Facts Don't Care About Your Hypocrisy
The populist right's fraudulent war on other people's emotions
Jamie Paul here. This article is a guest post by Silver Rose, but I also wanted to share a pair of new pieces I wrote for Queer Majority. “Simply Unerasable” is about the data on gay/lesbian-on-bi discrimination. “The Secret Double Lives of LGBT Iranians: An Interview With Majid Parsa” discusses Parsa’s new memoir about growing up in Iran’s underground gay scene, Iran’s war with Israel, Islam, trans issues in Iran, and more.
This is not your mother’s conservatism: gone are the days of pearl-clutching church ladies and “values voter” PTA moms. In their place is an ethos of “facts don’t care about your feelings” and a chorus of edgy boys eager to burst delicate sensibilities. Or at least that’s the new branding. Echoing the reason/emotion binary in classical political thought, today’s right frames itself as the last bastion of reason and truth-seeking in the face of an emotional, irrational, and overly feminized liberal culture (the so-called “longhouse”).
Among the most frequently singled out for lambasting is the feminine-coded emotion of empathy. As journalist Cathy Young notes in The Bulwark, empathy has become the target of a growing number of new right-wing books including Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy (2024), Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy (2025), and Gad Saad’s forthcoming Suicidal Empathy. Allegedly, empathy clouds Western societies’ ability to confront “hard truths” ranging from traditionally conservative views about why disadvantaged people can’t or shouldn’t be helped to ideas like the “Great Replacement Theory.” When Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the liberal justices in pausing the high-profile erroneous deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia pending judicial review, Elon Musk reacted by tweeting: “Suicidal empathy is a civilizational risk.”
While it’s true that classical natural law theorists like Thomas Aquinas and William Blackstone believed that reason could discern moral truth, they held this to be the case because they believed nature and language reflected divine will. In contrast, today’s right — including figures like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro, who are themselves religious — make natural law arguments without acknowledging that they necessitate a specific theological worldview. Long-standing conservative beliefs grounded in tradition, religion, and ”common sense” moral intuitions get repackaged as “objectively true” because of “logic” and “science.” Slogans like “abortion is murder” or “there are only two genders” are treated not as normative values or theological claims, but as objective biological and linguistic facts.
But declaring something “murder”, whether that be abortion, war, or meat-eating, presupposes its moral wrongness rather than demonstrating it. Similarly, the fact that there are biological differences between the sexes doesn’t “objectively prove” that there are “only two genders”, since the point at issue is precisely whether gender should be understood as synonymous with, tied to, or fully distinct from biological sex. There’s an inherently normative dimension to these kinds of hot-button questions that can’t be bypassed by pointing to the dictionary or reciting scientific factoids.
Indeed, science, while invaluable in describing what is, cannot — as David Hume famously pointed out — tell us what ought to be. It cannot tell us which distinctions are socially important enough to deserve distinct labels, and which can be grouped together under the same term. And language, far from being an objective mirror of reality, is a constantly evolving, inherently arbitrary and messy way to categorize and navigate it.
Meanwhile, the emotional register that dominates the populist right is not recognized as emotional at all. Instead, it’s restyled as moral clarity, as when Michael Knowles declared that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” in the name of defending truth.
Political and cultural life is framed as a zero-sum struggle for power, and claims made from positions of professional and institutional authority are dismissed as the lies and manipulations of irredeemably woke and biased “experts.” Unless, of course, the “experts” happen to conform to a right-wing worldview, in which case their words are treated as gospel.
Take, for instance, Vice President J.D. Vance, who spread false rumors on the campaign trail claiming that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were abducting and eating pets. Local authorities found no evidence to support the claim, but Vance defended the story as a way of conveying “the suffering of the American people.” More recently, in an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance alleged that lots of migrant communities in the US are full of “pre-modern brutality.” When Douthat followed up by inquiring about whether this shows up in crime statistics (it doesn’t), Vance explained that this “pre-modern brutality” goes largely unreported. The claim is thus conveniently unfalsifiable.
Or take Elon Musk, who publicly accused President Trump amid a feud over the “Big Beautiful Bill” of being in the “Epstein files” before deleting his tweet after the two men reconciled. The clear implication of Musk’s actions is that he either had no objections to Trump being a pedophile until their political fallout, or he just made the whole thing up.
Similarly, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, following the shooting of Minnesota Democratic lawmakers Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman, claimed (without evidence) that the shooter was a “Marxist.” Unsurprisingly, Musk amplified the claim on Twitter, blaming the “far left”, even as authorities confirmed the suspect’s right-wing motives. And on and on and on.
This posture reflects the broader tendency within today’s right toward what political scientist Matt McManus calls “postmodern conservatism.” What matters is not evidence, but allegiance; not argument or merit, but whose side you’re on. These narratives resonate with their intended audience because they confirm their intuitions and biases, not because of their factual accuracy.
What’s at stake is not logic versus emotion, fact versus feeling, or truth-seeking versus sentimentality, but a struggle over which emotional and moral framework becomes so dominant that it comes to be regarded as the only rational — and therefore the only valid — one. The populist right’s “brave truth-telling” should be understood in this context: not as a genuine pursuit of truth, but as an aesthetic, tribal, and, above all, emotional performance of it.
See also: “DOGE Isn’t Conservative — It’s Radical Arson”
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