The Charlie Kirk Show - How the Pathogen of Progressivism is Killing Common Sense with Dr. Gad Saad

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00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:08.000 Today 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.

00:00:19.000 We have answers about postmodernism, feminism, identity politics, and more from one of the leading intellectual critics of the academy.

00:00:26.000 You're going to love this conversation.

00:00:27.000 Please consider supporting us at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:31.000 Email us your questions as always at freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:34.000 We have an AMA Ask Me Anything episode coming up for Monday.

00:00:38.000 And get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com.

00:00:41.000 Gad Sad is here, everybody.

00:00:43.000 Here we go.

00:00:43.000 Buckle up.

00:00:45.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:46.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:48.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:52.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:55.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:56.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:57.000 His 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.

00:01:06.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:14.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:17.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:18.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:20.000 Gad Sad is with us today, who is the author of the awesome book, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.

00:01:30.000 I think that is a perfect title, considering how everyone is worried about how things are so contagious today.

00:01:36.000 Gad, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:38.000 Oh, thank you so much for having me, Charlie.

00:01:39.000 Good to be with you.

00:01:41.000 So you make some phenomenal arguments in this book.

00:01:44.000 I'm still working my way through it.

00:01:46.000 And the part of the book I was writing on page 50 that really caught my eye was around political correctness.

00:01:51.000 And you really go after how dangerous political correctness is for Western society.

00:01:58.000 Can you build out kind of where does political correctness come from?

00:02:03.000 And why is it such a danger to the type of civilization that we have all come to enjoy?

00:02:09.000 Right.

00:02:10.000 So political correctness, I analogize it to the sting of a parasitic wasp.

00:02:16.000 So a parasitic wasp stings a much larger spider, rendering it zombified.

00:02:22.000 It then drags it into its burrow, lays an egg on it, and then as the egg hatches, it eats the spider in vivo.

00:02:30.000 Well, political correctness zombifies us into silence.

00:02:34.000 It leads us, instead of to the burrow, it leads us to the abyss of infinite lunacy.

00:02:38.000 How did it start?

00:02:39.000 Well, 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?

00:02:48.000 So universities are there not to assuage your feelings.

00:02:52.000 Universities are there to take me wherever truth takes me.

00:02:56.000 But 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.

00:03:06.000 So 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.

00:03:17.000 They almost evangelistically tell students there is no such thing as truth.

00:03:21.000 Don't even bother even trying to find it.

00:03:23.000 Can you help build that out?

00:03:25.000 Yeah, so in the book, I talk about a whole range of idea pathogens.

00:03:30.000 And 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.

00:03:42.000 So 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.

00:03:56.000 And 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.

00:04:03.000 But instead of being brainworms, they're actually idea worms.

00:04:07.000 Well, 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?

00:04:24.000 Now, in science, we do wake up every day thinking that there is a truth to be discovered.

00:04:28.000 Now, truth can change, right?

00:04:30.000 It is provisional.

00:04:31.000 What we thought was true in science 300 years ago might not be true today.

00:04:35.000 But 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.

00:04:42.000 And that's exactly what happens with postmodernism.

00:04:45.000 If I have time, can I give you a specific story that demonstrates it?

00:04:49.000 Absolutely, yes.

00:04:50.000 We're in no rush.

00:04:52.000 Go ahead.

00:04:52.000 Thank you.

00:04:53.000 So 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.

00:05:03.000 So it was myself, my wife, him, and his date, okay, for the evening.

00:05:08.000 And 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.

00:05:23.000 And so, and so he was trying to warn me, you know, please be on your best behaviors.

00:05:29.000 I said, oh, don't worry.

00:05:30.000 I'm going to be on my best behavior.

00:05:32.000 This is your celebratory night.

00:05:33.000 Don't worry about it.

00:05:34.000 Of course, that was complete nonsense.

00:05:36.000 There was no way I was going to be on my best behavior.

00:05:38.000 So 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?

00:05:45.000 Yes, no universal truth.

00:05:46.000 Do you mind if I share with you what I think are some universal truths and then you could tell me how I'm wrong?

00:05:51.000 Go ahead, go for it. 0.99

00:05:52.000 Is it not the case that within Homo sapiens, humans, only women bear children? 1.00

00:05:58.000 Is that not a truth? 1.00

00:05:59.000 Is that a statement that is absolutely universally true?

00:06:02.000 She looks at me with complete disgust, with scorn in her eyes and says, absolutely not.

00:06:07.000 What do you mean?

00:06:08.000 That's not true.

00:06:09.000 She 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.

00:06:20.000 So by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us, you know, barefoot and pregnant.

00:06:26.000 So after I recovered from my mini stroke, I then said to her, well, how about we tackle something that's a bit less contentious? 0.99

00:06:34.000 Because it's way too controversial to argue that women bear children.

00:06:39.000 So I'm going to give one that's a bit less controversial.

00:06:41.000 Is it true that within any vantage point on earth, the sign, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west?

00:06:47.000 So here she used another form of postmodernism.

00:06:50.000 It's called deconstructionism.

00:06:52.000 She argued, what do you mean by left and right?

00:06:54.000 By East and West, what do you mean by sun?

00:06:58.000 That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena.

00:07:01.000 I said, well, fine, the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west.

00:07:05.000 She said, well, I don't play those label games.

00:07:07.000 Now, she wasn't some meant, you know, some psychiatric patient who just escaped the psychiatric institute.

00:07:14.000 She was aping exactly what is taught in postmodernist classes.

00:07:19.000 So this is back in 2002. 0.99

00:07:22.000 So 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.

00:07:33.000 We end up where we are now.

00:07:36.000 Can you build this out further?

00:07:38.000 Because a lot of our listeners are new to these terms.

00:07:41.000 Postmodernism, they have no understanding of Jacques Derrida or Michelle Foucault.

00:07:48.000 And I always mispronounce the French name.

00:07:50.000 So you have to forgive me. 0.98

00:07:51.000 But yeah, I butcher him.

00:07:54.000 So go ahead.

00:07:56.000 So, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, the holy trinity of French postmodernists, the grand apostles, right?

00:08:05.000 So, let me explain to you what they now.

00:08:07.000 This is a theory.

00:08:08.000 I don't have definitive proof, although I do point to some proof for my theory in the parasitic mind.

00:08:15.000 Imagine 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.

00:08:25.000 They'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.

00:08:32.000 Well, maybe if we can develop a language that is as impenetrable as mathematics, then maybe we could also be the cool kids on campus.

00:08:41.000 So, therefore, we will create endless prose of faux profundity. 0.98

00:08:46.000 And 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. 0.99

00:08:58.000 And they were able to pull it off for 40, 50 years. 1.00

00:09:01.000 So, there you go.

00:09:02.000 I have so many questions about that, but let's just get so basic for some of our listeners that are still trying to understand this stuff.

00:09:10.000 Uh, because I first have become aware of postmodernism by visiting these university campuses.

00:09:16.000 And the first time I came aware of it four years ago, a Stanford student said, The laws of physics are completely subjective.

00:09:23.000 He said, What are you talking about?

00:09:24.000 I said, Force equals mass times acceleration.

00:09:26.000 They said, No, no, no, no, because force for me might not be force for thee.

00:09:30.000 I said, I'd never come across this absurdity.

00:09:34.000 Can you just help build out how they reject all science that we know to be universal?

00:09:39.000 They reject all just in the empirical pursuit of truth.

00:09:44.000 Can you please help build that out from just the ABCs of postmodernism?

00:09:48.000 Look, it's each of these idea pathogens, whether it be postmodernism or any of the other idea pathogens in the book.

00:09:54.000 So, 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.

00:10:06.000 So, for example, the idea that men and women should be equal under the law is something that any sane person should support. 0.63

00:10:13.000 So, that's equity feminism.

00:10:15.000 The 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.

00:10:27.000 There are no biological bases to any sex differences.

00:10:30.000 Everything is a social construction.

00:10:33.000 So, social constructivism is another one of those idea pathogens.

00:10:36.000 Now, 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.

00:10:55.000 It couldn't be because there are any innate differences across people.

00:11:00.000 So, it's hopeful.

00:11:01.000 I'd like to believe that message.

00:11:02.000 Therefore, I sign up for that idea pathogen.

00:11:05.000 So, 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.

00:11:17.000 And 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.

00:11:29.000 I was just with a multi-billionaire in Texas, and we sat down at length.

00:11:35.000 This was about a week and a half ago, and I walked him through postmodernism.

00:11:40.000 And 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.

00:11:51.000 And he said, there's no way this is actually being taught in our schools.

00:11:55.000 I refuse to believe it.

00:11:56.000 So, can you just reinforce that this is not some fringe ideology?

00:12:00.000 Because that's the other accusation I come under from critics: no, no, no, this is not predominant.

00:12:04.000 This is just, you know, the intellectual calisthenic class that's trying to expand their horizons.

00:12:10.000 Can you please just show how normalized this has become?

00:12:13.000 I 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?

00:12:25.000 Can't we just ignore those blue-haired people?

00:12:28.000 It isn't, right?

00:12:29.000 Because the blue-haired people become the prime minister of Canada, right?

00:12:34.000 The prime minister of Canada, Lady Justin Trudeau, is a walking manifestation of all these idea pathogens, right?

00:12:42.000 I 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.

00:12:52.000 It becomes the law of the land.

00:12:53.000 So let me give you an example.

00:12:55.000 Diversity, inclusion, and equity, which I refer to in the book as the DAI religion, right?

00:13:01.000 Is perfectly contrary to a meritocracy, right?

00:13:07.000 Because a meritocracy says, hey, we run the 100 meters, whoever crosses first wins.

00:13:11.000 Now, 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.

00:13:21.000 That's no longer the case.

00:13:23.000 It is now law in Canada.

00:13:25.000 And 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?

00:13:41.000 If you win the grant, what will you do to support DAI principles?

00:13:44.000 I do nothing to support DAI principles.

00:13:46.000 I hire the best people.

00:13:47.000 They could be transgender people of color. 0.97

00:13:49.000 They could be purple people from Mars. 1.00

00:13:51.000 I don't give a damn. 0.78

00:13:52.000 Well, if I said that, I wouldn't get the grant.

00:13:55.000 As 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.

00:14:04.000 He wasn't sufficiently progressive.

00:14:06.000 They never read the rest of his grant.

00:14:08.000 Maybe it could have cured cancer, but who gives a damn?

00:14:11.000 Because he wasn't serious about the DAI principles. 0.86

00:14:13.000 It's insane.

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00:15:18.000 So you also, we kind of talked about postmodernism.

00:15:21.000 You also talk about radical feminism.

00:15:23.000 And you touched on this a little bit.

00:15:26.000 Where has this almost militant push amongst the radical feminists? 1.00

00:15:32.000 Where does this come from? 1.00

00:15:34.000 And what is their desired objective if they have one?

00:15:38.000 Well, 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?

00:15:50.000 We can perfectly chew gum and walk at the same time.

00:15:53.000 I could be fully supportive of equity feminism, right?

00:15:56.000 While not agreeing with the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women.

00:16:01.000 I 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?

00:16:20.000 So, I could have two thoughts in my head.

00:16:23.000 I do have a functioning brain, but no, the activists say no.

00:16:27.000 If 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.

00:16:37.000 No, right?

00:16:38.000 So, 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?

00:16:51.000 Now, imagine there are 2 million species on earth for 1,999,999.

00:16:57.000 We perfectly use biology to explain their behavior.

00:17:00.000 But somehow, when it comes to humans, we are outside of our biology.

00:17:04.000 We transcend our biology.

00:17:06.000 So, 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.

00:17:17.000 So, 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?

00:17:26.000 And the response that I usually get, what are you talking about?

00:17:28.000 Those kinds of things are relevant for the mosquito and the zebra and the dog.

00:17:32.000 They don't apply to humans.

00:17:33.000 So, you see, what you end up getting is what I call death of the West by a thousand cuts.

00:17:38.000 Bit by bit, you erode the edifices of reason that we've built over many hundreds of years.

00:17:44.000 It's insane and it's infuriating.

00:17:46.000 And it really is suicide.

00:17:47.000 You're exactly right.

00:17:49.000 We are doing this to ourselves.

00:17:50.000 We're doing this by platforming these, as you call it.

00:17:54.000 I want to make sure I get this right.

00:17:56.000 You called it pseudo-intellectual terrorism or something of that sort, right? 0.68

00:18:02.000 Where 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?

00:18:17.000 Something that I don't quite understand is all of the mechanisms of accountability that are supposed to be checking and balancing the academy. 0.96

00:18:27.000 They don't hold any of these views and they refuse to even understand or know it.

00:18:31.000 How did this happen?

00:18:32.000 So, let's take, for example, cultural relativism, since we've already discussed postmodernism for a bit.

00:18:37.000 Cultural relativism is the idea that, you know, who are we to judge other cultures?

00:18:42.000 Each culture is shackled by its own unique idiosyncratic trajectory.

00:18:46.000 So, there are no human universals.

00:18:48.000 Now, that was originally started almost 100 years ago by an anthropologist at Columbia University named Franz Boas.

00:18:56.000 The idea was that he and his colleagues wanted to remove the possibility of people misusing biology in understanding human affairs.

00:19:05.000 Why?

00:19:06.000 Because a whole bunch of folks had usurped evolutionary theory, right? 0.92

00:19:11.000 So, take, let's say, later the Nazis, right? 0.73

00:19:13.000 There's a natural struggle between the races. 0.67

00:19:15.000 Hey, that's Darwinian. 0.94

00:19:16.000 We, the Aryans, won. 1.00

00:19:18.000 Sorry, Jews, you lost. 1.00

00:19:19.000 If we kill you, what's wrong with that? 1.00

00:19:21.000 That's Darwinian. 0.99

00:19:21.000 Of course, it has nothing to do with Darwinian theory, but all sorts of real nasty folks usurped evolutionary theory. 0.99

00:19:28.000 So these noble professors decided to come along and now create a new edifice of knowledge that is bereft of biology.

00:19:37.000 So again, as you can see, in each case, it starts off with somewhat of a kernel of truth, with somewhat of a noble cause.

00:19:44.000 But in the pursuit of that noble cause, we end up killing truth and we end up with the lunacy that we have today.

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00:21:01.000 So you call these ideas parasites. 0.83

00:21:04.000 You say they're infectious.

00:21:06.000 How can we metaphorically inoculate ourselves against these ideas?

00:21:12.000 How do we defeat this pathogen or these parasites?

00:21:15.000 So in chapter seven, I talk about what are called nomological networks of cumulative evidence.

00:21:21.000 It's a mouthful, so just give me a few minutes to explain it.

00:21:24.000 So 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.

00:21:35.000 Instead, 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.

00:21:53.000 Well, I argue that we have to develop that kind of discipline in building this tsunami of evidence whenever we take a position.

00:22:01.000 So let me give you a concrete example in the current context.

00:22:04.000 If I want to prove to you, Charlie, that toy preferences are not socially constructed.

00:22:08.000 In 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.

00:22:18.000 How would I go about proving that to you?

00:22:20.000 Well, I could get you data from children who are too young to be socialized and show you that they already exhibit those preferences.

00:22:28.000 I 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.

00:22:39.000 I'll do one more, although the network is much bigger than that.

00:22:43.000 I 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.

00:22:53.000 Well, girls who suffer from this disorder have toy preferences that are like boys. 0.55

00:22:57.000 So bit by bit, I could put the epistemological noose around your neck.

00:23:02.000 I don't need to get hysterical.

00:23:03.000 I don't need to get emotional.

00:23:05.000 I let the data drown you in your sorrow.

00:23:09.000 You follow?

00:23:10.000 And so, but the problem is that that takes effort.

00:23:13.000 And most people are cognitively misers. 0.88

00:23:16.000 They're intellectually lazy. 0.97

00:23:17.000 They'd rather use their emotions than to use their mental hygiene discipline. 0.83

00:23:23.000 So that's one.

00:23:24.000 In chapter eight, I then turned this into what are some actual concrete calls to action.

00:23:29.000 So one of the ones that sticks most with people is what I call activate your inner honey badger.

00:23:35.000 The honey badger is an incredibly ferocious animal.

00:23:39.000 It's the size of a small dog.

00:23:40.000 You could get six adult lions approaching it.

00:23:43.000 They will run away.

00:23:44.000 Why?

00:23:44.000 Because they look at this unbelievably ferocious animal and say, I don't want a part of that.

00:23:48.000 Well, you need to have that kind of honey badger ideological commitment when you're defending your principles.

00:23:55.000 The 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.

00:24:03.000 I'm coming after your ancestors. 0.99

00:24:05.000 I'm coming after your dead. 0.99

00:24:06.000 Why?

00:24:07.000 Not because I'm a mean guy, but because I so believe in the principles that I'm defending that nothing could shake me off.

00:24:15.000 I'm a honey badger.

00:24:16.000 The problem, of course, is that most people don't have that reflex.

00:24:19.000 Most people, if you go boo, they are cowed into silence.

00:24:23.000 No, defend your principles. 0.62

00:24:25.000 Let me, I found out that my children at their, they're in elementary school, their science teacher had a BLM avatar.

00:24:33.000 So I wrote to the principal. 0.93

00:24:35.000 I didn't leave it to somebody else to fight.

00:24:38.000 I got involved.

00:24:39.000 I 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.

00:24:49.000 And secondly, was the principal aware that BLM was not just, oh, I love black people.

00:24:55.000 BLM 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?

00:25:06.000 Well, the next day, the BLM avatar was gone.

00:25:09.000 Well, so imagine if everybody did what I did.

00:25:12.000 I didn't get hysterical.

00:25:14.000 I didn't get violent.

00:25:15.000 I didn't pick it.

00:25:16.000 I didn't burn down buildings.

00:25:18.000 I simply engaged her reason in a polite but firm way.

00:25:21.000 If each of us were to do that, we would defeat these idea pathages by next Tuesday.

00:25:26.000 If we don't, it's going to be a long ride.

00:25:29.000 I 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.

00:25:41.000 They 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.

00:25:50.000 Can 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? 0.98

00:25:58.000 It's one of the top tactics of the intelligentsia.

00:26:01.000 You're exactly right. 0.99

00:26:03.000 Remember 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? 0.97

00:26:21.000 My wife once told me many years ago, we've been married for 20 plus years. 0.98

00:26:26.000 She 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. 0.92

00:26:39.000 So again, you're exactly right. 0.94

00:26:41.000 That's how they get you. 0.94

00:26:42.000 They're charlatans, right? 0.94

00:26:43.000 They're faux profund, right? 0.96

00:26:45.000 But that's the beauty of it.

00:26:47.000 I give an example in the book where you could take the exact same scientific study, the exact same one.

00:26:52.000 And in one case, you can add a picture of a brain image with all the colors.

00:26:56.000 In the other one, you don't.

00:26:58.000 And then you ask people which one seems more scientific.

00:27:01.000 The people will judge the one that has the brain image as, wow, it's so much more scientific.

00:27:06.000 That's marketing, right?

00:27:07.000 It's all charlatanism, right?

00:27:09.000 But people are too weak in their self-confidence in terms of what they know, they succumb to it. 1.00

00:27:14.000 No, if it smells like bullshit, it's bullshit. 0.99

00:27:19.000 And 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. 0.99

00:27:42.000 They're in a very vulnerable state and they prey on them.

00:27:47.000 These are intellectual predators.

00:27:49.000 I've said this for quite some time.

00:27:50.000 And they've done such a disservice to our civilization, to the West.

00:27:57.000 And 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.

00:28:06.000 I'm a conservative, and I feel like I have all of a sudden become a defender of true liberal values, right?

00:28:12.000 Which I think is this incredible intersection, right?

00:28:15.000 I'm an evangelical, conservative Christian.

00:28:18.000 That my best friends on these things are James Lindsay and Peter Bogogian, who are not evangelical Christians.

00:28:24.000 And 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.

00:28:40.000 Can you talk about how high the stakes are?

00:28:42.000 This is not just some coffee table discussion.

00:28:45.000 This is not just some debate.

00:28:47.000 We hope we win.

00:28:49.000 This is actually the fate of Western civilization.

00:28:53.000 100%.

00:28:54.000 It's absolutely not hyperbolic to say that we are fighting for the souls of our society.

00:28:59.000 Look, 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.

00:29:09.000 I come from a culture that was defined by identity politics, right?

00:29:15.000 So 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.

00:29:24.000 In Lebanon, everything is determined by your religious affiliation.

00:29:29.000 Even 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. 0.57

00:29:36.000 So I have seen the ugliest manifestation of identity politics.

00:29:41.000 So 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.

00:29:54.000 And that's because the West is ungrateful.

00:29:57.000 They are blasé.

00:29:58.000 They don't understand what's out there.

00:30:00.000 And so they assume that the beauty of the West is something that's a default value.

00:30:05.000 Take it from someone who tried to come to the West.

00:30:05.000 It's not.

00:30:08.000 The world is not made up of the West.

00:30:12.000 And 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.

00:30:37.000 And I want to credit you and Jordan Peterson.

00:30:40.000 And you guys might not really realize it, but you have awoken millions of Westerners to really what's going on here.

00:30:48.000 And it has manifested itself politically.

00:30:50.000 Where you said you have Justin Trudeau, who is nothing more than a postmodern identity politic pandering politician.

00:31:00.000 And what's so scary about that is these ideas are no longer just quarantined to the academy.

00:31:06.000 Is that now they have gone into corporate boardrooms? 0.96

00:31:09.000 Now 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. 0.97

00:31:23.000 And it's dangerous.

00:31:24.000 And it has resulted in every declining civilization in the history of the world.

00:31:33.000 In our fast-paced world, it's time to make reading a priority.

00:31:36.000 At least it used to be.

00:31:37.000 A new app called Thinker.

00:31:38.000 Guys have heard me talk about it, thinker.org slash Charlie.

00:31:40.000 T-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.

00:31:49.000 Read 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.

00:31:55.000 If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons and what?

00:31:58.000 Become a better thinker.

00:32:00.000 Go to thinker.org slash Charlie.

00:32:02.000 That's T-H-I-N-K-R.org slash Charlie to start an extended free trial and put your mind in motion.

00:32:12.000 Well, identity politics is really a collectivist ethos, right?

00:32:16.000 It's basically saying that instead of placing the individual as the most fundamental unit, right?

00:32:24.000 So, for example, I'm not God Sad.

00:32:26.000 I'm first a Lebanese Jew, or I'm a green-eyed Lebanese Jew, right?

00:32:30.000 So it's always placing some collective identity marker ahead of my individuality.

00:32:37.000 Yes, I'm a Lebanese Jew, but that's just a small part of my multifaceted personality.

00:32:42.000 When I introduce myself to Charlie Kirk, I'm Gad Sad with all my faults and all my merits.

00:32:48.000 And of course, that's a central foundation of classical liberalism, right?

00:32:51.000 The dignity of the individual over the mob.

00:32:55.000 But of course, that's not what identity politics is.

00:32:57.000 Identity politics says, no, we're going to have a battle between all these identity groups.

00:33:01.000 We're going to pigeonhole people as oppressor and oppressed and so on.

00:33:05.000 By the way, when I talk about victimology, I talk about something called collective Munchausen, right?

00:33:10.000 Which is, I don't know, do you know the term Munchausen?

00:33:12.000 Do you know what that is?

00:33:13.000 No, it sounds German.

00:33:15.000 Munchausen 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.

00:33:28.000 And I argue that the orgiastic victimology that we constantly see now is a form of collective Munchausen.

00:33:36.000 That's a perfect way to put it.

00:33:38.000 You're exactly right.

00:33:39.000 Thank you.

00:33:40.000 And it's grotesque, right?

00:33:41.000 Because Jossie Smollette wasn't satisfied in being, you know, an actor that was getting paid well until he became a victim.

00:33:49.000 And if he wasn't a victim, he had to manufacture the victimology narrative.

00:33:53.000 It's grotesque, man.

00:33:54.000 It's insane.

00:33:57.000 No, I'm completely going to credit you with that.

00:33:59.000 I'm going to repeat it for the next many months because what I have said is that victimhood has now become the ultimate currency.

00:34:07.000 Is 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,

00:34:30.000 which 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.

00:34:55.000 Munchausen, or how do you say that?

00:34:58.000 Okay, I think it's perfectly put.

00:35:00.000 Syndrome by proxy, by the way.

00:35:02.000 Let me just complete the thing.

00:35:03.000 Munchausen 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.

00:35:14.000 That's what Elizabeth Warren does, right? 0.97

00:35:16.000 She does collective Munchausen by proxy.

00:35:18.000 Let me piggyback on the history of the indigenous people by pretending that I'm Indigenous. 0.89

00:35:23.000 That way I get the ego strokes of their tragic history. 0.99

00:35:26.000 It's insane.

00:35:29.000 So help some of our listeners answer this question.

00:35:35.000 I get more than any other question.

00:35:37.000 So I'll go around to all sorts of different groups.

00:35:40.000 We're giving five speeches a day sometimes.

00:35:42.000 And I get this question.

00:35:44.000 Charlie, now I understand the rubbish of postmodernism better.

00:35:48.000 Now I can see the fraud of critical race theory.

00:35:51.000 Now I can see the danger of identity politics.

00:35:55.000 But what do these people actually want?

00:35:58.000 I get this question all the time.

00:36:00.000 Why are they doing this?

00:36:01.000 Why are they espousing it?

00:36:03.000 Why are they spending billions of dollars for it?

00:36:06.000 Can you help build out from your own theory?

00:36:10.000 What is their goal in mind if they have one?

00:36:14.000 So I think it depends on which idea pathogen that we're talking about.

00:36:17.000 But in a sense, they're all utopians.

00:36:20.000 They all think that we need to dismantle the existing order so that we could start fresh, right?

00:36:26.000 The Marxists think that, the communists think that, the Islamists think that, the intellectual terrorists in universities think that.

00:36:34.000 So they all share this kind of puritanical, utopian view that we are currently diseased.

00:36:41.000 And 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.

00:36:53.000 And 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.

00:37:07.000 I'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.

00:37:27.000 And I think that's kind of the new alliance that has been very in an unusual fashion kind of put together. 0.73

00:37:34.000 Well, 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.

00:37:43.000 But it's no coincidence that it's much more conservative outlets that invite me.

00:37:50.000 Why isn't Rachel Madow inviting me on her show? 1.00

00:37:53.000 Does she not support freedom of speech?

00:37:55.000 I fight for women's rights and against female genital mutilation in the Middle East.

00:38:00.000 Does she not support that?

00:38:01.000 So 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.

00:38:13.000 Sure, I love to talk to the conservatives, but why isn't the other side interested in my ideas?

00:38:17.000 That's the lunacy that we've arrived at.

00:38:20.000 And it's not an inherently political book that you've written at all.

00:38:25.000 It 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.

00:38:37.000 You identify identity politics, radical feminism, postmodernism, political correctness as these pathogens.

00:38:41.000 I want to close with this.

00:38:42.000 The hurt feelings over pursuing truth.

00:38:45.000 How do we go about properly educating young people?

00:38:48.000 Because we're doing a miserable job of it right now in the West.

00:38:50.000 So there's something in mathematics that's called operations research.

00:38:54.000 Operations research is an applied mathematics field where you're trying to optimize or minimize something.

00:39:00.000 So for example, there's something called the traveling salesman problem.

00:39:02.000 If I want to go to 10 different cities visiting each one once, what should be the route that I take to minimize how much gas I spend?

00:39:09.000 Okay.

00:39:10.000 So now let's apply that framework to the university.

00:39:13.000 What's the objective function of a university?

00:39:15.000 What is it trying to maximize?

00:39:17.000 If it is the pursuit of intellectual growth, then we should stick to that.

00:39:21.000 If it is the minimization of hurt feelings, well, that goal is contra the other one.

00:39:27.000 You see what I'm saying?

00:39:28.000 So yes.

00:39:30.000 They're incompatible.

00:39:31.000 Yes. 1.00

00:39:32.000 When I study sex differences, I don't care how the results come out in light of hurt feelings.

00:39:38.000 I study it honestly using the scientific method and let the data fall where it may, right?

00:39:43.000 But what people are saying now is, no, no, no, you have to be consequentialist. 0.60

00:39:47.000 If the data hurts someone's feelings, suppress it, Nazi. 0.75

00:39:52.000 No, the truth is the truth, whether you like it or not. 0.87

00:39:54.000 So we need to teach kids that they need to be deontological in the pursuit of truth.

00:40:00.000 When it comes to truth, there is absolute truth.

00:40:02.000 I never sacrifice a millimeter to spare your feelings when I'm pursuing truth.

00:40:07.000 That's it.

00:40:08.000 And 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.

00:40:18.000 And then the other side thinks that it's all nonsense.

00:40:20.000 This is such an important book.

00:40:21.000 I wish we had more time.

00:40:22.000 It's The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad.

00:40:26.000 You can check it out: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.

00:40:29.000 Everyone, pick up a copy.

00:40:31.000 We're going to have to have you back on our podcast to keep on exploring these ideas.

00:40:35.000 And I think what you are doing is so incredibly important.

00:40:38.000 And I'll be honest, do not lose how blunt you are when you talk about this stuff.

00:40:42.000 It's incredibly effective and it's needed because people need a wake-up call with the danger this all is.

00:40:48.000 Thank you so much, Doctor, and hope to have you on again soon.

00:40:53.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:40:54.000 Get involved with Turning Point USA.

00:40:56.000 Start a chapter.

00:40:57.000 Get engaged.

00:40:57.000 Get involved.

00:40:58.000 If you want to come to our big, hopefully a celebration in Palm Beach in December, go to tpusa.com/slash SAS, the Student Action Summit.

00:41:08.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, just go to tpusa.com.

00:41:12.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:41:15.000 Please consider supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:41:19.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:41:21.000 Listen to our sister episode, our instant debate reaction.

00:41:23.000 God bless.

00:41:24.000 Talk to you soon.

The Charlie Kirk Show - October 23, 2020

How the Pathogen of Progressivism is Killing Common Sense with Dr. Gad Saad

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