This piece argues that the Left has weaponized language, turning empathy and rights into concepts that excuse bad outcomes and protect perpetrators while leaving victims without real protection, using recent U.K. scandals and U.S. examples to show how cultural insulation lets elites demand policies that ordinary people pay for.
The Left has a knack for bending language until it serves a political script, and that habit matters because control of words shapes what people accept as normal. They have redefined debate terms so thoroughly that strange claims can be sold as common sense, and the result is policies that often have perverse consequences. Ask yourself how they can convince some people that some men can, in fact, get pregnant?
Few words have been tortured more than ’empathy.’ The textbook definition of empathy is ‘the ability to understand, share, and experience the feelings, emotions, and perspectives of another person.’ Once empathy becomes a political weapon, it stops being a private human strength and starts functioning like a rule that overrides safety and commonsense judgment.
Close behind empathy is the Left’s reimagining of rights, a shift worth calling out because it changes who counts as deserving. Rights, as understood best in America’s founding documents, are things endowed to us by our Creator, things that cannot be taken away or limited by the government, like the right to free speech or the right to keep and bear arms. The modern progressive playbook instead treats popular policy preferences as rights and strips the name from things conservatives have long defended.
The result is predictable: anything the Left likes — education, healthcare, housing — becomes a right, while things they dislike — free speech and guns, for instance — are treated as negotiable or undeserving. That flip lets activists demand sympathy for chosen groups while dismissing the suffering of those who fall outside the favored categories. Using both of these definitions is how actor John C. Reilly, who I happen to like as an actor, was able to ask how the ‘right wing’ doesn’t care about human rights or empathy.
Having the ability to empathize with another human being does not mean you have to eschew all semblance of common sense and self-preservation. Yet that’s what Leftists often demand, insisting empathy must always come at the cost of security and accountability. That insistence shows up again and again in how institutions respond to criminality when political optics matter more than victims.
Look at recent tragedies in the U.K., where the supposed crime of ‘racism’ is treated as a more serious sin than violent assault, a mindset that helped enable avoidable deaths like Henry Nowak’s. The Rape Gang Inquiry Report detailed how girls, mostly white and lower-class Brits, were systematically and violently abused by Muslim gangs that coordinated a massive human trafficking ring to rape, abuse, and harm these girls. The institutions that should have protected those victims — social workers, police officers, healthcare workers — in too many cases looked the other way.
https://x.com/MarcoFoster_/status/2069050104816795915
Why did that happen? Because officials and elites wanted to be seen as compassionate toward migrants, preferring to avoid scrutiny of a community labeled as vulnerable. To be ’empathetic’ to the Muslim migrants, of course, became, for some, a higher moral priority than shielding girls from sexual violence. That kind of moral calculation produces awful tradeoffs and lets perpetrators keep harming people without meaningful consequences.
Too often, criminals are not held to account because punishment is portrayed as cruel or unempathetic, while their victims get treated like collateral damage. Think of Americans harmed by illegal immigration or violent offenders who should never have been free, including victims such as Laken Riley. Think of women like Iryna Zarutska, who was simply taking a train home and was stabbed in the neck by someone who should have been behind bars.
Empathy is an admirable human trait and it helps communities recover after disasters and tragedies, but it is not, and was never meant to be, a suicide pact. When empathy becomes a principle that forbids holding people accountable or securing borders, it stops helping anyone and instead becomes an excuse for failing to protect the vulnerable.
People like Reilly and other elites can preach relentless empathy because they are insulated from the consequences of the policies they promote. It’s not their daughters being raped in the U.K., it’s not their sisters being stabbed on public transit, and their neighborhoods are less likely to be lined with strung-out homeless meth-heads. It is a lot easier to demand policies that sound noble when life is good for you, and the rest of us end up paying the bill.
