Republicans hone their traditional closing message: "F*** 'em all!"

By Political Editor David Bloviator with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

Our mainstream media, like the Eternal One but unlike the Mad King, neither slumbers nor sleeps.

Their latest scoop: they've discovered a fundamental principle of Republican politics that had eluded them up to now.

Here's the news from conventional wisdom geyser Axios:

The only religious group that couldn't rally a pro-empathy majority were those holier than thou and staunch Republican white evangelicals.

Axios's findings are based on a poll from PRRI, which found that, wait for it, Democrats and Republicans have very different views on the fundamental value of empathy.

If you prefer your data in text:

The vast majority of Democrats (84%) agree empathy helps build a healthy society, while seven in ten independents (70%) and a slim majority of Republicans (54%) agree.[6] Republicans who hold favorable views of Trump are split in their views on empathy. About half side with the statement that empathy is a foundational moral value (49%), and nearly as many believe empathy can be dangerous (48%). By contrast, nearly three-quarters of Republicans who view Trump unfavorably (72%) view empathy as a foundational moral value. 

Half of the Mad King supporters are anti-empathy? Wow. 

Who could have guessed that those who cheer locking up immigrant children, shooting and beating protesters, cutting US foreign aid that kept hundreds of thousands of starving refugees alive, and bombing Iranian school girls might have a problem with empathy? 

A century of Republican empathy on parade...

It's not just that these people are monsters; it's that they are being told constantly by mainstream Republicans that empathy is dangerous, if not un-American.  Just last week, the revolting Republican candidate for Governor of Ohio, Vivek Ramasmarmy '07, smeared his opponent, a victim of horrible child sexual abuse by her stepfather, by airing an ad from her birth mother, who, forced to choose between her child and her abusive husband, chose the abuser.

Who would not empathize with the harrowing tale of a survivor of child rape who rose to become a doctor and a candidate for Governor?

Enter the President and Vice President of the United States, both of whom amplified the preposterous smears and told Republicans not to believe the victim.

Even supposedly non-bent Republicans like the current Governor Mike DeWine who condemned the smear urged Ohioans to vote for...the guy who financed the disgusting attack ad.

The Republican dislike of empathy is not limited to child rape victims like Dr. Acton or the children in the Epstein files, which they continue to suppress.

It's actually premised on their white extremist “Christian” base, who have the great brass balls to argue that empathy for the oppressed and afflicted is anti-Christian:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Empathy is usually regarded as a virtue, a key to human decency and kindness. And yet, with increasing momentum, voices on the Christian right are preaching that it has become a vice.

For them, empathy is a cudgel for the left: It can manipulate caring people into accepting all manner of sins according to a conservative Christian perspective, including abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration and certain views on social and racial justice. 

The world's richest and most evil man not surprisingly has a dim view of empathy, which he views as suicidal when it comes to the plight of immigrants seeking legal relief or just a splint for the broken leg they got on the kill line at a Kansas meatpacking plant.  This sociopathy was confirmed by Snopes.com:

 

He practices his empathy-free life every day, refusing to do anything with his insane unearned wealth that might actually ease the plight of anyone else. 

We're not going to waste time explaining why empathy is a good thing, if not the summum bonum of ethical life.  Our friends at Public Notice are happy to explain it here.

We'd make a different point: no one should be surprised by Republicans and their supporters arguing against empathy.  That's been the core Republican position for over 100 years.

The Hoover Administration has passed from living memory (but in the 60s plenty of voters remembered it vividly).  That was the era in which a smart, honest Republican President presided over the greatest collapse of the American economy ever.

The response from Hoover and other mainstream Republicans was telling:

In October of [1932],..the New York City Health Department reported that over 20 percent of the pupils in the public schools were suffering from malnutrition.  In the mining counties of [Appalachia], the ratio was sometimes over 90 percent...A teacher suggested that one little girl go home and eat something, the child replied, "I can't. This is my sister's day to eat."...

"Nobody is actually starving," President Hoover told reporters.  "The hoboes, for example, are better fed than they have ever been.  One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day."

...George W. Bush: no empathy detected

W. Manchester, The Glory and the Dream at 41.

That hobo's grandson must have been the strapping young buck buying T-bone steaks on food stamps, a story told by great and notoriously empathic Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1980.  

One could argue, based on facts, that the absence of empathy has been a bipartisan feature of American history by pointing to the extermination of Native Americans, the enslavement of Black Americans, the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent, or really any other time when empathy faced off against white supremacy and lost.

But as Republicans have become the party of white supremacy, they seem to have purged all empathy from their cold bigoted hearts.  

Richard Nixon didn't seem to care about the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Indochina during his six-year effort to shirk responsibility for losing the Vietnam War, not to mention the four college students slaughtered at Kent State. 

We've already mentioned St. Ronald of Bitburg's disregard of his fellow Americans left to sicken and die in agony because they could not afford health care, with particular emphasis on the victims of the AIDS epidemic, whose private conduct offended St. Ronald and his hateful hag wife and vizier Nancy.

A final example of Republican empathy

Which leads us to the current day, when in the last three elections Republicans have voted for a stone-cold sadist and sex criminal because he pandered to their prejudices.  

After his most recent victory, the Mad King unleashed the equally callous Elon Musk on the government, which has already led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of sick and starving Africans due to the illegal cutoff of U.S. foreign aid.

The inability of empathy to overcome white supremacy and plutocratic greed is and has been a foundational principle of Republican politics for generations.

It's as true now as it has been since the days of McKinley.  If you have no empathy for your fellow humans, your choice is clear: vote Republican.