They're trying to kind of create this intellectual infrastructure so that people can justify to themselves that actually by hurting other people, with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Julia Carrie Wong.

Julia is a features writer at the Guardian US, and I've been reading her work for a long

time, so it was really great to have her on the show. Now, you might have heard recently that

Elon Musk has a new enemy, and it is empathy. In a recent podcast with Joe Rogan, he explained

that he thinks empathy is an enemy of Western civilization, that it is holding us back and is ultimately going to be our

downfall. Now, to many people, that might sound like quite a surprise and quite a wild thing to say,

because it is. But as you might expect, there is a much bigger story here. This is not something

that just popped into Elon Musk's mind out of nowhere, but comes from a right-wing

movement, surprise, surprise, that he has probably been seeing a lot of posts about on Twitter or X,

and, you know, is probably in the circles with people who support these ideas.

So I wanted to have Julia on the show to talk about this because she wrote a

really in-depth piece, looking at how the Christian right is turning against empathy and how

these narratives that Elon Musk is using come from that playbook, come from the types of things

that this right-wing version of Christianity that is growing in the United States, that is embracing Donald

Trump, is arguing, and why they think that this is like a form of suicidal empathy that is

ultimately a threat to American Western civilization that they want to protect. And, you know,

that they see as part of this broader threat to basically white people,

right? You know, the great replacement theory being advocated by these white nationalists.

And so in this conversation, we talk about what these Christian nationalists really think,

you know, what their ideology is, but also this other kind of pseudo-scientific version of this that comes from, unfortunately,

once again, a right-wing Canadian god Saad, whose arguments help to provide a supposedly

scientific underpinning for these ideas that have been embraced by the Christian right.

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