There are more strong, caring citizens who have yet to step up.
Let's encourage them to join us and help face down MAGA cruelty, peacefully.
Welcome back
Welcome back, subscribers to the Empathy Surplus Network USA Substack. Our mission is to support members in promoting our commitment to a mutual and moral duty to care for one another’s human rights and freedoms. Empathy Surplus is headquartered in Wilmington, Ohio.
We are grateful to trustee Sandy Bernabei, Ardsley, New York, for launching a New York survey titled Is our New York State Legislature caring or cruel? To find that survey and a similar one for Ohio, check out our new MODEL LEGISLATION page at www.empathysurplus.com/modellegislation.
We are grateful to our organizational scholarship sponsors:
Antiracist Alliance, White Plains, New York
Books N More, Wilmington, Ohio
Circular Development, Sugarcreek Township, Ohio
Edward Jones Financial Advisor Jason Hillard, Wilmington, Ohio
Linndale Equipment, Wilmington, Ohio
Practice with Purpose LLC, Legal Counsel, Dayton, Ohio
Shalom Massage LLC, Oakwood, Ohio
TGE Solar, Cincinnati, Ohio
Whistle-blowers against MAGA.
More and more Americans are choosing to publicly promote the duty to care for their neighbors as they are confronted with MAGA cruelty and murder. Neighbors are caring for one another and banding together to stop harmful data centers from coming to their communities. Neighbors are caring for one another with whistles, warning each other that ICE kidnappers and murderers are nearby. Neighbors are caring for one another to stop concentration camps from being built in their communities.
Peaceful care works.
They’re caring for one another peacefully. They’re caring for one another repeatedly. They’re caring for one another in cooperation with neighbors of opposing political parties. They’re caring for one another effectively. They’re legally caring for one another. They’re publicly caring for one another. And it’s working.
Taking a page from the marketer’s playbook.
Nevertheless, we still need to get better at describing the caring society we want and how to get it, rather than complaining. Moral outrage is great, but it needs to be channeled into effective, science-based communication strategies that are well known to corporate marketers.
Make our equality “self-evident.”
Cruel wing MAGA wants a culture war, and their Epstein POTUS wants to provoke us into a real war, so he can declare martial law. Care-wing citizens want a caring society, an effective government, and economic development that produces broad prosperity. In other words, care wing America wants to be free, safe, and prosperous. We must continue doing what we’re doing peacefully and get better at explaining why.
Messaging mistakes.
When you don’t understand how the brain works, you make messaging mistakes. The most common mistake is to constantly negate your opponent’s ideas and names, rather than repeating why you want something else. This mistake is big because, even though you say you don’t want something, simply naming it reinforces the idea in everyone’s mind. When you fill your head with the latest Epstein POTUS cruelties, you are NOT filling your head with the millions of caring activities of ordinary Americans, especially in your own backyard. Journalists can do better.
The truth sandwich is an equation.
For example, when Richard Nixon went on TV after the Watergate break-in and said, “I am not a crook,” everyone still had to wonder whether he might be. When journalists don’t sandwich MAGA lies between the truth and the ideal of a caring America, we all suffer. The truth sandwich builds on the science that 2 is bigger than 1. That is, we must talk about what and why we want something at least twice as much as what we don’t want.
Goodbye, David Brooks.
David Brooks said goodbye to the New York Times as a columnist in his last Op-Ed last week titled “Time to Say Goodbye.” Some will miss Brooks. I will not.
Brooks used Orwellian language to suggest to his readers that he didn’t like being a full-blown MAGA conservative careening toward fascism. He claimed he wanted to moderate conservatism’s harm to democracy. Brooks wrote, “When I came to The Times, I set out to promote a moderate conservative political philosophy informed by thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton.”
Brooks’ pretense.
Was it all a pretence? I think so. Cognitive scientist, linguist, and progressive activist George Lakoff thinks so, too. Lakoff warned care-wing Americans, especially journalists and Democrats, about Brooks and his Orwellian colleagues in a 2008 peer-reviewed paper published at UC Berkeley titled “What Orwell Didn’t Know About the Brain, the Mind and Language.” Lakoff described the process of large-scale, gradual brain change of Americans using a phenomenon known as reflexivity.
Lakoff’s paper warned us, and a few of his disciples continue to argue that American cruel wing propaganda is sophisticated and well-written. He wrote, “The editor in Orwell would love David Brooks’ prose. Mind control works via brain change, through the effective use of well-written language to activate not just frames, conceptual metaphors, and emotions, but whole worldviews. When the language is repeated, and the words become just the normal way you express the idea, then even the best people in the media get sucked in.”
Brooks never blamed the billionaires.
Brooks ultimately blamed the American people for our current moral decay, a technique he used throughout his career. He left billionaire-owned media and algorithms blameless. Using the Epstein POTUS’s name six times, Brooks offered a two-sided approach to the same argument: sure, such and such was bad, but it had a good effect. I guess that’s how he conned the New York Times into being an unwitting accomplice to the rule of law.
Lewis Powell helped launch MAGA in 1971.
Brooks is just one of thousands of cruel wing communicators informed by the kind of think tanks that produced the murderous Project 2025. Recruitment of this host of cruelty was launched in 1971 by the legal counsel of the US Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell. Prior to accepting Nixon’s nomination to the US Supreme Court, Powell wrote a memo to the CEO members. In it, he vilified Ralph Nader and Charles Reich and called for the creation, among other things, of a council of “highly qualified scholars in the social sciences” from the ranks of the cruel wing to put a unitary executive on an American throne.
In defense of her husband in 1998, Hillary Clinton referred to this billionaire-funded autocratic network of think tanks, media outlets, endowed university departments, speakers’ bureaus, textbook publishers, etc., as “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” Almost 30 years later, in a 2026 essay in The Atlantic magazine titled “MAGA’s War on Empathy,” she used the word “empathy” 23 times to advance the idea that our central debate today is whether America will be a caring or cruel society.
You can only will what’s in your brain. If an idea isn’t there, you can’t will it into existence.
In that same 2008 paper, Lakoff continued, “Once a member of the public has undergone brain change, he or she then thinks like a conservative on the issue. (They weren’t) convinced rationally, just subject to the techniques every marketer uses. Is “free will” being exercised? The very idea of “free will” has been changed.”
Step up and embrace reflexivity!
Journalists and Democrats must put away their science-based communication denial and embrace the latest insights of the brain. For example, you can trust everyone the longer you know them and learn what you can trust them to be and do. Trust is like common sense in that it can be changed over time through language and experience. The phenomenon is called reflexivity. Now more than ever, we need to understand what trust IS, how it’s built in the brain, and how it can be shifted.
For example, democracy is a trust built on empathy for and responsibility to humanity to expand freedom from fear and want and broaden prosperity and opportunity. Autocracy is a trust built on obedience to a unitary executive, or face harsh punishment, in the constant struggle to accumulate all the wealth for oneself.
Let’s frame and reframe constant public discourse on human rights around empathy.
If you want a strong, effective democracy, we need to constantly encourage more people to promote a vision of strong, diverse, and broadly prosperous communities of nurturing families caring for one another’s human rights and freedoms.
We need to do this so much that when you walk into a room of people who know you, they can pretty well guess what you are going to say, because they’ve heard you say it over and over and over again. But not only that, they can guess what you’re going to say, because their experience of you aligns with your language. This is what Jesus meant when he told his disciples, “You shall know them by their fruits.”
The fruit of life, liberty, and security is sweet and meant for everyone. But everyone has to care deeply about the work. Let’s recommit ourselves to our duty to care for human rights and freedoms every day. If you want help, go to www.empathysurplus.com and join us. Peace and love.