The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - September 17, 2025


The Importance of Free Speech Absolutism (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_879)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Donald Trump Suicidal Empathy Brett Kavanaugh Julian Epstein Hunter Biden Shabbat Judaism Gadzad Gadsad Bondi
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

184.19

Word count

886

Sentence count

64

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Zeynep T. Gadzad to talk about her new book, Suicidal Empathy, and why we should not allow hate speech by radical leftist ideologues.

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 Carotid artery blown out by a bullet while he's having a conversation with other people?
00:00:05.140 You celebrate that and you think you're entitled to just keep your job?
00:00:11.860 That would be a total infringement on the rights of the employer.
00:00:15.480 But at the same time, unequivocally, we should not be trampling the speech 0.94
00:00:19.380 of these left-wing lunatics, no matter how vile, no matter how disgusting, 0.98
00:00:24.100 no matter how condemnable these people are. 0.99
00:00:26.740 You can't do it.
00:00:28.400 That's the deal.
00:00:30.000 Because at the end of the day, what would they do?
00:00:31.680 They'll just conceal that speech in dark places, be harder to find them.
00:00:35.880 If you hate these people and what they stand for, you have to fight it at its core.
00:00:40.000 And that is the Marxist ghouls who are spending a fortune,
00:00:43.900 an absolute fortune here in recent years, to radicalize this country as much as they can.
00:00:49.900 There's a lot of very dark money spinning around.
00:00:53.120 It's coming from familiar names that maybe live in China,
00:00:55.940 familiar names that have done business all over the world.
00:01:00.000 All in an effort to undermine and destroy your country.
00:01:04.220 And the president talked about it earlier this week.
00:01:07.560 We have some pretty radical groups and they got away with murder.
00:01:10.920 And also, I've been speaking to the attorney general about bringing RICO against some of the people
00:01:16.700 that you've been reading about that have been putting up millions and millions of dollars for agitation.
00:01:21.600 These aren't protests.
00:01:23.180 These are crimes, what they're doing.
00:01:24.520 Dr. Gadzad is a visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center at Ole Miss,
00:01:30.400 author of the forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, and back with us tonight.
00:01:33.680 Sir, good to see you.
00:01:35.800 Where do you stand on this?
00:01:37.560 I don't think an employer should have to keep somebody and their employee if they're condemnable and disgusting in this way.
00:01:43.140 But you can't fight what's happening to this country by stifling free speech.
00:01:48.740 Right.
00:01:49.380 I mean, I couldn't agree more with pretty much every syllable in your excellent monologue.
00:01:54.060 Again, I'm going to introduce terms that I may have mentioned on the show before.
00:01:58.320 There's a difference between deontological and consequentialist ethics.
00:02:01.700 Deontological ethics are absolute statements.
00:02:04.100 So, if I say, it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement.
00:02:08.900 If I say, it is okay to lie to spare someone's feelings, that would be a consequentialist statement.
00:02:15.160 For many things in life, it makes perfect sense for us to be consequentialists.
00:02:19.240 When it comes to foundational principles like freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, presumption of innocence,
00:02:25.980 by definition, those things have to be deontological.
00:02:28.960 So, when you say things like, I believe in freedom of speech, but not for Donald Trump, because he's an existential threat,
00:02:36.560 you're committing that error.
00:02:38.200 If you say, I believe in journalistic integrity, but not when it came to Hunter Biden's laptop,
00:02:43.800 because then Donald Trump would have won the presidency, that is consequentialism.
00:02:49.480 If you say, I believe in presumption of innocence, but not for Brett Kavanaugh,
00:02:53.500 because then he would have ascended to become a justice, you're again committing that error.
00:02:57.880 So, it's really important to recognize that free speech means that we have to stand the most grotesque types of speech.
00:03:05.440 I've said this before on your show.
00:03:07.180 I'm Jewish. 0.90
00:03:08.540 There is nothing more offensive than denying the Holocaust, but I support the right of Holocaust deniers to spew their nonsense.
00:03:15.740 Now, if they say, let's meet at five o'clock at the end of the Shabbat services, 0.93
00:03:20.520 at the corner of X and Y street and kill the Jews, that's incitement to violence. 0.99
00:03:25.640 But if they say Judaism is a useless religion, that's not hate speech, that's allowed. 0.98
00:03:31.620 Yeah, and the ACLU used to fight to protect that kind of speech.
00:03:35.080 I don't think they do that really anymore, which is one of the many ways that we're seeing kind of the collapse of the institutions
00:03:41.460 that are supposed to support what this country stands for.
00:03:44.500 And, you know, we saw with the Bondi comment got quickly walked back by herself.
00:03:49.720 You know, you give her the benefit of the doubt that maybe she just misspoke in that moment.
00:03:53.720 I don't really know what to think of that.
00:03:55.800 But it is scary to see how easy it is for power to flirt with the idea of suppressing speech,
00:04:01.520 because in their position, it makes everything tremendously easier, right?
00:04:05.200 It makes it so much easier to run a society without all the freedoms that we have,
00:04:08.780 which are such a liability for the people that run the country.
00:04:11.320 Indeed. And if it's not hate speech, then you can argue we're going to stop people from spreading misinformation and disinformation.
00:04:19.900 What is disinformation? Is it that women can have penises or is it that women cannot have penises? 0.99
00:04:25.880 Well, guess what? It's the people who are in power who decide what is disinformation or not. 1.00
00:04:30.840 This is a reflex that has existed throughout human history.
00:04:34.400 What has made the West is that we had a doorstop against that reflex and we should make sure to protect with all of our might the First Amendment.
00:04:43.220 Well said, Dr. Gadsad. Good to see you, sir. Thank you.
00:04:46.060 Thank you. Cheers.
00:04:46.920 Julian Epstein is a Democrat consultant.