Elon Musk & Strom Thurmond: Odd Bedfellows in the War on Empathy

Musk’s Rejection of DEI Is at Heart an Argument Against Reconstruction

A weird bit of historical confluence took place over the past couple of months. When Elon Musk went on his anti-empathy rant on the Joe Rogan podcast, his argument used the same narrative structure that Strom Thurmond used in 1958 to protest the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Then, just a few weeks later, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) broke Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest senate filibuster in American history: Thurmond’s 24-hour-plus filibuster was part of the hard-right attempt to derail civil rights legislation; while Booker’s filibuster aimed to protest the right-wing autocratic assaults of the Trump administration in 2025.

How these three storylines intersect is a study in what has NOT changed in American political narratives since 1957, and how much America is still rankled by the old, unhealed wounds of prejudice (of all kinds).

Elon Musk Hates Empathy (Surprised?) Because Civilizational Inferiors Use It to Exploit Us

Where it started: Elon Musk went on the Joe Rogan show at the end of February and had a hissy fit over the toxicity of human empathy. He homed in on what he called the “empathy exploit,” a concept with two key storylines embedded in it:

• societies commit “civilizational suicide” by virtue of their empathy for immigrants from poorer less-developed countries, who dilute and destroy the host society’s culture; and

• western civilization is duped into committing suicide by outsiders taking advantage of its goodness—by exploiting its inbuilt empathic response.

From coverage in the Guardian:

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s catnip to both men’s followings on X. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.” [emphasis added]

Because the West’s “empathy response” is being “exploited” by devious, undeserving invaders, we need to shut down that response entirely—at least for them. The Guardian piece is well worth reading and bookmarking because it summarizes a growing movement across the Christian right to disengage the human faculty of empathy.

The Guardian quotes multiple supposedly Christian leaders having hissy fits over Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde imploring Donald Trump to have mercy on, and empathy for, those who fear his presidency. From the same article:

“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” tweeted the Christian podcaster Ben Garrett with a photo of Budde in her religious garb. “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too.”

Another Christian podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, tweeted: “This is to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word and in support of the most satanic, destructive ideas ever conjured up.”

The pastor Joe Rigney drove the argument home in the evangelical publication World. “Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness,” Rigney wrote. “Bishop Budde’s exhortation was a clear example of the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy.”

Strom Thurmond: Trust Not the Tug of Thine Own Empathy

In December 1958, just over a year after President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, Strom Thurmond appeared on the syndicated radio show Manion Forum—a program produced and hosted by the former dean of the Notre Dame Law School Clarence Manion, who was a fringe conservative media pioneer and ideological forbearer of every right-wing media star in the firmament.

[Note: The book Messengers of the Right by Nicole Hemmer gives a full accounting of who started that movement, why, and what powered its success.]

On that program, Thurmond objected to the admission of Alaska into the Union as it set a precedent for admitting “territories peopled with persons who have no heritage in American political or religious philosophy.” Sound like Musk’s “civilizational suicide” rant, or Tucker Carlson’s “legacy Americans” rant?

As for the question of empathy, reading the Thurmond/Manion transcript is like reading a 1950s version of Musk/Rogan. Thurmond argued that the civil rights movement (which he nearly always prefaced with the word “so-called”) was a totalitarian project that succeeded by exploiting America’s innate “humanitarianism”:

“The gravest danger to our country is from within, and our enemies’ most powerful weapon is our own complacency … Our humanitarian instinct comprises one of our strongest national traits. It is our very humanitarianism, admirable and worthy thought it may be, on which our complacency is founded...

“By using a subtle, sometimes even subliminal approach, our enemies have enlisted our unthinking support of causes apparently for the promotion of ‘human rights,’ but which, when carefully examined, reveal an underlying advancement of collectivism.”

Thurmond doubled down on that argument six months later in May of 1960 in an address to Winthrop College, saying:

“Our heritage has determined that Americans are a sympathetic and charitable people. Those who would subvert our liberty seek to use this noble and admirable characteristic to lead us down the road of socialism, by hiding their ultimate goal under the cloak of humanitarianism.”

Sound familiar—like maybe an “empathy exploit?”

Empathy Be Damned. Inferior People Can Only Get It By Fraud or Trickery.

Thurmond uses the antiquated word “humanitarianism” while Musk uses the thoroughly modern word “empathy,” but both men are telling the same story.

The sad irony is that both men believe that their superiority derives in large part from their goodness, but it’s their very superiority that leads them to reject the demands of goodness when felt toward those they deem inferior. They feel the tug of empathy, but reject it.

The reason?

If inferior people have somehow tapped their sense of empathy, it could only have happened by fraud or trickery.

By an “exploit” in Musk’s words. Or by “hiding their ultimate goal,” in the words of Thurmond.

That’s the story they tell themselves, and it’s not the only parallel in their narrative view of the world. Underneath their rejection of empathy is a darker storyline—one that is fundamentally opposed to any form of Reconstruction.

Whether it’s DEI today, or Reconstruction after the Civil War, both men view institutionalized redress as a form of tyranny.

Righting Past Wrongs Is an Imposition of Tyranny on the Present

In 1960, as he was preparing for a reelection campaign, Thurmond made a speech in Columbia, SC, in which he made plain his core objection to the entire concept of civil rights. The one overriding national issue that upset him the most was the “persecution” of the South on the “so-called ‘civil rights’ altar” and its aim of tyrannizing the South:

“The issue of co-called ‘civil rights’ is basically neither a legislative, a judicial, not a moral question. On the contrary, it is by its very nature a political question. [emphasis original]… the advocacy of unconstitutional, unwise, and unrealistic measures… for changing the segregated patterns in the South arises from no concern for the almost fictional plight of the Negro, either in the South or elsewhere. … their sole goal is political force.”

In Thurmond’s worldview, the civil rights movement had one overriding goal:

“It is obvious that the ultimate goal [of civil rights legislation] was to reimpose Reconstruction on the South.”

There we have the clear admission, and it’s worth looking at it again: Thurmond’s core animating narrative against the civil right movement, in all its forms, was that redress would “return the South to Reconstruction.” In another speech, he explicitly called it “obnoxious power grab legislation [aimed at] bureaucratic tyranny and totalitarianism.”

In an era of expanding communist influence around the world, any government mandate was conflated with totalitarianism, even a mandate to stop the tyranny of racism against Black Americans.

A key contention justifying that anti-civil rights narrative is the notion that complainants are undeserving and their complaints imaginary. The “plight of the Negro” is “almost fictitious.” Any true believer in the cause of civil rights is a “starry-eyed dreamer deluded by his own false propaganda, who is bereft of reason and blinded by passion.” He argued that “the voting discrimination issue was for the most part fictitious.”

In that Columbia speech he extolled the “Americanism” of “our thriving free-enterprise system” and those “willing to do a day’s work for a day’s pay,” which was a barely veiled slight against social welfare programs aimed at redressing racist wrongs.

And in support of his view about the undeserving status of Black Americans, he quoted his own filibuster:

“We spoke about the necessity for the Negro race to earn its place in society, and pointed out crime and illegitimacy statistics which illustrate so clearly its failure to do so.”

He argues that resolving racial conflict was best left to local governments, which at the time were the very enforcers of the racist status quo.

To Thurmond, Black people had failed at the “rugged individualism” that defines America. In his speech to Winthrop College, he told graduates that American prosperity was won by “individual effort.” He warned against “proposals to substitute government actions for private effort,” arguing that “economic security and tranquility know no ultimate source but the individual.”

That clarion call to individualism culminates in the idea that, “The government holds no security for us that we cannot provide for ourselves as individuals.”

Except if you’re Black in the Jim Crow South—he leaves that part out.

It’s also a statement full of irony: his Columbia speech offers a long list of ways he had used government to “protect the interests of working people,” for example, from the “corrupt practices of big labor bosses” and saving jobs from “the flood of low-wage imports.” Apparently, there are limits to what individualism can get you, even if you’re White. Turns out there are some things beyond individualism that only a U.S. Senator can do for you. Ending racism just isn’t one of them.

Musk from Another Age? The Parallels Between Musk & Thurmond

In a long interview with Don Lemon, Musk drops another Thurmond-esque line as part of his objection to DEI programs:

“You cannot be judge and jury of your own position… You cannot have a situation where someone is a self-described victim and they just get to be that because that’s how they feel.”¹

It’s the very same discounting of the experience of excluded, disenfranchised people used by Thurmond; a mirror of the view that victimhood is invented, that it’s “fictitious.” Just the same as Musk writing off criticism of Tesla as a racially intolerant workplace to the complaints of “phony social justice warriors.”

Invented victimhood is part of Musk’s objection to the “empathy exploit,” i.e., the real victimization is targeting good, successful people by stealing their empathy.

He also echoes Thurmond when he argues that DEI programs are anti-meritocratic, that DEI programs “lower standards,” particularly for doctors. He obsessively invokes some imagined lowering of standards in the Lemon interview—an idea of undeserved opportunity that echoes Thurmond’s view that the “Negro race” had not “earned” its place in American society.

Newsflash to Musk: a) If specific DEI programs are lowering standards, then those programs are doing it wrong. The point of DEI is equal access to opportunity by qualified people, not preferential treatment for the unqualified; b) systemic racism itself is a system of preferential treatment based on race rather than qualification, so when you prop up a racialist system, you are by definition supporting the anti-meritocratic system you claim to abhor.

The granting of supposedly unearned opportunity is, for Musk, an affront to his views on individualism and free-enterprise, in which he’s in alignment with Thurmond.

Musk invokes individualism over and over in his interview with Don Lemon, arguing for “treating everyone who they are as individuals”…. and moving “beyond questions of race and gender and judge people based on their character and their skills… are they a good person and contributing to society, and that’s what matters.”

Fine, it would be great if we could get there some day, but we’re not fully there yet.

That fact, however, is something for which Musk, like Thurmond, has little tolerance. Musk believes that forcing a conversation about redress—never mind forcing redress itself—is “divisive.” He tells Lemon:

“If we keep talking about it nonstop then it will never go away.”

Like Thurmond, he apparently believes that systemic inequities will somehow miraculously self-correct and “go away” on their own if we stop talking about them, and if the government would just stop giving undeserving people an unearned advantage.

He also shares Thurmond’s anti-government narrative as much for its tyranny as its inefficiency. Musk posted prior to the election that:

"Unless Trump is elected, America will fall to tyranny."

In an interview with Ben Shapiro, he unironically invoked the idea of likening government to a corporation, which is his asserted reason for withholding resources and consent:

“Government is the ultimate corporation… How much more do you want to give the world’s biggest corporation that has a monopoly on violence?... The less the government does the more the economy will prosper.”

[Not true the government is not at all like a corporation. But even if it were, then his point on accountability and risk is meaningless… if government and private businesses are all corporations, then they are interchangeable. They all operate the same way and should be subject to the same skepticism and withholding of resources and consent, because they all pose the same dangers. Transferring power from government to the private sector is just transferring power from one corporate entity to another. He seems oblivious that his comment is as much an indictment of the potential tyranny from private corporations as from government.]

And finally, Musk mirrors Thurmond’s inability to register the reality of racism and other forms of prejudice, as well as Thurmond’s sense of racial victimhood.

Lemon challenges Musk that America’s outstanding ability to create opportunity doesn’t means less to people who can’t take advantage of such opportunities in the same way Musk did, simply because of the color of their skin. His obtuse and mystified response:

“What advantages does the color of my skin give me?”

When Lemon asks him to see a parallel anti-racism struggle in post-slavery America as in post-apartheid South Africa. Musk’s indignant response:

“There’s a slow white genocide happening in South Africa. Do you care about that?”

That quick turn to being a victim is as much a non-sequitur as his bizarre claim that everyone on Earth is descended from slaves at some point in their history. He’s clearly implying that no one has a right to any claim of disenfranchisement because we’re all the same.

Of Course We Should Treat People as Individuals—The Problem Is That America Doesn’t, and Is Even Less Likely to Now

Should we judge people as individuals? Of course. Is individual effort important to growth, advancement, accomplishment, and resilience? Of course. Those are not controversial positions.

Do “woke” attempts at redress, and conversations about redress, go off the rails sometimes? For sure. John McWhorter offers a thoughtful take on improving “a worthy project that has its flaws.” Some of his critiques of the anti-whiteness of DEI feel sharp, but necessary. But in his conclusion, he argues that:

“Outlawing affirmative action of any kind, as Trump attempts to do, will discourage institutions from trying to level the playing field at all. This overreaction to DEI’s acknowledged missteps not only sets us back—it is immorality incarnate.”

The origin of DEI and wokeness and all the other things Musk so passionately hates are rooted in the fact that the playing field is NOT level, opportunity is not equally accessible to all based on merit and individual skills, talents, and qualities of character. We live in a world still coated with the residue of systemic prejudice—something he refuses to address in a substantive way.

In his time, Thurmond expressed a nearly identical resistance, and/or complete dishonesty, about the exact same issues, as well as his refusal to accept any kind of formal Reconstruction to set them right. He used many of the same arguments and narrative framings that Musk uses today.

Not only is Musk completely wrong on empathy, when put side by side with the Strom Thurmond, Musk’s arguments against DEI and wokeness show up clearly as a modern strand of anti-Reconstructionism.

• Strom Thurmond believed in White civilizational superiority and the innate inferiority of marginalized groups and immigrants; refused to admit the existence of systemic disadvantage created by America’s legacy of systemic racism; considered all systemic efforts at redress as socially divisive that victimized White Southerners; blamed the position of the marginalized on their own failure to live up to the rigors of American individualism; and fought all efforts to enforce redress as a violation of liberty and an imposition of the unconstitutional and illegal tyranny of Reconstruction.

• Likewise, Elon Musk believes in American and European civilizational superiority and the innate cultural inferiority of immigrants from less-developed parts of the world; admits the existence of systemic disadvantage only when pressed but then refuses to accept systemic efforts at redress; claims that forcing a conversation about redress is divisive; rejects DEI programs as implicitly a gift of undeserved opportunity to those who have not earned their place; claims victimhood for his own privileged group; and claims that, if wokeness is not stopped, the Left will force a tyranny on the nation that stamps out all freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

Whether it’s Strom Thurmond fighting capital-R Reconstruction in the South in his day, or Elon Musk fighting the small-r, extra-legislative “reconstruction” efforts of DEI today, the narrative is the same. And this is where Cory Booker enters the story.

Booker’s senate filibuster, now the longest in American history, aimed to call attention to the fact that the Trump administration’s anti-woke, anti-DEI crusade is installing exactly the kind of ideological tyranny that the Right has been fearing from the Left for decades.

Rather than promoting debate and reconciliation, Musk’s own support of power-grabbing, dissent-stifling autocracy pushes reconciliation further away, and makes his ideal meritocratic world more and more difficult to achieve.

Will Musk ever course-correct? Strom Thurmond never really came around on the issue of race, even though he got more pragmatic in his later years (the myth of Thurmond’s remorse was well-covered by Slate). It’s unlikely that someone as invested as Musk will reconsider his stance on inclusion or reign in his ferocious attacks.

To him, as it was with Thurmond in 1957, it’s life or death.

1. The derisive reference to self-claimed victim status is a rich one. The foundation of the modern American conservative identity is a self-claim of victimhood dating back to the 1950s. As scholar Paul Elliott Johnson writes in his book I the People, mid-century conservatives’ victim identity, which thrives to this day, is based on a projection of conservative feeling, not an objective assessment of the world:

“Though conservatives [of that era] held a ‘deeply felt sense of themselves as outsiders on the defensive, they were never the excluded figures they believed themselves to be.’ Conservatives were not reacting to the fact that they, as people, were excluded from the political world. They were instead externalizing their disagreement with the view of the political mainstream…

“Entrance into the conservative franchise was conditioned on one’s status as a victimized individual… For conservatives, negotiation and compromise with the political system as they imagine it threaten both the capacities of the subject and life itself … Conservatives imagine that when they face a difference of opinion, they are participating in a timeless struggle between a person yearning to be free and the forces trying to keep them down.”