How Female Empathy Became Our Most Dangerous Vulnerability

He warned that mass migration is “transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.” He called the abandonment of sovereignty a civilizational abdication. He was right on all counts.

But there is a dimension to this civilizational crisis that no one in that conference room was willing to name. So I will.

Women are the canary in the coal mine of Western civilization. Where they are free, educated, safe, and equal before the law, civilization is functioning. Where they are subjugated, silenced, trafficked, or erased, civilization is failing. That is the core finding of our new report, Women and the West: Liberty, Tyranny, and True Liberal Values, which examines what actually separates the countries where women flourish from those where they suffer. The answer is not money. It is order, coherence, sovereignty, and the moral courage to defend them.

But here is the argument our report only begins to make, and one I am prepared to finish: women are not only the canary. In the most advanced stages of civilizational rot, they become the noxious gas itself.

Consider what happened in Minneapolis not long ago. ICE agents, many of them Hispanic Americans, were conducting enforcement operations targeting child rapists and murderers. These were criminal men who had no legal right to be in this country and had used that presence to prey on the most vulnerable among us. Many of those physically impeding the investigation were white women—women who called these minority law enforcement officers “race traitors.” These are women who believe, with apparent sincerity, that they are doing something righteous.

The soft power of female consensus has always shaped cultural norms in the West.

They were not protecting immigrants. They were protecting predators. And they did it in the name of compassion.

There is a reason this inversion is so dangerous, and it extends far beyond one protest or one city. When women misdirect their moral authority, institutions follow. School boards recalibrate. Prosecutors decline charges. University administrators rewrite codes of conduct. Media outlets adjust language to avoid offending the loudest activists. The soft power of female consensus has always shaped cultural norms in the West. Historically, that power restrained male excess and demanded higher standards of conduct. Today, in too many quarters, it is being mobilized to dissolve standards altogether.

A society cannot maintain borders, enforce laws, or defend itself if its moral center has been trained to interpret enforcement as cruelty and sovereignty as oppression. When enough women internalize that framework, political outcomes change. This is not about suppressing women’s voices. It is about recognizing that women’s voices carry disproportionate civilizational weight. When that weight is anchored to reality, the culture strengthens. When it is untethered from order and truth, the culture fragments.

This is suicidal empathy at its most grotesque and its most clarifying. These women did not arrive at these moments through malice. They arrived through a long process of ideological capture, one that began with genuine values (tolerance, inclusion, protection of the vulnerable) and ended with those values so inverted that shielding child rapists from accountability felt like virtue.

I am a woman. I am saying this plainly because only a woman can say this with the clarity it requires: this is a female pathology, and we must name it as such. Women are driving this self-destructive movement not because they are uniquely foolish, but because women are uniquely socialized toward empathy and communal harmony—qualities that are genuine civilizational assets until they are weaponized. And they are being weaponized, deliberately and systematically, by ideologies that understand exactly how to convert women’s strengths into Western civilization’s vulnerabilities.

The vulnerability has a specific psychological profile. Women score higher on average in trait agreeableness and empathy than men. These are findings replicated across decades of personality research and across cultures. In functioning societies, these traits are civilizational assets. Women build communities, transmit culture, and sustain the relational fabric that holds institutions together.

Russia, China, and Iran have each developed sophisticated operations specifically designed to exploit it.

They are also, by the same architecture, more responsive to social pressure, more averse to ostracism, and more susceptible to moral shaming as a silencing mechanism. Social media has industrialized that mechanism. Platforms have known for years—and have had internal research confirming—that their algorithms are psychologically damaging to adolescent girls by accelerating anxiety, depression, and ideological radicalization. They chose to continue their harmful engagement with girls instead of prioritizing their safety; they chose profit over responsibility.

Those same platforms are now the primary delivery system for the moral frameworks that turn empathetic women into enforcers of the very forces that harm them. A teenage girl who learns on Instagram that questioning open borders makes her a white supremacist, or that defending women’s sports makes her a bigot, is not developing a political opinion. She is being conditioned. And the platforms facilitating that conditioning have faced no meaningful accountability for it.

This vulnerability has not gone unnoticed by those who wish the West to fail. Russia, China, and Iran have each developed sophisticated operations specifically designed to exploit it. This is documented in congressional testimony, intelligence community assessments, and investigative reporting. Code Pink, a prominent American anti-war organization whose members have appeared at countless progressive women’s demonstrations, has been linked to funding from Chinese Communist Party-connected entities. Russian influence operations have systematically targeted progressive women’s networks on social media, deliberately amplifying messages that erode support for border enforcement, military funding, and law enforcement legitimacy.

The strategic logic is straightforward and deliberately calculated: identify the empathy, identify the cause, and fund the chaos. These operations do not need to manufacture outrage from scratch. They need only to find women and girls already primed by social media radicalization and accelerate the process—providing organizing infrastructure, amplification, and ideological framing that feels indigenous but is anything but. The women who show up to these demonstrations believe they are acting from conscience. The operations funding and directing their energy understand exactly what they are producing, and for whom.

Rubio said in Munich that armies fight not for abstractions but for a people, a nation, a way of life. He is right. And I would add: the way of life worth fighting for is precisely the one that produced, for the first time in human history and against staggering odds, societies where women are free. That achievement is neither inevitable nor irreversible. It was built on specific foundations—rule of law, cultural confidence, ordered borders, and honest institutions—and it is now being dismantled, often by people (especially women) who believe they are building something better but in fact are being manipulated to support something far worse.

Radicalized women are now among the biggest threats to the foundational principles that are necessary for women themselves to thrive.

Rubio is right that America and Europe share a destiny. What he did not say, but is also true, is that the front line of that shared civilizational fate runs directly through the lives of women. Not as symbols, nor as mascots for competing political agendas. Women are the most reliable leading indicator of whether a society is holding together or coming apart. Unfortunately, in too many parts of the West, radicalized women are now among the biggest threats to the foundational principles that are necessary for women themselves to thrive.

The question Rubio’s speech puts before the entire Western alliance is whether we still have the will to survive. The question our report puts before every woman in that alliance is more personal: whose side, in the end, are you actually on?