You've probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. "Why are you doing this? That's not what we stand for." Some accounts are mocking her. "She voted for it." I won't. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It's a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy. The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us. Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat. Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces. Where does it come from? Four layers. First, biology. Empathy is a spotlight, as the psychologist Paul Bloom put it. It lights up the one face in front of you and leaves everything else in the dark. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. A spotlight is a terrible tool for running a country. Second, our own civilization. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else. Third, ideology. In The Parasitic Mind, Saad described idea pathogens, ideas that hijack our reasoning. Suicidal empathy is the emotional counterpart: an ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do. Fourth, status. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting "refugees welcome" costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night. The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad's conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct. Now the part I'll add myself, and that few people dare to say. On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It's one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It's a strength. But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration. This is where men have a responsibility. Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say "she deserved it." Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves. Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends. That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It's surrender. And the first to pay for it are women. Many women already understand this better than anyone. Some of the bravest voices in this fight are women, precisely because they are the first to feel the danger in the street. A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left. Look at that young woman again. She isn't the enemy. She's what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough. Our job is to make sure she's the last generation that has to learn it this way.

I showed you France burning. This morning I showed you the machine behind it. Now there is only one question left: how do we get out? My answer: the West needs a Nuremberg for communism. In 1945, the Allies did something no civilization had done before. They put an ideology on trial through the men who carried it out. The Nuremberg Charter gave a name to what the Nazis had done: crimes against humanity. Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, persecution on political, racial or religious grounds, committed against civilian populations. Read that list again. Then look at the 20th century. The Holodomor, millions of Ukrainians deliberately starved to death. The Gulag. Mao's Great Leap Forward, tens of millions dead in a famine created by ideology. The Khmer Rouge, who killed roughly a quarter of Cambodia's population in four years. Close to 100 million dead, by the estimate of the Black Book of Communism. Every item on the Nuremberg list, checked again and again, on three continents. Nazism was tried, condemned and buried. Communism never was. No trial. No reckoning. No moment where the West looked at it and said: never again. The closest we came was Cambodia, where a tribunal finally convicted Khmer Rouge leaders of genocide and crimes against humanity, almost forty years too late. So instead of being buried, the idea survived. It went to university. Today, nobody would walk into a lecture hall wearing a swastika. But you can wear Che Guevara on a T-shirt, wave the hammer and sickle at a march, and build a career teaching Marx as a guide to justice. One totalitarianism became a moral taboo. The other became a fashion. That double standard is the root of everything I described this weekend. Marxism didn't die in 1991. It changed costume. The class struggle became the identity struggle. The proletariat was replaced by any group that could be cast as a victim, and the bourgeoisie by the West itself. Same logic: split society into oppressors and oppressed, tear down the old order, hand power to those who claim to speak for the oppressed. It spent seventy years marching through the institutions: universities, media, schools, NGOs, the civil service. Today it sits at their center. That's how a civilization falls. First the idea, then the invasion. And here is the part most people still don't see. The alliance between the far left and Islamism is not an accident. It's a strategy. By the end of the 20th century, Marxism had a problem: it had lost its revolutionary class. The Western working class never wanted the revolution. It wanted good jobs, safe streets, and a country that still looked like home. And it started voting for the right. In France, the industrial towns that once voted communist now vote for the national right. So the left went looking for a new proletariat. In 1994, the British Trotskyist Chris Harman published The Prophet and the Proletariat, a strategy text on how revolutionaries should ally with Islamist movements. In 2011, Terra Nova, a think tank close to the French Socialist Party, advised the left to stop chasing the working class and build its majority on graduates, young people and minorities. From there, mass immigration stopped being just a policy. It became a political project. Open borders to bring in a new base. Islamism to supply the energy, the numbers and the hatred of the Western order that the left could no longer produce on its own. And Marxist theory to supply the vocabulary: every Islamist is "oppressed," every critic is "racist," every attack is "a reaction to discrimination." Islamism is the Trojan horse. Marxism is the army hiding inside it. Except the left forgot one thing: this horse has its own rider. History already ran the experiment. In 1979, Iran's communists and leftists marched alongside Khomeini against the Shah. They were sure they were using the mullahs. Within four years, the Tudeh communist party was banned and its leaders were paraded on television making forced confessions. In 1988, the regime executed thousands of political prisoners, leftists among them. The useful idiots were among the first to hang. That is the future the far left is building for itself. Islamism does not share power. Once it has used them, it will devour them first: the feminists, the gay activists, the secular teachers, the students waving its flags today. Then everyone else. And let's be precise about the enemy. It is Islamism, a political project of domination. Not the Muslims who came to work, live in peace and raise their children in the West. Many of them fled exactly these fanatics, and they know better than anyone what happens when they win. Now watch what the far left does when its strategy starts to show. It reaches for the oldest trick in history: blame the Jews. Since October 7, movements that call themselves antiracist have marched behind Hamas flags, chanted for Israel's erasure "from the river to the sea," and refused to call the massacre of civilians terrorism. In France, antisemitic acts nearly quadrupled in a single year. Israel has become the universal culprit: of colonialism, of capitalism, of every injustice on earth. Once again, the Jews are the people a movement points at so its own followers never have to look at themselves. René Girard spent his life explaining this mechanism. When a society falls into crisis, the crowd needs a scapegoat: a victim it can blame for the chaos, unite against, and sacrifice. His book The Scapegoat opens with a 14th-century poet calmly recounting how the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells during the Black Death, and then massacred. Seven centuries later, the mechanism hasn't changed. Only the vocabulary has. Girard saw something else too. Christianity gave the West its unique concern for victims. And he described a new totalitarianism that would seize that concern, radicalize it, and turn it into a weapon. That's exactly what Marxism does: it presents itself as the defender of the oppressed, and then it goes hunting for someone to blame. So let's be clear about who the enemy is. Our enemy is not the Jews. It is not Israel. It is not the Muslim family next door. It is not the twenty-year-old who was taught all this in school and never heard anything else. Our enemies are ideas. Marxism, and every variant it has spawned: the heirs of the Frankfurt School and critical theory, critical race theory, intersectionality, decolonialism, wokism, the "social justice" industry, the DEI bureaucracy, eco-radicalism, and degrowth, which wants the West poorer as penance for existing. Different labels, same machinery. Split the world into oppressors and oppressed. Designate a culprit. Demand that the West pay for its own existence. Islamo-leftism is just the latest alliance that machinery has built. That's why this is a civilizational war, not a seminar debate. Ideas have consequences. These ones have armies, budgets, and a body count. Not every Western country is equally sick. Europe is deep in it. America is the least infected, and I believe it owes that to its Constitution: the First Amendment, the Second, a federal structure that makes it hard for one ideology to capture everything at once. But protection is not immunity. The same ideas are in your campuses, your newsrooms, your HR departments. You have less time than you think. So what does a Nuremberg for communism look like? First, the verdict. Western nations formally recognize the crimes of communist regimes as crimes against humanity, with the same moral weight as Nazi crimes. Europe has started. The 2008 Prague Declaration, signed by Václav Havel, and the European Parliament's 2019 resolution both put the two totalitarianisms side by side. Now make it mean something. Second, the same rules. In France, glorifying Nazi crimes is a criminal offense. Glorifying the Holodomor, the Gulag or the killing fields of Cambodia should be treated exactly the same way. Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine already ban communist symbols alongside Nazi ones. They lived under both. They know. Third, the institutions. Bring back real neutrality in schools, universities and the civil service. Stop handing public money to activist NGOs. Make every foundation that shapes policy as transparent as a political party. And take back control of who enters our countries, because a nation that cannot choose its own people is no longer a nation. Fourth, and most important: culture. Nazism didn't become taboo because of a courtroom. It became taboo because of Schindler's List, Band of Brothers, Shoah, the Diary of Anne Frank, thousands of documentaries, novels and school trips to Auschwitz. Every child in the West knows what a swastika means. Almost none of them know what the Holodomor was. We need the same work for communism. Films, series, documentaries, animated films for kids, games. The Ukrainian farmer whose last grain was confiscated. The Cambodian teacher executed for wearing glasses. The Soviet dissident locked in a psychiatric ward. The Iranian communist who cheered for Khomeini and died in his prisons. And the story of how the West itself was captured for seventy years without a single shot fired. Hollywood taught us to weep for the victims of one totalitarianism. Someone has to teach us to weep for the victims of the other. And for the first time, you don't need a studio to do it. A small team with the right tools can. The Nuremberg I'm calling for is not about banning thought. Read Marx, study him, debate him, the way historians study Mein Kampf. What has to end is the glorification. The romance. The idea that an ideology with 100 million corpses behind it is a respectable starting point for "social justice." Nazism was defeated twice: once on the battlefield, then in our minds. Communism lost the Cold War, but it never lost the battle for minds. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The one in our heads is still standing. Time to finish the job.

Many in the comments are saying: "The French voted for this." Fine. Now ask yourself a better question. Why is it the same story in every Western country at once? France, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Belgium, Canada. Different languages, different histories, different voters. Same outcome. Same open-border policies, sold in the same beautiful packaging: progress, inclusion, integration, "our values." When dozens of peoples who never coordinated end up with the exact same policy, it wasn't the peoples who decided. It was the class that governs all of them. Same schools, same forums, same networks. For decades, they have systematically lied to Europeans about what was happening and what it would cost. They tried it with you too, America. You came close. What saved you was your Constitution, and a handful of people like Elon Musk and the All-In crew who refused to stay quiet when silence would have been easier. But don't celebrate too early. The West is not a country. It's a civilization. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and every nation that inherited or built on what came out of them: Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and allies like Japan who share its institutions and its fate. If Europe falls, you don't get to watch from across the ocean. You lose half your civilization, your oldest allies, the cradle of everything you believe in. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic has any interest in waking up to an Islamist Europe. So understand that this fight has two levels. There is the national fight. Every people has to win its own battle at home, at the ballot box, in its own institutions, under its own laws. No one can do it for us. You can't vote in France, and we can't vote in Ohio. And there is the civilizational fight. The West is under attack on two fronts at once. From the inside, by a soft communism that hates its own history and wants to dissolve nations into a managed mass. From the outside, by Islamism, which sees our weakness and fills the vacuum. And the two have found each other: Islamo-leftism, where the far left defends the very ideology that would crush it first. The national fights are the battles. The civilizational fight is the war. And here's what the other side exploits: your kindness. Western civilization produced something rare in human history: a moral instinct to extend compassion to strangers. To the refugee, the outsider, the weakest. It's one of the most beautiful things we ever built. The globalist class turned it into a weapon against us. Gad Saad has a name for this: suicidal empathy. Empathy that no longer asks who it protects and who pays the price. Empathy that cares more about how it looks than about what it causes. Empathy so detached from reason that it ends up sacrificing your own people, the girl attacked on her way home, the worker priced out of his neighborhood, the town that no longer recognizes itself, just to signal virtue toward strangers. And every time you object, they don't answer your argument. They question your heart. "Where is your compassion?" That's the trap. They know a decent people will hesitate before being called cruel. They've been running that play for thirty years. Now add the money. A few left-wing billionaires understood long ago that you don't need to win elections if you can shape the institutions around them. The Gates Foundation became one of the largest funders of the World Health Organization. George Soros's Open Society Foundations have spent billions funding NGOs, advocacy groups and legal networks, with Europe as a major focus. Unelected, unaccountable, and extremely well organized. And it's not only private money. Brussels funds NGOs with taxpayers' money, and those same NGOs then lobby Brussels for the policies it already wanted. A closed loop. Citizens pay for it. Nobody ever asked them. This is the supranational machine: Brussels, the galaxy of NGOs orbiting it, the foundations feeding them, and the political class moving freely between all three. It answers to no voter in any country. It does enormous damage. And it can't be voted out, because no one ever voted it in. And if you want to know where its center of gravity is, look at Washington. The Democratic Party is its political headquarters. Not because every Democrat is a globalist, but because that's where the whole network converges: the big foundations, the NGO galaxy, the international organizations, the legacy media, the platforms. Same donors, same people rotating from one to the other, same worldview. Brussels is the branch office. Covid showed it in real time. Within weeks, almost the entire Western world adopted the same playbook. Same measures, same messaging, same "trust the science." Anthony Fauci became the face of the official line far beyond America's borders. The Gates Foundation, co-founder of the global vaccine alliances and one of the WHO's largest funders, sat at the center of global health policy. And anyone who questioned the line was branded a spreader of misinformation. The lab-leak hypothesis was a "conspiracy theory" right up until it became a respectable one. And in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg admitted in writing that senior Biden administration officials had repeatedly pressured Meta in 2021 to censor Covid content, including humor and satire. Government, foundations, international organizations, platforms. All moving in the same direction, at the same time, and no voter ever consulted. That's the machine. Covid was the moment it stopped hiding. That machine is what has to be taken apart. Defund the NGOs living off public money. Bring decisions back to elected national parliaments. Make every foundation that shapes public policy as transparent as a political party. Compassion is a Western virtue. Letting it be used against us is not. So let's not fall into the trap. The trap is Western nations turning on each other. Americans mocking Europeans, Europeans sneering at Americans, each country telling itself "they deserve what's happening to them, they voted for it." I'm pro-border. I'm pro-nation. I believe every people has the right to decide who enters its home and to defend its own culture. That will never change. But what we face today is not one nation attacking another. It's an attack on the civilization all our nations belong to. And a civilization under attack cannot afford to let its members watch each other burn. When you see France on fire, don't say "they chose this." Understand how it happened. Understand who did it. And understand that the same people are working on you. The West has to stand together against this, fully, without ambiguity, and its peoples have to understand each other. National pride and civilizational solidarity are not opposites. They are the same fight at two scales. A Frenchman voting to take back his borders and an American voting on November 3rd are on the same front, in the same war, for the same civilization. We lose it separately, or we win it together.