Charlie Kirk once said empathy was ‘made-up, new age term’

Following the Sept. 10, 2025, shooting death of Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk, online users shared a quote allegedly originating from the conservative political pundit on the subject of empathy. According to those users, Kirk once said, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage.”

Snopes received reader emails and website searches about this matter. For example, one reader asked, “Did Charlie Kirk say, ‘I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage.’” Another user sent a message reading, “I just wanna fact check the quote. I’m seeing where Charlie Kirk says empathy is a weakness.”

Users shared the purported Kirk quote as a video or meme on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads (archived), TikTok (archived) and X.

Kirk genuinely said these words during an Oct. 12, 2022, episode of “The Charlie Kirk Show.” A longer clip of the same remarks also circulated on the same day in a popular post (archived) on X, then known as Twitter. (The remarks begin around the 36:40 mark of the full episode of Kirk’s show, hosted on Rumble.)

During Kirk’s comments, he said he didn’t care for the word “empathy” and instead preferred “sympathy.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Meanwhile, the same dictionary defines sympathy as “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.”

Kirk said the following in his remarks, with the quote social media users shared appearing in bold:

So the new communications strategy for Democrats, now that their polling advantage is collapsing in every single state… collapsing in Ohio. It’s collapsing even in Arizona. It is now a race where Blake Masters is in striking distance. Kari Lake is doing very, very well. The new communications strategy is not to do what Bill Clinton used to do, where he would say, “I feel your pain.” Instead, it is to say, “You’re actually not in pain.” So let’s just, little, very short clip. Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It was all about empathy and sympathy. I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage. But, it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy. That’s a separate topic for a different time.

On the same day, Kirk shared (archived) additional thoughts on Twitter about people allegedly lecturing him about the word “empathy,” writing:

The same people who lecture you about ’empathy’ have none for the soldiers discharged for the jab, the children mutilated by Big Medicine, or the lives devastated by fentanyl pouring over the border. 

Spare me your fake outrage, your fake science, and your fake moral superiority.

For further reading, Snopes also investigated whether Kirk once truly said “it’s worth it” to have some gun deaths in order to have the Second Amendment, as well as what his last words were before his shooting.