Jamey Carney, a 43-year-old from New York, believed she had found love with 28-year-old Jordanian asylum seeker Ahmad Al-Saqar, who she met at a pro-Palestinian demonstration last year. 

The mother-of-one married Al-Saqar and built a new life with him and her teenage daughter in Ireland, where she had moved from the US back in 2021.

Last week, Carney was found beaten to death in her home and Irish authorities identified Al-Saqar as the primary suspect. According to police, after allegedly murdering Carney, Al-Saqar fled Ireland for Jordan where he was arrested on Monday.

Carney's story is difficult to consider without asking what for many has become the  unaskable: How did an apparently intelligent American woman and mother wind up with Al-Sagar in the first place?

The answer could very well lie in the fact that Carney's relationship with Al-Sagar wasn't merely born from romance, but from politics as well. 

Amid the substantial age and cultural gaps between the two, their marriage represented a political worldview that increasingly teaches that tolerance and leniency are just as important as love.

Within this worldview, red flags are now seen not as warnings to heed, but opportunities to prove one's own virtue. When pressed to make moral judgments, the question has ceased to be, 'is this person trustworthy?' and has become 'am I open-minded enough to trust him?'

It is no coincidence that today's Democratic base is disproportionately composed of unmarried women who are overwhelmingly religiously unaffiliated. According to recent Pew data, 72 percent of never-married women and 84 percent of atheists belong to the Democratic party.

For these voters, politics is more than a means of deciding how government should function. Politics is a source of identity, moral purpose and community. Institutions that once provided belonging - churches, civic organizations and, most strikingly, family life - have weakened. 

Politics, among the most shallow and transactional of affiliations, has rushed in to fill the void.

Once politics becomes a substitute for religion and community, it begins to demand near-religious levels of devotion. Political causes, like support for Palestine, become moral crusades. Activists like Al-Saqar or like-minded politicians become saints. Opponents become heretics.

People stop asking whether a relationship is wise or a candidate is even competent. They begin asking whether embracing that person affirms the kind of person they believe themselves to be.

Maine serves as a perfect illustration of this phenomenon, where Democrats continue to reckon with the implosion of Democrat Graham Platner's failed campaign for the US Senate. 

Writing in New York Magazine last week, noted feminist Rebecca Traister attempted to explain why so many progressive women became so captivated by Platner, despite his moral shortcomings.

Traister speaks of how Platner's female supporters turned, in her words, 'googly-eyed with irrational fanaticism' for Platner. His appeal wasn't merely ideological; it was emotional, if not spiritual.

Platner embodied a female fantasy: the masculine progressive who could finally carry their values to victory after years of watching candidates like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris make similar arguments without delivering results. 

Platner himself recognized this, observing that being 'a relatively healthy white man that comes across in a very masculine way' gave him advantages that female politicians simply couldn't match.

Those advantages allowed Platner's candidacy to survive even after the first wave of negative revelations about his past were published in the New York Times in May. 

The reporting was troubling: In one account, Platner's ex-girlfriend (and my longtime friend) Lyndsey Fifield accused her former partner of regularly grabbing her by her shoulders and once twisting her arm behind her back and forcing her into a room as he held the door closed. Platner denied the allegations.

But there were additional red flags: Platner's chest tattoo of a skull and crossbones, which he covered up after learning its [expletive] symbolism. Then, there were reports of offensive comments made in since-deleted Reddit posts, which he apologized for.

It was also reported that his wife had found sexually explicit messages on his phone with multiple other women. Platner - who was said to be using the messaging app Kik - later said that he and his wife 'went through something hard' but had worked through it. 

Yet, supporters, particularly female supporters, still stood behind their candidate. A poll conducted by the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and YouGov found shortly after the Times investigation fund that 54 percent of women continued to back Platner, while just 35 percent favored his female opponent, incumbent Susan Collins. Polling from the University of New Hampshire revealed almost identical results.

Weeks after the claims in the Times report came to light, another ex-girlfriend, Jenny Racicot, accused Platner of raping her in an interview with Politico, which Platner has denied. 

He dropped out of the Maine Senate race last week.

Although separated by distance and circumstance, the cases of Carney and Platner reveal the same habit of mind. Instead of honestly evaluating the individual standing before them, women focused on what they wanted that individual said about them. 

Carney appears to have conflated pro-Palestinian political solidarity with romantic compatibility. Thousands of female voters in Maine mistook charisma for competence and character.

Today, progressivism often discourages the very act of discernment, framing it as bigotry and intolerance. 

To suggest that some cultures are freer than others, that some belief systems deserve greater scrutiny than others, or that some men ought to be approached with more caution than others is regarded not as prudence, but as prejudice. 

Instead of examining the stranger standing before you, you begin examining yourself for signs of insufficient tolerance or open-mindedness. Never mind that 44 percent of American Muslims now support Hamas, according to Pew.

That is how obvious warning signs – such as Al-Saqar's alleged demands for money from Carney or Platner's tattoo – are turned into moral tests. The stranger from a radically different culture, the activist with revolutionary politics, the charismatic candidate whose appeal outruns his record are no longer considered with sober judgment. 

Red flags don't merely disappear; they are reinterpreted as badges of moral courage.

Canadian philosopher Gad Saad has a phrase for this phenomenon: '[self-harm] empathy.'

In practice, the problem begins when empathy displaces discernment, when compassion is treated as a higher virtue than wisdom and when refusing to make moral distinctions is mistaken for moral progress.

Jamey Carney's death was an unspeakable and quite possibly avoidable tragedy. And female infatuation with Graham Platner lasted far longer than it should have, potentially costing Democrats a Senate seat, if not control of the entire Senate.

There is a price to pay for placing ideology before instinct. Because ultimately a society that teaches its citizens to suppress their own best interests is not producing more compassionate citizens, it's producing less discerning ones, [expletive]-bent on self-harm.