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9/20 belated redumbdent --> yikes target 4 PRIMARY 3 26 EZ CENTRAL ~ HIERARCHY ~ MISO

merri ok

see psycho sociopath narcisism

SEE CRUEL SADISM MISOGYNY ~MALE MACHO EVANG XIAN NAT’L FASCISM STRICT FATHER EVANG 6

see fem apology

~CRITICAL THINKING? REDICTIONISM ZERO SUM

see amanda cdv

rooted in ayn rand? LIBTARD

SEE SWIM POOL FILLED

NOTE // IMMIGRATION [GREIVANCE// RETALIATION CRUEL STRICT FR ]

sparked by trump MIA KIA losers suckers, what's in it for them and

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AHA NOT MINE // CRITICAL THINKING

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Since assuming the self-titled role of “Secretary of War,” machismo has been at the core of Pete Hegseth’s military leadership. According to a new op-ed by the i Paper columnist Ian Dunt, Hegseth’s “fragile masculinity” is not only an “insecure” projection, but an “embarrassment” to the United States that makes the country “weaker.”

Machismo has always been at the core of the Trump administration’s ethos, Dunt explained, as it has sought to promote executive authority while denigrating women and LGBTQ people, and no one in the administration better represents that than “moron” Pete Hegseth. Not only is he unqualified and “perhaps the least complex individual ever given high office,” but he has “translated his personal flaws into the operating manual for the US armed forces.”

Dunt argued that this issue dates back to the earliest days of Hegseth’s tenure, which he launched with complaints about pronouns, “climate change obsession,” and “dudes in dresses.” Then in what Dunt called “one of the weirdest single moments in American military history,” Hegseth gathered the majority of the nation’s generals and other defense leaders to chastise them about facial hair and various culture war talking points as “they sat in baffled silence.”

As Dunt pointed out, while most recognize his “fragile” overcompensation, “Only in Trump-land would he be considered a sensible candidate for anything.” But the problem with having someone like Hegseth in power isn’t just a matter of morality, but a question of effectiveness.

“This personality type does not plan,” wrote Dunt. “In fact, planning is considered distinctly effeminate. Evidence-seeking, briefings, assessments of vulnerabilities, scrutinising your expectations, critically assessing your strategic objectives, using deep domain knowledge to establish geopolitical reality, understanding the motivation of your opponent: these are the qualities which win conflicts.”

But as the Trump administration is now discovering as the war in Iran expands, Hegseth's approach does not deliver the rapid results that they hoped for. Dunt cites reports that the Iranian regime has turned down two US requests seeking a ceasefire while closing the Strait of Hormuz, throwing the global energy market into chaos.

The impact of all this, Dunt argued, is being felt economically, politically, and beyond, not only weakening the United States but emboldening its greatest foes like Russia and China. What’s more, “It is an embarrassment for a great nation like the US.”

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rww

09/30/2026

byKyle Mantyla

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6 26 utube on truck

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The Crisis of Empathy: Gad Saad on Why Good Intentions Create Bad Outcomes | The Brief

183,122 views Premiered Jun 20, 2026 The Brief

What is “suicidal empathy” and can good intentions actually destroy a civilization? In this episode of The Brief: Insights From The Inside, host Shabbos Kestenbaum sits down with Professor Gad Saad, evolutionary psychologist and New York Times bestselling author of Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, to unpack how victimhood culture, open borders, soft-on-crime policies, censorship, and misplaced compassion can produce devastating real-world consequences. Saad explains why empathy is not inherently bad — but becomes dangerous when it “hyper fires” toward the wrong targets and overrides reason, judgment, and self-preservation. The conversation covers open borders, free speech, Canada’s MAID laws, anti-Semitism, civilizational decline, and whether the West still has the will to correct course. If you’ve ever asked: • Why does victimhood culture dominate politics? • Are open borders a threat to Western civilization? • Can free speech survive modern censorship? • Is the West collapsing from within? This episode is Gad Saad’s blunt answer.#politics #news #podcast #ShabbosKestenbaum

The Crisis of Empathy: Gad Saad on Why Good Intentions Create Bad Outcomes | The Brief - YouTube

bezos on tax rich?

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The terms "toxic empathy" and "suicidal empathy" have become a popular insult in the MAGA movement, from evangelical Christian nationalists to Tesla/SpaceX leader Elon Musk. The idea is that "empathy" is a sign of weakness and is harmful to Christianity. But not everyone on the right embraces the "toxic empathy" concept, which Never Trump conservative David French is vehemently critical of. And in The Bulwark, libertarian/Never Trump conservative Cathy Young offers a biting critique of a new book she describes as a cliched litany of MAGA "grievances."

The book is "Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind" by psychologist Gad Saad, who is originally from Lebanon but has spent most of his life in a country where U.S. President Donald Trump is wildly unpopular: Canada. The 61-year-old Saad is known for his anti-Islam views, and his anti-empathy argument has made him a popular figure among MAGA Republicans in the United States.

Young argues that while "Suicidal Empathy" has some valid points, most of the book uses shallow "pop psychology" to promote "familiar" MAGA "grievances." And he makes some of his points "bizarrely," according to the libertarian journalist.

"The thing is, Saad's concept — empathy is a good and necessary trait, but can be bad and self-damaging when taken too far — is one few people would dispute," Young explains in the conservative Bulwark. "Obvious examples include being trapped in an abusive relationship or a toxic friendship because you're afraid to hurt the other person by ending it — a concern exploitative people can easily manipulate. On a larger scale, it is self-evidently true that empathy alone is usually not a reliable guide to policy or collective action: refusing, on compassionate grounds, to forcibly hospitalize people experiencing certain acute mental health crises can result in grave harm not only to other people, but to the patients themselves."

But according to Young, one of the book's main flaws is that it uses "suicidal empathy" as "strictly a culture-war concept." Moreover, Young stresses, Saad makes huge generalizations — for example, blaming Muslims in general for acts of Islamist terrorism.

"In his framework," Young argues, "the term refers to ostensibly compassionate political views he considers misguided: support for migrants and refugees, Muslim immigrants in particular; excessive concern with the rights and wellbeing of criminals and/or homeless people; high taxes to pay for social programs; defense of transgender identities; an #IBelieveHer stance toward women who accuse men of sexual misconduct — unless, of course, the alleged perps are migrants or Muslims or both, in which case insufficient support for the victims is a sign of suicidal empathy for those groups. This isn't to say that Saad is always wrong. Progressive policies on crime, homelessness, immigration, etc. sometimes really are flawed in ways that can be described as arising from misplaced empathy."

Young continues, "But much of the time, Saad can't help taking his argument to the other extreme: If progressives can downplay Islamist radicalism, he treats the Taliban as representative of Islam and asserts that Muslim public prayers in western countries are 'a signal of dominance.' When residents of a small Italian town insist that they have no problem with Muslim refugees despite one refugee man's arrest for the rape of an underage girl, Saad can only throw up his hands at what he sees as liberal brain rot; he's unwilling or unable to concede that the townsfolk might not wish to judge the whole group by the one case."

The book, Young writes, includes "some extremely shoddy analysis."

"If you're starting to suspect that much of 'Suicidal Empathy' boils down to a catalogue of familiar right-wing grievances," Young says, "you're not wrong."

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CONTEXT

MMA

Right-wing media’s heinous rhetoric against people experiencing homelessness

From calling for homeless people to be sent to “internment camps” to fantasizing about making them “fight like gladiators,” right-wing media’s crusade against people without housing continues

Written by Sage Hodil

Published 04/03/26

Right-wing media have a long history of attacking homeless people, and so far 2026 has seen a continuation of that trend. Pundits have called for sending homeless people to different countries, “internment camps,” and institutions. Right-wing media figures have also pushed dehumanizing rhetoric by referring to homeless people as “bums,” “blighty,” “junkies,” “mentally deranged,” and even joking about their deaths.

//

  1. ### Jesse Watters’ decade-long hate campaign against homeless people

07/17/23

  1. ### Fox News zeroes in on a new target: the homeless

06/04/19

  1. ### NY Post's Latest Attack On Homeless Demonstrates Real-World Consequences Of Poor-Shaming

03/10/16

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"Suicidal Empathy": The War Over Who Matters Is as Old as America

"Suicidal Empathy": The War Over Who Matters Is as Old as America - YouTube

5.9K views

1 day ago

tad s 2 26

Suicidal Empathy": The War Over Who Matters Is as Old as America

Resistance History with Tad Stoermer

61.2K subscribers

6,020 views Feb 12, 2026 ✪ Members first on February 12, 2026 #resistancehistory #americanhistory #history

:{:{Chip Roy of Texas, defending the SAVE Act on the House floor, called the enemy "this age of progressive, suicidal empathy." Not a policy objection. Empathy itself — the act of caring whether a law harms people — is the pathology. The people who notice the harm aren't political opponents. They're carriers. He's not alone. Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that empathy is "a bug in Western civilization" — engineering language, deliberate. A design flaw to be patched out.}:

Gad Saad wrote a book calling it "maladaptively irrational altruism." Conservative pastors are preaching that empathy is toxic, dangerous, aligned with hell. They're not hiding what they want. They want a society in which solidarity is the disease and the cure is its removal. Take them at their word. Because once you do, a lot of things that seem confusing get very clear. The corporate retreat from DEI wasn't cowardice. }:

:{:{McDonald's, Deloitte, JPMorgan, Meta, Amazon, Target, Walmart — they didn't agonize. They moved. Faster than anyone predicted. Because there was nothing to overcome. The post-Floyd diversity commitments were risk calculations, not convictions. When the cultural wind shifted, the institutions didn't cave. They exhaled. Scholars like Stephen Levitsky say the problem is fear, and the prescription is courage. Rally leaders to find their nerve. Remind them who they are. Hold them accountable to commitments they made. That seems to be going well. If the values were never there, none of that works.}:

You can't rally people to a position they were performing. You can't hold them accountable to commitments they were managing. "Remember your values" doesn't land when suicidal is the word they chose to describe yours. This isn't new. American resistance gets stopped at predictable chokepoints — when movements must move outside sanctioned channels, when they must surface from covert action into open confrontation. But there's a third chokepoint that doesn't get named enough: the discovery that your coalition was never your coalition. }:

:{:{That the people who showed up when it was safe were managing their exposure to you, not expressing solidarity with you. The speed of their departure is the diagnostic. They weren't overcome. They were waiting. The argument about who counts, whose suffering matters, whether empathy is strength or weakness — it's older than this republic. I'd date it to 1676.}:

The side arguing that empathy is weakness has had the structural advantage for the entire history of the country. The Constitution was built to protect the interests of people who didn't want to care about the people they were excluding. So stop mistaking moral clarity for a strategy of persuasion. Some people have decided that other people's suffering doesn't count. Your coalition is smaller than you thought. It always was. Build power with those who reject that. And let the rest go. }:

Full essay on Substack. Link below. 📝 Full Substack essay: https://tadstoermer.substack.com

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5/21 someone said democracy depend on empathy (trust, rebuild commons vs rather fill in public pool good than let those undeserving POC use it; rather cut social a\safety net that i poor rural not well educated ppl need to stay in middle class to make sure brn/blk ppl don't use it lazy.

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President Donald Trump’s belligerent foreign policy can be understood by his “abusive, impulsive narcissist relations with women,” says the associate editor of a prominent Washington DC magazine.

Describing Trump’s statement last week that he plans on “taking Cuba in some form” because he can “do anything I want with it,” the bottom line is that “Trump’s megalomania continues to grow because he is so rarely punished for it,” wrote Washington Monthly associate editor Gillen Tener Martin in a Sunday editorial.

From winning the 2016 presidential election despite the "Access Hollywood” tape leaking (in that tape he bragged about sexually assaulting women) to getting reelected in 2024 even though he was found liable by a civil jury for the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, Trump has learned that he can harm others with impunity — and that translates into his policy choices.

“But, of course, ‘I can do anything’ isn’t just Trump’s modus operandi with women,” Martin wrote. “It’s his mantra—how he moves through life: selfishly, chaotically, with little forethought and no expectation of consequences. And we’ve seen how that translates into policy; from tariffs to vaccines to DOGE, from Minneapolis to Venezuela to Iran.”

Martin added, “Turns out, if you’re an abusive, impulsive narcissist in your relations with women, you tend to be one in other areas of life, too. Who would’ve thought?”

There is good news for anti-Trumpers in that Trump’s attitude of invincibility does not translate into actual invincibility, Martin pointed out. He failed to repeal Obamacare, contain the COVID-19 pandemic, steal the 2020 presidential election or convince America’s former allies to back his reckless military venture in Iran.

“Even a military superpower needs allies in war, and allies are hard to find when war is waged on specious grounds without a diplomatic endgame,” Martin concluded regarding the last point. “Under different circumstances, the president being forced to reckon with the consequences of his actions may have brought solace—even glee—to some. Alas, the repercussions of this mess will come for us all.”

Martin’s concern over a possible US invasion of Cuba is based on Trump’s recent fixation on the Caribbean island country. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents are Cuban immigrants and who is a staunch opponent of that nation’s longstanding Communist regime, has long called for the island to be democratized.

"There is a very personal and corrupt agenda that he is carrying out, which seems to be sacrificing the national interests of the U.S. in order to advance this very extremist approach," Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla told the AP in October about Rubio.

In response to additional Trump threats in January, Cuba's President Miguel Diaz-Canel told Reuters that "Cuba is a free, independent, and sovereign nation. Nobody dictates what we do. Cuba does not attack; it has been attacked by the U.S. for 66 years, and it does not threaten; it prepares, ready to defend the homeland to the last drop of blood."

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MMA

February 3, 2026, edition of Fox News' The Five

GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): You go back to the revolutions. The Bolsheviks, a radical minority, trying to impose their will and power on the majority, and they can only do that through fear, intimidation, organized violence, oppression, and the way they often do that is they use women and children. Why? Because children don't know any better and it's frightening to see it happen. And women can have their compassion and their emotions hijacked and they're often the most passionate revolutionaries. I mean, the Manson family, those murders were done by young women who believed in a cause. And when you talk to them, they don't know why.

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Some conservative women who were prominent figures in the Republican Party in the past — columnist and former Nancy Reagan speechwriter Mona Charen, conservative pollster and organizer Sarah Longwell, former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Virginia), among many others — now feel estranged from conservatism and are firmly in the Never Trump camp. But their absence from the center of the GOP and much of the right-wing media is giving MAGA women an opening on the far right.

In an article published on January 28, The Guardian's Alaina Demopoulos takes a look at some mothers who have become prominent MAGA influencers: Riley Gaines and Allie Beth Stuckey. And one of their talking points is that "compassion" and "empathy" detrimental to the MAGA movement and to fundamentalist evangelical Christianity.

Demopoulos' article comes at a time when Minneapolis and other U.S. cities are being targeted by the Trump Administration for aggressive immigration raids. And Gaines and Stuckey, according to the Guardian journalist, are saying that compassion must not be allowed to distract MAGA from its goals.

"Gaines is one of the leading figures of the 'Womanosphere' movement: mostly white Christian conservatives who promote an anti-feminist, gender-essentialist agenda to their followers, and who have been parroting the Trump Administration's messaging that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has done a good, moral job in its brutal crackdown on immigrant communities," Demopoulos explains. "Any evidence proving otherwise is wrong, warped or fabricated, they insist…. Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative podcaster and author, is another such figure beating the drum for ICE."

Stuckey is the author of the 2024 book "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion." And the argument that "compassion" and "empathy" are bad, according to Demopoulos, is a recurring theme from Stuckey and others in the Womansphere.

According to former evangelical April Ajoy, a demand for ideological purity is another characteristic of the 'Womanosphere'.

Ajoy told The Guardian, "If you are not fully in line with every single position (that Womanosphere figures promote), then you can get ostracized from your community. That’s what happened to me."

*Read Alaina Demopoulos's full article for The Guardian at this link.

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amanda b rek

When former President George W. Bush described himself as a "compassionate conservative" during his eight years in the White House, some far-fight pundits objected to the "compassionate" part. Bush, they argued, was hurting conservatism when he called himself "compassionate," and they believed the right needed to purge itself of "compassion sickness."

The term "compassion sickness" isn't as popular in right-wing media as it was during the 2000s, but the concept is alive and well. Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk considers "suicidal empathy" a major threat to the United States' wellbeing.

That term is closely identified with Musk. But in an article published on December 1, Salon's Amanda Marcotte stresses that the far right's use of "empathy" as an insult originated with evangelical Christian fundamentalist podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey.

"As with much of the asinine ponderings coming from the Silicon Valley billionaire class," Marcotte explains, "there's a pseudo-intellectual rationale to prop up this nonsense. Musk got this 'suicidal empathy' language from Gad Saad, a Canadian college professor who falsely presents himself as an 'evolutionary behavioral scientist'… But I'm not here to debate Musk and Saad's self-serving delusions. More interesting is that while they have tried to frame this anti-empathy discourse in faux-scientific and masculinized rhetoric, the right's modern war on empathy really began with a woman."

Marcotte continues, "Unlike Saad and Musk, fundamentalist Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey doesn't see empathy as a failure of evolution. As a creationist who denies the scientific reality of prehistoric dinosaurs, she doesn't even believe in evolution. And even though she believes the Bible forbids women from being pastors, Stuckey has made it her mission to rewrite the teachings of Jesus so that her savior is a harsh disciplinarian whose 'love' has little to do with empathy."

"Phyllis Schlafly knock-off" Stuckey, according to Marcotte, has been railing against "empathy" for at least three years on her "Relatable" podcast.

"Stuckey's book 'Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion' came out in late 2024," Marcotte observes, "but the idea for it appears to have originated on a 2022 episode of her popular podcast 'Relatable.' She hadn't yet come up with the catchphrase 'toxic empathy' — which, in true trolling style, appropriates the progressive use of the term 'toxic' to describe unhealthy and cruel behavior — but her basic argument is right there…. In a sense, she is simply reworking a longstanding argument from the Christian Right that kindness and compassion are not what Jesus meant by 'love.'"

Marcotte adds, "To the contrary, true Christian love is what looks, to most people, like beating someone into submission…. This line of thought has always been the paper-thin rationale for bigotry and abuse. But Stuckey's sinister genius was in using her gender to make these tired gambits seem fresh and modern."

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How the Christian Right Betrays Everything Jesus Ever Said (w/ John Fugelsang)

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John Fugelsang Shreds Allie Beth Stuckey's TERRIBLE "Toxic Empathy" Book

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Conservative journalist David French, in his New York Times columns, has often stressed that religion — including Christianity — plays a valuable role in American life. But in his October 16 column, the Never Trump conservative offers a grim critique on the state of U.S. Christianity almost nine months into President Donald Trump's second term.

French, on one hand, laments that many Americans are still turned off to religion in 2025. But he also fears that MAGA converts to evangelical Christianity are embracing a mean-spirited view of faith.

"Despite what you may have heard about the renewal of interest in religion in America," French explains, "we are not experiencing a true revival, at least not yet. Instead, America is closer to a religious revolution, and the difference between revolution and revival is immensely important for the health of our country — and of the Christian church in America. At this point, it's almost beyond debate that something important is stirring in American religion. There is too much data — and too many anecdotes — to ignore."

French argues that "as a Christian who has long lamented the decline of church attendance in the United States," he "should be very happy about" a growing interest in religion on college campuses. But he is worried about MAGA's role in these conversions.

"There is darkness right alongside the light," the conservative columnist warns. "Christians stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Christians have believed and applauded dark prophecies that compare Donald Trump to Jehu, a murderous Old Testament king who commanded the slaughter of the previous queen, Jezebel, and had the severed heads of the previous king's sons brought to him in baskets. Incredibly, Christians are attacking what they call the 'sin of empathy,' warning fellow believers against identifying too much with, say, illegal immigrants, gay people or women who seek abortions. Empathy, in this formulation, can block moral and theological clarity. What's wrong is wrong, and too much empathy will cloud your soul."

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French continues, "There was the ReAwaken America tour that crisscrossed America during Joe Biden's presidency, during which angry Christians called for vengeance at sold-out venues from coast to coast. And, as I wrote last month, the (Charlie) Kirk memorial itself mixed calls for love — most notably, Erika Kirk's decision to forgive her husband's killer — with the Trump administration's explicit hate."

French finds the us-versus-them rhetoric of MAGA evangelicals especially troubling.

"Revival begins with the people proclaiming, by word and deed, 'I have sinned,'" French writes. "MAGA Christianity has a different message. It looks at American culture and declares, 'You have sinned.' And it doesn't stop there. It also says, 'We will defeat you.' In its most extreme forms, it also says, 'We will rule over you.' That's not revival; it’s revolution, a religious revolution that seeks to overthrow one political order and replace it with another — one that has echoes of the religious kingdoms of ages past."

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*David French's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

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RUBBER REVERSE

Fox News contributor and podcaster Brett Cooper attacks Joe Rogan's criticism of mass deportation, saying it's his “**:{toxic empathy speaking”}:

VID]

October 14, 2025, edition of The Brett Cooper Show, uploaded to YouTube

FEMALE

BRETT COOPER (PODCAST HOST): So I just want to respond to Rogan here because I genuinely feel like he is smarter than this. He obviously is smarter than this. This is just his, you know, toxic empathy speaking, his emotions speaking. And, obviously, anybody with any kind of heart is going to have part of them that feels a tinge of discomfort or empathy when they watch these types of videos, when they know what is happening with ICE on a, you know, on a day to day level. What is happening when they are going into cities and they are deporting people.

But guys, this is what we voted for. There are articles that are coming out now where these podcasters are saying, this isn't what I voted for. I'm sorry. What did you think mass deportations was? This was something that was spoken about every single day. Everybody was in favor of, you know, basically securing our border and cleaning out our country. That's just a very matter of fact way to say it, but we were in favor of this. This was something that Trump talked about on a day to day basis. This is what we voted for.

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Liberal Georgia-based journalist Zaid Jilani, who was raised Muslim, has a long history of criticizing the Religious Right. Jilani, back in the 1990s and 2000s, often argued that while there's nothing wrong with faith and religion, "theocracy" has no place in a constitutional democratic republic like the United States.

But in an op-ed published by the New York Times on September 26, Jilani lays out some reasons why he finds 2025's MAGA Christian nationalists much more troubling than the fundamentalist evangelicals he criticized in the past.

"As the George W. Bush years rolled on," Jilani recalls, "I joined my fellow liberal activists in watching documentaries like 'Jesus Camp,' which warned of an impending Christian theocracy. I argued vigorously for separation of church and state, and I waited on pins and needles for the end of a movement I viewed as stifling freedom of religion and freedom of expression. But I'm starting to miss the Christian conservatives I grew up with. Unlike the Christian Right of my childhood, today's variations — some of which see President Trump as a religious figure — seem incapable of being compassionate toward outgroups like mine."

Jilani recalls that after al-Qaeda's 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-President George W. Bush was careful to make a distinction between jihadist and non-jihadist Muslims. Bush described Islam as a "great religion," making it clear that he didn't blame all Muslims for 9/11.

"I think back to the days right after September 11, when Mr. Bush — the politician most closely associated with the 21st-Century Christian Right — visited a mosque in Washington, D.C., to emphasize that Muslims were just as American as anyone else," Jilani explains. "It's easy to laugh this off, given what happened afterward — he set off a bungling war on terrorism that included an unnecessary war in Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Yet Mr. Bush set the tone for the millions of devout Christians who voted for him."

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MAGA's "Christian nationalism," Jilani laments, "can be distinguished more by cruelty than kindness."

"These new Christian conservatives are represented by people like Matt Walsh, a popular right-wing Catholic commentator," the Georgia-based journalist warns. "Conservatives spent years working across the aisle on criminal justice reform. Mr. Walsh has floated the return of whipping and amputations as punishments and said that by resisting Mr. Trump's militarization of law enforcement in Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson had committed treason and should be 'given the requisite punishment for a capital offense'…. There is no issue where the current crop of Christian Right politicians departs more from the old than immigration."

Zilani, who is Pakistani-American, adds, "Christians like Mr. Bush condemned nativism. These new activists embrace it."

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KIRK WORDS

Black people

Black pilots
Black women
Civil rights
Death penalty
Democrats
Empathy
Feminism
Gay people
George Floyd
Great Replacement Theory
Guns
Jews
Martin Luther King Jr.
Muslims
Palestine
Transgender people

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AN 9 25

President Donald Trump's 'Reverse Robin Hood" policies of taking from the poor and giving to the rich isn't just making people poorer, but it's leading to the "collapse of democracy and civil society," according to Salon's senior politics writer Chauncey DeVega.

"Whether the American people are capable of connecting poverty, inequality and homelessness to the collapse of democracy and civil society under Trumpism" is an entirely other question, DeVega adds.

Pointing to what he deems "The Big Vile Bill," DeVega cites a pollby University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showing a "stark" divide in which it's clear, according toNew York Timescolumnist Jamelle Bouie, that the "American right sees the market as the ultimate decider of survival."

READ MORE:'Irrational': GOP senators are 'sick of' Trump’s 'love affair with everything Putin'

In that poll, “Republicans are more likely than Democrats to cite personal choices as major factors for both poverty (77 percent vs. 49 percent) and homelessness (77 percent vs. 51 percent),” whereas, “In contrast, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to cite lack of government support as major factors for both poverty (61 percent vs. 21 percent) and homelessness (63 percent vs. 26 percent).”

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DeVega says this split is deepening, and "since Trump’s return to power, this right-wing moral economy has become even more hard-hearted."

As a result, the right-wing "moral economy," DeVega notes, has led conservatives to "increasingly view human empathy as a weakness, something wholly alien," as seen recently when Fox News host Brian Kilmeade suggested executing homeless people.

READ MORE:'Speechless': Free speech advocates rip Trump AG’s 'psychotic' claim about Charlie Kirk'

And while Republicans are "driven by small government ethos," DeVega says, "as Trump expands his power and control over all areas of American life, those same so-called principled conservatives who spent decades howling about 'states’ rights' and 'big government' have fallen deafeningly silent."

The performative patriotism of the right, draping themselves in American flags and waving pocket Constitutions, DeVega says, has now "been revealed as a sham — and about obtaining power to impose their will on other people."

And when it comes to the social safety net, "white working-class people who form the base of Trump’s MAGA movement — hold some alarming ideas," says DeVega.

Among those ideas the author notes: "They support government assistance primarily for white people like themselves, whom they deem deserving and to be 'real Americans.'"

READ MORE: 'Deeply troubling': Military expert warns Trump is unilaterally 'deciding to kill people'

When they use programs like welfare or food stamps, they see it as temporary and justified, DeVega says.

"But when Black and brown people — especially women — use the same programs, they are labeled lazy, undeserving takers or 'welfare queens,'" the author writes.

These callous views, DeVega notes, are of another era. "A society’s values are, in large part, reflected by how it treats its most vulnerable members — and America in the 21st century is growing increasingly Dickensian."

As American society continues to fracture, the public and their leaders must broaden their understanding of how poverty and other forms of social inequality are directly linked to structural — and political — violence, DeVega says.

READ MORE: 'We don't care': Fox host downplays murder of Democratic lawmaker in profane meltdown

“We live with this kind of violence, we experience it, every single day. We just don’t call it ‘political.’ To conservatives, it’s not even violence," writes author Jessica Valenti, who says that pregnant women dying of sepsis, abortion provider assassinations, school shootings and people dying from insurance claim denials are all examples of political violence.

“We live with this kind of violence, we experience it, every single day. We just don’t call it ‘political.’ To conservatives, it’s not even violence," Valenti says.

The social safety net that is supposed to protect people, DeVega writes, saying, "Healthy democracies have a strong social safety net that helps to prevent and alleviate poverty and other forms of social inequality."

Unfortunately, authoritarians and demagogues don't have much concern for the public good, DeVega says. In fact, they thrive on misery And therein lies the problem.

"These leaders have an interest in keeping their constituents vulnerable. Economic insecurity breeds malleability, and an increased willingness to seek out the protection of a strongman,"DeVega concludes. "Inequality, they know, is a dagger to the heart of democracy — and it’s one they enthusiastically wield."

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AN 8 25

The word "empathy" usually has a positive connotation. But during an interview with vodcast host Joe Rogan in February, Tesla/SpaceX/X.com head Elon Musk railed against "suicidal empathy" and declared, "The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit."

Musk's critics were quick to pounce, arguing that his disdain for "empathy" underscores the lack of compassion that plagues the far right and President Donald Trump's MAGA movement.

Musk, however, isn't the only one who claims that "empathy" is a bad thing.

READ MORE:Aides sat 'helpless' as 'incoherent' Trump displayed 'stunning ignorance': biographer

In an article published on August 21, Associated Press (AP) reporter Tiffany Stanley takes a look at far-right white evangelical Christian fundamentalists who "are preaching that" empathy "has become a vice."

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Allie Beth Stuckey, author of the 2024 book "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion" and host of the podcast "Relatable," told AP, "Empathy becomes toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, validate lies or support destructive policies."

Another anti-empathy book is evangelical pastor Joe Rigney's "The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits."

According to Stanley, the "anti-empathy arguments" coming from Stuckey, Rigney and others "gained traction in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term."

READ MORE:'They said it's a felony': Police yank Dem lawmaker out of bathroom for speaking to media

But not all Christians are buying into the anti-empathy arguments coming from white evangelicals and MAGA Republicans.

Historian Susan Lanzoni, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told AP that empathy is "the whole message of Jesus."

The Rev. Canon Dana Colley Corsello of the Washington National Cathedral takes issue with the evangelical anti-empathy trend as well.

Corsello told AP, "Empathy is at the heart of Jesus’ life and ministry…. It’s so troubling that this is even up for debate."

READ MORE:'Baby out with the bathwater': Red state Trump voters speaking out against this key policy

*Read Tiffany Stanley's full Associated Press article at this link.

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AN 8 25

PsyPost reports a new psychological study has found that people who claim favorable views of President Donald Trump also tend to score higher on measures of callousness, manipulation, and other malevolent traits—and lower on empathy and compassion.

“Our findings suggest a link between malevolent personality and conservative political ideology, which in our study included positive view of Trump, and that persons with malevolent personality dispositions view political figures with malevolent traits favorably,” said study author Craig Neumann, a Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of North Texas. “Further, people who view malevolent political figures favorably also report less empathy for others and enjoy the suffering of others.”

The paper, which was several years in the making, “was designed to address why some people might view favorably a political figure with a history of business failures, bankruptcies, misogynistic statements caught on video, use of charity money for a self-portrait, etc,” said Neuman.

READ MORE: Tipping point: Analysts say Trump 'panicked' as he 'keeps a death grip on the government'

PsyPost said researchers conducted two large surveys with a total of more than 9,000 U.S. participants. The first sample consisted of 1,000 men recruited online, about one-third of whom were racial or ethnic minorities. The second sample included 8,047 men and women who completed personality questionnaires on a public psychology website. Participants in both samples completed a range of validated questionnaires measuring political attitudes, personality traits, and empathy, researchers say.

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In “Sample 1”, researchers measured social dominance orientation (the belief that some groups should dominate others), right-wing authoritarianism (support for conformity, obedience, and traditional norms), and psychopathic traits. In “Sample 2,” researchers say they added measures of broader malevolent traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism) and benevolent traits (humanism, faith in humanity and respect for others).

The findings “consistently showed people who identified as politically conservative—and especially those who rated Trump’s presidency highly—were more likely to score higher on measures of authoritarianism, social dominance, and malevolent personality traits,” reports PsyPost.

In the first sample of men, all three predictors — social dominance, authoritarianism, and psychopathic tendencies — predicted conservative ideology and favorable views of Trump, but only for white participants.

READ MORE: The only strategy that will destroy Trumpism — once and for all

The report also revealed that while both men and women showed similar patterns, the associations were stronger for men

Read the full PsyPost report at this link.

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AN AH 7 25

ALTHO... es Gunn's new "Superman" movie is performing well at the box office, many right-wing media outlets are attacking it as "woke." The film touches on immigration, much to the chagrin of Fox News and others.

In an biting article published on July 21, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that right-wing media attacks on Gunn's film aren't just silly, but underscore their troubling view of the world.

"Every time there's a pop cultural phenomenon — a blockbuster movie, a chart-topping single, a hot new fashion trend — conservative media and MAGA influencers rush to denounce it as anti-American, anti-family or even demonic," Marcotte observes. "Labubu dolls are Satanic. The 'Barbie' movie is anti-male. Conservative men are being traumatized by rap songs informing them that women can experience sexual arousal — not that said conservative men are willing to believe it."

READ MORE: 'Can't beat the president': Former Trump lawyer issues major prediction about Rupert Murdoch

Marcotte continues, "The reasons right-wing pundits engage in this are transparent. The biggest is simple attention economics. Glomming onto popular topics is a good way to attract new audiences, especially those who may not be that political, and lure them into engaging with reactionary content. It also helps feed the paranoia that fuels the right, by propping up the narrative that all of pop culture is out to destroy them and their way of life."

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The "MAGA talking heads" attacking Gunn and his "Superman" film, Marcotte observes, are "mad" because "Superman is an immigrant" in the movie.

"My initial reaction when I saw right-wing media conduct its all-too-predictable tantrum over the new 'Superman' movie was that it’s just more of the same: Claim it’s 'woke' propaganda, work the audience into a tizzy of boycott threats and reap the reward of alienating their base further from the rest of society so that the MAGA cult is all they have left," Marcotte explains. "Which, to be fair, is bad enough. But the actual content of the complaints made this whole exercise even more sinister."

The Salon journalist continues, "The attacks on 'Superman' are part of a larger effort by the right to completely rewrite history, so they can pretend that being a patriotic American means embracing authoritarian values…. Immigrants and kindness are both canceled in Donald Trump’s America, so the right was outraged. Jesse Watters of Fox News 'joked' that Superman should have 'MS-13' on his cape…. There have been a lot of dutiful, fact-check-style responses pointing out that Superman is an immigrant and the character was always 'woke,' in that he has a history of fighting fascists and KKK members. But in a sense, that was unnecessary, because everyone already knows this. That's where this Fox News gambit goes from being stupid to deeply sinister: They are asking their audience to deny not just the facts, but a fact we all grew up with, something woven into the DNA of our American identity."

READ MORE:'Reeks of regret': Republicans suffering 'remorse and shame' over 'grudgingly' obeying Trump

Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.}:

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an

During a three-hour interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan some months ago, Elon Musk revealed the core of the ideology animating the richest person in the world.

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization isempathy,” Musk said, adding that liberals and progressives are “exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Musk pointed to California’s move to provide medical insurance even to undocumented people who qualify for its low-income Medi-Cal program.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk continued. Empathy has been “weaponized.”

Musk is now officially out of Trump world but his DOGE lives on. It has already destroyed almost every empathic part of the U.S. government.

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Musk disdains social insurance such as Social Security, which he calls a “Ponzi scheme.”

Musk’s former buddy Donald Trump presumably agrees with him. As do many Republicans, including Joni (“Well, we all are going to die”) Ernst and Mitch (“They’ll get over it”) McConnell.

Trump’s Republicans are now raiding Medicaid and food stamps to make way for a giant tax cut mostly for the rich. No empathy bug there.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is grabbing people off the streets and from courthouses without warrants and putting them in detention centers.

The number of immigrants detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities across the country has reached a record high of more than 56,000. The result is overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and enormous pain for affected families and communities.

It’s the opposite of empathy — treating people as if they aren’t human, as if they’re the “other.”

Both Musk and Trump are experts in taking selfish advantage of everything, anything, and anybody. Both have altered government programs and regulations to reap personal financial gain. Both have been quick to fire people. Both demand loyalty to themselves but have no loyalty to anything or anyone besides themselves.

They’ve got it all wrong. Empathy is a necessary precondition for a society.

Without empathy, we’d be living in a social Darwinist jungle animated only by selfish individuals pursuing selfish needs, like Musk and Trump.

If everyone behaved like Musk and Trump, we’d have to assume everyone else was out to exploit us if they could. Much of our time and attention would be devoted to outwitting or protecting ourselves from other Musks and Trumps.

Without a shared sense of empathy and responsibility, we would have to assume that everyone — including legislators, judges, regulators, and police — was acting selfishly, making and enforcing laws for their own benefit.

In a world populated by people like Musk and Trump, we couldn’t trust anyone to be truthful if they could do better for themselves by lying. We couldn’t count on any claim by sellers of any product or service. Internet-based “reputational ratings” would be of little value because raters would be easily bribed.

Journalists would shade their reports for their own selfish advantage, taking bribes from advertisers or currying favor with politicians. Teachers would offer lessons to satisfy wealthy or powerful patrons. Historians would alter history if by doing so they gained wealth or power. Scientists would doctor evidence for similar selfish motives. The truth would degenerate into a cacophony of competing factual claims, as, in part, it has.

We couldn’t trust doctors or pharmacists to give us the right medications. We couldn’t trust bankers and accountants not to fleece us, restaurants not to feed us tainted food, lawyers not to hoodwink us.

A society depends on people trusting that most others in society will have a modicum of empathy for others rather than take advantage of them. In this way, civic trust is self-enforcing and self-perpetuating, while civic distrust can corrode the very foundations of a society.

Polls tell us that many of today’s Americans worry that the nation is losing its national identity. Yet the core of that identity has never been the whiteness of our skin, the uniformity of our ethnicity, or the commonality of our birthplace.

Our core identity as Americans — the most precious legacy we have been given by the generations who came before us — consists of the ideals we share and the obligations we hold in common. We are tied together by these empathic meanings and duties. Our loyalties and attachments, guided by empathy, define who we are.

If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming blacker or browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing the ties that bind us together, our collective empathy.

Musk and Trump typify what has gone wrong. Their most damaging legacies may be the erosion of the trust and empathy on which our society — any society — depends.

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aha? trollery contagious? she is mocking the IDEA of APOLOGY?

she caved on principles with hegs rape? BBB is all that matters?

an 6 25

Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte derided U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) for adopting a “favorite lady MAGA trick” for dealing with uncomfortable situations: “pretending to be stupid.”

On Friday, Ernst infuriated constituents at a town hallin Butler County, Iowa, with her “bizarre defense of taking away people's medical care to pay for tax cuts for billionaires,” according to Marcotte. The tactic appeared to involve steering into the realm of the philosophical: "Well, we’re all going to die," she told the crowd, which elicited a volley of boos.

But Ernst had “absorbed Donald Trump's philosophy of always doubling down,” says Marcotte.

READ MORE: The MAGA death cult’s entire game was just exposed by one clerical error

“I made an incorrect assumption THAT IS THEY ARE STUPID CHILDISH that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth,’ she said while walking in a cemetery. “So, I apologize, and I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”

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“Ernst may play the mean bimbo for the camera, but she is aware that people aren't asking to live forever,” Marcotte confided. “They just don't want to die decades before their time, due to a lack of basic health care.”

But while the media focuses on her act, Marcotte says Ernst’s follow-up spin was, “if anything, even more callous. She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it's okay to let people die from easily preventable causes.”

"But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ," Ernst declared in her video, with what Marcotte describes as smugness.

READ MORE: The rift we didn’t see coming: MAGA elites could be turning on Trump 'lickspittles'

“To those whose understanding of Christianity is based on compassion and love, this comment was jarring. But Ernst understands the second rule of MAGA: their version of Christian ‘love’ is cruelty,” said Marcotte, adding that when a CBS News reporter asked Ernst for follow-up Ernst barked "I'm very compassionate," while running for an elevator.

The coldness is a “deliberate choice,” says Marcotte, which falls in line with a larger trend in white evangelical circles to redefine empathy as a “sin" according to a recent slate of books. These include ‘Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,’ published last year by right-wing podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, as well as right-wing theologian Joe Rigney’s best-selling ‘The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.’

“This is how the conservative Christian convinces himself it's ‘love’ to deny LGBTQ people their freedom, because compelling heterosexuality will get them into heaven,” Marcotte says. “… These are the rationalizations of people who want to hate while denying they are hateful.”

The good news to this, according to Marcotte, is Ernst's “shut-up-and-die ideology is not popular, even with a lot of people who consider themselves conservative Christians,” as suggested by Democratic state Rep. J.D. Scholten recent announcement that he's running against Ernst in the 2026 election.

READ MORE:'Corrupt' Trump official used new access for personal gain 100 times in first 5 months: report

See the full Salon report at this link.

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what about taking are of fam? not empathy? duty?

an 6 25

A controversial $20 million study examining why young American men are leaving the Democratic Party paints a sobering picture—and confirms growing concerns about liberals’ hold on a critical voting bloc, according to its initial findings.

“Democrats are seen as weak, whereas Republicans are seen as strong,” Ilyse Hogue, co-founder of the Speaking with American Men (SAM) project, told Politico. “Young men also spoke of being invisible to the Democratic coalition, and so you’ve got this weak problem and then you’ve got this, ‘I don’t think they care about me’ problem, and I think the combination is kind of a killer.”

America's young men are stressed, ashamed and confused over what it means to be a man in 2025, Politico reported.

READ MORE: ‘Vindictive Erasure’: Hegseth Ripped for Pride Month Order to Rename USNS Harvey Milk

"They vented about conflicting cultural messages of masculinity that put them in a 'no-win situation around the meaning of ‘a man,’ ' according to the SAM project memo."

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Economic concerns are a big driver behind young men feeling stressed. Being unable to buy a home in today's market with high prices and high interest rates, or worried about paying for their children's college, has led to their concerns about "being a man, and living up to their own expectations or the expectations of their family or society," SAM project co-founder and pollster John Della Volpe told Politico.

Focus group participants' responses helped paint the picture.

"An Asian American professional described Democrats as embracing 'the fluid masculinity of being, like, empathetic and sensitive,' while 'Republicans are more like, the traditional masculinity of a provider, strong, and the machismo type.'"

READ MORE: ‘You Have One Job’: MTG Scorched for Not Reading Key Provision in Budget Bill

A Latino man told the project that Kamala Harris was focused on, “Oh, I got Beyonce on stage with me. Oh, I got Lady Gaga on stage,” and “it just kind of felt like, what does that have to do with me? I’m trying to move up in life.”

“Trump’s over here like, ‘if we’re able to get a surplus in our budget, then we’re going to have no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. It’s going to take a while to get to that point, but at least he’s saying the things that — oh, this is what I’m going to do."

Although the report did not mention it, Harris unveiled a comprehensive economic package that included financial assistance for first time homebuyers and parents who wanted children. It's unclear if those messages got through.

Another "Latino man from Las Vegas spoke admiringly of Trump and Andrew Tate, a controversial influencer who has been accused of rape and sex trafficking, as 'always loved and hated, but they’re truthful, honest, to what they believe in.'”

But Hogue also said Democrats are just not speaking the same language as America's young men, and until that changes they "can’t win these folks over."

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an 5 25

Duringhis most recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk levelled a critique at empathy, calling it “the fundamental weakness of western civilization.”

If your first instinct is to brush this off as another example of Musk’s awkwardness, we suggest you think again. As journalist Julia Carrie Wong noted in The Guardian in April, Musk’s comments have appeared “amid a growing wave of opposition to empathy from across the American right.”

A diverse coalition of figures have taken up this “war on empathy,” including pastor Joe Rigney, conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey and marketing professor Gad Saad.

Each has coined their own meme-able phrase: “The Sin of Empathy,” “Toxic Empathy” and “Suicidal Empathy,” respectively.

You may find a war on empathy perplexing — even downright dangerous — given that our contemporary global historical moment is one marked by climate-induced migration, rising political authoritarianism and a “relentless opposition” against LGBTQIA+ rights.

Doesn’t this moment call out for more empathy rather than less?

What is empathy anyway?

But first, we need to know what we are talking about.

Some recent criticisms of empathy have been premised on bad definitions. For instance, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently claimed that empathy is “destructive” for immigration policy because “empathy means never having to say no.” This definition is not accurate.

Though a precise definition of empathy still eludes us, empathy is simply the ability to feel what someone else might be feeling. “Imagining yourself in another’s place,” writes neurologist Richard E. Cytowic, “is the basis of empathy.” Coming from a different angle, literary scholar Suzanne Keen defines empathy as “a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect” that “can be provoked… even by reading.”

The word “empathy” was coined in 1909. Previously, what we today call “empathy” fell under the name “sympathy.” For instance, writing in the 18th century, Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith described sympathy as the imaginative capacity to “enter as it were into [another’s] body, and become in some measure the same person.”

With the discovery of “mirror neurons,” modern neuroscience has in a sense validated Smith’s theories. As neuroscientist Christian Keysers explains: “The mirror system builds a bridge between the minds of two people,” showing that our brains are not only “deeply social” but also “magically connected to each other.”

Put simply, we are hardwired for empathy.

Sympathy and social contagion

In our research, we have explored literary depictions of self-destructive, suicidal and monstrous sympathies. We recognize some parallels between MAGA’s war on empathy and conceptual debates of the past, parallels at times interesting and worrisome.

During his appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Saad criticized Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s appeal to Trump for mercy on behalf of undocumented immigrants and those in the LGBTQIA+ community, suggesting it was indicative of the “parasitic idea” of open borders and an example of “suicidal empathy.”

A few months later, Canadian pop-psychologist Jordan Peterson echoed Saad and told Rogan that today’s political left is vulnerable to those who “parasitize empathy.”

This association between empathy and parasitic contagion is not at all new.

As literary scholar Mary Fairclough explains, in the 18th and 19th centuries, sympathy was “understood as a disruptive social phenomenon which functioned to spread disorder and unrest between individuals and even across nations like a ‘contagion.’”

As an example, Fairclough quotes the author Thomas De Quincey, who opined that “many a man has been drawn, by the contagion of sympathy with his own class acting as a mob, into outrages of destruction.”

The writer Mary Shelley literalized this notion of contagious sympathy in her 1826 novel *The Last Man*, which depicts a (perhaps uncomfortably familiar) plague pandemic. The novel paints sympathy as a method of mass control and societal dissolution just as contagious as the plague.

But unlike De Quincey, Shelley also celebrates sympathy as our most valuable and effective collective resource in times of crisis. This celebration is most notable in the character of Adrian, who devotes his life to “bring[ing] patience, and sympathy, and such aid as art affords, to the bed of disease.’”

The uses and abuses of empathy

Much as Shelley suggests for sympathy, research shows that empathy must be properly channelled so it isn’t used to divide and manipulate.

For example, research shows that empathy is not impartial. People tend to empathize more easily with those who share their racial or social background, and less with those who are perceived as different. In other words, racial prejudices may bias our instinctive empathetic responses.

At the same time, empathy has been linked to problematic practices like racial impersonation and colonial appropriation, where members of dominant groups claim to identify with marginalized people in ways that often reinforce power imbalances rather than dismantle them.

But MAGA’s approach to empathy is less a well-meaning critique than an all-out war and comes at the issues with a far less benevolent set of assumptions and goals. As Wong noted: “We are witnessing the construction of the ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale.”

Consider what Musk said to Rogan regarding immigration:

“I believe in empathy, like I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”

This comment is strikingly similar to the idea of “racial suicide” endorsed by eugenicist thinkers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Racial suicide was a concept rooted in the xenophobic fear that one’s own ethnic population would be replaced by another racialized population that happened to have a higher birth rate.

As the historian Rob Boddice notes, “eugenic morality” was “to be guided by sympathy construed as sympathy for the whole of society” rather than towards individuals. For the eugenicists, this ideology justified extreme measures, such as forced sterilizations and racial segregation. The horrors of eugenics and its influence on the Nazi Holocaust are well documented.

Despite these history lessons, Musk and his ilk, however, seem unperturbed and even enthusiastic about repeating history.

Much can be said about empathy’s potential limitations alongside its many virtues. But while MAGA supporters may have balked at her speech and her call for empathy, we would do well to remember the words of Bishop Budde:

“We should be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.”

Michael Cameron, PhD Candidate of English, Dalhousie University and Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square, Assistant Professor in Literature, the Environment, and Climate Change, Mount Allison University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AN 4 25

'Bizarre in many ways': Libertarian reveals what’s behind far right’s 'war on empathy'

A crowd of attendees at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference. Photo: REUTERS / Nathan Howard

Alex Henderson

April 21, 2025

During George W. Bush's presidency, a term that occasionally appeared on right-wing talk radio was "compassion sickness." The implication was that liberals and progressives were wasting sympathy on people who didn't deserve it, and that messaging was a sharp contrast to Bush himself — who famously called himself a "compassionate conservative."

"Compassion sickness" didn't really catch on the way that "bleeding-heard liberal" was popular on the right during the 1970s and 1980s. But now, the MAGA movement has a term that is making the rounds on the far right: "suicidal empathy."

Libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young describes this "bizarre" MAGA trend in an article published by The Bulwark on April 21.

READ MORE:'Mafia Boss': Legal experts sound alarm as Trump White House 'sabotages itself with unbridled hostility'

Young notes that Tesla head Elon Musk, on April 7, tweeted, "Suicidal empathy is a civilizational risk." And MAGA pundit Christopher Rufo, on X, wrote, "Corey[sic] Booker going to El Salvador to rescue Kilmer[sic] Abrego Garcia is the male equivalent of Taylor Lorenz gushing over Luigi Mangione. Empathy turned pathological."

Young says of Rufo's tweet, "The analogy is bizarre in many ways: For starters, Luigi Mangione is awaiting trial for the premeditated murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson, while Abrego Garcia has never been charged with any crime. Also, showing empathy for a probably innocent man who may be facing life imprisonment in a modern-day gulag at the age of 29 is maybe not so pathological? And lastly, concern for Abrego Garcia's fate is not just about 'empathy': It is, first and foremost, about the outrageous facts of a case in which a man who had legal authorization to live in the United States, and is the husband and father of U.S. citizens, has been disappeared without due process — and our government is refusing to return him in defiance of the courts."

Young points out that Canadian professor Gad Saad even has a forthcoming book titled "Suicidal Empathy." And she notes that MAGA attacks on ultra-conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett lambast her for having "empathy."

"As the sexist attacks on Barrett indicate," Young observes, " the right's war on empathy often has a distinctly misogynistic subtext. Empathy generally tends to be regarded as a feminine trait, and women do, on average, report higher levels of empathy than men, though studies of objective evidence yield mixed results. It's not that the anti-empathy right goes easy on males — Pope Francis is a favorite target — but the swipes at women are far more likely to be sex-specific."

READ MORE:'Reality has a well-known liberal bias': Inside Donald Trump's war on numbers

*Cathy Young's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

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The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.

Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body “upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently beingchallenged in court.

Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power.

The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost in the daily deluge of outrageous claims. Since the new administration took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.

“The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, recently enthused after a trip to Capitol Hill. Legislation paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states should be complete by the end of the year, he claims.

Inspired by the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.

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Peter Thiel in Tokyo in 2019. Photograph: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images

One might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a flag-waving “America first” platform, to lend credence to this vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings. And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the Maga mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked as “technofeudalists” who “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being” – let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside Trump’s awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most recently reaching a boiling point over tariffs. Still, the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first appear.

The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers. These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.

Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies ... we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before

Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites are suddenly finding Jesus, it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.

If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.

Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.

Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled “ASMR”, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).

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Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of an El Salvador prison in March. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP

The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.

It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.

Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.

Not so long ago, it was primarily religious fundamentalists who greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including several Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence to expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will get their celestial kingdom.

Mike Huckabee, Trump’s newly confirmed ambassador to Israel, has strong ties to Christian Zionism, as does Pete Hegseth, his secretary of defense. Noem and Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect who now leads the office of budget and management, are both staunch advocates for Christian nationalism. Even Thiel, who is gay and notorious for his party lifestyle, has been heard musing about the arrival of the antichrist of late (spoiler: he thinks it’s Greta Thunberg, more on that soon).

But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”

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Mike Huckabee touring Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem in 2008. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images

Elon Musk, who dramatically grew his fortune alongside Thiel at PayPal, embodies this implosive ethos. This is a person who looks up at the wonders of the night sky and apparently sees only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. Though he burnished his reputation warning about the dangers of the climate crisis and AI, he and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) henchmen now spend their days escalating those same risks (and many others) by slashing not only environmental regulations but entire regulatory agencies, with the apparent end goal of replacing federal workers with chatbots.

Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space – now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession – beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the sci-fi Mars Trilogy that appears to have partially inspired Musk, is blunt about the dangers of the billionaire’s fantasies about colonizing Mars. It is, he says, “just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.”

Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.

What of the Maga base, though? Not all are sufficiently faithful to earnestly believe in the Rapture, and most certainly don’t have the cash to buy a spot in a “freedom city” let alone on a rocket ship. Fear not. End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.

Listen to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast – which bills itself as Maga’s premier media outlet – and you will be barraged with a singular message: the world is going to hell, the infidels are breaching the barricades, and a final battle is coming. Be prepared. The prepper message becomes particularly pronounced when Bannon switches to hawking his advertisers’ products. Buy Birch Gold, Bannon tells his audience, because the over-leveraged US economy is going to crash and you can’t trust the banks. Stock up on ready-to-eat meals from My Patriot Supply. Sharpen your target practice using a laser-guided at-home system. The last thing you would want to do is depend on the government during a disaster, he reminds listeners (left unsaid: especially now that the Doge boys are selling off the government for parts).

End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy

Bannon doesn’t only urge his audience to make their own bunkers, of course. He also advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and interests. The bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda, and of end times fascism. Inside its logic, the first job is to harden national borders and expunge all enemies, foreign and domestic. This ugly work is now well under way, with the Trump administration, enabled by the supreme court, having invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to Cecot, the now infamous mega-prison in El Salvador. The facility, which shaves prisoners heads and packs up to 100 people into a single cell, stacked with bare bunks, operates under the civil liberties-destroying “state of exception” first declared over three years ago by the country’s crypto-loving, Christian Zionist prime minister, Nayib Bukele.

Bukele has offered to provide the same fee-for-service system for US citizens the administration would like to drop into a judicial black hole. “I love that,” Trump said recently, when asked about the proposal. No wonder: Cecot is the sick if logical corollary of the “freedom city” fantasy – a zone where everything is for sale and due process does not apply. We should expect much more of this sadism. In a chillingly candid statement, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, told the 2025 Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a more “business”-oriented approach to these deportations, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.

If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.

This bunker mentality also helps explain JD Vance’s controversial forays into Catholic theology. The vice-president, who owes his political career in no small part to the largess of the premier prepper Thiel, explained to Fox News that, according to the medieval Christian concept of ordo amoris (translated both as “order of love” and “order of charity”), love is not owed to those outside the bunker: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” (Or not, as the Trump administration’s foreign policy would indicate.) In other words, we owe nothing to anyone outside our bunker.

Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies – justifying hateful exclusions is hardly new under the ethno-nationalist sun – we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before. The “end of history” swagger of the post-cold war era is rapidly being supplanted by a conviction we are in the actual end of times. Doge may wrap itself in the banner of economic “efficiency”, and Musk’s underlings may evoke memories of the young, US-trained “Chicago Boys” who designed the economic shock therapy for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, but this is not simply the old marriage of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It’s a new, money-worshiping millenarian mashup that says we need to smash the bureaucracy and replace humans with chatbots in order to cut “waste, fraud and abuse” – and, also, because the bureaucracy is where the Trump-resisting demons hide. This is where the tech bros merge with the TheoBros, a real group of hyper-patriarchal Christian supremacists with ties to Hegseth and others in the Trump administration.

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Steve Bannon advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.

It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.

At the dawn of Trump’s first term, the New Yorker investigated a phenomenon that it described as “doomsday prep for the super-rich”. Back then, it was already clear that in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists were hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers and building escape homes on high ground in places like Hawaii (where Mark Zuckerberg has downplayed his 5,000 sq ft underground pad as a “little shelter”) and New Zealand (where Thiel purchased nearly 500 acres but found his plan to build a luxury survivalist compound rejected by local authorities in 2022 for being an eyesore).

This millenarianism is bound up with a suite of other Silicon Valley intellectual fads, all premised on an end-times-inflected belief that our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved. Transhumanism is one such ideology, encompassing everything from minor human-machine “enhancements” to the quest to upload human intelligence into a still illusory artificial general intelligence. There is also effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long term.

Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole. They also share a marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort of figures now actively shun. Instead of effective altruism the Mar-a-Lago regular Andreessen and others have embraced “effective accelerationism”, or the “deliberate propulsion of technological development” without guardrails.

Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience, like the neoreactionary pro-monarchy rants of the coder Curtis Yarvin (another one of Thiel’s intellectual touchstones), or the “pro-natalism” movement’s obsession with dramatically increasing the number of “western” babies (a Musk fixation), as well as the exit guru Srinivasan’s vision of a “tech zionist” San Francisco where corporate loyalists and police join forces to politically cleanse the city of liberals to make way for their networked apartheid state.

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Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan speak during a panel discussion about bitcoin in San Francisco in 2014. Photograph: Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

As the AI scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres have written, though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads “are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared out, or terminated. Until recently, few paid attention. Much like Próspera, where members can already experiment with human-machine mergers such as having their Tesla keysimplanted into their hands, these intellectual fads seemed to be the marginal hobby horses of a few Bay Area dilettantes with money and caution to burn. No longer.

Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.

None of this should be written off as paranoia. Many of us feel the imminence of breakdown so acutely that we cope by entertaining ourselves with various versions of life in a post-apocalyptic bunker, streaming Apple’s Silo or Hulu’s Paradise. As the UK analyst and editor Richard Seymour reminds us in his recent book, Disaster Nationalism: “The apocalypse is no mere fantasy. We are living in it, after all, from deadly viruses to soil erosion, from economic crisis to geopolitical chaos.”

The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants

Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the industries driving all of these threats – fossil fuels, weapons and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world – these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium. This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt admitted as much,telling Congress that AI’s “profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence “higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our relinquished world.

And they are worried – just not about the actual threats they are unleashing. What keeps the leaders of these entangled industries up at night is the prospect of a civilizational wake-up call – of serious, internationally coordinated government efforts to rein in their rogue sectors before it’s too late. From the perspective of their ever-expanding bottom lines, the apocalypse is not collapse; it’s regulation.

The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other anything by right of our shared humanity. Silicon Valley is done with altruism, effective or otherwise. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pines for a culture that celebrates “aggression”. Alex Karp, Thiel’s business partner at the surveillance firm Palantir Technologies,rebukes the “losing” “self-flagellation” of those who question American superiority and the benefits of autonomous weapons systems (and, by association, the lucrative military contracts that have made Karp’s vast fortune). Musk informs Joe Rogan that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilization” and he vents, after failing to purchase a supreme court election in Wisconsin: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Meaning we humans are nothing but grist for Grok, the AI service he owns. (He did tell us he was “dark Maga” – and he’s not the only one.)

In arid and climate-stressed Spain, one of the groups calling for a moratorium on new datacenters calls itself Tu Nube Seca Mi Río – Spanish for “your cloud is drying my river”. The name is fitting, and not just for Spain.

An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate, profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm. This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.

Consider Vance’s recent European sojourn, where the vice-president harangued world leaders for “handwringing about safety” in relation to job-destroying AI while demanding Nazi and fascist speech go uncurtailed online. At one point he made a telling aside, expecting a laugh that never came: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”

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JD Vance speaks at the Munich Security Conference in February. Photograph: dts News Agency Germany/REX/Shutterstock

His comment echoed those made by his equally humorless patron Thiel. In recent interviews focused on the theological underpinnings of his far-right politics, the Christian billionaire has repeatedly compared the indefatigable young climate activist to the antichrist – a figure he warns was prophesied to come bearing a misleading message of “peace and safety”. “If Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire,” Thiel intoned.

Why Thunberg, why now? In part, it’s clearly the apocalyptic fear of regulation eating into their super-profits: accordingto Thiel, the science-based climate action Thunberg and others demand could only be enforced by a “totalitarian state”, which he claims is more dire a threat than climate breakdown (most distressingly, the taxes under such conditions would be “quite high”). There may also be something else about Thunberg that frightens them: her steadfast commitment to this planet and the many life forms who call it home – not to simulations of this world generated by AI, or to a hierarchy of those deserving of life and those who are not, nor to any of the various extra-planetary escape fantasies the end times fascists are selling.

She is committed to staying, while the end times fascists have, at least in their imaginings, already left this realm, ensconced in their opulent shelters or transcended to the digital ether, or to Mars.

Shortly after Trump’s re-election, one of us had the opportunity to Anohni, one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its arms around the death drive that has gripped our world. Asked about what connects the willingness of powerful people to let the planet burn and the drive to deny bodily autonomy to women and to trans people like her, she responded by drawing on her Irish Catholic upbringing: it’s “a very long-held myth that we are enacting and embodying. This is the culmination of their Rapture. This is their escape from the voluptuous cycle of creation. This is their escape from Mother.”

How do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.

Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.

This basic sentiment, of course, is not new. It is central to Indigenous cosmologies, and it lies at the heart of animism. Go back far enough and every culture and faith has its own tradition of respecting the sanctity of here, and not searching for Zion in an elusive ever-distant promised land. In eastern Europe, before the fascist and Stalinist annihilations, the Jewish socialist Labor Bund organized around the yiddish concept of Doikayt, or “hereness”. Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about this neglected history, defines Doikayt as the right to “fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead” – and rather than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the United States. Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that concept: a commitment to the right to the “hereness” of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. “Hereness” can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.

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Anti-Trump protesters march against the administration in New York in January. Photograph: Julius Constantine Motal/The Guardian

That future would require its own apocalypse, its own world-ending and revelation, though of a very different sort. Because as the scholar of policing Robyn Maynard has observed: “In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end.”

We have reached a choice point, not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take. The activist sisters Adrienne Maree and Autumn Brown touched on this recently on their aptly named podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”

To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here. Or, to quote Anohni again, this time referring to the goddess in which she now places her faith: “Have you stopped to consider that this might have been her best idea?”

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A rising group of conservatives is increasingly challenging conventional ideas about empathy, often calling it "sinful."

Amanda Marcotte, a senior writer at Slate, wrote in an articlepublished Friday that the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement considers empathy to be a weakness and that sentiment is what makes them support President Donald Trump, who she referred to as "incapable of empathy."

She referred to the transition of Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, from denouncing Trump as a "predator" in 2016 to being one of his "loudest Christian right defenders." In a recent interview, Mohler said he now condemns empathy, calling it "an artificial virtue" and "destructive."

ALSO READ:We’re talking to our neighbors about the MAGA rampage — and people are listening

Marcotte noted in the article that the right-wing figures who openly deride empathy follow Trump so much that many high-profile psychologists have argued that he should be considered a sociopath, "despite not consenting to a formal diagnosis."

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"The political impetus behind this overt assault on what was once considered a baseline virtue is obvious enough," she said.

She added, "Trump has eclipsed Jesus himself as the object of worship on the Christian right, as evidenced by the hosts of "Girls Gone Bible" invoking Trump's name as if he were God in their rewrite of the Lord's Prayer. At his inauguration ball, a 'worship painter" even replicated Trump's image while the crowd sang 'amen' over and over, underscoring this shift in the de facto theology of these 'Christians.'"

The author further said Trump's "sociopathy" has now surpassed the empathy of Jesus in MAGA eyes. She added that the MAGA movement has an "unhinged obsession with gender and escalating hatred of women," which is why they see empathy as "feminine."

ALSO READ:'The arc of concentration camps is twofold': Experts detail the 'logical endpoint' of MAGA’s rhetoric

"Both firmly agree that femininity is the root of all evil. One doesn't have to speculate, either, to see this aspect of the war on empathy. Plenty of MAGA leaders will say the misogynist part out loud," she wrote.

Many commentators described misogyny as a reason why former Vice President Kamala Harris, who would have been the first female president of the United States had she won the 2024 election, lost to Trump.

In December last year, just days after the election, a panel of Black female experts argued that "misogynoir, the intersection of racism and sexism," was the main factor in Harris's loss.

“Racism is designed in such a way to make you question your humanity, but sexism is also. Sexism is really a power move,” LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund said at the time. “When you combine those two things together, I think that that best explains what [Harris] experienced.”

ALSO READ:'Powerful motivator': Sociologist explains ways 'fear-based messaging' keeps GOP in power

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2 25 NOTE EMPATHY ON BANNED WORD LIST

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During the inaugural prayer service, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde urged President Donald Trump to “have mercy” on undocumented migrants and LGBTQ kids, and right-wing media responded by calling her a “fake bishop” with “deranged political beliefs,” saying her sermon was “heretical” and “satanic,” and claiming she was “forcing left-wing platitudes down everyone’s throat.”

Budde’s comments about mercy provoked Trump

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  • The bishop leading the inaugural prayer service at Washington National Cathedral made a plea to Trump to “have mercy” on behalf of LGBTQ kids and migrants.“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” said Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families. Some who fear for their lives.” She added, “They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues.” NBC News, [1/21/25]}:

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alternet-no lnx

Noblesse oblige is dead: Today’s wealthy elite just don’t give a damn

Scientists explain why the wealthy struggle with empathy

Thom Hartmann

October 30, 2024

Last Sunday the richest man in America — who owes most of his wealth to President Obama bailing out his electric car company and government contracts — endorsed a man for president who’s a naked racist, fascist, and xenophobe who famously said:

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. … I want to grab all that money.”

Two days before, we learned that the billionaire owners of The LA Times and The Washington Post killed their own newspaper’s planned endorsements of the Harris presidential campaign, presumably to avoid angering Donald Trump so he wouldn’t mess with their business interests should he be elected.

“To hell with democracy,” they essentially said. “There’s money to be made!”

What ever happened to the sense of obligation that wealthy Americans used to feel to help out their country and her people in need?

Maybe it’s all the new money. Maybe it’s just good old-fashioned greed. Maybe it’s the nearly psychopathic drive to crush everything and everyone in your way to make that first billion dollars that twists people’s perspectives and their view of their fellow citizens.

Whatever it is, the concept of noblesse oblige — the obligation to give back to the society that helped make you rich — seems dead for today’s “conservatives” among the morbidly rich.

It wasn’t always this way.

— At 13, Andrew Carnegie came to this country from Scotland with his parents, his younger brother, and two dollars in their collective pocket; he became, within four decades, the richest man in the world. And he funded 2,509 libraries, ultimately giving away his entire fortune before the end of his life. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” he wrote in his book The Gospel of Wealth.

— Joe Kennedy was a bank president at 25 and a millionaire by 30; he and his wife Rose pounded into their children the idea that, because of their great wealth, they had an absolute obligation to serve their nation and its people, particularly those most in need. From that simple childhood instruction came Joe Jr., who died when his plane was shot down during WWII, and the political careers of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy.

— Foundations established by the Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller families have all done great good in America (until Timothy Mellon disgraced his family by giving millions to Trump), and self-made billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have made funding good works central to their lives by giving away most of their fortunes.

But that noble old concept is now lost on most among the current crop of billionaires and multimillionaires. Instead of devoting themselves and their fortunes to bettering our nation, so many are instead promoting climate change denial, funding politicians who promise them tax cuts, and spearheading efforts to strip America of its social safety net and public education system.

Changing attitudes toward wealth and success have been a hallmark of the post-Reagan “greed is good” era. When the Libertarian Party was started in the 1950s by the real estate lobby to provide a front to fight against rent control and low-income rent subsidies, it — along with Ayn Rand’s writings — provided the morbidly rich with a convenient excuse for greed.

If everybody acted with maximum greed at all times, they argued, all of that greed would power society toward a new utopian era. It was demonstrably a lie, but provided a great excuse for extremely wealthy individuals to back away from the philanthropy that helps America and its people, replacing those efforts by funding think tanks and politicians who champion more tax loopholes, deregulation, and voter suppression.

As John Kenneth Galbraith famously wrote:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

These billionaires have also supported sycophantic scholars and media stars willing to promote the idea that they didn’t get rich because of luck or coming from wealthy families, but, rather because of their rare and extraordinary talent and brilliance.

To this bizarre end, at least one of today’s billionaires who came to America from South Africa seems committed to impregnating as many white women as possible to spread his good genes.

As the gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else has widened, we’ve experienced less social connection and empathy between economic classes.

America also now has the greatest income inequality in the developed world. The morbidly rich have largely separated themselves from the rest of us, traveling on private jets through private airports that don’t even check security, vacationing on their massive private yachts with Supreme Court justices, and living in gated compounds with round-the-clock security and live-in butlers, cooks, and nannies.

Another thing that may be causing so many of America’s billionaires to abandon philanthropic efforts to help the country that made them rich is the globalization of wealth.

Because many now run business empires that span the globe, they feel less tied to any particular local community or even to the United States. Others, wanting to continue to do business with authoritarian regimes, simply avoid doing anything here that might be seen as supportive of democracy or even of America.

Reagan’s massive income tax cuts, lowering the top bracket from 70 percent down into the twenties, give another strong incentive to obscenely wealthy individuals to hang onto every penny. When you’re no longer looking at high tax rates, you no longer need the tax breaks that come with charitable good works.

Finally, between the decline of social expectations of generosity and the fetishizing of capitalism, some billionaires are now embracing what they call “philanthrocapitalism.” Pushing everything from private prisons to private schools to privatizing Medicare and Social Security, they argue that the so-called “free market” will solve all social problems.

We thus need to create a cultural shift that reframes wealth not just as a privilege, but as a responsibility to contribute positively to society, bringing back the notion of noblesse oblige. This requires a multi-faceted approach involving education, incentives, and a redefinition of social norms.

We should teach the concept of noblesse oblige in our elementary schools, both to inculcate future individuals who may rise to great wealth and to give our people the ability to spot and shame those rich people who ignore their obligations to society.

Social recognition is another way to amplify noblesse oblige by publicly acknowledging and celebrating wealthy individuals and families whose generosity has had real and positive impact.

We also need to return to the tax incentives for philanthropy by returning to a top tax bracket well north of 50 percent which can be reduced through charitable contributions. Similarly, corporations should be both socially pushed and financially incentivized to consider their broader social impact.

Finally, let’s encourage and reward those filmmakers and television producers who embrace social issues like Frank Capra did with It’s a Wonderful Life.

We occasionally get a taste of this with movies like the Dark Knight series, where wealthy Bruce Wayne becomes Batman to help his city and its people, but more movies and TV shows with a message of social conscience and noblesse oblige could have a real impact on the generation coming up now.

The rich, as Jesus noted obliquely when speaking of the poor, will always be with us. But there are ways we as a society can encourage them to be less destructive of the public good. We should take them.

===

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an 7 24

Jeremy Sherman

July 06, 2024

The culture war is not fundamentally between left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and reactionary, tolerant and intolerant.

Fundamentally it has nothing to do with ideals, values or visions of the future. It’s a fight between decent people and sociopaths.

Psychopaths are congenitally shameless. Born, that way, they are neurologically deaf to the inner nag of empathy.

Sociopaths aren’t born but made. Some are brainwashed but many are not. Many are motivated sociopaths because being one is tempting, satisfying, efficient and effective.

Sociopaths learn how to be shameless. We underestimate the appeal of shamelessness. Shame constrains us. Shamelessness is a liberation. If you learn to be absolutely shameless – even shameless about your shamelessness, you grant yourself the ultimate dream come true, a reliable feeling of perfect freedom and perfect invincibility, as though you can do anything and whatever you do beats all. Sociopathy is like being granted a wildcard/Trumpcard.

Learning to be absolutely shameless is easy. It takes no study and very little practice before you get the hang of it. Whatever path you’re on has easy detours down to the haven of motivated sociopathy.

There are many ways to learn it. They all boil down to learning to blurt words as if you really mean them, without you thinking about their meaning at all.

What words? Any words that declare you the winner. No matter what you do, you can always find words to blurt that will do the trick and if you don’t care which words you use, but use them with intense conviction, the trick will work – so long as other people misinterpret you as meaning your words

Once you’re getting away with it, it’s smooth sailing. Even if people say “shame on you!” you can just blurt more shameless words that make you feel like a winner.

Once it’s smooth sailing your conscience just atrophies. You don’t need it anymore and it only gets in your way. Eventually you become a proud, deaf shameless sociopath blurting whatever makes you feel invincible no matter what you do.

People become proud motivated sociopaths by many routes. Some just get fed up, say “Aw, hell no! I’m tired of being pushed around” and start blurting cliches they get from popular culture. For example, they can say “just deal with it” to people who are already dealing with it by challenging them. And weirdly the people back down. If they grab a cliché that works, they’ll use it more.

Some people fall into a patch of such cliches all clustered around some brand-name ideology which enables them to make a crusade out of proudly, shamelessly insisting that they’re the winners. It could be any brand, left, right, spiritual, religious, philosophical, whatever.

As a cluster, the words are hypocritical ways to play god or a god or demagog’s humble servant lording it over everyone.

Omnipotence: “I’m heroic because I’m winning/I’m heroic because I’m losing.”

Omniscience: “I know everything/I don’t know about that, so it’s irrelevant.”

Omnificent: “Shame on you for not living up to my moral standards/Moral standards are for losers”

Motivated sociopaths take shameless pride in their hypocrisy. Still, they’re consistent about one thing: “I never contradict myself and no matter what happens, it proves I’m right, righteous and heroic.”

Sociopath simply means “socially-sick” – pretty vague. There are vulgar names for them too, also vague. I call them Trumpbots – lowercase “t” not after the Donald though he fits the description perfectly as would a leftist parroting the same cliches.

The word “trump” means both fake as in “trumped up” and “beats all.” A Trumpbot robotically plays fake trump cards. Again, it’s a tempting lifestyle that one can fall into from any angle, left, right, center, religious, spiritual, philosophical. One can become a Trumpbot for anything or nothing. Once one falls into this tempting lifestyle there would be no reason to leave so long as one can get away with it.

So how can we keep them from getting away with it? How can we make motivated sociopathy costly? How can we honorably shame the absolutely shameless? How can we humbly humble people who will say anything to avoid humility?

The answer is simple and obvious and yet consistently overlooked in our culture wars: Expose and flout their Trumpbot formula; taunt and flaunt the alternative.

Expose and flout their trumpbot formula:

Flout: Care about their words as much as they do: Not at all. You’ve been taught to listen, value and be open to everyone’s ideas. That’s wrong. Do that with decent people but with trumpbots it’s as enabling as listening to a psychopath.

Expose: If you have to deal with a trumpbot, simply declare over and over that they’ll say and do anything to pretend they’re right and righteous. You know what they’ll do in response? They’ll confirm your diagnosis. They’re one trick phonies. They’ve got nothing else. When they trumpbot at you in response, say “there he goes again.” Again and again. They’ll give up and declare themselves the winners but you will have cost them, especially if you do it in front of others.

Taunt and flaunt the alternative:

Taunt: What’s the alternative to being a trumpbot? Being human, trying to guess what best to do. Experiencing ambivalence and being brave enough to show it. Trumpbots want you cornered, wincing at your moral failings. Trying to prove your morality to them is deadly. They don’t care about morality. They’ll shame you for immorality and then laugh at you for caring about morality. So be yourself. Stand your ground without trying to prove it. Your power lies in taunting them with brave honest humanness while they’re robotically playing God.

Flaunt: If they accuse of you of violating some moral code (that they don’t care about) don’t deny it. For example, if they shame you for shaming, say “Of course I shame, like everyone, like you just did, trying to shame me for shaming. I try to shame where it’s deserved whereas you pretend you don’t shame while shaming.”

It is our civic duty to make motivated sociopathy costly.

===

aha: hooked up to jumper cables; real men do not talk about feelings, but Biden and Raskin have to great effect, so in great GOP trad of turning strength (swift boat) into an attack, these 2 pow:

6 22

united States Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) appeared on a recent edition of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia)'s podcast and suggested that Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) is unable to do his job because his son committed suicide.

Raskin served as the House of Representatives' manager of former President Donald Trump's second impeachment for inciting the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Raskin also sits on the Select Committee investigating the attack, which was triggered (at least in part) by Republican lawmakers refusing at Trump's behest to acknowledge President Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election.

Now, with just 24 hours remaining before public hearings revealing what the bipartisan congressional commission has found begin, Gaetz and Greene have launched a new and unusually cruel offensive against Raskin.

"When people encounter trauma, they often associate a lot of the other things around that trauma with it, even if they don't naturally or even rationally associate. And what I worry about for the Congress and for Jamie Raskin, you know, no one would ever want to lose a child, particularly to suicide," said Gaetz.

"As human beings, our hearts go out to him. But I think that he takes that trauma and he associates it now with his work in the Congress to such an interwoven way that he's unable to do the congressional experience outside of just the dungeon of that personal trauma," Gaetz continued, "and I think it makes him look at everything in these very like, dark and severe ways."

Greene agreed.

"You know, we try to come to the job to uplift people," Gaetz resumed.

"We're here to serve the people," Greene interjected.

"Well and we love this country," Gaetz added.

"Absolutely," said Greene.

"We're not here out of a sense of grievance or hatred. We love America," Gaetz said.

"No we love it," Greene chimed in again.

"And we want to vindicate the rights of our citizens and we want to champion their causes andbattle their dislikes," Gaetz remarked.

"Yes that's right," Greene said.

"But I think for Jamie Raskin, it's really like, his service in the Congress has almost become like inextricably attached to this sad personal trauma he's had," Gaetz proclaimed. "And I do think it clouds his judgment and you could see that, that very darkness and that pain manifest on Thursday in a way that's not particularly relevant to the challenges that we've talked about, but it might be deeply relevant to what he's going through. And the country shouldn't have to go through all that with him."

Greene then stated the quiet part out loud.

"Well my goodness, it's a horrible thing, what he went through, but it doesn't change the fact of, uh, his political beliefs," she said, "and I believe he's a communist and I believe what he's doing on the January 6th Committee is completely wrong."

Watch below via PatriotTakes:

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aha: chicken-egg layers ampl feedback?

cawthorne sez raise boys to be monsters, ayn says altruism is evil; capitalism social darwin says winners deserve to, invis hand means we all benefit; nutron jack welch is a hero, musk? strict father yaweh

an 10 21

It happened three times yesterday, and I only watched or half-watched a few hours of TV news. It happens every day, it seems. Somebody wonders out loud (yesterday's most prominent was Alex Witt with Dr. Anthony Fauci) why over 60 million Americans who are eligible to be vaccinated are still refusing — including hospital workers in some parts of the country.

Everybody treats it like it's a confounding question with no easy answer. The actual answer, though, is pretty straightforward: the psychopaths running the rightwing media ecosystem dominated by Fox "News" and social media, and echoed by 1500 radio stations across the country, have decided people dying and being disabled is both profitable and politically advantageous to them.

When Joe Biden was elected president the Republican Party and their joined-at-the-hip rightwing media did a sudden about-face from praising Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" to encouraging their followers to remain unvaccinated so President Biden would struggle to get the economy back on sound footing.

That, they figured, was their best bet to take back Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, and they've stayed on-message ever since Biden took office on January 20th. As I noted in considerable detail back in July, death is their political strategy.

And now, as if to put a punctuation point on it, the headline at Raw Story warns: Fox News host uses Colin Powell's death to launch anti-vax rant: "Fully-vaccinated are dying of Covid."

Almost 750,000 Americans have died of Covid and recent research published by the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that at as many as half of the 45 million Americans who've been diagnosed with the disease will suffer long term consequences, the main ones being dementia, exhaustion and damage to the heart and kidneys.

It used to be in American business that you knew where the psychopaths were: tobacco. It's an industry producing a product that, when used as directed, kills around a half-million Americans every year.

Being able to comfortably fall asleep every night knowing that the product of your workday had killed another 1,300 people is a rare competence that typically requires the mental illness of psychopathy.

About 1% of Americans are psychopaths, although such people tend to be concentrated in some areas: as many as 12% of major corporate CEOs are believed to be psychopaths, and about 15% of people in prison.

A psychopath, for all practical purposes, believes that he's quite literally the only "true human being" on planet Earth.

Everybody else is an actor of some sort, a prop, in the grand play of the psychopath's life. Everybody else is here to make him happy and meet his needs, and he doesn't have to worry about hurting them or not meeting their needs because they are not "real people" like he is.

The clinical terminology is that psychopaths "lack the ability to feel empathy." Weirdly, this lack of empathy can make them more successful in big business and politics, as well as in criminal and prison environments.

Thus, the CEO of Fox "News" — the network that daily spreads vaccine misinformation leading to deaths that are tearing apart American families — tells the Hollywood Reporter that she sleeps "well at night." Just like the tobacco CEOs.

Meanwhile, people who watch Fox and all its imitators across various media are taking the implicit advice of Fox's primetime hosts and avoiding vaccination…and getting sick and in some cases dying.

They're embracing quack cures promoted on the network and across rightwing media, including hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, giving their viewers the false sense of security that if they get sick with this awful disease there's a ready cure at hand…so there's no need to get vaccinated.

Even worse, consumers of this media are doing their best to disrupt rational public health efforts like mask and vaccine mandates by harassing public health officials, school boards, and elected representatives across the country — all leading to even more disease and deaths.

When Americans realized, mostly as the result of massive lawsuits in the 1990s, that the CEOs of the tobacco industry were knowingly killing people (and even reaching out to addict children) we took action.

We limited access to this death-dealing product, from outlawing television advertising to limiting placement of cigarette vending machines and strict enforcement of age-limited retail sales. We also required that the product be honestly labeled: "Tobacco kills."

This isn't an option for media, and rightly so because of our First Amendment protections of the press (including this article). And nobody wants to take those freedoms and protections away.

But the most important and effective campaign our nation embarked on to cut tobacco use was the nationwide campaign to educate people about the dangers of tobacco use. We taught adults and schoolchildren alike how the industry was trying to addict them and showed them the consequences of using that deadly product.

Now that rightwing media has arguably caused more Americans to die in the past year than has tobacco, it's time to consider a similar strategy to balance the lies and misinformation streaming out of them every day.

If we can't rely on the news and social media industries' content producers or executives to stop spreading death-dealing misinformation, we can at least wake people up to the dangers of their products.

#RightwingMediaCausesDeath

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strict fr pathological strain?

1021 an

So much depends on respectable white people. Those are white people who care about appearing respectable to other white people, who themselves care about appearing respectable to other white people. They are the great globular middle of American politics that determines electoral outcomes in this country.

For the longest time, they sided with the Republican Party on account of tax cuts and other goodies. My hope is that, for the foreseeable future, they will side with the Democrats on account of tax cuts and other goodies being a banner for hiding the fact that sadism is the GOP's point.

Sadism isn't only about sex, though it can be, obviously. When I say "sadism," I mean the pleasure derived from seeing other people suffer. The Republicans have no policy goals. Their only goal is creating legal and political conditions in which the in-group is protected while the out-group is punished. But it doesn't end with punishment. It can't.

When the out-group gains power, the in-group feels powerless. When the in-group feels powerless, the in-group feels oppressed. When the in-group feels oppressed, it cries out for freedom. But in order to feel free, the in-group must do more than merely punish the out-group. It must derive pleasure from seeing pain and suffering. This is what I want respectable white people to understand. When they vote for tax cuts and other goodies, they are doing far more. They are helping the GOP's authoritarian base feel a freedom that depends on suffering.

When white police officers pulled a Black paraplegic man out of his vehicle by his hair last month in Dayton, Ohio, on illegal drug suspicion, that might appear to be another case of police brutality. (Body cam footage of the incident was released Friday. An investigation by the police department is underway.) But to the authoritarian base of the Republican Party, what the Dayton cops did was the goal itself. Seeing the man's pain produced pleasure. It made them feel free.

It is sadism. It is not cruelty. Cruelty is not the point. Sadism is. You can be cruel without meaning to. You can be cruel without taking pleasure in pain. You can be cruel because you can't help it (on account of repeating past traumas, for instance). But sadism takes intention. It takes the desire to set aside priorities, like tax cuts and other goodies. It is its own cause. It is its own effect. This is another thing I want respectable white people to understand. Sadism isn't an unintended consequence. It's the point. When you vote for the Republican Party, when you give money to Republican candidates, you are joining a concerted effort to bring more suffering to more people, and you are complicit in the derivation of pleasure from suffering. You have become a sadist.

This sounds extreme. That's because sadism cancels equality. If the Republicans had some degree of commitment to equality, they might seek conditions in which the in-group feels free regardless of whether the out-group feels pain. But there is no equality. Therefore, there is no equal protection under law. Therefore, there is a one-to-one relationship between in-group freedom and out-group pain. Put another way, it's quite impossible for the in-group to feel free when the out-group does not feel pain. Sadism is the GOP's vital link.

Given the reality of this one-to-one relationship, you can see they don't mean freedom when they say freedom. They don't mean the presence of choice. They don't mean the absence of coercion. They don't mean freedom in any conventional sense. What they mean is the pleasure of seeing other people's pain, because their freedom can't exist without their suffering. Respectable white people need to understand this. Cries for freedom are in fact cries for sadism.

Just as they don't mean freedom when they say freedom, they don't mean borders when they say borders. Ten Republican governors went to the southern border to pressure the president to do more about immigrants coming in. Most of them were from non-border states. And that's the tell.The border they are defending isn't the border. It is the border between us and them, between the GOP's authoritarian base that can't feel free unless someone suffers, like immigrants, and everyone else who can feel free as they share power with others.

This is the last thing I want respectable white people to understand. There is no middle way. There is no neutral position. "Every state is now a border state," said Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany last week while visiting the border. Every state is a border state. Every issue is a border issue. Every person is a border person who must choose a side. Are you with us or against us. Sadism is the point.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/is-fox-news-obsessed-with-hate-study-finds-network-uses-this-word-5-times-more-than-its-rivals/

no grafs

Tucker Carlson is a big fan of the phrase 'they hate.' Usually, he's talking about Democrats.

Curd Knüpfer, Freie Universität Berlin and Robert Mathew Entman, George Washington University

Fox News is up to five times more likely to use the word “hate" in its programming than its main competitors, according to our new study of how cable news channels use language.

Fox particularly uses the term when explaining opposition to Donald Trump. His opponents are said to “hate" Trump, his values and his followers.

Our research, which ran from Jan. 1 to May 8, 2020, initially explored news of Trump's impeachment. Then came the coronavirus. As we sifted through hundreds of cable news transcripts over five months, we noticed consistent differences between thevocabulary used on Fox News and that of MSNBC.

While their news agendas were largely similar, the words they used to describe these newsworthy events diverged greatly.

Fox and hate

For our study, we analyzed 1,088 program transcripts from the two ideologically branded channels – right-wing Fox and left-wing MSNBC – between 6 p.m. and 10:59 p.m.

Because polarized media diets contribute to partisan conflict, our quantitative analysis identified terms indicating antipathy or resentment, such as “dislike," “despise," “can't stand" and “hate."

We expected to find that both of the strongly ideological networks made use of such words, perhaps in different ways. Instead, we found that Fox used antipathy words five times more often than MSNBC. “Hate" really stood out: It appeared 647 times on Fox, compared to 118 on MSNBC.

Fox usually pairs certain words alongside “hate." The most notable was “they" – as in, “they hate." Fox used this phrase 101 times between January and May. MSNBC used it just five times.

To put these findings in historic context, we then used the GDELT Television database to search for occurrences of the phrase “they hate" on both networks going back to 2009. We included CNN for an additional comparison.

We found Fox's usage of “they hate" has increased over time, with a clear spike around the polarizing 2016 Trump-Clinton election.But Fox's use of “hate" really took off when Trump's presidency began. Beginning in January 2017, the mean usage of “they hate" on the network doubled.

'Us' versus 'them'

So who is doing all this hating – and why – according to Fox News?

Mainly, it's Democrats, liberals, political elites and the media. Though these groups do not actually have the same interests, ideology or job description, our analysis finds Fox lumps them together as the “they" in “they hate."

As for the object of all this hatred, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and other Fox hosts most often name Trump. Anchors also identify their audience – “you," “Christians" and “us" – as the target of animosity.Only 13 instances of “they hate" also cited a reason. Examples included “they can't accept the fact that he won" or “because we voted for [Trump]."

Citing liberal hate as a fact that needs no explanation serves to dismiss criticism of specific policies or events. It paints criticism or moral outrage directed at Trump as inherently irrational.

For loyal Fox viewers, these language patterns construct a coherent but potentially dangerous narrative about the world.

Our data show intensely partisan hosts like Hannity and Carlson are more likely than other Fox anchors to use “they hate" in this way.Nevertheless, the phrase permeates Fox's evening programming, uttered by hosts, interviewees and Republican sources, all painting Trump critics not as legitimate opponents but hateful enemies working in bad faith.

By repeatedly telling its viewers they are bound together as objects of the contempt of a powerful and hateful left-leaning “elite," Fox has constructed two imagined communities. On the one side: Trump along with good folks under siege. On the other: nefarious Democrats, liberals, the left and mainstream media.

Research confirms that repeated exposure to polarized media messages can lead news consumers to form firm opinions and can foster what's called an “in-group" identity. The us-versus-them mentality, in turn, deepens feelings of antipathy toward the perceived “out-group."

The Pew Research Center reports an increasing tendency, especially among Republicans, to view members of the other party as immoral and unpatriotic. Pew also finds Republicans trust Fox News more than any other media outlet.

Americans' divergent media sources – and specifically Fox's “hate"-filled rhetoric – aren't solely to blame here. Cable news is part of a larger picture of heightened polarization, intense partisanship and paralysis in Congress. [vid "hate & hysteria]

Hannity portrays criticism of Donald Trump as hate-based.

YouTube/Fox News

Good business

Leaning into intense partisanship has been good for Fox News, though. In summer 2020 it was the country's most watched network. But using hate to explain the news is a dangerous business plan when shared crises demand Americans' empathy, negotiation and compromise.

Fox's talk of hate undermines :{democratic values like}::{ tolerance}: and reduces Americans' trust of their fellow citizens.

This fraying of social ties helps explain America's failures in managing thepandemic– and bodes badly for its handling of what seems likely to be a chaotic, divisive presidential election. In pitting its viewers against the rest of the country, Fox News works against potential solutions to the the very crises it covers.

Curd Knüpfer, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin and Robert Mathew Entman, J.B. and M.C. Shapiro Professor Emeritus of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University

This article is republished from The Conversation

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/psychopath/

new study published in the latest edition of "Personality and Individual Differences" highlights the relationship between psychopathic tendencies, pathological personality traits and prejudicial views. Research suggests people with "calloused, deceitful, and manipulative interpersonal styles" are more prone to align with the beliefs of right-wing authoritarianism, according to PsyPost.

Sandeep Roy, a doctoral candidate with a major-applied focus on clinical psychology at the University of North Texas, explained the correlation between the two.

"My interest in the relationship between pathological personality traits, such as those captured by psychopathy, and prejudicial tendencies originated from my experiences working with offenders in the Arizona correctional system prior to graduate school," said Roy.

He added, "I noticed offenders who were elevated in psychopathic propensities, as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003), frequently used racial epithets to denigrate me and other staff. When I began studying this personality disorder more in my graduate training, I noticed a paucity of literature relating psychopathy to prejudice."

Roy went on to explain what inspired his research as he noted his concern about the uptick in "hate-based violence" in recent years. The study focused on the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale-Short Form (SRP-SF) which broke psychopathy into four distinct categories: "a manipulative and deceptive interpersonal style, callousness and lack of empathy, impulsivity, and overt antisocial tendencies."

"Given the increase in hate-based violence in the last few years, I wanted to explore if certain personality traits traditionally studied in the realm of clinical psychology may be predictive of prejudice and provide empirical research on this understudied topic," he explained. "Psychopathy is particularly relevant to prejudice given that facets of the disorder, such as callousness or lack of empathy, are predictive of prejudicial tendencies."

The latest research findings are said to align with previous studies conducted in Austria which highlighted how some people with seemingly "dark" personality traits had an increased likelihood to support right-wing political views and beliefs.

Roy's research also noted a direct correlation between psychopathic tendencies judgmental views. During an interview with with the publication, Roy further explained his findings.

Roy said, "The findings of the study suggest that psychopathic traits, particularly the calloused and deceptive traits, are robustly associated with the tendency to prefer a society that keeps marginalized groups low in status and power and are also predictive of the propensity to use aggression towards violators of traditional social norms, both of which are salient predictors of a variety of prejudicial attitudes."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scientists-explain-why-the-wealthy-struggle-with-empathy/

matt r salon

a new study reveals that people from higher income backgrounds struggle with certain aspects of empathy when compared to individuals who have lower incomes, who are better at reading people’s emotions.

The research paper, which was published in the “Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,” asked individuals from different class backgrounds to infer others’ emotional states by looking at images of their eyes and to attempt to assume the visual perspective of other people.

The findings suggest that our socioeconomic status may affect the way we see and interact with other people.

Researchers know that there are many things can make it difficult for one person to effectively empathize with another, including neurological conditions like autism and psychological illnesses like schizophrenia. In their study, researchers Pia Dietze of the University of California, Irvine and Eric D. Knowles of New York University attempted to better understand how social class specifically influences Theory of Mind.

"[Theory of Mind] encompasses a range of competencies that together enable people to solve problems in a world full of other minds,” the authors explain. “Examples of ToM include our ability to infer people’s emotions, understand others’ visual perspectives, trace behavior to actors’ underlying intentions and desires, and grasp the fact that others’ beliefs might misportray reality. We focus on two facets of [Theory of Mind] in this work: emotion perception and visual perspective taking.”

The authors concluded, both from their research and by analyzing previous research (some of which they felt was unreliable), that “higher social class is associated with attenuated [theory of mind] performance,” with individuals from higher income backgrounds struggling more to ascertain the emotions and empathize with the visual points of view of other people. One possible explanation for this is that “lower-class individuals—owing to their greater levels of cultural interdependence—may appraise other human beings as more relevant to their goals and well-being than do higher-class individuals.”This would also help people from lower classes to “spontaneously calculate other people’s perspectives.”

Dietze and Knowles also point out that their conclusion “stands in clear contrast to the common discourse concerning neurocognitive deficits among the lower classes.” They also note that “decades of research documents that lower-class individuals are more likely to exhibit attentional deficits and display impaired working-memory performance. The evidence provided here suggests that these deficits may be domain-specific. Indeed, we show that lower-class performance outcomes are reversed in the social realm.” The term “domain-specific” refers to the theory of learning which holds that there are multiple forms of intelligence rather than a single way to assess where one has cognitive strengths and/or weaknesses.

This is not the only new research which sheds light on how being wealthy can lead to harmful psychological behaviors and personal habits. In July a different study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that individuals from affluent backgrounds would often deny their class privilege by “increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover [their] privilege in a veneer of meritocracy.”

“Flying in the face of meritocratic prescriptions, evidence of privilege threatens recipients’ self-regard by calling into question whether they deserve their successes,” the authors wrote in their study. “Evidence of class privilege demonstrates that many life outcomes are determined by factors not attributable to individuals’ efforts alone, but are caused in part by systemic inequities that privilege some over others.”

Another study, this one published in June in the journal Nature Communications, argued that the consumption patterns of the affluent are so egregiously unsustainable from an ecological standpoint that only a concerted effort by the wealthy to consume less can prevent catastrophes like global warming, pollution and biodiversity loss.

“The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions,” the authors wrote, adding that “existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change.” They advocated “a global and rapid decoupling of detrimental impacts from economic activity,” pointing out that “theworld’s top 10% of income earners are responsible for between 25 and 43% of environmental impact” while “the world’s bottom 10% income earners exert only around 3–5% of environmental impact.”

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