Several conservative public figures say misplaced empathy for hardened criminals and Islamist migrants has pushed Western society to the brink of collapse.
Vice President J.D. Vance, trillionaire Elon Musk, social researcher Gad Saad, Baptist podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey and Catholic media evangelist Bishop Robert Barron have argued that Americans have been kind to a fault with such people.
Most of them have close ties to the Trump administration, which has restricted illegal immigration, made deep cuts to social spending and deployed National Guard troops to police major cities. And all have used terms such as “toxic empathy,” “suicidal empathy” and “the sin of empathy” to justify such policies.
“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,” Mr. Vance said during a January 2025 interview with Fox News after taking office. “And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
Mr. Vance cited the “ordo amoris,” a Catholic idea that people must first love those closest to them before tending to those further away.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Mr. Musk, who co-led President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, said during a February 2025 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.
Bishop Barron, who served on the president’s Religious Liberty Commission, said during an Aug. 31 podcast that love rather than empathy defines Christian virtue.
“And love does not mean, primarily, feeling the feelings of the other or not hurting those feelings; it means willing the good of the other,” the bishop said.
Mr. Saad, a visiting professor at the University of Mississippi’s Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom, advanced similar views in his recent book “Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind.”
He told The Washington Times in a phone interview that empathy is a good thing if it remains “well-calibrated” to reason.
“Rational empathy requires that I show more empathy to my children than my rapist,” said Mr. Saad, a Lebanese Jewish immigrant who holds a doctorate in marketing. “Suicidal empathy is to institute an open border policy for immigrants who fight for my demise.”
He cited examples of rape victims disguising the race, sexuality and nationality of their attackers out of a greater concern not to feed conservative narratives than to catch the criminals.
’Not a trap … a superpower’
Prominent liberals, psychologists and Trump critics have pushed back on the framing of empathy as weakness. They accuse the president’s supporters of turning the concept into a sin to prevent people from seeing the pain of foreign nationals and others hurt by his policies.
“Empathy is not a trap,” actor John C. Reilly said while endorsing LGBT rights during a June podcast interview. “Empathy is a superpower. It’s what makes human beings exceptional.”
Singer Billie Eilish and former Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, both singled out Mr. Musk’s comments in public attacks last year.
“I see weaponized empathy as just another trigger word used to keep attention off those who really don’t care about our humanity,” said Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center.
Others pushing back have included Episcopalian Bishop Mariann Budde and New York Times columnist David French.
Mr. French, a self-described conservative evangelical critic of Mr. Trump, argued in a February 19 column that the “MAGA Christian right” has excommunicated empathy to rationalize its political support for the president.
“The attack on empathy would have gained very little traction in the church if Donald Trump weren’t president,” Mr. French wrote. “He delights in vengeance, and he owes his presidency to the evangelical church.”
Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge University empathy researcher, said that empathy detached from an appropriate emotional response is not really empathy at all.
“Empathy by definition cannot oppress anyone,” Mr. Baron-Cohen said in an email. “Cruelty becomes possible when affective empathy is reduced.”
Psychological origins
British psychologist Edward B. Titchener coined the word empathy in 1909, translating it from a 19th-century German art term that meant “feeling into.”
The word has evolved since then. Psychologists now define it as the ability to understand other points of view by vicariously sharing their feelings, thoughts and perspectives.
“Properly understood, empathy is being able to put yourself in the other person’s place,” said Ray Guarendi, a Catholic family psychologist based in North Canton, Ohio. “It does not mean license for the other person to do whatever they wish and that you will understand.”
Avigail Lev, a San Francisco-based psychologist, said weaponized or suicidal empathy often occurs when narcissists exploit the guilt or shame of others to excuse their bad behavior.
“If invoking my suffering repeatedly makes you feel guilty for holding me accountable, I’m weaponizing your empathy,” Ms. Lev said in an email. “We see this in dysfunctional relationships.”
She argued that weaponized empathy has been on the rise in recent years, driven by a growing polarization between Republicans pushing for reason to override feelings and Democrats replacing logic with emotions in the debate over U.S. support for Israel.
“One side claims the heart and the other the mind, when healthy empathy requires both,” Ms. Lev said. “That polarization makes the entire society less empathic.”
Empathizing better
Several experts disagreed on how to stop people from manipulating others for personal and political gain.
“The more clinically useful question is what happens when empathy becomes selective, disconnected from critical thinking, or organized around group identity and a simplified victim/perpetrator narrative,” said Malka Shaw, a trauma therapist who founded Kesher Shalom Projects in New Jersey to treat people impacted by antisemitism after the October 2023 terror attack on Israel.
Carolina Estevez, a psychologist who treats mood and anxiety disorders at Soba New Jersey Drug & Alcohol Rehab, said there’s no point in arguing whether “society has too much or too little empathy.”
“The appropriate question to ask is if the empathy being demonstrated is consistent across all situations and being used in conjunction with good decision-making,” Ms. Estevez said in an email.
Several psychologists said it would be a mistake to dismiss empathy because of the biased ways some people deploy it.
“It helps us act not just in our self-interest, but in the interests of others, which allows us to cooperate and achieve much more than we would if we existed in the world alone,” said Jo-Ann Tsang, a psychology professor at Baylor University in Texas.
“You don’t cure a threat response by asking people to feel less,” added Elizabeth Edwards, a behavioral researcher at the Engagement Science Lab in Colorado. “There is no historical case of a civilization that ended because it cared too much.”
Some predicted that decreasing political polarization would help keep people from weaponizing empathy against each other in the future — a prospect they viewed as unlikely.
“We really could do more to focus on the common good rather than just individual desires,” said Thomas Plante, a psychology professor at private Santa Clara University in California. “Too often, empathy can be viewed as virtue signaling, especially in our social media-centered world.”
“Our highly polarized society makes questioning our political narratives, changing our minds, and being open to new information feel dangerous,” added Liz Moyer Benferhat, a Bronx-based healing facilitator.
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