Elon Musk’s attack on empathy is an old reactionary trick. First, he sets it up with a weak disclaimer:
"I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide,"
Musk said on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Translation: Empathy is fine—unless it threatens the existing power structure. When it challenges inequality or exclusion too much, it becomes “suicidal.”
Then he continues:
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.
…
Weaponized empathy is the issue.”
Now it’s not just a flaw—it's a bug in the system. And who’s "exploiting" it? Musk keeps it vague, but the subtext from the prior 15 minutes of the podcast is Democrats, progressives, and generally we can assume, anyone naively advocating for universal human rights. He’s saying that caring too much about the wrong people (while noble) is an existential threat. He's telling us not to trust our most basic instincts to care for one another, and to trust Republicans to be hard-nosed realists that can save us from the self-destruction promised by Democrats, who he has repeatedly claimed are “mass importing” illegal immigrants to steal elections.
Now I'm reading between the lines a bit, but given Musk repeated the “Democrats are importing voters” conspiracy prior to discussing weaponized empathy in the same podcast, I don't think it's an unfair assumption.
“Triple digit increases of illegals in swing states over the past 4 years. Voter importation at an unprecedented scale!”
Musk wrote in October, 2024, in a post viewed 21 million times.
“What’s actually happening is they’re buying voters… It’s like a giant voter scam – they’re importing voters… it is an attempt to destroy democracy in America.” - 01:07:22
How's that for an empathy exploit!
Ultimately, Musk's central point is wrong. Civilizations don’t collapse because of empathy, or even when empathy is weaponized by elites. They collapse when corruption, inequality, and elite greed rot them from the inside.
If Musk was serious about decline, he’d talk about corporate monopolization, wage stagnation, and a billionaire class that hoards wealth while stripping workers of rights. Instead, he blames immigrants and the people who advocate for them. That’s the point of this rhetoric: to redirect justified anger away from the ruling class and toward scapegoats.
So let’s be clear: This isn't taking him out of context. He’s saying empathy is a systemic vulnerability, a tool used by shadowy forces to destroy Western civilization. His empty qualifier—"I believe in empathy"—means nothing when he follows it by calling it the fundamental weakness of civilization. That's his central point, not that it's good in general, but that “they” are weaponizing empathy to get us to care about immigrants, and if we give in to those heart strings and open our borders wide open, for instance, we're gonna destroy civilization.
It'd be better to steal away our hearts and make the tough choices, for the greater good of civilization, Musk argues. But this should obviously read as a false choice. The alternative to Trump's militarized border wall, ICE raids and mass deportations isn't “open borders,” it's a sensible humanitarian policy that's welcoming, orderly, and focuses on the real causes of economic inequality.
Now to clarify: weaponized empathy is certainly real. America weaponized empathy to take us to war after 9/11, and Israel did it to justify their war crimes after 10/7.
I'm not criticizing the idea that our empathy can be hijacked for nefarious purposes. I'm calling out Musk's partisan grift.
It's clear from the full podcast that Musk and Rogan would like us to believe this is something that only Democrats do. That's half true of course. Biden promoted misinformation about 10/7 to maintain support for sending Israel billions in arms, as just one example. Of course Democrats engage in this. They're helping to manage an empire that a lot of US citizens want to see dismantled, after all! But Musk is really trying to pull the wool over our eyes when he acts as if Republicans aren't deeply invested in these exact same tactics, from immigration fear-mongering to anti-woke moral panics.
If Rogan and Musk made a truly bi-partisan critique, I'd give credit where it's due, but we shouldn't be surprised that they never explore the ways that Trump, Republicans and Musk himself have weaponized empathy and grievance politics to provide cover for their own corporate agendas.
That's what's truly revealing: what Musk doesn't object to.
Billionaires get corporate bailouts, Musk’s businesses get government subsidies, Wall Street gets handouts, the rich get more tax cuts—none of that is a problem to Musk, but when people talk about treating immigrants with dignity, it’s "civilizational suicide." This is not a well-reasoned argument. It’s a justification for withholding empathy from the "wrong" kinds of people while oligarchs continue to pillage America.
Remember: no society has ever died from caring too much—they die when greed, corruption, and manufactured division destroy them from within. And people like Musk? They profit from that destruction.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, an online library for people who want to change the world. He lives in Lawrence, KS.
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