Is Gad Saad is building a culture-war hero persona by distorting Canadian reality?

Gad Saad speaks with attendees at the 2023 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons , CC BY In a few days, Gad Saad, a longtime right-wing Concordia University marketing professor, starts a new position at the University of Mississippi .

His move to the United States has been described as a Jewish professor leaving Canada for his own safety on the front page of the National Post .

Antisemitism has risen in Canada and elsewhere, and there’s no reason to doubt Saad faced death threats and intimidation.

The question raised here is whether Saad’s account of his time at Concordia — and his larger narrative about Canada as an authoritarian nation captured by woke ideology — tells the whole story.

There is reason for skepticism.

Canada is home to a disproportionate number of hard-right and far-right internet sensations, from Jordan Peterson to Lauren Southern, Ezra Levant and, more recently, Saad himself.

Born in 1964 in Lebanon, educated at McGill and Cornell , Saad has moved from scholarship to a popular writer, polemicist and self-help author on the right with The Parasitic Mind (2020) and The Saad Truth about Happiness (2023) .

Saad recently published Suicidal Empathy , a book that became a bestseller, likely in part due to the amplification on X provided by his new friend Elon Musk .

Now a darling of the MAGA right, Saad has significant influence because of his critiques on what he alleges is a “mind virus” of radical feminism, postmodernism and left-wing “woke” and anti-Israel politics .

Cancelled panel discussion But how much of what Saad says can be trusted? It the early years of his career, Saad was a serious scholar, creating a substantial record of publications in a new field in business schools applying evolutionary theory to understand marketing.

Saad also raised reasonable questions about the reluctance of social scientists to use the insights of biological sciences .

And for those who had concerns about how controversial speakers were de-platformed in the United States and Canada in the period between 2017 and 2020 , some of Saad’s arguments represented legitimate views amid necessary societal debates.

But he was not a good-faith commentator on these issues.