Thanks to Elon Musk, most Americans learned earlier this year that MAGA thinks empathy is evil. Cruelty isn’t the problem, the Tesla CEO claimed in an attempt to justify his turn toward authoritarian politics. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” he declared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February.
As the billionaire was decimating much of the federal bureaucracy devoted to serving Americans, he said it was good to be heartless, comparing “the empathy response” to a computer bug. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” he said, arguing counterintuitively that caring about others will somehow bring ruin to the entire human species.
As with much of the asinine ponderings coming from the Silicon Valley billionaire class, 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.” In fact, he’s a business professor with degrees in marketing and management, with no background in biology. But in 2024, Saad began pushing the notion that empathy has become a “cancer” because it allegedly has no “stopping mechanism” and will eventually kill its host — the human race. This, of course, is unscientific babbling, which is why the professor is a beloved guest on Rogan’s show. But it also cuts against basic common sense. Any study of wars, poverty and other manmade crises shows us that humanity still suffers from a lack of empathy, not a surfeit.
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.
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.
Stuckey’s book “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion” came out in late 2024, 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.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Sign up for her free newsletter, Standing Room Only, now also on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
“Feeling too much for someone can blind us to reality,” she argued. “It can cause us to ignore the truth, the objective truth, in favor of how a person feels.”
What Stuckey asserts as “objective truth” is anything but: That being gay is wrong, that women are meant to submit to men, that immigrants are dangerous to Americans, that trans identities are illegitimate and that the only meaningful racism in America is “anti-white.” 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.” To the contrary, true Christian love is what looks, to most people, like beating someone into submission. Denying someone equality or basic dignity, this argument goes, may be painful now, but it supposedly saves them from hell, so hatefulness is actually a deeper form of love.
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.
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. Everything about “Relatable,” including that try-hard name, is exquisitely designed to invoke a stereotypical feminine softness. The logo’s font is straight out of mid-century woman’s magazine. Stuckey has soft blonde hair and favors pastels in her clothing and decor. Like so many Phyllis Schlafly knock-offs before her, Stuckey has built a career on arguing that women can’t be equal to men. That way, she gets to relish being an ambitious career woman, while enjoying male support — she’s hosted by Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media — that she would never get insisting that women are equal.
Stuckey’s ability to package her work as fluffy girl stuff worked well on the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, who presented her to his well-meaning but gullible liberal audience as a harmless church girl whose podcast is the equivalent of a Sunday afternoon ladies brunch. He gushed about her “strong parenting and motherhood and female life element,” portraying her as reaching “younger religious women” with content about “sunscreen and parenting styles and the secret to fixing your period.”
But that’s all nonsense. Stuckey’s “fixing your period” episode, for example, was actually about scaring women into stopping birth control by falsely portraying it as dangerous.
Stuckey is just one of many far-right female commentators who have realized that they can use hyper-feminine aesthetics to conceal what would immediately register as dystopian, even fascistic sentiments if they came from a man. But what makes her especially dangerous is that she applies this strategy to the concept of empathy. Whether consciously or not, Stuckey grasps that “empathy” tends to be coded as a feminine virtue. When men attack empathy, it comes across as sexist and condescending. But a woman opposing empathy is counterintuitive. In our era of vibes over facts, that twist makes her message feel more persuasive, especially to those who already are sick of hearing that being mean to other people is bad.
We need your help to stay independent
It’s basically the same trick the right is pulling when they make women the face of anti-feminism. Because they’re perceived as going against their own self-interest, female misogynists tend to get more of a hearing, which isn’t true. There are ample financial rewards for being a female anti-feminist, far beyond what feminism has to offer. But the perceived novelty of the anti-feminist woman keeps working, even as it is objectively a tired trope. Stuckey’s spin is even more abstract, but the same tactic. “Toxic empathy” is a phrase that embeds the idea that women have too much power in our society — and that their alleged overabundance of compassion is destroying us.
Stuckey’s actual speaking style, though, is not stereotypically feminine at all. She has a brash overconfidence that people tend to associate mostly with men. Even in the era of Donald Trump, she has a rare skill at saying incredibly stupid things — like mocking the reality of dinosaurs — with an utter self-certainty that is frankly unnerving. It’s an unfortunate talent that has profound power in the era of social media, where the ability to perform often compels people far more than facts.
For women in most professions, there’s an obligation to signal humility, no matter how right you think you are. But because she’s telling the worst men what they want to hear, Stuckey has created space for herself to live out the usually male role of being the pompous bully who will brook no dissent.
But hey, as least she does avoid charges of hypocrisy. Stuckey has declared that empathy is “toxic,” and has weaponized her gender in such a way that she gets to act like someone who experiences no empathy at all.
