00:00:14.000What can you do to push back against it?
00:00:15.000We'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.
00:01:23.000His 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.
00:01:31.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:55.000Gad Saad is the professor of marketing at Concordia University and former holder of Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences.
00:02:04.000He has held the visiting associate professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and University of California, Irvine.
00:02:09.000And he also has a phenomenal book that he has authored called The Parasitic Mind.
00:02:15.000And he is one of the most articulate and effective opponents of wokeism and the moral decay that is occurring in the West.
00:02:23.000Professor Saad, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:29.000So I think it would be helpful, Doctor, for you to kind of introduce the thesis behind your book, The Parasitic Mind.
00:02:35.000A lot of our audience is new, and it's been a while since we've had a conversation.
00:02:40.000Reintroduce 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.
00:02:55.000The first great war was growing up in Lebanon when the civil war began.
00:02:59.000And that allowed me to see the dangers of identity politics because everything in Lebanon is viewed through the prism of your religious identity.
00:03:08.000And 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.
00:03:19.000I've now been a professor for almost 30 years.
00:03:21.000And 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.
00:03:38.000So all of these idea pathogens have parasitized human minds, leading us to the abyss of infinite lunacy.
00:03:45.000And 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.
00:03:56.000So, Dr. Said, I want you to kind of explain to our audience how some of these ideas end up being so persuasive to people.
00:04:05.000Let's just take one in particular: this idea that men can become pregnant.
00:04:10.000It's something that Apple, a multi-trillion dollar company, has embraced.
00:04:15.000It's something that you're not even allowed to push back against.
00:04:18.000However, 95% of people in the West think this is patently insane.
00:04:23.000How 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?
00:04:45.000That'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.
00:04:57.000And so, in the same way that different cancers manifest themselves in very different ways, right?
00:05:03.000Leukemia is very different from melanoma.
00:05:05.000What they do share in common is that they all involve the unchecked cell division.
00:05:11.000They all have that as an inherent feature of any form of cancer.
00:05:14.000And so, what makes all of these idea pathogens so alluring is that they free us from the pesky shackles of reality.
00:05:22.000So, 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.
00:05:36.000Postmodernism frees us from the shackles of any scientific phenomenon because it says that there are no objective absolute truths.
00:05:46.000We are completely shackled by subjectivity.
00:05:48.000We are completely shackled by our personal biases, by relativism.
00:05:52.000Social 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.
00:06:09.000And then it's only the nefarious forces of socialization that make us become either Michael Jordan or flipping burgers.
00:06:16.000Well, of course, socialization matters, but not so much.
00:06:19.000Michael 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.
00:06:29.000But it is a very hopeful message to presume that any of our children can become anything.
00:06:35.000So, because of this desire for always kind of navigating an orgiastic hope, we end up trying to eradicate the pesky shackles of reality.
00:06:44.000And that's why all of these idea pathogens become so alluring and intoxicating.
00:07:21.000Is there something within who we are as human beings that's always trying to escape the type of reality that we're in?
00:07:27.000And 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.
00:07:39.000Yeah, I'm not sure that it's due to, because escapism almost makes it sound as though there's kind of this hedonistic pursuit.
00:07:48.000It's much more psychoanalytic than that, right?
00:07:50.000Reality creates boundaries for us, right?
00:07:54.000Know 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.
00:08:03.000Imagine if I can just jump off a building and float nicely while singing kumbaya.
00:08:08.000My god, that sounds nice, and so it's really.
00:08:11.000It's much more than just kind of a, a innocuous form of escapism.
00:08:16.000It's really an epistemological form of terrorism.
00:08:19.000Right, i've always, i've often analogized postmodernism which is probably the, the nastiest of all idea pathogens.
00:08:27.000I've analogized it to the 911 hijackers, right, the 9-11 hijackers flew uh, planes onto our buildings.
00:08:35.000Well, postmodernists fly planes of bs into our edifices of reason.
00:08:40.000Right, it's a form of orgiastic nihilism right, by the way, you're you're.
00:08:45.000When 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.
00:09:06.000Uh, one of my doctoral students had just defended his, his phd dissertation and we were going out for a celebratory dinner.
00:09:13.000It was myself, my doctoral student, my wife and then the date that he was bringing along.
00:09:17.000So 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.
00:09:35.000And so uh, I then promised him that I would be on my.
00:09:39.000I promised him that I would be on my best behavior which, of course, was an utter lie.
00:09:43.000So 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.
00:10:13.000She 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.
00:10:25.000So, by you restricting the conversation to the biological realm, that's how you keep us, you know, barefoot and pregnant.
00:10:31.000So 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?
00:10:42.000So 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?
00:10:53.000And 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.
00:11:03.000There is no reality outside of language.
00:11:05.000And so she said, what do you mean by east and west, and what do you mean by the sun?
00:11:11.000That which you call the sun, I might call dancing hyena, literally her words.
00:11:15.000I said, well fine, then the dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west.
00:11:19.000And then her answer was, well, I don't play those label games.
00:11:23.000This was not an escapee from a psychiatric institution, although you can't tell the difference between the two.
00:11:28.000So 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.
00:11:45.000So that's, by definition, the epitome of a parasitic idea, it leads to nowhere.
00:11:52.000Does it make any sense that the same company who controls half of online retail also passively eavesdrops on your private conversations at your home?
00:12:00.000What about the idea of a single company controlling 90% of all internet searches, run your email service and gets to track everything you do on your smartphone?
00:13:25.000Escapee from a psychiatric institution.
00:13:29.000There's a lot of places I want to go with that.
00:13:31.000When 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?
00:13:41.000Or 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?
00:13:50.000Where have you been on that in the last 20 years?
00:13:52.000Because it's now kind of the dominant philosophy of major cultural shaping institutions.
00:14:01.000I 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.
00:14:12.000But 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.
00:14:40.000Now, 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.
00:15:30.000I've always said that they are incomplete because we need to do an amendment and add an eighth sin called cowardice.
00:15:36.000The level of cowardice that shapes people's lives is simply astonishing.
00:15:40.000Now, 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.
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00:17:42.000Prior, a couple of weeks ago, I had another one of those people.
00:17:45.000And when I had an opportunity to really dive into it, I found myself getting a little frustrated.
00:17:49.000I 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.
00:17:59.000And it got, it became this kind of endless mess of word play and word games.
00:18:07.000I'm sure you've experienced this before.
00:18:09.000For example, I would say, you do agree that there are the laws of gravity.
00:18:26.000So the way you've set up the question is spot on.
00:18:30.000It'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.
00:18:39.000So 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.
00:18:47.000So that said, if they are willing to engage you, I do have a, if you like, a manual of best practices.
00:18:54.000And it's one that I cover in chapter seven of the parasitic mind when I talk about how to seek truth, right?
00:19:00.000So 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?
00:19:10.000And to do that, I do what's called the building of nomological networks of cumulative evidence.
00:19:18.000So maybe if you give me a minute or two to give you a specific example, then I think it'll be very clear.
00:19:23.000So 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.
00:19:32.000They're not due to the fact that your parents are, you know, sexist, patriarchal pigs.
00:19:39.000So 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.
00:19:52.000I 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.
00:20:03.000I 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.
00:20:12.000Therefore, they couldn't have been socialized by definition.
00:20:15.000I 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.
00:20:28.000Well, guess what happens to the toy preferences of such little girls?
00:20:32.000They become like those of little boys.
00:20:35.000I 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.
00:20:45.000I 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.
00:21:00.000So look how I have put the epistemological noose around your neck.
00:21:05.000I got you data from different species, different disciplines, different cultures, different time periods, different theoretical frameworks, all of which point to that unassailable fact.
00:21:17.000So the challenge, of course, is that it takes a lot of effort for you to build that network.
00:21:23.000And it takes the epistemic humility of your interlocutor to actually give you the opportunity to present it.
00:21:31.000So 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.
00:21:38.000And one other quick point, and then I'll seed the floor back to you.
00:21:43.000What 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.
00:21:57.000You're not going to defeat me in a debate.
00:21:59.000On 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?
00:22:08.000My answer to you would be, I simply haven't done the homework.
00:22:11.000I haven't built the requisite nomological network to answer that with full assuredness.
00:22:17.000So when I know, I know, and good luck to you in trying to debate me.
00:22:22.000But when I don't know, I have all the humility necessary to say, you know what, I simply don't know.
00:22:26.000So 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.
00:22:37.000Yeah, so Dr. Saad, two thoughts on that.
00:22:39.000Number 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.
00:22:49.000The 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.
00:22:58.000Instead, it kind of just descends into an argument where I know what a man is, I know what a woman is.
00:23:06.000Their gut instinct actually is confirmed by the voluminous amount of data that you articulated.
00:23:11.000As 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.
00:23:28.000And if yes, what is the proper way that we should societally approach this issue?
00:23:34.000Is it something where it's just kind of an annoyance, we kind of cast it aside?
00:23:37.000Or is this something that is in some ways different?
00:23:40.000That 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.
00:23:50.000If we don't fight against it, then who knows what comes next?
00:23:54.000Yeah, again, such an amazing question.
00:23:57.000Look, there are two ways to answer this.
00:23:58.000Number 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.
00:24:07.000But then any context whereby you are murdering truth is one where you should stand up.
00:24:12.000So that's kind of like saying, should I intervene when this person is being mugged in an alley or this person?
00:24:17.000Well, all cases where someone is being innocent, you know, an innocent person is being attacked, you should hopefully intervene if you have courage.
00:24:23.000So the unique circumstances around the trans issue is that it is such a departure from what defines us as a sexually reproducing species.
00:24:35.000I 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.
00:24:55.000Why is the peacock's tail the way that it is?
00:24:56.000It certainly doesn't, it serves no benefit to the peacock to have such a big tail from a survival perspective.
00:25:03.000As a matter of fact, it reduces its survivability because it makes it more difficult for the peacock to take off into flight.
00:25:10.000It makes it easier for predators to see you.
00:25:13.000And so it evolves precisely because it confers a mating advantage.
00:25:17.000The peacock's tail is saying, look, despite this burdensome cost of this tail, I am here.
00:25:34.000Now, that doesn't mean that trans people don't exist.
00:25:37.000It doesn't mean that trans people shouldn't be afforded every single right and human dignity that anyone else should have.
00:25:44.000But I could walk and chew gum at the same time.
00:25:47.000I could defend the right of transgender people to not face any institutional bigotry while also not murdering truth.
00:25:55.000Therein lies the problem with many of these idea pathogens.
00:25:59.000The proponents of these idea pathogens believe that in the service of a noble goal, if I have to murder truth, so be it.
00:26:07.000So they have a very what's called consequentialist perspective on truth.
00:26:12.000In other words, if I have to kill truth in the service of a higher goal, so be it.
00:26:17.000Whereas I come on to defense of truth from what's called a deontological perspective.
00:26:23.000Deontological means you never lie when it comes to the truth.
00:26:27.000Now, if your spouse asks you, do I look fat in those genes?
00:26:32.000Then you better quickly put on your consequentialist hat and engage in a white lie and say, no, of course not, sweetie, you look gorgeous.
00:26:39.000So 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.
00:26:48.000So the trans issue is not the unique civilizational defining issue, but it certainly defines who we are as a biological species.
00:27:07.000I 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.
00:27:20.000It's as if the people that are pushing the trans issue, they are unafraid to embrace the role of the tyrant.
00:27:27.000They're unafraid to get people fired from their job.
00:27:29.000They're unafraid to get people kicked off of social media.
00:27:33.000It's a particular issue where the oppressed quickly becomes the oppressor instantaneously.
00:27:39.000What'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.
00:28:01.000If you're at a bar and you start picking a fight with someone, you may have the courage to stand up to them.
00:28:07.000But if you correctly predict that they have nothing to lose, they are irrational.
00:28:12.000They'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.
00:28:23.000So that's really the dynamic between the typical rational person and the blue-haired Taliban, right?
00:28:28.000They're willing to go to any length to fight you.
00:28:31.000And so you say, you know what, they're completely non-malleable.
00:28:36.000I'm never going to be able to convince them.
00:28:40.000But 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.
00:28:51.000So 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.
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00:30:30.000So Dr. Sand, you talk about activating your inner honey badger, rejecting kind of cowardice.
00:30:35.000Talk 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.
00:30:50.000So before I answer this in a very pragmatic way, let me just explain some of the reasons why people are driven to inaction.
00:30:56.000So there's something in ecological economics called the tragedy of the commons.
00:31:00.000Let'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.
00:31:11.000And so we come to a gentleman's agreement, all 10 farmers, that none of us will use the land.
00:31:51.000So, 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.
00:32:01.000So, we've already explained psychologically the mechanisms that lead to inaction.
00:32:05.000The 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?
00:32:19.000So, 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.
00:32:31.000And now, look at the number of parents that have stood up, right?
00:32:34.000A year ago, it would have seemed impossible for anybody to fight against the infusion of CRT into the schools.
00:32:41.000So, we mystify what it takes for us to make changes.
00:32:45.000We overestimate the power of the blue-haired Taliban, and so we are all cowed into inaction.
00:32:51.000But you don't need to be cowed into inaction, right?
00:32:54.000Here's another thing I would say: you need to develop a personal code of conduct, a very exacting one.
00:33:01.000So, when people tell me, Why do you do the things that you do?
00:33:04.000I 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.
00:33:13.000If I did walk away, then I would feel like a fraud and I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
00:33:18.000It would be the perfect recipe for insomnia.
00:33:20.000Now, 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.
00:33:29.000If one of your friends says something idiotic at the bar, challenge them privately.
00:33:33.000So, 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.
00:33:42.000Some 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.
00:33:52.000As you well know, Charlie, most people detest these parasitic ideas.
00:33:57.000So, the silent majority is on our side.
00:33:59.000Out, find your spine, grow a pair, and I promise you, we will turn this around very quickly.
00:34:11.000It's that simple: it's that their ideas are so bad, they're so unpopular, they're so easy to disprove.
00:34:18.000The 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.
00:34:27.000That's something that people don't want to say because tolerance has become a fake virtue of the West.
00:34:32.000That's a separate topic, actually, for another time, Dr. Saad.
00:34:34.000But I want to thank you for coming on The Parasitic Mind, one of my favorite conversations I've had recently.
00:34:49.000Thank 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.