MAGA's war on empathy exposes misogynist fears

[marmar]

MAGA's war on empathy exposes misogynist fears
Elon Musk and the Christian right call empathy "toxic" and "suicidal" — blame their shared misogyny

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published April 11, 2025 6:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner is famous in people-who-read circles for his ability to get maloevent and/or stupid people in leadership to humiliate themselves in his interviews. Lucky for him, the right provides an endless supply of people who are egotistic as they are ignorant, meaning he will never go without subjects who don't bother to learn this history before agreeing to go on the record with him. The latest deserving victim is Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went from denouncing Donald Trump as a "predator" in 2016 to being one of Trump's loudest Christian right defenders. Chotiner drew Mohler, a supposed follower of Jesus Christ, to admit he now condemns empathy. Mohler sneered that empathy is "an artificial virtue," calling empathy "destructive and manipulative."

....(snip)....

The political impetus behind this overt assault on what was once considered a baseline virtue is obvious enough. All these people follow Trump, a man who is incapable of empathy, so much so that many high-profile psychologists have argued that he should be considered a sociopath, despite not consenting to a formal diagnosis. 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."

So yeah, Trump's sociopathy now outranks the empathy of Jesus in MAGA eyes. But there's another angle to this, as well: This is about the MAGA right's unhinged obsession with gender and escalating hatred of women. Empathy is seen as a "feminine" emotion by both the atheistic techbro right and the Christian nationalist right. 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.

....(snip)....

The "sin of empathy" talk got even louder this week when Justice Amy Coney Barrett was the only conservative on the Supreme Court to agree with the three liberal justices that Trump has no right to send innocent Venezuelan immigrants to a torture prison in El Salvador. The four justices who dissented against Trump are women, so William Wolfe, former aide to Al Mohler, used it as evidence that women cannot be trusted with power. "Illegal alien criminals don’t need to be ‘mothered’ by the women on the Supreme Court," he screeched on X. (Wolfe is lying, it must be said. Reports show many, probably most of the men who were disappeared had legal asylum status.) He then called them the "Four Horsewomen of Suicidal Empathy." ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/11/magas-on-empathy-exposes-misogynist-fears/

[Scrivener7]

1. Wellllll..... those fears were never exactly hidden.

[Clouds Passing]

2. The devil is at the pulpit