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Every month or so I get a desperate message from a 25-year-old Afghan refugee in Pakistan. Another came just last week. I\u2019ve written<\/a> about Saman in the past. Because my intent today is to write about her place in the moral universe of Elon Musk<\/a> and Vice President J. D. Vance<\/a>, I\u2019ll compress her story to its basic details: During the Afghan War, Saman and her husband, Farhad (they requested pseudonyms for their own safety), served in the Afghan special forces alongside American troops. When Kabul fell<\/a> in 2021, they were left behind and had to go into hiding from the Taliban before fleeing to Pakistan. There the couple and their two small children have languished for three years, burning through their limited cash, avoiding the Pakistani police and Taliban agents, seldom leaving their rented rooms\u2014doomed if they\u2019re forced to return to Afghanistan\u2014and all the while waiting for their applications to be processed by the United States\u2019 refugee program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No other country will provide a harbor to these loyal allies of America, who risked everything for the war effort. Our country has a unique obligation to do so. They had reached the last stage of a very long road and were on the verge of receiving U.S. visas when Donald Trump came back into office and made ending the refugee program one of his first orders of business. Now Saman and her family have no prospect of escaping the trap they\u2019re in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe stress and anxiety have become overwhelming,\u201d Saman wrote to me last week. \u201cEvery day I worry about the future of my children\u2014what will become of them? Recently, I\u2019ve developed a new health issue as well. At times, my fingers suddenly become tight and stiff\u2014almost paralyzed\u2014and I can\u2019t move them at all. My husband massages them with great effort until they gradually return to normal. This is a frightening and painful experience \u2026 Please, in this difficult time, I humbly ask for your help and guidance. What can I do to find a way out of these hardships?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve brought the plight of Saman and her family to members of Congress, American activist groups, foreign diplomats, and readers of this magazine. No one can offer any hope. The family\u2019s fate is in the hands of Trump and his administration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n George Packer: \u2018What about six years of friendship and fighting together?\u2019 <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n And, after all, their story is just one small part of the suffering caused by this regime. A full accounting would be impossible to compile, but it already includes an estimated several hundred thousand<\/a> people dead or dying of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria because of the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as the starvation of refugee children in Sudan, migrants deported to a Salvadoran Gulag, and victims of domestic violence<\/a> who have lost their shelter in Maine. In the wide world of the regime\u2019s staggering and gratuitous cruelty, the pain in Saman\u2019s fingers might seem too trivial to mention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But hers is the suffering that keeps arriving in my phone, the ongoing story that seems to be my unavoidable job to hear and tell. And sometimes one small drama can illuminate a large evil. Since reading Saman\u2019s latest text, I can\u2019t stop thinking about the people who are doing this to her and her family\u2014especially about Musk and Vance. As for Trump, I find it difficult to hold him morally responsible for anything. He\u2019s a creature of appetite and instinct who hunts and feeds in a dark sub-ethical realm. You don\u2019t hold a shark morally responsible for mauling a swimmer. You just try to keep the shark at bay\u2014which the American people failed to do. Musk and Vance function at a higher evolutionary level than Trump. They have ideas to justify the human suffering they cause. They even have moral ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Musk\u2019s moral idea goes by the name longtermism<\/em>, which he has called \u201ca close match to my philosophy.\u201d This reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism seeks to do the greatest good for the greatest number of human beings who will ever live. By this reasoning, the fate of the hundreds of billions of as-yet-unborn people who will inhabit the planet before the sun burns it up several billion years from now is more urgent than whether a few million people die of preventable diseases this year. If killing the American aid programs that helped keep those people alive allows the U.S. government to become lean and efficient enough to fund Musk\u2019s grand project of interplanetary travel, thereby enabling human beings to live on Mars when Earth becomes uninhabitable in some distant era, then the good of humanity requires feeding those aid programs, including ones that support refugee resettlement, into the woodchipper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Refugees\u2014except for white South Africans<\/a>\u2014aren\u2019t important enough to matter to longtermism. Its view of humanity is far too large to notice Saman, Farhad, and their children, or to understand why America might have a moral obligation to give this family a safe home. Longtermism is a philosophy with a special appeal for smart and extremely rich sociopaths. It can justify almost any amount of hubris, spending, and suffering. Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency mogul who is serving a 25-year sentence for fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, was a longtermist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It isn\u2019t clear that Musk, during his manic and possibly drug-addled<\/a> months of power in the Trump administration, applied moral reasoning when hacking at the federal government. His erratic behavior and that of his troops in the Department of Government Efficiency seemed driven more by destructive euphoria than by philosophy. But in February, on Joe Rogan\u2019s show, Musk used the loftiest terms to explain why the cries of pain caused by his cuts should be ignored: \u201cWe\u2019ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it\u2019s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is another category of the long view, with an entire civilization in place of the planet\u2019s future inhabitants. Musk\u2019s sphere of empathy is galactic. In its cold immensity, the ordinary human impulse to want to relieve the pain of a living person with a name and a face disappears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vance once called himself \u201ca proud member of both tribes\u201d of the MAGA coalition\u2014techno-futurists like Musk and right-wing populists like Steve Bannon. But when Vance invokes a moral code, it\u2019s the opposite of Musk\u2019s. The scope of its commitment is as narrow and specific as an Appalachian graveyard\u2014the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where five generations of Vances are buried and where, he told the Republican National Convention last summer, he hopes that he, his wife, and their children will eventually lie. Such a place is \u201cthe source of America\u2019s greatness,\u201d Vance said, because \u201cpeople will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.\u201d Politically, this is called blood-and-soil nationalism. Religiously, Vance traces his moral code to the Catholic doctrine of ordo amoris<\/em>, the proper order of love: first your family, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News, then your neighbor, your community, your nation, and finally\u2014a distant last\u2014the rest of humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Vance\u2019s theology is as bad as his political theory. Generations of Americans fought and died for the idea of freedom in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II, and other conflicts. And Christian doctrine does not say to keep out refugees because they\u2019re not your kin. Jesus said the opposite: To refuse the stranger was to refuse him. Vance likes to cite Augustine and Aquinas, but the latter was clear about what ordo amoris<\/em> does not mean: \u201cIn certain cases, one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one\u2019s own father, if he is not in such urgent need.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n