Miranda Devine: The left is weaponizing girls’s misplaced empathy — and it threatens all of us

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.

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. 

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Yet 84% of women aged 18-29 voted in cop-hater Zohran Mamdani as mayor on the promise of replacing NYPD officers with social workers to deal with mental health emergencies, homelessness and even domestic violence. 

The judge who released Burke despite a recent string of four arrests for bizarre and violent behavior is also a woman. 

Judge Marva Brown, a former Legal Aid Society public defender, is known for her lenient treatment of violent felons. In an undated video of a speech doing the rounds on social media, she explains her thinking: “The personal effect of having an incarcerated family member is very strong with me and the work that I do each and every day.” 

‘Resort to violence’

A few hours before he allegedly murdered Falzone, cops took Burke to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation after arresting him yet again for crazy, menacing behavior. The hospital reportedly let him out on the street after about an hour and later defended its fateful decision as “appropriate.”

Was it appropriate for Falzone, or for the city’s decision-makers, who turn a blind eye to public safety in the name of compassion for the criminal?

Rampant homelessness, open-air drug dens, defunded police and emasculated justice systems are hallmarks of Democrat cities and all justified in the name of compassion. 

The biggest defenders of this breakdown of moral order are pampered white liberal women, who are so conspicuous that they have earned the acronym “AWFL” for Affluent White Female Liberal. 

President Trump triggers these women into paroxysms of performative rage, escalating from the pussy hat protests of his first term to the anti-ICE protests and mystifying No Kings rallies across the country. Almost 90% of No Kings participants were white, almost 60% were women, the median age 44, and almost one quarter agreed with the statement that “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” according to researchers at American University who surveyed the group in Washington, DC, last year. 

Sometimes, if they are literally mugged by reality, they change their tune, like “The Young Turks” podcast co-host Ana Kasparian. She said she quit the Democratic Party after being berated by fellow liberals as a heartless racist for saying she was afraid to leave her house after being sexually assaulted by a homeless man while walking her dog in Los Angeles.

Spencer Pratt, the long-shot MAGA candidate running to be mayor of LA, is attracting similarly red-pilled liberal moms to his “women and children first” public safety messages.

But we shouldn’t have to wait for women to become victims of crime before they wake up.

The weaponization of compassion has also led to disproportionately female support for political assassination, according to a January survey from the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers. Support for political murder is about 15% higher among females than among males. 

‘The shift matters’

The survey came out just four months after the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, allegedly by a young man driven by transgender ideology, and months after two separate assassination attempts against Donald Trump, and a year after health care CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in the back in midtown Manhattan, allegedly by another cold-blooded political assassin, Luigi Mangione.

Justification for the murder of Donald Trump jumped to 67% from 56% last April among Left-of-Center respondents surveyed by Rutgers, while 54% of Right-of-Center respondents expressed justification for murdering  Mamdani, showing the Luigi culture has jumped the ideological divide.

But it was the women who most surprised the Rutgers researchers, who wrote that the “unexpected rise in tolerance for assassination rhetoric among women under conditions of high social media exposure [indicates that] something fundamental in the moral environment has shifted.

“This shift matters because women have historically played a stabilizing role in civic and social life. Across cultures, they are more strongly associated with norms of care, harm avoidance, and social cohesion. When even groups long linked to moral restraint begin to show elevated tolerance for political violence, it suggests that the erosion is not ideological but structural.”

Yes, it’s terrifying. 

Women’s nurturing instincts have been turned into weapons of political warfare, especially on the left.