The Smugness of Anti-Empathy Politics
Gad Saad's new book, 'Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind,' critiques what he sees as misguided compassion in political views. The concept gained attention following a tragic subway incident in New York, which Saad uses to illustrate his argument. While some agree with his perspective, others criticize it as overly simplistic and lacking depth.
- ▪Gad Saad's book discusses the dangers of excessive empathy in politics.
- ▪A recent subway incident in New York has been cited as an example of 'suicidal empathy.'
- ▪Critics argue that Saad's views are overly simplistic and self-absorbed.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Bulwark |
| Canonical URL | https://www.thebulwark.com/p/suicidal-empathy-the-smugness-of-anti-empathy-politics-gad-saad |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 05:50:47 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T05:57:00.625Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T06:29:09.634Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zF98nhvLc3pj |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Smugness of Anti-Empathy PoliticsGad Saad spells out his ‘own the libs, scorn the weak’ ethos.Cathy YoungMay 22, 20261Share“SUICIDAL EMPATHY,” THAT BUGABOO OF THE RIGHT, is back in the news. Gad Saad, the Canadian “heterodox” pop psychologist who coined the concept and gave it to folks like Elon Musk, is hawking a new book titled Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. Meanwhile, a tragic incident in New York is being held up as emblematic of this hidden menace. After an elderly retired teacher was shoved down a flight of stairs on the subway—allegedly by a just-released psychiatric ward patient—and died from the fall, a 23-year-old woman told the New York Post that the same man had assaulted her and a friend in a scary subway incident in April.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Bulwark.
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