Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.

According to Elon Musk, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

When I read this in the Guardian, I almost fell out of my chair. Sadly, it gets worse! This heresy is not merely a hallucination emanating from Elon’s ketamine-fueled brain: It is gaining traction not only among evangelical Christians, “who have begun to recast the pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump” but also Catholics in the JD Vance mold.⁠

This is, perhaps, the most extreme example of the Trump Administration engaging in what George Orwell called “doublespeak,” coining the word in his dystopian novel “1984.” This is a trick to try to fool citizens into believing things are the opposite of what they really are. Examples of Orwellian doublespeak include “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.”

“Empathy is weakness” is Elon’s over-the-top contribution to doublespeak. It flies in the face of the Golden Rule, which calls on us to treat others as we would want to be treated by them. Various expressions of this rule have been the bedrock of religions and creeds throughout the ages.

The Golden Rule gained strength as recently as the Obama administration, when scientists discovered “mirror cells,” a type of nerve cell that reacts both when a subject performs an action and when the subject sees that action performed by someone else.

This discovery provided a biological explanation for empathy, strengthening religion’s age-old claim. Perhaps this is what led President Obama to declare that America was not suffering from a budget deficit but an empathy deficit.

What a transformation from then to now: from the height of Obama lamenting the cuts to social programs as an ‘empathy deficit’ to Musk gleefully slicing through social programs while wielding a giant chainsaw.

Many other examples of over-the-top doublespeak come to mind, like Trump’s oft-repeated mantra that he won the 2020 election in a landslide when, according to all credible sources, he lost.

But to me, Musk’s empathy statement takes the cake. Riding the wave of their unchecked power, Republicans and Musk forget history. He is a throwback to Ayn Rand, who was the darling of conservatives in the 1950s. Rand wrote popular books promoting ultimate individual freedom while showing no mercy to the weak and disadvantaged. In many ways, Musk is Rand’s clone.

This isn’t the first time Republicans, when in control of all branches of our government, have leaned too far over their skis and crashed in a ridiculous fashion. Just look at what happened during the McCarthy era in the 1950s when the FBI was run by J. Edgar Hoover, a right-wing zealot, much like our current director, Kash Patel.

Here’s one example:

Influenced by testimony from extremists like Ayn Rand, Hoover issued a scathing report on the movie industry, including his findings on a revered Christmas classic we still watch. Hoover determined that Frank Capra’s classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” was “written by Communist sympathizers” attempting to instigate “class warfare” while “demonizing bankers.”

I predict future generations will look back on the second Trump administration and wince in the same manner we do when remembering the McCarthy era’s shameless witch hunt against loyal Americans.