Allie Beth Stuckey at the 2025 Young Women's Leadership Summit in Grapevine, Texas on June 14, 2025 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Some conservative women who were prominent figures in the Republican Party in the past — columnist and former Nancy Reagan speechwriter Mona Charen, conservative pollster and organizer Sarah Longwell, former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Virginia), among many others — now feel estranged from conservatism and are firmly in the Never Trump camp. But their absence from the center of the GOP and much of the right-wing media is giving MAGA women an opening on the far right.
In an article published on January 28, The Guardian's Alaina Demopoulos takes a look at some mothers who have become prominent MAGA influencers: Riley Gaines and Allie Beth Stuckey. And one of their talking points is that "compassion" and "empathy" detrimental to the MAGA movement and to fundamentalist evangelical Christianity.
Demopoulos' article comes at a time when Minneapolis and other U.S. cities are being targeted by the Trump Administration for aggressive immigration raids. And Gaines and Stuckey, according to the Guardian journalist, are saying that compassion must not be allowed to distract MAGA from its goals.
"Gaines is one of the leading figures of the 'Womanosphere' movement: mostly white Christian conservatives who promote an anti-feminist, gender-essentialist agenda to their followers, and who have been parroting the Trump Administration's messaging that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has done a good, moral job in its brutal crackdown on immigrant communities," Demopoulos explains. "Any evidence proving otherwise is wrong, warped or fabricated, they insist…. Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative podcaster and author, is another such figure beating the drum for ICE."
Stuckey is the author of the 2024 book "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion." And the argument that "compassion" and "empathy" are bad, according to Demopoulos, is a recurring theme from Stuckey and others in the Womansphere.
According to former evangelical April Ajoy, a demand for ideological purity is another characteristic of the 'Womanosphere'.
Ajoy told The Guardian, "If you are not fully in line with every single position (that Womanosphere figures promote), then you can get ostracized from your community. That’s what happened to me."
Read Alaina Demopoulos's full article for The Guardian at this link.
