True confession: It took me three sessions to make it through Allie Beth Stuckey’s interview with New York Times writer and erstwhile conservative David French, an interview that did him no favors. Between his intellectual dishonesty and his distracting fidgeting, squirming, sock-pulling, and nervous swallowing—all telltale signs of a man whose pants are on fire—it was a difficult 1 1/2 hours to endure.
The conversation began with a debate on “toxic empathy,” which is Allie’s term for “feeling so deeply for a person that because of those feelings you end up affirming sin, validating, lies, or supporting destructive policies.” In discussing “toxic empathy,” the issue of abortion was raised, specifically, “abortion abolitionism.”
While French has long been and ostensibly remains pro-life, he asserts that abortion abolitionists lack empathy, a position that Allie ably refuted despite not being an abortion abolitionist herself.
French claimed that the view that mothers should be held accountable for hiring abortionists to kill their babies demonstrates a “profound lack of empathy for the mothers” and constitutes “moral folly.”
Allie disagreed, making the abolitionist argument persuasively—again, a position that she does not seem to hold but believes is both empathetic and morally coherent:
They’re not always desperate 19-year-olds. … there are women who know exactly what they’re doing. And it’s not just at six weeks gestation. It’s at 16 weeks gestation. Not all women just because they’re having an abortion are an automatic victim.
And then I think the bigger idea is that if we really believe that all human beings are made in the image of God from the moment of conception, why doesn’t that little baby deserve the same rights that you and I do? … I think the argument … by abolitionists is that well then we really are treating those little embryos as unequal. If we’re saying that their murder or the person who paid for them to be … knowingly murdered, if they don’t go to jail, we don’t actually believe in fair and equal justice for that embryo.
While French asserted that the motivation behind the abortion abolitionist movement is lack of empathy, Allie countered that the movement is motivated by a principled commitment to equality and justice and empathy for prenatal humans.
Perhaps sensing Allie had the more intellectually and morally persuasive arguments, French suddenly pivoted to a new argument, which was that the abortion rate dropped during the Obama years and rose during the Trump administration.
When Allie challenged him on his implied argument, he first denied that the drop was “monocausal,” and then claimed that Trump is “a very libertine man”and that “libertinism—doing what you want—is incompatible with a prolife ethic,” thereby implying that Trump’s “libertinism” is, indeed, the cause of the rise in abortions.
This a stunning argument for a man who voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the last presidential election.
The Democrat Party celebrates sexual libertinism. Dems are the party of libertinism, decadence, hedonism, and sexual anarchy. It’s the party that destroyed marriage, shouts abortions, allows cross-dressing men to read stories to toddlers and sashay about with their willies waggling in women’s locker rooms, requires minors to read obscene material in publicly funded schools, sells babies to homosexual couples, and has befouled city streets for decades every June.
Remember lady-killer Ted Kennedy—the lion of the Senate? How about Bill Clinton and his many sexcapades?
And what about those Democratic hotbeds of libertinism: social media and the entertainment industry?
But the long history of libertinism among Democrats and the libertine policies they socially construct didn’t weigh heavily on French when he voted for Kamala Harris. Not even the many Democrats who heartily endorse abortion from conception to birth for any or no reason served as an obstacle to anti-libertine stalwart David French.
Why did the libertinism of the Democrat Party have so little affect on French’s presidential pick? Allie asked him.
His decision to support Kamala Harris in the last presidential election was impelled by his desire to be on the right side of history when historians write about the Ukraine war and the demise of NATO, which apparently omniscient French knows Trump will cause.
“Foreign policy” is “very, very, very important” to French—not just very important—very, very, very important. Ridding the world of the nuclear and ballistic capabilities of a terrorist theocracy hell-bent on the destruction of the Great Satan is apparently not part of his very, very, very important foreign policy considerations.
Enquiring minds wonder if he has experienced the kind of empathy for the 40,000 Iranians slaughtered by their own government that he claimed to feel for the Ukrainians.
The plights of the Iranian people and our ally Israel don’t even make his list of concerns. After the Ukraine war and the anticipated collapse of NATO, French’s other top reason for voting for Harris was Jan. 6.
I’m not sure what his moral calculus is in deciding that prosecuting Jan. 6 trespassers is of a higher moral order than protecting the lives of the unborn. He didn’t share that either.
He blathered on about his unalloyed commitment to the Constitution but said nothing about the many Democrats who view it as a living, mutating, shape-shifting document written in invisible ink, or about the ones who view it as archaic, an anachronism no longer fit for a new world order in which queers support Palestine and Davos and the U.N. determine the fate of mankind.
He said nothing about the Democrat-engineered Russia Collusion hoax and Trump impeachment sham. He said nothing about the shocking collusion of the Democrat Party with news organizations and social media to conceal news, including about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He said nothing about the Democrat concealment of Biden’s dementia. He said nothing about the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ going back to the Obama administration.
When Allie mentioned the political persecution and prosecution of David Daleiden by Kamala Harris when she was California’s attorney general, he said nothing. When she brought up the DOJ’s targeting of pro-lifers at the behest of Democrats, he said nothing.
But this is what French did say:
I’m furious at the Republican party. And I definitely wanted to punish them. And I’m furious at the Republican party because what it did in service of Donald Trump was it took out the pro-life plank in the Republican party platform. There’s no more call for the human life amendment. It’s now a functionally pro-choice platform by state.
Hell hath no fury like an inauthentic, evasive nerd who writes for a dying newspaper.
But there you have it. That’s what infuriates the intellectually incoherent French. He is so furious at the Republican Party for removing the pro-life plank that he’s going to vote for the party that has never had a pro-life plank.
Allie began the interview by gently but directly confronting French about his harsh criticism of her book on “toxic empathy,” which she explicitly distinguishes from the virtue of compassion.
Largely ignoring her critical distinction, French argued that we need more empathy. His evidence that America desperately needs more empathy included his odd perception in 2015 that we were “living in a world where there was so much blatant white nationalism and racism coming from American Christian denominations, evangelical denominations.”
It’s weird that I, an evangelical Christian, saw little to no “white nationalism,” unless by that French means white people who love America. I also saw little racism—far less than in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
Now, I did see a rise in racism once Obama was elected and DEI was foisted on America via our colleges and universities that loathe ideological diversity as much as they loathe conservative Christians. But French didn’t talk about that.
French characterized support for immigration enforcement as a lack of empathy:
Maybe you’re an immigration restrictionist and you really want to have fewer immigrants, or maybe you want to see … very, very large scale mass deportations, and then you get extremely resistant to all of the stories of suffering that are the consequence of your policy and then you write this off as “well, that’s toxic empathy.”… I do see that this has been a cultural phenomenon, especially in parts of like what I would call MAGA Christianity.
How does French’s Leftist Christianity square with his purported absolute, unequivocal commitment to the Constitution?
By the way, all countries restrict immigration, and all countries have deportation laws. In fact, in some European countries, law enforcement agents are permitted to stop anyone and ask for identification papers.
But French-the-Ardent-Constitutionalist describes those who believe immigration laws matter and border scofflaws ought to return to their own countries as demonstrating “incomplete” or “selective” empathy.
It was obvious from the beginning of the segment in which Allie confronted him about his criticism of her book that French was uncomfortable. In his defensiveness, he posited perhaps his dumbest argument. He tried to imbue his plea for “empathy” with a degree of gravitas by arguing “So, there’s emotional components to empathy for sure. No question about it. But there’s also intellectual components to empathy.”
He continues:
There’s … physical practice components to empathy. It’s a pretty broad concept, and it’s actually pretty difficult. Like to do it well is pretty difficult. And … I don’t want people to think of empathy as just an emotion. … And so, [empathy] has to be really pulled out of that emotional context because it is an intellectual practice as well, a very important intellectual practice. And often it’s the intellect that precedes the emotion because it’s the intellectual practice that allows you to imagine … and then also … provides you with opportunities to try to think about how can I understand better.
He was definitely blowing smoke or maybe smoking something. If Jack Handey and Professor Irwin Corey had a baby, it would be David French.
Near as I can tell, he was saying empathy is so much more than an emotional experience because one must use one’s mind to imagine or comprehend. But everything we perceive, feel, or imagine is processed through our minds. That doesn’t make everything an “intellectual” practice. Experiencing empathy is not difficult, nor is empathy preceded by any intellectual exercise of reasoning or logic.
But most important, French, caught with his short pants down, is trying to change Allie’s argument about “toxic empathy” to make his criticism seem sound. Her argument is simple: When empathy leads to the abandonment of truth and virtue, it becomes destructive.
When we vicariously identify so closely with the feelings of others that we subordinate truth and principle to the sinful or disordered feelings of another person, we have left the world of compassion and charity and descended into toxic empathy.
I’ll conclude with just one more tidbit of idiocy from French.
Allie asked him why he refers to his cross-dressing colleague at The Dispatch, Brian Riedl, by the female pronoun “she.” Riedl is a married father of two who now pretends to be a woman and adopted the transonym “Jessica.”
French responded, “I’m definitely not going to go out of my way to call Jessica ‘he.’ I’m … going to use names … because I want to be kind to people. But I also don’t want to say things that … I don’t believe to be true.”
Using true pronouns is not unkind or “going out of one’s way” to be unkind.
Using a distinctly female name when referring to a man is affirming a falsehood. Further, avoiding the natural use of pronouns altogether constitutes going out of one’s way to affirm that falsehood.
After listening to this interview, it’s hard to believe French has achieved such a pinnacle of success. I guess intellectually incoherent arguments and obfuscation can take people far in life.