Professor Gad Saad — he of the now-famous The Parasitic Mind — has pulled up stakes in Montreal and is heading to Mississippi — the University of Mississippi, to be exact. Or God’s country. Flyover Country is God’s country.
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Saad’s new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, arrived in May. It’s a welcome sequel to The Parasitic Mind. His insights and analyses are original. Saad’s writings and commentaries are seminal.
Saad isn’t moving to the Magnolia State just for the sun. Canada — well, not all of it, but woke bastions Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa, Kingston, and Vancouver, chiefly — is no longer hospitable to a Jew who believes in liberty — specifically, personal empowerment borne of intellectual rigor, reason, and Western beliefs and values. Virulent antisemitism is becoming commonplace.
Don’t pity Gad Saad, though. He possesses a free man’s spirit, and is liberating himself from a country that is fast betraying its heritage. Saad is fleeing to the U.S. because, well, we’re freer, and haven’t flushed Western values — though that isn’t true everywhere across the Union. Hence, the nation is locked in a decades-long cold civil war.
Blue states and cities are home to elites who are more in sync with Canada’s Mark Carney and Britain’s Andy Burnham. The coasts, the Northeast, New England, just about every major city and college town is infected with leftist viruses — yes, which entail parasitic mindsets and intellectual flaccidity prone to suicidal empathy.
Yet, it seems that Saad’s exodus to Mississippi is more on the order of trying to outrun the wolf — for a bit. Does the professor believe that it’s just a matter of time before the U.S. succumbs to the same mind viruses destroying Europe and Canada?
From the Wall Street Journal article, July 10:
It’s no surprise that he [Saad] admires President Trump, perhaps the least suicidally empathetic politician in the Western world. Can Mr. Trump and his administration turn the tables on the suicidal empathizers?
Mr. Saad fears not. “He’s only here for a limited time, right? So, he’s a doorstop, an ephemeral doorstop to the tsunami of suicidal empathy. If there isn’t a longer-lasting change that actually shifts the culture away from regarding suicidal empathy as the highest virtue, then Donald Trump will only have served as a pause button.” While it was “much better, in my view, that Trump won instead of the lobotomized one [Kamala Harris], there’s too much more that needs to be done.”
Still, the U.S., he says, is in much better shape than Canada, which is in a “Stage 5 state of civilizational seppuku — one higher than Stage 4, which is the worst stage of cancer.” Other countries that are as “doomed” as Canada include Sweden, Norway, the U.K. and Germany. Part of the problem is that the end of the Cold War has meant that Western societies no longer have to affirm their own values: “We no longer believe that we are exemplars, better than other societies.”
Saad’s assessment mostly pegs it, though America is in much, much better shape than the country he’s leaving. Let’s suggest that he spend a year or two in
The argument here is that roughly half the nation hasn’t been zombized by woke claptrap — and it won’t be. Call that take a mix of experience and gut feel. Flyover country is the heart, soul, and backbone of America. It’s worth adding that flyover country is wherever patriots live. Why, some patriots can be found in socialist-occupied Manhattan. All that may sound like cornpone to Canadians, Europeans, and homegrown progressives, but far from it.
Half the country retains deep commitments to freedom, faith, and Western values — even if they can’t articulate the whats and whys. Their ancestors fought and shed blood to uphold all three. Traditional American culture remains bedrock. There’s an instinctive attachment to what makes America, America. Even some old-style liberals like Bill Maher are catching on.
When asked by WSJ, “Aren’t there robust forces in the West pushing back against Western self-destructiveness,” Professor Saad responded that…
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[snip] “the welder, the trucker, and the corrections officer are not suffering from suicidal empathy.” But they aren’t the ones dictating policy: “Those are the intelligentsia: academics, journalists, boards of corporations. It’s not the Navy SEAL who’s suicidally empathetic. It’s Justin Trudeau and the invertebrate castrati, lacking in spine and testicles, who make up our elites.”
Of course, the professor speaks from his years of experience in Canada. And as an academic, he’s surrounded by the very elites he indicts. He acknowledges that “the welder, the trucker, and the corrections officer are not suffering from suicidal empathy,” though discounts them. They don’t run institutions, they aren’t monied, and they haven’t gone to the “best” schools. Elites hold power positions, dictate policy, and are indomitable. The proletariat are just work-a-day lugs — subjects. The “invertebrate castrati” have momentum. If elites are to be defeated, it’ll take herculean effort.
Dare say, there’s a heaping spoonful of fatalism in that summation. The American character, best exemplified by working people, is such that patriots neither believe nor accept that elites dictate their lives. Granted, elites have upper hands in many respects, but history is replete with examples of elites being toppled, many times due to hubris.
A revolution was waged and won here against seemingly impossible odds. Smug British elites were expelled from the Colonies. A civil war was fought. The two sides had very different ideas of what constituted liberty. Southern elites — dominant into the late 1850s — lost their grip with Lincoln’s 1860 plurality victory. A four-year bloody slog resolved in favor of the Union, and under the governance of a recently formed coalition of disparate nonelites called Republicans.
The fight between liberty and tyranny — whatever the iteration — is never over in the U.S. Lincoln might have declared that God Almighty intended this land to be a proving ground, where our worthiness to be free is repeatedly tested.
Since the 1960s, nonelite America made the Goldwater movement, then came the Silent Majority, then the Reagan Revolution, and then Gingrich and the Contract with America. The Tea Party formed in reaction to Obama’s presidency, followed by Donald Trump’s rise. Today, there’s MAGA, a thriving coalition of “out” Americans.
None of those movements were or are limited to politics and economics; each contains cultural components. Common sense Americans are learning that the fight is more than ever about defending traditional American culture.
An epic cultural battleground can be found in the fight over abortion. It’s far from settled. One side — led by elites — claims there’s a right to terminate life in the womb. The other side aims to protect innocent life, consistent with Judeo-Christian teaching, the Western tenet of individual worth, and in step with the Declaration. Echoes of the slavery fight resound. If history instructs, the wager is on pro-life forces triumphing.
When Professor Saad is happily ensconced in Mississippi, one final suggestion: Channel Alexis de Tocqueville. Travel. Go to church socials. Hang with folk at BBQ joints. Sit with parents at Little League games. Attend Ole Miss Rebels’ football. Visit workplaces. Talk to small business owners. Chat with folk who volunteer with charities, and those who are active in local politics.
Said de Tocqueville:
Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
Many tens of millions of Americans are good — and they mean to keep America great.
J. Robert Smith can be found at X. His handle is @JRobertSmith1. At Gab, @JRobertSmith. Also at Truth Social, @JRobertSmith. He blogs occasionally at Flyover.
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Image: Gage Skidmore