00:01:44.300at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
00:01:46.740So even though you have a continental sensibility,
00:01:50.420you're in our Oxford, not their Oxford.
00:01:52.360but but but i wanted you know this this france thing it took americans by surprise maybe it
00:02:00.380shouldn't and as i'm looking at this this it looks like a coalition really i don't mean in any
00:02:06.740organized way it may be organized but between islamicists and leftists in france but isn't
00:02:12.460that what we isn't that what we had at columbia university the same the same they call it
00:02:18.360intersectionality. You might call it, some people call it an axis of evil. I don't know what you
00:02:22.320call it, but isn't that the same two forces? It is, right? They both share a disdain for the West,
00:02:29.000and so they feel as though they can be bedfellows. Let's join together and bring down capitalism,
00:02:34.640bring down American exceptionalism, bring down Western traditions, and then we will sort out
00:02:40.160which of the two camps will kill the other one. Of course, they don't realize that once we bring
00:02:45.780down the West, the kind and suicidally empathetic leftists will have a wake-up call when the0.79
00:02:53.520Islamists come after them. I should just mention, though, I only use the term Islamist because you0.97
00:02:58.340used it. There is no such thing as Islamism. There is no radical Islam. There is no Wahhabism.
00:03:04.280There is no militant extremist Islamism, right? So if you add the magical ism after Islam,0.92
00:03:10.240it doesn't somehow make it distinct from Islam. There is only Islam. Now, many Muslims are0.98
00:03:16.080perfectly peaceful because they don't take their religion seriously. But there's only one set of1.00
00:03:21.400canons known as Islam. And therefore, to try to find ways to euphemistically soften the blow on0.95
00:03:28.840Islam is probably not a good idea. Well, we don't like to get nasty letters to the editor, but I
00:03:34.260I take your point. But let me ask you this, though, about that. I mean, you know, there are people, scholars, like my friend Shadi Hamid, who writes for the Washington Post. They don't ever come out and say this, but from my standpoint, and I'm not Muslim, I'm Christian, it seems like that religion needs a reformation, that there are problematic texts in the Old Testament and the New Testament in terms of incorporating those beliefs into modern society.
00:04:02.960But that this religion, although there's two great branches, Shiite and Sunni, they've never had the kind of reformation where you get permission to be liberalized, to be more accepting.
00:04:16.380Yeah, but the reason why there can be a reformation, so it's not as though in the past 1400 years since Islam has existed, people haven't thought of the idea of reforming it.0.95
00:04:27.220But you can't, because you start with the premise that anything that is codified in0.82
00:04:33.880those Islamic texts is the final, unchanging, inerrant word of Allah, and therefore, by
00:04:40.400definition, canonically, you cannot engage in this information.
00:04:44.480So yes, there are passages in Deuteronomy that might not be nice, but there was a mechanism
00:04:50.420by which we can ignore the part that says, take your children, your insolent children
00:04:56.120to the gates of the city and stoned them to death.
00:04:58.940And so we don't worry today about, you know,1.00
00:05:01.240Orthodox Jews or Seventh-day Adventists
00:05:03.680taking the Old Testament or the New Testament,
00:08:29.940But if we were to take a sampling, a random sampling of all of the people that are committing most of the street violence, I can predict with almost near certainty that their names are not Jean Miquelon.
00:08:44.740I can predict that with absolute guaranteed assuredness.1.00
00:08:49.260And so Roe, whatever his name is, is a baffling imbecile.1.00
00:09:18.020Is he right? Could it happen here? I guess that's a big question.
00:09:20.800So E.O. Wilson, who is a famous Harvard biologist who recently passed away, one of my intellectual heroes, he studied in his research, he studied social ants.
00:09:31.900And he was once famously asked, Professor Wilson, what are your thoughts on socialism slash communism?
00:09:38.400And he paused and gave one of the greatest answers of all time.
00:09:41.740He said, great idea, wrong species, meaning that the reason why communism has failed for
00:09:50.040a hundred plus years in countless ecosystems is precisely because it is antithetical to
00:09:55.820some foundational principles that define our human nature, right?
00:10:00.840On the other hand, social ants have a reproductive queen, a indistinguishable cast of worker
00:10:11.740Some are taller, shorter, harder working, less harder working.
00:10:15.020And so that idea that we just need to tax those ogre rich people and then we will live
00:10:22.680in the beautiful unicornia, I understand that mindset because it also appeals to another
00:10:29.340frailty of human nature, which is envy, covetousness, right?
00:10:34.060That's why the seven deadly sins have envy as one of the seven sins.0.99
00:10:38.460Why does that bastard have more money than I have? That's not fair. If only my parasitic overlord called the government can steal his money and redistribute it, we can all hold hands and be happy. So that reflex exists. It is an inerrant feature of human nature, but we've tested that experiment and it always fails.0.99
00:11:01.180Well, and in the more or less theoretical world, I mean, I've never heard anybody say that France's tax burden was too low.
00:11:09.380I mean, it's two and a half times the average burden in the United States.
00:11:13.240And this idea that you Democrats like say you can't incarcerate your rate out of the crime problem.
00:11:20.380And I take their point. You can't tax your way out of France's problems, I wouldn't think, because pretty soon there's no money.
00:11:28.980Well, I'm living proof, right? So, I mean, I'm not Elon Musk, but I'm certainly more successful than the average person. Let me tell you what I escaped from in Canada. The highest tax rate at the provincial level is, I mean, at the federal level is, I think, 33%. The highest tax rate at the provincial level, where I lived in Quebec, is 25.75%. So we're well over 50%.
00:11:54.320Now, whatever the government allows me to keep, which is around 40% after they've taxed all my book royalties, most of which were garnered outside of Canada, I'm left with 40%. Now, when I spend on something, they tax me 15% on that. Then we add carbon tax and property tax and school tax and this tax and that tax. I'm left with about 30 cents to the dollar.
00:12:18.700Let's put it another way. From January till end of August, I work for free for the government.
00:12:27.240Starting in September, the government allows me to keep my money. Guess what? I left Canada. Now,
00:12:34.240many Canadians who are progressive are celebrating the fact that I left Canada.
00:12:39.060But is it a good idea for our most productive people in a society to one day say, hey, I can't
00:12:44.580take being so, you know, thieved every day, I'm going to leave. That's what's happening. It'll
00:12:50.540happen in France. It happened in Norway. It happens everywhere. Can I ask you about the
00:12:56.080sort of premise of the book, which is, and you've said before, look, empathy is a good thing
00:13:00.340in moderation, right? You don't want too little of it. You don't want too much of it.
00:13:04.340How do we find the balance? And how did we end up in a place, both here and in the West,
00:13:11.500where we were out of balance, where we just, you know, we ended up tilting too far toward
00:13:17.320excessive empathy. Right. Well, first, thank you for saying that I'm not attacking empathy.
00:13:22.420As an evolutionary behavioral scientist, I fully recognize the adaptive values of well-modulated
00:13:28.500empathy. We're a social species for you and I to have a meaningful conversation. I need to put
00:13:33.900myself in your mind and vice versa. That's called theory of mind or cognitive empathy.
00:13:38.200But like everything in life, like Aristotle explained to us 2,000 plus years ago, too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, and much of life is about finding that sweet spot.
00:13:50.220So to your general question, how do we know that we've passed the inflection point of the inverted U curve?
00:13:55.860Well, if you are willing to be so empathetic as to erase the invocation of your survival instinct, you've probably passed the curve.
00:14:07.140So if we have open border immigration policies that will absolutely guarantee the destruction of our civilization, but at least we are kind to those noble others who just wish to participate in our lovely experiment, you've probably passed the point.
00:14:26.600If you are a rape victim, but you don't tell the cops that the people who gang raped you were speaking in Arabic, but you lie to them and say they were speaking in German because you don't wish to contribute to a rise in Islamophobia, you probably passed the empathy inflection curve.0.84
00:14:44.920So it's not difficult to know the difference between well-calibrated empathy and suicidal empathy.
00:14:50.980we're talking to gatsat he is a scholar of the declaration of independence at the center for
00:14:59.940the american freedom at the university of mississippi want to make sure i got that right um
00:15:06.420you know why is this a western phenomenon i mean because i take it from what you're saying that
00:15:11.300this is sort of something that um that's happening in the west but it's not happening in china it's
00:15:15.860It's not happening in other countries.
00:15:19.140It's certainly not happening in the Islamic world.0.92
00:15:21.980Why are we the ones who are, in your view, committing this social suicide?0.93