‘Thank God For ELON!’ Dr. Gad Saad on Musk, Trump, Charlotte Murder and Woke (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_880)
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Summary
A young Ukrainian refugee was murdered in Charlotte, North Carolina. Is this a textbook case of suicidal empathy? In this episode of Global News Today, I speak with Gad Saad, a visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Global News Today. I'm Micheál Pernigás and joining me today is Gad Saad,
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the visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American
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Thanks so much for your time, Gad. A story that shocked the entire world. A young Ukrainian
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refugee has been butchered in Charlotte. Isn't this a textbook case of suicidal empathy? That's
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the name of your upcoming book. I don't want to name the assailant himself. He's a scumbag and he
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doesn't deserve any publicity. Isn't this a case, a title case for your book?
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It is in that what suicidal empathy, the way it works, let me offer a quick explanation and then
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link it to that specific case. So empathy is a beautiful, noble virtue. It is something that
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we need to have as a social species for you and I to have a meaningful conversation, Micheál. I need
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to have theory of mind as you do. In other words, we need to put ourselves in each other's minds to
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be able to have a meaningful interaction. So it is perfectly reasonable to argue that empathy is
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a laudable, noble virtue. The problem arises when empathy misfires. And before I explain how it
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misfires, let me draw an analogy. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is the misfiring of an
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otherwise adaptive process. So for example, the fact that you and I shake hands and I notice that you
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have a cold, I might go ahead and wash my hands because I don't want to catch your cold. That is
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perfectly adaptive and it makes evolutionary sense for me to do that. But OCD is when I spend eight
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hours a day washing my hands in scalding water until my skin is falling off. I can't make it to work
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because I'm obsessed with washing my hands. So what started off as an adaptive mechanism becomes
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maladaptive when it misfires. So that's exactly my argument for suicidal empathy. When empathy
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starts misfiring in ways that you target your empathy toward the wrong target, you're orgiastically
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empathetic for all of the wrong times and the wrong situations, that becomes suicidal empathy. So in that
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particular case, what you have is an incredibly lax justice system, penal system, that basically argues
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along the following lines. It is unfair to not give hardened felons 637 chances or second chances
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because they've already been victimized by the racist society of white supremacy. Therefore, what is the
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point of us punishing them harshly? Don't they deserve a 138th chance? And it is literally what
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happened in this case. This guy had been arrested for 14 prior crimes, but yet we should give him
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a 15th chance at redemption. It results in suicidal empathy and the death of this beautiful Ukrainian
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refugee. The alleged killer had 14 prior arrests. A judge released him after his 15th. Should judges like
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this face justice themselves? Look, that's a tricky one in that you would like to think that a judge is
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not going to always be personally held liable for judicial decisions that they make, because then in
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that case, they will always take the decision that is least likely to result in repercussions on them.
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So it's a tricky one. You can't always say, irrespective of the context, they should be held
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accountable. But certainly, if you are letting hardened felons get out of prison time and time
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again, because you have been completely parasitized by suicidal empathy, then I see no moral, ethical,
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or legal reason why you should not be held accountable for that decision.
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And Elon Musk himself, he has shone a huge amount of light on this story. A lot of the mainstream media
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ignored it. I think this is the perfect example of the importance of freedom of speech and the
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importance of him buying X. Indeed. So the minute that I found out, maybe not the minute, but probably
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within the next day or two, when I found out that Elon had bought what was then Twitter, I put out a clip
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on my channel, The Sad Truth, where I basically explained that of all great initiatives and great
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accomplishments that Elon Musk has ever or will ever do, none will come remotely as impactful as him
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having bought that platform. Because for better or worse, that platform is the central public square
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where ideas flow at a feverish velocity. I know just from personal experience, what the things that I could
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say or the things that would get me punished, and you know, I'm probably the most irreverent, outspoken
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professor on earth. You know, if I were to say that women, you know, do not have penises, well, I stood the
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chance of having my account shut down. And so what Elon has done is he's come along, completely removed the
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shackles that we were all being restrained by. And so thank God for Elon.
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President Trump has responded quite forcefully. He's also recently sent in regards to crime, the National Guard into
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D.C. While Democrat run cities are spiralling into chaos, why do leaders of these cities resist law and order?
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Yeah, that's a great question. So let me give you one of those professorial psychologist answers.
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There's a great book by two French psychologists, they're actually evolutionary psychologists, their names are
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Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier. They wrote a book called The Enigma of Reason. And in that book, what they argued is
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that our faculty of reasoning did not evolve to seek some objective truth, but rather, regrettably, our faculty of
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reasoning only evolved to win arguments. Now, that's quite a pessimistic view, because it basically says
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that for most people, the truth doesn't matter. What matters is that I am proven to be right, even if I'm
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wrong. So when Donald Trump does something like solve crime in D.C., the other camp doesn't say, attaboy,
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great job, great job, President Trump, they have to find a way to stand against it. And as the old joke
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says, if Donald Trump were to personally cure cancer, the Democrats would come out and say,
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look how evil he is. He's now made sure that a whole bunch of oncologists will be out of a job.
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So that's really regrettable, because again, it shows you that certainly politics is not about the
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adjudication of different ideas until we reach truth. It's simply about making sure that my team
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is right and your team is wrong. Has Donald Trump, has he proven a lot of the Democrats wrong?
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My goodness, what hasn't he proven them wrong on, right? I mean, did we need in the 21st century to
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have, as I think it was his first executive order, that there is such a thing as male and female,
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and we know exactly what those two sexes are? Until 15 minutes ago, the 117 billion people who
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had existed on Earth seemed to exactly know how to navigate that very, very difficult conundrum of
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identifying what male and female is. But when you are parasitized by idea pathogens, as I explained
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in my book, The Parasitic Mind, you then have to have an executive order by the president of the United
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States saying that there are only two sexes called male and female, and we know what they are. So he
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proved them wrong there. He proved them wrong about closing the borders, right? It took him 15 seconds
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to close the borders, right? He proved them wrong on pretty much anything and everything. So ideas
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matter. And, you know, people think that, you know, I've got posters of Donald Trump in my bedroom.
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It's not that, right? I don't succumb to the cult of personality. As a matter of fact, I'm Canadian.
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So it's not as though I've got a direct dog in that fight. But certainly, if you believe in American
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freedom, then you have to believe that the Republican Party and Donald Trump exemplify those
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American freedoms much more than the Democrats do.
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And you're an expert in evolutionary psychology. How did we go from protecting the tribe to protecting
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Well, that's where suicidal empathy comes in, right? So I argue that history is basically the
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following story that I'm going to explain now that the average five-year-old will understand.
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History is the following. There are two tribes on each side of the river. Each members of each tribe
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look at the resources and other desired objects on the other side of the tribe and want to steal it,
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right? That's why the Ten Commandments have, do not covet thy neighbor's wife, right? Covetousness
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is a ugly trait. Envy is an ugly trait. But the only thing that stops tribe A from, you know,
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attacking tribe B is that they know that the people in tribe B are likely to have men who are not going
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to be very happy about that approach. And therefore, they have to think twice before attacking. And it is
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that mechanism that keeps people in check. Now, imagine if you become parasitized, for example,
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by orgiastic pacifism, right? So that the highest virtue in my society is one whereby I will never,
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under any circumstances, respond to you with violence. Well, what do you think will happen
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to a society that is organized around orgiastic pacifism? It likely will cease to exist very
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quickly. And so that's why I use the framework of the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy to explain
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the nature of your question. Because nothing else could explain from a survival perspective,
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we've evolved the most fundamental need for survival to protect ourselves, to protect our loved one,
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to protect our children. But once those instincts become sublimated in my desire to demonstrate to the
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world that I am infinitely tolerant, compassionate, generous, and empathetic, we end up having major
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problems. Elon Musk has offered $1 million to fund murals of Irina Zarutska across US cities. Is this
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not the kind of moral clarity and courage that's needed right now? Exactly. I mean, one of the reasons
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why Elon Musk, Donald Trump, first of all, our gentlemen that I admire greatly is because to me,
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they exemplify something that I discuss as a key call to action in the last chapter of the
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parasitic mind, which is activate your inner honey badger. So some of your viewers or listeners may not
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be familiar with why I'm using that imagery. The honey badger, the African honey badger,
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has been rated as the most ferocious and fierce animal in the animal kingdom. Now, that's quite a
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big title because it isn't a big animal. It's the size of a small dog. And yet, adult lions will cross
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to the other side of the street when they see Mr. Mean Honey Badger. Now, why is that? Because the
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honey badger doesn't care. It stands tall, despite the fact that it is small in stature. So Donald Trump
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and Elon Musk are not encumbered by political correctness. They're not encumbered by ensuring
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that they are going to be invited to the cool kids parties. They stand tall, even though they are
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literally tall men. They stand tall, fully capable and willing to defend their principles. And that's
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why I implore people to activate their honey badgers. That's why I think Elon Musk and I have a strong
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affinity for one another because, regrettably, while I'm not nearly as tall as him in stature physically,
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I'm certainly someone who walks like a honey badger. And so that tends to attract similar-minded
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people. Whereas, on the other hand, most of my academic colleagues are what I call members of the
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invertebrate castrati, meaning that they don't have any spines, nor do they have any, I hope I can say on
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your show, any testicles. Right? They're whiny. They're wimpy. They're afraid of their shadow.
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They'll never utter a word that might draw back anything against the accepted orthodoxy.
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That's not how an academic should be. An academic should be an intellectual Navy SEAL.
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And Donald Trump and Elon Musk certainly exemplify those qualities.
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They're honey badgers, and you're a honey badger as well, it seems.
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Elon Musk has proved himself to be a staunch defender of free speech. I've seen you say on
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Twitter that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his ultimate defense of free speech.
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100%, 1,000%. Listen, Barack Obama won a Nobel Prize, I think it was even before he had assumed the
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presidency, or maybe within a few days of assuming, or whatever. I don't remember the exact temporal
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timeline, but it's because he had uttered some hopeful message or some nonsense, right? I mean,
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I have antiquated socks, socks that I no longer wear, that are substantially more worthy of the
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Nobel Prize than Elon Musk, excuse me, than Barack Obama. So if Barack Obama can win a Nobel Prize for
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doing literally nothing, then how many Nobel Prizes should Elon Musk win for having freed us from the
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shackles of, as we say in French, les bien-pensants, the well thinkers, the politically correct class.
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People have spoken ad nauseum about Elon Musk. You said in your last interview here on the station
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that he's a very humble man. He is. You know, we've had a chance to meet. I spent maybe four and a half
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hours with him at his home. He had invited me down to discuss all sorts of important issues. We had a
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chance to both have, you know, an intimate discussion about family dynamics, but we also discussed, you
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know, preserving human consciousness and interplanetary travel. And we were able to oscillate from very
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personal, intimate things to very grand, abstract things. No ego, no obnoxiousness, no attempts to,
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you know, try to, you know, outdo, outrank each other. Just two guys, hopefully with good ideas,
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sitting together, who respect each other, having a fun conversation. I felt as though he had zero ego.
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And if anything, after, you know, meeting him personally and chatting with him, I only learned to
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admire him that much more. We know that Elon Musk and President Trump are two enormous characters.
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They had a very huge falling out, especially on social media. Are you hopeful that they can make
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amends? That's a great question, because when I first heard of their rift, actually, it was a friend
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of mine who used to be a former student of mine who wrote to me and said, hey, what do you think of
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your two guys fighting? And I was traveling. I said, what are you talking about? And so he was the one who
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broke the story to me. And I looked at that with great regret, because, look, the United States in
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particular, but the world in, you know, more generally, is a much better place if those two,
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you know, gigantic leaders see eye to eye, right? So it is my hope that, I mean, it certainly seems as
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though some of the venom has softened. So in an ideal world, they will hug it out, go back to being
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friends, and we will all benefit from that renewed friendship. Could you broker a peace?
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Well, I can certainly try. I don't know if I can deliver. I'm very, I'm very well calibrated
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about what I can or can't do. So I can certainly reach out and try to broker it, whether they'll
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listen to me or not, or, you know, whether it happens or not. Inshallah, only God knows.
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A story that's absolutely dominated in the news over the past week. It was the frankly
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Orwellian arrest of the Irish comedian Graeme Linehan for his tweets made in the UK where
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he criticised the trans movement. What was your reaction, Gad?
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Yeah, I mean, in a sense, I was surprised because it's as if we're back to being in 2020 or 2022.
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But that actually speaks to a point that I've often made, where people write to me and say,
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hey, now that Donald Trump has started his second term, Dr. Saad, can we expect that all of this
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woke parasitic stuff will go away? And my answer is always an emphatic no, unfortunately. Yes,
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it's good that Donald Trump won. That doesn't mean that all of the nonsense and the Orwellian
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degeneracy is going to magically go away. It took 50 to 80 years for many of these ideas to first be
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spawned on academic campuses. So it's going to take a while for us to fully eradicate them. But
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to your more specific point, I'd like to contextualise what happened with that comedian
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with something that I talk about in the parasitic mind, and that is the distinction between
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deontological and consequentialist ethics. Let me break it down for you very quickly.
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Deontological ethics are absolute statements. So for example, if I say,
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it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement. A consequentialist
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statement would be, it's okay to lie if you wish to spare someone's feelings. So if your wife might
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ask you, do I look fat in those jeans, then you might want to put on that consequentialist hat and
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say, absolutely not. You've never looked more beautiful. It might be a small white lie, but you're
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doing it out of love for your partner. And so there's a consequentialist ethos to it. But when it comes
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to foundational principles, presumption of innocence in the justice system, freedom of speech, freedom
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of inquiry, by definition, those have to be deontological. The second that you say, I believe
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in freedom of speech, but the second you put the but qualifier, you're a degenerate who doesn't
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understand what freedom of speech is. I am Jewish. I've had a very rough upbringing in my childhood in
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Lebanon. Yet I support the right of Holocaust deniers to deny the Holocaust. There is almost
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nothing that you could think of that is more offensive than denying the Holocaust. Yet if I wish
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to live in a free society where freedom of speech is an enshrined principle, I have to put up with
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idiots, imbeciles, racists and anti-Semites. So when Starmer says, hey, by you saying this, you are
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marginalizing the noble, holy trans people, that is exactly a consequentialist ethos. And it hurts me to
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no end that Britain, the place where many of these original principles, you know, were spewed,
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is now turned into such a, not only Orwellian, but Kafkaesque reality. Terrible.
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And speaking of Keir Starmer, what are your thoughts on him?
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Well, Mrs. Starmer needs to see if there is a way for her to find some testicular fortitude.
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Now, I say this, some people will say, oh, but why do you speak in such a direct manner? Why can't
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you be more empathetic and kind? You know why? Because I'm disgusted that a country as founded
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in the principles that we now call liberty and freedom in the West, including in the United States,
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right, has sunk to such a low. When you can't talk about the grooming gangs in Britain, because you
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don't want to offend a particular demographic group, where you care about managing the feelings of that
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group more than you care about protecting the bodily integrity of your children, that's probably
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not a good leader. So I don't have too many good things to say about that, Prime Minister.
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You and your family escaped the civil war in Lebanon. Did real violence make you immune
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to the fake trauma obsessions in the West? Yeah, great question. Look, one of the reasons why
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it's very difficult for people to try to cancel me and so on, because if they use the victimology
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narrative, the faux victimology narrative that is so often present in the West, then I pull out my
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real victimology cards, then suddenly they, you know, they whittle away because real victim versus fake
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victim. If that's the currency you want to use, then I'm going to win every single time. So because
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of that, because of the horrors that I've seen growing up in the Middle East as a Lebanese Jew,
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my parents were kidnapped by Fatah and tortured. We escaped execution. Death awaited us at every corner,
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every second of every day for that first year of the civil war. Then I'm not very sympathetic,
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not only to faux victimology stories, but intergenerational victimology stories. Slavery did
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happen in the United States, but not today. So you don't get to wallow intergenerationally because
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something happened to someone who may or may not have been related to you 200 years ago. That doesn't
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minimize the horrors of slavery, but it says that what makes you stand tall and with dignity in Arabic,
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since I'm speaking on al-Arabiya, it's someone with shakhsiyya. Shakhsiyya means they have a strong
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sense of self, someone with sharaf, someone who has honor. I overcome my victimology. Let me just,
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just for you to know. So my family escaped the Lebanese civil war. My parents were kidnapped and
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tortured by Fatah. My grandparents escaped Syria because they were Syrian Jews. My wife's family
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also escaped Lebanon because for also religious reasons. Her ancestors escaped the Armenian genocide.
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My brother-in-law's family escaped in the 1950s from Alexandria, Egypt because they were Egyptian Jews.
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So within my lifetime, any family member that you could think of, whether by bloodline or by marriage,
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has faced horrifying victimology. And yet here I stand, happy that I exist, hoping to create a better
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world. Yes, my victimology story is part of my past, but what makes me who I am is that I've overcome
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it. So stop whining and get off the couch and do big things. I agree with you, Gad. I'm from an Irish
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background and I think obviously the Irish famine perpetrated by the British on Ireland, it was
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absolutely abhorrent. But I don't necessarily, I try not to think about it too much and I try not to let
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it define me. How would you go about teaching this kind of resilience to young people now?
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Well, it's certainly, well, two ways. There are some things that the young people can do to build
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resilience, but also there are things that the caretakers of the young people should do in order
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to inculcate resilience in the young people. So let's start with the latter. When COVID finished,
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and I actually discussed this in my forthcoming book, So Wasala Empathy, when COVID finished and we
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were back to teaching in person, one of the first, if not the first departmental meeting we had
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was bathing in orgiastic misplaced empathy. So here are the types of things that I would hear.
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Well, the students are no longer capable because of the COVID lockdowns to actually sit for three hours
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in a lecture. The students are no longer capable of taking notes. It's too onerous for them.
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It's too much to expect of students to have to do evaluative exercises like exams because they
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suffer from post-COVID stress. That's not how you build resilience. Let me draw a very good analogy.
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This is actually from this book right here, my book on happiness. I start one of the chapters which
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actually deals with resilience and anti-fragility. I use a quote from the great Stoic Roman philosopher
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Seneca. I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but so I'll paraphrase it. He said that strong
00:26:04.680
trees with deep roots, with strong trunks, are those that have been exposed to heavy wind stressors.
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That's precisely why they then evolve those strong roots. That's precisely why they evolve the strong
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trunk. The trees that have not been exposed to the wind stressors are very brittle. They're easy
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to uproot. By the way, that's exactly true of our immune system. So for example, if you take
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autoimmune diseases like asthma, children who are raised in very clean environments end up having
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greater incidence of asthma than children who are raised on farms with pet dander, with allergens,
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because our immune system expects to be challenged in order to then mount an optimal response. So
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at the very least, what we should be doing is rather than always hugging our children and saying,
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they're there, it's okay, everybody gets a trophy. No, teach them about competition, teach them about
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resilience, teach them about dignity, and hopefully those things become an integral part of their
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personhoods. And one thing I detest, Gad, is the polarized nature of politics. I'm probably going to get
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some flack for even speaking to you today by kind of some corners of the online media. As a Middle
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Eastern Jew, how did growing up as a minority shape your rejection of identity politics?
00:27:41.540
Well, it shaped it greatly. And that's why in chapter one of The Parasitic Mind, knowing that later I was
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going to critique identity politics, I wanted to share my story because Lebanon is the perfect model
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of what happens to a society that is perfectly organized along identity politics lines, right? And
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in the case of Lebanon, it's according to which religion you belong to, right? So Lebanon, for example,
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has what's called the confessional parliamentary system, meaning that who the president is going to be,
00:28:15.460
who the prime minister is going to be, who the speaker of the house is going to be, or the
00:28:20.120
parliament, how many seats are going to be assigned to different sects, is all based on your religion.
00:28:28.940
And as we know from Lebanon and Rwanda and Iraq and Syria and the Balkans, these kinds of fractured
00:28:38.160
tribal identity politics societies don't really end up, you know, with great outcomes. And so
00:28:46.060
it very much shaped my subsequent positions because what I love about the West, and I know it sounds as
00:28:55.000
though it's just a cliche at this point, but it isn't. It's a really important lesson. Individual
00:29:00.780
dignity supersedes collective identity. Yes, I may be a Lebanese Jew, and that is one marker of my
00:29:09.160
identity, but I present myself to the world and to Al Arabiya as God's side. I'm not a representative
00:29:17.480
of the Lebanese people. I'm not a representative of the Jewish people. I'm not a representative of
00:29:23.340
people who have green eyes. And so you judge me based on my qualities and my frailties. And so therefore,
00:29:30.560
there is nothing worse than collective tribalism. And by the way, if people only hear the last
00:29:37.740
minute of what I just said in the Middle East, and truly internalize it, the Middle East would be
00:29:43.960
one of the most stunning, gorgeous places imaginable on earth. That's what we hope, Gad. You're penning a
00:29:50.620
new book at the moment called Suicidal Empathy. Do you feel like a kid in a candy shop with the amount of
00:29:56.420
real world examples you're able to cover in your book? Well, the running joke is because now, you
00:30:03.300
know, I've been speaking a lot about suicidal empathy for, you know, a long time so that it's
00:30:08.300
really, it's gone completely viral. You know, millions and millions of people in perhaps 60 languages
00:30:13.440
are now quoting and citing my suicidal empathy concept. But I always, so people will write to me
00:30:20.420
and say, God damn it, when is this book going to be ready, Professor? And I say, how can I be ready? How can
00:30:25.860
it ever be ready when every single day when I wake up and I go on X, I now need to increase the size of
00:30:32.660
the book by 50 new pages? And so one of the most difficult parts, frankly, has been to try to rein that in
00:30:42.080
because I've already cut 11,000 words from my book. Because rather than using the 35,000 examples
00:30:52.520
that I can use as a manifestation of suicidal empathy, I now have to ask myself, okay, I can't
00:30:58.020
put all of these in the book. How should I strategically pick the best ones? So the biggest challenge for me
00:31:03.580
has not been to write the book, but rather to cut out sections of the book. It could be a trilogy.
00:31:14.720
We're just out of time. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you, Gad. All the very best.
00:31:28.160
That's all we have time for on Global News Today. Be sure to join us tomorrow for more exclusive