Weaponized empathy is the issue

I’ve written about the advice being given to Republican members of Congress: Voters (or “paid agitators”) have been showing up at member town hall meetings and telling the member they are quite angry at the destruction of the federal government. The advice is: Don’t hold town hall meetings. Emily Singer of Daily Kos said that Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina ignored that advice and held an event in Asheville. Three hundred people packed the auditorium. Another thousand had to remain outside. Edwards defended his vote for the budget plan that “would cause massive and unpopular cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in order to only partly pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.” He also defended DOGE. Several statements prompting loud booing. Responses like that show there could be a Republican wipeout in 2026. Since Republicans are not holding such meetings several Democrats are now planning to hold town halls in Republican districts. I’ve heard Gov. Tim Walz is a part of that effort. Alex Samuels of Kos looked at the first comprehensive polling done in swing states since the November. The important bit says a Republican wipeout in 2026 is not a sure thing.

Essentially, pollsters discovered that most voters in competitive House districts believe that congressional Democrats “are more focused on helping other people than people like me.” Just 1 in 4 independents (27%) believe that Democrats are focused on helping them, while a majority (55%) feels the party aims to assist others. “The Democratic brand is still not where it needs to be in terms of core trust and understanding people’s challenges,” said Molly Murphy, one of the pollsters, in a conversation with Politico. “Even though voters are critical about Trump and some of the things he’s doing, that criticism of Trump doesn’t translate into trust in Democrats. The trust has to be earned.”

Other findings: Over half do not believe Democrats prioritize working people. About half say the term “elitist” describes the Democratic Party. And 40% believe Democrats don’t have a strategy for responding to the nasty guy. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had a couple quotes critical of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for his support for the Republican spending bill that averted a government shutdown but gave the nasty guy more protections. One quote is from Dan Pfeiffer of The Message Box:

This is a failure of leadership. No plan, no strategy, and no attempt to communicate honestly and forthrightly with the base. At no point did we know what Dems were fighting for or what victory would look like. Schumer and some Senate Democrats wanted to be seen as “fighting” up until the moment the fight was set to start. Everyone hoped that Johnson would fail to get the votes in the House, which would force them into negotiations with Democrats. But that didn't happen; and there was seemingly no plan for what Senate Democrats would do if Johnson did get the votes. This is a pattern with Senate Democratic leadership. There is a reticence to have tough conversations with the base, to tell them that this is a fight we can’t win or shouldn’t pick for the reasons Schumer laid out in his op ed. You have to set expectations. Senate Dems should have signaled their worries about the shutdown weeks ago. But because they raised expectations for a fight and pulled the rug out at the last minute, people are enraged — and for good reason. Democrats need to treat our voters like adults and be willing to have tough conversations.

David Remnick of the New Yorker interviewed Atun Gawande, a former USAID senior official discussing the closing of USAID. I think this quote is from one of Gawande’s answers:

This damage has created effects that will be forever. Let’s say they turned everything back on again, and said, “Whoops, I’m sorry.” I had a discussion with a minister of health just today, and he said, “I’ve never been treated so much like a second-class human being.” He was so grateful for what America did. “And for decades, America was there. I never imagined America could be indifferent, could simply abandon people in the midst of treatments, in the midst of clinical trials, in the midst of partnership—and not even talk to me, not even have a discussion so that we could plan together: O.K., you are going to have big cuts to make. We will work together and figure out how to solve it.” That’s not what happened. He will never trust the U.S. again. We are entering a different state of relations. We are seeing lots of other countries stand up around the world—our friends, Canada, Mexico. But African countries, too, Europe. Everybody’s taking on the lesson that America cannot be trusted. That has enormous costs.

And a tweet from Politico with a link to one of their stories:

The architect of Project 2025 says the plan is working perfectly: “It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams.” Paul Dans, the project’s ousted former director, on how Trump is implementing his agenda after all.

That last bit is because during the campaign the nasty guy pretended he knew nothing about Project 2025. In a second roundup Chitown Kev quoted Edward Isaac-Dovere and Annie Grayer of CNN talking about Schumer and Democrats”

They say Schumer flubbed weeks of strategy, essentially negotiating with himself for less to make the final bill worse than they could have gotten it to be with better pushback. They say he mismanaged dynamics internally with colleagues and publicly so that he ended up delivering a fresh round of dejection to a party already slumping on the ropes. Any Democrat paying attention knew this week of negotiations was going to be terrible for them. But, many say, it was Schumer’s leadership that left them looking and feeling even worse—and with much less leverage for future fight, now that Senate Republicans saw how easy it was to write what Trump wants into the bills, make no effort to reach out to Democrats, and watch them be the ones to attack each other. “Republicans saw Democrats were weak, and thought, ‘We’re going to call your bluff’—and they were right,” said a top aide to one Senate Democrat. “This was always going to be no-win. But it didn’t have to be this much of an ‘L’.”

Political science professor Philip D. Bunn writing for his “Everything Was Beautiful” Substack about the DOGE claim of improving government efficiency:

If “government efficiency” alone is your goal, Nazi Germany is exemplary. This is not to make a lazy accusation of DOGE supporters or affiliates being Nazis, only to highlight that “efficiency” itself is contentless. It describes means, not ends, unless we make the mistake of mistaking our means for ends in themselves. [...] ...consider the “inefficiency” afforded to us by our Constitutional rights. The fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments provide citizens, suspects, and criminal defendants strong protections in the course of criminal investigations and trials. These protections are surely opposed to bare efficiency. It would be more efficient for police officers to be able to search whomever they want, for trials to proceed without regard for protection against self-incrimination, for convicts to have no right to an appeal, and so on. Efficiency in the criminal justice system, pursued single-mindedly, would require removing the pesky rights that slow the process and drag out cases for many months and years. [...] All of this to say, I find the narrow focus on “government efficiency” troubling, both in principle and in practice. I recognize that “efficiency” in most people’s minds is opposed directly to “waste, fraud, and abuse” and I certainly am not defending waste and fraud. But finding and resolving issues of waste, fraud, and abuse is more properly speaking an issue of government accountability, not bare efficiency. In attempting or purporting to increase the efficiency of government, we risk eliminating things that are, despite their inefficiency, quite essential to healthy, stable government….

I’ve written that many Republicans and their rich backers want to privatize the Postal Service so they can make money off it. This appears to be a step in that direction. Samuels reported that Postmaster General Louis DeStroy has reached an agreement with Musk to make “further efficiencies” at USPS. This includes cutting 10,000 workers out of a total workforce of 635,000. That’s on top of 30,000 job cuts since 2021. Ten days ago Kos of Kos discussed Musk and what’s going on with his companies. The value of Tesla stock has dropped 45% since a high in December. That has cut $121 billion from Musk’s net worth. But that leaves him with about $340 billion. The weekend before Musk threatened to cut Ukraine’s access to Starlink, the internet service provided through a constellation of satellites. Ukraine has used Starlink to coordinate combat activities in the front lines of the war. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski reminded the world that Ukraine’s Starlink access is paid for by Poland at a rate of $50 million a year. Ukraine pays for every terminal that connects to Starlink. Musk’s threat is prompting Europe to come up with an alternative to Starlink, though a European competitor isn’t scheduled to come online until 2030. Italy appears to have killed a $1.6 billion deal for its own Starlink network. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is head of América Móvil canceled a Starlink contract worth $7.5 billion and announced a $22 billion investment with both European and Chinese providers for a Starlink replacement. Musk’s evil deeds are affecting his net worth. I had previously written that when Biden and Congress authorized more funding for the IRS the agency would be able to audit rich people and pull in much more in taxes than was spent on the new auditors. Of course, Republicans and their rich backers didn’t like having to be honest on their tax forms. Andy Kroll, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos, wrote that the probationary employees of the IRS are being fired. Since Biden was able to hire most of these specialists only in the last year, most are still on probation.

John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.

I referred to these employees as specialists. Kroll explained why. To properly audit a tax return from an oil company the IRS needs petroleum engineers. These are the people who would be able to tell if a big research tax credit is legitimate. Specialists from other industries were hired to audit returns from those industries. They are paid more than other IRS employees, but their work brought in orders of magnitude more than their salaries. In 2024 the IRS made a big push to bring in these specialists and get them trained. Now most are gone.

“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn't anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I'll do it again this year.’” “When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”

About ten days ago I came across an interesting quote within a meme in the comments of another pundit roundup. The link to that meme is now broken. So I went elsewhere to find that quote. And I found it in an article by Caroline Wazer of Snopes posted on Yahoo! News. Yes, the quote is legit and this article goes to the source and provides a bit more context. The quote is by Musk and was said when Musk was on Joe Rogan’s show. Here’s the exchange with the first sentence the quoted one:

Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. Rogan: Right, understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool. Musk: Yes, like, it's weaponized empathy is the issue.

In the comments of a third pundit roundup is a cartoon by Toonerman. The first speaker is a dog, which seems to be this cartoonist’s voice of sanity.

Dog: You have $420,000,000,000. You can do anything you want, buy anything you want, go all over the world! It’s incredible. Elon, ... so what do you want to do? Musk: Take money away from old people, take food away from children, take health care away from the poor and keep homeless vets on the streets. ... yeah that’s fun ... You know, killin’ poor people is a blast!

I’ve come to understand that some people, and Musk is a prime example, measure their self-worth by the gap between their lives and the lives of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Having $420 billion isn’t enough of a gap. He works so that those at the bottom have even less, making his gap bigger. Not quite so far down in the comments exlrrp posted a meme (with a link still intact):

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham asked Putin’s Puppet last night why he’s so much “tougher with Canada than you are with some of our biggest adversaries?” His answer: “Only because it’s meant to be our 51st state. One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada.” Do you get it yet? This is exactly the same reasoning Putin uses to annex and invade Ukraine. This gives Putin cover to continue his land grab of former Soviet Union countries.