This article is a follow up and expansion of this older article – https://fulcrumandaxis.com/2025/05/22/the-empathy-war-why-stories-are-the-battlegroundby-frank-m-anderson/
I don’t know exactly when empathy became controversial—but I know I felt it. First as a writer. Then as a teacher. And now as a father watching entire shelves of books disappear from schools.
Today, that feeling got louder.
On September 10, 2025, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University. Authorities say a single round struck him in the neck during an outdoor event; Utah’s governor called it a “political assassination.” As of late Wednesday night, police and federal agents said the manhunt for the shooter was still active. Leaders across the spectrum condemned the violence. Graphic video of the moment spread online within minutes.
What followed was as revealing as the act itself: an internet full of hot takes and cold hearts. I saw celebration. I saw mourning. I saw people insist this was proof of everything they already believed about the other side. And I saw something that scared me more than any one post: the steady normalization of dehumanization.
This is the empathy war. And stories are the battleground.
Who Owns the Myth?
Every generation remixes its myths. That’s how culture stays alive. But lately it feels less like remixing and more like seizure—who gets to own the narrative of America, and who counts as human inside it.
We watched the entropy of empathy happen with faith. The Christianity I learned was radical empathy: feed the hungry, visit the prisoner, turn the other cheek. Somewhere along the way, the gospel got privatized and repackaged as a brand—weaponized to ban books, punish the vulnerable, and pass purity tests Jesus never gave.
And we watched it happen in politics. Charlie Kirk was a talented myth-maker for the right, a figure who helped mobilize young conservatives and shape a story many found clarifying: good guys and bad guys, winners and losers. Today that story met a bullet. And already, rival myths are scrambling to claim his death—a martyrdom to one audience, a cosmic gotcha to another—each side auditioning outrage, each insisting their narrative is the only one that fits.
Performance vs. Personhood
If the last decade taught us anything, it’s that performance beats nuance. We reward confidence over truth and spectacle over mercy. The more polarized we get, the more our stories harden into litmus tests: who you weep for, who you mock, who you erase.
The video of Kirk’s shooting wasn’t just “news”; it was content—spliced, captioned, optimized for sides. Mainstream outlets struggled with how much to show while the clip metastasized across social feeds. This is what happens when attention, not understanding, becomes the point. The market will always prize the hot take over the hard question.
The right way is to have empathy for everyone. To walk through another person’s fear, certainty, grief. To say: I don’t have to agree with you to insist you are human.
When empathy gets called “weakness,” we end up cheering for death. When empathy becomes partisan, we forget that accountability without dehumanization is the only way democracies survive.
Why We’re So Afraid
I get the exhaustion. 9/11, Desert Storm, COVID, January 6th—every few years something cracked. People are tired. Uncertainty breeds purity tests. Purity feels safe: If I never extend empathy to the “wrong” person, my team won’t excommunicate me.
But purity also shrinks the human circle. It says: only my people get to be complicated. Everyone else is a cartoon.
When that logic meets a gun, it doesn’t ask what it’s doing to our souls. It asks whether it’s on-brand.
Reclaiming Empathy (Without Letting Go of Truth)
We can hold people accountable without giving up on people. We can name rhetoric that harms without celebrating when harm finds the rhetorician. We can condemn political violence—full stop—without asterisks for team colors. (Today, leaders from both parties did exactly that. Good. Let’s mean it tomorrow, too.)
Because here’s the deal: if we only grieve our own, we’re not defending America—we’re auditioning for a smaller one.
Empathy isn’t surrender.
Empathy is discipline.
Empathy is courage.
And right now, it’s the most radical thing we can offer.
Frank M. Anderson's Writing 
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