Blog #269 The Left Weaponizes Women’s Empathy
Miranda Devine: The left is weaponizing women’s misplaced empathy — and it threatens all of us
Published May 10, 2026, 10:10 p.m. ET
A young liberal woman refused to cooperate with prosecutors after violent recidivist Rhamell Burke attacked her on the subway five weeks before he allegedly pushed a retired NYC teacher to his death on Thursday. Now the 23-year-old woman has regrets.“
Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail,” she told The Post. Rhamell Burke is led out of the 13th Precinct in Manhattan after his arrest Friday,
Maybe if she had indulged in less self-congratulatory empathy for the maniac who allegedly tried to kill her and felt more compassion for her fellow New Yorkers left to the mercy of an out-of-control predator roaming the streets, Ross Falzone would still be alive.
But Falzone, 76, was unlucky enough to be entering the Chelsea subway station Thursday afternoon when Burke allegedly randomly shoved him down a flight of stairs, leaving the beloved ex-teacher to die hours later at Bellevue Hospital from a catastrophic brain injury.
The woman’s irrational attitude to public safety is a textbook example of suicidal empathy, the condition described by evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad in which compassion becomes so excessive that people or societies make decisions that undermine their own survival.
‘Woke mind virus’
It’s as good an explanation as any to describe the years-long harassment campaign by sizable chunks of the public against law enforcement in New York and around the country, even as chaos and disorder grow, the predators get bolder, and the body count grows.
The irony is that women, just like Burke’s lucky victim, are overrepresented in the ranks of angry anti-NYPD, anti-ICE agitators. They are among the most vulnerable targets of violent predators, yet they insist on protecting them at the expense of their victims.
ICE agents, many of whom are Hispanic, prioritize arrests of murderers and child rapists, whether in Minneapolis or New York, but their biggest opponents are feral, shrieking women who have been brainwashed into misdirecting their natural nurturing instincts toward the perpetrator.
These women are “so concerned about how they’ll be perceived by the public, to the point where they refuse to do the right thing,” says psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, author of “Therapy Nation,” a timely book about modern culture’s psychological unraveling to be published next week.
“It’s another manifestation of the so-called ‘woke mind virus. Ideological conditioning and horrifically terrible judgment that distorts all logic …
“They feel like it’s their duty to take a stand and not be responsible for stopping illegal migrants coming into the country or sending a black man to prison …
“[But] the guilt this young woman [who refused to testify against Burke] is feeling now far outweighs any perception of racism she might have felt.”
It’s women and children who are most at risk in a city plagued by the soft-on-crime policies implemented since 2020 by successive leftist governors and mayors.