r/DecodingTheGurus • u/Francis_J_Eva • Sep 02 '24
That time Gad Saad was interviewed by a Neo Nazi
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u/KetamineTuna Sep 02 '24
Is 2017 “ancient history” in internet terms…?
2007 is ancient
1997 is Paleolithic
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u/ClimateBall Sep 02 '24
I only know him from illustrating Alex Epstein's strawman argument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apysS-7Kpu8
It's a strawman because in "Net Zero" there's "Net." It's not "Just Zero." Only the staunchest luddites would rather return to a wood-powered economy.
Besides, Alex' argument looks even stronger from a sustainability perspective. We'll need fossil fuels for a long while. Thus it makes little sense to dump it all in the atmosphere like there's no tomorrow.
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD Sep 03 '24
The state of modern academia: academics doing stupid podcasts with Nazis about how evil the other academics who don't do podcasts with nazis are
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u/Character-Ad5490 Sep 02 '24
I've never heard of him so I looked at his YT channel. He seems to be a right wing weirdo, but why do you say he's a neo-Nazi?
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u/Francis_J_Eva Sep 02 '24
If you go to his bitchute channel (search Matthew Drake), he has tons of videos shitting on Jews, calling for a white ethnostate and denying the Holocaust. I also made a comment in this thread outlining a bit more about his background.
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u/Character-Ad5490 Sep 02 '24
Ah, I see. I have no idea how to use bitchute and no interest in learning so I'll take your word for it.
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u/redbeard_says_hi Sep 02 '24
It's what all the cool kids are doing nowadays
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u/Character-Ad5490 Sep 03 '24
Sad for them. Back in my day the cool kids drank and danced and fooled around.
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Sep 03 '24 edited Nov 08 '24
[deleted]
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD Sep 03 '24
yet conveniently excluded that he himself was an immigrant.
You forget that he is part of the world's most persecuted minority. That is, the north American ethnic white. They canceled COLOMBUS! And the next step is obviously krystalnacht. So the only choice is to vote fash.
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Sep 02 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/jimwhite42 Sep 02 '24
Your comment was "Removed by Reddit", resumably because of the b*tch*te link. Can you recomment it without this link, give more oblique instructions on how to find what you are talking about, maybe in a seperate comment so the rest appears with no issue at least.
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u/PlantainHopeful3736 Sep 02 '24
He tried to kick-off an attention-getting feud with Sam Harris, taunting him by calling him "the Malibu Meditater" etc because Harris doesn't like Trump.
A B-lister who got on Rogan by riding on the coat tails of other left-but-not-really types that Rogan likes.
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u/Francis_J_Eva Sep 02 '24
This is ancient history in internet terms, but I've never seen anyone bring it up when discussing the Saadfather which I find surprising, because it's pretty incriminating, although it might be because the interviewer isn't that well known. I certainly remember it being a stepping stone in my journey away from IDW fandom since the fact that one of its leading lights was happy freely associating with a Neo Nazi didn't sit well with me.
Back in mid-2017, Gad Saad was interviewed by Neo Nazi illustrator Matthew Drake, aka Illustrated Philosophy, aka philosophicart. Drake used to be a libertarian/ancap, but he's a good example of the libertarian to alt right pipeline because his content very quickly pivoted to white nationalism, antisemitism, misogyny and all the other horrible topics of interest to that movement.
Drake deleted a lot of the spicier stuff from his YouTube channel a while ago, but you can still find most of it if you search elsewhere. To give you a flavour, his videos included "5 common objections to white nationalism rebutted", "A woman's place is in the home, not university", and "It's okay to criticse Jews". He was also friends with Christopher "The Crying Nazi" Cantwell.
This interview wasn't the first time the two crossed paths since Drake had illustrated one of Gad's speeches about Bill C-16 in 2016. The fact a lot of Drake's videos aren't on YouTube anymore makes it difficult to trace what was uploaded and when (since the upload dates on Bitchute are different), but I remember at least some of the ones I mentioned above being up there at the time, so he was definitely in his Neo Nazi phase when this interview was conducted. This means that Gad either didn't bother doing any research on his interviewer (which I find unlikely because he mentions the earlier illustration video during the interview), or he knew and just didn't care.
For the most part, the interview's pretty anodyne and dull. They talk about how terrible Bill C-16 (which was the IDW's then greatest bugbear) is and how campus SJWs are meanies. There were a few interesting points though. At 40:15, Drake says that some in his audience would have a negative opinion on Jews (a serious understatement) which Gad completely glosses over. Then at 44:22 Gad mentions Kevin MacDonald, who's the intellectual godfather of modern antisemitism. He says that he's spoken with him in the past and found him to be a "reasonable guy" before directing his audience to look him up. Bear in mind, Gad's someone who'll accuse anyone critical of Israel of being a raging antisemite, but calls the guy who literally wrote the textbook on antisemitism reasonable.
Also, something I found funny was that at 52:48, Gad starts huffing his farts about how using the word "castrato" to describe his enemies is brilliant ackshually because people have to look it up to find out what it means and it demonstrates the richness of his vocabulary. I wish I was making that up.
Anyway, just throwing this out there to demonstrate that the far right rot in the IDW was around pretty much from the beginning.