Dr. Gad Saad joins Dave Rubin to dismantle the conflation of Islamic criticism with Islamophobia, exposing how cognitive biases shield doctrines while attacking figures like Sam Harris. They critique the 44-to-1 Democrat dominance in humanities departments and the rise of "safe spaces" that censor contrarian views, arguing this culture of non-offense is pussifying the West. Ultimately, they assert that true equality requires intellectuals to abandon cowardice and engage in honest discourse without special protections for any religion or ideology. [Automatically generated summary]
As you guys know, we are making the move to Aura TV.
They are building me an unbelievable set right now.
So Larry King was nice enough to let me use his studio today.
And the reason we wanted to do Some stuff with you guys today is because I have Dr. Gad Saad here.
He is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and he's the Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption.
I normally don't use a teleprompter, but I needed it for that.
Okay, so the reason that I wanted to bring you in, and the timing of this really is just perfect, is because we connected sort of in the last year and a half or so on Twitter.
We find ourselves often in the same Twitter wars with people.
The atheists, and the new atheists, and the far left, and the people on the right, and everyone that's always battling on Twitter.
And we're usually on the same side of things.
And really what started this whole thing was when Sam Harris was on Real Time with Bill Maher and he and Ben Affleck and Bill got into a big fracas.
So let's take a look at the clip and then we'll go from there.
So the other thing we want to talk about of course is that you and I have been trying to make the case, I think, I have anyway, that liberals need to stand up for liberal principles.
This is what I said on last week's show.
Obviously I got a lot of hate.
But all I'm saying is that liberal principles like freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion you want without fear of violence, freedom to leave a religion, equality for women, equality for minorities, including homosexuals.
These are liberal principles that liberals applaud for.
But then when you say, in the Muslim world, this is what's lacking, then they get upset.
Well, liberals have really failed on the topic of theocracy.
They'll criticize white theocracy, they'll criticize Christians, they'll...
Still get agitated over the abortion clinic bombing that happened in 1984.
But when you want to talk about the treatment of women and homosexuals and free thinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would argue that liberals have failed us.
And the crucial point of confusion... Thank God you're here!
Well, I mean, the crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry toward Muslims as people.
You guys are saying, if you want to be liberals, believe in liberal principles, like freedom of speech, like we are endowed by our forefathers with an inalienable life, like all men are created equal.
Okay, so that clip goes on for about ten minutes, and I showed you about two minutes right there, and I think Sam hit the point right at the end that we have to be able to criticize bad ideas.
And to me, this—I've seen a real schism in people on the left.
Now, I'm obviously on the left.
I stand for liberal principles.
But this schism and this idea that you can't criticize ideas without somehow condemning a whole group of people—I know this is a big point of contention for you, so can you walk us through that a little bit?
I don't think that people have difficulty criticizing ideas.
I think it's a specific idea, right?
So, I see it every day in my exchanges on Facebook.
If I criticize some Jewish practice, I get many, many likes on Facebook.
If I criticize some hick Republican senator about his position on evolution, I get tons of likes.
But if I dare criticize something about Islam, I'll give you a very quick example.
I put up a clip of an Iraqi scientist, an astronomer, who was arguing that the Earth is flat, as it says so in the Quran.
So I received, of course many of my Facebook friends are academics, I received from a white, sort of guilt-ridden academic from California, a note saying, Why are you ganging up on these folks?
So she wasn't offended by the fact that this Iraqi scientist was holding an astonishingly outrageous view.
She was annoyed that I would actually point to that.
Right, so to me, Bill Maher sort of hit maybe the bigger point here, which is that for people on the left, for liberals, we have to stand up consistently for liberal principles, which is certainly what I try to do.
I stand up for women's rights.
And gay rights and freedom of religion and economic equality and all of those things.
So in a weird way, what you're saying is that liberals don't want to criticize Islam because there's this idea that a lot of Islamic people have brown skin, but there are plenty of Moroccan Jews.
You're a Lebanese Jew, right?
There are plenty of Christians that are Iraqi.
There's not that many anymore.
So even that, in a weird way, you could say that that's actually bigoted, that that concept is bigoted.
How do you, as a dark-skinned Jew, how do you feel about that?
Well, I usually am able to get away with a lot more stuff precisely because I invoke the fact that I have dark skin, the fact that I'm from the Middle East.
And I use this victimology game against the social justice warriors Yeah.
By basically saying, hey, be careful.
Don't you criticize me.
Because then you'd be engaging in araphobia, fatism.
So the next part of this that I think is particularly interesting, and this is really where we met because of the Twitter thing that I referenced earlier, is there has been sort of an endless onslaught on Sam Harris since this.
Now Sam is a philosopher, I think he's a neuroscientist, I've read some of his books.
He's not a political He writes a little bit about politics, but not really.
But there has been this endless onslaught, and I think slandering and smearing him, coming from the left, from people that in some cases I admire partly, some people that I've worked with.
I'm talking about from Glenn Greenwald, who obviously has done great stuff with the NSA, and Reza Aslan, my former boss, Cenk Uygur, people that are really distorting his views.
And I wanted to show a tweet that I got last night that I think kind of sums up the whole thing.
So let's take a look at the tweet.
OK, so this had nothing—I wasn't tweeting about this.
This has nothing to do with anything.
And someone tweeted this at me.
Question for Rubin Report.
How exactly are we better than ISIS if we nuke the Middle East, killing millions of civilians like Sam Harris suggests?
And then Sam Harris later wrote back to the person and said, you really believe that I've actually suggested that?
Okay, so that tweet right there, the reason I wanted to use it is because I feel like it's a perfect example of how this discussion that we're talking about has been so far derailed.
Now, of course, Sam Harris doesn't want to nuke the Middle East.
He had one page in his book that's mostly about philosophy and religion where he's talking about how in the Cold War we had, you know, mutual assurances basically with Russia because you had rational actors, basically, that wouldn't nuke each other because then they were afraid they were going to get nuked.
Now, this is nothing—he never said nuke the Middle East or any of this stuff, but these people keep implying it.
They keep retweeting memes of, you know, selective quotes.
What do you make of that?
I mean, these are pretty respected people, some that I know personally, which is why I struggle with this so much.
You know, in the battle of ideologies, the people that you want to go after are not the people who've got big muscles, but the people who have big brains.
Those are so totalitarian ideologies always go after the intellectuals first.
They want to purge them because they don't want anybody to counter their narrative.
And so this is exactly what happens to guys like Sam Harris.
He has a huge following that he can't be literally beheaded because we don't live in the Middle East.
But I could certainly try my darndest to behead his reputation.
And I'm going to do that.
By engaging in endless misinformation so that people can distance themselves from him.
Well, these false equivalences are everywhere within this discourse.
So, for example, if you take some feminists, they'll argue that the bikini is a patriarchal tool of oppression, whereas the burqa is a liberating thing, because it removes the male gaze from the picture, right?
So while the bikini-clad woman is being visually raped by men, Once you don the burka, she is liberated.
So these types of equivalences are astonishing, but they're everywhere.
I guess one of the reasons why they attack the atheists is because they might be some of the most vociferous group of people that are critical of religion in general, but Islam in particular.
And so to the extent that the progressives don't like criticisms of Islam, and to the extent that many of the most famous atheists are quite vociferous in their criticism of Islam, then we have to go after them.
I would bet, and someone can check this for us, but I would bet that Bill Maher has spent far more time attacking Christianity because he attacks things in this country far more than attacking Islam or Judaism or whatever.
What do you make of how much hatred there seems to be towards atheists at the moment?
Because I see all these polls, and on the show many times we've done, how atheists are the most underrepresented group in everything.
Barney Frank, who was in Congress for 30-something years, was able to come out as gay in the 80s, but not as an atheist until he retired.
From Congress, right?
What do you make of this?
Because atheists hold no power, are atheists killing people that I don't know about?
My feeling is that there is a coupling of atheism and immorality in the minds of most people.
So most people believe that it doesn't matter which religion you follow, as long as you are religious, then you somehow have a moral compass by which you live your life by.
Last year I gave a talk at Wellesley College, an all-women's college, about the Thought Police and how it regulates the free exchange of ideas.
After my lecture, a student came up to me and said, I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of a professor at the start of class polling a hundred students about how you should address them.
So even though, for example, Dave Rubin is my student, I clearly see you as a male, at the start of every lecture, I should say, do you gender identify as male or female?
Because that will determine... So I looked at her in true astonishment.
I said, do you really see this as a viable way by which society would be organized, where every single time we interact, we should first preempt any greeting with, what do you self-identify as?
And she said, absolutely, because that way you wouldn't be hurting anybody by Yeah.
So there were studies that were done looking at the political affiliations of professors at major American universities, whether they're Republican or Democrats, and the numbers are just astonishing.
And they get worse and worse in terms of the ratio as a function of the softness of the field.
So in the humanities and sociology and gender studies, It's something like 44 to 1, the ratio.
Now, for some issues, political lens doesn't matter.
I mean, even though I may in most cases agree with that end of academia, certainly not the political correct side, but I might agree with them philosophically on a lot of the points, how do you balance that out?
So Thomas Sowell, who's a very famous conservative economist, He said, and I'm going to botch the exact quote, he said, intellectual diversity is—diversity on campuses is great as long as it's sexual orientation diversity, ethnic diversity, racial diversity, but the one diversity that should really matter, intellectual diversity, we condemn it.
Well, what we need to do is find— Which is thought.
Which is thought, exactly.
And what we need to—is to find ways to create greater diversity on campuses, to allow both sides of any position to speak.
Do you think a lot of this has to do with the way our culture has changed in the last couple years, like where you can't bully a kid?
Now, I'm not for bullying, of course, but this concept where we keep making everything that no one can ever be offended by anything.
You know, they took after the shooting in Charleston, now they took Duke's Hazard off television.
Those guys were not, they were not somehow southern, white supremacists, you know what I mean?
But they took that off television.
I'm not gonna defend Cosby, who was one of my comedy heroes growing up, but they took the Cosby Show off the air.
Like, we're starting to censor ourselves, I think, in a way that's gonna lead to everything.
You know, every time I watch Seinfeld now, every episode, I think, in 10 years, they're gonna say this was racist and misogyny, literally every single episode.
Salon did a piece a couple weeks ago about troublesome episodes of Seinfeld.
We need to find a way to break through this thought police.
I'll give you an example.
I used to be a very competitive soccer player.
If I were to today look at the trash-talking that went on the soccer field between players, which is part of the ritual, then everybody would be arrested today.
Everybody would be sent to a hate speech tribunal.
Do you remember when Bill Maher was being asked to give the commencement speech at Berkeley?
Berkeley, which is the bastion, the home of free speech in America.
And some of the kids there didn't want him to do it.
He ended up doing it.
But he had a guest, I forget her name, I was actually in the audience that episode, he had a guest who said that he shouldn't do it because he's against free speech.
Meanwhile, she's on her, she's on his show using her right to free speech.
I wrote an article at Huffington Post where I talked about trigger warnings and I listed all of the different concepts that necessitate trigger warnings.
You know, I do think there is a connection between, you know, if you do all this stuff, right, and you give everyone, everyone has the trigger warnings, you give them safe spaces, you don't let them hear from contrarian views and all this stuff, then you throw them out in the world where none of this stuff is real, because you get out to the world and it's pretty shitty and, you know, you're gonna have a boss that might be sexist or a neighbor that might be homophobic.
Well, at the very least, and I often admonish my academic colleagues for this, who don't participate in this great public discourse.
They're very interested in doing their very narrow research, but yet they're shy away from talking about these bigger issues, even though they're professors.
I mean, you're all about meme propagation if you're a professor.
And so what I would do, at least what I do in my limited sphere of influence, is to try to get my colleagues to weigh in on these issues so that we could have academics weighing in and not just the trolls.
Yeah, so what does that say then that it's not just, I guess it's coming from every angle, right?
It's coming from politicians and it's coming from the media people and it's coming from the professors, not just the Well, I would add cowardice as part of the seven deadly sins.
Sometimes I think when I'm tweeting about this stuff or when I'm writing about it or whatever it is, I think, I wish I didn't have to talk about this stuff in a weird way because it's so obvious to me, you know, that the atheists and the seculars, we're on the right side of letting everyone, I want to treat everyone as shitty as everyone else.
They don't even have to be treated as well as everyone else, you know what I mean?
I don't want to be treated better than anyone or worse.
Just treat me the same shitty way you treat everybody else.
A lot of times when I'm in New York City, that's what I think.
Like, everyone, there's every race there, there's every color, there's every ethnicity, everything.
And it's like, everyone hates each other, but no one's killing anybody.