#weaponized empathy

People love to demonize those without empathy. Say that empathy is a good human trait. That empathy MaKeS pEoPlE KiNd! That using your empathy makes you a saint and differentt!

Are we just gonna ignore people who weaponize empathy? Like?

A dude can recognize and feel when his girlfriend is sad. Because he has empathy. And he uses that recognized sadness against her for gain. Does his empathy make him inherantly virtuous still?

Having empathy is like owning cash. Sure you having money is good! Totally! But when you, ohh, I dont know, use that money to buy weapons specifically to Kill someone, how good is the money right?

By: Payton McNabb

Published: Mar 19, 2026

Polling shows women are more likely than men to back male participation in female sports, as fear of backlash and social stigma leads many women to suppress obvious truths are the expense of their own safety.

In 2022, I suffered a traumatic brain injury from a spike by a biological male who was allowed to play on the opposing girls’ volleyball team. The force from the hit was unlike anything I’d experienced from female opponents, and the injuries I sustained ultimately ended my career. Three years later, I still battle headaches and cognitive issues. 

You’d think that women, even more than men, would be aghast at this. After all, women are the ones who know intimately—from a young age at that—how vulnerable we are against men who are bigger and stronger than us and capable of overpowering us. 

But according to a recent study, women are actually less likely than men to support policies that ban males from women’s sports. Per James Nuzzo on X and Substack, multiple polls from 2015 to 2025 in the U.S., UK, and Canada show that women consistently show higher support than men for allowing trans-identified males to compete in female categories. 

In survey after survey—Gallup, YouGov, and others—women’s support for permitting men in women’s sports edges out men’s, even as overall approval for permitting men in women’s sports has declined sharply over time. It’s a pattern that defies intuition: the group most impacted by unfair competition, safety risks, and lost opportunities is the one more inclined to accommodate it.

How did we get here? 

For the past decade and a half, the dominant narrative—from schools, mainstream media, social media, colleges, and basically every mainstream institution—has framed any concern about biological males in women’s spaces as “transphobic.” In many social circles, even questioning the concept of “gender identity” means you’re somehow invalidating someone’s existence. After all, good, compassionate women are supposed to support inclusion, right?

Of course, “inclusion” only applies to those who fall in line. Dissidents are not included in the slightest. Instead, we are called “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), bullies, and bigots, ostracized not only from friend groups but from mainstream society itself. Raising complaints about a man in the women’s bathroom at college can get you kicked out of your sorority, as I was, and challenging ideas about gender that were fringe positions not long ago can get you smeared and attacked online. 

Add to that the guilt that too often accompanies the decision to buck the Left’s idea of empathy. Gender activists have convinced far too many that if we don’t affirm a man who claims to be a woman, if we don’t let him into our spaces, if we don’t risk being injured by him, he might withdraw into a depression, or worse, commit suicide—an unfortunately persistent myth promoted by activists.

Women are inherently wired to be communal and we are wired to be nurturers. We want to minimize conflict and maximize harmony and empathy. We don’t want to be shunned. But even more than that, we don’t want to hurt the vulnerable. 

Now, it’s silly to say that a 6’0” man who wants to join women’s contact sports is somehow “vulnerable” while the women he is competing against are oppressors, but the topsy-turvy language of gender ideology, having infiltrated society, has convinced polite society that up is down and down is up. 

When activists frame the choice as being between “protecting the transgender community” and “being bigots who hate those who look different,” it’s not shocking that women would default to the former. 

Indeed, gender ideology weaponizes the best of women’s nature against our actual, sex-based interests. The problem is that while most women (and most Americans) have been inundated with gender ideology propaganda, they probably haven’t seen the injuries up close, or seen the numbers on how male puberty confers lasting advantages in strength, speed, and power that hormone suppression doesn’t fully erase. And that’s before the social worries, one of which is: that speaking up could hurt someone else’s feelings—or their own reputation. So many women nod along, suppress their instincts, and publicly affirm what feels like the “kind” position. 

But there is no kindness in lying to ourselves or others, or in putting women like myself in vulnerable positions that get us injured by men who never should have been in our spaces. 

Kindness, ultimately, can only be found in truth, and the truth is that men cannot become women, no matter how they identify. Women’s sports were fortified under Title IX precisely because sex-based differences matter for fair competition. To reject Title IX undermines the very equity we’ve fought for. 

What are we getting wrong? I think number one, what we are getting wrong is we're underestimating the Islamists.

The war on terror blinded us to the other methods of asymmetric warfare they apply like subversion, like alliance building, like propaganda, like weaponizing victimhood and minority status. We've underestimated their weapon of Muslim demographics eternally waiting for that silent Muslim majority to stand up and reject Islamism openly.

We've underestimated their conviction and devotion to their faith and the revival of the caliphate. And in fact, their most important commitment, which is this, that they state so openly, the annihilation of the Jews.

We've also underestimated how incredibly resourceful they are in raising money. They raise money from Qatar. They raise money through zakat and arms. They raise money through these generous welfare states that have welcomed them into the West.

By: Patrick West

Published: Sep 1, 2025

When the newly re-elected US president Donald Trump began his drive to dismantle all manifestations of modern identity politics in the arms of state back in January, many concluded that this signalled the ‘end of woke’. News that he had created an advisory group, the Department of Government Efficiency, to enact swinging cuts to the US government, was followed by a flurry of comment articles proclaiming that hyper-liberal ideology was finished. Although this mood of exhilaration has now subsided, there remains a feeling that woke is over.

Andrew Doyle is too seasoned a veteran of the culture war to be swept away in such a wave of unbridled optimism. As author of Free Speech and Why it Matters, (2021) and The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World (2022), he knows full well the power and allure of an ideology that captured so many institutions worldwide. It was unlikely to go quietly or quickly, and certainly not by the mere fiat of a president. As Doyle reminds us, wokery (or wokeism, a consensus on the abstract noun has yet to be established) remains so powerful, and was able to propagate dangerous absurdities, because it duped people into believing that it was simply about ‘fairness’ and ‘being nice’. It was allowed to become so brutal and intolerant because it could tar its opponents as ‘nasty’ – as racists, bigots and ‘phobes’.

Rather than follow the blind and sometimes desperate optimism of those who say that’s all over and everything’s now better, Doyle’s latest book, The End of Woke, expresses a tentative hope that this just might be the case. Perhaps too tentatively. ‘During the woke era, the gender wars became the key means by which power was exerted and the authoritarian impulse unleashed’, he writes in the past tense. Then, in the present tense, he writes: ‘Now that woke is dying… we are moving into a new phase of the culture war.’ Eventually, Doyle shifts to the subjunctive mood when he says: ‘With any luck, the end of woke will mean that books will no longer be treated with suspicion.’ A less assured writer than Doyle might have appended a question mark to the book’s title.

Whether woke is at an end, the author cannot tell us for sure. Developments since the book’s publication suggest it isn’t. The hounding of television chef John Torode for supposed racist remarks which he made years ago, or the sending home of a schoolgirl for wearing a Union Jack dress on ‘diversity day’, remind us that the spirit of censure and intolerance is very much still here.

As these two incidents indicate, woke certainly lives on in matters related to race, ethnicity and multiculturalism. Where attitudes and governmental policies have shifted noticeably, even in the past 12 months, is on issues pertaining to trans and gender. And it is on this issue that Doyle writes with the greatest authority and persuasiveness.

The Cass Review of April last year not only put a stop to the reckless medicalisation of children. It also heralded the beginning of the end of what Doyle has neatly dubbed the ‘woke supremacy’ in the area of gender. This is noticeable even when it comes to trivial matters, such as preferred pronouns on email signatures or social-media bios, which have largely disappeared. And Doyle is spot on to observe, as an increasing proportion of the populace has also come to see, how the gay-rights movement as embodied in the first Pride march of 1970 has changed beyond recognition: hijacked and debased by opportunists, woke capitalists and the bandwagon-jumping herd. ‘Pride has transformed from an important act of resistance into a month-long orgy of corporate veneration and virtue-signalling, teeming with heterosexuals desperate to slink their way into an oppressed group with the help of gender ideology’, he writes.

Doyle hesitates to declare with finality the end of woke, perhaps because he is too familiar with the beast he has been grappling with ever since he became a chronicler of it via his alter ego, Titania McGrath. It was through this faux social-justice warrior, in the late 2010s, that he initially came to expose the irrationality of wokery. And she makes a welcome re-appearance here. Doyle reminds us how she first explained how gender identity simply is ‘the immutable yet totally fluid feeling that one is male or female or neither or both based on conceptions of masculinity or femininity that are natural and innate but also social constructions that don’t actually exist’. Only now, very recently, and thanks to the likes of Doyle, have many come to see through the flawed logic of much wokery.

One suspects Doyle isn’t convinced that woke is over, because he appreciates the eternal instincts that brought it about in the first place. He recognises what causes human beings to act in such a belligerent, censorial and cruel way when they descend into tribal thinking and fall under the spell of perfectionist idealism. It’s because, in a theme he returns to, people have always behaved like this, and he sees no reason why we will ever change our ways. It’s no accident that the names of Plato and Thomas Hobbes re-emerge throughout. Plato because the ancient Greek embodied that timeless urge to create a perfect society, by force if need be. Hobbes because he warned us that without the constraints of civilisation, we will remain slaves to our savage, animal predispositions.

While Doyle protests that he seeks to defend the good name and honest spirit of ‘liberalism’, one that was once embodied by John Stuart Mill, one can’t help but suspect that there looms within him the mind and soul of a conservative. He is resigned to the imperfect follies of man: ‘The authoritarian impulse is the default condition of humankind, the true “state of nature”, and that civilisation is the armour we construct against our basic instincts.’ His warning about the ‘woke right’ as an emergent, reactionary and equally strong force is less convincing. However intolerant the Very Online right-wingers may be, I can’t envisage them ever capturing institutions of education, health and government to such a comparable degree.

Bulletin/Novus: Nine out of ten foreign-born people have holidayed in their country of birth

By: Alex Alma

[ Note: Auto-translated from Swedish ]

A new survey from Novus shows that over 85 percent of foreign-born people have at some point traveled back to their country of birth for a holiday. Among those who came to Sweden as refugees, the proportion who have holidayed in their old home country is 79 percent.

Holidaying in the country you fled from has become a topic of discussion in European countries in recent years. Bulletin has commissioned Novus to investigate how foreign-born people view repatriation, their children's growing conditions and holidaying in their country of birth. The sample consists of 1050 foreign-born people and the survey was conducted between 18 and 24 August.

The survey shows that only two percent of foreign-born people plan to return to their country of birth in the future, while 16 percent answer maybe. 76 percent believe that they intend to stay, among those who have come to Sweden from a non-European country, the proportion is 81 percent. 53 percent of foreign-born people believe that Sweden is a better country for their children to grow up in compared to their home country, while 9 percent believe that Sweden is worse than their home country. 33 percent answer neither.

Holidays in the country of birth

In the Bulletin/Novus survey, 85 percent of foreign-born people have visited their home country as a holiday destination at some point. Among those who came as family immigrants, 92 percent have traveled back to their country of birth to holiday at least once, while the figure is 79 percent among those who came as refugees. The group of foreign-born people with the highest proportion have never holidayed in their country of birth are the adopted, where 41 per cent have not visited the country of birth since they came to Sweden.

Novus points out that it is in the nature of things that those who participate in their surveys are reasonably well integrated in Sweden, since they answer questions in Swedish. The political conditions in their countries of origin may therefore have changed as time has passed.

But 79 percent is still a very high figure considering that we are talking about those who have come to Sweden and claimed that they are refugees.

In Norway, Aftenposten reported in 2018 that 24 percent of immigrants from Somalia, 40 percent of immigrants from Afghanistan, 55 percent of immigrants from Iran and 71 percent of immigrants from Iraq regularly traveled to their home country. According to Aftenposten, the data had been produced by Norway's statistical authority SSB. A difference with Bulletins/Novus is that the Norwegian figures are the proportion of immigrants who regularly holiday in their home country, while the Swedish figures report those who have travelled at least once.

Most countries allow people who have become citizens to return to their home country on vacation. At the same time, the fact that so many who originally came as refugees are returning indicates that the need for protection no longer applies, or perhaps never was so great.

The regulations for asylum seekers who have not been granted citizenship differ depending on the country. In Sweden, there are no restrictions for refugees who have been granted a permanent residence permit to travel back to their home country. However, refugee status can be revoked if it turns out that the person no longer needs international protection from their home country, and in cases where asylum seekers have been found to provide incorrect information about their need for protection. Other countries have stricter regulations. Switzerland, for example, does not allow asylum seekers to travel back to their home country to see relatives or vacation, except in very special circumstances. If this happens, the foreign-born person loses the right to continue to have a residence permit in Switzerland, according to UNHCR.

In Germany, too, asylum seekers' holiday trips to their home country became a political issue, as holiday trips were considered incompatible with the claim that one is fleeing for one's life and seeking protection in Germany due to danger in the home country. In a statement in 2019, Germany's then Interior Minister Horst Seehofer warned refugees that they would be investigated and stripped of their residence permits when traveling to their home country.

"If someone, a Syrian refugee, regularly vacations in Syria, he cannot honestly claim to be persecuted in Syria," he said, adding "we would have to strip him of his refugee status."

According to DW, for example, in 2016, investigations led to 66 refugees from Iraq and Syria being stripped of their residence permits, and were no longer considered to be in need of protection because they had gone on trips to their home country.

Angela Merkel has also criticized refugees' holiday trips to their home country, and said that it could be interpreted as meaning that the need for protection should be reassessed.

CORRECTION: The article previously stated that Sweden does not have restrictions for those who have been granted asylum to return to their country of origin. The Swedish Migration Agency has pointed out: "That statement is directly incorrect, refugee status can be revoked if it turns out that the person no longer needs international protection from their home country or if they have provided incorrect information about such a need." The text has been corrected.

==

Legal immigration and legitimate asylum/refugee protection are all good things.

But western societies are being taken for a ride by people who are exploiting their empathy. When you claim to be fleeing a toxic ideology but then have no problem wandering back, we're justified in assuming you're not on the side that you claimed to be or that benefits us.

By: Joseph (Jake) Klein

Published: Nov 15, 2023

From top-to-bottom, society has conditioned us to think kindness is an unmitigated good. The golden rule to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is one of the most remembered lines of Jesus, but the lesson is near ubiquitous across both the world’s religions and secular moral philosophy. To be kind is one of the first lessons we teach our children. Our greatest works of fiction have focused on the heroism of kindness. Even our advertising frequently uses the morality of kindness to ingratiate us to brands.

But far from an unmitigated good, kindness has a dark side. The once virtuous cell of kindness has metastasized into a cancer. The evolution of kindness, manifested in the unparalleled cooperative ability of mankind, enabled the development of civilization.

In contemporary times, however, pathological kindness has become one of the greatest threats to bring about its destruction.

In the beginning, kindness was not a luxury, but a need. To escape the poverty and starvation inherent to the state of nature, humanity had no choice but to learn to be kind to each other in order to successfully cooperate and produce what they needed to survive. As the great economist Ludwig von Mises explained, “[w]e may call consciousness of kind, sense of community, or sense of belonging together the acknowledgment of the fact that all other human beings are potential collaborators in the struggle for survival because they are capable of recognizing the mutual benefits of cooperation, while the animals lack this faculty.”

“However,” Mises continues, kindness was not developed as a virtue purely in the abstract. “we must not forget that the primary facts that bring about such consciousness or such a sense are the two mentioned above. In a hypothetical world in which the division of labor would not increase productivity, there would not be any society. There would not be any sentiments of benevolence and good will.”

Kindness became a virtue precisely because it’s productive. But, in a world of abundance, kindness instead now often eats away at the resources of society. In a prosperous, advanced society where individuals have moved up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, expressions of kindness towards those who cannot or will not help themselves has been able to develop as a dominant virtue.

Kindness towards those who cannot help themselves is indeed a virtue; anyone of us could fall into this situation through no fault of our own. But kindness towards those who will not help themselves, who seek to leech off of us rather than contribute to society’s progress, is where virtue slips into vice. Most dangerously, those who are successful at taking advantage of society’s kindness rarely admit they will not help themselves, but wear the mask of those who cannot.

When a scammer takes advantage of your kindness to profit at your expense, we all know they’re the bad guy. But when someone claims victimhood and takes advantage of you by passing laws and regulations, we’re supposed to call that the justice of democracy.

This is the politics of Leftism, from the Jacobins through classical Marxism and now wearing its more fashionable woke regalia. A class group or cultural group (including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) flips morality on its head by claiming itself as oppressed—those who cannot help themselves—and appeals to the vice of kindness to gain legal advantages over other groups and redistribute resources towards itself.

To be clear, not everyone on the Left is a manipulative leech. Numerically most will be manipulated hosts. But their manipulators fit a personality type known as the dark tetrad: narcissism, psychopathy, machiavellianism, and sadism. Amongst other traits, dark tetrad types tend to present with a sense of entitlement and a victim mentality. Studies have demonstrated a strong link between the dark tetrad personality and politically correct authoritarian behavior, which includes a belief in censorship of words and ideas deemed offensive by the authoritarian, that those who utter these words and ideas should be punished for it, and a belief that alleged perpetrators of crimes against a victim group should be treated as guilty before proving their innocence.

Distinguished evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins brilliantly explains in the video below how evolution leads to the existence of such dark tetrad behavior. A world full of kind people is evolutionarily unstable as it creates an incentive to take advantage of the productive ability of the kind masses. But if those who live by leeching off of others become dominant in society then it’s just as evolutionarily unstable, as society collapses from its inability to produce. A society mostly full of kind people, but with a few leeches, can last for the long run.

In an era where victimhood culture is becoming dominant, we are moving into unstable space. It wouldn’t be the first time such an unstable arrangement had the opportunity to destroy a civilization—just look at the Soviet Union. While dark tetrad personalities only constitute about 7% of the international population, in the contemporary West the leech’s activism appears to have led to a far larger percentage of their hosts accepting their destructive ideas. These hosts are overrepresented amongst the world’s upper classes given that being higher on Maslow’s Hierarchy provides more of an opportunity to extend pathological kindness. Rob Henderson has famously labeled this phenomenon “luxury beliefs.”

So what do we do about this problem? You read it already: it’s time to stop being kind to people. Not everyone, obviously, kindness is usually a virtue and should be extended to everyone who wishes to cooperate to build our shared society in peace and productivity, and should also extend to the many well-intentioned hosts of bad ideas who know not what they do.

But when it comes to the leeches, it’s time to cease acting as if it’s a moral virtue to extend endless kindness to those who seek to gain at your expense. Feeding their victimhood and entitlement is what provides an incentive for them to continue; like training an animal, when the rewards cease the behavior will follow.

As the French economist Frédéric Bastiat put it, “[w]hen, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.”

Yes, many already express hostility and disgust towards the woke and mock them online (and sometimes in person), but how many speak of it with clarity as a moral virtue to do so? To make the leech’s hosts stop feeding them, they must understand that their overextended kindness is a moral evil.

At least one woman understood this: Ayn Rand. Rand spoke of the “virtue of selfishness,” pioneering clickbait tactics with an intentionally provocative phrase designed to grab people and force them to think, but that when explained becomes more agreeable than at first glance. “Selfishness” to Rand did not mean gaining at another’s expense, as the leeches (or “parasites," in her words) do, but acting in one’s long-term rational self-interest. That includes being kind to those who work cooperatively with us to make the world a better place, which is most people most of the time. But to be virtuously selfish, in Rand’s view, one must oppose altruism: self-sacrifice for another’s gain.

Unkindness towards those who deserve it needn’t and shouldn’t be a permanent attitude. Those willing to stop using victimhood as a weapon should be met with forgiveness. Perhaps they should even be treated with disproportionate kindness to encourage others to also give up their maladaptive beliefs. We want to reward people who stop their pathological behavior and join the cooperative harmony of human civilization. But until then, we must be brave. We must be willing to be seen as black sheep in order to fix society’s broken morality.

Don’t be kind to those who seek your destruction, and know and say loudly that you are right not to do it.

==

It's not a kindness to help people avoid living in reality. It's not kindness to lie in order to deprive grown adults of the opportunity to live in the real world.

We don't lie to the religious any more. We don't pretend to pray with them because they'd be offended otherwise. We don't say that their faith is reason enough to believe an obvious lie.