The Gadfather

I encountered Dr. Saad the first time on Dave Rubin's once-recommendable talk show (which had started as a former left-winger presenting interesting characters from the Right and gradually has slid into presenting anyone who has either something nice to say about Trump or something ugly about progressives), and I was immediately captured by the charisma oozing from the man. He conjured up the image of a gregarious, beguiling, and nefarious wizard from the Arabian Nights. The one who shares his tainted wisdom with kings and, with his oily tongue and enchanting tales, lures the young and curious onto dark paths.

I've come to believe this strange first impression was not completely inaccurate, but the real man is of course more interesting than his fantasy alter-ego. Gad Saad was born into an Arabic-speaking Jewish community in Lebanon, 1964. During the civil war, his people had few friends, and eventually his family was forced to run for their lives. He arrived in Montreal, Canada at the age of 11. He reveled in the new-found freedom and opportunities, and in his youth he had two contradicting aspirations. He wanted to be an academic and a soccer player. As it happens, an injury decided the question, and Saad went to study mathematics and computer science, then marketing, and finally evolutionary psychology. In his first book, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, he paved the way for applying tools from evolutionary psychology to study consumer behavior.

He is a popular lecturer, a prolific academic writer, and the recipient of multiple awards, but he started gaining wider attention after he testified in front of the Canadian senate against Bill C-16. He appears frequently on the internet, wreaks havoc on Twitter, and runs his own podcast, The Saad Truth. Saad is a vehement defender of Western values, freedom of speech, and scientific truth, against what he perceives is a full-scale assault of radical left-wing ideas. He takes issues with the usual SJW talking points: race and gender are social constructs, the white patriarchy is the oppressor, criticism of Islam is Islamophobia, etc... As a former refugee from a war-ravaged country, he caustically mocks Western snowflakes wallowing in victimhood, and as a Jew, he demands free speech for even Holocaust-deniers. But as a scientist, he is particularly incensed by the claim of postmodern philosophy, that is, science is just a tool of oppression and there are no objective facts. Postmodernism has already consumed Academia, and the society's defenses are eroding under its relentless attack.

The "vehement defender" qualifier is an understatement. Even though Dr. Saad possesses many noble character traits worthy of a fictitious antagonist - charisma, gregariousness, eloquence, wit -, magnanimity is not one of them. When challenged, the rotund and affable professor turns into a bloodhound. When he viciously and relentlessly goes after someone, the words "lobotomized", "moron", "imbecile", or "castrati" fly with abandon. If someone attacks him, he hits back ten times harder - as he proudly confirms.

To reach into fiction for analogies again, this time in the Victorian-era, he is both the criminal mastermind and the henchman.

His trademark combination of swagger and eloquence (or the warm joviality juxtaposed by a predilection for mischief and ruthlessness) makes Gad Saad a very entertaining performer. Like many characters on the Right (although the good professor is hard to pigeonhole in the political spectrum), he loves the sound of his own voice and is visibly comfortable in his own skin. And like many of them, he flies close to the sun. As expected from one who enjoys being a contrarian, he is not very concerned about associating with characters who live in the intellectual gray zones touching the far right. And, tripping off my personal alarm, he finds anti-Trumpism much more problematic than Trump himself, to the extent that he often seems to think that anyone very critical to Trump is an LGBTQ* propagandist. His own critics get lumped in the same category as well. Thin-skinned-ness and preference for passion over nuance might be the weaknesses not only of Social Justice Warriors, which in the case of their most ardent adversary is, mildly speaking, ironic.

In the Culture War raging today, he is a warrior-scholar who is admired as the champion of freedom on one side and passionately hated as the enabler of patriarchy on the other. Ideological wars are complex and messy businesses and their fighters come in all shades of gray. The line between the forces of good and of evil will be drawn only after the dust has settled. On which side the indomitable, vain, and fiercely independent academic will go down in history, is yet to be seen. Until then, there is a lot to learn from Professor Saad. And perhaps a lot be cautious of.