MAGA's war on empathy was started by a woman [View all]

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MAGA’s war on empathy was started by a woman
Allie Beth Stuckey weaponizes her gender to sell the idea of a cold-hearted Jesus

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published December 1, 2025 6:45AM (EST)


(Salon) 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.

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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.

“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. ....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/01/magas-war-on-empathy-was-started-by-a-woman/