The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - June 27, 2026


Discussing Suicidal Empathy on The Dana Loesch Show (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1010)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Suicidal Empathy Dana
Timothy Sandefur - Author of ＂Proclaiming Liberty＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1009) Chat with Piers Morgan - On Gabor Mate, Elon Musk, Migration & Grooming Gangs (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1012)

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

181.43

Word count

1,927

Sentence count

122

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

14

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Gad Saad is a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of the bestselling book, "Suicidal Empathy" and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. In this episode, we discuss the phenomenon of "suicidal empathy" and how it manifests in everyday life.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 My next guest, Gad Saad, who is the author of the bestselling book, Suicidal Empathy,
00:00:04.900 this headline, Dying to be Kind.
00:00:08.040 That is so true.
00:00:09.220 He is a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom
00:00:13.160 at the University of Mississippi.
00:00:14.940 He has a lot of thanks to his CV, and he joins us now via video.
00:00:19.840 Gad, it's a pleasure to have you.
00:00:20.920 Thank you so much for joining me.
00:00:22.220 And not to say that I don't trust your judgment at all, because obviously I do, but I had
00:00:28.100 to do a double take of this story because this is exactly what you wrote about. Suicidal empathy.
00:00:34.440 They go after the victim because she gave a simple statement that's supported by statistics.
00:00:41.260 Yeah. First, thank you so much for having me, Dana. Look, I'm the author of Suicidal Empathy,
00:00:47.160 and I couldn't believe the cases that I was documenting in the book. And I had the same
00:00:52.860 reflex as you, each time that I would discuss a new case in my book, I would double, triple,
00:00:58.720 quadruple check to make sure that it wasn't satirical because it really defies reality.
00:01:03.840 I'll give you even a worse example than the one that you mentioned, although the one that you
00:01:07.980 mentioned is a perfect manifestation of suicidal empathy. A white woman, a white progressive woman 0.96
00:01:12.940 goes to Haiti because she wants to demonstrate that the stereotype of black men ever committing
00:01:20.580 violence is only something that you see in white supremacist United States. So she goes to Haiti
00:01:25.900 to prove that point. Well, then she's slapped by this thing called reality where a Haitian man 1.00
00:01:31.560 in Port-au-Prince takes her to a rooftop and rapes her all night. At the end of which she 0.85
00:01:37.340 concludes, and the reason we know that she concludes this is because she writes a post-rape
00:01:42.520 essay where she says the end result of the rape is that she's thankful for the experience because 0.92
00:01:49.120 it demonstrated that the Haitian man was only raping her because of what he faced due to white 0.97
00:01:56.040 supremacy. So her body was a justified vehicle of the black man's hatred of white supremacy. 0.99
00:02:05.280 And he's in Haiti. So he's not even under the auspices of white supremacy, United States, 0.92
00:02:11.400 but she was thankful for the experience. You're right. That is absolutely horrific. And I feel
00:02:18.520 like we're rewiring an entire planet, an entire generation to accept this because this is, you 0.69
00:02:27.160 know, as you say, suicidal empathy, your people think that, you know, instead of kill them with
00:02:31.280 kindness, we're being killed because we're being kind. I'm not quite sure when this began. And,
00:02:37.560 you know, I've read a lot of what you have written, especially on this topic, because I just know
00:02:43.340 when I was growing up and I came of age in the 90s, when I was growing up, we did not have this.
00:02:48.840 There was this phenomenon. This did not exist. At least at that point, you had consequence and
00:02:54.720 you had cause and effect. And if you violated the law, then you were equal underneath the
00:03:00.640 Constitution. It's not like that anymore. When did this start? Is this recent or have we been
00:03:05.980 building? Yeah, no, great question. No, it's been building to a tipping point that then results in
00:03:13.240 you seeing it everywhere and the way that it's been building is it's really the one-two punch
00:03:17.960 of my earlier book parasitic mind and then suicidal empathy and let me explain how that is
00:03:23.040 so we are both a thinking and feeling animal dana and so if i wish to parasitize hijack your ability
00:03:31.000 to engage in critical thinking i need to do two things i need to hijack your cognitive system 0.86
00:03:36.400 your thought processes that's what the parasitic mind explained but then i also need to hijack your 0.88
00:03:42.980 affective system, your emotional system. And that's what I explain in Suicidal Empathy. 0.64
00:03:47.680 But to your exact question, it's the parasitic ideas that were originally spawned on university
00:03:55.400 campuses over the past 50 to 100 years that then laid the minefield for suicidal empathy to
00:04:03.340 flourish. And so it has been something that's been building up for many decades, and we're
00:04:08.780 now seeing the result of it. We are seeing the results of this. And I would think, because I
00:04:13.780 keep hearing these stories about women being the most directly affected. We had a story of, we were
00:04:19.100 talking about the UK grooming gangs, the report that came out, which is horrific. And they
00:04:23.500 interviewed, and I'll play this for you, Gad, if we can get that video ready. I can't remember what
00:04:28.900 cut that was. One of the fathers of this, one of these Pakistani rapists that was targeting these 0.98
00:04:34.300 girls, he said that he didn't really think that his son bore a lot of responsibility for this.
00:04:38.780 I'm going to have you listen to this and get your reaction.
00:04:41.080 Go ahead. 0.66
00:04:41.600 So you don't see it as rape?
00:04:43.380 Well, I don't.
00:04:46.280 And she's 13.
00:04:47.500 She's 13 years old.
00:04:51.120 Well, yes, obviously.
00:04:52.500 That's some responsibility lies for it.
00:04:55.220 But as far as grooming is concerned,
00:04:56.940 I think that the judge has gone over the board,
00:04:58.960 the jury has gone over the board,
00:05:00.720 the police has gone over the board
00:05:02.220 just because of this lads oration.
00:05:05.040 I was stunned.
00:05:06.600 I mean, we all were sort of that reporter
00:05:08.480 in that question and answer. He doesn't think that his son is responsible, a 13-year-old girl,
00:05:14.540 and he questions her virtue as a way to, I guess, you know, defend his son. This is not just one
00:05:21.180 example in the UK, as you know. There are thousands of these examples, and their families are defending
00:05:25.640 them. Exactly. Well, so look, one of the important features of life is to know to whom you should
00:05:32.480 ascribe causality, right? So many people, when they are successful in something, they say,
00:05:37.780 I did well on the exam because I studied hard and it was because of me, I'm intelligent. And if I
00:05:43.760 did poorly on the exam, I ascribe it to external factors. It's because Professor Saad is a mean,
00:05:49.560 an unfair jerk. Now, so what this guy is doing is he's basically saying that the description of 0.99
00:05:56.800 causality of this rape of a child does not lie with his son. He doesn't have personal agency,
00:06:04.500 So it must lie outside of him. 0.97
00:06:07.560 And by the way, you see that often in Islamic thinking, right? 1.00
00:06:10.660 So the reason why you need to erase the identity of women by putting them in what I call, 0.99
00:06:15.920 sarcastically, freedom veils is because if you don't do that, that might be very tempting 0.99
00:06:22.700 to men. 1.00
00:06:23.580 And so if you walk around like the non-Muslim woman that you are showing all of your beauty, 1.00
00:06:29.220 then maybe it makes perfect sense for the Muslim men to justifiably rape you. 1.00
00:06:33.900 It's grotesque. It is. And it's I like how you put it, too. It's somehow this person doesn't have the agency, but we all have agency and we get blamed for having agency that they then take from us. 1.00
00:06:45.160 It's it is a very wild scenario. And the United States, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be that far behind France, the UK, Spain, even some of these.
00:06:55.880 there was a woman who was beheaded by an Islamist in Florence, of all places, just last week in
00:07:01.560 Italy, like right there with the tourists at the height of tourist season. She has her head cut
00:07:05.100 off in the street. The United States isn't that far behind because of this suicidal empathy, 0.97
00:07:10.380 as you call it, and your amazing book, which people should go out and get. We have it baked
00:07:16.360 into our justice system at this point with restorative justice, where we're doing the
00:07:20.680 same thing here in the United States with criminals. And as you know, you've seen these
00:07:24.760 cases. But is it too ingrained at this point to, I guess, the lack of a better way to say it, to
00:07:34.580 reset? Because this is a really, it seems beyond just a logical discussion. And especially with
00:07:42.060 the left, it is very hyper emotional that I don't know if that conversation to reverse this could
00:07:47.500 ever be had with them. So I have good news and I have bad news relating to your question. Let's
00:07:53.580 start with the good news. The good news is this is not an intractable problem in that there is a
00:07:59.040 template. There is a set of autocorrective procedures that we could implement to completely
00:08:04.500 reverse the problem. So that's the good news. And this is actually good news because imagine,
00:08:09.580 God forbid, you go to see your physician and he or she says, here's the disease you have. There
00:08:14.160 are no cures for it. You've got three weeks left. Get your stuff in order. So this is not the case.
00:08:19.920 So we could celebrate the fact that in the abstract, we could implement a cure for this
00:08:25.140 problem.
00:08:25.780 Here's the bad news now.
00:08:27.380 I see absolutely no evidence that the West has an iota of testicular fortitude to implement
00:08:35.180 any of the autocorrective procedures.
00:08:38.180 So now to go back to the physician example, it's as if your physician says, well, there
00:08:42.200 is a solution for this and we can give it to you.
00:08:44.440 And then you answer, well, no, the disease doesn't exist.
00:08:47.240 And if the disease exists, it's really a Zionist plot and so on and so forth. 0.72
00:08:51.200 Well, guess what? 0.85
00:08:51.660 You're going to die from the disease.
00:08:53.080 So that's the problem.
00:08:54.340 If we can get people to actually, in unison, stand up and say, basta, no more.
00:09:00.100 We've had enough.
00:09:01.180 We can solve the problem by next Tuesday.
00:09:03.500 I worry and fear, Dana, that it's going to be a long, drawn out, bloody conflict.
00:09:09.080 I do too, especially, and you talked about this.
00:09:11.760 It doesn't seem as though people recognize altruism anymore.
00:09:15.280 I mean, there is a difference between being a welcome mat and then being altruistic.
00:09:19.340 There's a very, I mean, there's a significant difference and it seems as though no one recognizes it.
00:09:24.160 Exactly.
00:09:24.760 And so that's the perfect segue to actually explain the difference between adaptive empathy and suicidal empathy.
00:09:31.820 I'm not arguing that empathy is a bad thing.
00:09:34.960 As a matter of fact, as an evolutionary psychologist, I perfectly recognize that being a social species, we are expected to be empathetic.
00:09:42.540 We want our spouses to be empathetic, our best friends, our physicians, our therapists.
00:09:47.500 So empathy within well-calibrated ranges is perfectly rational.
00:09:52.400 The problem, as Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago, is that too little
00:09:57.360 of something is not good.
00:09:58.560 Too much of something is not good.
00:10:00.260 And life is about finding that middle sweet spot.
00:10:04.040 As applied to empathy, if I exhibit no empathy, I'm likely to be a psychopath.
00:10:08.640 path. But if I have my empathy mechanism on hyperdrive, if it hyperfires in the wrong
00:10:15.720 situations towards the wrong targets, I end up with suicidal empathy.
00:10:19.800 There you go. And the book as well, which everyone should go out and get if you haven't already,
00:10:24.160 Suicidal Empathy, Gad said, it's a pleasure to have you. I would love to have you back. And even
00:10:27.900 when you're able to have a longer conversation, because I would love to just pick your brain about
00:10:32.240 so many issues, but I appreciate the time that we had today. Thank you so much.
00:10:35.640 I would love that. Thank you so much, Dana. Cheers.