We often speak of “suicidal empathy,” but most of the time, the concept is abstract. We are talking about societal trends, AWFLs sympathizing with predators who roam in neighborhoods far from their comfortable enclaves, soccer moms whose heartstrings are plucked when they hear “Maryland father” to describe an MS-13 member, or activists who celebrate Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters taking on “colonialism.”
But the sickness, verging on or crossing into mental illness, is very real, and something celebrated by many on the left who believe that their own needs and even those of their family and community must be subordinated to those of whom they think of as victims.
The example I have used from the ICE riots—and there are many—is of this mother who says her babies aren’t any more important than others’. No doubt many people find that sentiment heroic, including her TikTok followers, but that is one of the sickest things a normal person could think.
Of COURSE your babies should be more important to YOU. What kind of mother ARE you?
HOLY SH*T!
White leftist mother from Minneapolis proudly posted about getting ready with her 18-month-old to “patrol” for ICE in subzero weather, claiming her “babies aren’t more important than anybody else’s.”
Unbelievable!
Some leftist parents are putting the lives of… pic.twitter.com/8lsvk2KaFf
— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) January 24, 2026
But what got me thinking about this was this article in The Nation, which puts into words the twisted psychology of the suicidally empathetic. Before you say “that’s one person,” it’s not. It is being published by The Nation to its highly progressive readers as an example of revolutionary commitment, not as a warning about going too far for your political beliefs.
“The legal burden for proving rape colonizes my own mind, shaping the very way I conceive of what happened to me even as I refuse to subscribe to to its external pressures,” writes @AnnaKrauthamer.https://t.co/X2au1TSekq
— The Nation (@thenation) January 24, 2026
This is supposed to be sacrificing for the cause. In reality, it is wrong on so many levels, not the least of which is that she is putting other women at risk by protecting six men who gang raped her in a hotel room.
A lot of Democrats think like this now.
Zohran said that prisons serve no purpose https://t.co/8N5zrF9PYm
— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) January 25, 2026
The author, Anna Krauthammer, is your typical radical leftist. She is into Critical Theory, writes for all the Best™ magazines, including The New Republic and the LA Review of Books, is associated with Columbia Law School, and is a PhD candidate at Columbia.
Because of course she is.
So why didn’t she report her rape? Was it the trauma of going through the criminal justice system? Of course not. It is because she doesn’t believe in criminal justice and just wants to deny reality.
The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons. The less simple, less articulate answer is that to pursue prosecuting and potentially incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me, even when they have hurt me more than I could have ever believed possible. Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened. The prospect of being a participant in other peoples’ incarceration is as alien to me as anything could be, to the point that I can only conceive of it in childish terms—how silly and strange it would be to have a group of people incarcerated at my expense when doing so would do nothing to fix the damage they have already so thoroughly done.
The difference between those two answers—prison abolition or that other, never fully articulated sense of my existence in relation to other people in the world—is not a question of competing ideologies. It’s not that on a personal level I want to prosecute my rapists but that instead my intellectual and political belief in abolitionism prevails. Rather, it is a different and more complicated question of what it is that separates a feeling from a thought: what separates an inchoate mess of affects, drives, impulses and sensations from the clear-mindedness of a deeply held political ideal.
I have believed in and used the term prison abolition for at least a decade, but for less time than I’ve felt in my bones that I could never participate in any chain of events that might send someone to prison. I’m not sure that the latter even led to the former; rather, the belief and the feeling both exist inside of me like parallel lines.
Abolitionism advocates for the complete dismantling (not reform) of the prison system. Reading abolitionist literature and scholarship by the likes of Francoises Verges or Angela Davis was an academic and political awakening for me; a series of realizations for which I was entirely conscious, the content of which, now, I could easily talk about at length, defend, and argue passionately.
Uh, wut? These men RAPED you. Perhaps the worst violation of one’s person imaginable. We put rapists in prison not just because the act itself is evil, but also because people like this are predators who present a danger to everybody.
There are so many layers to this, but I would like to focus on one in particular, because I think it encapsulates something fundamental that is easy to overlook in the horror we feel at the rest of what she says.
“Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened.”
I can understand exactly WHY she feels like that, but the reality is that it DID happen, which requires an act of self- and societal-defense.
I have tried many times to communicate how insane one of the fundamental principles of leftism really is: it requires us to deny fundamental truths. Human nature is something that is real. Evil exists and must be fought. There is a necessary cruelty required to maintain social order and ultimately civilization itself.
It may seem cruel to imprison people, but unless we do, cruelty itself wins. The choice isn’t between empathy and kindness on the one hand and cruelty on the other. It is between controlled, limited cruelty and the breakdown of civilization itself.
As I have said many times, people misunderstand A Few Good Men when they think Tom Cruise is the hero. Jack Nicholson is entirely correct when he says that Cruise can’t handle the truth, because civilization does require hard men defending the walls against barbarians, and what suicidal empathy is, in reality, throwing rocks at the men doing so.
Just as, in the Caine Mutiny, the entire movie sets you up to despise Captain Queeg, but Barney Greenwald, who as the defense lawyer destroyed Queeg on the stand explains at the end, the real villains were the people who despised Queeg and led to his downfall.
It’s a sobering insight, because it reminds us that we can feel that toxic empathy only because hard men do dirty jobs to create a space for civilization. Without them, and the sometimes distasteful things they do like round up and punish criminals, society collapses.
The Nation wants us to believe that Anna Krauthammer is a political hero for letting six rapists escape justice. She is not. Not even a little bit.
Sure, we all have to wonder about how somebody could subordinate their own trauma so much that she lets these men off, but that is one person’s mental illness.
What should worry you is that she is seen as a hero by her ideological allies. Because if they let cruel men do this to them, what will they let them do to you, your neighbors, and your children?
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