying, you know, yes, the Jews are a major0.90
00:14:14.900problem, and then you let in hundreds of thousands of those people, do you really then need to be0.51
00:14:20.540scratching your head in wonderment that there is increase in Jew hatred in Canada. So it's very
00:14:27.400frustrating because these are problems that were of our own making. It's not that another society
00:14:33.640had to go through the hard work of fighting against us in a kinetic war and then, okay,
00:14:39.520they won. Good for them. Because of our suicidal empathy, we said, hey, you don't have to fire a
00:14:46.300single shot we will show you to all of our riches you can destroy our heritage our culture our
00:14:52.280society our religion because we will not be non-empathetic towards you there is death before
00:14:58.320not being empathetic it's insane it it really is and it's it's shocking that we didn't really
00:15:04.740think about this or or have have a conversation about it i think part of the reason i was warning
00:15:09.420canadians at the time professor is because my husband is from iran originally and he fled his
00:15:14.800family flight in the 90s and you know he told me in that part of the world and where he grew up
00:15:19.620they would chant death to israel death to the jews and he was taught that if he shook a jewish
00:15:24.300person's hand he was supposed to wash his hand afterwards uh because it was so like repulsive0.89
00:15:28.720whatever and it's like you know those are the values that thankfully his family rejected and
00:15:32.820taught him otherwise but the the masses and the most people you know that's the that's the
00:15:37.240environment that they're coming from and they're bringing those values slowly slowly slowly into
00:15:40.420Canada. One of the things I noticed in your book is that you argue that our civilization is in rapid
00:15:46.840decline. And I noticed that Elon Musk has, you know, been promoting your work. And he said that
00:15:54.740this, he said this of the book, the Western civilization is doomed unless the core weakness
00:15:59.040of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard but necessary for survival.
00:16:04.420Gad said articulates this well. All of Gad's books are great, including this one. I wanted to read
00:16:08.980one other review that i i found to be really helpful michael schirmer who's a publisher of
00:16:14.740skeptic magazine um he wrote this he said i'm deeply worried that the west faces a challenge0.95
00:16:20.420like no other but i was unable to link the desperate threats dei blm the trans movement0.57
00:16:25.460the fetishization of victimhood status the ennobling of terrorists and criminals the0.69
00:16:29.860failure to stop the drug and homelessness problems these are all things that we talk about all the
00:16:33.940time at juno news and on my show and so he he basically goes on to say we're killing ourselves
00:16:40.420with kindness and it must stop before the patient dies starting with this book which includes the
00:16:46.180contagion's diagnosis prognosis and treatment what a great uh you know sell for the book so
00:16:52.580i can you can you sort of walk us through like you know are we doomed and like what are the steps
00:16:57.700that we need to take that we have to take to treat this societal ailment we so we're not doomed
00:17:05.300there's a positive message but it's going to be tempered by a negative one so forgive me for not
00:17:11.380being fully optimistic the the optimistic part is that there are clear policies and auto correction
00:17:19.380procedures which we can get into if you'd like uh that exist that are identifiable that we could
00:17:26.900implement to solve the problem. So that's the good news because it could be much worse, right?
00:17:32.140If God forbid your physician were to tell you that you have stage four pancreatic cancer and
00:17:37.220you've got two weeks left to live and there are absolutely no interventions, then you would be
00:17:41.580much worse off. There is no possible intervention strategy. Here we do have a set of intervention
00:17:47.180strategies, but now here comes the pessimistic part. I see zero evidence that the West in general
00:17:54.620and certainly canada in particular is exhibiting any of the testicular fortitude that would be
00:18:00.860necessary to implement a single millimeter of those policies so the positive is there are ways
00:18:07.340to solve it the negative is there doesn't seem to be an appetite to solve it if anything there is a
00:18:12.540doubling and tripling down of many of these suicidally empathetic policies well what are
00:18:17.660yeah go ahead well i was just gonna say i mean it seemed like canadians did have a willingness
00:18:22.060for change, right? There was a high appetite for change in the last election. We saw Justin
00:18:27.160Trudeau be removed. To me, that was a step in the positive direction. But then, you know,
00:18:32.360culturally and societally, we still see like every single job posting from a university
00:18:36.420basically says white men need not apply. So we're telling young men that they're just not even
00:18:41.380welcome. They're not even, there's no point in even trying, right? You know, we have all these
00:18:46.020examples. Yesterday, the top story on our news site was about someone's indigenous ancestry
00:18:54.220This man abused and assaulted a toddler, a six-month-old,
00:18:58.780and he was just let off with a six-month sentence
00:19:01.380because of the internalized abuse of his ancestors, basically.
00:19:05.820Like, just, you know, we're so far removed from the basis of our society.
00:19:11.500Like, the rule of law, the idea that all people are equal,
00:19:14.820you know, that justice is blind, all these factors have just been, like,
00:19:18.920and and and there's no it doesn't seem to me like it's slowing down or stopping us pretty much the
00:19:24.040purpose of our news organization professor gad uh sad is to showcase these things and and show
00:19:29.800canadians how much this stuff is still happening so let me mention a couple of things as relating
00:19:36.120to what you just said number one that the the example with the indigenous uh perpetrator is
00:19:41.480something that i exactly warned against in the 2020 book the parasitic mind where i contrasted
00:19:47.880progressive logic to Sharia law. Sharia law basically, this is Islamic law, it basically argues
00:19:54.720that the severity of the punishment of a crime depends on the identity of the perpetrator and
00:20:03.580the victim. It is enshrined in Islamic law. So if a Jewish man kills a Muslim man, it is not the
00:20:11.560same penalty as if a Muslim man kills a Jewish man. So imagine that now Canada is internalizing0.98
00:20:19.060the tenets of Sharia law. So maybe Mark Carney was right when he said Islamic values are the1.00
00:20:24.980same as Canadian values. So that's point one. Let's talk about your example with universities1.00
00:20:29.140and men need not apply. You may or may not know the example, and I discussed this in
00:20:34.100the forthcoming book, University of Waterloo, which I would presume most of your Canadian
00:20:40.060listeners would know, but it's the equivalent of a Caltech or an MIT, top engineering, top computer
00:20:46.340science school. Last year, they put out two calls for Canada research chairs. So this is the highest
00:20:52.900chaired professorship that is endowed by the Canadian government. So I'll just mention one
00:20:58.280of the two Canada research chairs. They were looking for world-renowned experts in AI because
00:21:04.540AI is now the hot thing. We want to be leaders in Canada in the AI revolution. If I were to show
00:21:12.940you the actual call, which you may or may not have previously seen, it says the people that
00:21:19.120could only apply for this have to be two-spirit, non-binary, transgender, and so on. So imagine
00:21:26.920that the endower of the highest chaired professorship in Canada, which is the Canadian0.99
00:21:34.680government, is imposing the restriction of you being two-spirited or non-binary so that you can0.64
00:21:43.140attract the top AI talent into the country. That's what suicidal empathy looks like. Now,0.86
00:21:48.980Why is it suicidal empathy? Because it is arguing that in the competing calculus of being empathetic to truth and science or being empathetic to marginalized voices, always choose celebrating the voices of the marginalized people.
00:22:07.620So we may not be able to get the top AI person who suffers from the indignity of being a heterosexual white male, because what is more important is that we get an indigenous non-binary person to fill that position. That's what suicidal empathy looks like.
00:22:24.080Suicidal empathy is precisely the fact that in the year 2026, we are debating what constitutes
00:22:32.120male or female, something that I warned about in the Canadian Senate in 2017, when until 15 minutes
00:22:39.480ago, the 117 billion people that had existed on earth were able to fully navigate the very
00:22:47.800confusing conundrum of who is male or female. Your ancestors and mine seem to know exactly how
00:22:53.460to couple when they wanted to reproduce but now we no longer have that that's what suicidal empathy
00:23:00.340does so the one-two punch of first parasitizing your cognitive system then parasitizing your
00:23:07.540emotional system well now i own you in a true orwellian sense well it just doesn't seem like
00:23:14.100we're a serious country right like if if you don't actually want to solve the problems that are in
00:23:18.580front of you, then sure, prioritize hiring a two-spirited person for an important job.
00:23:23.700You know, like I kind of think if you're having a heart attack and you need a doctor, you're
00:23:29.720not going to say, actually, no, I'm going to wait until a two-spirited doctor can show