The Charlie Kirk Show - Why America is at the 'Abyss of Infinite Insanity' with Dr. Gad Saad

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody, Tana Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 My conversation with Gad Saad.

00:00:03.000 I laugh harder on this episode at one point than I have laughed in a long time.

00:00:06.000 So you'll have to listen to hear exactly what he says to make me laugh that hard.

00:00:10.000 You guys can email me your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:12.000 What are the parasitic ideas?

00:00:14.000 What can you do to push back against it?

00:00:15.000 We've had Dr. Saad before on this topic, but this is a much deeper and I think much more fulfilling conversation than we even had the first time.

00:00:23.000 I think you'll really enjoy it.

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00:01:08.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:01:09.000 Here we go.

00:01:10.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:12.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:01:14.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:17.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:21.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:22.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:23.000 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.

00:01:31.000 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.

00:01:40.000 That's why we are here.

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00:01:52.000 With us right now is one of my favorite guests.

00:01:54.000 He's a lot of fun.

00:01:55.000 Gad Saad is the professor of marketing at Concordia University and former holder of Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences.

00:02:04.000 He has held the visiting associate professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and University of California, Irvine.

00:02:09.000 And he also has a phenomenal book that he has authored called The Parasitic Mind.

00:02:15.000 And he is one of the most articulate and effective opponents of wokeism and the moral decay that is occurring in the West.

00:02:23.000 Professor Saad, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:26.000 Oh, so nice to be with you, sir.

00:02:29.000 So I think it would be helpful, Doctor, for you to kind of introduce the thesis behind your book, The Parasitic Mind.

00:02:35.000 A lot of our audience is new, and it's been a while since we've had a conversation.

00:02:40.000 Reintroduce kind of the argument you make in that book and why you believe that these parasites, otherwise known as kind of the woke variants, are so dangerous to Western society.

00:02:51.000 Right.

00:02:52.000 So I faced two great wars in my life.

00:02:55.000 The first great war was growing up in Lebanon when the civil war began.

00:02:59.000 And that allowed me to see the dangers of identity politics because everything in Lebanon is viewed through the prism of your religious identity. 0.58

00:03:08.000 And then the second great war that I faced was the one, the war that was being waged on reason, science, logic, common sense that we saw on university campuses.

00:03:19.000 I've now been a professor for almost 30 years.

00:03:21.000 And so I wanted to write a book that documented all of these dreadful ideas, which I refer to as idea pathogens, postmodernism, you know, radical feminism, cultural relativism, biophobia, the fear of using biology to explain human affairs.

00:03:38.000 So all of these idea pathogens have parasitized human minds, leading us to the abyss of infinite lunacy.

00:03:45.000 And so I wanted to explain first the pandemic of the human mind, of the viruses of the human mind, and then to hopefully offer an inoculation, a vaccine against these dreadful ideas.

00:03:56.000 So, Dr. Said, I want you to kind of explain to our audience how some of these ideas end up being so persuasive to people.

00:04:05.000 Let's just take one in particular: this idea that men can become pregnant. 0.78

00:04:10.000 It's something that Apple, a multi-trillion dollar company, has embraced.

00:04:15.000 It's something that you're not even allowed to push back against.

00:04:18.000 However, 95% of people in the West think this is patently insane.

00:04:23.000 How is it that things that we know are not true, that we know are filled with this kind of lack of wisdom and just war on reality, how do they end up becoming so embedded in our society and persuasive, not to lots of people, but to people at the top of the hierarchies in the West?

00:04:45.000 That's a great question because as I, in the book, as I was going through all of the idea pathogens, all the parasitic ideas, I wanted to find some commonality across these otherwise very different, dreadful ideas.

00:04:57.000 And so, in the same way that different cancers manifest themselves in very different ways, right?

00:05:03.000 Leukemia is very different from melanoma.

00:05:05.000 What they do share in common is that they all involve the unchecked cell division.

00:05:11.000 They all have that as an inherent feature of any form of cancer.

00:05:14.000 And so, what makes all of these idea pathogens so alluring is that they free us from the pesky shackles of reality.

00:05:22.000 So, for example, if I want to be freed from the pesky shackles of my biological reality, then I just need to put some prefix before my name and voila, I become of a different sex.

00:05:36.000 Postmodernism frees us from the shackles of any scientific phenomenon because it says that there are no objective absolute truths.

00:05:46.000 We are completely shackled by subjectivity.

00:05:48.000 We are completely shackled by our personal biases, by relativism.

00:05:52.000 Social constructivism, another idea pathogen, frees us from the shackles of realizing that my son will not become the next Michael Jordan because social constructivism basically says that we are all born tabula rasa, empty slates, with equal potentiality.

00:06:09.000 And then it's only the nefarious forces of socialization that make us become either Michael Jordan or flipping burgers.

00:06:16.000 Well, of course, socialization matters, but not so much.

00:06:19.000 Michael Jordan was certainly born with a set of athletic tools that made him more likely to be a great NBA star than I would have been.

00:06:29.000 But it is a very hopeful message to presume that any of our children can become anything.

00:06:35.000 So, because of this desire for always kind of navigating an orgiastic hope, we end up trying to eradicate the pesky shackles of reality.

00:06:44.000 And that's why all of these idea pathogens become so alluring and intoxicating.

00:06:49.000 Yeah, and they are alluring.

00:06:50.000 That's a great way to put it.

00:06:52.000 I love, I just wrote this down.

00:06:53.000 I'm going to use it.

00:06:54.000 It allows us to reject the pesky shackles of reality.

00:06:58.000 I suppose it's, is it an escapism type ideology then?

00:07:02.000 Is that what you're saying, Professor, that people kind of want to no longer be governed by the laws of nature?

00:07:08.000 They no longer want to live under these kind of this acceptance of a very finite reality of that you can't fly when you want to.

00:07:18.000 You have to live under the laws of thermodynamics.

00:07:20.000 Is there something within us?

00:07:21.000 Is there something within who we are as human beings that's always trying to escape the type of reality that we're in?

00:07:27.000 And it's, I suppose that's connected to the now unprecedented momentum that we're seeing with these literally insane, and as you put it, parasitic ideas.

00:07:39.000 Yeah, I'm not sure that it's due to, because escapism almost makes it sound as though there's kind of this hedonistic pursuit.

00:07:46.000 I think it's much more insidious.

00:07:48.000 It's much more psychoanalytic than that, right?

00:07:50.000 Reality creates boundaries for us, right?

00:07:54.000 Know that if I jump off from a building, I will be constrained by this thing called gravity, whereby my head will splatter on the pavement once I hit it.

00:08:03.000 Imagine if I can just jump off a building and float nicely while singing kumbaya.

00:08:08.000 My god, that sounds nice, and so it's really.

00:08:11.000 It's much more than just kind of a, a innocuous form of escapism.

00:08:16.000 It's really an epistemological form of terrorism.

00:08:19.000 Right, i've always, i've often analogized postmodernism which is probably the, the nastiest of all idea pathogens.

00:08:27.000 I've analogized it to the 911 hijackers, right, the 9-11 hijackers flew uh, planes onto our buildings.

00:08:35.000 Well, postmodernists fly planes of bs into our edifices of reason.

00:08:40.000 Right, it's a form of orgiastic nihilism right, by the way, you're you're.

00:08:45.000 When you asked me the question about, you know, men becoming pregnant and so on I uh, I had a prophetic story happen to me back in 2002 so this is 20 years ago and I recount the story in the parasitic mind where uh, I can't remember if I mentioned the story when I last came on your show, but it's worth repeating even to those who might have heard it.

00:09:06.000 Uh, one of my doctoral students had just defended his, his phd dissertation and we were going out for a celebratory dinner.

00:09:13.000 It was myself, my doctoral student, my wife and then the date that he was bringing along.

00:09:17.000 So the student in question calls me up before the the dinner date to give me a heads up that the, the lady that he was bringing to to the dinner, was a graduate student in postmodernism, radical feminism and cultural anthropology, to which I answered, ah, I get it, the holy trinity of Bs.

00:09:35.000 And so uh, I then promised him that I would be on my.

00:09:39.000 I promised him that I would be on my best behavior which, of course, was an utter lie.

00:09:43.000 So about halfway through the evening, I turned to the lady in question and I said to her, uh, I hear you're, you're a student of postmodernism.

00:09:50.000 There are no universals, correct?

00:09:52.000 She said yes.

00:09:53.000 I said well, do you mind if I propose what I think are some universals, and then you can correct me?

00:09:57.000 She goes, yeah, go for it.

00:09:59.000 I said, well, is it not true that within Homo Sapiens, only women bear children?

00:10:03.000 This is 20 years ago, Charlie.

00:10:05.000 Uh, she looked at me with utter disdain and disgust and said, absolutely not.

00:10:09.000 I said, it's not true that only women bear children, how? 1.00

00:10:12.000 So explain it to me?

00:10:13.000 She said, well, because there is some Japanese tribe off some Japanese island whereby, within the mythological realm, within their you know cultural folklore, it is the men who bear children.

00:10:25.000 So, by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us, you know, barefoot and pregnant. 0.94

00:10:31.000 So once I recovered from the mini stroke that was due to her stupidity, I then said, okay well, how about I propose a slightly less controversial example of a human universal? 0.71

00:10:42.000 So I asked her, is it not true that since time immemorial uh, sailors have relied on the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west? 0.98

00:10:53.000 And there she turned to a variant of postmodernism called deconstructionism, which is, Jacques De Rida, is the the leader of that movement whereby language creates reality.

00:11:03.000 There is no reality outside of language.

00:11:05.000 And so she said, what do you mean by east and west, and what do you mean by the sun?

00:11:11.000 That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena, literally her words.

00:11:15.000 I said, well fine, then the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west.

00:11:19.000 And then her answer was, well, I don't play those label games.

00:11:22.000 So this was a graduate student.

00:11:23.000 This was not an escapee from a psychiatric institution, although you can't tell the difference between the two.

00:11:28.000 So if I, so if I can't get a graduate student who is spending certainly her parents hard-earned money to agree that only women bear children, and there is such a thing as east and west and the sun, then you ask yourself what is the point of that exercise.

00:11:45.000 So that's, by definition, the epitome of a parasitic idea, it leads to nowhere.

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00:13:22.000 I haven't laughed that hard in a long time, Dr. Said.

00:13:25.000 So thank you for that.

00:13:25.000 Escapee from a psychiatric institution.

00:13:29.000 There's a lot of places I want to go with that.

00:13:31.000 When you had that encounter at the time and the years that followed, were you at all concerned that that fringe ideology would soon all of a sudden kind of govern the top levels of society?

00:13:41.000 Or did you think this is insane, but it's going to kind of just stay in its own corner in the university, you know, and it's never going to kind of get much traction?

00:13:50.000 Where have you been on that in the last 20 years?

00:13:52.000 Because it's now kind of the dominant philosophy of major cultural shaping institutions.

00:13:57.000 It's a fantastic question.

00:13:58.000 And I hate to toot my own horn.

00:14:01.000 I was the guy standing in the back row screaming while nobody listens, saying these ideas may start off in an esoteric department in the humanities and in the highfalutin world of the ivory tower.

00:14:12.000 But just like actual physical biological viruses break out of a lab, bad ideas are not geographically constrained to the women's studies department at Wellesley. 0.94

00:14:23.000 They eventually break out.

00:14:25.000 And so I kept warning people: this is going to become normalized.

00:14:29.000 And people would say, oh, come on, you're being hyperbolic.

00:14:32.000 You're exaggerating. 1.00

00:14:33.000 Who cares about what some idiot and postmodernist feminist thinking is espousing? 1.00

00:14:39.000 But I knew. 0.99

00:14:40.000 Now, I can't pretend to have been able to predict that it would have become such a tsunami of lunacy, but I certainly was well aware that dreadful ideas may start among the intellectual class, but eventually it infects every nook and cranny of society.

00:14:56.000 And that's what's happened.

00:14:58.000 Yeah, and that's, it wasn't taken seriously.

00:15:00.000 It's USA Today.

00:15:02.000 And it's the Women of the Year Award.

00:15:05.000 And it has here Rachel Levine as Woman of the Year, someone who spent 54 years as a man.

00:15:11.000 I'm sure you saw this.

00:15:12.000 Yes.

00:15:13.000 It's at the top levels.

00:15:14.000 We're now the government in USA Today.

00:15:16.000 So how did we get here?

00:15:18.000 Did no one fight along the way?

00:15:20.000 You were trying to warn it, but I guess people just didn't take it seriously.

00:15:22.000 And now they're afraid of this kind of regime of insanity.

00:15:25.000 Look, I tell you, you know, the seven deadly sins.

00:15:28.000 I'm sure you're familiar with them.

00:15:30.000 I've always said that they are incomplete because we need to do an amendment and add an eighth sin called cowardice.

00:15:36.000 The level of cowardice that shapes people's lives is simply astonishing.

00:15:40.000 Now, I happen to be, I always tell people, activate your inner honey badger because the honey badger is a ferocious animal, the most ferocious animal.

00:15:47.000 You need to be ideologically fierce.

00:15:49.000 When you see people espousing nonsense, stand up and be hurt by this attack on truth.

00:15:55.000 Now, I happen to have the personality to do it, but everybody can certainly weigh in to whatever level they feel is appropriate for them. 0.56

00:16:02.000 But what they can do is sit quietly in a fetal position while sucking their thumb. 0.70

00:16:07.000 That's called cowardice. 0.99

00:16:08.000 That's called you're an invertebrate, you don't have a spine. 0.96

00:16:11.000 Find your spine and speak out.

00:16:14.000 Well, my wife is Lebanese and you're Lebanese.

00:16:17.000 And I could say there's something Lebanese culture about standing up against nonsense.

00:16:21.000 A little more likely to be outspoken.

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00:17:31.000 So Dr. Said, I want to tell you a problem that I run into.

00:17:34.000 I talk on college campuses a lot.

00:17:36.000 Last night, we had a couple, you can call them postmodern trans activists.

00:17:40.000 I think we handled it pretty well.

00:17:42.000 Prior, a couple of weeks ago, I had another one of those people.

00:17:45.000 And when I had an opportunity to really dive into it, I found myself getting a little frustrated.

00:17:49.000 I didn't really let it show very much, but at some point, we couldn't agree on any form of absolute truth at all whatsoever, no universals.

00:17:59.000 And it got, it became this kind of endless mess of word play and word games.

00:18:07.000 I'm sure you've experienced this before.

00:18:09.000 For example, I would say, you do agree that there are the laws of gravity.

00:18:12.000 Well, that's your opinion.

00:18:14.000 And at some point, you just kind of throw up your arms.

00:18:16.000 And so I guess my question, Dr. Said, is, is that worth engaging in?

00:18:20.000 If yes, how do you combat it or counter it?

00:18:22.000 What are your best practices to help navigate that?

00:18:25.000 Fantastic question.

00:18:26.000 So the way you've set up the question is spot on.

00:18:30.000 It's only worth navigating such individuals as long as they don't have their, you know, their fingers in their ears going, la, la, la, I'm not going to listen to you.

00:18:39.000 So as long as they have the humility to at least give you an opportunity to plead your case, then I think it's worth engaging.

00:18:47.000 So that said, if they are willing to engage you, I do have a, if you like, a manual of best practices.

00:18:54.000 And it's one that I cover in chapter seven of the parasitic mind when I talk about how to seek truth, right?

00:19:00.000 So if I want to convince you of something, Charlie, how would I go about to offer you unassailable evidence that proves that my position is vertical?

00:19:10.000 And to do that, I do what's called the building of nomological networks of cumulative evidence.

00:19:17.000 It's a mouthful.

00:19:18.000 So maybe if you give me a minute or two to give you a specific example, then I think it'll be very clear.

00:19:23.000 So let's suppose I want to prove to you that toy preferences, the sex-specific toy preferences that children prefer, are not due to social construction. 0.99

00:19:32.000 They're not due to the fact that your parents are, you know, sexist, patriarchal pigs. 0.99

00:19:37.000 How would I go about doing it? 1.00

00:19:38.000 Okay.

00:19:39.000 So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get you data from across cultures, across time periods, across species, across methodologies, all of which point to that unassailable fact.

00:19:50.000 So let me give you examples.

00:19:52.000 I can get you data from vervet monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and chimpanzees that shows you that infants within those species exhibit the exact same sex-specific toy preferences that human infants do.

00:20:03.000 I can get you data from developmental psychology showing you that children, human children, who are too young to be socialized already exhibit those sex-specific toy preferences.

00:20:12.000 Therefore, they couldn't have been socialized by definition.

00:20:15.000 I could get you data from pediatric endocrinology, whereby little girls who suffer from a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, this is a condition that masculinizes the behavior of little girls.

00:20:28.000 Well, guess what happens to the toy preferences of such little girls? 1.00

00:20:31.000 They are perfectly reversed.

00:20:32.000 They become like those of little boys.

00:20:35.000 I can get you data from completely different cultures from ours in sub-Saharan Africa, where the sex-specific toy preference are exactly the same as those in the Western tradition.

00:20:45.000 I can get you data from 2,500 years ago, where you do an analysis of funerary monuments, mausoleums in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, where children are depicted on those mausoleums, playing with exactly the same types of toys as we do now.

00:21:00.000 So look how I have put the epistemological noose around your neck.

00:21:05.000 I got you data from different species, different disciplines, different cultures, different time periods, different theoretical frameworks, all of which point to that unassailable fact.

00:21:17.000 So the challenge, of course, is that it takes a lot of effort for you to build that network.

00:21:23.000 And it takes the epistemic humility of your interlocutor to actually give you the opportunity to present it.

00:21:31.000 So that's why when I started the answer to your question, as long as you don't go, la la la, I'm not going to listen, then I'm going to convince you.

00:21:38.000 And one other quick point, and then I'll seed the floor back to you.

00:21:43.000 What this allows you to do, Charlie, is that when I go into a very hostile room, knowing that people are a priori against anything I'm going to say, I walk with all of the swagger that is befitting of someone who's already built his nomological networks.

00:21:57.000 You're not going to defeat me in a debate.

00:21:59.000 On the other hand, if you were to ask me, hey, what is the net benefit or cost of the legalization of marijuana policy in Canada?

00:22:08.000 My answer to you would be, I simply haven't done the homework.

00:22:11.000 I haven't built the requisite nomological network to answer that with full assuredness.

00:22:17.000 So when I know, I know, and good luck to you in trying to debate me.

00:22:22.000 But when I don't know, I have all the humility necessary to say, you know what, I simply don't know.

00:22:26.000 So I think if people were to use this type of epistemological power tool to be able to construct their arguments, I think we'd be in a much better place.

00:22:37.000 Yeah, so Dr. Saad, two thoughts on that.

00:22:39.000 Number one, there are what happens to be what we'd be considered a common sense fits perfectly into that very well-articulated argument that you just put forward.

00:22:49.000 The challenge is I don't think most people are going to be able to put together arguments from separate data sets and over periods of time.

00:22:58.000 Instead, it kind of just descends into an argument where I know what a man is, I know what a woman is.

00:23:02.000 Guess what?

00:23:03.000 They're not wrong, by the way, by saying that.

00:23:04.000 They're actually totally right.

00:23:06.000 Their gut instinct actually is confirmed by the voluminous amount of data that you articulated.

00:23:11.000 As a tangent of that, I'd like to ask you, though, because there is, we get a lot of feedback from our audience, and we've taken some very strong stances on the entire kind of trans issue, if you will, about how this is a civilizational defining issue, about how this is fundamental.

00:23:27.000 Do you agree with that?

00:23:28.000 And if yes, what is the proper way that we should societally approach this issue?

00:23:34.000 Is it something where it's just kind of an annoyance, we kind of cast it aside?

00:23:37.000 Or is this something that is in some ways different?

00:23:40.000 That if we don't fight on this particular issue of what is a man, what is a woman, can men become pregnant, all these sorts of different things that are just kind of being repeated as incantations of our society.

00:23:50.000 If we don't fight against it, then who knows what comes next?

00:23:53.000 What's your take on that?

00:23:54.000 Yeah, again, such an amazing question.

00:23:57.000 Look, there are two ways to answer this.

00:23:58.000 Number one, no, I don't think it is the singular definitional issue on which we, you know, we need that this is the hill that we need to die on.

00:24:07.000 But then any context whereby you are murdering truth is one where you should stand up.

00:24:12.000 So that's kind of like saying, should I intervene when this person is being mugged in an alley or this person?

00:24:17.000 Well, all cases where someone is being innocent, you know, an innocent person is being attacked, you should hopefully intervene if you have courage.

00:24:23.000 So the unique circumstances around the trans issue is that it is such a departure from what defines us as a sexually reproducing species. 1.00

00:24:33.000 So what do I mean by that?

00:24:35.000 I appeared in front of the Canadian Senate back in 2017, along with Jordan Peterson, where I was arguing that as an evolutionary behavioral scientist, when I teach evolution, I have to teach, for example, sexual selection, which is Darwin's explanation for why species evolve certain traits that confer a mating advantage.

00:24:55.000 Why is the peacock's tail the way that it is?

00:24:56.000 It certainly doesn't, it serves no benefit to the peacock to have such a big tail from a survival perspective.

00:25:03.000 As a matter of fact, it reduces its survivability because it makes it more difficult for the peacock to take off into flight.

00:25:10.000 It makes it easier for predators to see you.

00:25:13.000 And so it evolves precisely because it confers a mating advantage.

00:25:17.000 The peacock's tail is saying, look, despite this burdensome cost of this tail, I am here.

00:25:23.000 I've survived.

00:25:24.000 Shouldn't you pick me?

00:25:25.000 So the recognition that there are two phenotypes for sexually reproducing species is not just an esoteric question.

00:25:32.000 It's what defines us.

00:25:34.000 Now, that doesn't mean that trans people don't exist.

00:25:37.000 It doesn't mean that trans people shouldn't be afforded every single right and human dignity that anyone else should have.

00:25:44.000 But I could walk and chew gum at the same time.

00:25:47.000 I could defend the right of transgender people to not face any institutional bigotry while also not murdering truth.

00:25:55.000 Therein lies the problem with many of these idea pathogens.

00:25:59.000 The proponents of these idea pathogens believe that in the service of a noble goal, if I have to murder truth, so be it.

00:26:07.000 So they have a very what's called consequentialist perspective on truth.

00:26:12.000 In other words, if I have to kill truth in the service of a higher goal, so be it.

00:26:17.000 Whereas I come on to defense of truth from what's called a deontological perspective.

00:26:23.000 Deontological means you never lie when it comes to the truth.

00:26:27.000 Now, if your spouse asks you, do I look fat in those genes?

00:26:32.000 Then you better quickly put on your consequentialist hat and engage in a white lie and say, no, of course not, sweetie, you look gorgeous.

00:26:39.000 So I'm not saying that for everything in life, you need to be deontological, but when it comes to truth with a capital T, I never see a millimeter.

00:26:48.000 So the trans issue is not the unique civilizational defining issue, but it certainly defines who we are as a biological species.

00:26:56.000 And so we should address it.

00:26:59.000 And it seems as if people are very afraid to engage on it.

00:27:01.000 As you said, the eighth sin is cowardice.

00:27:03.000 And I completely agree.

00:27:05.000 And why do you think that is?

00:27:07.000 I have a personal theory, which is that the very people that are pushing this particular trans issue, because there's a lot of these kind of, you know, let's say cultural instances happening that are being affected by your pathogens. 0.91

00:27:20.000 It's as if the people that are pushing the trans issue, they are unafraid to embrace the role of the tyrant. 0.79

00:27:27.000 They're unafraid to get people fired from their job.

00:27:29.000 They're unafraid to get people kicked off of social media.

00:27:33.000 It's a particular issue where the oppressed quickly becomes the oppressor instantaneously.

00:27:39.000 What's your take on how, because you're starting to see this deliberalization of the West when it comes to people that supposedly want equal rights, when in reality, they just actually want to be in charge and to make us conform to their specific pronouns and the way of life that they want us to kind of accustom to.

00:27:58.000 Look, it's a standard dynamic.

00:28:01.000 If you're at a bar and you start picking a fight with someone, you may have the courage to stand up to them.

00:28:07.000 But if you correctly predict that they have nothing to lose, they are irrational.

00:28:12.000 They're willing to go to any length to knife you for some small slight, then you might decide to walk away because you realize that you stand to lose more than they do.

00:28:23.000 So that's really the dynamic between the typical rational person and the blue-haired Taliban, right? 0.98

00:28:28.000 They're willing to go to any length to fight you.

00:28:31.000 And so you say, you know what, they're completely non-malleable.

00:28:36.000 I'm never going to be able to convince them.

00:28:39.000 So let me walk away.

00:28:40.000 But you can't do that in all circumstances because if I walk away and you walk away and the next guy walks away, so they are completely unimpeded in the promulgation of their nonsense.

00:28:51.000 So again, the people that landed in the Normandy beaches knew that they were going to be mowed down like little mosquitoes, and yet they signed up to do it.

00:28:59.000 They weren't guaranteed safe passage.

00:29:01.000 So of course, speaking out has some risks, but ultimately we all have to bear some of these costs.

00:29:07.000 Some of us will be more courageous than others, but what you can't do is simply say, let Gat Sad worry about it.

00:29:13.000 He's big enough.

00:29:14.000 He wears big pants.

00:29:15.000 He'll handle it on my behalf.

00:29:17.000 Don't diffuse responsibility.

00:29:18.000 Speak out, activate your inner honey badger, and we'll get rid of these problems by next Tuesday.

00:29:26.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

00:29:27.000 The war in Europe is the kind of chaos foreign identity thieves love and an easy target for American homeowners. 0.74

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00:29:36.000 That's small time stuff.

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00:29:41.000 It's exploding in the United States and you're not covered by homeowners insurance or common identity theft services.

00:29:47.000 The problem is the title to our homes are kept online.

00:29:49.000 An identity thief knows his big payday is as easy as forging your signature, stating you sold your home to him.

00:29:55.000 Then he'll take out loan after loan against your home and you won't know until the collection calls start or you get an eviction notice.

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00:30:21.000 Do not allow your home to be stolen by thieves.

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00:30:30.000 So Dr. Sand, you talk about activating your inner honey badger, rejecting kind of cowardice.

00:30:35.000 Talk about other technical things people can do, immediate action steps that people can take to push back against these parasitic ideas, the woke ideology that they feel so, they feel alone, they feel isolated.

00:30:48.000 What else can people do?

00:30:50.000 So before I answer this in a very pragmatic way, let me just explain some of the reasons why people are driven to inaction.

00:30:56.000 So there's something in ecological economics called the tragedy of the commons.

00:31:00.000 Let's suppose I've got 10 farmers, all of whom are using a particular patch of land for their livestock to graze, but the land needs a couple of years to recover.

00:31:11.000 And so we come to a gentleman's agreement, all 10 farmers, that none of us will use the land.

00:31:16.000 Honor's word, I won't violate it.

00:31:18.000 Now, the ideal thing is for me to violate it, hoping that the other nine people will stand up to their agreement.

00:31:27.000 Therein lies the tragedy of the common.

00:31:29.000 All end up violating the agreement, and then the land can never recover now.

00:31:32.000 How is that relevant to what we're talking about?

00:31:34.000 That's exactly what happens when you diffuse responsibility onto others to speak on your behalf, right?

00:31:40.000 Each of us says, You know what?

00:31:42.000 I'm going to speak, but you know what?

00:31:43.000 It's probably too risky for me because people are not going to like me on Facebook.

00:31:47.000 Maybe I'm going to get fired.

00:31:48.000 Maybe I'll be kicked off Twitter.

00:31:49.000 You know, someone else will do it.

00:31:51.000 So, hopefully, they will be courageous enough to speak, whereas I can lay in my cowardly action, and then hopefully the problem will be solved without me having to bear any costs.

00:32:01.000 So, we've already explained psychologically the mechanisms that lead to inaction.

00:32:05.000 The way you've taught to come to answering your question in a direct way, don't diffuse responsibility by taking whichever steps you think are appropriate for your own calculus of risk to reward, you know, ratio, right?

00:32:19.000 So, until about a year or, you know, I don't know, you know, 10, 12 months ago, maybe few people had heard of Christopher Ruffo, and then serendipitously it fell on him to become sort of all things anti-CRT.

00:32:31.000 And now, look at the number of parents that have stood up, right?

00:32:34.000 A year ago, it would have seemed impossible for anybody to fight against the infusion of CRT into the schools.

00:32:41.000 So, we mystify what it takes for us to make changes.

00:32:45.000 We overestimate the power of the blue-haired Taliban, and so we are all cowed into inaction. 0.91

00:32:51.000 But you don't need to be cowed into inaction, right?

00:32:54.000 Here's another thing I would say: you need to develop a personal code of conduct, a very exacting one.

00:33:01.000 So, when people tell me, Why do you do the things that you do?

00:33:04.000 I tell them that when I go to bed at night and I put my head on the pillow, I need to feel as though I never walked away from any opportunity to defend the truth.

00:33:13.000 If I did walk away, then I would feel like a fraud and I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

00:33:18.000 It would be the perfect recipe for insomnia.

00:33:20.000 Now, I'm not expecting all people to have my exacting standards, but move from wherever you are today, which is your utter, complete apathy, to just weighing in. 0.99

00:33:29.000 If one of your friends says something idiotic at the bar, challenge them privately.

00:33:33.000 So, I'm not asking everybody to build tomorrow a Joe Rogan's platform and spew all of their anti-CRT to the world, but do something. 0.97

00:33:42.000 Some of us will do a lot, some of us will do a little, but if we accumulate and amalgamate all those actions, I tell you, we will resolve the problem.

00:33:52.000 As you well know, Charlie, most people detest these parasitic ideas.

00:33:57.000 So, the silent majority is on our side.

00:33:59.000 Out, find your spine, grow a pair, and I promise you, we will turn this around very quickly.

00:34:06.000 All it takes is action, and we win.

00:34:09.000 If we act, we are going to win.

00:34:11.000 It's that simple: it's that their ideas are so bad, they're so unpopular, they're so easy to disprove.

00:34:18.000 The missing ingredient is the will, the will to fight, the will to oppose it, the will to call it out, the will to, quite honestly, not tolerate it.

00:34:27.000 That's something that people don't want to say because tolerance has become a fake virtue of the West.

00:34:32.000 That's a separate topic, actually, for another time, Dr. Saad.

00:34:34.000 But I want to thank you for coming on The Parasitic Mind, one of my favorite conversations I've had recently.

00:34:39.000 Incredibly smart.

00:34:40.000 And I love to have to come have you come out to Phoenix for a long, um, long-form interview.

00:34:44.000 It would be a lot fun.

00:34:45.000 It's gadsaad.com.

00:34:47.000 Parasitic Mind.

00:34:49.000 Thank you so much, Dr. Saad, for what you're fighting for and your effective and entertaining, I have to say, voice against these parasitic ideas and the damage that these people are doing to our civilization.

00:35:01.000 Thank you so much.

00:35:02.000 Thank you, sir.

00:35:03.000 Cheers.

00:35:06.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:07.000 Email us your thoughts.

00:35:08.000 As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:10.000 Deeply appreciate all the support.

00:35:12.000 Thanks so much.

00:35:13.000 Talk to you soon.

00:35:16.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - April 01, 2022

Why America is at the 'Abyss of Infinite Insanity' with Dr. Gad Saad

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