You may recognize the name Allie Beth Stuckey. A popular Christian conservative podcaster, she rose to prominence in the late 2010s after launching her show, Relatable. The podcast surged in popularity in 2020, as Stuckey gained notoriety for criticizing lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2024, she published a New York Times bestseller, Toxic Empathy, which accused the progressive movement of exploiting Christian empathy to advance its political aims.
Today, Stuckey is one of the most prominent voices on the Christian right. And last week, Hillary Clinton took aim at her in The Atlantic, casting Stuckey as the centerpiece of the MAGA movement’s so-called “war on empathy.” It’s a forceful essay, one that exposes a deeper clash between two visions of religious morality and the role it should play in public life. That’s one of the defining debates of this moment—which is why we invited Stuckey to respond. —Jillian Lederman
I’ll be honest: If I had made a list of predictions for 2026, being the target of a piece by Hillary Clinton in The Atlantic would not have made the cut.
But that’s exactly what happened.
In her essay last week titled “MAGA’s War on Empathy,” Clinton lambasted the Trump administration for the recent killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Their deaths, she said, encapsulate “a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?”
She continued: “The glorification of cruelty and rejection of compassion don’t just shape the Trump administration’s policies. Those values are also at the core of Trump’s own character and worldview. And they have become a rallying cry for a cadre of hard-right ‘Christian influencers’ who are waging a war on empathy.”
