Hello and welcome to global news today. I'm Miho Prinergass and joining me today is Gadsad, the visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.

Thanks so much for your time, GAD. A story that shocked the entire world. A young Ukrainian refugee has been butchered in Charlotte.

Isn't this a textbook case of suicidal empathy? That's the name of your

upcoming book. I don't want to name the assailant himself. He's a scumbag and he doesn't deserve

any publicity. Isn't this a case, a title case for your book? It is in that what suicidal empathy,

the way it works, let me offer a quick explanation and then link it to that specific case. So empathy is a is a beautiful, noble virtue. It is something that

we need to have as a social species. For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, Mihal, I need to have

theory of mind as you do. In other words, we need to put ourselves in each other's minds to be able

to have a meaningful interaction. So it is perfectly reasonable to argue that empathy is a laudable,

noble virtue. The problem arises when empathy misfires. And before I explain

how it misfires, let me draw an analogy. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is the misfiring of an otherwise

adaptive process. So for example, the fact that you and I shake hands and I notice that you

have a cold, I might go ahead and wash shake hands and I notice that you have a cold, I might

go ahead and wash my hands because I don't want to catch your cold.

That is perfectly adaptive and it makes evolutionary sense for me to do that.

But OCD is when I spend eight hours a day washing my hands in scolding water until my skin is falling off. I can't make

it to work because I'm obsessed with washing my hands. So what started off as an adaptive mechanism

becomes maladaptive when it misfires. So that's exactly my argument for suicidal empathy.

When empathy starts misfiring in ways that you target

your empathy toward the wrong target, you're orgeastically empathetic for all of the wrong

times and the wrong situations. That becomes suicidal empathy. So in that particular case, what you have is an incredibly

lax justice system, penal system, that basically argues along the following lines. It is unfair to not give hardened felons 637 chances or second chances,

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