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

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.