The burrito discourse began last week with this Twitter (always Twitter, never X) exchange:

It quickly devolved into stuff like this:

Yes, tell people to eat crap and betray yourself as someone who hasn’t looked at the price of those items in the grocery store for a long time.

There were also responses which acknowledged that a lot of people are struggling with what things cost now:

And notice he doesn’t understand why his response is making people angry. I can explain it though. See when you tell people things are hard and that their response should be “suck it up”, they’re going to be angry. I’m old enough to remember when people used to want to make sure succeeding generations had it easier, but I guess that’s another thing good thing from the past that MAGA has killed. And that’s because of the idea of toxic empathy.

Well as it turns out, that idea can be traced back to people behind Cities Church, the St. Paul, MN congregation that featured that peaceful protest that led to all of those questionable arrests. From my piece on that:

The church itself was founded by Joe Rigney, who wrote a weird book called “The Sin of Empathy”. Here’s his defense of it:

Can you give me an example of where an excess of empathy would be destructive?

If someone throws a pity party, starts to sulk, and then we capitulate and give in then we’re coddling, enabling and indulging them. We’d be focused more on their short-term feelings rather than their long-term good.

Another, more political example is the way the trans movement has weaponised society’s compassion. “Here’s people who feel themselves to be in the wrong body. They are very distressed by this mismatch between their biology and their felt sense of [identity], and we need to do whatever we can to enable them to align those, including surgeries.” When we tell the parent who has a boy who thinks he’s a girl, “would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?” that’s a twisting of compassion. When asked, “Do you want to avoid your child [taking their own life]?” then to give in at that moment feels compassionate. You’re trying to keep them from being harmed in some way, but in doing so, you’re actually causing harm, because they’re going to take the puberty blockers or be castrated. That would be a more extreme political example.

And now these pernicious ideas are being applied to everyone in society. We are told that we should not be outraged by a system which is being openly manipulated to hurt regular people and to make billionaires happy. The Supreme Court said the tariffs are illegal. Great news! Except that the money will go back to the huge corporations who for some reason are not legally responsible for returning that money back to their consumers.

Taylor Farms is selling food that can make people sick, and testing confirmed it early in the Cyclospora outbreak. But its owner is a rich guy who doesn’t want to be responsible for what his company does, and since he’d already bribed President Grievance with a million dollars, the administration made his blame magically disappear. It was a false positive, you see. And the fact that new items from Taylor Farms are making people sick is fine. Suck it up, everyone. Why are you spending money on restaurant food anyway when you should be home eating peanut butter sandwiches on stale bread?

Back in 2017, when we all thought that Trump couldn’t get much worse, Kayla Chadwick wrote this piece that became viral, I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People. Maybe you remember it? Here’s a pertinent excerpt:

I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.

[deletia]

If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP. Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.

I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. I cannot have one more conversation with someone who is content to see millions of people suffer needlessly in exchange for a tax cut that statistically they’ll never see (do you make anywhere close to the median American salary? Less? Congrats, this tax break is not for you).

I cannot have political debates with these people. Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters.

[deletia]

The “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” attitude has been oozing from the American right wing for decades, but this gleeful exuberance in pushing legislation that will immediately hurt the most vulnerable among us is chilling.

I have called this the “I Gots Minez” attitude for decades now. But what has happened is that even some of the Haves are now starting to feel like Have Nots. And rather than call for accountability from their political leadership, the solution is to scapegoat vulnerable people; first trans people, but now also immigrants and especially Haitians, and Muslims and especially Muslims in or running for public office. But we used to care about making things better and not just sitting back resigned to whatever awful thing happens next.

I’ll leave you with this: