I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, New Age term that — it does a lot of damage. But it is very effective when it… - Charlie Kirk

I can't stand empathy. I think empathy is a made-up, New Age term that — it does a lot of damage, but it is very effective when it comes to politics.

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term, and it does a lot of damage. I much prefer the word compassion, and I much prefer the word sympathy. Empathy is where you try to feel someone’s pain and sorrows as if they’re your own. Compassion allows for understanding. I prefer the word sympathy, because politics has weaponized empathy.

I can’t stand the word empathy actually. I think empathy is a made-up, New Age term that — it does a lot of damage, but it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy I prefer more than empathy.

The willingness of, for example, generations of the elite to fight those devastating wars over oil-rich regions is a perverse side effect of the mingling of private interests and public power. Just as government subsidies for pharmaceutical purchases start looking like a great idea if your family is in the pharmaceutical industry (or, like Medicare Part D architect and former senate majority leader Bill Frist, the hospital management industry), your family being in the oil business just might make you more willing, on a subconscious level, to tolerate great sacrifices (on the part of others, including taxpayers) in the name of keeping the black lifeblood of industry flowing.

Obviously and thankfully, Hillary Clinton never became president, but all of the achievements described above are real — and are the handiwork of the person who became president on January 20, 2017: Donald J. Trump. (Many of these items come from the Washington Examiner’s tally of Trump successes.)

A two-party cartel, entrenched and self-serving, soon looks like the most natural manifestation of democracy imaginable. The heads of those two parties argue when they must, each party hoping to differentiate itself from the other just enough to eke out a victory in the next election — but neither wants to argue for, or if elected institute, change so fundamental that it would destroy all the stuff that the leaders of the two parties have in common with each other and not with you, the general public: unearned use of $4 trillion a year, the power to regulate, and the endless attention of fawning lobbyists and Washington powerbrokers.