The Empathy Monopoly

Hijacking Religion to Justify the Unjustifiable

The political arena has perfected a remarkably efficient piece of rhetorical technology: the identity shield. It is a simple, elegant mechanism that allows a modern state to outsource its moral defense to an ancient religion, ensuring that any critique of a prime minister’s cabinet is instantly reclassified as an attack on Abraham himself. A state should not inherit moral immunity from a religion. Yet Trump and Kushner want it both ways: they demand absolute secular immunity for a foreign government while wrapping its domestic military actions in a sacred shroud.

To observe this apparatus in its natural habitat, one needs only to look at the current administration. Donald Trump and Jared Kushner have elevated this conflation into a foundational pillar of statecraft, routinely asserting that the State of Israel, its military apparatus, and all Jewish people globally are one indivisible, uniform monolith. Kushner, operating as a special peace envoy, famously transformed Middle Eastern geopolitics into a real estate pitch. He leveraged the sacred weight of historic heritage to secure a multi-billion-dollar windfall from Gulf sovereign wealth funds for his private equity firm, converting a regional crisis into a highly lucrative corporate portfolio. Together with Trump, they have flattened the language of the debate entirely. Anti-Zionism becomes indistinguishable from antisemitism, and the vast, diverse population of American Jews who happen to vote for Democrats are routinely scolded from the podium for being “disloyal” to their own heritage. It is a loyalty test that demands an American citizen’s religious identity dictate absolute fealty to a foreign government’s right-wing political party, conveniently transforming geopolitical dissent into a spiritual crime.

The supreme irony of this strategy is that it relies on the exact logical blueprint of the bigotry it claims to fight. By insisting that an entire global ethnic and religious group is collectively responsible for the actions of a single government, the defender of the state accidentally validates the narrative of the genuine antisemite. Both factions arrive at the exact same broken conclusion: that a Jewish family in Paris or a student in Chicago is somehow a voting member of the Israeli parliament.

But if this method of shielding state power through identity is considered acceptable, it deserves to be applied universally. We should expand the franchise. Imagine, for instance, if the international community decided to conflate the concept of humanitarianism in the exact same way.

Under the Rules of Total Conflation, the Red Cross, the United Nations, and the very concept of human empathy would be declared one and the same with whatever entity claims to represent them. If a humanitarian organization were to mismanage its budget, overcharge for emergency blankets, or launch a poorly executed logistical campaign, any critique of that organization would be immediately branded as a violent assault on kindness itself. To question a line-item expense for bottled water would be decried as an act of aggressive anti-altruism. “How dare you audit our shipping costs,” the press secretary would announce, “when we are the sole curators of human love?”

The beauty of the system becomes even clearer when we look at the internal contradictions it allows us to ignore. While the administration uses the sanctity of identity to shield its foreign policy from human rights scrutiny, it simultaneously employs Stephen Miller to design domestic border policies that read like a dystopian manual on clinical state cruelty. Miller, who wears his own Jewish identity as a matter of ancestry while championing mass deportations, family separations, and the systematic stripping of civil liberties under the Project 2025 blueprint, represents the ultimate malfunction of the monolith. His policies carry the distinct, bureaucratic chill of mid-century authoritarian regimes. This isn’t high-minded theory; it’s a spreadsheet that separates toddlers from their mothers. Yet by the logic of the conflationists, his domestic ruthlessness is compartmentalized away from the grand moral shield erected for the foreign policy. We are left with a landscape where a government can claim the moral high ground of an ancient faith on Monday to justify actions abroad, and implement policies of clinical, bureaucratic cruelty at home on Tuesday, all while the public is told that noticing the connection is a form of prejudice.