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So that Virginia decision nullifies the advantages. They would have picked up four more seats in Virginia, the Democrats, and it's nullified now. And I think that's the last plague, the Virginia Supreme Court.
So, and I think the Supreme Court in Florida has already indicated they're going to uphold that.
So they say a net. Prior to this, the net was a fourteen seat game for Republicans. I'm going to figure out that this could be another four. Gad Saad joins us now, Unrelated, best-selling author, professor of marketing at Concordia University, scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. He's got his latest book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.
Gad, welcome back.
So good to be with you, Brian. Would you say some of that suicidal empathy is, for example, let's get the homeless. Uh let's make give the homeless needles. Let's find a way, let's let society take the blame for a lot of the ills of society. Exactly.
So, when you ascribe responsibility, you can either ascribe internally, I did well on the exam or I did poorly on the exam because of me, or it's something that happened outside of me. Right.
So, typically, the Democrats. Ascribe all ills that happen to marginalized people as not coming from their personal agency.
So, why are you putting the felon away in prison when he's only been arrested 186 previous times? He lives in a way. Have a heart. Have a heart, be kind, be empathetic. Be kind to the homeless, even though the taxpaying folks can't take their children there.
Be kind to all people who want to come in illegally to the United States. They deserve to be part of the American experience.
So, empathy is a wonderful thing, but suicidal empathy is the dysregulation of a noble virtue. I was going to say, how do you know the difference? I feel for that person. Let me help them. And let's say their intentions are good.
We're assuming their intentions are good.
Some people maybe have evil intentions and will pretend they have empathy because they think it'll hurt the country. How do you know the difference? How do you know if you're going over?
Well, so. Aristotle explained to us 2,000 years ago that the golden mean is that too little of something is not good, too much of something is not good, you have to find the sweet spot.
So little to no empathy makes you a psychopath. Too much empathy.
So if it hyper-fires, if it is invoked in the wrong situations, and if it Targets the wrong targets, you get suicidal empathy.
So, for example, it'll be nice if all Guatemalan immigrants could come in and be part of the American experience, but not. When you have to instead give them the resources rather than American vets who have lost their limbs.
So it's about a calculus, right? When I give gifts to my loved ones, I'm more likely to give a gift to my brother than to a second cousin.
So it has to be an evolutionary based calculus. Empathy is the same way. It can't orgiastically fire to every possible potential recipient of your empathy. Wow.
So this is really what we're dealing with now. And I could see it on the debate stage in Los Angeles. Exactly.
Right.
And we. Maybe we even have the soundbite. You have a soundbite yesterday from Spencer Pratt when he was on the stage talking about going, talking about the homeless. How do you help the homeless?
Well, no one spent more money on the homeless than Los Angeles. And the reaction has been more homeless than any place else in the country. It is the capital of homelessness. And a guy like Spencer Pratt is coming out saying, this is not working. And then you have a liberal come out and say, no, we just got to get more homes for them.
Listen to this. The reality is no matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth. They are on fentanyl. The DEA statistics says 93% of this is a drug addiction problem. Nithya Councilwoman Robbins plan for treatment first.
I will go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with her, and we can find some of these people she's going to offer treatment for. She's going to get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or super meth. This is exactly what you're talking about, right?
Exactly right. But it can apply to so many other cases. I mean, people tell me that once they see the framework of suicidal empathy, they see it everywhere, right?
So take for example, A woman who is raped. In this case, I'm going to give some examples from Europe. She's raped by Middle Eastern men, but she tells the police, this was in Germany, but she tells the police that they were speaking in German because she didn't want to say that they were speaking in Arabic and Farsi, because then that would marginalize those communities. I'm here to tell you, as an evolutionary psychologist, that our emotional system did not evolve to empathize with our rapists. But they are.
But they are. Yes, we're seeing that. You also put on I think it's Twitter that there have been and it's in response to a podcaster that came out that seems to be very pro open to Islam and them having a point And say there's been 48,000 Islamic terror attacks in nearly 70 countries since 9/11. The fact is that vertical independently of Israel. Islam has eradicated Christianity in countless societies, and there has been the reality prior to the existence of modern-day Israel.
So Don't blame Israel for everything, and there's a problem here when it comes to Islam.
So, this is what I call six degrees of Jew. I give you any calamity in the world, and you have up to six illusory causal mechanisms to blame the Jews for it. And sometimes, when we want to be a bit more politically correct, instead of blaming the Jews, we blame Israel. I love the Jews. I just hate the Zionists.
That's how they say. In this case, I think I was responding to Megan Kelly, who I have had a very warm relationship with, but apparently she recently came out and said, Well, you know, I guess I was wrong about Islam. It's really the Israeli lobby that's making me think that Islam is bad. In the fourteen hundred years that Islam has existed, no data could be any more convincing that Islam's foundational tenets are incongruent with our Western values in general and the American ethos in particular. And I 100% agree with you, and really.
I can't believe she I'm good friends with her too. But I noticed that there's other people who have that. That point of view and the anti-Israel, anti-democracy attitude is concerning. Is it concerning to you? Of course it is.
I mean, you know, look, it usually takes immigrants such as myself, such as Ayan Hersey Ali, that have sampled from the buffet of available societies to then come to the United States and say, please don't take your freedoms for granted. Most Americans think. That the freedoms that you have here is somehow the default values value across societies. It isn't. We have to defend those values.
And it oftentimes takes the Canadian to defend American freedoms. Right.
So tell everybody your background.
So I'm born in Lebanon. I was part of the last minuscule remaining group of Lebanese Jews. They tolerate you until they don't tolerate you. And the problem is, you don't know when that intolerance is going to kick in.
So when the civil war broke out in the mid-70s, It became unfortunately impossible to be Jewish. We left Lebanon, emigrated to Canada. My parents, on one of their return trips to Beirut, were kidnapped by Abu Nidal's group, Fatah. They were tortured.
So, all the stuff that we see on October 7th is basically called my childhood. And for the next 25 years or so, I was pretty, you know, Islam was in the rearview mirror, never to be seen again. But over the past 25 years, the Islamophilia. That the West has been exhibiting towards Islam has been just breathtaking to see.
So, why do you think that is? Because Islam is the religion of the noble other. It's the religion of brown people, even though Albanian Muslims are about as white as can be. There are Asian Muslims, there are African Muslims, there are white Muslims. And so You romanticize, you mythologize Islam as being that of the other.
And so, because of the reflex of suicidal empathy, all cultures are equal except the West, which is really not equal. Clearly inferior because we live on stolen land. We are transphobic. We're Islamophobic. We're misogynistic, self-flagellation, self-flagellation.
It's not a good reflex to have. If you go to see a clinical psychologist and you have a bad sense of self, he or she will help you. But somehow, if you internalize that at the collective level and say, I am an awful society, you're a progressive.
Well, yeah, so that is interesting, the way you play that all out.
So, when you talk about what's happening in Lebanon in particular, I'm listening to someone explain to me. About what's happening in Lebanon. They said, isn't Israel just expanding their power, using this as an excuse to grab Lebanese land? No, of course not. It would take probably less time than we have on this show for Israel to completely take over Lebanon if they wanted to.
From a military perspective, they can easily do it, right? The fact that they don't do it, despite the fact that they could easily achieve those goals, suggests that they just wish to live in peace. In 1978, when they signed the Camp David Accord with Anwar Sadat and the Americans, Menachembegum. And Menachembegum, they gave up the entire Sinai in order to have peace.
So if it were about land grab, you wouldn't give up a land that quadruple even more the size of Israel if all you didn't want was to just live in peace, right? Look, Judaism is not an expansionist religion. As a matter of fact, it is illegal to proselytize in Judaism. That's why Judaism as a marketing endeavor really sucks, frankly, because we still have only 15 million Jews. On the other hand, Islam, in the past 1,400 years, one-fourth of humanity is Islamic.
They're very good at marketing. The Jews are not as good at marketing. And procreating. And procreating. Yeah, so there's a lot of them.
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So we really are watching your book, Suicidal Empathy, play out on the political. On the political front, because almost all of our, you know, we've got to save the planet, so we have to destroy our oil and gas industry. Because I have empathy for those, and those people in developing areas are the ones who pay the great price because of our use of fossil fuels. I even have a more direct anti-Darwinian perspective regarding Mother Earth. How about all of the sort of pro-climate movements that say do not reproduce in order to save Mother Earth?
If you reproduce, you're creating more carbon footprint. And so one of the most fundamental drivers of our human existence, which is to reproduce and propagate our genes, becomes a form of rape of Mother Earth.
So stop reproducing, be empathetic to Mother Earth. And now, Dizzy, do you also think tax the rich and vilify the rich is an unhealthy approach to what we're seeing from Democrats right now?
So communism is very much rooted in an appeal to empathy. It is unfair and non-empathetic to have some people have a lot more money than other people. Let me, the benevolent overlord, come in and create equality amongst everyone. Therefore, we can all be equally miserable, but at least there'll be no differences between us. I want you to hear AOC said something really astounding on the podcast, CUP 25.
You can't earn. A billion dollars. That's right. You just can't earn that. That's exactly correct.
You can. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws.
You can pay people less than what they're worth. But you can't earn that, right? Since you didn't earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.
So, can you wrap your head around that? It's unbelievable. Let me tell you, I mean, this relates to her because she's a socialist/slash communist. E.O. Wilson, who's a very famous Harvard biologist who recently passed away, was an entomologist.
He studied social ants. Ants happen to be communistic because there is a reproductive queen, and then there are worker ants and soldier ants that are indistinguishable from each other.
So, when he was asked, Professor Wilson, what are your views on communism? He gave one of the greatest short answers ever. He said, great idea, wrong species. It is not within our evolutionary history to ever be a communist species, because some of us are taller, shorter, harder working, less harder working.
So to impose the dictums of equality of outcomes on a hierarchical species is literally anti-Darwinian. Right.
So that's part of it.
So what do you hope people get away from suicidal empathy? That hopefully they find an inoculation against it. It's nice to be empathetic, but in a way that makes evolutionary rational sense.
Well, you know, when you were talking before, I was thinking about the fight that President Trump was having with the Pope. The Pope is saying, I want peace.
So, why are you starting a war in Iran? And behind his very high Vatican walls, so I can exhibit all of the virtue while being protected from all the consequences of my ideas. Yeah, immigration.
So, when you talk about why would you attack, well, they have a nuclear weapon, they are hanging their own people. They just killed 41,000 in cold blood, but I don't want to see innocent people get hurt.
Well, you should have worried about the 41,000 and the 10 that just got hung today.
So, there's a, how does religion? And the theoretical world of, let's just say, really good people, how does that function in our world? The practical world. It has to empathy, has to be well modulated, right?
So it can't be that you grant greater empathy to felons than to their victims, to illegal immigrants than to natural, you know, born citizens. Everything in life is rooted in a rational evolutionary calculus. And now, whether that calculus comes from religion or from Darwinian theory, it has to be rooted in a rational calculus. Suicidal empathy says, by definition, I'm not going to adhere to those because I want to be stroking my hair in the mirror of moral preening and demonstrate to the world that I'm a good person. Right.
And we do get it. You see through it all. I do see through it. Gad sad. Thanks so much for coming in.
Suicidal Empathy, the name of the book, Dying to Be Kind. And it is out this week, right? Can you get it?
Next Tuesday. Oh, next Tuesday. Yeah. Pre-order it now. Please.
