00:00:08.000Today on the Charlie Kirk show, the legendary Gad Sad, he is an unbelievably awesome new book out, The Parasitic Mind, where he talks about the ideas that are metastasizing all throughout our culture.
00:00:19.000We have answers about postmodernism, feminism, identity politics, and more from one of the leading intellectual critics of the academy.
00:00:26.000You're going to love this conversation.
00:00:27.000Please consider supporting us at charliekirk.com slash support.
00:00:31.000Email us your questions as always at freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:34.000We have an AMA Ask Me Anything episode coming up for Monday.
00:00:38.000And get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com.
00:00:57.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:06.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:39.000Well, I think it starts when we start placing a higher currency on the protection of people's feelings than the unencumbered pursuit of truth, right?
00:02:48.000So universities are there not to assuage your feelings.
00:02:52.000Universities are there to take me wherever truth takes me.
00:02:56.000But when I now have to be shackled in not saying this or not researching that, lest it might hurt someone's feeling, we start going down a dark alley.
00:03:06.000So the issue with the universities, and we deal with a lot of them, and you know it very well, is that it's not even that they try to interrupt the pursuit of truth.
00:03:17.000They almost evangelistically tell students there is no such thing as truth.
00:03:21.000Don't even bother even trying to find it.
00:03:25.000Yeah, so in the book, I talk about a whole range of idea pathogens.
00:03:30.000And again, to draw an analogy in the animal context, when we talk about parasite or brain parasites, we're actually talking about brainworms that can cause the host to behave in maladaptive ways.
00:03:42.000So Toxoplasma Gandhi is a parasite that can inflict the brains of mice so that when a mouse is parasitized by this particular brainworm, it loses its innate fears of cats and it's actually sexually attracted to the cat's urine.
00:03:56.000And so I take that model and I argue that idea pathogens, and I'm going to answer your question in a second, idea pathogens serve the exact same purpose.
00:04:03.000But instead of being brainworms, they're actually idea worms.
00:04:07.000Well, the granddaddy of all idea pathogens, to answer your question, is postmodernism, because postmodernism, as I call it, is really a nefarious form of intellectual terrorism because it removes the possibility of there being a truth to be discovered, right?
00:04:24.000Now, in science, we do wake up every day thinking that there is a truth to be discovered.
00:04:31.000What we thought was true in science 300 years ago might not be true today.
00:04:35.000But there's no point in getting out of bed if we thought that everything is shackled by subjectivity, everything is shackled by my personal biases.
00:04:42.000And that's exactly what happens with postmodernism.
00:04:45.000If I have time, can I give you a specific story that demonstrates it?
00:04:53.000So in 2002, I was invited by one of my doctoral students who had just defended his doctoral dissertation to go out for dinner to celebrate.
00:05:03.000So it was myself, my wife, him, and his date, okay, for the evening.
00:05:08.000And so he took me aside prior to the evening and said, I just want to warn you that the date that I'm bringing is a graduate student in postmodernism, cultural anthropology, and radical feminism, sort of the holy trinity of blood.
00:05:23.000And so, and so he was trying to warn me, you know, please be on your best behaviors.
00:05:34.000Of course, that was complete nonsense.
00:05:36.000There was no way I was going to be on my best behavior.
00:05:38.000So about halfway through the evening, I looked to the lady in question and said, hey, I hear you're a postmodernist, no universal truths, right?
00:06:09.000She goes, well, there is some exotic tribe off some Japanese island where within their mythological realm, within their folklore, it is the men who bear children.
00:06:20.000So by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us, you know, barefoot and pregnant.
00:06:26.000So after I recovered from my mini stroke, I then said to her, well, how about we tackle something that's a bit less contentious?
00:06:34.000Because it's way too controversial to argue that women bear children.
00:06:39.000So I'm going to give one that's a bit less controversial.
00:06:41.000Is it true that within any vantage point on earth, the sign, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?
00:06:47.000So here she used another form of postmodernism.
00:07:22.000So imagine how insane it is to indoctrinate students who pay $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year that there is no East and West and it's not only women who bear children.
00:08:08.000I don't have definitive proof, although I do point to some proof for my theory in the parasitic mind.
00:08:15.000Imagine you have a bunch of professors in the humanities and social sciences, and they're looking across the campus at the physicists, at the chemists, and the biologists who are doing great contributions.
00:08:25.000They're mapping the human genome, they're landing us on the moon, but you know, nobody's paying attention to us in the humanities and the social sciences.
00:08:32.000Well, maybe if we can develop a language that is as impenetrable as mathematics, then maybe we could also be the cool kids on campus.
00:08:41.000So, therefore, we will create endless prose of faux profundity.
00:08:46.000And that way, when I espouse all this garbage, then people will attribute it to them being too stupid because they never say it's because the guy who is speaking is a charlatan, it's because I'm too dumb to understand the profundity.
00:08:58.000And they were able to pull it off for 40, 50 years.
00:09:24.000I said, Force equals mass times acceleration.
00:09:26.000They said, No, no, no, no, because force for me might not be force for thee.
00:09:30.000I said, I'd never come across this absurdity.
00:09:34.000Can you just help build out how they reject all science that we know to be universal?
00:09:39.000They reject all just in the empirical pursuit of truth.
00:09:44.000Can you please help build that out from just the ABCs of postmodernism?
00:09:48.000Look, it's each of these idea pathogens, whether it be postmodernism or any of the other idea pathogens in the book.
00:09:54.000So, militant feminism, cultural relativism, identity politics-they all start with a kernel of truth and a noble cause, but then it metamorphosizes in complete gibberish.
00:10:06.000So, for example, the idea that men and women should be equal under the law is something that any sane person should support.
00:10:15.000The problem becomes when we go from equity feminism to militant feminism, where in the pursuit of that laudable objective, we need to start arguing that men and women are indistinguishable from each other.
00:10:27.000There are no biological bases to any sex differences.
00:10:33.000So, social constructivism is another one of those idea pathogens.
00:10:36.000Now, again, you can imagine how that idea pathogen is terribly intoxicating because social constructivism basically says that if Charlie Kirk has a child, that child is just as likely to be Leonel Messi or Albert Einstein or Michael Jordan, because it's only socialization that shapes our trajectory.
00:10:55.000It couldn't be because there are any innate differences across people.
00:11:02.000Therefore, I sign up for that idea pathogen.
00:11:05.000So, this is how each of those idea pathogens attacks the edifices of reason, resulting in someone like the guy that you talked about saying that no, no, physics is just a social construction.
00:11:17.000And some people that are very successful, I'm talking about the highest levels of business finance in America, they refuse to believe this is actually being taught.
00:11:29.000I was just with a multi-billionaire in Texas, and we sat down at length.
00:11:35.000This was about a week and a half ago, and I walked him through postmodernism.
00:11:40.000And I said, The rejection of science, the rejection of mathematics, that it's the spherical earth, gravity, all these things that you mentioned, they think it's all frame theory, and there is no such thing as truth, and it's all my.
00:11:51.000And he said, there's no way this is actually being taught in our schools.
00:11:56.000So, can you just reinforce that this is not some fringe ideology?
00:12:00.000Because that's the other accusation I come under from critics: no, no, no, this is not predominant.
00:12:04.000This is just, you know, the intellectual calisthenic class that's trying to expand their horizons.
00:12:10.000Can you please just show how normalized this has become?
00:12:13.000I always get this question because people have the exact same response as that billionaire friend of yours, which is, well, isn't this just some esoteric thing that's happening in one building in the humanities?
00:12:25.000Can't we just ignore those blue-haired people?
00:12:29.000Because the blue-haired people become the prime minister of Canada, right?
00:12:34.000The prime minister of Canada, Lady Justin Trudeau, is a walking manifestation of all these idea pathogens, right?
00:12:42.000I mean, literally every single word that comes out of his mouth, every single policy is not some esoteric thing that was left behind in the humanities department.
00:12:55.000Diversity, inclusion, and equity, which I refer to in the book as the DAI religion, right?
00:13:01.000Is perfectly contrary to a meritocracy, right?
00:13:07.000Because a meritocracy says, hey, we run the 100 meters, whoever crosses first wins.
00:13:11.000Now, imagine in science or in academia, you would think it's the one who gets the chaird professorship or the Nobel Prize or the award is the one who merits it the most.
00:13:25.000And by the way, in many places, it's also in the U.S., where when you put out a call, say for a grant, you want to apply for a $400,000 grant, $1,000 grant, you have to put a DAI statement, which basically states, what have you done in the past to support DAI principles?
00:13:41.000If you win the grant, what will you do to support DAI principles?
00:13:44.000I do nothing to support DAI principles.
00:13:52.000Well, if I said that, I wouldn't get the grant.
00:13:55.000As a matter of fact, a colleague of mine at a sister University of Montreal, a very notable physical chemist, was denied a grant because they didn't get past the DAI statement.
00:15:34.000And what is their desired objective if they have one?
00:15:38.000Well, so it points to what I mentioned earlier, which is in the pursuit of a noble cause, which is that there shouldn't be institutionalized sexism, we end up murdering truth in the pursuit of that goal, right?
00:15:50.000We can perfectly chew gum and walk at the same time.
00:15:53.000I could be fully supportive of equity feminism, right?
00:15:56.000While not agreeing with the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women.
00:16:01.000I could fully support transgender rights, as I do, without agreeing that a 270-pound six-foot-five guy with a nine-inch penis who used to be called Bob, but now self-identifies as Linda, can now compete in MMA against biological women who are one-third his weight, right?
00:16:20.000So, I could have two thoughts in my head.
00:16:23.000I do have a functioning brain, but no, the activists say no.
00:16:27.000If I need to pursue this objective fully and assiduously, and if I have to murder truth in the service of that goal, so be it, sorry, truth.
00:16:38.000So, so whether it be militant feminism or transgender activism or what I call biophobia, biophobia is the fear of using biology to explain human affairs, human phenomena, right?
00:16:51.000Now, imagine there are 2 million species on earth for 1,999,999.
00:16:57.000We perfectly use biology to explain their behavior.
00:17:00.000But somehow, when it comes to humans, we are outside of our biology.
00:17:06.000So, much of the social sciences teach, whether it be sociology or economics or consumer psychology or any discipline, it is always taught outside of biology.
00:17:17.000So, I come along and I say, wait a minute, how could you study consumers or managers or employees or employers without, for example, understanding how our hormones affect our behavior?
00:17:26.000And the response that I usually get, what are you talking about?
00:17:28.000Those kinds of things are relevant for the mosquito and the zebra and the dog.
00:17:56.000You called it pseudo-intellectual terrorism or something of that sort, right?
00:18:02.000Where did these ideas come from and how did they get so mainstream, considering they are so foolish and they are incongruent with the people that are sending their kids to these schools, that are funding these schools, and many of the people that sit on the boards of these schools?
00:18:17.000Something that I don't quite understand is all of the mechanisms of accountability that are supposed to be checking and balancing the academy.
00:18:27.000They don't hold any of these views and they refuse to even understand or know it.
00:21:06.000How can we metaphorically inoculate ourselves against these ideas?
00:21:12.000How do we defeat this pathogen or these parasites?
00:21:15.000So in chapter seven, I talk about what are called nomological networks of cumulative evidence.
00:21:21.000It's a mouthful, so just give me a few minutes to explain it.
00:21:24.000So if you think back of Charles Darwin, when he was developing his theory of natural selection, he didn't run a study with 30 undergrads at Ohio State and then drop the mic and say, good night, everybody.
00:21:35.000Instead, over 30 years, he assiduously collected data from geology, from paleontology, from animal husbandry, from comparative morphology, from ecology, from biodiversity, so that when you put all that data together, it became unassailable that he was on the right path.
00:21:53.000Well, I argue that we have to develop that kind of discipline in building this tsunami of evidence whenever we take a position.
00:22:01.000So let me give you a concrete example in the current context.
00:22:04.000If I want to prove to you, Charlie, that toy preferences are not socially constructed.
00:22:08.000In other words, the fact that little Johnny plays with a truck and little Linda plays with a doll, it's not due to the sexist parents, but there must be some biological signature.
00:22:18.000How would I go about proving that to you?
00:22:20.000Well, I could get you data from children who are too young to be socialized and show you that they already exhibit those preferences.
00:22:28.000I could get data from other animals, from vervet monkeys, from recess monkeys, from chimpanzees, and show you that the infants of those other species exhibit the same sex differences.
00:22:39.000I'll do one more, although the network is much bigger than that.
00:22:43.000I could get you kids who suffer, girls who suffer from something called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is an endocrinological disorder that masculinizes the behavior of little girls.
00:22:53.000Well, girls who suffer from this disorder have toy preferences that are like boys.
00:22:57.000So bit by bit, I could put the epistemological noose around your neck.
00:23:44.000Because they look at this unbelievably ferocious animal and say, I don't want a part of that.
00:23:48.000Well, you need to have that kind of honey badger ideological commitment when you're defending your principles.
00:23:55.000The reason why I don't get canceled is because if you come after me, you better come after me with a really big knife because otherwise I'm coming after you.
00:24:39.000I wrote a very polite but very firm email stating that it is inappropriate during the exercise of her pedagogic duties for her to be engaging in political signaling.
00:24:49.000And secondly, was the principal aware that BLM was not just, oh, I love black people.
00:24:55.000BLM has a set of beliefs and I shared some of those beliefs and I said, do you think it's appropriate for this teacher to be signaling those beliefs to that, to the students?
00:25:06.000Well, the next day, the BLM avatar was gone.
00:25:09.000Well, so imagine if everybody did what I did.
00:25:18.000I simply engaged her reason in a polite but firm way.
00:25:21.000If each of us were to do that, we would defeat these idea pathages by next Tuesday.
00:25:26.000If we don't, it's going to be a long ride.
00:25:29.000I think also one of the reasons why people are afraid to interface on these ideas, and you hit it perfectly early on, is that the ideas are such rubbish.
00:25:41.000They are so awful that people think that they are missing something and they told they are, like, you're not smart enough to understand this stuff.
00:25:50.000Can you just reinforce that if you think it's complete and total trash, you're probably right and you should be unafraid to say so?
00:25:58.000It's one of the top tactics of the intelligentsia.
00:26:03.000Remember earlier when I mentioned that postmodernism uses a great trick, which is when the guy gets up and starts espousing gibberish, he relies on the fact that you're going to presume that you don't understand, not because he's giving you BS, but it's because you're too dumb to understand, right?
00:26:21.000My wife once told me many years ago, we've been married for 20 plus years.
00:26:26.000She told me, you know, when I hear you speak about postmodernism, it was such a relief for me because when I used to take those courses in college, I thought that I was too dumb to understand it, but now you're telling me that it was truly rubbish.
00:27:09.000But people are too weak in their self-confidence in terms of what they know, they succumb to it.
00:27:14.000No, if it smells like bullshit, it's bullshit.
00:27:19.000And what we have done is by removing reason and removing, I think, a lot of the core teachings that have built the West, we have unprepared young people to cross-examine these incredibly deceitful and bitter professors that teach this stuff with such authority to young people that already are searching.
00:27:42.000They're in a very vulnerable state and they prey on them.
00:27:50.000And they've done such a disservice to our civilization, to the West.
00:27:57.000And I think that's really one of the things that you hit on in this book as I'm working through it, which is that this idea of freedom and reason and true liberalism.
00:28:06.000I'm a conservative, and I feel like I have all of a sudden become a defender of true liberal values, right?
00:28:12.000Which I think is this incredible intersection, right?
00:28:15.000I'm an evangelical, conservative Christian.
00:28:18.000That my best friends on these things are James Lindsay and Peter Bogogian, who are not evangelical Christians.
00:28:24.000And it's kind of this incredible, I hate to use the term intersection, intersectional coalition, but it's kind of where if you just believe in speech and you believe in the pursuit of truth, then you're kind of natural allies in this cause.
00:28:40.000Can you talk about how high the stakes are?
00:28:42.000This is not just some coffee table discussion.
00:28:54.000It's absolutely not hyperbolic to say that we are fighting for the souls of our society.
00:28:59.000Look, in chapter one of the parasitic mind, I explain my own personal background so that I can provide a context as to why I am so indignant about all this nonsense.
00:29:09.000I come from a culture that was defined by identity politics, right?
00:29:15.000So let me mention, I'm from Lebanon, and we are Lebanese Jews who escaped Lebanon when the civil war started because it was no longer feasible to be Jewish in Lebanon.
00:29:24.000In Lebanon, everything is determined by your religious affiliation.
00:29:29.000Even in the constitution, it says who's going to be president will have to be of this religion, who's going to be prime minister has to be of that religion, and so on.
00:29:36.000So I have seen the ugliest manifestation of identity politics.
00:29:41.000So imagine if now I see with utter dismay that there's one of two political parties in the United States that is completely, desperately trying to replicate that which I escaped 45 years ago in Lebanon.
00:29:54.000And that's because the West is ungrateful.
00:30:12.000And the lack of gratitude, the lack of appreciation, and the lack of understanding of what we have here in the West has created a couple of generations of people that then believe so incredibly dangerously that they themselves hold the answers to create something that is better.
00:30:37.000And I want to credit you and Jordan Peterson.
00:30:40.000And you guys might not really realize it, but you have awoken millions of Westerners to really what's going on here.
00:30:48.000And it has manifested itself politically.
00:30:50.000Where you said you have Justin Trudeau, who is nothing more than a postmodern identity politic pandering politician.
00:31:00.000And what's so scary about that is these ideas are no longer just quarantined to the academy.
00:31:06.000Is that now they have gone into corporate boardrooms?
00:31:09.000Now they are running our tech companies and the highest levels of government, where the people who control the police and the military are now making their decisions from a framework that is complete and total garbage.
00:31:38.000Guys have heard me talk about it, thinker.org slash Charlie.
00:31:40.000T-H-I-N-K-R has solved that problem by summarizing the key ideas from new and noteworthy fiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form.
00:31:49.000Read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, including old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.
00:31:55.000If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons and what?
00:33:15.000Munchausen is actually 10 years ago, I had written a medical paper in a medical journal where I was talking about Munchausen syndrome, which is when someone feigns illness so that they can garner sympathy and empathy.
00:33:28.000And I argue that the orgiastic victimology that we constantly see now is a form of collective Munchausen.
00:33:57.000No, I'm completely going to credit you with that.
00:33:59.000I'm going to repeat it for the next many months because what I have said is that victimhood has now become the ultimate currency.
00:34:07.000Is that Jussie Smollett, instead of wanting to properly apply himself to win Oscars or Emmys or whatever, he's a singer and actor, instead of wanting to do that, he believed that the ultimate level of achievement came in being targeted or punished by the Western ruling class,
00:34:30.000which he incorrectly thought was white conservative Trump supporting men in negative 20-degree weather in Chicago coming after him, where he applied his time, resources, skill, and free time not to become a better person, but to stage an event that would then elicit his capacity to then have Much Hassausen syndrome.
00:35:03.000Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when you take someone that's under your care, your biological child, your pet, your elderly parent, and you harm them so that you could piggyback on their sympathy.
00:35:14.000That's what Elizabeth Warren does, right?
00:35:16.000She does collective Munchausen by proxy.
00:35:18.000Let me piggyback on the history of the indigenous people by pretending that I'm Indigenous.
00:35:23.000That way I get the ego strokes of their tragic history.
00:36:20.000They all think that we need to dismantle the existing order so that we could start fresh, right?
00:36:26.000The Marxists think that, the communists think that, the Islamists think that, the intellectual terrorists in universities think that.
00:36:34.000So they all share this kind of puritanical, utopian view that we are currently diseased.
00:36:41.000And if only you adopt Islam, or if you only adopt critical race theory, or if only you adopt socialism, then we could finally all hold hands, make love, and sing John Lennon's Imagine.
00:36:53.000And what I find to be interesting, as I mentioned earlier, is that the greatest partners in this are the Protestant Christians and the reason-based scientific community, some of which might be secular atheists.
00:37:07.000I'm just, you know, I just think of James Lindsay and Peter Bogogian, because there is kind of an admission between the Protestant community and that community that this world is pretty screwed up, that speech really works, you know, the utility of being able to discuss ideas is important and critical, that Western society isn't a garbage heap, and maybe we should try to preserve this thing.
00:37:27.000And I think that's kind of the new alliance that has been very in an unusual fashion kind of put together.
00:37:34.000Well, look, it's regrettable that this is true because I would love to be able to share my message and talk about the parasitic mind with everybody.
00:37:43.000But it's no coincidence that it's much more conservative outlets that invite me.
00:37:50.000Why isn't Rachel Madow inviting me on her show?
00:37:53.000Does she not support freedom of speech?
00:37:55.000I fight for women's rights and against female genital mutilation in the Middle East.
00:38:01.000So it's insane that now anybody who speaks from my position, supporting science, reason, logic, common sense, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, is really, I find the home in the conservative camp.
00:38:13.000Sure, I love to talk to the conservatives, but why isn't the other side interested in my ideas?
00:38:17.000That's the lunacy that we've arrived at.
00:38:20.000And it's not an inherently political book that you've written at all.
00:38:25.000It should be a completely unanimously accepted piece of literature where you identify, and I want to get to the final thing, which is hurt feelings over pursuit of truth.
00:38:37.000You identify identity politics, radical feminism, postmodernism, political correctness as these pathogens.
00:40:08.000And that is exactly why you see this fusion of alliance between Christians and scientific reason, you know, people inside of reason, because that is one thing that is agreed.
00:40:18.000And then the other side thinks that it's all nonsense.