Dr. Gad Saad is a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi and author of The Suicidal Empathy, a new book about the dangers of cultural suicide. Dr. Saad has been a long-time friend of the show and was a regular guest on the show in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
00:02:59.040I mean, we'll get there, because we have to get there, just because of his own biography, Dr. Saad's biography out of Lebanon and what's happened in that country.
00:03:07.640But I have to start with my personal pet favorite, which is birthright citizenship, which I believe is a suicide pact that a country would make, especially in this day and age of air travel that the founders and the drafters of the 14th Amendment would have never conceived.
00:03:24.060they couldn't have conceived of jets that can fly from south africa direct to los angeles they
00:03:29.660wouldn't have but here's the thing it is a suicide pack a trojan horse where we now have to our own
00:03:36.760laws bind us to our own constitution binds us to letting in ccp spies that can then determine an
00:03:43.180election if they get millions of voters that live in china but can vote in america why why strike us
00:03:48.800militarily if we just are letting them in the front door what is your take on birthright
00:03:53.340I mean I couldn't agree with you more of course the old maxim demography is destiny is exactly
00:04:00.680what you're alluding to and to your earlier point when you kindly introduced me as a scholar at Ole
00:04:06.560Miss and you said you know here's the Lebanese guy who's defending American freedoms the American
00:04:11.840spirit is enshrined within the DNA of our value systems right it's not the fact that you're born
00:04:19.240in the United States through, you know, the birthright nonsense that makes you American.
00:04:24.520It's whether you've internalized a set of values and of codes that uniquely defines
00:04:31.940American exceptionalism. And so even though I'm not born in the United States, even though I'm
00:04:38.100officially now Canadian, I venture to say that I'm a lot more of an American than people who just
00:04:44.600come to the U.S., plop down a kid, and then voila, he becomes American. So I couldn't be
00:04:50.080more in agreement with you. And the quicker that they, meaning the United States,
00:04:54.960changes that law, the better it'll be for everyone. Yeah. And I, you know, I try not to do this,
00:05:01.240but I did just tweet out something that I think is central. I didn't come up with this idea, but
00:05:06.120I was, we had Molly Hemingway and Sean Davis from the Federalist, and we're talking with them. And
00:05:11.340I just said, no great nation would allow a loophole that allows communist birth tourists to vote in
00:05:17.220its election and bestow citizenship on the children of those who broke the nation's law
00:05:21.760to enter the country in the first place. No great nation would allow themselves to get played like
00:05:26.780that. And I just, the fact that the legal scholars are telling me it's probably going to go seven to
00:05:32.520against getting rid of this ridiculous policy that the entire rest of the world seemed to have
00:05:37.540gotten rid of by about 2005 it breaks my heart because i i'm i feel grieved internally that we
00:05:45.080would be so dumb that we would be so hamstrung by idiocy um you know at least the greeks when
00:05:51.280they were letting in the trojan horse they didn't know what was inside of it we know what's inside
00:05:55.380of this trojan horse and i had my own take which is really the bleak thing if the supreme court
00:05:59.900rules that way okay you know i don't we don't know the full law maybe there's some dumb reason
00:06:04.160they can justify it but okay it should be pretty simple to change the law to have a congress that
00:06:09.740says oh chinese oligarchs don't get to just buy kids from america and their citizens tourists
00:06:14.620can't just sail a boat 10 miles offshore drop a kid on that boat and they're a citizen for life
00:06:19.400like that's an absurd thing and our congress should be ready to ban it and i think this gets
00:06:24.800back to your big point it's suicidal empathy that makes us refuse to do this obvious thing
00:06:30.000yeah i actually go ahead go ahead dr sad i was gonna say and i know maybe you're not ready to
00:06:36.500segue into the the islam issue but but it really is relevant to what we're talking about here
00:06:40.980where you sort of become impotent to implement you know auto corrective mechanisms that are
00:06:46.760complete common sense right so i often hear from esteemed american lawyers hey professor sad dr sad
00:06:53.440i i completely get your story with islam but you know unfortunately we have freedom of religion
00:06:59.120here. And I say, really? So you actually think that there is no mechanism that you could come
00:07:06.520up with that would then autocorrect the fact that not all religions are equally congruent
00:07:13.700with the foundational ethos of the United States, right? So, and I often do this satirical,
00:07:19.640you know, dialogue where I say, you know, some guy, some immigrant from that region says,
00:07:25.060I want to kill you. I want to rape you. I want to destroy your heritage. I want to destroy your
00:07:29.660religion. I want to destroy your culture. And then some American lawyer says, hey, you're not allowed
00:07:34.500to say that. That's incitement to violence. And then the noble immigrant responds, no, but that's
00:07:39.600in my religion. I have freedom of religion. Oh, okay, sorry, carry on. So it really is in its
00:07:45.420astounding form of impotent suicidal empathy to say that we are somehow hamstrung, as you said,
00:07:52.240by these codes that can never be, they're inerrant and they can never be changed.
00:07:56.880And if it has to be that we commit civilizational seppuku, so be it.
00:10:38.320Yeah, and they were talking about their equity cards and their point of personal privilege.
00:10:42.540I just I couldn't man it's it's but Blake made a great point it's laughable it's cartoonish it's
00:10:49.440fun to to make fun of but boy oh boy is that serious stuff it's serious stuff because it's
00:10:54.640one step away from you know Gen Z adopting a lot of that stuff and being mainstreamed in America
00:11:00.180too I think Blake agrees with me but it's okay if you don't completely if you go back through
00:11:04.940America's history we had this huge immigration wave between the 1880s and about 1920 and they
00:11:11.620set the, in the 1920s, they had an immigration act with a quota system that was overturned by
00:11:16.860Hart Seller in the 1960s. The people that fought in the 1920s for that immigration quota system
00:11:23.360did not consider America to be a nation of immigrants. It was a myth that was created
00:11:29.280after World War II to bring everybody together in this wave of Polish and Irish and Italian
00:11:35.980immigrants. But before that, they did not want this new wave of Eastern and Southern Europeans
00:11:40.960because they were too catholic or the culture they weren't anglo enough or whatever we were
00:11:45.860a nation of settlers and the people that warned then about this new wave of immigrants uh had a
00:11:51.520point because it then embedded this idea that we're a nation of immigrants and that we sort of
00:11:57.080have um what's the word uh the expression uh the blank slate right the this blank slate of humanity
00:12:04.500it doesn't matter if you're muslim it doesn't matter if you come from the third world you
00:12:07.800you'll be an american just as a piece of paper i hate this myth i want to destroy this myth
00:12:13.300and i'm saying it to a lebanese man who i believe is like fully american at this point
00:12:17.900so help me make sense of this what are your thoughts on the history that we just went through
00:12:23.420uh well i i completely agree with you actually uh look uh in suicidal empathy i talk about this
00:12:30.380classic categorization error that frankly if if you're if you're if you have greater cognitive
00:12:36.000of acuity than a three-day-old pigeon, you should be able to not be committing this error.
00:12:40.500And let me explain what it is. Your cat Fido is a feline. So is the wild lion in the jungle who
00:12:48.960would happily eat you. They're both called feline. The fact that they're both feline doesn't mean
00:12:54.580that when I'm on a safari in Botswana and I see a feline, I say, oh, let me get out of my Jeep
00:13:00.920so I can cuddle with the wild lion because he's a feline just like the cat I have at home.
00:13:06.000But when you say all immigrants are equal in the way that the progressively suicidally empathetic people do, they're saying that there is no inherent differences between the values that might come with one set of immigrants versus another.
00:13:22.720and I will receive tons of hate mail, gentlemen, where people say, well, you are such a degenerate
00:13:28.960hypocrite. You are an immigrant. So is your buddy, Elon Musk. So you are immigrants who can come
00:13:35.500here. But Mohammed and Ahmed, who went to a summer camp in Afghanistan, can't also be perfectly nice
00:13:42.560Arkansas immigrants. But that's what the categorization error is, right? When you say
00:13:47.660all immigrants are equal, you're simply saying that once they become members of the host
00:13:52.640society, they're treated equally under the law. But the idea that we all come with the exact same
00:13:58.940baggage, to your point about the Latin term, by the way, for empty slate, is tabula rasa. We're
00:14:05.480not tabula rasa, right? So it's not surprising, for example, if you let in millions of people
00:14:10.200that come from societies where they've been surveyed and shown to have 95, 96 percent of
00:17:16.380And this is why I think our foundational myths, it's the software that's running in the background of our brains that we think are these eternal truths, but actually they're myths, like America is a nation of immigrants.
00:17:30.240Well, we have immigrants, but we're actually a nation that was founded by settlers.
00:17:34.920OK, that's that's a core myth that we have to deconstruct.
00:18:30.260Sat Ted. What would you said? The West is a woman to be mounted.
00:18:34.780That is the Islamic creed. Remind us of it.
00:18:37.520I would repeatedly hear from Arabic speaking, Muslim speaking immigrants.
00:18:42.560And in this case, it was in Canada, always say that the West is a woman to be mounted.
00:18:49.280And what the reflex that that captures is that all of the virtues that we think as laudable in the West, compassion, magnanimity, generosity, empathy, are heard as weakness, weakness, weakness, and weakness by cultures that don't necessarily share our infinite largesse.
00:19:12.900And so it's exactly what they're saying.
00:31:33.680Pam Bondi will soon leave her job as the attorney general.
00:31:38.600She is going to get a different job within the administration.
00:31:41.920It doesn't sound like there is any bad blood between her and President Trump,
00:31:45.800but it does seem like they want her to go and do something else.
00:31:49.780And in an interim role, she will be replaced by Todd Blanche, who is currently her deputy at the Justice Department.
00:31:59.420So President Trump has given a truth social here, Dr. Saad.
00:32:03.880He says, Pam Bondi is a great American patriot and a loyal friend who faithfully served as my attorney general over the past year.
00:32:09.500Pam did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in crime across our country, with murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900.
00:32:17.060I'm sure that just happened. It was just a trend.
00:32:19.780uh we love pam and she will be transitioning to a much needed important new job in the private
00:32:24.040sector to be announced at a date in the near future and our deputy attorney general the very
00:32:28.080talented and respected legal mind todd blanche will step in to serve as acting attorney general
00:32:32.020thank you for your attention to this matter um blake we we we reported it and it has come true
00:32:39.480once again we did this with uh christy noem by the way same same deal well i think we had we had
00:32:45.000inside scoop on this one this time our scoop was some before but yeah well yeah fair enough the
00:32:49.640other one was a better call. Todd Blanche is tweeted as well. He says, Pam Bondi led the
00:32:54.600department with strength and conviction, and I'm grateful for her leadership and friendship. Thank
00:32:58.260you to President Trump for the trust and opportunity to serve as acting attorney general.
00:33:01.700We will continue backing the blue, enforcing the law, and doing everything in our power to keep
00:33:05.320America safe, which ties in to this other. I saw this story, Dr. Sad, and I got enraged because
00:33:11.820I've seen people do this to Charlie as well, where people put up murals and then people
00:33:15.960take them down or they vandalize them and it's it's so infuriating to watch uh this is out of
00:33:21.680providence rhode island a private business erected a mural to arena zarutska to memorialize her and
00:33:28.600her brutal uh murder on that on that train in north carolina by a repeat criminal who should
00:33:35.560have never been on the streets and this this mayor's trying to take it down in providence
00:33:41.640You said the intent behind these murals is divisive and does not represent Providence.
00:33:47.520The murals artist sort of feels like he was stifled.
00:33:50.040Do you have any regrets about what you said and how you handled this?
00:33:52.620I regret the state of where we are in politics today, where absolutely everything is political and controversial and hard.
00:34:01.120There's nothing we should be doing to take away from the tragedy of the loss of life that was represented here.
00:34:06.040But then it was distorted by an erroneous tweet by our president, and then a movement was funded by some right-wing billionaires, and it found its way to our community.
00:34:16.460A private owner of a building decided to put a mural up that I don't think he understood the full context of, and I was asked whether I thought it should come down, and I thought it should.
00:34:25.820It certainly wasn't bringing us together as a community.
00:34:27.980I don't think we're a stronger, more united community because of this mural, and I thought the best thing to do was to just take it down.