Tech Won't Save Us - The Roots of Elon Musk’s War On Empathy w/ Julia Carrie Wong

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Julia Carrie Wong to discuss Elon Musk’s recent opposition to empathy, how it comes out of the Christian right, and the relationship it has to previous discussions of longtermism.  Julia Carrie Wong is a features writer at The Guardian.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham.Also mentioned in this episode:Julia wrote about how the Christian right is reframing empathy as a threat to civilization. In 2017, she also interviewed Elon Musk about worker injuries at Tesla.In February, none other than Pope Francis pushed back on JD Vance’s use of a Christian theological concept to justify Trump’s inhumane immigration policies.Support the show

They're trying to kind of create this intellectual infrastructure so that people can justify to themselves that actually by hurting other people, I'm saving civilization and I'm saving them from harm. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Julia Carey Wong. Julia is a features writer at The Guardian US, and I've been reading her work for a long time, so it was really great to have her on the show. Now, you might have heard recently that Elon Musk has a new enemy, and it is empathy. In a recent podcast with Joe Rogan, he explained that he thinks empathy is an enemy of Western civilization, that it is holding us back and is ultimately going to be

our downfall. Now, to many people, that might sound like quite a surprise and quite a wild thing to say, because it is. But as you might expect, there is a much bigger story here. This is not something that just popped into Elon Musk's mind out of nowhere, but comes from a right-wing movement, surprise, surprise, that he has probably been seeing a lot of posts about on Twitter or X, and, you know, is probably in the circles with people who support these ideas. So I wanted to have Julia on the show to talk about this because she wrote a really in-depth piece looking at how the Christian right is turning against empathy and how these narratives that Elon Musk is using come from that playbook, come from the types of things that this right-wing version of Christianity that is growing in the United States, that is embracing Donald Trump, is arguing, and why they think that this is like a form of suicidal empathy that is ultimately a threat to American Western civilization that they want to protect, and, you know, that they

see as part of this broader threat to basically white people, right? You know, the great replacement theory being advocated by these white nationalists. And so in this conversation, we talk about what these Christian nationalists really think, you know, what their ideology is, but also this other kind of pseudoscientific version of this that comes from, unfortunately, once again, a right-wing Canadian, God Saad, whose arguments help to provide a supposedly scientific underpinning for these ideas that have been embraced by the Christian right. So I think that this is a fascinating conversation. It gives us insight into where, you know, this kind of right-wing cohort of tech folks is finding itself and kind of finding these ideas that they are spreading out to a much larger group of people.

But also, of course, what is fundamentally wrong with this way of seeing the world and the threat it poses to so many people in our societies. So I think this is a great conversation. I think you're really going to like it. If you do, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so we can keep having these in-depth critical conversations so that we can do other things like, you know, making the series that we do from time to time. And again, more information on that soon. You can do that by joining supporters like David from Leeds, Steve from Boulder, Jacob from London,

Lauren in Santa Cruz, Mindy from New Jersey, Ali from Bristol, Meredith from Indiana, and James from Bloomington by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Julia, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. I am really excited to chat with you. I've been reading your work for years at The Guardian, and I'm sure wherever you were before that, and just like a big fan of the work that you're doing. I think it's fantastic. Your latest piece, I think, really hits on a lot of things that people are concerned

about right now and seeing the evolution of the tech industry and where it is today. And so I think I just need to start with like the obvious question. Your piece centers around, or I guess takes as a jumping off point, this interview that Elon Musk did with Joe Rogan, where he's talking about empathy as civilizational, suicidal empathy, and calling it a fundamental weakness of Western civilization. What was your reaction when you heard Elon Musk saying these things? It's a little bit funny because I have been interested in thinking about empathy as a concept for a little while. I listened to a psychoanalytic podcast and they had an episode about empathy maybe last year, and it was about kind of taking a critical approach to empathy. And I was very intrigued

by that. And it was kind of the scholar that they were interviewing, Jay Davis, she was specifically talking about kind of some of these like neoliberal technical solutions that are designed around empathy, something that the tech industry, you know, with VR got very invested in. You can do a VR experience and you can really empathize with the experience of a refugee. You can know what it's like to be in solitary confinement through a technological experience. I thought that that was a really thoughtful and interesting way to think about how do we assess the weight that we give to these kind of imagined experiences that we have where we try to put ourselves into somebody else's shoes. And so I actually started

working on the piece like a week before Elon did that Joe Rogan appearance because I had started to see him and others on social media saying negative things about empathy. There was one like tweet that the Babylon Bee guy shared where he was quoting Nietzsche positively. Nietzsche in certain hands, I think has a track record of like not being great. And so I was kind of like, hmm, that's curious. And I had started to see also that there were folks on the Christian right that were talking

about empathy in a strange way after this very high profile interaction at the service at the National Cathedral for Trump's inauguration. You know, empathy, I was like thinking about and starting to look into it. And then Elon goes on Joe Rogan and states this civilizational suicide thesis. And I was like, okay, I got to figure out what's actually going on here. It was just very strange. And I mean, you don't hear people criticizing empathy that much. I mean, maybe, you know, on a psychoanalytic podcast in a very like left wing, like critical theory kind of way, But like to hear that kind of straightforward rejection, basically of altruism and caring about other people is pretty confronting.

And I was kind of like, okay, I need to actually find out what's the argument that they're making, because I was kind of primed from having been thinking about a left wing critique of empathy, I was kind of primed to be like, maybe there's something in it, maybe they have something interesting to say. And I don't think that that's actually what, but that was kind of how I went into it and how I was hearing Elon on Joe Rogan and his introduction to the world of this idea of suicidal empathy. That's so fascinating. So you were on the case even before Elon made his public declaration. That's perfect. It's really interesting to me because as you were saying, like hearing people slam empathy as a concept is not the most common thing. And I think

the vast majority of people, if they heard someone say, oh, you know, empathy, that's a real mark against us. They would be like, wait, sir, what the fuck is wrong with you? It just seems like kind of a base thing that is present within so many of us to think about other people, to care about other people. Maybe that's not always expressed in the best ways or those kinds of feelings aren't always reflected in people's actions, but it feels like that is something that was kind of like very basic in a lot of people to have that kind of caring instinct, right? And so then to see someone like Elon Musk, who there has already been criticisms that maybe he lacks some of this empathy, or, you know, maybe his disconnection or his wealth or what have you from the regular person makes him seemingly less likely to feel these things. And so then to see it expressed

in this way, it's like, okay, he has taken another step down this path of really not caring about the average person. I mean, it's interesting with Elon because I think that most people that come into contact with him, I actually interviewed him briefly once. And my takeaway, I think that as a human being, like it is true that he doesn't really have a lot of empathy. I interviewed him about a story that I did about Tesla worker injuries. And so I was describing to him the findings of an investigation that I did that was about workers in his factories who had experienced life-altering injuries, injuries that meant that they couldn't use their hands, that they couldn't lift their arms, they couldn't do their hobbies or care for their families in the way that they had previously been able to.

These are injuries that are preventable, right? Like the auto industry in general has really huge advantages in ergonomics as far as figuring out ways to run a factory that does not result in debilitating and disabling injuries for your workers. So I was pushing him on that issue and his response was just entirely self-focused. He was like, I suffer more than anybody else. And I put my desk in the factory into the most uncomfortable corner. It's like the story of him sleeping in the factory with the production house stuff, right? Which is like, nobody asked you to do that, dude. And also, B, is it even true?

I'm not asking you about whether you suffer based on where your desk is. I'm asking if you care about your worker's suffering. And the answer apparently seems to be no. I do think that he is somebody that as an individual doesn't really have the natural inclination or kind of, I don't know if it's a capacity or what, to think about other people's perspectives. But it's really a step further to kind of, on the one hand, there's like not really bothering with the mental labor involved in kind of taking a step and saying,

how do my actions affect other people? It's really a second step to say, not only do I not bother, but those of you who do bother are actually harming civilization as a whole, because now you're actually creating this like ideological justification. And the work that that's doing is ultimately towards excusing the suffering of others and saying, actually, if you are caring about the suffering of others, you're hurting civilization and hurting people more. I mean, it's just specious. It's not a good argument. It doesn't make any sense. But that's what they're trying to do. I mean, they're trying to kind of create this intellectual infrastructure so that people can justify to themselves that actually by hurting other people, I'm saving civilization and I'm saving them from harm, which is quite a dangerous thing to do,

I think, in the history of bad ideas and things that get people prepared to accept and to participate in really horrific activities that hurt other people. It feels quite kind of pathological to me. And the connection to the Christian right wasn't the first thing that I jumped to just because it is something that I am less familiar with, right? I didn't know that these terms and these concepts were already being used quite openly and commonly by people who are on the Christian right and pushing these ideas and pushing this kind of larger political fascist project, right? The first connection I made was actually to that concept of long-termism that we were talking about

a couple of years ago, right? That seemed to be very much associated with Elon Musk and in particular, this notion that like, we need to be thinking about civilization millions of years from now. And if that means people need to suffer in about civilization millions of years from now. And if that means people need to suffer in the present to protect the future people, that is okay, right? And that already seemed to be justifying particular things that Elon Musk was doing as he would frame them in this way, and certain other people in the tech industry. And so when I heard Elon Musk saying these things, I was like, oh, he's taken a further step down this path because he was already kind of making these justifications that some kind of thing in the future justifies harm in the present and in particular harm being committed or enabled by people like Musk himself.

And so then to see him go even further and be like, empathy itself is, you know, a threat to civilization. And in doing so, basically saying we are going to have to round people up. We are going to need to like implement this fascist project in order to protect Western civilization. It seemed like, okay, you know, he's taken a further step down this path. But then to hear your connection to the Christian right, I was like, ah, this makes even more sense because of the trajectory that we have obviously seen Musk on for the past number of years. That's really interesting that you brought up long-termism because there's a lot of different kind of ideological and intellectual threads going on here. And a lot of them I find

very interesting. And then some of them I find to be very like, okay, I'm just like, that's very pseudoscientific and BSE. But in 2016, I think that it would be fair to say that there was a certain idea of empathy as a very powerful, positive political force that was really embodied by Barack Obama and his style of politics. He spoke explicitly about empathy being this force that was needed in politics to create a more just society. And that kind of was all happening at the same time that there was a huge amount of enthusiasm in the science world and in kind of like the popular

science press around the idea of mirror neurons, which were this type of neuron that kind of responds both to somebody doing an action and seeing somebody else do an action. So the theory was that somehow the act of empathy was encoded, you know, in our neurons. And there was a ton of science that was done and books that were written about how, you know, the science of empathy and how this was all baked in. And that really hit a peak around 2013 and then started to trail off. And as we were moving into, I think, this broader political backlash against Barack Obama and against multiracial democracy, we also see a backlash against that kind of like very positive and progressive idea of empathy as this tool that can be used for good. And it's

interesting because I think that the tech industry was very much on board with that idea of empathy. So you had things like Facebook, which obviously was like very in the early industry was very much on board with that idea of empathy. So you had things like Facebook, which obviously was in the early days very much kind of of the Barack Obama hope and change and connecting people. That was kind of like their corporate philosophy to a certain extent, or at least their corporate marketing. in their offices, where if you were a developer, you could go into an empathy room and use different Android devices as if they had a mobile connection in South Africa, or as if they had a mobile connection in Bangladesh. So you could get a sense of what the digital experience of people using the technology and the connectivity that is available in other countries and see how Facebook products are going to work. Experience what it's like to use the free basics.

Yeah. Experience what it's like to use internet basics. I feel like that kind of really encapsulates kind of like the shallowness of a certain kind of way that we were talking about empathy in the early aughts where like, that's not empathy, that's product testing. You know, you're not actually like thinking about what it's like to live in Myanmar, because if you were, maybe you would have like actually paid attention to the insane, violent instigation and hate speech that was taking over the platform. Like that's just slow Wi-Fi. It just slow wifi. It's not empathy. It's not a real effort to understand another perspective and another point of view.

So there was a certain kind of like shallowness, I think, to some of this empathy promotion. And there was a certain level of backlash to that. So in 2016, there was a book published by this Yale professor, Paul Bloom, called Against Empathy. And he was kind of making the effective altruism case against empathy. And so this, I think, kind of really fits with your long-termism. His argument basically was that empathy is not necessary to altruism, that we can make rational decisions about doing good. And it's better to have those not be influenced by the emotions that get involved with empathy because empathy is, it's a complicated thing, but you know, it's partly affective. And as far as like sharing emotions, it's also partially cognitive as far as imagining yourself in another point of view.

So he kind of is arguing that the affective parts of empathy are subject to manipulation and not actually making rational decisions, that something like affective altruism, which is very closely tied as a movement to long-termism, is a better way. And so that was kind of one stream. And I think that there are obviously a lot of people in the tech world that got very into affective altruism and into long-termism. I do think that what Elon Musk is promoting is different from that. He is not just saying we should not take our emotional reaction to people's suffering into account when we're making rational decisions about how best to prevent suffering. He is actually kind

of with the help of this Canadian marketing professor who is heavily influenced by so-called evolutionary psychology. He has glommed onto this idea that empathy is in fact kind of an anti-evolutionary and anti-adaptive thing that is at odds with our evolutionary progress as a species. And this is where things start to get very, very eugenicist very quickly. When you start talking about stuff like this, the ideas that are being pushed by Gad Saad, who is a very, you know, he's a big figure on Twitter and has kind of this very public bromance with Elon Musk. And he wrote the book that kind of popularized this idea of the woke mind virus that Elon and others are so obsessed

with. He's taking it a step further because he's not saying that we need to be rational and not manipulated in how we do our altruism. He's saying having altruistic feelings towards anybody that's not blood related to me or part of my, you know, he's not saying race, but he's saying part of quote unquote Western civilization that is evolutionary disadvantageous and therefore wrong and must be kind of jettisoned. It's a very circular argument because he both says this is just how things are. This is evolution. People care more about the people that are like than they do.

But he's also giving it kind of like this normative level where he's saying, and if you do care about other people, despite your evolution, you know, so-called evolutionary programming, there's something wrong with you. You have a woke mind virus. I think that like as an argument, it fails on every level. It is based in pse every level. It is based in pseudoscience. It is racist. It is completely just of a piece with a lot of bad thinking around social Darwinism that we know always goes in very bad directions. But it has captured Elon Musk and a pretty frightening number of people who are nodding along and agreeing with this and saying that this is a good idea, which is frightening.

And surely Elon Musk talking about it on such a widely seen platform will only further kind of extend the number of people who are coming into contact with these particular ideas and maybe picking them up as a result of that. So we talked about how Elon Musk would use long-termism to kind of justify, you know, say his space pursuits or his treatment of workers or his despoiling of the environment and ignoring environmental regulations because all of this had to be justified for this grander project that he was pursuing, right? Do you think that as you explained, and I agree with you, what he's talking about now is quite distinct from what we see in kind of long-termism effective altruism. Do you

feel like there has been kind of, I don't know the right way to frame it, but like an evolution there? Or do you think these more Christian right, far right ideas have supplanted the type of thing that justified his actions in the past? It feels like it's obviously going further down a very dark road, but also that this is a man who is just always looking for concepts, ideas, ways of seeing the world that justify his own power and ability to kind of do whatever he wants. Exactly what you just said about this is an exercise in self-justification. I think that that's a big part of it. I mean, to a certain extent, I think that that is kind of how I think about the long-termism stuff. There's a lot of smoke screens, right? That are

keeping us looking at a distant horizon with Mars or this like grand, frightening idea of the end of Western civilization. But in reality, in the here and now, what's happening is that a 38-year-old dad is being ripped away from his family and deported. And if you can keep people looking at Mars, I think it's easier to keep them from looking closely at what's happening in El Salvador. But I think that the kind of these two things, like, you know, they're being instrumentalized in furtherance of a project that is creating mass suffering now. It's a common tactic, I think, of fascism to create this kind of phantasmagoric threat and something that is existential. And the Nazis, of course, is ruining the race, the folk, the people, and their connection to the land. That

doesn't really work in the current situation. So it's Western civilization is playing the same role. And instead of having Jews be the people that are threatening Western civilization, you know, there's a slightly broader mix of the enemies to quote unquote Western civilization. But it's basically kind of, I think, doing the same thing, which is kind of focusing people's anger and passions into justifying things that are not justifiable, which are just, you know, destroying people's lives and causing unnecessary suffering in the here and now. Very well said, I think. And so I want to pivot now to broader ideas discussed in your piece, and you started to lay some of that out there and talking about God's sad and what he has been promoting, these notions of suicidal empathy and things like that. And I guess since you already

brought him up, my question would be, do you see him as completely aligned with the ideas that we're getting from the Christian right more generally, or is he distinct from that? I think that part of what's interesting about the anti-empathy movement, such as it is, is that there's two very distinct threats. One of them is coming from the hard Christian right. It's evangelical, and it's being led by this guy, Pastor Joe Rigney, who is closely associated with another pastor, Doug anti-trans, hugely anti-trans. And they have an argument that is based on scripture level. I'm not an expert on Christianity in any way, but the argument is kind of, you know, empathy as a word and as a concept, it's just over a hundred years old. We think of it as being this kind of like essential part of the human experience, but it was only invented as a concept in the late 19th century. And it was only given an English

word in the early 20th century. So before that, there was compassion or sympathy or pity, which are all things that are in the Christian Bible are big supporters of my understanding is part of what the Christian argument against empathy is, is to say that empathy is different from that. It's not just compassion. It's not just sympathy. It's something modern and new that's slightly weird. And it is something modern and new. Like it came out of modernism and out of, it was actually people who study aesthetics started to wonder, you know, what is going on when, if I have a weird swoopy feeling, when I look at a painting, what is that? And that they started to identify that feeling

as empathy. And then from there, the concept kind of goes on this like interesting intellectual journey of people trying to probe and understand and define and quantify in some cases, this aspect of subjective experience that is very, very difficult to put your finger on. Parts of it are, as I said, affective. If somebody else's mood affects yours, it's a strange experience to suddenly feel differently because somebody else is feeling differently. What's going on there? How are they influencing me without me agreeing to it? And that's something that we think of as being part of empathy, but then also the mental imaginative leaps that people can make. And I think that people should make to just try to imagine themselves being in another person's perspective. That's also, I mean, it's a

complicated cognitive thing that's going on there. It does relate to our emotions and how it can change how we feel about things. So it's, it's a very complicated, very modern concept that still at a very basic level, it kind of boils down to like how we deal with the fact that we live in a world with other people, whether we want to or not, we care about how they feel. I think it's kind of the existential situation that empathy is like trying to get its hands around is that like, we do care about other they feel, I think is kind of the existential situation that empathy is like trying to get its hands around is that like, we do care about other people and they do affect our feelings. And we do think about them in ways that cause us to change our behavior sometimes. And some people don't want that. When you bring up the early stages of empathy and it kind of

relating to like looking at a painting and feeling something, It's like not at all how I feel like we would generally use the word today, right? Like I feel like it has evolved in its meaning very much since like those early days. The original empathy was the German aesthetics who were doing that kind of like measuring stuff of trying to quantify what these feelings are that we have when we look at art. They use the word Einfühlung. I'm not pronouncing that correctly. And that was translated into English as empathy. The psychoanalysts started to get interested in it. The psychologists started to get interested in it. Social workers got interested in it. And so they started to pile on these additional meanings to empathy. And by the mid-20th century, the meaning of empathy had changed so much that there is now a new word in

German to translate back, which is just like empathy or empathy. The meaning of this word has very much changed and it very much circles around something that is still very hard for people to put their fingers on. And I think everybody thinks that they know what they mean when they say empathy, but then when you start to kind of probe it, it's weird. I mean, it's just like at a very basic level, like it's speaking to something that is, I think, like one of the great problems of human existence, which is like we don't really understand what it means to be subjects in a world with other people who have their own subjectivity. How do we manage that? How do we think about what their subjectivity is and what our subjectivity is? And especially given the fact that in weird and interesting ways, their subjectivity can influence our subjectivity and take it over and make us feel things that we didn't know that we were going to feel. So it's kind of like this

word that gets at the horror and mystery and scariness of being a human. It is interesting that that is something that we have these two different fields who are very uninterested in pursuing. And one of those is hardcore right-wing evangelical Christianity, which I think is not interested in the modern project of unpacking the complexities of subjective human experience, which is interested in having a set of rules and guidelines that are handed down from above and enforced by the male, exclusively male leaders of the church. And so that is a very kind of totalizing ideology that doesn't allow for some of the weirdness of, I think, of empathy. And then on the other side, you have this,

what I would call pseudoscientific evolutionary psychology idea around human development that again is nominally based in scientific inquiry. But it's not really. Like when you actually read Gadsad's arguments, he's just coming up with metaphors. That's not a scientific argument. He thinks that certain ideas are like parasites. He thinks that because he has a PhD in something related to evolutionary psychology, that that makes that science. But it's just a metaphor. There's no real argument there. It's just what he thinks. He thinks that a lot of evolutionary psychology thinking has this very like just so story where because it has ended up the way that it is, that proves that it had to always be that way. And it's this very circular thing. And I think that that is also what's happening with

his conception of empathy, which is basically because not caring about people has produced the world that we live in. We have to continue to not care about people because that's the way it always had to be. We were evolved this way. That's just how it is. Oh, and are there other people that do care about other people? Well, they're incorrectly evolved. I mean, Gadsad uses the word degenerate to demean his ideological opponents all the time. And degenerate is, people know it from like the degenerate art exhibition that the Nazis put together. But that idea, it's an idea also from the late 19th century, early 20th, that was very popular among these social Darwinist eugenicist types, that some people had evolved backwards.

This idea that people who care about others have evolved backwards. There's no science there. That's just a judgment that he's made based on the fact that he doesn't like people that care about other people because their political program is not to his liking. But it has been given this air of like unquestionable authority. And I think that that's where you really see the way that certain types of pseudoscience can be so close to religion because in both of these cases, it's very much like there is a universal truth that cannot be questioned in any way. I mean, both the Christian anti-empathy people and God's sad Elon Musk have like a particular obsession with opposing trans rights and denying

the existence of trans people. And I think that that really speaks to why empathy is such a problem to them, because like they refuse to imagine that other people feel differently than they do and other people experience the world differently than they do. And so there's just this declaration that it's not real and that it can't be real. It's common sense. It's science. It's biology. It's God's word. You know, it's all of these things that just end the conversation instead of just curiosity or interest or saying, oh, like that's different from what I have experienced. Tell me about it. You know, it's a very kind of anti-intellectual approach that I think we're seeing on both sides. Yeah. You know, it's very closed minded. It's my way. And I will never accept that something else

might exist in the world that is different from the way that I currently see it. And like you're saying about the arguments that he's making in the sense that like he can declare these things authoritatively and then sprinkle some like scientific words and some papers that he's citing around it to make it seem like it is like legitimate and should be taken seriously. But that doesn't mean that that is the case just because he happens to believe that this is the way the world works, right? I wanted to pick up on more of like the Christian right side of this, because we've been talking about, you know, God's side and that kind of pseudoscientific side of it quite a bit. And when I encounter these types of arguments, and you know, you kind of started to talk about this earlier, but we know that Christianity has been involved in justifying some pretty despicable

things within its history, right? Like nobody is ignorant to that fact. I'm not an expert on Christianity or the Bible either, but I feel like these ideas about like caring for your fellow man and stuff are supposed to be kind of like important tenets of this faith, even if they're not always observed to the degree that you would expect. But I feel like when you look at these Christian right folks or these evangelical Christians who are espousing these ideas in the United States, who are so firmly opposed to empathy, it feels to be in significant contrast to, I guess, the more popular form of at least Catholicism that seems to be represented today when you look at, say, the late Pope Francis and what he was trying to do. So I guess what do you make of these

distinctions or these disagreements? And to what degree is this kind of Christian nationalist anti-empathy version of Christianity? Like how popular is it, I guess, is my question. Is this something that is widely held in the United States or is this still quite a fringe minority? I'm not an expert in any way on Christianity. I spoke to a political scientist, John W. Compton, when I was working on this piece and it was very helpful. And he's written a book actually called The End of Empathy. It came out in like 2018 and it was kind of telling the long arc history of how did white Protestant churches in the U.S. go from being a crucial pillar of the progressive movement, the anti-child labor movement in the early 20th century, and the civil rights movement in the 60s, to go from that to what we see today, which is that 81% of white evangelicals vote for Trump. I'm not going to say what is Christian and what isn't, but many, many kind of Orthodox Christian down the line people will say there is nothing Christian about Trump's persona, you know, from a standard Orthodox reading of the New Testament, you are called on to love your neighbor. You are called on to welcome the stranger. You are called

on to treat others the way that you want to be treated yourself. Like this is the bedrock of the moral order. And so it is very strange. And I think it's rightfully people are asking questions like what the hell is going on here his argument which i think is really interesting is that through the 1960s basically the mainline protestant churches so the non-evangelical protestant churches had a huge influence over you know white american social life and entree into middle class respectability was very much membership and activity in your local church was very much like that was a requirement of it, which meant that the churches were kind of able to exert a pretty strong influence over people's politics and over keeping the social mission

central to what the, to participation in the church. Compton's argument is that after World War II and with the huge influx of funding for higher education and just the booming economy and really expanded social mobility, you had a situation where there was no longer necessary for people to be members in good standing of their local Presbyterian church in order to be a businessman in the community who was well thought of. And so those mainline denominations, I mean, their membership collapsed like just hugely. And then as people who were still looking for some kind of religious meaning in their life were then kind of freed up to go looking for something that felt right for them. And he argues that this kind of created this like reverse situation where people went looking for something that felt good for them.

And that was something that was much more self-focused. You know, there's a lot of focus on personal salvation and a lot less focus on social good works in the evangelical church. You know, you focus on you and your family and the rest of the world takes care of itself. And so his argument is that that's kind of like what led to the huge explosion in evangelicalism and really a drawing away from any of the care for the widow and the orphan and the poor and the immigrant type value system in among white American Christians. And I mean, I think that that is something that we have been seeing get consistently further and further to the right. One of his arguments as well is that there have been periods where these new leaders of the religious right, these evangelical leaders who rose to prominence

in the 80s and 90s, they have actually tried to get their followers more interested in certain social issues. There was a pretty concerted effort to buy the religious right to get people interested in funding for HIV AIDS and to get people interested in immigration reform, like actually doing a big immigration bill to make our system make more sense. And these institutions spent money, they tried their best to get their congregations to be interested in this, and they actually ended up being more anti-immigrant than they had been when they started and more anti-immigrant than other religious denominations. able to go out looking for the religious leaders that appeal to them. And if you say something that they don't like, if you say like, you know, you actually do need to like be good to your neighbor and go do some good works, they might just leave. So there's a competition towards accommodating the political beliefs that people have. And I think that we are seeing that really accelerate

in the era of Trump. I mean, the Christian right tried to oppose Trump in 2016, the leaders of the Christian right, and they were not able to get their congregants not to vote for this guy who was, you know, married 17 times and allegedly sexually harassed thousands of people, etc. I'm sorry, that was huge exaggeration. But they tried to make that argument and they failed. And what actually has been catching on is not the more moderate kind of traditional leaders of the religious right. They've really lost a lot of influence while people like Joe Rigney and Doug Wilson, who 10 years ago, incredibly marginal figures. Doug Wilson is somebody who had to retract a book that he co-authored that was an apologia for slavery, not even because of the slavery apologia. It was plagiarized. These are really fringe characters building this

Christian nationalist theocracy in Moscow, Idaho. But they are promoting ideas that chime with the general concept that you can be a Christian and still support Trump. And not only can you be a Christian and support Trump, but you're a better Christian than these other Christians that don't understand that actually empathy is a sin and that actually the things that they are doing that prevent them from supporting Trump are sinful in themselves. So again, it's like all about justification of where you want to be in the first place, which is embracing a political movement that is enacting mass suffering on people based on them being different. Everything that the Trump administration is doing, just horrible. No, absolutely. And just to be clear, when you said Moscow, Idaho, we mean a town in Idaho called Moscow, not Moscow, Russia and

somewhere in Idaho. But yeah, I, you know, I think you're completely spot on with that. And it's fascinating to hear how that expert you spoke to kind of lays it out, because it sounds quite convincing that argument, right? And now we're at a point where, as you're saying, we don't just see these like growing congregations of evangelical Christians who have these right-wing beliefs, but they are not just backing Trump, but now his like kind of second in command is this extremely right-wing Catholic to the degree that he converted to Catholicism in 2019, J.D. Vance, that is of course. And while Pope Francis was alive, we would even see him kind of speaking out and kind of pushing back on the ways that J.D. Vance was framing particular Christian

orthodoxy or whatever you want to call it. These particular arguments or pieces of the Christian religion that J.D. Vance would be wielding to justify the right-wing program and policies of the Trump administration, you know, deportations and things like that. And you would have these rebukes coming from the Vatican being like, that's not actually what this means. And it was like really wild to see that. But you can see the power that this movement has gained, at least in the United States in particular, where it is like firmly entrenched in the government at this point. I mean, the J.D. Vance version of anti-empathy is very interesting. And it's not,

I'm probably going to say this wrong, but so it's a concept called Ordo Amoris. So it's Latin for like the order of love. It came up in medieval Catholic theology. And the idea was that first, you love your family, then you love your congregation, then you love your community, then you love your nation, then you love the rest of the world. And that that was the proper way to order your love. J.D. Vance, because he spends all of his time in getting in Twitter fights, because I guess you don't really have to do anything as a vice president. He like got into a Twitter fight with this British MP where he was like, it's Ordo Emerus, look it up. I love that. Do your own research, you know? And he's using this to justify, it's the same policies. The policies are being anti-immigration,

being anti-migrant. And especially like the cutting of the foreign aid, I think was also something that was very pertinent when he was in that argument. And so he's saying like, actually, God says we have to care about ourselves first. And the Pope quite explicitly said, you are wrong. This is not the case. But I mean, there were kind of Catholic intellectuals in the U.S. who were writing pieces backing up J.D. Vance. So I have no idea like how to quantify how popular these specific kind of like theological ideas and justifications are within among Catholics in the U.S. or among all white Christians in the U.S. But I do think that like we are seeing movement among elites to embrace it. And that's noticeable. And I think that the reason that we're seeing that is because there's demand for it from below. Another like really good example of this movement. So there's this guy, Albert Moeller, who is the president of the Southern Baptist Conference's like main seminary. So there's this guy, Albert Moeller, who is the president of the Southern Baptist Conference's main seminary. So he's a very influential guy in the Southern Baptist Conference,

which is the biggest evangelical denomination in the US. And he has a daily podcast and he has all sorts of media stuff that he does. He's kind of like a big intellectual, Christian intellectual guy that's out there thinking about current issues and the church and how evangelicals should be interacting with the world. So after the Ferguson uprising or during the Ferguson uprising, on his daily podcast, he did a whole episode where he talked about how empathy is the most important thing to focus on in moments like this. And he talked about how, you know, he connected it to scripture and was making a Christian

argument in favor of empathy at a moment of deep social division over issues of race and violence in the state. And he said something along the lines of that love thy neighbor is the second most important commandment. And because of that, that's empathy. He said, you have to do empathy. And then in 2016, Albert Mueller, he campaigned against Trump. He wrote an op-ed against Trump saying, you know, he's the opposite of Christianity. He's a disgrace. You know, white Christians voted for Trump by 81% anyways. By 2020, he gave an interview to The New Yorker where he said, I'm going to vote for Trump because he's better than Biden, but I'm not

going to make any apologies for him. In 2024, he endorsed Trump. And a month or two ago, he invited Joe Rigney onto his podcast where they had like an hour long, very friendly interview. And he offered his own harsh critiques of empathy, which he said was synthetic and not real and, you know, related to Marxism and critical theory and feminism and all this. Here we go. I just thought it was like really pertinent because clearly he was somebody of real, you know, institutional weight and influence. And in the past 10 years, he has been brought into the Joe Rigney, Doug Wilson camp, not the other way around. It's coming from below and it's pushing above, like even further to the right,

which is concerning to say the least. Somebody that just like 10 years ago was able to make a really strong argument in favor of empathy because using scripture is now suddenly saying that scripture says, don't be empathetic. It's terrifying, right? To see that evolution, if we want to call it that, this kind of push for these figures who were not as evil before to completely embrace much more of this right-wing program, right? And I would just say to make a final point on the Pope, I think now that he has died and there is going to be a new Pope, I think it's actually going to be really interesting to see like the debates around that and what emerges from it because you don't need to be a Catholic to recognize that Catholicism and the Pope have

a lot of impact. And if the right succeeds in getting a right-wing Pope or whatever, then that is going to have a lot of consequences down the line for a lot of people, right? And we know that there has been this agreement for a number of years, you know, as you were talking about between, say, what happens in the Vatican and kind of the Pope Francis version of Catholicism and what we're increasingly seeing becoming dominant and popular in the United States and some other countries where, you know, it's this very kind of right-wing version. So yes, it's religion, but it's also very political. Also, just so much of the work of the immigration system that we have is done by ministries, right? Like the Lutherans, the Catholics, like that's how it is in the United States. And so to suddenly have, I mean, like we now have

like the Trump, you know, they were, they were attacking the Lutherans briefly, which is very, I mean, it's just a very strange thing to do. Like caring for immigrants is a very common Christian ministry. And so, yeah, it definitely really will be interesting to see what happens. Totally. And I've read that Pope Francis has appointed a lot of the Cardinals will be doing the voting. So maybe that is like a positive sign. I don't know. We'll see what happens, right? I don't know about Vatican politics or any of that.

So I'm completely out of my depth. So I have a final question, right? You know, we've talked about these two different groups or arguments that are increasingly opposing empathy, right? You know, this kind of pseudoscientific one coming from the kind of gods of the world, and then this more kind of Christian hard right evangelical version that does not want you to kind of empathize with people outside of your small little group or, you know, evangelical community or what have you, right? And so you've already kind of been talking about this a bit,

but what do you see as the broader consequences of this kind of hatred of empathy or opposition to empathy taking root in the political system being represented by important political figures or, you know, powerful figures more generally, especially at a moment where you have this rising far-right project in the United States that is deporting immigrants, that is going after minorities. What is the consequence of seeing empathy in this way? It's hard to know which comes first, right? Are you arguing against empathy because you actually think empathy is wrong and then that leads to you doing things to hurt other people?

Or are you hurting other people and you know that empathy is an impediment to your ability to do that. And so you're creating this intellectual scaffolding that people can cling to in order to feel like they're still okay. I mean, I think it's probably more of the second. This is kind of being put in place in order to take people further and further down the line of accepting what it should be unacceptable. And I think that the guy that Albert Mueller, who I was just talking about, what I see when I look at him is somebody who is a thinker, right? He has a moral intellectual way that he looks at the world in order to make himself understand and feel comfortable within it. And over the past eight, 10 years, he has adjusted his thinking to allow for more and more and more suffering by other

people. And to do that, he has allowed himself to be convinced that empathy is bad. And so I think that what we're seeing, you know, I don't know how much of it is like push and how much of it is pull, but I really see this as being part of a project of enabling fascism. People ask, how did ordinary Germans get to the point where they were okay with genocide? How does any society get to a point where people are okay with treating their neighbors with the kind of horrific inhumanity that we are seeing, you know, from these ice raids and from these detentions and disappearances. So I think that this is an essential part of it. The night before he invaded Poland, Hitler had a big meeting with his generals and folks, and he gave one of his big like rousing speeches. And my understanding from

the translation is that a big part of what he was saying was that you have to harden your hearts, harden your hearts, harden your hearts. I think that people naturally and not necessarily willfully, I think that most people do possess empathy. I think that we care about other people. It's not always like our choice to care about other people. Sometimes it's against our choice. I don't necessarily like always choose to like feel really upset on behalf of other people, even though like, but it happens anyways. Like it's not something that we have total control over. And that's difficult. Like it's part of the scariness of being human is dealing with our emotions and dealing with the fact that we are a social animal. We have to live with other people and we care

about other people, whether we want to or not. I think that this is kind of a broader project to teach people to ignore that voice or to ignore that part of them that says, oh, I'm not okay with taking a mother away from her kids. I'm not okay with taking a dad away from his kids. On the one hand, it's terrifying because I think that they are having a certain amount of success and that's clearly they are having a certain amount of success. And I mean, you can just look at the fact that like, I mean, there's been a genocide going on in Gaza for the past year and a half. And like a huge amount of success has been had in getting people to not pay attention, not listen to the part of them that says there's something wrong going on here. At the same time, I also like I do believe that they're fighting against something that is real and that is strong and that like we can and should cultivate and emphasize and kind of try to use because caring about other people, I think, is good. And it's difficult because there's so much suffering going on unnecessarily right now due to the policies and the actions of the Trump administration. And it's not good that that suffering is happening, but it is good that people will respond and care about it. And I think that we need to encourage

people and try to take that caring and bring them into saying, we don't have to do this. We can live with each other and we can figure out a better way of living with each other that doesn't involve brutally ripping families apart and using the border as a means to like exact pain and division. The reason that they're going after it is because I think that at a certain level they recognize it is what could be their undoing. But we as people need to really like go for that and push on that and use it to our advantage and try to like, I don't know, keep reaffirming that like we care about other people and we're not going to stop. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. And you have to like, that is a politics that is not, you know, a politics of death and fascism.

It's very controversial of you to say that empathy is good, actually, but I appreciate you doing it on this forum. Obviously, I agree with everything that you said. I think it's so important that one, that we understand what is going on here, but that we're also able to push back against this attempt to further dehumanize so many people by trying to revoke or diminish the amount of empathy that we feel for other people who are not just in our kind of like immediate communities and things like that, right? Julia, it's been really fantastic to have you on the show. Keep doing the great work that you're doing over at The Guardian. And thanks so much for taking the time. Thank you. It was really a pleasure to talk with you.

Julia Carey Wong is a features writer at The Guardian US. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.