this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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The full quote is "I can't stand the word empathy. I think empathy is a made up new age term and it does a lot of damage. Sympathy is a better word, because empathy means you are actually feeling what another person felt, and no one can feel what another person feels."
He was talking about how the democrats use language
I disagreed with the guy on a great many things, but cutting his clips out of context like this is pathetic.
It isn't a new age term, regardless of what he said or how others use it. It's a description of a specific subjective experience, it's a neurological function, not a political concept. Pretending to be empathetic doesn't make empathy into something else for people who experience empathy every day. For people who only know empathy from democratic politicians, it suggests a lack of personal experience with it. Nobody who experiences empathy regularly would throw away the word because politicians lie about it. Their own experience of it would dwarf by magnitudes the volume of experience between the two.
Sympathy and empathy are not the same and can not be swapped without changing significantly the meaning. What it may mean about Charlie Kirk is what makes the quote so notable. Sympathy does not mean feeling what others feel, that is empathy, it means feeling pity, concern or compassionate in response to the experiences of others, but not sharing their feelings, again that's empathy. It would be expected that a psychopath would prefer sympathy and not understand empathy. Psychopaths pity people all the time for seeing them as being worse than they are. Psychopaths may, however, be heavily influenced about what empathy is by its use in politics, as they do not have the neurological function to experience empathy every day, like normal human beings do. In that case, a psychopath might prefer sympathy over empathy and use semantics as an excuse to safety express a part of their world view that would have hurt them to express without the semantic argument.
Most MAGA members are sociopaths. Lack of empathy is a key feature of sociopaths. He said what he said and meant it.
This explains why he and other MAGAts dont think empathy is real and confuse it with sympathy ... it's part of being a sociopath.
We clearly have problems with people not giving a fuck about most other people, that's easy to see. But I wouldn't go label a huge swath of the US population that way. Realistically, we're looking at something like 1-4 percent of the population. Granted, that's still millions of people, but nowhere near the majority.
What may be the bigger problem is that our society selects for people with sociopathic tendencies in high office, police, and powerful positions in companies. IMO, a kind of modeling effect is more likely how this impacts everyone else.
I am so tired of people using this half-quote to attack his character. He was making a symmantic argument, not claiming that empathy is bad. This meme will be used by maga to show that the left is irrational and stupid, and in this case they'll be right.
Thank you for posting the full quote and the context.
Not a fan of the guy, yet I don't celebrate his murder. And regarding the full quote, he's misguided imo.
The way I understand the words...
"Empathy" - Able to approximately feel what someone else is feeling, like absorbing the mood of the room. Their emotions become your emotions.
"Sympathy" - Able to 'put yourself in their shoes'. Understand someone's feelings; at the same time, very aware of your own, which can be different.
Empathy can be used for evil ends, yet it itself is not a bad thing to have.
On the other hand, fuck him. Fuck everything that ever dribbled out of his foul, hateful, shit-spewing maw until his finest moment was captured on film. Humanity loses nothing but a little of the dead weight holding the rest of us back with his demise.