The Perils of Toxic Empathy in Minneapolis Makes It Feel Like 2020 All Over Again

News pouring out of Minneapolis these last few weeks is generating a strange sense of déjà vu.

Once again, protests in that midwestern city are saturating Americans with emotion — intense, performative and increasingly untethered from reality.

On social media, in particular, it feels like 2020 all over again.

Check out Instagram and you’ll see a rolling broadcast of distress: long captions about trauma, solemn declarations that this moment is unlike anything we’ve seen before and constant reminders that to look away is to fail.

Well-meaning people of all political persuasions, women above all, have succumbed to an irrational empathy that’s strangling any hope of reasoned debate on law enforcement and illegal immigration.