It isn’t a new age term, regardless of what he said or how others use it. It’s a description of a specific subjective experience, it’s a neurological function, not a political concept. Pretending to be empathetic doesn’t make empathy into something else for people who experience empathy every day. For people who only know empathy from democratic politicians, it suggests a lack of personal experience with it. Nobody who experiences empathy regularly would throw away the word because politicians lie about it. Their own experience of it would dwarf by magnitudes the volume of experience between the two.

Sympathy and empathy are not the same and can not be swapped without changing significantly the meaning. What it may mean about Charlie Kirk is what makes the quote so notable. Sympathy does not mean feeling what others feel, that is empathy, it means feeling pity, concern or compassionate in response to the experiences of others, but not sharing their feelings, again that’s empathy. It would be expected that a psychopath would prefer sympathy and not understand empathy. Psychopaths pity people all the time for seeing them as being worse than they are. Psychopaths may, however, be heavily influenced about what empathy is by its use in politics, as they do not have the neurological function to experience empathy every day, like normal human beings do. In that case, a psychopath might prefer sympathy over empathy and use semantics as an excuse to safety express a part of their world view that would have hurt them to express without the semantic argument.