How “Consequentialism” Killed Charlie

My name is Charlie Kirk.

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Here we go.

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All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.

Andrew Colvedin here, executive producer of this show, joined by Jack Pesovic, host of Human Events Daily with Jack Pesovic.

So honored to have our next guest here, Dr.

Gad Saad,

who is a great friend of the show, has been a great friend to Charlie Kirk.

He is also

scholar.

I want to get this title right because he has

actually

a new wonderful title, Dr.

Gad Sad, Scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at University of Mississippi.

He is also the author of a bunch of amazing books, The Parasitic Mind.

He's working on a new one.

I want to talk to him about that.

Dr.

Sad, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show, and thank you for making the time.

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Cheers.

Yeah.

Well, Dr.

Sad, I want to let you start where, you know, I think it makes sense most, and that is, you know, we haven't had you back on the show since

Charlie was taken from us on September 10th.

And I just want to give you a chance to reflect on what this last month and plus has meant to you.

And just let you reflect on what a loss we've all suffered.

I mean, I sort of oscillated from sadness to anger.

Only maybe, I think it was maybe a month prior to the tragic day I had appeared on the show with Charlie.

And

I've told the story before, but it's worth repeating here.

You know, I've spoken to many wonderful people, you know, throughout my professional career, many of whom have come on my show.

I mean, really, really top people.

My daughter, who's 16 years old, never asked for me to introduce her to anybody.

When I was appearing on Charlie's show this last time,

she came home excitedly and said, Could you please just introduce me to Charlie?

And so that kind of gives you a sense.

I'm 61 years old and a fan of Charlie, and my 16-year-old is a fan of Charlie.

So

it is an immeasurable tragedy, but here we are

promoting his legacy.

So hopefully he lives on in all our hearts and minds.

And Dr.

Saad, maybe that's the next best place to start.

You know, you talk about his legacy.

I don't typically throw this question out to people, but you are a public intellectual.

You are a great thinker.

You have a way of distilling ideas.

What is Charlie's legacy in your mind, and what do you hope that it will grow into?

You know, there are several ways by which I could answer this question.

I'll take a stab at one or two ways.

Number one, you know,

in the last chapter of the parasitic mind, I ask people to activate their inner honey badger.

And I use that terminology because the honey badger has been officially uh classified as the most fierce animal in the animal kingdom now i don't mean when i say activate your inner honey badger for you to be violently ferocious but it means you know get off the couch and do big things stand tall and charlie was not only physically tall at six foot four but he was a tall honey badger in that at 18 years old when most of us are worried about how we're going to get through the next day as you know with teenaged angst.

He starts off something that is absolutely impossible that most people in their 80s wouldn't dare start.

And so, first of all, the fact that he had the chutzpah, right, which is a Yiddish word for sort of existential gull, the fact that he had the confidence to say at 18 years old, I'm not going to university.

I've got better ways to be able to contribute to the cause, is something that we could all cherish and be inspired by.

But then, the fact that he was able to cater to the young people, to get involved, to get excited, so that my daughter is not asking me to introduce her to Elon Musk, but is asking me to introduce her to Charlie Kirk.

That says everything you need to hear about his legacy.

He is a unique individual in that he had the intellect, he had the political ability to organize, he had the warmth, right?

He always has a smile, even when he's engaging in difficult debates.

He's warm, he's engaging so he's he's he's an immeasurable loss truly one in a generation type of fellow yeah absolutely giant of our generation and but he his memory and his legacy will live on and you know we're committed at turning point and on the show to growing it to expanding it as best we can and the outpouring of love and support that we've seen both at the show but at the students on campuses has been truly truly wonderful and heartening to see now dr sad you you we are going to get into some news of the day with you because you have a way of making sense of the chaos, unlike few can.

But I do want to pick up on something we touched on in the previous hour, and that is the rise of Islam.

It's something you and Charlie talked a lot about.

And I just want to play one clip from a conversation that you had with Charlie on this show, 290.

What would you say?

The West is a woman to be mounted.

That is the Islamic creed.

Remind us of it.

I would repeatedly hear from Arabic-speaking, Muslim-speaking immigrants, in this case, it was in Canada, always say that the West is a woman to be mounted.

And what the reflex that that captures is that all of the virtues that we think as laudable in the West, compassion, magnanimity,

generosity, empathy.

are heard as weakness, weakness, weakness, and weakness by cultures that don't necessarily share our infinite largesse.

And so it's exactly what they're saying.

West is weak, it's a woman, therefore really quick.

Yeah, powerful stuff.

And we've seen those clips go viral where you can actually hear them in their own words say, the West is a woman to be mounted.

Especially, I think the clip that I've seen was from the UK, a place that Charlie visited relatively recently before, I mean, soon before the tragic events of September 10th happened.

And so he saw it up close.

And you had zeroed in on this idea of suicidal empathy.

It's almost

an opening that both the left and Islam were exploiting.

Exactly.

Maybe I could give you a quick synopsis of the framework of suicidal empathy.

Many people have wrongly presumed that what I mean by suicidal empathy is that empathy.

is a bad thing.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

We are a social species, and therefore it makes perfect evolutionary sense that empathy would be part of our repertoire of possible strategies, right?

For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa.

That's called theory of mind, which is part of cognitive empathy.

Autistic children, for example, fail a theory of mind test.

This is how we diagnose them as being Autistic.

So empathy, when

properly modulated to the right targets in the right situations in the right amounts, is a perfectly relevant and appropriate evolutionary response.

The problem arises, as is the case with many psychiatric disorders, when you have a dysregulation of this otherwise beneficial virtue, right?

So, for example, laughter is great, right?

It has medicinal properties, but then you could have pseudo-balbar effect, what the Joker in the movie had, where he, because of abuse, he starts laughing uncontrollably in wrong situations, or the way Kamala Harris can cackle the way that she does, that becomes an inappropriate form of laughter.

And so, suicidal empathy takes this beautiful virtue, and then because it becomes dysregulated, it becomes hyperactive, and it targets the wrong targets, leads to the demise of the West.

And unless we get rid of this reflex really quickly, I can assure you that the West will fall.

It might take five years, it might take 50 years, or it might take 500 years, but it will fall the way many other societies have.

Yeah, no, that's really well said.

I, you know, and I think of basically what MAGA is, what conservatism has transformed into, in large part, thanks to President Trump, but also to Charlie Kirk and others, is that it now has a muscularness to it.

It has a backbone.

It has a fighting chance.

Ultimately, that's why the left hates it so much, because it's effective, because it is the

anti-vector, it is the counteraction to what the left has been doing in this country since essentially post-World War II in

the invasion,

the move in our institutions, the long march through the institutions of progressivism, of liberalism, in a negative sense, obviously, in that second sense, in the second word.

But yeah,

this is the anti-venom of what we're doing at MAGA, what we're doing in the conservative movement and President Trump.

That's why the fight is so intense.

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I want to share with the audience a little bit of breaking news right now.

President Trump has just concluded his call

with

Vladimir Putin.

They've been on a very long call, and it looks like he's saying that they have agreed to send high-ranking delegates led by Marco Rubio to meet.

And then they are going to, after that meeting, with high-level advisors, the United States will be meeting, or President Trump will be meeting with

Putin in Budapest.

So President Trump, hot off the heels of getting peace in the Middle East, is now going to be meeting with President Putin in the near term.

So, hopefully, we can get that, as he calls it, inglorious war between Russia and Ukraine brought to an end.

He is going to be meeting with President Zelensky tomorrow here in Washington, D.C.

So,

Jack, that feels like a good time to throw to you.

Jess,

you are,

you do have a bit of a feel for Eastern Europe as well as war analysis in general?

Yeah, no, I mean, look, I've traveled to the war a couple weeks after it started back in March of 2022, excuse me, May of 2022.

I've been to Budapest a few times.

I was at the Anchorage meeting.

I accompanied the President's delegation as a new media member there aboard Air Force One when he met with Putin just

a few weeks ago in Alaska.

So I was in the room with himself, Putin, Lavrov, all the rest.

And what can I say?

It looks like I'm going to Budapest.

Oh, wow.

There you go.

Dr.

Sad,

and we'll keep Jack involved.

And I want to make sure we're working you in, Jack, here.

No, no, no.

But Dr.

Saad, maybe comment really quickly.

We've been told that American leadership on the world stage was coming to an end, that Trump was going to ruin America's standing in the world.

And yet here he is pulling off win after win after win, achieving peace.

Tie that into what it means for the West, that America's leadership is strong and robust, and we're leading the way.

Look, to go back to our earlier conversation where many Muslims say the West is a woman to be mounted,

President Trump lives in the real world where he actually understands human nature.

He may not call himself an evolutionary psychologist, but he is an evolutionary psychologist because throughout his long and successful life, he's had to deal with many people, whether it be in his real estate life or in his TV life, where his ability to succeed in those forums stems from his, you know, understanding of human nature.

And so having people like Joe Biden and the other super sweet and kind and empathetic diplomats who cross their legs, like Justin Trudeau, might look nice because you could show off your really colorful socks.

But that's not that's not what really nasty folks around the world respect, right?

So under, you know, I come from the Middle East.

In the Middle East, we have the creed, right?

Might is right.

Or, as you probably, of course, know, the old term, you know, if you wish to have peace, prepare for war.

There are endless, you know, military dictums that speak to the fact that it's nice to have a velvet glove while you're shaking someone's hands.

But make sure that behind your back, you have a really big stick, right?

As you also know, speak softly, but carry a big stick, right?

So, all of these maxims exist throughout history because the world doesn't exist in a utopia, in a democratic, progressive utopia.

It exists in the real world where people respect might.

And Donald Trump exemplifies that.

That's why you're seeing win after win.

Well, Dr.

Saad, you know, you're reminding me of something you said on the show with Charlie years ago.

I remember it very clearly because we were at Berkeley and he was about to do a campus stop at Berkeley and a tabling stop there.

And

we had to do the show.

So we set up, you know, in some back room, we set up a kind of a mobile, mobile studio in some back room at Berkeley.

And you guys were talking about gender ideology and the transing of youth and this, but it relates to this conversation too.

The line you used, and he stole it.

I don't know that he always gave you attribution, but I remember hearing it and going, oh, that's a good line.

I texted to him.

He's like, oh, totally, that's great.

But you said the pesky shackles of reality, the pesky shackles of reality.

These things like you might think you can fly, but you're going to jump off a building and find out really quick that gravity still pulls you down.

You might think that the rules of nature, nature's God, don't apply to you, but just test nature's God and find out.

So, so I love that because you are a realist.

Trump is a pragmatist,

and he knows that the vile monsters on the stage, it's better to work with them, it's better to have them fear you and respect you than to be cowed by them.

So, Dr.

Sad, I'm a little upset at Jack right now because Jack spilled the news that I spilled coffee in.

It's not all that's being spilled around here.

Yeah, and now he's spilling tea, coffee, all the things.

But listen, I love this because, well, I don't love the coffee spill.

There's like memes being made.

That's all right.

I warned him about the Keurig.

I said we got a bum Keurig in here, and he did not heed my warning.

I have my coffee right here.

What I love here, though, Dr.

Sad, is that you and Jack Pisobic are on a show together.

I think

you and Jack have disagreed on minor, honestly, very minor things in the past.

But

in this post-era, of this post-Charlie era, we all have to come together, and I love that.

And, you know,

I feel like if you look at the medal ceremony, Dr.

Sad, you had all these Fox hosts, you had senators and congressmen that don't always see eye to eye coming together to celebrate Charlie.

And so I'm just glad this moment is happening.

And Jay, I don't know what's going on.

It's all right.

Well, no, I actually,

the question that I had, and

honestly, it was, you know, really to kind of pick your brain because you have such a good theory of mind of the left and such a good theory of mind of you have this ability to really get into what makes them tick.

And one of the things that we've all been grappling with here, Dr.

Sad, is this idea that

there was this kid, Tyler Robinson, an ex-Mormon or comes from a Mormon family, would then find himself on a roof hundreds of miles away from where he lives in a relationship with a trans boyfriend, so a biological male who is transitioning to a female, and then somehow thinks he's defending his boyfriend by, and again, allegedly, legally speaking, pulling a trigger and shooting Charlie Kirk.

And I wonder at all if you could possibly attempt to unpack that twisted psychology for us.

Yeah, thank you for that question.

So I taught, I don't know if you guys have heard me discuss the difference between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics.

So it might be worth repeating it here, even if some of the viewers might be familiar with it.

Deontological ethics are absolute statements.

So for example, if I say it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement.

If I were to say it's okay to lie to spare someone's feelings, I would be engaging in consequentialism.

And of course, for many things in life, we are all consequentialists.

I always joke, although I'm being serious, that if you wish to have a long, happy marriage, if you hear the following question, do I look fat in those jeans?

Very quickly, put on your consequentialist hat.

And even if you have to slightly lie, you're doing it because you love your spouse and you don't want to hurt her feelings.

So that's perfectly fine.

But when it comes to certain foundational principles that certainly define the unique American experience,

presumption of innocence in the courtroom, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, those things cannot be consequentialist principles, right?

So, if I say I believe in freedom of speech, but not if you marginalize a particular group, then I'm succumbing to consequentialism.

So, to now wrap that up to your question, I think what this

the alleged assassin has done is he's drank from the Kool-Aid of the pool of consequentialism, which basically says Charlie Kirk is such a dangerous guy that the deontological principle of freedom of speech and exchange of ideas no longer applies to Charlie Kirk.

He is saying words that are akin to violence.

So if I stand on that rooftop and take him out, boy, I should be lauded as a hero rather than be put in prison.

So that's what makes consequentialism so dangerous.

And so in his mind, it's almost like he feels as though he's defending

his boyfriend, his lover.

Again, we don't know all the specific details there, but I'm just going off of what we've seen.

And

it's a complete, you know, you talk about the

suicidal toxic empathy.

It seems like it's almost that suicidal empathy, but in the person of one individual here.

Well, exactly.

But that's why.

So suicidal empathy is targeting the wrong targets, right?

We love the Hamas fighters, but we have no empathy for the Jews.

So there is no empathy for Charlie Kirk and his right to speak freely.

There is only empathy for the trans community.

Right, or his wife, his children, his friends, and everyone else.

And so on.

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We are with Dr.

Gad Saad,

who is a scholar at the University of Mississippi.

So

you are, you know, you're just loving the South now, huh, Dr.

Sad?

Oh, I gotta tell you, I am the only thing that I'm lacking to be a full Southerner is that I grotesquely lack in height.

Now, if you want to feel like your self-esteem is going to take a hit, if you're six feet tall in the South, you're rather height challenged.

And so, the only complaint I have about Mississippi thus far is that everyone is over six foot four when I am merely the height of Linale Messi.

So, I'm struggling with those ego issues, but otherwise, I am loving the South.

I am immersed in the South.

Love the place.

Well, I mean, you just got to get that accent too, Dr.

Said.

We're going to wait for that.

Y'all, y'all.

Have you picked an SEC team yet?

That's the real, that's the real college football.

You've got to.

There you go.

All right.

Almost.

There it is.

See?

He's in.

So I'm going to play a clip for you, Dr.

Seth.

I went to this News Nation town hall last night.

I got put in a panel with this Midas Touch kid.

I'd never met him before.

He seemed very nice.

As soon as we got on stage, it was, he was.

Coming, he wanted his clip.

He wanted his viral clip.

Sure enough, he's posted on the left seems to love it because I'm not disavowing the New York Republicans.

I have no idea about the context of them.

My position on disavowing the New York Young Republicans is that when, listen, the Democrat Party gets to a point where they want to call Jay Jones to pull out of the race, and they disavow him by actually disavowing him and saying they denounce anybody that would run for the top cop in the state of Virginia that would fetishize murdering his political opponents, which obviously is an issue very near and dear to me.

Anyways,

this is a clip 274.

Political violence overwhelmingly comes from the right.

These mass shootings come from the right.

My dear friend was just killed by left-wing violence, assassinated in cold blood.

There has been how many ICE facilities that have been targeted?

What about George Floyd?

What about that whole summer of looting and rioting?

Listen, but there is a justification for political violence.

It shows up in every poll, and it's coming from progressives.

And of course, there is this poll that I was thinking about in my head.

Go ahead and throw up image 31.

This was from September 12th through the 15th.

So just in the immediate aftermath of Charlie's murder.

And it shows that almost 30% of liberals that are self-described liberals between the ages of 18 and 39 justify political violence.

You see that blue dot over on the left side of

the screen.

It is an outlier of outliers, Dr.

Saad.

Your thoughts.

And by the way, this perfectly segues into what we discussed earlier with deontological versus consequentialist.

This is exactly consequentialism.

It is per, I'm speaking now if I were one of the progressives.

It is perfectly fine to engage in political violence when you are facing the existential threat of Orange Himmler, Donald Trump, and so on, right?

So again, look, I don't know if you remember in 1960, the Mossad had

identified where Adolf Eichmann was hiding, and he was in Argentina.

And they could have easily put a bullet in his head to, you know, met out justice, but they wanted to stay true to the deontological principle which is that even someone like adolf eichmann deserves his day in court so they ended up at great personal cost or risk and great diplomatic risk tried to get him out of Argentina so that he could have his day in court in Israel.

Of course, eventually he was found guilty and was hung.

But that shows you the difference between what the left does and in this case, what Israel did, which is even Eichmann deserves his day in court.

Yeah, well, that's a fascinating insight, Dr.

Saad.

You know, listen, I think

my belief here is that, of course, we want to get to a point of political unity, unanimity on the issue of political violence.

But in order to get there, we have to confront a very unfortunate truth in this country, and that is that there is one side of the political aisle that has begun to justify, and you put it beautifully, the rationale or the philosophical underminings of why.

But that is the truth that we must confront, that they have completely abandoned the liberal values of a constitutional republic of open debate, open dialogue, the very values that Charlie himself espoused and championed.

And

we cannot forget that the assassin on these bullets had Bella Chow, had

catch fascist, hey, fascist catch,

on the bullet casings.

This is, he may not have been a card-carrying member of Antifa, but he was certainly inspired by them.

You had a question for Dr.

Said.

Dr.

Said, so

we've identified this.

It's spreading.

You've talked about it as if it's a parasite, which continues, but we're also talking about...

anti-venom.

We're also talking about potential cures.

Is there a way to reach people who, and and again, perhaps not so that some that are so far gone that they would pull the trigger themselves, but we also saw in the wake of Charlie's murder, thousands upon thousands of people taking to social media, celebrating, clapping, cheering this on.

And these were not card-carrying members of Antifa.

These were people in positions of authority.

You saw pilots, you had doctors, nurses, HR departments,

all over the place where people seemed to share in this belief.

Is there any way to kind of break them out of this?

Yeah, that's a great question.

And one that I struggle with often when I'm trying to decide whether to engage someone in terms of whether I could flip them, if I could administer the mind vaccine to them or not.

And it's not always obvious that your...

your time is not going to be wasted on some people.

But I do think, and maybe here I'm being naively optimistic, I do think that with enough showing of the evidence,

people can come around, but it takes a lot of dogged efforts.

So for example, I had a person who in 2010 I had had a very, very difficult email exchange with.

Well, it took her 14 years, but then last year she came around and said, oh boy, I wish I could have listened to you back in 2010.

She was one of those super progressive liberal Jews who was very upset that I was saying saying some detrimental things about Islam because her friend is a Muslim woman and she's very peaceful and kind and empathetic.

And I was, you know, not adding to the ecosystem of love by spreading hateful things about Islam and so on.

Well, 14 years later, she said, oops, I guess I was wrong.

So I'd like to think that with enough evidence, people can potentially be reached.

But here's where I'm going to hit you with the counterpoint that's slightly more pessimistic.

I was recently asked on a show by a British psychiatrist, what is the singular thing that has most surprised me about human nature in all the years that I've studied human behavior?

And I don't think you're going to be happy to hear this.

I said the difficulty to get someone to change their opinions once they are fully anchored.

So it takes a Herculean effort, but hopefully we're all up for the challenge.

Well, that's exactly why we were devoting so much and we are devoting so much of our energies, Dr.

Saad, to ensuring that these high school chapters get off the ground.

I will never forget, we were in Aspen.

A couple weeks before, we were having a retreat

for donors of Turning Point USA, and Charlie was working on the presentation the night before he was going to present it to everybody.

And

his vision was very clear.

He wanted a Club America chapter in every high school in the country.

And, you know,

getting to students before they get completely ideologically brainwashed at the university, at universities where Dr.

Sad is not is not a professor, of course, is critical.

Obviously, the university chapters are critical as well.

But

you do see this.

It's very interesting.

I'm learning something with this clip, right?

Because this

gentleman from Midas Touch,

his name's Adam, I guess.

He is clipping it for his audience, and his audience loves it because I refuse to disavow the New York Republicans, young Republicans.

Well, they also talked over you.

I did get a chance.

I basically said, listen, I'm willing to have a conversation about it, but until you tell me that you're willing to disavow the

John,

what the, now I just blame him Jay Jones, gosh.

Jay Jones, two Jays.

Jay Jones, attorney general candidate, Democrat in

John Jones in Michigan, if you like.

Jay Jones.

So until you're willing to actually tell him he needs to drop out of the race, then listen,

we're going to be at an impasse here.

I'm willing to have a conversation about some of the things that were said.

I don't agree with some of the things that were said.

I don't understand understand the context of them.

But this is what's funny.

We are in this hyper-polarized environment because I have never gotten so many compliments from people about my performance last night saying, baste, you know, way to go, way not to, way not to, you know, they were proud of me for not doing the disavow ritual on stage with Chris Cuomo and this Midas Touch kit because that's what he wanted.

He wanted this clip to be able to put it on social media.

There was no civil dialogue.

There was none of this.

And it does raise an interesting point about, you know, social media.

I'm being told by authorities, a lot of this stuff happens on gamer chats, right?

This is a lot of this radicalization fully anchoring into these ideas is happening on these

Discord chats and things like this.

So what is the solution when it comes to the fact that we are just living in completely different algorithms where we seem to be getting further apart because of the machines?

Yeah, well, I mean, I try to do my part in terms of reaching the young people at the university level.

But I think what made, you know, to your original question about Charlie's legacy, the fact that he's able to reach, I mean, nobody wants to listen to, you know, a 61-year-old professor with gray hair, but people want, kids want to listen to Charlie, right?

Because he seems only slightly older than him.

And his brilliance is actually, I mean, it really needs to be highlighted.

Let me draw an analogy.

When I teach consumer psychology and I explain to the students that we can't sell chewing gum to 10-year-olds because they don't yet have the cognitive apparatus to fight against the advertising

message that's thrown at them.

So that's why all the ideologues try to get to your children early, right?

That's why we have, you know, twerking dragwins for during, you know, reading hour when they're five and six years old, because the ideologues understand

that we need to get to the children very early before they have developed the cognitive armory to protect themselves against the nonsense.

And so I did my part at the university level.

God willing, you guys will be doing it at an earlier age bracket.

And hopefully we can administer the mind vaccine globally.

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I want to talk about this AOC Bernie Sanders Town Hall, Dr.

Sad.

You know, well, they were talking about social media, so let's play this clip.

248.

Why does Republican messaging on social media seem so much more effective than Democratic messaging and what can we do about it?

Well that's a great question.

I think the Republicans are effective.

They have learned a lot about social media.

And by the way, it doesn't hurt that their friends own all of the major social media platforms.

That's factually inaccurate.

But you know, there is this thought that I've been having, Dr.

Sad, is that this reaction

they're resorting to violence.

There is this thought that I've that keeps occurring to me, you know, and I said this last night at the town hall: you just need better ideas.

I mean, part of the reason that the left is losing the social media battle is because their ideas do not hold up to scrutiny.

And once they are allowed to be scrutinized in an equal setting, equal footing, they tend to fall apart.

Ours go viral because they're common sense.

Yeah, can I just say something about X and Elon, which, by the way, the only one, right?

We have like X and I guess like a little bit of CBS right now, maybe.

I don't know.

And

Elon didn't come in and start boosting conservatives, though.

What he did is he came in and he stopped banning conservatives.

He stopped censoring conservatives and he instituted one-tier standard for everyone.

And then he also instituted community notes and all the rest.

And that, for some reason to them, made them so upset that they all started running over to Blue Sky.

It wasn't in a boost of engagement that Bernie Sanders is saying.

It was actually leveling the playing field to an equal standard.

Indeed.

And I'll just, yeah, maybe I'll add a point.

So it is true, of course, that in the battle of ideas, the conservative ideas, of course, we would all agree are much better than the progressive ones.

But I want to introduce a slight cosmetic point that speaks to sort of the virality on social media.

In my happiness book,

the book After the Parasitic Mind, I talk about the research, not my own research, but there's unequivocal research that shows that on average, conservatives score much higher on happiness than do progressives and liberals.

And the research is unequivocal.

So that if you look at, and the reason, by the way, if I can just explain it very quickly, the conservative, I argue, wakes up in the morning.

He may not live in a perfect society, but there are things worth conserving if you are a conservative by the definition of that term.

The progressive wakes up with unbelievable existential angst.

I live in a supremacist society, white supremacy, transphobic, Islamophobic, built on slavery.

Therefore, I need to eradicate the current society.

And around the corner, there'll be unicornia.

So I'm sullen, I'm dour, I'm angry.

Look at Bernie Sanders.

I mean, he is more scary looking than you know, the black mamba.

Whereas you look at you guys, you look at all of the beautiful women on Fox, they look happy.

They are easy to on the eyes.

And so I think that certainly is an additional element beyond just the quality of the ideas that makes people more drawn to some of the leading conservative figures.

I think that's a really smart point.

I've never actually

thought about it that way, Dr.

Sapph.

We live in a state of gratitude and of a sense of, I would say, obligation of duty to conserve the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Things we're grateful for, things we have joy knowing that they exist.

The progressive mind lives in a state of existential dread because they believe the world is not good, true, or beautiful right now, and they want to make it that way.

And so they're willing to tear down all the edifices they see as in between them and their utopia that is simply never going to exist on planet Earth.

And that dichotomy is why you...

liberals tend to wear their dread on their face, whereas conservatives tend to be happy.

We tend to be jovial.

And it was funny because

I heard also kind of like, like, like, it's like self-effacing, right?

It's like, it's like you hate yourself, so you look worse.

And then it's like, you know what I mean?

But it's funny because sometimes I would notice on social media in the wake of this tragedy, Dr.

Sad, that some people would say, oh, you guys aren't mourning enough.

And it's like, okay.

First of all, like

that's not true.

If you could just see us in private.

But secondly, we do not mourn the way the world mourns.

I have faith that Charlie is staring Jesus in the face, and that's our Christian faith.

And I believe that

he's wearing a crown of glory and he's a martyr for the faith and for the country.

I believe that God has a plan.

I trust God's plan.

I don't understand God's plan.

I don't have to like God's plan all the time, at least in my flesh, but I trust it.

And

there is a sense of of higher purpose at play that I am willing to

park my emotions in my flesh at the door and trust the Lord.

I want to play this other clip, Dr.

Saad, because it's again, we're talking about this AOC Bernie town hall.

Caroline Levitt's weighing in, saying we now have the two new leaders of the Democrat Party.

Tough to argue with that observation.

But she can't, she really struggles to give Trump credit for this peace deal in the Middle East.

And I want to dive into what that says at a deeper level about our politics in this country.

261.

Maybe I'm wrong about the ceasefire in Gaza.

Do you believe President Trump deserves credit for that?

Well, you know, I find

these there have been several ceasefire announcements and developments that have happened over the past two years.

As President Trump was on the plane back to the United States, there's already indications and questions about whether this ceasefire will hold.

But do you give him credit?

Do you give him credit, though, for getting to this point where it did get those 20 hostages back home with their families?

In this particular development, yes, but we also know that President Trump Trump was an obstacle to peace previously as well.

Okay, so he was an obstacle.

The whole world

celebrated when this happened.

And everybody said that nobody could do this except for Trump, and yet somehow he is an obstacle.

She says, yes, he gets credit, but instantly has to say, oh, but the peace is fragile.

Well, of course it's fragile.

Dr.

Saad, what does this tell us about the state of politics where we can't leave our domestic issues at the shoreline like we used to and sort of present a united front internationally?

You know, I thank you for that question because, in the way that I'm going to answer it, it shows the power of studying psychology and behavioral science.

So, here's the answer to your wonderful question: There is a great book by two French cognitive psychologists by the name of Sperber and Mercier.

The book is titled The Enigma of Reason, where they argued that our capacity to reason did not evolve in order to achieve some objective truth, but rather it evolved to win arguments.

So that even when we are applying our faculty of reasoning, we are doing it in a tribal coalitional manner, right?

So it doesn't matter if Andrew convinces me that my position is wrong and therefore I will have the humility to say, thank you for correcting me, Andrew.

you're right and I was wrong.

I will double down, triple down forevermore because my team can't lose.

That's exactly what AOC is showing.

She is showing that she's not an honest interlocutor.

All that matters is that I don't give credit where credit is due.

I can never accept the fact that Trump might have done something that was decent, and therefore I'm going to try to avoid giving him the due credit.

Jack, anything to add to that?

So, I suppose, is it possible then that we are able to return to a point in this country where

things like being an American are where what we see as our tribe?

And this is one of the reasons that I think that Trump's defense of the American flag, fighting against the kneeling during the national anthem during the Super Bowl and NFL games, that

if you bring everyone under one umbrella of saying we're all American citizens, we may disagree on our SEC team and our

Super Bowl team, or Andrew and I are crosswise because his Dodgers beat my Phillies in the

darn nearest win.

Okay.

All right.

I remember.

Thank you.

You didn't even make it interesting.

We had the one.

Okay.

It was 8 to 2 at the one game.

Anyway,

we left too many men on base.

But the point is, we can still all be American.

And I think that

it's the messing around with those nuts and bolts of the country that have gotten us to this place.

One minute.

100%.

Yeah, let me give you an example.

I recently had on my show N.

S.

Kander Freedom, the former NBA player, right, who retired to play for Boston Celtics, right?

Now, this guy is from Muslim background, but I don't care that he's Muslim, even though I don't have nice things to say about Islam, because he exemplifies the types of immigrants that we want in the United States or in the West.

He comes to the United States and says, I want to be, to Jack's point, I want to be united under the common rubric called the United States.

I'm Canadian, yet I'm at Old Miss at a center called the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom, because I embody and I I'd like to think I exemplify all of the values of American exceptionalism.

So you're exactly spot on.

No more hyphenated Americans.

If you are American, you believe in our foundational principles, and then welcome in my brother.

If you don't, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

And that is a perfect place to leave it.

Dr.

Gad Sad, a southerner from who's rooting for Ole Miss.

I never thought I'd see the day,

but it's but it's we're all building bridges, but

post September 10th.

I think it's fitting somehow.

Dr.

Sad, thank you for so much of your time.

Thank you.

That was great.

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