World-renowned marketing professor Gad Saad has been a pioneer in using evolutionary psychology to understand human behavior, publishing innumerable scientific and scholarly papers. He s the Associate Editor of Evolutionary Psychology, and he s the author of some big books that have reached international audiences around the world, including The Consuming Instinct and The Parasitic Mind. He's currently the visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University, and today he joins me to talk about his forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, and how this concept helps to explain the progressive forces which are threatening basic Western values and principles that we too often take for granted.
00:05:59.340We're a kind and tolerant people, and therefore, maybe we can rehabilitate him by having him take ceramic courses,
00:06:06.900and then he won't in the future rape because he learned how to express himself through art.
00:06:13.020It sounds as though I'm being facetious, but that's kind of the stupidity that you see.
00:06:17.400So in this case, my empathy toward the criminal supersedes my empathy towards the endless prospective victims,
00:06:28.660and that's what makes me progressive and tolerant.
00:06:34.040You have idea generators and idea consumers in the generators of the suicidal empathy.
00:06:43.000Can I see them as puppet masters that are manipulating the public, or do they really, truly believe in the ideas that they generate?
00:06:54.260That's such a fantastic question because I often ask myself whether the ones who promulgate these ideas in the deep recesses of their minds,
00:07:04.540whether when they put their heads on the pillow at the end of the night, whether they truly believe their nonsense or not.
00:07:10.240And, you know, depending on the day, I'm either of one opinion or the other.
00:07:14.800Now, maybe this is a cop-out, and maybe it's not a good answer, or it doesn't fully satisfy you,
00:07:20.300but there's actually an evolutionary reason for self-deception.
00:07:25.800It was proposed by Robert Trivers, who is a very well-known evolutionary biologist,
00:07:31.520and he basically argued that in a social species like us, we are constantly involved in an evolutionary arms race
00:07:39.040where I'm trying to get you to do things that serve my interests that may not be beneficial to you,
00:07:45.080and then you evolve the capacity to read my cues to know whether I'm being duplicitous or not, manipulative or not.
00:07:53.680Well, one of the ways that I can ensure that you can't read any signs of manipulation on me is if I first believe it myself.
00:08:02.860So by me believing it, it removes any of the possible visual or auditory cues that might allow you to gauge the fact that I'm being manipulative.
00:08:13.280So I think for some of them, they probably truly believe it, but for others, they're consequentialists,
00:08:20.100and they say, I will be the puppet master, to use your term.
00:09:14.120I do think that, yes, there are many people who are doing it for the reasons that you just enunciated,
00:09:19.880but I do think that there is a class of sort of lobotomized progressives who truly believe that there is no higher virtue than to be orgiastically empathetic, right?
00:09:34.860The way that I measure how virtuous of a person I am is that anything that you throw at me, I will always be kind and forgiving, right?
00:09:45.580So the sort of hashtag refugees welcome, right?
00:09:48.640I'll tell you a great story, which will go into my forthcoming book, Suisala Empathy.
00:09:54.980And actually, it involves someone from your original homeland of Somalia.
00:10:00.720So in 2013, a Norwegian man was sodomized, was raped by a Somali.
00:10:08.680I don't know if the guy was legally or illegally in Norway.
00:10:17.440And then when he came out of prison and was going to be deported back to Somalia, the gentleman who had been raped by him felt very, very bad about the fact that his sodomizer was now going to have a difficult life in Somalia.
00:10:38.980And he'd have a much better life in Norway.
00:10:41.920Well, I submit to you, Ayaan, that that is not an evolutionary reflex that I would have predicted as an evolutionary psychologist.
00:10:49.400It makes a lot more sense for me to feel a sense of vindictiveness to the person who sodomized me than I would to feel, oh, I feel so bad for him.
00:10:59.100He's going to go back to Mogadishu, where there aren't many employment opportunities.
00:11:03.360So I think there is a subclass of people that have been fully parasitized by this orgiastic form of endless empathy.
00:11:11.380There are a growing number of thinkers who are concluding that what you are describing is a warped form of Christianity.
00:11:20.080When Christianity declined in the West, but people still have this, I would say, very strong impulse to worship or for spiritual fulfillment, it expresses itself in these odd ways.
00:11:33.600Right. Well, I do think that wokeism in general is a form of quasi-religion.
00:11:39.220And if you can draw a lot of very powerful analogies, right?
00:11:43.060So in religion, as you know, it doesn't matter which religion.
00:11:45.880It could be Islam, it could be Christianity, it could be Judaism, it could be a whole host of other religions.
00:11:50.680There are revealed truths that are incontrovertible to evidence, right?
00:11:55.820There is no way for me to engage the scientific method to demonstrate to you that your religious position might be incorrect because it's in my book and my book is right and therefore it becomes an infinite tautology.
00:12:09.240Well, wokeism has similar things, right?
00:12:11.780Where people are utterly impervious to any amount of evidence, right?
00:12:16.780And it's that that allows us to then espouse, quote, woke revealed truths that are so insanely contrary to reality, right?
00:12:26.340So the fact that, for example, in the 21st century, we're no longer able to confidently state whether it is men who bear children or women, whether it is men who menstruate or women, where, for example, a person who is going up for confirmation as a justice in the Supreme Court in the United States doesn't feel epistemologically confident to say, what kind of stupid question is that that you're asking me, what is a woman?
00:12:53.420Of course, I know what a woman, of course, I know what a woman is, and she is that.
00:12:56.480Well, the fact that that has happened demonstrates that then parasitic wokeism, exactly to your point, takes the form of a quasi-religion.
00:13:07.580And this parasitic mind virus, is it infecting just the West or are there other societies in history or in the rest of the world that are, let's say, infected with this suicidal empathy?
00:13:25.240And I actually remember your husband asking me a similar question.
00:13:31.200I had given a talk, it was during COVID, so it was the Stanford Classical Liberal Forum where I was talking about the parasitic mind, and he asked a question about a historical question.
00:13:42.940Is this something contemporary or have parasitized minds always existed or something to that effect?
00:13:49.440So apparently great minds think alike, and by great minds, I mean you and your husband.
00:14:05.040What is specific about today are the specific idea pathogens, right?
00:14:11.260Post-modernism did not affect those who were succumbing to the Salem witch hunts, right?
00:14:18.320That was another form of parasitic idea.
00:14:20.960So what is unique in the current reality is the constellation of all of the parasitic ideas that are unique to the contemporary time, all of which, by the way, Ayaan, as I know you know, but maybe some of your listeners and viewers don't,
00:14:38.780all of those ideas were generated, promulgated, spawned on university campuses by professors, because as I often joke and to kind of channel George Orwell, it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the dumbest ideas, right?
00:14:56.900So post-modernism, cultural relativism, social constructivism, radical feminism, identity politics, and many other of these parasitic ideas were all spawned on university campuses from roughly about 100 years ago, say for cultural relativism, to about 50 years ago for post-modernism.
00:15:18.020And they took hold of what is now three or four generations, but I think suppressed first by the events of the First World War, and then the Second World War, and then the world after that.
00:15:34.460Now, after the Cold War, I think there was this general sense that all of these bad ideas are defeated.
00:15:40.880And we didn't pay attention to the fact that they were hiding and incubating in universities in general, and especially in American universities.
00:15:49.400And I think that there's this sense that it's not just the universities that are captured.
00:15:58.240And so one institution that is, I think, highly relevant, that is captured via the universities, is one of the major parties in the United States, the Democratic Party.
00:16:12.460And initially, I'm going back to, say, from the time of Obama, you know, let's elect a black president because we're making history.
00:16:22.020That wasn't, at the time, I remember thinking, but that can't be a compelling argument.
00:16:28.440But now, knowing what I know, and listening to you talk about the parasitic mind, I think, for Americans, that was a compelling argument.
00:16:38.100And every time you invoke that terrible history in the brief period in America when they held slaves and during the segregation period, that you can invoke that and get this almost magical reaction.
00:16:59.880His economic policies, his foreign policies, his social policies, in fact, I think, but I'm a minority in this, he amplified racial tensions.
00:18:06.640And you can tell by this 2024 election.
00:18:09.260If Trump wins, and if he wins by a wide margin, do you think that it's over, that the mind virus is cured, that we can go back to, I don't know, sort of the normal reservation of self-interest?
00:18:30.940Before I answer that one, and I hate the fact that I'm going to answer it in a less than fully optimistic way.
00:18:37.940But before I answer that, let me just say that one of the reasons why in the first chapter of the parasitic mind, I talked about my personal history in Lebanon
00:18:47.940is because Lebanon is the perfect end result of what happens to a society that is fully organized along identity politics lines, right?
00:18:58.280So to your point about politics, and we're going to elect the first black president, the Lebanese system is called the confessional parliamentary system, meaning that which position you can ascend to is determined by your religion.
00:19:17.020So, you know, the president has to be, I can't remember if he's Maronite or Shia or Sunni.
00:19:26.120I mean, there's basically three main roles.
00:19:28.200There's the president, the prime minister, and the speaker of the house.
00:19:31.160And then one of them has to be Maronite Christian.
00:19:36.740So if you were a Lebanese Jew, there was no way that you could ever ascend to those positions by decree, by confessional parliamentary decree.
00:19:48.100So Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Balkans is exactly what happens to a society that follows perfectly, in quotes, the identity politic lines.
00:19:58.340Now, to come to your question, I don't think that if Trump wins, the mind virus ceases to exist, because it took, to our earlier question, 50 to 100 years for that infestation to then make its way in every nook and cranny of society, right?
00:20:22.260So when Donald Trump first came to power, I was one of the first to say, this is great, but the fight is far from over, because then Donald Trump steps down, and then we can go back to the orgy of woke mind viruses, right?
00:20:37.020So you need to have an eradication, an inoculation of these parasitic ideas everywhere, right?
00:20:44.800So, you know, Justin Trudeau still exists, and he may still exist, even though Donald Trump might become the president in 2025.
00:20:55.520I'm glad you mentioned, by the way, just in this context, I'm so glad you brought Canada up.
00:21:00.580One strategy of educating the public on why this mind virus leads to rubble, it's just, it's pure nihilism, it leads to a destruction of everything we know, is to look at the societies that actually applied it.
00:21:17.760So you take a country like yours, Canada, wealthy, first world country, and it's without, I would say, and with abandon, it applies this altruism, suicidal empathy, you know, mind virus, and in Canada, it's called multiculturalism.
00:21:37.620And so now, 20 years ago, Canada was the envy of the world.
00:21:43.660In 2024, Canada, like Sweden, is one of these basket cases, and you think, hey, we're all in North America, if you live in New York, or in California, or in any of the blue states in the United States, before you are sold on this, just go over the border, take a look at what's happening in Canada.
00:22:14.220You want to see what happens to the United States if you keep going down that path.
00:22:19.320As you said, Ayaan, just come up north and see what happens with us.
00:22:22.500So let me give you a few very explicit examples.
00:22:27.680I left Lebanon in 1975 after the first year of the Civil War.
00:22:32.780There was, even though progressive and tolerant Lebanon, it was endemic, it was embedded within society to have Jew hatred.
00:22:42.720And I discuss many of these examples in the book.
00:22:45.720And then I came to Canada, and for the next 30 plus years, I would experience very, very sporadic, once every few years, some instance of anti-Semitism.
00:22:57.440Fast forward to the last few years, I think it's less dangerous to be Jewish and certainly a high-profile Jew in Lebanon than it would be in Canada.
00:23:10.480Well, because exactly to your point about multiculturalism, we are a post-nation state.
00:23:16.800We don't have Canadian cultural values, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained to us.
00:23:22.340By the way, multiculturalism was really the product of his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
00:23:29.920So, well, today, because of immigration, you let in millions of people within a very, very short time period that are defined from their home societies by their endemic Jew hatred.
00:23:44.860So, you could take, for example, Pew survey results, where you poll people from Pakistan, from Lebanon, from Egypt, from Syria, from all of those countries that are now.
00:25:04.120Let me give you one, another personal one.
00:25:07.660Diversity, inclusion, equity is something that's now all over the place.
00:25:11.340Well, in Canada, at my university, you can't apply for research grants if you don't fill out a diversity, inclusion, and equity statement, right?
00:25:22.520Now, imagine the position that it puts me in.
00:25:25.560Because on the one hand, I'm the guy who stands up on top of the mountain screaming against how non-meritocratic, how anti-scientific diversity, inclusion, equity is.
00:25:35.120Then when I have to apply for a grant, when nobody is looking, I'm going to be inauthentic and play the game.
00:25:46.060So, therefore, it's now been probably six, seven years that I haven't applied for research grants because I'm unwilling to play along with the game.
00:26:22.420And is there, you're a psychologist, and one of the, I'd say, one of the things that correct human behavior is pain.
00:26:36.700When you implement these policies and people, a society becomes poorer, more violent, more unstable, the core identity breaks down, as that's the result of multiculturalism as is applied in Canada.
00:26:50.300Does that lead, that pain, does it lead to a reflection on what happened and a course correction?
00:27:00.340When is it not too late to course correct?
00:27:03.540You know, about two weeks after October 7th happened, I put out a tweet that, unbeknownst to me, I didn't think it would be so viral, had gone completely viral.
00:27:16.280I can't remember what the numbers were, but I think it was viewed 10, 20 million times.
00:27:21.600It was a tweet where I didn't exhibit my usual kind of optimism and playfulness.
00:27:28.240And even when I'm dealing with very difficult subjects, I try to be sarcastic or satirical or humorous.
00:27:33.060Here, it was a very, very dire, somber one.
00:27:36.720And that, I think, had caught the attention of a lot of people because they were saying, well, if the happy warrior seems like he's lost hope, then maybe we need to wake up.
00:27:44.380So, to your point, I think the thing that makes me most pessimistic is precisely that our ability to auto-correct seems to have been shut off, in part because of the parasitic ideas, in part because of suicidal empathy, right?
00:28:00.660I mean, you would think that if a physician gives me a pill to reduce my blood pressure and then my blood pressure doesn't go down, there's an auto-corrective mechanism that says, hey, it didn't work, let's auto-correct.
00:28:13.060But if irrespective of the amount of evidence that is thrown at me, I'm going to double down, well, then we're dead, right?
00:28:21.380I mean, if the doctor tells you that you've got pancreatic cancer and your response is, well, there is no such thing as cancer.
00:28:28.780And if there is cancer, it's probably because of the Jews who are holding back the cure for cancer.
00:28:33.700Well, then you're going to die of pancreatic cancer.
00:28:35.920So, I think that's what the West is facing right now, stage four pancreatic cancer.
00:28:41.400But I'd like to be able to wake up every day and feel as though your voice and mine still matters.
00:28:47.740And that's why it's important to do the shows that we're doing, why we're having this conversation, because I don't think it's ever too late to wake people up.
00:28:54.680The problem is that had we solved the problem 10 years ago, it would be a much less violent solution than the one that we will solve in 20 years.
00:29:08.440But the longer you wait for them to wake up, the less likely that it will be through reason and more likely that it will be a repeat of the Lebanon that I escaped.
00:29:16.580What makes me optimistic now is this unexpected groundswell against the Democratic Party.
00:29:26.340I don't even think that the election we are seeing now is so much for Trump as it is against wokeism, against the mind virus.
00:29:35.460I mean, every time you say common sense, people go, duh.
00:29:39.560So, there is this return, A, to common sense, and B, and now I'm talking about America, not Canada.
00:29:48.640America makes me more optimistic because it's grounded in Christianity.
00:29:54.900It's grounded in the principle of free market and political freedom.
00:29:59.860And I think that when you take these freedoms away from Americans, they are tolerant for a long time.
00:30:07.200And then they reach a level of intolerance.
00:30:14.320It's quite frightening, actually, because if things do get out of hand in America, it's unlike any other place in the world where you could have...
00:30:24.640It's probably one of the most awful things to have a civil war in America.
00:30:28.080But instead of having a civil war, we're having rallies.
00:30:33.520We have, I think it's one of the most optimistic things, the tech community is rising to this challenge led by Elon Musk.
00:31:12.020I mean, we were really getting into this grim place where we thought, okay, so Western civilization is just going to die without even a whimper.
00:31:31.600And since our last conversation, just a few days ago, you probably know, I don't know if we would put him as a tech bro or not, but Jeff Bezos, by simply refusing to allow the Washington Post to make an explicit endorsement of Kamala Harris, in a sense, I mean, he's not as forthright in his positions as Elon Musk.
00:31:56.040But wink, wink, we could assume that we have a sense of how he's starting to lean.
00:32:02.800So, of course, that makes me optimistic because for a moment, Ayan, close your eyes and imagine.
00:32:09.420Actually, yesterday was the two-year anniversary of X, right?
00:32:12.080Imagine the world we would be in today if Elon had not bought X.
00:32:19.260And I remember the day, I mean, probably within a couple of days of when it was announced that he had bought it.
00:32:23.820I had put out a clip on my channel, on my show, where I said that of all of the things that Elon has done or will ever do, I guarantee you none of them will come close in their historical importance as him having bought X.
00:32:41.240And I certainly doubled down on that position because my voice, your voice, many of the free thinkers' voices would have been completely in the abyss of, you know, invisibility were it not for him.
00:32:54.500So that, to your point, I definitely feel optimistic that a lot of these incredibly influential, wealthy guys are coming around to reason.
00:33:42.840We start having this incredibly intense conversation, both professional stuff, you know, parasitic mind and all this kind of stuff, but also very personal stuff.
00:33:55.540So when I see, now that I've gotten to know him, when I see all the stuff that the unhinged people write about him, it pisses me off.
00:34:04.760Maybe it's my Middle Eastern mentality of you always defend a friend or whatever, but it genuinely pisses me off because you really see how unhinged they are.
00:34:13.980The guy is such a sweet soul, never mind all his intelligence and all that.
00:34:20.220Yeah, it's absolutely amazing what Elon's doing, more power to him.
00:34:25.060I have met him and he is, I mean, we talk about authenticity.
00:34:29.980I don't think I've met someone more authentic and more himself than Elon Musk.
00:34:36.120And there's so many things I love about Elon, but one of the things that I think sets him apart from anyone else is, okay, he takes in all of these problems and listens and then says, okay, let's fix it.
00:34:49.060And it's literally what he is doing now.
00:34:52.980He wants us to be left alone by government and all these people.
00:34:56.280And obviously in the tech broad circles that he runs in, he then shows leadership and says, okay, let's take back America and he's going to execute it.
00:35:06.100We're going to take back America because of Elon Musk.
00:35:08.560And they threaten him with everything that they threaten people that they don't like.
00:35:13.460It was a character who wanted to put it on X, owned by Elon Musk, that Elon Musk should be put, that President Biden should put Elon Musk in prison.
00:35:26.880Is this the character who we can confuse as Rachel Maddow because he wears similar glasses to Rachel Maddow?
00:35:36.360I'm referring to Keith Oberman and I saw that and I just remember feeling that you are describing that Lebanese, but in my case, that Somali burst of flame and I couldn't help myself but tweet that he was insane and a loser.
00:35:49.100But to get back again to the optimism, there was another little video that someone tweeted quoting Van Jones, who works for CNN, and we know Van Jones a little.
00:36:02.980And he goes, if you call all white people racist and all men toxic and all billionaires evil and they leave, you shouldn't be mad that they're leaving.
00:36:14.720And I don't know, it's just a small grain of something, but isn't that, aren't they waking up?
00:36:50.420So maybe I'm overestimating the number of lobotomized people because, you know, I love receiving fan mails from the trucker and the corrections officers, precisely to your earlier point, because they are wedded to common sense and reality.
00:37:04.200I take a lot more pleasure from a trucker saying, I listen to your show when I'm driving from Kansas to Oregon than I do from a Stanford professor telling me how smart I am, because the former, that means that my message is resonating.
00:37:19.280But, you know, as we said earlier, the people who are educated become our leaders, and I don't see much auto-correction taking place within academia yet.
00:37:33.740When the Jeff Bezos thing happened a few days ago, I started seeing on my feed from fellow professors, all of them posting how they're no longer subscribing to the Washington Post, right?
00:37:48.920Because I don't, they're basically saying, I don't want to be a part of a newspaper that wouldn't support the candidate that I support.
00:37:57.660Now, imagine that you feel proud of having that reflex.
00:38:12.200No, because they are some of the most parasitized people.
00:38:15.660And here, I think the person that I most resonate with, and I think you'll understand why, who is one of my intellectual heroes would be Thomas Sowell, because he's a guy who was calling out this nonsense when you and I either weren't born or we were in diapers.
00:38:31.980And so I wish the world were inhabited with professors like Thomas Sowell and less like the ones that I hang out with.
00:38:40.820I think that's also something we have to fight for, and that is either, I don't know, to what degree we can rescue the existing universities and existing departments or start new ones.
00:38:54.000And here, I think, again, online, the internet helps.
00:38:57.000You've seen the work that Jordan Peterson is doing and others.
00:39:00.520And then the explosion in independent media, and that is, I think, why there is this push for censorship.
00:39:07.480We keep talking about misinformation and disinformation.
00:39:10.560It's just all sorts of excuses to censor us from top down, because the only way, really, that the far left, and I'm not talking about the Democrats, the moderates within the Democratic Party, but the far left within the Democratic Party, the only way they can come to power and hold on to power.
00:39:30.520It's through repression, through force, through censorship, and through this shameless lying.
00:39:39.280I mean, they'll accuse you of lying, and then they lie.
00:39:42.720They say that Trump is going to be the next Hitler, but they use the justice system to go after him and go after everyone they don't like.
00:39:59.240And then they came around and pretended it never happened, that they never called him sharper, none of these things, and they just flipped it.
00:40:07.140Who the hell do they think the American people are?
00:40:09.560And then they brought Kamala Harris, and they said, oh, she's Wonder Woman.
00:40:12.500So one day she's Wonder Woman, and the next day they're sitting there on these panels and saying, one guy likened her to a duck-billed platitude.
00:40:26.060So they just, and they say there are no conspiracies.
00:40:29.020There's a conspiracy unfolding before our very eyes between these far left groups within the Democratic Party and the media, and they think that they can hide it.
00:40:38.500And unfortunately for them, they can't hide it because of X, because of Substack, because of all of us making these videos and putting them on YouTube, even because of TikTok.
00:40:51.680I know TikTok is not a great platform, but still, it's free enough, and it's a challenge enough to the mainstream media.
00:41:00.020And so we break through the conspiracy theories.
00:41:02.720I think there's a lot to be optimistic about if we are willing to fight.
00:41:07.220And one thing that worries me is that one election victory can get people to be complacent again to say, oh, you see, I've seen this fight after 9-11-2001.
00:41:17.200People were awake, understood the threat of or tried to understand the threat of radical Islam.
00:41:22.360And then over time, they just went back to sleep.
00:41:25.200And there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who are converting to Islam through the Muslim Brotherhood and other activists, Islamist programs.
00:41:33.900So there is always that, I don't know, the impulse to fall asleep again.
00:41:41.540And I've actually often argued that, regrettably, the architecture of the human mind is such that you will ignore a problem until it literally comes to your doorstep, right?
00:41:54.160So what are you talking about Islam is dangerous?
00:41:57.540Well, it becomes true when now it is affecting how your children are being taught at school.
00:42:03.240So, for example, we just had a scandal in Quebec where 11 teachers were caught in a school infusing the official Quebec government-sanctioned pedagogy with all Islamic stuff.
00:42:17.940Well, I mean, I had been warning about this for 25 years.
00:42:20.560Nobody listened because it wasn't yet.
00:42:22.880So people don't have what I call the imagination to extrapolate, right?
00:42:28.000Because to extrapolate into some ugly future is scary.
00:42:32.880So I'd rather bury my head in the sand, as the proverbial metaphorical ostrich does, than to actually deal with it.
00:42:57.420But I often say, but why didn't you wake up three weeks earlier or three years earlier?
00:43:03.620Well, because he was busy doing other things.
00:43:06.320And so it is the few that have the capacity to extrapolate that stand up on top of the mountain and keep screaming until the others catch up.
00:43:14.880But to my earlier point, they will catch up.
00:43:18.680But then the retaliation, Second Amendment, will be a lot more violent than if we were able to solve the problem five years ago or 10 years ago.
00:43:27.540So before we finish, there are two questions that I want to ask.
00:44:02.300You have this proliferation of bad ideas and bad actors and a lot of bad money that advances it.
00:44:09.220What are the good ideas that we have that make it make an effective combat possible?
00:44:22.500So certainly an absolutist stance when it comes to freedom of speech.
00:44:28.000So freedom of speech cannot be a consequentialist principle.
00:44:32.360It's not, I believe in freedom of speech, but the second that you say, but you are sinking into consequentialism, right?
00:44:40.320I'm Jewish with my own very tragic personal history, but yet I support the right of Holocaust deniers to say that the Holocaust never happened.
00:44:48.920By definition, there's almost nothing that could be as offensive, as historically egregious, as insulting as to deny the Holocaust, but that's the price that I have to pay to live in a free society.
00:45:01.160So no consequentialism when it comes to deontological principles that we have to adhere to.
00:45:07.300There is no, I believe in journalistic integrity, but not when it comes to Hunter Biden's laptop, because if that story spread, then Orange Himmler would have come into power.
00:45:20.980And therefore, for that one particular case, it's okay if we ignore that.
00:45:25.660No, that's what made the West great, is it had this foundational set of deontological principles that were inviolable.
00:45:33.720Meritocracy and individual dignity over collectivism and grievances certainly has to be returned to, right?
00:45:41.740It doesn't make sense that chaired professorships are granted as a function of whether I am non-binary or two-spirited.
00:45:52.060I mean, by the way, this is not God's satire.
00:45:54.880University of Waterloo, which is often referred to as the MIT of Canada, it's the top engineering school of Canada.
00:46:03.140It's the top computer science, one of the top computer science programs in Canada.
00:46:06.900They put out a call for Canada research chairs, which is the highest chaired professorship that you can have in Canada, and it was restricted to two-spirit people, non-binary, trans women, and so on.
00:46:25.240So Alan Turing, one of the most famous computer scientists who's ever lived, would have been denied that, even though he was gay, he would have been denied that chaired professorship at the University of Waterloo because he wasn't two-spirit or non-binary.
00:46:41.540So meritocracy is the game that we play.
00:46:59.160There is no Lebanese Jewish way of knowing.
00:47:02.060That's why science is so beautiful, because it frees us from the shackles of our personal identities.
00:47:08.620There is no Lebanese way of doing psychology.
00:47:10.840Yes, there might be an element of Lebanese culture that makes us more hospitable than another culture, but there is no way to study scientific issues other than through the scientific method.
00:47:23.080So, I mean, there are others, but to summarize, absolutist defense of First Amendment, meritocracy, and individual dignity over tribalism and collectivism, the scientific method, and if we return to these, we'll be in good shape.
00:48:00.300She speaks of Lebanon with such great love.
00:48:03.840And then she obviously talks about what happened to Lebanon and how the Islamists there spread, hijacked the whole process, and introduced it to what it is now.
00:48:52.780There are incredible similarities in our stories in that there is a common enemy that was happy to eradicate both of our existence.
00:49:02.640Now, there is a slightly worse element, not to play oppression Olympics or victimology poker here, but being Jewish is worse in the Middle East than being Christians.
00:49:14.920Not that it's a fun amusement ride if you're a Christian, and certainly today there's the dwindling communities of Christians is going the same way that the Jews went, and we could have predicted this from history.
00:49:28.000But I think that there is a unique difference, which is, and I'll answer more generally how it was to grow up in Lebanon.
00:49:35.180I'm answering now the comparison between Brigitte and I.
00:49:37.400And so in Lebanon, one of the ways that you would most likely to be killed early in the war is they would set up roadblocks, different militia groups, and they would ask you for your papers.
00:49:51.360In Arabic, it's called Hawiye, which basically is like an ID card, like a passport that has your religion very conspicuously clearly on it.
00:50:01.320Well, if you were Christian, you might not make it out of some roadblocks, and you might make it or not make it, depending on who's stopping you.
00:50:11.600There weren't many roadblocks that you were going to make it out of if you were Jewish.
00:50:15.800So in that sense, there was an added horror to being Jewish in Lebanon.
00:50:20.460How was it for me to grow up in Lebanon?
00:50:22.480Look, there is an element to what people, the lore of Lebanon, the Paris of the Middle East.
00:50:29.600It was where all the jet setters were.
00:50:32.960I remember as a young boy, you know, how the women dress.
00:51:40.920But I could see that even as a young boy.
00:51:43.540So, for example, when I was five years old, I tell these, I'll mention very quickly a couple of stories from my Lebanon upbringing.
00:51:50.020When I was five years old, Gamal Abdel Nasser died, who was the pan-Arabist Egyptian president revered by all the Arabs because he was trying to unify all the Arabs into sort of one common block.
00:52:03.080Well, when he passed away, I wasn't quite six years old yet.
00:52:07.200As you know, often happens in the Middle East, people take to the street.
00:52:11.340They start screaming and lamenting and all this kind of stuff, shouting.
00:52:15.060And they were all coming down my street screaming, death to Jews, death to Jews.
00:52:19.840I remember as a five-year-old, I looked at my mom.
00:52:22.440I said, well, why are they screaming death to Jews?
00:52:36.420The day that we left Lebanon, Ayaan, I mean, literally the day when we got out and we cleared the airspace of Lebanon, the pilot said we are now outside of Lebanese airspace.
00:52:50.540So, my mother puts a pendant around me with a Star of David and says, now you can wear this proudly and not hide your identity.
00:53:08.940My wife comes to pick me up with one of our children who had just played a soccer match in the east end of Montreal, which has a particular demographic group that's not very friendly towards the Jews.
00:53:22.180As she came to pick me up, I was working at a cafe on my laptop.
00:53:25.800As we got into the car, my son, who was almost the exact same age I was in 1975, looks at me and said, daddy, if you wore a Star of David and came to watch me play soccer where we just came from, you'd be dead.
00:53:41.440So, 45 years ago, I escaped Lebanon and my mother puts a Jewish symbol on me.
00:53:47.38045 plus years later in Montreal, Canada, it's dangerous to wear that good symbol.
00:53:53.180So, I want to end on an optimistic note.
00:53:55.300I do think that the silent majority is with us, but I implore everybody, don't diffuse the responsibility onto others.
00:54:05.740It's not only Ayaan who should be speaking about these issues.