B (8:11)

God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared.

A (8:20)

Now.

B (8:22)

There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.

A (9:02)

I had forgotten about JD Vance's awesome facial expressions as that woman is giving her rant when she says trans kids, he looks at his wife like oh my gosh, this is ridiculous. And that is what we all feel. But it's not only ridiculous, it's also evil. The idea that a child could be born in the wrong body, the idea that a child should go on puberty blockers or should change the hormonal makeup or the body that God providentially gave them, is not only unbiblical, it is downright wicked. And it leads to a life of brokenness for that child. And so yes, it is evil. That is the Christian position. And it is toxic empathy that leads someone to feel so deeply for a person who says they were born in the wrong body that you actually condone a practice or a policy that ends up maiming their body. So let me just explain what toxic empathy is. Hillary Clinton is confused. Maybe she's only read the Salon article about my book. She hasn't actually read the book. And by the the way, if Hillary Clinton wants to send over the mailing address, I'd be happy to sign a copy of Toxic Empathy for her. I can send it her way so she can read my argument in its totality. But a little tldr Empathy means to be in someone's feelings. So it's different than sympathy you feel for someone. It's different than compassion that means to suffer with someone. And it's different than love to seek the best for another person. Empathy actually means to feel how someone else feels, and it's not always bad. But empathy becomes bad when it blinds you to both reality and morality. You are so deeply in one person's feelings that you no longer can think objectively. You no longer consider the person on the other side of the equation. And then you make decisions based on how much you feel for one person rather than on what is true and moral. And Just so, for example, you feel so deeply for the poor woman carrying a pregnancy that you forget about the existence, the rights, and the pain of the baby inside the womb. You feel so deeply for the man who thinks that he's a woman that you ignore biological reality and the rights and the privacy of girls and women. Empathy becomes toxic when it leads you to do three things. One, to affirm sin, two, to validate lies, and three, to support destructive policies. Christians instead, are not called to callousness, but we're called to love. And the thing about love that distinguishes it from empathy is that it is inextricably intertwined with the truth. God is love, 1 John 4:8. He gets to define it, and he tells us what it is. In First Corinthians 13 and in verse 6, we read that love never rejoices in wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. So you cannot have in Christianity love without truth. And this is the dichotomy that Jesus represented. Not unconditional empathy toward every purported victim group. He showed mercy to the outcast and we should too, but he also urged them to repent of from sin. So that is my clarification of what toxic empathy actually means. Now Hillary Clinton wants to tell us about her faith, to convince us that she is actually the authority on all things theology. She says, I've never been one to wear my faith on my sleeve, but that doesn't mean it's not important to me. Quite the opposite. My faith has sustained me, informed me, saved me, chided me, and challenged me. I don't know who I would be or where I would have ended up without it. So I am not a disinterested observer here. I believe that Christians like me, and people of faith more generally, have a responsibility to stand up to the extremists who use religion to divide our society or undermine our democracy. Now, I just want to say that truth divides. Like, I'm not worried about someone accusing me or anyone else of being divisive. That's not the purpose in anything I say. The purpose in what I say is to try to tell the truth in love as much as I can. But Jesus himself didn't bring peace, but a sword. The truth divides undermine our democracy. That's just a silly accusation. Not even sure what that means. And I'm not being sarcastic when I say I'm glad to hear that Hillary Clinton identifies as a Christian. I did not know that we had that in common, sincerely. But for her to position herself as someone who is an authority on faith when she admits here that she's never been public about her faith, that's a problem. That's actually not something that's an option within Christianity. Christianity is a word based evangelism based public faith. It's not like Buddhism or other religions out there that say, well, you can just keep this to yourself. Just lock away the belief that Jesus is that Jesus is king in one compartment and it doesn't have to affect other areas of your life. You don't actually have to tell people about it. The last command that Jesus gives us before he ascends to heaven is, go, therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So we are called to be agents of this truth in love, this gospel that God entrusted us with through Christ. And so this idea that you can just have this compartmentalized faith that you don't tell people about, that's not what Christianity is. So I just want to correct the record on that. But I also want to look at the fruit of Hillary Clinton's life. Now, if she's repented of these stances, that would be news to me. Think that would have been a much more interesting Atlantic article than the 15th article about my book Toxic Empathy. But as far as I know, she still holds all of these beliefs on abortion. So I just want to go through them just the, just the facts very quickly. First, I want to remind you what Hillary Clinton thinks about abortion and we can look back to her time as senator. As a senator, Clinton voted no on prohibiting minors from crossing state lines to get an abortion. She voted no on notifying parents when their teenage daughter leaves the state to abort their grandchild. This was in the early 2000s, by the way. She voted no on giving criminal penalties to someone who harms an unborn child during a crime like assault that doesn't even have anything to do with abortion. She voted no on prohibiting partial birth abortions. She was given a 100% rating by Pro Abortion NARAL. She was endorsed by Planned Parenthood not only when she was a senator, but also when she was running for president. Clinton has been clear in the 20002016 debates over and over again that she believes in the unqualified legal right to kill unborn children through all nine months of pregnancy. She has been clear on that for years. She said, quote, I will defend Planned Parenthood now. Planned Parenthood kills about a million unborn children every year. She said, I will defend Roe v. Wade and I will defend women's rights to make their own health care decisions. Now, if you want to talk about an oxymoron, health care abortion is an oxymoron. And also, just to show how much she flip flops on things like let's look at her immigration stance. In 2003, she was the one who said on a radio show, I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants. We've got to do more at our borders and people have got to stop employing illegal immigrants. So she just kind of goes where the wind blows because in her 2016 campaign, she described Obama's immigration policy as too harsh. And of course now she is criticizing the morality of, quote, mass deportations. She also flip flopped on things like gay marriage. In 2004, she said, I believe that marriage is not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman. In 2013, she changed her stance on that. And no, this is not just genuine evolution. This is what politicians do. Also 2019, she said completely unabashedly, quote, unquote, trans rights are human rights. She is in complete support of the idea of men becoming women and infiltrating women and girls spaces. Of course she's got a long list of scandals in her past. She's got the Clinton foundation scandal. The Clinton foundation took in millions from foreign governments like Saudi Arabia and Algeria during Hillary Clinton's time as Secretary of State. There are a lot of questions about what actually happened with those funds, if they were actually used to help the poor people in places like Haiti that they were supposedly supposed to be helped helping. Also of course, we've got the whole email server scandal. She kept a private server with all of her Secretary of State correspondence on it. She lied about that. And in one of the 2016 presidential debates, she claimed she didn't send or receive any classified material to the server, which of course was a lie. If we look back to 2012 Benghazi. She was Secretary of State during the September 11th, 2012 Benghazi attack that killed four Americans. She linked the violence to an anti Islam video. But of course there's no evidence of that. The attack was a pre planned assault by terrorist militants. It wasn't a spontaneous protest because of any kind of any kind of video. And you'll remember, speaking of empathy, her callousness when she was asked about, hey, what happened that resulted in the loss of these lives?

C (18:28)

We had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?

A (18:38)

And then she also goes on to specifically highlight the problem with me. She says the mainstream Christian view is one that rejects the Christian nationalist narrative of rejecting the stranger and saying that people who are oppressed deserve their oppression. That's what she's saying people like me believe. And I don't like that there are mainstream Christians who are repudiating that view. She says this is exactly the kind of mainstream Christian view that enrages. Ali Beth Stuckey, the author of Toxic Empathy, who styles herself as a voice for Christian women, has more than a million followers on social media. And between lifestyle pitter patter and her demonization of IVF treatments, she warns women not to listen to their soft hearts. This commissar of MAGA morality targets other evangelicals whose empathy, she warns, has left them open to manipulation. Maybe they recognize the humanity of an undocumented immigrant family and decide that mass deportation has gone too far. Or they make space in their heart for a young rape survivor forced to carry a pregnancy to term and start questioning the wisdom and morality of total abortion bans. It's all toxic to sucky. First of all, I don't know a lifestyle pitter patter is. I should start doing lifestyle pitter patter. I should have a whole playlist on my YouTube channel, lifestyle pitter patter. I'll have to think about what to post on that. I'm not sure yet. Okay. My stance on ivf. I know why she's doing that. She's trying to target a lot of the women who are in the middle and who are more moderate, and they hear demonization of IVF and they think it's some radical position. But my position is that all human life matters, whether you are an embryo or whether you are a full grown adult. And I don't think that people, human beings, should be frozen indefinitely. I don't think that they should be graded for abnormalities like down syndrome and then discarded. I don't think that they should be treated as social experiments. And I do believe that we should honor the dignity of all human life by protecting them from the earliest moment of conception. And IVF actually put those. Puts those lives at risk. And so I've got lots of episodes on that if you want to hear more. And I write about it in my book, Toxic Empathy. And then, you know, she says, I'm a commissar of MAGA morality, which goes so hard. Like, I'm definitely going to continue to use that. I might have to put that, like, behind me, purposely misrepresenting Toxic empathy, of course. So we should just break that down for a second because she actually gives me really good examples of what that is. You should recognize the humanity of illegal immigrants. They are image bearers of God, just like the baby in the womb, might I add. But their humanity does not justify failing to enforce our completely valid immigration laws. You should make space in your heart for rape survivors. They should. But this should not lead you to justify killing a baby who is not guilty of anything. Like, if we want to talk about the death penalty in a rape situation, let's give the death penalty to the rapist, not to the baby. Hillary Rodham Clinton believes that babies should receive the death penalty for a crime that someone else committed. And then she would like to turn around and preach to us about morality and dignity. And just remember, she has over and over again stated that she believes in the unconditional right to kill a child inside the womb. Now she argues that we should have more empathy and not less, and that actually that's going to save civilization. She writes, empathy won't destroy civilization. Indeed, it might just save it. We can debate policies, we can debate theology, but if we give up on empathy, we give up on any real chance of coming together to solve our problems. Empathy does not overwhelm our critical thinking or blind us to moral clarity. It opens our eyes to moral complexity. It is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of strength. She's completely wrong on that. There's a book called Against Empathy by a Yale psychologist named Paul Bloom. He's coming at it from a secular perspective. He argues that psychologically empathy does arrest our thinking and that when we use it to make moral decisions, we end up making bad decisions. He also talks about this phenomenon that Abigail Shrier has talked about on my show, that you can be full of empathy and mean as hell. So when you feel so deeply for one particular person, everyone that you perceive as the enemy of that person becomes your enemy. And therefore you justify cruelty against them. It's like the Mama Bear effect in Paul. In politics, you feel like the illegal immigrant or the man who says that he's a woman is almost like your child that you have to protect. And everyone who is against them and against their so called rights, no matter how common sense those positions are, they become your enemies. And you justify violence against them, you justify cruelty against them. She says the empathy opens her eyes to moral complexity. But when you're saying things like trans rights or human rights or that abortion is health care, well, you're not showing empathy for the little girl who is forced to change in front of a man in a locker room. You're not showing empathy for the baby inside the womb, who is being poisoned, who is being dismembered, whose life is being snuffed out before they're born. That's the problem with empathy. When it leads you, your morality becomes very one sided. It's much better to be guided by the truth in love, she said. We already have Christian influencers saying empathy is a sin. That's not exactly what I said. It can lead you to sin though, she says. I hope grassroots faith leaders across the country who are appalled by what they see from an immoral administration and an extremist political right also find their voice. Influencers like Stuckier zealously policing any deviation from the party line. But speaking truth to power has been part of the Christian tradition since the very beginning. I actually agree with that. Christianity has always been a boil on the back of tyrants and it will continue to be. And she doesn't believe in Christians speaking the truth to power when we're speaking against the zeitgeist that is pro abortion culture in our country or against the idea that a man can become a woman. She is appealing to the Christians who are wavering right now. She very badly wants the female Christian vote and she knows that she can pull on your heartstrings and emotionally manipulate you into no longer critically thinking about both sides of an issue, but simply going along with what she and others say is the virtuous choice. It is manipulation. It's moral extortion. It is weaponizing your good soft heart, your Christian compassion against you, you for nefarious and chaotic means. Remember, empathy becomes toxic when it leads you to affirm sin, validate lies or support destructive policies. And so I just want to thank Hillary Clinton because she's put more eyes on this book. And it's not about selling books. It is about getting Christian women to see what is logically and factually and most importantly biblically true about some of the biggest issues of our day and to be able to stand confidently in that, even when we see the swirling propaganda all over Instagram and elsewhere. And I just want to end on an encouragement, a piece of encouragement and an appeal to you. I want to remind you of a couple Bible verses that I remind myself of, Luke 6:22 Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you, and when they revile you and spurn your name as evil on account of the Son of man, when you are speaking the truth about Life inside the womb, about gender, about marriage, about the things that the Bible makes very clear, even though those things have become political, at the end of the day, you are being persecuted for something that is ultimately theological. And if Hillary Clinton is against you on those things, it is a pretty good, not perfect, but a pretty good indication that you're probably on the right track. Luke 6:26. Such an encouragement. Woe to you when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets. And so it's actually a bad thing when everyone speaks well of you. Remember Jesus, perfect the God man. They crucified him. Stephen, full of grace and power, simply told the truth, shared the gospel to people who did not want to hear it. They stoned him to death. And so if that was how they treated Jesus, if that was how they treated Stephen, if that was how they treated the apostles, then surely today we are not going to get better treatment by going against the grain, swimming upstream, saying what is biblically true, even when it is unpopular. And I, I just want to make an appeal here because I don't actually know the state of Hillary Clinton's heart. Like, I, I, I can't say the state of her salvation. I can look at her statements and some of the fruit. But honestly, this is the truth. Like, I hope to see Hillary Clinton in heaven and I hope that Jesus reveals himself to her. And I just, if you're listening to this and this is all new to you, I just want you to know that no one is too far off, no one is too far gone. That the gospel is that God sent his son Jesus to die a death, that you deserve to die on behalf of your sin, so that you could be forgiven forever, so that you could be reconciled to God, so that you could be friends with God, so that you could be free from sin today and live forever with him. Like that. Truth is for you. That gospel is for you. And maybe you disagree with me on all of this, but I just want you to not listen to me. I want you to pick up a Bible. I always encourage people, get the ESV Study Bible. It's available on Amazon. It's not very expensive. Start in the Book of John and go from there. Don't take my word on these things. If you never listen to me again, that's okay with me. But I want you to pick up a Bible and see the truth and the good news that really, really matters in all of this. Again, tune in tomorrow. We've got our regularly scheduled episode of Relatable coming out on Saturday. This weekend. I'll see you guys then, Sam.