3/28/25

THE WAR AGAINST EMPATHY

RUMEYSA OZTURK, in white parka, Tufts University doctoral student, is captured by masked federal agents on a street in Somerville, Mass., March 25, and whisked away to Louisiana. Donald Trump hopes that most people won't care.

I SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN SURPRISED. And neither should you.
     The story I heard last weekend on NPR seemed so preposterous that I thought at first it must have been a satire, a spoof, or maybe I just heard it wrong.
     So I went to the online archives of “Weekend Edition,” found the segment, and listened again.
     Yup. I heard it right the first time. It was a story about  empathy. And it wasn’t good. Not the story; the story was okay. The problem was empathy – empathy, it turns out, is bad.
     Empathy has been added to the Right Wing's enemies list.

HOW COULD THIS BE, I WONDERED? Doesn’t the Right  have enough to do without picking a fight with empathy?
     Aren’t there enough college students to deport? Aren’t there millions of people my age to be impoverished by undermining Social Security? And what of the campaign against Canada? There's so much history to distort. So much climate to change.  And so many hungry school children to make hungrier.  It's a long list.
      So why pick on empathy? Sweet little old empathy, which is the harmless – should I even say it, virtuous – practice of understanding what someone else is going through or thinking?  You know, that "Walk in the other person's shoes" sort ofthing.
      The problem for the Right Wing, it turns out, is that empathy has been hijacked by the Left Wing. The liberals have weaponized empathy as an underhanded way of advancing their nefarious causes.
      Headlined, “How empathy came to be seen as weakness in conservative circles,” the NPR story included soundbites from the front lines. One went like this:
      “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
      Turns out that the speaker isn’t just any Joe Blow spouting off at the neighborhood bar.
      It’s none other than the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, the rocket guy, the electric car guy, the satellite guy, the guy who’s tearing the bejezzus out of the entire U.S. government.
     Elon was talking in February on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” one of the most-listened to podcasts of our moment.
      Elon and Joe were chatting about immigration and how it can get out of hand, imperiling a country’s politics and culture, and empathy was part of the problem.
     “There’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself,” Elon says.
     “Yeah,” says Joe.
     NPR seems to have picked up the idea for its story from David French, a New York Times columnist, who explained the basics in an essay “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy.”
     French mentioned other Right Wing “thinkers,” who are so bothered by empathy they’ve written books about it. Allie Beth Stuckey, a podcaster, authored “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.” And  Joe Rigney, a theologian, turned out “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.”
     One chilling fact about empathy: women.
     Women are empathy’s fall guys. The girls are easily led astray by the empathy lure. NPR found a soundbite from Stuckey on a podcast, “Family Talk,” explaining how liberals exploit the ladies:
     “They’ll use emotional, compassionate, kind-sounding language in order to get a woman to think, ‘Well, in order to be a good person, in order to be kind, in order to even love my neighbor, then I have to be pro-open borders, I have to be pro- LGBTQ, I have to be pro-choice.’”

AS I SAID, there’s nothing here that should surprise us as we head into the fourth month of the Trump nightmare.
      Cruelty, the opposite of empathy, is essential to the Trump agenda.
      I don’t know why the president is so angry, so savage, so sadistic and so determined to inflict pain, terror and fear on friend and foe alike.
     But it turns out that he is.
     Most people aren't. At least, I don't think most people are like are like Donald Trump.
      Most people  are kind. They care about other people, and they want others to care about them. Most of us don’t want each other to be hungry, homeless, to live in poverty, to be sick without medical care, to suffer in pain, or to be scared out of our minds every day when we tune into the news.
      For Trump to succeed in whatever it is he’s up to, he has to change the fundamentals of being human, to warp the national character.
     Compassion must be turned into disgust, love into hate,  empathy into revulsion.

 SO THAT WHEN WE WATCH that video showing the capture of the Tufts University doctoral student, Rumeysa Ozturk, by masked federal agents on a street in Somerville, Mass., on March 25, and see her hustled away in an unmarked SUV, we must not care.
      We must not care that Ms.  Ozturk ends up in Louisiana, where, lacking her medications, she has an asthma attack. We must not care that her apparent “offense”  is co-authoring an op-ed essay in a student newspaper. We must not care that a former  classmate, Jennifer Ruth Hoyden, tells the Boston Globe that Ms. Ozturk is “an extremely gentle human being, who could not use a swear word if you paid her.” We must not care that Ms. Ozturk, is 30 years old, from Turkey, enrolled in Tufts’ doctoral program for child study and human development.
     Because empathy has no place in Donald Trump's America.

DONALD TRUMP'S "bad picture" at the Colorado State House before he pleaded for its removal.

THERE'S AN EMPATHY EXEMPTION, of course, because nothing is straight forward with Donald Trump.
     Trump demands empathy for Donald Trump.
     An example is Trump’s recent complaint about his portrait in the Colorado State House, which he described this way on his social network platform:
     Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before. The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst. She must have lost her talent as she got older. In any event, I would much prefer not having a picture than having this one ….
     By March 25, the day on which Ozturk was, in effect, kidnapped by Trump’s goons, empathetic Coloradans had taken taken down the hurtful painting, which produced a sort of win-win outcome: Trump got his wish; State House visitors no longer had to look at him.

BUT FOR TRUMP TO SUCCEED, empathy must seen as a fool’s errand, too naïve, so wrong-headed and dangerously foolish.
     Which suggests one way to counter the horror Trump is inflicting on our country and on our world.
     Maybe we can’t make it to the next big protest.
     Maybe an inspiring Democratic leader has yet to emerge. Maybe we can’t contribute to every email demanding campaign money. Maybe we don’t own a a Tesla that we can trade in as a rebuke to Musk. And for sure none of us can speed up the calendar to get to the 2026 midterm elections.
      But we can do one simple thing.
     We can care.
     We can be kind.
     We can empathize.
     We can do that every day.