Dr. Gad Saad joins the show to talk about the death of the West and the rise of the citizen in Western civilization. Dr. Saad is a visiting professor and Global Ambassador of Northwood University and author of the new book, "Suicidal Empathy." He is also the founder of Turning Point USA, a youth organization dedicated to fighting for freedom on college campuses across the country. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and other media outlets, and is one of the most influential people in American politics. He's also the author of several books, including "Sonic: The Hedge Fund" and "Kamala Harris's War on America: How to Succeed in a Post-Civilized World," which will be out in paperback in 2020. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts. And don't forget to leave us a rating and review! It helps us keep track of future episodes and future guests coming on The Charlie Kirk Show! Subscribe, Like, and Share, and Subscribe to our other shows! The Dark Side Of Politics is a podcast about politics, economics, culture, and culture! Subscribe, share, and everything else going on in between! Charlie, and to become a Friend of the Dark Side of Politics! . Subscribe & Share this podcast on your social media platforms so you can be apart of the conversation. and help spread the word out there about what s going on around the world. ! Thank you for listening to this podcast! - Charlie, Charlie, the great podcast? - Tom, the CEO of TTPusa, the creator of the podcast, the podcast and the podcast that does it better than that, the future of it, the next generation, and more! , the next best thing, the best podcast in the rest of the world, and so much more. - Thank you, Charlie Kirk, the greatest, the realest of it all of the good stuff, the truth, the good thing, more and more, more than that! ... thanks for listening, and much more, thank you, Mr. , more than enough, really, really really, truly, really good than that... in the real thing, really? - Cheers, really good, really great, really??
00:00:36.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:43.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:21.000One of my favorite guests and very smart man, Dr. Gad Saad, visiting professor and global ambassador of Northwood University, and I think I got that right.
00:01:31.000Also, we have a forthcoming book, which I'm excited about the title, Suicidal Empathy.
00:01:37.000Won't be out until 2026 at the earliest, but the title alone is worth discussing.
00:01:43.000Dr. Saad, welcome back to the program.
00:01:51.000I saw a photo of you with President Trump where you towered over him, which reminded me of the fact that I shall never, ever take a photo standing next to you.
00:02:31.000Dr. Saad, I have been really enjoying your Twitter feed, your ex-feed lately.
00:02:36.000I think it's been so crisply put and so prescient and so important about the danger of what Kamala Harris would bring To America, but also to the entire West.
00:02:49.000I wanted to book you for the entire hour because you do speak about politics, but you don't always speak about politics.
00:02:54.000But you have found that this particular political threat is worthy of your platform and examination.
00:03:00.000Please walk our audience through how you're thinking about this.
00:03:02.000Well, you know, one of the things that worries me the most, Charlie, is the fact that When people should be engaging their cognitive system when making such a consequential decision as choosing the leader of the free world, they're solely and singularly focusing on their affective system, which basically is a fancy way of saying feelings over thinking, right?
00:03:27.000Now, it's not that emotions are not important, right?
00:03:31.000We are both a thinking and feeling animal.
00:03:33.000So, for example, when advertisers are trying to sell you a perfume, which is a hedonic product, they don't try to engage your cognitive system.
00:03:41.000They show you a sexy girl on a horse with flowing hair and then some cool brand name like Mystère, right?
00:03:49.000Because in this case, it's a hedonic product.
00:03:54.000But on the other hand, if I'm trying to sell you why you should buy my reverse mortgage or why you should invest in my hedge fund, then I need to engage your cognitive system.
00:04:03.000Now imagine if the most consequential decision that most citizens of a democracy will ever make is the choice of their leader.
00:04:11.000Imagine if one camp, which is the Kamala camp, is completely hijacking the electorate with joy, positive vibes, future vision, right?
00:04:26.000The whole goal is to ensure that you shut off your brain and only allow your feelings to dictate whom you choose for.
00:04:34.000That worries me a lot because the substance of what she's talking about is very dangerous.
00:04:39.000Yeah, and just, this is so important, and by the way, just so we're clear, I hear from people all the time, Dr. Saad, they say, oh, Americans are going to get their reason back and their cooler heads will prevail.
00:04:49.000I say, hold on a second, there's no guarantee at all that the rational or the reasonable will triumph over the emotive or the pathological, right?
00:05:01.000Dr. Saad, we should not underestimate the power of feeling-based propaganda.
00:05:07.000Thank you so much for having mentioned my next book, Suicidal Empathy.
00:05:12.000It's not that emotions are not important.
00:05:15.000Empathy is a noble emotion when it is triggered in a regulatory manner, in a manner that's within normal ranges, and it is triggered to the right target.
00:05:26.000But if I prefer being empathetic to you know, millions of illegal immigrants
00:05:32.000over my American veterans, then it is misfiring.
00:05:36.000So it's not that feelings are not appropriate, but you have to evoke them in the right context.
00:05:41.000So if I want to choose my president, what's your position on immigration,
00:06:52.000Because humans face great computational complexity in the world, right?
00:06:57.000If I stopped and tried to analyze the pros and cons of every single decision I'd be making, I'd spend the next week choosing which meal to have next, right?
00:07:06.000And therefore, we need to fast Find what a very bright German psychologist by name of Gerd Gigeranzer, he called them fast and frugal heuristics.
00:07:19.000Fast and frugal means frugal means that they should not be cognitively too effortful and fast means that they should be easily deployed, right?
00:07:35.000So, in a sense, it takes a Herculean effort to convince more people to engage their cognitive system over their emotional system.
00:07:44.000That's why, by the way, Charlie, whether you're Republican or you're Democrat, Whenever it comes around to election season, what is the first thing you do?
00:08:07.000But also, we shouldn't just allow one side to utilize it.
00:08:12.000Obviously, I want Donald Trump to win to save the West.
00:08:14.000How can Donald Trump use emotion and feelings to his advantage?
00:08:19.000Why should Kamala Harris have a monopoly on such tactics?
00:08:22.000So I'm going to answer it in a kind of a reverse way.
00:08:25.000So it's not that he should, he shouldn't elicit necessarily positive emotions, but he should try to at least mitigate the probability that people are negatively triggered by some of his behavior, right?
00:08:39.000So you know this because you're, I know that you're, you're, you're a good friend of his, and I'm sure that people have tried to tell him there are ways by which he elicits a negative Response.
00:09:27.000If we can get Donald Trump to not get the undecided voters to decide against him simply because he triggers a repulsive disgust reaction, then I think he's on his way to the White House again.
00:10:51.000Let me draw an analogy with a phenomenon that at first might seem to be completely unrelated but I'll tie it back together.
00:10:58.000So in Lebanese culture there is this process whereby you take the residue of the Turkish coffee and you flip the coffee mug and then it creates certain patterns and then someone will come over to your house, a fortune teller, to read your future, right?
00:11:15.000Well, my paternal aunt was supposedly a fortune teller and when she'd come over, she'd start telling you things like, oh, I see in your future there will be happiness.
00:11:26.000I see that in your future there'll be joy.
00:11:29.000So how is she able to get away with this?
00:11:31.000Because her enemy is specificity, right?
00:11:34.000She doesn't predict That in three months, you're going to be moving to Atlanta and get an 8% increase in your salary.
00:11:41.000She just hits you with anything that can be fitted to your reality in any possible way.
00:11:47.000That's exactly what Kamala Harris does.
00:11:50.000I see a future vision for who we will be, right?
00:11:53.000So all that Kamala Harris is, is my paternal aunt that was reading the coffee stain leaves in Beirut, Lebanon in 1967.
00:12:02.000That's right, and there's no specificity, it's nothing but abstractions.
00:12:07.000And so, for Ben Stiller to say something like this, I mean, I don't think Ben Stiller is exactly bright, but it shows that the mind virus can be so powerful they can convince themselves that you must vote for change while voting for the status quo?
00:12:24.000Or you can get Rosie O'Donnell, which I'm not sure if that's a different person from Keith Olbermann because I've never seen the two of them in the same room at the same time, but I don't know if you saw the clip of Rosie O'Donnell where she said she does not believe that Donald Trump was shot.
00:12:42.000So imagine the conspiratorial, parasitized mindset where you have the actual footage of the attempted assassination but that must have been some big conspiratorial plot to garner sympathy for Donald Trump.
00:13:00.000What upsets me the most though is that This kind of imbecility is not reserved only for, you know, the great unwashed who otherwise are not educated.
00:13:10.000To the contrary, some of the folks who engage in this kind of denial of reality, they're called professors and doctors.
00:13:23.000So, one of your tweets here was in response to an account about what's happening in the United Kingdom.
00:13:31.000Can you tease our audience about your analysis of what's been happening in Britain, especially these last couple months?
00:13:37.000Oh, I mean, Orwell couldn't have predicted it to be so nefarious, right?
00:13:42.000I mean, did you see the clip where an 11-year-old is being whisked away because he posted something?
00:13:48.000I don't know the exact details, right?
00:13:50.000People are getting put in prison for two years, whereas child groom gang rapists are being let go because to arrest them would be Islamophobic.
00:13:59.000It is simply dystopian what is going on in Britain.
00:14:02.000I simply can't believe that within my lifetime I've seen the change that's happening in the West.
00:14:07.000And we're going to go through why, and your tweet says it best, which is that there is no leader so weak and so castrated as Western leaders right now.
00:14:24.000We are seeing the suicide of the West of a civilization that is deciding to no longer exist, to no longer flourish, allowing the third world to come in and to rape our women, to overtake our culture and our society.
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00:15:49.000So, I've accepted a visiting professorship and global ambassadorship, what a lovely title, at Northwood University, which its official tagline is the free enterprise university.
00:16:03.000So my free thinking, my support for liberties and freedoms, all of the things that have historically made
00:16:10.000the United States great, those things that I defend are exactly the values
00:16:29.000As you know, it has not been an easy reality in Canada in general for Jews.
00:16:36.000Canada and Montreal in particular, which is my official residence, has been listed as the number one most anti-Semitic city in North America.
00:16:47.000So, for all sorts of reasons, I thought it was time to explore other frontiers, and so I'm really, really excited with this opportunity at Northwood.
00:16:56.000And so, I mean, Canada in some ways is a warning to America.
00:17:00.000How did it happen, and what lessons can we glean to apply the rise of our own communist Marxist revolution via Kamala Harris?
00:17:07.000Right, well, you know, the old expression is when the United States sneezes, Canada catches a cold.
00:17:13.000Well, we can argue in the reverse direction, right?
00:17:16.000Canada is certainly more woke and more parasitized than the United States, but That doesn't mean that the parasitic ideas will stop magically at the border, right?
00:17:27.000The border agents can't stop ideas from infecting your society.
00:17:31.000Look, Canada is built on the idea of, you know, a socialist paradise, right?
00:17:37.000It really is built on the idea that The more government intrusion you have to create the utopian social welfare state, the happier everyone will be.
00:17:46.000But of course, it's a Ponzi scheme in that it requires that 5% of the most productive people pay everything for the other 95%.
00:17:55.000Well, I happen to be part of those 5%.
00:17:58.000And therefore, it may not surprise you to know, Charlie, that at the end of the year, when I look at my bank account, thinking that there'll be a lot of zeros, I realize that there's actually almost zero amount of money left because, you know, our benevolent government has decided that my thoughts, my ideas, my words should be taxed to a level that most Americans could simply not fathom.
00:18:21.000So, Kamala Harris is trying to replicate the same ideology, which is to the extent that there are any differences between people, it can't be because there are individual differences between people.
00:18:33.000Some work harder, some work less hard, some are taller, some are shorter.
00:18:37.000It must be because there are some nefarious reasons why person A is behind person B, and I will come along, Kamala Harris, and create equality.
00:18:46.000So you will all be starving at the breadline, but you will be starving equally.
00:18:51.000So let me ask just if I could poke here.
00:19:22.000But now you might think, okay, I have already fleeced this guy enough, I'm gonna leave him be with his 40, around 40% remaining.
00:19:31.000No, if I now spend money, you will tax me 15% sales tax.
00:19:38.000Part of it is provincial tax, part of it is GST, the goods and services tax at the federal level.
00:19:44.000So once you take out 50, 55, 58% of my income tax, Then you take sales tax, then you take property tax, then you take school tax, then you take carbon tax, then you take gas tax.
00:20:03.000Imagine working in a place where So, for example, if I were 100% a slave, from January 1st to December 31st, none of my labor would be owned by me, right?
00:20:15.000If I were 100% free, all of it would be owned by me.
00:20:18.000Now, in the Canadian system, as I face it, I start making money, Charlie, around September.
00:21:07.000And then you also have to have the The government basically take all of your earnings and all of your income.
00:21:14.000So, in Canada, there's not that same sort of liberty-loving spirit that we have in America, but we're seeing the entire West kind of be on the ballot this November.
00:22:23.000Now you couple that with my next book, which is Suicidal Empathy, which is the idea that the most laudable thing you can be in life is empathetic, even if it means Killing your society.
00:22:36.000Nothing is more noble and progressive than not only self-flagellating and self-loathing, but killing off yourself because that is the highest thing that you could aspire to as a progressive.
00:22:50.000Well, if you let in millions of people into your country, whether through legal or illegal immigration, And those people do not share a single one of the foundational values that define the Western tradition.
00:23:06.000It doesn't take a fancy professor to tell you that things are going to go wrong.
00:23:10.000Now it might take five years, it might take 50 years, it might take 500 years, but you are going to have irrevocable friction that could only be resolved through violence.
00:23:20.000And that's why I've been predicting now for nearly three decades that civil war will be coming to the West.
00:23:25.000I simply can't tell you exactly on which date it will be.
00:23:30.000I hope it's prolonged and I hope it never actually happens.
00:23:34.000So what we have in America is an opportunity to refute this and to really create a referendum against it.
00:23:42.000For now, you as a newcomer to America, can you remind our country here how important this opportunity is and how Canadian conservatives would kill for an opportunity to retake their country?
00:23:59.000Look, every single idea to the extent that she ever espouses a tangible, intelligent idea or semantically coherent idea That Kamala Harris espouses is absolutely incongruent with the American foundational deontological values.
00:24:18.000So for example, when she does the price control nonsense, right?
00:24:21.000Well, I mean, we know what happens with price control.
00:24:31.000In the same way that if you throw a tennis ball a hundred times, you know exactly what's going to happen a hundred times because there's this thing called gravity that you can't escape while you're standing on earth, right?
00:24:42.000So whether it be her price control, whether it be her equality of outcomes, right?
00:24:47.000Her commitment to diversity, inclusion and equity, that is an ethos that is contrary to Everything that the United States stands for, right?
00:24:56.000Why do immigrants come from all around the world for the past 250 years?
00:25:00.000Because I could shed the restrictions I had from whatever society I'm coming from and I could come to the United States and through my individual talents be anything that I can be.
00:25:09.000While she's saying no, you all have to end up at the same breadbasket suffering from famine.
00:25:56.000Those are Arabic guys when I would speak to them.
00:26:00.000And they didn't know who I was, and they could speak freely to me in Arabic.
00:26:03.000They're always amazed how weak, effeminate, and castrated the West, and they view the West as a woman to be mounted.
00:26:11.000And in Arabic, you know, there's a very sort of vivid, somewhat non-poetic way of expressing that, as you can imagine.
00:26:19.000Yeah, and Kamala Harris wants that to happen.
00:26:22.000So Dr. Saad, what is your response to somebody that says that Trump is insufficiently as, let's say, conservative or as in alignment with how they would like things to be?
00:26:35.000The idea that Trump is not the way that I would be, that he's not my perfect fit.
00:26:42.000I'm not asking you to make an apology, you know, do an apology tour for Trump, but how would you respond to those sort of criticisms where people say, I'll just let Kamala Harris become president.
00:27:21.000Earlier you mentioned, look, if you're a single issue person and it's immigration, then you have to go for Trump.
00:27:27.000Well, I could list off the top of my head the top four, five, six issues that I could think of if I were an American voter, and all of them Trump would perform better than Harris, right?
00:27:39.000So don't let your emotions hijack what is a very consequential decision that will have not only an effect on you, but on your children and theirs.
00:27:49.000Kamala Harris and her type will change irrevocably the fabric of the United States.
00:27:56.000So, one thing that makes this election a little different is the class traitors.
00:28:01.000People that have defected from statuses they once had.
00:28:05.000For example, RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, or Elon Musk.
00:28:08.000Just looking at this from an analytical standpoint, Twitter being liberated, and Elon Musk, who I think is one of the most important courageous people in the West, That will make a very big difference.
00:28:22.000Talk, Dr. Saad, for a second about this idea of class traitors that are defecting at great risk to themselves to try to save the West.
00:28:32.000Well, look, I was asked recently, I guess about a year ago on a British show hosted by a psychiatrist, what was the singular phenomenon that I thought was most surprising about the human condition?
00:28:47.000And I thought for a second and then I came back and said, The inability to get people to change their minds.
00:28:54.000So, to your point, the fact that someone like Elon Musk, who historically has been a, you know, moderate democrat, but obviously he's a brilliant man, an intelligent, honest man, is able to change his opinion, it might seem like it's an easy thing to do, but for most people, there is no amount of evidence that will ever get them to sway from their anchored positions.
00:29:17.000So, to me, You know, I love Elon Musk even more than I already did.
00:29:22.000And as you know, I have a personal relationship with him because he is an honest guy.
00:29:27.000He is doing what I found through my studies to be a nearly impossible task, which is to get people to change their minds.
00:29:33.000So I don't see these people as class traitors.
00:29:36.000I see them as terribly intellectually honest and that they're willing to alter their beliefs in light of incoming evidence.
00:29:43.000To repeat kind of a theme we said earlier, just to close, Dr. Saad, if the West does not rise up this election, what does the world look like under Kamala Harris?
00:29:54.000Add a little more context or detail to that.
00:29:57.000Look, the reason why some of the most vociferous and staunch defenders of the West are immigrants, such as myself, it's because we hail from the types of societies, we've sampled from the buffet of societies that are not Like the way the West is, right?
00:30:28.000So if Kamala Harris and her ideological commitments were to flourish in the West, then you would have in the West exactly the types of societies from which millions of us have escaped from, right?
00:30:41.000So again, Both carefully, engage your mind, not your heart, and hopefully you'll come to the right decision.